Preliminary Program
The conference embraces concepts and applications of „imagery“ and „action“ in the widest sense. „Imagery“ includes mind-wandering, kinaesthetic and multi-modal dimensions. „Action“ includes modalities of action in psychotherapy (Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy and Morphological Psychology). The conference program will comprise key-note lectures, panel discussions, workshops, poster sessions, visits to historic sound archives, an easy listening session and a concert. We also plan a guided walk to the landmark sites of historic Gestalt Research in Berlin Mitte. The conference languages are German and English.
Wednesday
Pre-conference event
Guided city walk to the historic sites of Gestalt Research in Berlin Mitte Meeting point: Statue of Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel at Hegel-Platz, behind the Main Building of Humboldt University, Dorotheenstr. 24, 10117 Berlin
Time slot: 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Arrival and opening with Wolfgang-Metzger-Award and Bozzi Award
Tieranatomisches Theater
Time slot: 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
including speeches by the award winners or possibly with keynote speech
(possibly Marc Leman with reference to Gestalt theory).
Thursday
Key-note lecture, panel discussions, workshops
Institute of Musicology of Humboldt University, Humboldt Forum
(can all be found in Berlin Mitte)
9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Panels
12:00 p.m. Keynote speech
2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Panels
6:00 p.m. Keynote speech
Friday
Key-note lecture, panel discussions, workshops
Institute of Musicology of Humboldt University, Humboldt Forum
(can all be found in Berlin Mitte)
9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Panels
12:00 p.m. Keynote speech
2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Panels
6:00 p.m. General meeting of the GTA-Members
8:00 p.m. Social dinner
Saturday
Key-note lecture, panel discussions
BSP Business & Law School in Berlin Lankwitz
Morning panel 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.
3:00 p.m.: Keynote speech Mauro Antonelli, Milan
5:00 p.m.: Salon concert
Confirmed panels
These panels have already been confirmed and will be added to the above program over the coming weeks.
Psychological Morphology, developed by Wilhelm Salber in the second half of the 20th century, forms the foundation of psychological teaching and research at BSP Business & Law School in Berlin and Hamburg. Based on depth psychology and Gestalt psychology, it evolved into a concept that focuses (radically) on the formations of everyday life and culture, and particularly explores phenomena in business, media, and sports from a psychological perspective. Examples from morphological research demonstrate how this approach is applied in practice.
Prof. Dr. Dirk Blothner: Practicing Psychology with the Drawing Pen – Wilhelm Salber’s Psychological Sketches
Prof. Dr. Björn Zwingmann: Morphological Film Analysis of “Air – Der große Wurf” (Ben Affleck, 2023)
Prof. Dr. Johanna Hodde: The Experience of Art as a Cultural Parameter Using the Painting “The Sacred Grove” (1882) by Arnold Böcklin as an Example
Dr. Sven Giebel: Pre-Form Analysis and Advertising Impact
Prof. Dr. Andreas Marlovits: Forms of Play – A Morphological Analysis of Football Matches
Wilhelm Salber (1928–2016), the founder of Psychological Morphology, left behind a remarkable number of sketches drawn with pencils and pens. At first glance, many of them appear strange or unfamiliar, with a simple and reduced style of linework. Using one or two examples, this panel contribution demonstrates how Salber’s psychological sketches differ from those of well-known artists such as Beckmann or Kirchner. At the same time, it develops interpretations of these images against the background of Gestalt-morphological concepts.
Art historians describe sketches as something highly private. Artists themselves often protect them and refrain from commenting on them publicly. This raises the question of whether it is possible at all to enter this private space of Salber’s. During his lifetime, he neither commented on his sketches nor explicitly referred to them in his writings. The contribution therefore explores how these sketches can nevertheless be analyzed psychologically.
It will become evident that Salber belonged to the “visionaries” among psychologists. In his drawings, he was less concerned with the visible world. What he captured in his sketchbooks were rather images of unconscious psychological patterns of formation. Taken together, however, Salber’s sketches do not constitute a “textbook.” They are pointed, spontaneously created perspectives on the structures of psychic wholes. They represent an independent and complementary form of Gestalt-psychological description and analysis. One could also say that they attempt to catch the unconscious formative processes of the psyche in the act.
