Gestalt Therapy

Roots and Branches - Collected Papers

Peter Philippson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429914270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is a collection of articles written in the period 1985–2011. The articles form a background for perspectives that concern the foundations of Gestalt therapy: foundations in philosophy and foundations in psychoanalysis and connections with other therapeutic theories.

PART I

ROOTS IN PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER ONE

The world according to Gestalt therapy^*

It was a joy to rediscover this piece, and its questioning of what we take for granted. Looking at this now, when we know about the banditry of the financial institutions, and the use of the Internet by people in rebellion against their governments in Egypt and other places, as well as by criminals, I feel somewhat smug in my predicting.

A few centuries ago, much of Europe consisted of small villages or towns, with open country in between. There were various lords and rulers who owned the villages, and made rules for the inhabitants. There were usually walls involved. Some towns had walls all round them. Villages were more likely to be overlooked by a castle, where the lord lived, and whose walls they could shelter behind in case of attack.

In open country, there were “outlaws” and bandits. There were wild animals. The law was based on survival rather than the law of the land, or the law of the lord of the manor.

Between the village and the open country there was a relationship. People from the village went out through the countryside to hunt, or to go into the next village, or to join the outlaws. The outlaws in the countryside often had family links with people in the village, although they risked their lives if they came visiting.

Each has its dangers. The danger of the countryside was violent death from wild animals or murderous people. The danger of the village was being destroyed by the lawgiver, or by hunger when the harvest was insufficient to feed the villagers.

Where is our open country, our wilderness, now? Certainly not in our tamed and cultivated countryside! We find elements of it in our cities, the “urban jungle”. Samuel Delany (1996) writes about the “unlicensed sector” of the city, where normal law does not hold, and about its relationship to the rest of the city. But most of our time, for most of us, is in the villages, where our lives are fairly predictable, and the laws are clear. (I think one of the differences between Europe and America is that America still has open country, complete with wild animals and outlaws, and that this still has some positive place in Americans’ hearts: they know what village-dwellers have lost.)

Gestalt therapy, developed in South Africa and America—countries with wildernesses—emphasises the freedom, unpredictability, and risks of the open country. The world of Gestalt therapy is big, lusty, unpredictable, both fulfilling and destroying, and, ultimately, fatal. Whatever I want to find is there to be found, but at a cost, which could be my life. We are part of the wilderness, but it is bigger than us—we cannot feel fully “at home”. The prospect is scary and exciting, sometimes too scary or too exciting.

So, we each make our villages, our places where we fully belong, which are not bigger than us. For some of us, the only village we can find is on our own, dreaming our own dreams. For others, we share our villages with other people who live by similar rules, and are willing to give up the same kinds of freedom in return for security. In some places, this is obvious, with estates with walls and security guards like the walled towns of the past. For some, the village is the nuclear family: the English say, “An Englishman’s home is his castle”. For the isolated, the walls become one small room on their own, or inside their skulls.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with living in a village, of whatever size. The chosen isolation of the hermit has its place as well as more communal options. The question is whether I am making a choice about my village, and whether I can fulfil my present wants and needs in this village. There come times in each person’s life when we need to expand our horizons beyond the village: adulthood, bereavements, relationships, redundancy, retirement. Each one of these opens for us the excitement and anxiety of the wilderness.

People usually come to therapy when they are living in a village where the harvest has failed. They need support to face the challenge of open country as they seek their new home. They need to be encouraged to contact the reality of the failed harvest, and of the actuality of possibilities and risks in their new decisions.

For the European Union, the wider horizons challenge its citizens with the open country beyond the national villages, and it is inevitable that some will respond by building their walls higher. Those who do this have a point: there are opportunities in the open country, but also bandits and warlords who see the Union as a territory to be conquered or plundered. Part of how the United States of America works is that people are culturally suspicious of central government, and would make themselves ungovernable rather than accept an erosion of local decision-making. Europeans will not usually do that, so there will be little check on the attempt to make decisions for the whole of Europe.

If there is a “global village”, where do the outlaws go? Where do we go if the harvest fails? The point I am making is that these questions will be answered one way or another. Outlaw enclaves will continue to emerge in cities, extreme nationalism will wall off areas for white people, or people of particular moral or religious viewpoints, people will withdraw inside their homes or their heads with their outlaw dreams. Or the Internet will become the wilderness, or, as a worst-case scenario, the financial markets.

