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Gestalt Therapy

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Gestalt Therapy is a psychotherapy, based on the experiential ideal of "here and now", and relationships with others and the world, and was co-founded by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls and Paul Goodman in the 1940s-1950s. It is related to but not identical to Gestalt psychology and the Gestalt psychology based Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy of Hans-Juergen Walter.

Contents

General description

The school of Gestalt therapy was co-founded in the late 1940s to early 1950s by Fritz & Laura Perls, both of whom were originally traditional psychoanalysts; and Paul Goodman, a political writer and anarchist. The seminal work was Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, published in 1950; co-authored by Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, and Ralph Hefferline (a university psychology professor, and sometime patient of Fritz Perls). As it turns out, most of the original part II of the book was written by Paul Goodman from the chaotic notes of Fritz Perls, and contains the meat of the theory. It was supposed to go first. The publishers decided that Part II, written by Hefferline, fit more into the nascent self-help ethos of the day, and made it Part I, making for a less interesting introduction to the theory. Isadore From taught Part II for an entire year to his students.

Gestalt therapy was influenced by a variety of psychological and philosophical sources, and in addition was a response to the social forces of its day. It was/is a therapeutic approach which is holistic (mind/body/culture) present-centered, and to some extent existential, in it's emphasis on personal responsibility for action, and the valuing of the I-thou relationship in therapy. The objective of this therapy is to enable a person to become more fully and creatively alive and to be free from the inhibitions to this vitality which may diminish optimum satisfaction, fulfillment, and growth.

Originally, Gestalt therapy was a development of psychoanalysis. It was part of a continuum moving from the early work of Freud, to ego analysis, to Wilhelm Reich and his notion of character armor. Add to this the insights of academic gestalt psychology about perception, gestalt formation and the tendancy of organisms to complete the incomplete gestalt, to form "wholes" in experience. Add further, existentialism. Fritz Perls, Jim Simkin and others threw into the mix a strong dash of existential thinking about the I-thou relationship as it applies to the therapist-patient interaction, and the emphasis on personal choice and responsibility. Then, the late 1950's-1960's movement toward individuality vs. conformity and the human potential movement fed into and was itself influenced by the Gestalt Therapy approach. The resultant of all these vectors was, in fact, a well-formed gestalt, Gestalt Therapy, with all the coherance and vividness characteristic of a "good gestalt."

Interestingly, when Fritz left New York City for California, there began to be a split between those who saw Gestalt Therapy as a therapeutic approach with great potential (this view was best represented by Isadore From, who practiced and taught mainly in New York, and the members of the Cleveland Institute) and those who saw Gestalt Therapy as a way of life. The former contingent of this first generation of Gestalt Therapists were often appalled by the notion of Gestalt Therapy leaving the consulting room and donning psychedelic robes...or doffing them, a la the "gestalt prayer." The split continues, with some practitioners seeing Gestalt Therapy as a way of life, and some seeing it as a way of doing therapy. However the former view seems to be fading with our memories of the 1960's, psychedelic shirts and "do your own thing." Esalen is still there, though a lot of things go on at Esalen Fritz would have laughed about...

Be this as it may, Gestalt therapy developed as a humanistic psycho-therapeutic model, with a well developed theory that combines phenomenological, existential, dialogical, and field approaches, to the process of transformation and growth of human beings.

A core concept in Gestalt therapy is the unifying idea of "contact". Contact is where one person meets another person, or meets the outside world. If contact is not interfered with by what Perls-Goodman called disturbances of the contact boundary, the individual can grow through assimilation of new experiences. In therapy, the patient/client is encouraged to experience his or her own feelings and behaviours in the here and now, and attention is brought to bear on the way contact is interrupted. The way in which he or she interrupts contact with the present environment is considered to be a significant factor in creating and maintaining dysfunctional patterns of behavior. Some of the contact interuptions occur through projection (seeing outside one's self what belongs to one's self), introjection (swallowing whole instead of assimilating, chewing, digesting); retroflection (directing impulses towards the self that rightly would be directed to the other, as in anger directed toward self causing depression or psychosomatic symptoms); confluence (making the self-other boundary go away and merging with the other). All of these disturbances have a pathological and a non-pathological aspect. It is appropriate for the infant and mother to become confluent, for example, or two lovers, but inappropriate for client and therapist. When the latter pair becomes confluent, there can be no growth because there is no boundary at which the one can contact the other.

By focusing the individual on self-awareness as part of present reality, new insights can be made and the fluid process of contacting resumed.