The starting point is the assumption of a “media soul,” according to which the psyche is not understood as an inner state, but rather as a process of Gestalt formation that essentially unfolds through media.
Using Air as an example, a specific Gestalt logic of the film experience is developed, organized around the motif of “belief.” Beginning with an unsatisfactory initial unity, a development unfolds in which one part strives to establish a new, more coherent unity. The analysis reconstructs the film experience as a tension-filled mediation between various basic complexes such as Repetition–Transformation, Change–Commitment, Humiliation–Triumph, and Limited–Beyond-Itself. Finally, in the turning points of key scenes, the complex Imperfect–Perfect also becomes experientially tangible.
In the further course of the analysis, the specific mode of transformation within the film is identified, which can be condensed into the fairy-tale motif of “Puss in Boots”: an unsatisfactory constellation is transformed into a successful form of accommodation through skillful mediation and reorganization.
From a cultural-psychological perspective, the film’s success and impact can furthermore be understood as an expression of a contemporary longing for a new and better unity: in a reality experienced as fragmented and uncertain, Air offers an image of how coherence can once again be established through belief, risk, and mediation.
The presentation demonstrates how fundamental processes of psychological self-understanding are represented within the medium of film. Air thus becomes readable as an example of how films function as mediating objects in which the psyche becomes experientially accessible through its own process of form creation.
“Anarchy and Dictate” was Wilhelm Salber’s diagnosis for the future at the turn of the millennium. In his article of the same name (1999), Salber describes the darker sides of the “invention of the private sphere” and the call for self-realization, accompanied by a simultaneous detachment from broader social contexts. In an almost prophetic manner, he points to the resulting desire for a strict guiding hand and for decisive intervention by “strong men” within Western societies. According to Salber, numerous diagnoses of contemporary culture reveal ambivalences connected to the choices available in our liberal society, while at the same time exposing a desperate search for meaning and a loss of orientation on the part of the individual: “Everything is possible,” yet “nothing works anymore.” Alongside the freedoms that place people in Western societies into a fever of constant alternatives—as sociological and psychological studies of everyday life demonstrate—new forms of compulsion emerge, whereby freedom of choice itself can become coercive. Such compulsions attempt, as symptoms, to contain the overwhelming burden of endless possibilities and to cope with the crisis of meaning, yet they themselves also lead to suffering.
The longing for a decisive form, one that implies transformation rather than mere changeability, became tangible among BSP students in an exploration of the pictorial impact of The Sacred Grove. The explorations, based on detailed experiential descriptions of approximately 30 minutes by participants in an art-psychological group exploration, as well as the subsequent fifteen two-hour in-depth interviews, revealed young people’s desire to confront the conditions of life itself. They want to know for what it is worthwhile to accept losses and make sacrifices. In the group’s spontaneous naming of the painting as a “sacrificial offering,” there lives the promise that through such commitment one may ultimately be rewarded or gifted, thereby giving one’s life a decisive direction. At the same time, however, a certain longing for the downfall of the existing order also resonates within this experience.
The experience of art can become a cultural parameter insofar as it confronts the viewer with the eternal fundamental paradoxes of human existence—and with the extent to which they themselves are entangled within them. The fundamental relationship between freedom and determination, which The Sacred Grove addresses, gains particular contemporary relevance in the context of right-wing political movements in Germany and Europe, as well as global tendencies toward de-liberalization and authoritarianism. Works of art can serve not only as revelatory experiences of the underlying irresolvable paradoxes; they often also open up a third or even fourth path. It is toward this perspective that the panel contribution seeks to open the discussion.
Wilhelm Salber’s morphological psychology understands advertising impact as a psychodynamic process of tension, form creation, and resolution, drawing on Kurt Lewin’s field theory and Friedrich Sander’s concept of Gestalt. Effective advertising does not address a neutral consciousness, but rather a tense and already moving field of experience. Accordingly, advertising impact is not an isolated event, but part of an ongoing psychological process of formation.