So, we need to balance any move towards the “global village” with respect for, and provision for, the wilderness. We need to avoid “outlawing the outlaw”. For all harvests fail sometimes, and we need pointers towards new places to go, and people willing to risk the journey.

Note

* First published in 1996, in Apertura Magazine, 1, Luxemburg.

CHAPTER TWO

“Let’s work seriously about having fun!” Psychotherapists’ systemic countertransferences

We all have our blind spots! The areas of our functioning of which we are unaware lead us, as therapists, to messy contact with clients. We avoid areas that we find frightening or uninteresting (because we do not let them be frightening). We call these messy contacts, and the processes behind them, countertransference, and bring them to supervision.

But what of the countertransferences which are liable to be shared between therapist and supervisor? Areas where the nature of our profession helps to blind us? In these areas, we can project our life choices on to a client, and have the process potentially invisible to a supervisor who has made the same life choices.

I shall go through the potential “systemic countertransferences” that I have thought of. These are not meant to be a fully inclusive list. The areas I have focused on are: relationships, playing, problem-solving, money, work patterns, clarity, and organismic change vs. effort. My method will be exaggeration: my picture of the psychotherapist is a caricature, but, I hope, a useful, recognisable one. I want to thank the therapists and clients from Manchester Gestalt Centre, and friends in the Gestalt in Organisations group, for their comments and suggestions.

Deep meaningful relationships

We can be an intense lot, we psychotherapists. Close relationships are important to us, and we gravitate to, and attract, other people who are also quite intense. We enjoy the intense, significant relationships we have with our clients. We analyse our relationships, aiming for the ultimate “I–thou”. And we are often not very good at casual friendships, especially with people who are good at casual friendships: often we scare them.

My early experience, and, I suspect, that of many psychotherapists, was of difficulty in making shallow, simple relationships, making small talk. My relationships were all or nothing, my boundary tendencies towards confluence or isolation. I have written elsewhere (Philippson, 1990; Philippson & Harris, 1990) about the difficulties inherent in such “oscillating relationships”.

And yet, there is a problem here. As therapists, we live in a subculture where this works, after a fashion. Our relationships can be stormy, but we rather enjoy the storms, the drama, the sorting out of the crisis even at the brink of separation. Our clients do not necessarily live in such a subculture. They could come from a more common subculture where the usual path to friendship is via casual encounters: in the pub, club, in leisure activities, or in bed. The pattern of relationship-making in this subculture is, in many ways, more organic than ours, moving from casual contact to fuller contact to intimacy. However, some people, like the stereotypical psychotherapist, find such casual contact difficult. They have not learnt to “fit in”, or rather, they have learnt to walk around with a mind-set that they do not fit into whatever environment they encounter. I remember a Groucho Marx quote, “I wouldn’t join any club which would have me as a member.” In such a situation, the therapeutic method is often not modelling the kind of relationship the client needs to experiment with. Not only do we go for the deep, significant relationship fairly quickly and value it very highly in comparison with casual encounters, we are doing it in a context where the therapist–client relationship says to the client, “You don’t fit into my world.”

With such clients, I encourage small talk, development of interest in the minutiae of the therapy room, even of my life. We talk about possible contexts where the client can meet people on a casual basis, for example, evening classes, sports activities, social clubs of various sorts, and the importance of deeper contact developing from casual “shallow” contact. However, especially in these days of AIDS, I do not encourage casual sex (and will often discuss the health dangers, and the problems associated with the trivialisation of sexuality). In the therapeutic process, our engagement in more profound work must similarly be based on an ability just to be interested in each other (and certainly not just interest in each other’s problems and issues!). The Gestalt approach, emphasising the “surface”, phenomenological way that the client presents in the here-and-now encounter of therapy, is very useful here.

Serious and professional

Professional helpers are often not very good at playing in an uninhibited, childlike way. Very often, our childhood experience was of too much responsibility for others too early. We even use the language of play pejoratively: Perls’ (1969a) “games-playing” layer, Berne’s (2010) use of “games”, and the therapeutic use of the term “collusion”. Thus, our temptation, when a client comes from a similar background and brings to therapy an inability to play, is to “work seriously” on the “issue”. Alternatively, we adopt a split-off, transactional analysis model, and do “regression” work: playing is all right for children/child ego states, not for adults/adult ego states.