History

Fritz Perls was a German psychoanalyst who fled with his wife Lore to South Africa to escape Nazi oppression. Central to Perls' modifications of psychoanalysis was the concept of "dental or oral aggression." Perls suggested that when the infant develops teeth, he/she has the capacity to chew, to break apart food, and by analogy experience, to taste, accept, reject, assimilate. This is opposed to Freud's notion that only introjection takes place in early experience. Thus Perls made "assimilation", as opposed to "introjection" a focal theme in his work. In contrast to the psychoanalytic stance in which the patient introjects the (more healthy) attitudes of the analyst, in Gestalt Therapy the patient must "taste" his/her experience, and either accept or reject, but not introject, or "swallow whole". Hence, the emphasis is on avoiding interpretation and encouraging discovery. And growth occurs through gradual assimilation of experience in a natural way, rather than by accepting the interpretations of the analyst. The Gestalt therapist contrives experiments that lead the patient to greater awareness and fuller experience of his/her possibilities.

Perls also derived much from Reich's emphasis on how defenses are embodied, and therefore paid a great deal of attention to nonverbal behavior. This was consonant with Lore's background in dance and movement therapy.

Fritz and Lore (now Laura) moved to New York City and founded the first Gestalt Institute. Isadore From became a patient and then trainer. He lived in New York until his death at 75 in 1993 and was known world-wide for his philosophical and intellectually rigorous take on Gestalt Therapy. Jim Simkin was a psychologist who also became a patient of Perls and then a co-trainer with Perls in California. In the 1960's Perls became infamous for his workshops at Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Isadore From referred to some of Fritz' several day workshops as "hit-and-run" therapy because of it's emphasis on showmanship, but Fritz never considered these workshops to be true therapy. Jim Simkin went on to co-lead training with Fritz and then to start his own training center next to Esalen. Here he developed his precise and brilliant version of Gestalt Therapy. Erv and Miriam Polster started a training center in La Jolla which also became very well known. Dan Rosenblatt (b. 1926) was part of the early group around Laura. A Harvard-trained psychologist and intellectual, he practiced Gestalt therapy for over 35 years, seeing 30 patients a week in individual therapy and doing groups almost every evening. He did training workshops in Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, New Zealand, Italy for many years. Rosenblatt, who also wrote several books on Gestalt therapy, exemplifies the Gestalt therapist as practicing clinician, rather than would-be guru. All of these therapists had their own distinctive styles, but always with Gestalt Therapy's focus on immediate experience as a central theme.

Although Gestalt Therapy reached its zenith in the mid-1980's and has since waned in academic circles, its contributions have become assimilated into current schools of therapy, sometimes in unlikely places. For example, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) shares much from Gestalt Therapy yet is considered to be a cognitive behavioral approach. Also mindfulness is a buzzword as of 2006, yet much of mindfulness work is connected to Gestalt Therapy's emphasis on the flow of experience and awareness. You won't see too much emphasis on Gestalt Therapy in clinical psychology programs in the US, however there are intitutes all over the world, including Asia. Dan Rosenblatt led Gestalt training groups in Japan for 7 years and Stewart Kiritz followed with public workshops and training workshops from 1997 through 2005. Gestalt Therapy is a very useful process for therapists-in-training of any persuasion because of its focus on the person of the therapist, barriers to full contact with others, self-awareness. And graduate students still seem to seek it out, even though it is not as recognized by the establishment as it once was.

Principal influences

Simple injunctions of Gestalt Therapy

  1. Live now, stay in the present.
  2. Live here, be with the present.
  3. Stop imagining, experience reality.
  4. Stop unnecessary thinking.
  5. Express, rather than manipulating, explaining, justifying, or judging.
  6. Give in to unpleasantness do not restrict your awareness.
  7. Accept no "should" or "ought", other than your own.
  8. Take full responsibility for your own actions, feelings and thoughts.
  9. Surrender to being who you are right now.
Here we have a paradox, however, because "you should not have shoulds" is itself a should! Most Gestalt Therapists would not be very comfortable with these statements as rules, but more comfortable with the idea that by experimenting and choosing what fits, one can come to a fuller experience of one's being than by rehearsing, intellectualizing, justifying, excusing, etc.

Suggested sections

  1. Introduction
  2. "Gestalt" and Perception.
  3. The Experience Cycle
  4. Awareness
  5. Contact Boundary Phenomena
  6. Polarities
  7. Field Theory
  8. Dialogue
  9. Experiment

See also

External links

 

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All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

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