The presentation demonstrates that advertising becomes effective when it takes up pre-formative developmental tendencies and transforms them into viable symbolic Gestalten—that is, into meaningful forms. The lecture introduces a further development of morphological advertising impact research that follows this movement from the pre-form toward a specific developmental direction within the process of form and formation.
Using an original study (the case of Dr. Oetker) as an example, it becomes evident how advertising can either enable coherent Gestalt formation or lead into morpholysis when tensions remain unresolved. The study analyzing a Dr. Oetker commercial demonstrates that it is already within the very first images of a commercial that it is decided whether the advertisement will be psychologically connectable and resonant or not.
Pre-form analysis therefore offers an instrument even for the very early phases of idea and concept development, enabling advertising to be designed in a psychologically resonant and meaning-generating way.
Football matches are often difficult to understand in the course of their development. They seem to contain a certain mystery. A game—or more specifically, a football match—is a collective process of formation between two teams. Within the simultaneity of cooperation and opposition, the Gestalt of the game emerges. As a process of formation, the game is highly dynamic, constantly undergoing formation and transformation, and is subject to the dynamics of a temporal order.
All players contribute through their actions on the field to the formation of this Gestalt. The form of play itself must be understood as an overall product in which individual elements participate, while at the same time being subject to the conditions of formal development in the creation of the Gestalt. In this process, the form of play produces its own history, one that often unfolds in strange and unexpected ways and cannot adequately be captured through purely tactical explanations.
The presentation introduces the method of Morphological Analysis of Sports Games, which understands itself as a qualitative, depth-psychological approach to the analysis of sporting events.
Dr. Angelika Böhm / Prof. Dr. Herbert Fitzek / Dr. Thomas Fuchs / Jüly Incel / Julia Rohner / Uta Wedam / Pola Zügge
Among the concepts of Gestalt psychology, the Berlin School of Gestalt Theory and Psychological Morphology are not only those that continue to be scientifically discussed and practiced today. Both have also given rise to therapeutic approaches that are taught and applied within psychological counseling and treatment contexts.
We are revisiting a discussion that began almost twenty years ago in Miesenbach (Lower Austria), and which we would like to continue and keep alive within the framework of the GTA. For this panel, we hope for an open discussion with the audience on the conceptual foundations and the lived practice of both approaches.
The subsequent discussions may orient themselves around shared points of understanding:
The points are not intended to be addressed strictly in this sequence, but may serve as a general orientation for the course of the discussion. The participants see their role as providing examples from therapeutic practice that can be introduced where appropriate in relation to the individual points.
Literature:
Beneder, D. (2009). From Goethe’s Morphology to Psychotherapy: An Encounter with Analytical Intensive Treatment (AIT). Phänomenal 1/2009, 26–29.
Endres, N. & Salber, W. (2001). Analytical Intensive Counseling. Gestalttherapie 15 (2), 59–81.
Stemberger, G. (Ed.) (2024). Basic Concepts of Gestalt-Theoretical Psychotherapy: The Gestalt Psychological Approach in Psychotherapy. Vienna: Krammer.
Chaired by: Prof. Dr. Herbert Fitzek / Prof. Dr. Marianne Soff
This panel focuses on the “Berlin School of Gestalt Theory” and its flourishing period at the Psychological Institute of the Friedrich Wilhelm University between 1922 and 1935 — ranging from the rooms in the palace, the atmosphere and collaboration of the time, to scientific and practice-oriented developments extending into the present day.
Thursday (17 September 2026)
Friday (18 September 2026)
After the collapse of the German Empire, science in the Weimar Republic also made a new beginning. Gestalt theory found particularly prominent conditions for this within the rooms of the Psychological Institute of the Friedrich Wilhelm University, located in the former Hohenzollern Palace. We aim to reconstruct how the Institute established itself within the palace: How did Köhler, Wertheimer, and Lewin live, work, and conduct research? Which rooms did they occupy? What were their main fields of work? Who collaborated with them? Which doctoral students conducted research within these rooms? Who, besides the representatives of Gestalt theory, belonged to the Institute? And what was happening around the palace itself? How did Gestalt theory become integrated into the culture of Berlin in the 1920s?
In this introductory contribution to the panel, we provide an overview of the research and working conditions of those engaged in Gestalt theory in 1920s Berlin, based on a concrete (virtual) insight into their place of activity within the former Hohenzollern Palace.
Lewin was one of the central figures at the Berlin Institute of Gestalt Psychology. In 1928, he delivered a lecture entitled “The Development of Experimental Psychology of Will and Psychotherapy” at the Third General Medical Congress for Psychotherapy in Baden-Baden. In this lecture, Lewin demonstrated to the medical audience that experimentally grounded research, when applied in a life-related manner, can also serve as a meaningful approach for examining psychodynamic relationships. Nearly 100 years later, the research findings from the studies on action and affect psychology—also known as the “Berlin Experiments”—remain highly relevant and up to date.
Within Gestalt-Theoretical Psychotherapy (GTP), which understands itself as being rooted in the tradition of Gestalt psychology, essential findings from this systematically developed experimental program have been taken up and transferred into the field of psychotherapy. The following thematic areas, which are of particular importance in psychotherapy, will be discussed exemplarily:
The presentation analyzes the collaboration between Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Max Wertheimer as a previously underappreciated constellation in the early history of Gestalt psychology. At the center stands the jointly published 1920 essay “On the Perception of Sound Direction,” which has generally been interpreted primarily as a contribution to early psychoacoustics or to military sound localization during the First World War. In contrast, this presentation advances the thesis that the investigations into binaural hearing can be understood as a paradigmatic example of a genuinely Gestalt-psychological research logic.
Beginning with the scientific milieu of Carl Stumpf, as well as the shared interests of Hornbostel and Wertheimer in music psychology—particularly Wertheimer’s investigations into the music of the Vedda in Ceylon—the presentation demonstrates that central problems of later Gestalt theory were already being prepared within the context of tonal psychology. The question concerning the unity of melody thus develops into a more general investigation of relationally organized perception.
Against this background, the studies on directional hearing also appear not merely as technical applications of psychological knowledge, but rather as experimental analyses of the conditions under which coherent spatial units of perception emerge from minimal temporal differences between the two ears. Particular attention is given to the so-called “theory of time,” to experimentally generated boundary phenomena, and to the concept of the “effective baseline,” which points to the irreducibility of auditory perception to purely anatomical or physical conditions.
Finally, the presentation highlights the proximity of these investigations to Wertheimer’s analyses of the φ-phenomenon in order to make visible the significance of the auditory field for a general theory of temporally organized Gestalt formation.
To this day, the central achievements of Gestalt psychology are traditionally located within the fields of perception psychology, thought psychology, and philosophy of science, as developed, among others, through the work of Alexius Meinong and Christian von Ehrenfels in Graz and Vienna, as well as Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler in Frankfurt and Berlin. Beyond the philosophical seminar room and the laboratory of perceptual psychology, this contribution turns to the lesser-known field of early applied Gestalt psychological research in Germany and Austria during the First World War and the interwar period.
Younger members of the Berlin Institute, such as Hans Rupp, Erich von Hornbostel, and Kurt Lewin, built a bridge from the laboratory to practical application. They developed psychological measurement instruments for the military and for industry, thereby creating a productive connection between Gestalt psychology and applied psychology, or psychotechnics. This development came to an abrupt end with the rise of National Socialism and was not resumed after the Second World War.
Der Beitrag schlägt den Bogen zwischen der Berliner Schule der Gestaltpsychologie und den Anfängen der angewandten Psychologie in Zürich seit den 1920er Jahren und verfolgt von dort aus die Frage nach ihrer heutigen Bedeutung. Ausgangspunkt ist die Feststellung, dass zwischen beiden Kontexten keine direkte institutionelle Traditionslinie bestand. Während die Berliner Gestaltpsychologie um Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler und Kurt Koffka primär als theoretisch ausgerichtete Grundlagenforschung zu Wahrnehmung, Denken und psychischen Ganzheiten etabliert war, formierte sich die Zürcher angewandte Psychologie zunächst im Umfeld der Psychotechnik, der Berufsberatung und der Eignungsdiagnostik und orientierte sich an praktischen Anforderungen von Schule, Verwaltung und Arbeitswelt.