Let us look seriously at what playing is. The infant’s first play is a play of arms and legs and facial expressions and sounds, with creating his/her own motion and language and expressing them in the world. This develops into games of contact, noticing the feedback the child gets from the parent, endlessly dropping things so the parent can pick them up. Peep-bo and hide-and-seek: games of developing “object constancy” (what unplayful language for “Are you still there mum?”). Games of “How far can I go?” and “What happens if I …?” Games of “mummies and daddies”, “doctors and nurses”, “cowboys and Indians”/“Americans and Iraquis”. Games of “Let’s pretend” / “Let’s act as if this box is a rocket”. Competitive sports, making and breaking friendships, fighting, making things together: all part of making a culture with others.

As the child gets older, all these abilities merge into a developing ability to be comfortable in many different surroundings, to know what s/he wants, to develop a personal identity, to operate an appropriate contact boundary, and to discover the consequences of various kinds of inappropriate behaviour. We learn to play many roles, and to develop our preferences. We learn to play sexually, both lovingly and by using others as sexual objects. But, in play, we can always step outside our everyday roles, and become anything else, as the ancient Romans (at Bacchanalia) and modern Germans (at Fasching) know.

Looked at this way, one can almost say that neurosis is a work–play split, the loss of the inability to play in a particular area of activity; psychosis is the fixation in a particular kind of play. And yet, we, as therapists, often downgrade play, even in Gestalt therapy, where so many of the ways of working are essentially games (role playing, reversals, non-verbal dialogues).

We need to be able to combine being responsible adult, professional, ethical therapists and being able to play footsie, fighting, painting, clay modelling, yelling, hide-and-seek, dolls and teddy bears, monsters and gorillas with our clients. If we cannot, or if we can only do it by losing our ethical standards, then this is a therapy issue to be worked through with a therapist who can play.

Problem solvers

Gestalt therapy, in common with psychoanalysis and Rogerian psychotherapy, is strongly against any attempt to reduce it to the resolution of particular problems in a client’s life. Rather, the aim is to facilitate the increasing of the scope of the client’s awareness via contact/dialogue and experiment, with the expectation that the sense of the problem changes on the way.

However, most of us therapists originally went into the game (or business, if you do not like playing with serious subjects!) out of a desire to help people with problems. Many of us even find that we can relate better to people with problems who are looking for our help. So, for us, the spotlight of awareness shines on people’s difficulties rather than their strengths, even losing the ability to see what the client presents at face value, and, once they become sorted out enough that their strengths and problem-solving abilities are obvious, we kind of lose interest.

And yet, it is through the client’s strengths and resources that new things can happen, new games can be played, and new experiments performed. They must be a major part of the therapy process. By analogy, the strengths of the therapist must be a major part of the supervision process. An important part of my contract with supervisees is that they bring work that they are particularly pleased with as well as work that causes them concern. I want to see the whole range of the therapist, and model that so that the therapist sees the whole range of the client.

Self-employed

A lot of we therapists are self-employed, many having moved out of jobs to work with people “free of organisational constraints”. We can now be more anarchic, choose our work to suit us (see also below), and innovate. And many of our clients (given that we often charge for our services, and might see people at times when employed people need to be at work) are also self-employed. However, I get the impression that we sometimes do not properly understand the world of someone who is employed by others, or is unemployed and wants to work for someone. We assume a kind of superiority of choice in being out of structures, are relatively oblivious to the advantages of working in organisations, and, paradoxically, often lose out ourselves by so doing.

Clients lose out because we can assume that the answer to major difficulties is to leave a job, rather than to struggle on. Both are options, and very frequently clients look at all the options, the climate for small businesses, a mortgage, lack of organisational support, loss of friends, pension difficulties, and opt to stay employed. I have come across therapists who are quite dismissive about taking this option.

Therapists lose out, in my experience as a supervisor, because they blind themselves somewhat with the “freedom” of self-employment. Their constraint then becomes lack of money! A therapist is a small business, in a climate that is not good for small businesses (high interest, etc.). We have the advantage that we profit financially from other people’s misery, and there is a lot of it around. We have the disadvantage that we tend to be uncomfortable with business realities (as described above). It is a well-known fact among self-employed people (except therapists) that when starting out in business, choice is limited as to what work you take on if you are going to make a reasonable living out of your work. Later on, as t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: ROOTS IN PHILOSOPHY
• PART II: ROOTS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CONNECTIONS WITH OTHER THEORIES
• PART III: ROOTS IN GESTALT FOUNDATIONAL THEORY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX