Method

Understanding is a question of depth.

We take ourselves for rational beings — and mostly are not. What people buy, choose and love is steered by unconscious patterns of meaning and structure. They are no buried trauma, but the quiet logic of everyday life. You won't find them in a checkbox. You find them in conversation.

Fig. — Hundreds of statements, seemingly scattered — from exactly one angle they arrange themselves into a gestalt. The analysis adds nothing; it finds the angle.

The foundation

Our work is based on the morphological psychology of Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Salber (University of Cologne). Unlike cognitive checklist approaches, it does not look for fixed need categories that cut across every industry; it reconstructs the gestalt an experience takes in the individual case — from the language, the images and the contradictions of the people interviewed. Interpretation by gut feeling does not exist here: nothing is more practical than a good theory.

Fig. — The hexagram: six transformations as pulling forces. The gestalt is not a compromise — it is what the tensions jointly hold.

The formats

rheingold salon Interview®: More than an interview: a research encounter of one to two hours, led by graduate psychologists trained in morphology. No question catalogue — the freedom to reach out, digress and, in doing so, lay open the unconscious logic of one's own behaviour.
rheingold salon Groups®: Group discussions that open a many-sided yet compact view of the psychological constitution of a topic — moderated in depth, not at the surface.
Workshops & coaching: Depth psychology as a way of working: as the kick-off of a study, as an implementation workshop after the results, as coaching for teams that truly want to understand their customers.
Quantitative complement: Where it strengthens the decision, we round off studies quantitatively — for instance with DeepQuant, the combination of depth psychology and statistics. The number validates what was understood. Not the other way round.

How a study unfolds

01 — Listening before researching

The briefing as a conversation: which decision is pending? Which question does nobody dare to ask?
02 — Fieldwork in depth

Interviews and groups — led by psychologists, in the salon by Cologne Cathedral or worldwide.
03 — Analysis as a team

Morphological interpretation in analysis sessions; AI keeps the material searchable, people make sense of it.
04 — From findings to decision

Results as strategy, positioning, communication — and, on request, as a study you can keep questioning.

What comes out of it — four case stories ↗

AI in the service of depth

What the machine does here — and what it never will

Synthetic “respondents” replace no conversation here. That a language model cannot be told from a human in dialogue proves nothing about whether it reflects real market trends — a perfect actor is not a witness. Everything else the machine is welcome to take over:

Co-creation with image models: Respondents make visible the inner images they lack the words for — together with generative models, in the middle of the conversation.
Transcription in many languages: Every conversation becomes searchable text — on our own servers, in dozens of languages.
Agent-assisted analysis: Agents work in the loop over the study material — for our researchers and, on request, directly for our clients. Every statement stays tied to the original quote.

The whole AI stance — the line, the tools, the workshop ↗