Gerade diese Ausgangsdifferenz schliesst frühe intellektuelle Berührungspunkte jedoch nicht aus. Der Vortrag zeigt, dass sich bereits in der Zwischenkriegszeit strukturelle Affinitäten erkennen lassen, etwa in der kritischen Haltung gegenüber atomistischen Erklärungsmodellen, in der Betonung situativer Bedingungen psychischen Handelns und in einem relational gefassten Menschenbild. Um diese Zusammenhänge zu erfassen, wird der Begriff der „Wahlverwandtschaften“ als heuristische Perspektive vorgeschlagen: Er bezeichnet keine Einfluss- oder Rezeptionsgeschichte, sondern verweist auf begriffliche Näheverhältnisse, die verschiedene Disziplinentwicklungen miteinander verbinden, ohne sie zwingend kausal zu verknüpfen.
Besonders sichtbar werden solche frühen Wahlverwandtschaften dort, wo gestaltpsychologische Konzepte – exemplarisch über Kurt Lewins Feldtheorie – eine Übersetzung in sozial , arbeits- und organisationspsychologische Fragestellungen erfahren und damit für Anwendungsfelder anschlussfähig werden. Vor dem Hintergrund der politischen Brüche der 1930er Jahre und der durch Emigration unterbrochenen Traditionslinien erhalten diese indirekten Anschlussprozesse zusätzliches Gewicht. In Zürich lassen sich entsprechende Entwicklungen insbesondere in der allmählichen theoretischen Erweiterung der angewandten Psychologie beobachten, etwa bei Hans Biäsch, der über eine rein psychotechnische Praxis hinaus ein systematisches, theoriegeleitetes Verständnis angewandter Psychologie vertrat.
Der Vortrag schliesst mit der Frage, was von der Berliner Gestaltpsychologie heute noch für die angewandte Psychologie in Zürich bedeutsam ist. Argumentiert wird, dass sich deren Wirkung weniger in expliziten Lehrtraditionen als vielmehr in grundlegenden Annahmen fortsetzt. In diesem Sinne erweist sich die Berliner Gestaltpsychologie als weiterhin wirksamer – wenn auch zumeist impliziter – Bezugspunkt im Selbstverständnis der angewandten Psychologie in Zürich.
My teacher Wolfgang Metzger had attended the Berlin School of Gestalt Theory, and through him I was able to gain some acquaintance with its spirit. Therefore, I ask today: What remains of this spirit? And I attempt an answer through the following questions:
What remains of the charm of the Psychological Institute on Rosenstraße?
What remains of the passion for direct intuition and observation (Anschauung)?
What remains of the pure and beautiful language?
What remains of the universal education and intellectual breadth?
What remains of the scientific modesty?
What remains of the philosophical depth of the Berlin School?
What remains of the “special position” that psychopathology was meant to occupy?
What, then, remains of the good spirit of the Berlin School of Gestalt Theory?
Recent research on crossmodal correspondences has shown that listeners consistently associate musical sounds with visual, emotional, and semantic features across cultures and developmental stages. Drawing on studies based on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, and recent work on multisensory mappings of consonance and dissonance, this talk explores how musical structure, timbre, and interval relations shape audiovisual and affective associations. I argue that such findings support the existence of robust multisensory organizations linking music perception, conceptual representations, and emotional meaning, while also raising broader questions concerning the origins and mechanisms of musical semantics.
Recent research on crossmodal correspondences has shown that listeners consistently associate musical sounds with visual, emotional, and semantic features across cultures and developmental stages. Drawing on studies based on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, and recent work on multisensory mappings of consonance and dissonance, this talk explores how musical structure, timbre, and interval relations shape audiovisual and affective associations. I argue that such findings support the existence of robust multisensory organizations linking music perception, conceptual representations, and emotional meaning, while also raising broader questions concerning the origins and mechanisms of musical semantics.
