Heart of Development, V. 1

Early and Middle Childhood

Gordon Wheeler, Mark McConville

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317707110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

In these groundbreaking new collections, the reader will find an exciting, boad-ranging selection of work showing an array of applications of the Gestalt model to working with children, adolescents, and their families and worlds. From the theoretical to the hands-on, and from the clinical office or playroom to family settings, schools, institutions, and the community, these chapters take us on a rewarding tour of the vibrant, productive range of Gestalt work today, always focusing on the first two decades of life. With each new topic and setting, fresh and creative ideas and interventions are offered and described, for use by practitioners of every school and method.

Part I:
Theory

1
The Developing Field: Toward a Gestalt Developmental Model

Gordon Wheeler

Revisioning the Self-and-Other¹

Gestalt work with children and adolescents, like all Gestalt work with people, rests ultimately on a radically re-visioned understanding of self, self-experience, and human nature and process, which underlies and then unifies a great variety of approaches, applications and methods under the Gestalt model. This view, which contrasts strongly with much of our common legacy of clinical and psychological training, is what we may call a field model of self and experience-an approach which is subtly but crucially different from the individualistic self and developmental models that have long dominated our clinical traditions, and the culture at large. In place of models which start with the individual self in isolation, and then view development from an outside, objective/mechanical point of view, we have here a model that attempts to look at experience from a subjective viewpoint, but at the same time to place that experience in its dynamic context of constant interaction and mutual influence with other subjective selves. Such a synthesis is both needed and deeply welcome, we believe, in a world that is struggling for relationship and meaning on every level, from the personal/developmental to the ecological/political-and at the same time is deeply confused about the relationship between self-development and other people, the individual and the social, autonomy and interdependence-which is to say all the questions of development in the broadest sense.

All these are the "part-whole" or gestalt relationship questions of our individual lives and our living social field; and all of them are much clarified by the articulation of a developmental model that is constructivist and phenomenological, relational and intersubjective, and holistic in the sense of taking in and unifying the full domain of living, from the body/affective/cognitive to the relational, community and spiritual dimensions of experience. We do unify all these dimensions of experience in our own development and in our ordinary life, at least as best we can. We have to try to do this, to live and make sense of our lives; and in fact some integration of this kind is probably close to a definition for most of us of healthy self-development in full human living. Yet these domains are widely separated in most of our received clinical models, and in much of the Western cultural tradition we are all a part of-the individual from the relational, the affective from the cognitive, the personal from the political, the bodily from the spiritual, and so on-with destructive results that we can see everywhere in the world around us, including of course our clinical and other work with, children, adolescents, and the worlds they live in.

Putting these dimensions back together, we believe, will give us a theoretical model that can encompass and clarify both the "inferiority" of self-experience and the dynamic mutual shaping of self and self-process in and with the social field-two perspectives on development and behavior that again have long been separated in much of our inherited clinical discourse. And as the Gestaltist Kurt Lewin pointed out long ago, there is nothing so practical as a good theory-because it is our theoretical model that orients and supports us to know when to do what in our work with children and others, and what part of the child's world to intervene on, and how: her world of internal experience and "structure," her behavior and behavioral contingencies, her family, her wider social systems, and so on. All of us who work with children do intervene at all these levels, of course; but we often have to do it without the support of-even in defiance of-our received developmental and self-models, which generally point us to one or another separate domain of the child's living, and leave it to us (and the child) to integrate them as best we can. A Gestalt field model of self and development provides us that support and that orientation-things we've almost forgotten that a model is supposed to provide us, and that a theory is supposedly for.

These are large promises, and important practical hopes. To see how such an integrated developmental viewpoint can itself be developed out of the premises of the Gestalt self model, and then how such a model can make a supportive difference in our work with children, adolescents, and their worlds, we will first discuss the need for a new model, and then move to a consideration of some of the types of developmental models that are already available for us to pick from, and already in use in various settings. From there we will move on to the beginnings at least of articulation of an integrated Gestalt field model of self and development, which we will argue is much closer both to our own lived and felt experience, and to the living problems and potentials of our work with children, adolescents, and their worlds of living. Finally, we will discuss applications of this model, to see what practical difference it can make and how it may support us in the interventions we need to make every day as therapists, counselors, teachers, parents and other adults in the lives of children.

The Need for a New Approach: A Consideration of Developmental Models

Most of us who work with children and adolescents have long been uncomfortable, at best, with the application of many of our inherited clinical and developmental models to any actual living children we work with, and to their families and life problems. When we look at "internal" or "depth" models, principally those growing out of the broad psychoanalytic tradition, we often have a sense that the developing child is being viewed far too much in isolation, as if human development were something purely "inner" or biologically-driven, something like the development of an acorn into an oak, with only the external provision of some bare minimum of biological conditions from the environment: sun, water, soil nutrients, and so forth. By a metaphorical stretch we could liken the social context of development to a physical environment of this kind, and certainly this has been done in many models; but in the end the stretch is simply too great, and the metaphor breaks down. Such a reductionistic picture, the "environment as background," does violence in particular to the intersubjective nature of our social world, which is populated not by "objects," resources and targets only, but by other subjective beings whose behavior is mediated by their own inner experience and self-process, like our own. This means that as we go about our life business of organizing our world to meet our needs and goals (and avoid the dangers and risks we perceive around us), the inner lives and self-process of other people are significant parts of our own experiential field, influencing and influenced by our own self-process and construction of meaning, in ways that the behavioral and drive models of self and development cannot handle or account for. This kind of objection applies not only to the classic Freudian model and its derivatives, with their language of drive, cathexis and object, but even to a sweeping revision like Erik Erikson's (1951, 1963) influential attempt to move beyond the limiting terms of his own Freudian legacy, and include family and culture in the developmental picture. Erikson's ambitious synthesis of psychoanalysis and anthropology, which dominated much developmental thinking at least in the English-speaking world for a generation, is probably as far as anyone can go in trying to integrate Western individualism with broader social and cultural perspectives; but ultimately the attempt is limited by the terms of the individualist, separate-self model he inherits from Freud and is then trying to stretch to fit the newer anthropological data. For example, the idea that separate identity is and must be formed and solidified before intimate intersubjective relationship can start, as Erikson's model implies, is simply too far from our lived, recursive experience to be helpful-and too far as well from the intervening two generations of infant research and feminist and other critiques of our established developmental models, critiques which emphasize the development of relationality from the earliest days of life.² Rather, our sense of self and sense of other-identity and relationship-are not separate stages but back-and-forth or recursive developmental processes which both run all through life, each giving rise to the other in ways that a self-in-isolation model cannot very well address or help us with. How and why this must be so will be clearer when we present a Gestalt field model of development in the pages ahead.

Also in this "internal" camp are important cognitive models such as Piaget's (1947), or Kohlberg's (1981) moral development scales, each of which lays out roughly parallel maps of inherent developmental progress from primitive or infantile to mature stages in a sort of natural unfolding of our inborn potential. Both models emphasize that the stages have a biological clock component and cannot be much accelerated: a child cannot reach the Piagetian stage of concrete operations, say, or the Kohlberg stage of social-conformity ethics, much before the age of "latency" because these stages are dependent on the development of symbols and a certain type of abstract thinking of which younger children are physically/cognitively incapable. (And notice how the use of the word "latency" illustrates how far the Freudian model has permeated our discussions of development, even when we think we have rejected its basic terms). On the other hand, the stages can plainly be retarded-something that Kohlberg at least recognizes even if he gives little attention to what social conditions might promote or retard moral progress from stage to stage. Some people never get to the Piagetian cognitive stage of full symbolic operations, for example-the manipulation of abstract ideas in terms of each other,-which would seem to be necessary for the kind of abstract standards of justice which Kohlberg associates with the highest levels of ethical reasoning and judgment. And certainly it is only too tragically obvious in the world that many, many people never reach what we would recognize, along with all the major religious traditions of the world, as a high or good standard of ethical behavior and moral decision-making. But again, why they don't get there, or what kinds of developmental conditions beyond the individual would be necessary to support this kind of growth and movement, are simply not much addressed in the literature of these models. Thus these perspectives remain focused on the individual in isolation, implicitly assuming that "self" is something deeply internal and mostly autonomous, and end up being not so much wrong as just unhelpful, when we turn to real children, real problems, and real lives.

These three-Erikson, Piaget, and Kohlberg together with Kohut (e.g., 1971)-probably represent the most important and influential of all the developmental models offered roughly at mid-century, which is to say up to around a generation ago, and all of them still remain broadly influential today.³ At the other extreme, seemingly, are all the social-psychological theories and models that do talk about system, culture, and the interpersonal world. Clinically we have all the systemic schools of thought, now branching out and deepening more and more into narrative and self-organizational models and complexity theory (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1994; Kaufman, 1994; Maturana & Varela, 1987; White & Epston, 1991). These talk about the self-organizational properties of individuals, families, and other interpersonal systems but still generally leave a gap between this discussion and the implications of variously ordered systems for individual development. And then in social philosophy we have the explicit consideration of the social and systemic context for the "good life"-some notion of which must be embedded somewhere in our clinical ideas about health and dysfunction-but still without the developmental time dimension of individual/life span developmental models.⁴

But just as working with children inherently undermines our cultural bias toward viewing people and problems in isolation from context, so it also makes it glaringly obvious that however much we may feel that we work "with the present moment" in therapy or counseling, or "where the client is" without any theoretical blinders, in fact we are never navigating without some implicit map, however deeply buried or unspoken. With adults we may forget our implicit theoretical assumptions and beliefs about development (while still being guided and constrained by them). With children, no one can approach a four-year-old, say, as she would approach a fourteen-year-old; treat a preverbal child the same as a verbal child; fail to take note of puberty, and so on. These two crucial and related points-contextualism and developmentalism-are gifts of clinical perspective forced on the child worker by the nature of the child-and of us all. Gifts, because they are important truths that the person who works only with adults may easily lose sight of in our individualistically biased culture. These truths can reorient and sharpen our work with children and adults as well, if only we can find a model that can do justice to both these points at the same time.

The trouble comes when so many of our received developmental models, as we have seen, seem to one degree or another to neglect that crucial first point-contextualism-or all the ways in which we are dynamically embedded in and arise out of a relational field from our earliest beginnings of or as self-while most of the perspectives that do address relationship, social context, culture and so forth are not developmental. To begin to construct a developmental model that can do both things-that is, help us think developmentally without losing sight of the interactive social context of that development-requires a level of thinking, and a model of self and self-process, at a new order of complexity. Let us turn, then, to a self model that does reflect the complexity and contextuality of subjective experience, and thus can handle both poles of self-experience-the "inner" and "outer" worlds-as dynamic aspects of an integrated whole of lifelong seif-experience and development. This is the Gestalt field model of self and self process drawn in particular from the provocative suggestions of Paul Goodman (Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951) and the subsequent half-century of infant and cognitive research-and very much based as well on the earlier insights and perspectives of the Gestaltists Kurt Lewin and Kurt Goldstein, and the philosophical works of James, Ricoeur, and Quine, among others.

For example, think of an array of developmental models widely in use today, underlying and guiding interventions in clinical, educational, and related settings. Broadly, these models may be grouped in line with the three major traditions of clinical study and practice across the past century: psychoanalytic, cognitive/behavioral, and "existential/humanistic"-the three great streams which can be usefully integrated and contextualized, we are proposing here, by the Gestalt approach (see also discussion in Wheeler, 1994a). With Freud we have the familiar oral-anal-phallic stages, paralleled in Erikson by trust-autonomy-industry, and by Kohlberg's moral development scale, of punishment, conformity, and rules/principles (and, somewhat more derivatively, by Kohut's stages of mirroring, idealizing, and twinship). With Piaget we have a different view based on perceptual/cognitive processes: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and so forth. Among the humanistic models we have the familiar Maslowian (Maslow, 1954) hierarchy of needs, from security up through self-actualization, which could also be conceived developmentally, with each life stage characterized by a dominant class of needs (assuming the previous stages are resolved). Thomas Kegan (1984) focuses on meaning-making, which is much closer to our Gestalt understanding of human process, and lists progressive "stylistic" stages like incorporative, impulsive, imperial, interpersonal, and so on. Within a Gestalt traditon, we likewise might derive an implicit developmental table from Perls's ideas on oral aggression (Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951), with life task stages based on stages of contact, either as elaborated by Goodman (1951) in their joint work, or as refined in the "Cycle" model moving from sensation and awareness through action to contact or resolution.

Looked at in this way, the Perlsian perspective on development would fall somewhere between the Freudian (with oral aggression substituting for Eros and Thanatos) and the Maslowian, moving as the Freudian does from the supposedly passive dependency of the infant to an ideal of fully autonomous, self-reliant adult maturity. In all these cases, the content of the identified stages and, to a lesser extent, the exact placement of the boundaries between stages, shifts; what remains fairly constant is the notion of a more or less linear sequence of more or less discrete stages, in the ideal case at least, from age to age and stage to stage. Moreover, many of these models are implicitly unidirectional: to Perls as to Freud, it is "infantile," and thus shameful, to go back to dependency (or "polymorphous perversion," in the Freudian lexicon). We simply "get over" our "infantile" needs, as we become firmly individuated and non-dependent adults. (Among the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• The Editors
• The Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Theory
• Part II Applications
• Part III Perspectives and New Directions