Connecting sensing, feeling and thinking: A Bayesian model of cross-modal correspondences with music
Cross-modal correspondences with musical properties in isolation or musical contexts have been extensively investigated using behavioural experiments. These experiments have shown robust associations between properties such as pitch height and vertical location, size and sharpness of an object, tension, brightness, and speed, among others. Furthermore, several origins of these associations have been identified.
In musical contexts, multiple factors play a role in shaping what multimodal experiences listeners (or performers) have with. This makes which correspondences are prominent for a particular context and listener probabilistic rather than deterministic. The aim of this paper is to explore this probabilistic nature of cross-modal correspondences with music, using Bayes’ rule to model associations.
Bayes’ rule is applied to link musical properties with correspondences. It takes into account the information content of the property, the likelihood of the correspondence and the level of evidence for the correspondence. The application of Bayes’ rule and its predictions is evaluated for a set of musical examples. This modelling raises new questions related to multimodal experiences of music, alongside proposing a possible mechanism.
The strength of this proposal is that it offers a way to formally investigate contributing factors to multimodal experiences with music. Using different models to make different predictions, for example by emphasising emotion as a source for correspondences or defining prior expectations.
Auditory Morphodynamics: A Gestalt-Based Approach to Explore Audiovisual Associations in Sonic Arts
Research on crossmodal associations—particularly between auditory and visual domains—has grown considerably in recent years. Such associations rely on multiple factors, from early perceptual processes to higher cognitive inferences, as well as emotional and environmental influences. The emerging concept of stimulus morphodynamics offers a new framework for examining crossmodal correspondences, focusing on the evolving features of a stimulus, its qualitative and quantitative continuities and discontinuities. Depending on morphodynamic complexity, such associations may arise from various perceptual similarities, ranging from structural alignments to conceptual analogies.
This paper investigates morphodynamics through a Gestalt-based paradigm, linking perceptual experience to both the structural properties and phenomenal appearance of a stimulus. Morphodynamic patterns can convey complex information arising from the temporal evolution of sensory input. Drawing on empirical studies conducted by the author, the paper examines the capacity of auditory stimuli to provide non-auditory information. Results show that participants consistently associate musical and ad-hoc prepared sonic materials (i.e., electronically synthesized abstract sounds) with mental images reflecting specific material qualities (such as viscosity or elasticity) and with visual depictions of objects that typify those properties.
Central to this study is the idea that non-referential abstract sounds can evoke real-world notions solely through their morphodynamic evolution. This finding reveals that sound patterns can communicate non-auditory information, uncovering a perceptual mechanism that transcends referential meaning. Such a perspective opens new avenues for understanding aesthetic apprehension in sonic arts, suggesting that certain music genres and sound practices—those minimizing references to physical causality and symbolic meaning—can be perceived as inherently meaningful through their dynamic form.
The Meta Schema: Spanning Gestalt Perception, Cross-Modal Correspondences, and Multimodal Semantics
At the intersection of Gestalt perception, cognitive psychology and linguistics, this contribution proposes a new construct underlying concept construction: the meta-schema.
The common denominator for Gestalt theory, research of cross-modal correspondences, and the study of image schemas in cognitive linguistics is the focus on the cognitive system’s active construction of experience. Thus Gestalt perception motivates organized configurations out of scattered patterns of light, e.g. “a jagged star”. Image schemas retain such constructs as templates for building metaphorical meanings (e.g. “jagged memory”). Finally, CMCs explain both how holistic perception extends from one modality to another (above: vision to language) and how such an established link naturally motivates further multimodal meanings (e.g. “jagged” musical timbre).
The present approach delves into further abstraction in claiming that some apparently cross-culturally and cross-linguistically separate image schemas, e.g. verticality, expansion and source-path-goal, are actually based on a single system of higher-order constraints. Thus pitches going “upward” in some languages, yet “shrinking”, moving “in a circle”, becoming “smaller” or “lighter” in others, are all based on an ordered system of primitive notions, typically an object moving or transforming from point A to point B, force needed to set the object in motion, energy to preserve the directionality of the movement, and discretization of “chunks” to mark the steps in this movement. In the talk I will illustrate how this “meta schema for pitch progression” is discernible from perceptual experiments, historical texts, anthropological findings, and multimodal materials (e.g. opera performances, musical album covers).
Lab-based and online studies have shown that music guides mental imagery and directs imaginings. Natural language processing (NLP) has proved useful for studying the contents of these imaginings, revealing that listeners converge around shared narrative interpretations of musical excerpts within cultures (Margulis et al., 2022). However, NLP approaches have not yet been applied to imaginings evoked by live music, where audience demographics vary and stimuli are longer than the 30-90 s excerpts typical of lab-based NLP paradigms.
This talk presents an analysis of free-form imaginings evoked during a live concert of chamber music. The concert was part of a professionally presented subscription series, featuring music by Beethoven, Brahms, and Stephen Hough. Audience members completed a written survey where they described autobiographical memories and fictional stories imagined for particular musical movements. Importantly, participants were not pre-recruited: they were invited in situ to complete the survey, enabling study of a real world concert-attending population. In total, 447 narratives were collected from 167 individuals. Analyses using both sentence embeddings (SBERT) and word embeddings (word2vec) revealed that imaginings were guided by musical content. Within movements, individual imaginings were significantly more similar to the average of every other semantic embedding for that movement (the group ‘consensus’) than to the average embeddings across other movements. Specifically, mixed-effects modelling showed a significant main effect for the within—across movement similarity comparison (SBERT: β = 0.06, SE = 0.01, t = 9.75, p < .001; word2vec: β = 0.04, SE = 0.01, t = 6.65, p < .001). Movement-level semantic content is also discussed. The findings extend prior work to a naturalistic paradigm incorporating full-length pieces, showing that even in naturalistic contexts, individual imaginings are shaped by musical features and can be broadly shared.
Recent research shows that the spontaneous thought people experience during musical listening includes vivid autobiographical memories and fictional imaginings. People have a sense that their imaginings are idiosyncratic and personal, but analyses of free response descriptions reveal that within a culture, they are in fact broadly shared, even when cued by novel, unfamiliar excerpts. In addition to shared content, these imaginings also unfold with shared temporal structure. Theoretical and methodological advances in studying spontaneous thought during music listening thus offer a unique lens into involuntary mental imaginings that are subjective yet structurally aligned with a stimulus.
My focus here is on body motion gestalts as a basis for mental images of musical sound in what I have called sound-motion objects. Digging deeper into features of sound-producing motion may provide us with a broader ecological basis for understanding gestalt-formation in musical imagery. It can be shown that crucial principles of motion such as frequency, amplitude, and quantity, and its derivatives such as velocity, acceleration, jerk, and snap, as well as principles of motor control such as coarticulation and phase transition, may all be present in sound-producing motion, hence, may be assumed to (variably so) be integral elements of musical imagery, in what I have called motormimetic imagery. My point is that these motion-related features are real in the sense of belonging to actual music performances, but that they may tend to escape more conventional note-centered Western notions of musical imagery.
Schizoid clients often present a challenge in verbal psychotherapy due to their tendency toward emotional withdrawal, dissociation, and intellectualization. While they may demonstrate strong reflective capacities, establishing emotional contact within approaches such as Gestalt psychotherapy can be difficult, often leading to therapeutic stagnation.
This presentation explores how Guided Imagery and Music (GIM) can support therapeutic work with schizoid clients by accessing emotional and symbolic material that remains unavailable through verbal interaction alone. GIM uses music to facilitate altered states of consciousness and spontaneous imagery, allowing clients to engage with inner experiences through imagination, metaphor, and narrative.
Schizoid clients frequently possess a rich inner fantasy life, which, rather than being viewed solely as defensive, can be used as a therapeutic resource. GIM offers a direct pathway into this imaginal world, where clients can encounter emotionally meaningful content and relational themes in a less threatening, non-verbal form.
The presentation will highlight how GIM can be integrated within a Gestalt framework, supporting the transition from imaginal experience to relational processing. Clinical insights will illustrate how music and imagery can foster emotional access, symbolic expression, and greater integration, bridging the gap between cognitive insight and lived emotional experience.