Heart of Development, V. 2

Adolescence

Mark McConville, Gordon Wheeler, Mark McConville, Gordon Wheeler

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135061326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

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:

Toward a Theoretical Framework

1

Lewinian Field Theory, Adolescent Development, and Psychotherapy

Mark McConville

“It is… this relatedness-at-the-boundary, this system of contacts, whose development we wish to trace… ” (Gordon Wheeler, 1990)

Introduction

In the lived world of adolescent clinical practice, we are presented in most instances, initially at least, with a situation, more than an individual client. There are anxious adults, strained relationships, and a story line unfolding toward an unfulfilled and unfulfilling future. And somewhere in the drama, we encounter the adolescent, a child who is no longer exactly a child, but also not yet self-organized or directed enough to make a viable life on his or her own. Such was the case with Nora, a depressed, self-mutilating sixteen-year-old referred to me by her school counselor. In fact, the counselor used this exact expression when she first telephoned me: “We’ve got a situation here,” she said, “and we’d like you to get involved.” And a situation it was, indeed, a piece of real-life drama unfolding in her office, its characters including scared classmates, “uncooperative” parents, frustrated and alarmed school officials, and of course, Nora herself, a bright, attractive girl who had sadly come to the conclusion that growing up was impossible, and life itself some sort of curse.

Todd, also sixteen, had come (apparently) to a somewhat different conclusion--something more along the lines of ‘life is a party, and growing up is irrelevant.’ And like Nora, Todd was introduced to me as part of a larger situation, a field in the language of Gestalt theory, which included Juvenile authorities, n’er-do-well friends, and parents who were divorced but still at war.

The question with both Todd and Nora, and in fact with most adolescent clinical referrals--the question that virtually defines the interface of clinical practice and developmental/psychotherapy theory--is where in the situation to insinuate ourselves, with whom, and in what fashion. We will return to Nora and Todd later, but first we must address this critical question: how is the clinician to assess and catalog the possibilities for intervention. Do we meet with the individual adolescent him or herself? Do we include the parent or parents? And what about the wider field, the adults and peers beyond the family who have become part of the adolescent’s unfolding drama? And whomever we engage therapeutically, do we address the subjective phenomena of experience and meaning-making? Or do we intervene to influence the external environment in an effort to increase or decrease the likelihood of specific behaviors? And beneath these questions, another question: how are we to make these determinations? What are the criteria, and what is the model that organizes our understanding of the adolescent’s development and the clinical difficulties that have solicited our involvement?

This array of questions is partly a reflection of the nature of adolescent development. For one thing, this development is mediated largely by interpersonal relationships, such that the adolescent self is intrinsically part of a wider social field. And as this self evolves through the teen years, adolescents spontaneously begin to segregate “inner” and “outer” worlds of experience and behavior, which sometimes seem indeed, almost as parallel, non-intersecting universes. The upshot, for the clinician who works with adolescents, is that sometimes we are called upon to engage our adolescent clients as singular beings, and at the most intimate level of subjectivity. At other times we are shut out of that world entirely, and can only intervene to influence and shape the social environment in which our clients behave, and in which their subjective experience takes shape.

Clinical theory and practice has evolved in corresponding fashion. There are approaches which attend almost exclusively to the nuances of the adolescent’s private, subjective experience--such as Bios’ (1979) Psychoanalysis, Kaupenhauer’s (1990) Jungian analysis, Wexler’s (1991) Cognitive Behavior therapy, or Oldfield’s Mythic Journey therapy (Peay, 1990)--and there are approaches which essentially disregard subjectivity and manipulate the environment--Glasser’s (1965) Reality Therapy. Minuchin’s (1974) and others’ family therapy approaches, and most behavior management methods-in order to shape behavioral outcome. And on both sides of the line, the adolescent’s first person experience is marginalized, relegated to epiphenomenal status, subjected to interventions which are either interpretive or manipulative, but which for the most part lack a rationale for authentic encounter and dialog.

In actual clinical practice, therapists who work with adolescent clients find themselves in an unenviable position. Those who practice strictly within the confines of a particular approach, say orthodox analysts, or strict family therapy practitioners, are limited to maps which cover only part of the total field, rendering them effective only with certain “types” of cases. Eclectic practitioners, by contrast, find themselves shuttling between models depending upon the presenting clinical profile. They are guided in this process by their intuitive grasp of where in the total field the ‘action’ is, and what sort of involvement on their part will most effectively promote the cause of development. One situation seems to call for parent guidance, another for family therapy, another for intervention in the school, and still another for individual work with the adolescent herself.

In other words, effective adolescent practitioners seem to develop their own intuitive field model of adolescent development and intervention, creatively adjusting to the insufficiencies of existing theoretical models. Gestalt therapy theory, in our view, provides the necessary theoretical base for developing a model of adolescent development and intervention that is both comprehensive and utilitarian--a model that allows us to understand adolescents on their own terms, in all their inward and outward complexity, and which supports interventions in all regions and levels of the field.

Field and Development

Developmental theories, according to Patricia Miller (1989), differ most essentially according to their implicit answer to the question, “What is it that develops?” Each developmental theory, she points out, makes assumptions concerning the proper unit of analysis. Gestalt therapy theory, as laid down in Perls, Hefferline and Goodman’s (1951) classic text, Gestalt Therapy, holds that the dynamic, interactive field of organism and environment is the only proper unit of psychological investigation. They write:

In any psychological investigation whatever, we must start from the interacting of the organism and its environment. Every human function is an interacting in an organism/environment field, socio-cultural, animal and physical. No matter how we theorize about impulses, drives, etc., it is always to such an interacting field that we are referring…” (1951, p. 228).

Traditional approaches to development, even in their most current articulations, generally fail to incorporate the central insight of field theory, namely, that all phenomena are of-a-field. According to developmental theorists Cathy Dent-Read and Patricia Zukow-Goldring (1997), “prevailing theories generally attempt to explain the changes in form, function and complexity observed during development by seeking causes in the child, or in the environment, or in some combination of the two.” But this sort of dualistic thinking is breaking down in the face of recent research and thinking, they point out, even in such fields as cellular biology. In a voice reminiscent of Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman, Dent-Read and Zukow-Goldring (1997) conclude that “…organisms and their environments do not ‘interact’ or cause each other… Rather, organisms and environments form reciprocal wholes, in which each plays a complementary role: Organisms act and adapt, environments support and surround” (p.7).

The implication of a field approach to development is that utilitarian psychological constructs, such as “self”,’’symptom”, and “personality.” and even developmental constructs such as “adolescence,” must be defined in field terms, as integrators of the overarching field of experience, and as organizers of the contact boundary of the child and her environment. Symptoms, personality traits, and even adolescence itself, traditionally viewed as phenomena of the encapsulated self--the self conceived in isolation--must be understood as creative adjustments to conditions of the field.

The weaning of emergent language, for example, in an 18-month old child, and more specifically, the meaning of this emergence for development is co-determined by the ground structures and environmental conditions of the overarching field in which the child finds himself. The value and utilization of language in a particular parent-infant dyad, and the role of language in a particular family, in a particular socio-economically indexed subculture, and at a certain time of the family history--these are integral reciprocals of the child’s emergent information-processing strategies. How this emergent potential is received may well determine its significance in the child’s overall development, and whether or not this or any emergent set of phenomena come to define a “stage” of the individual’s development.

Kurt Lewin’s Theory of Development

Twenty years before the publication of Gestalt Therapy, Kurt Lewin answered the dominant developmental theories of his day--psycho-analysis and American behaviorism--with a field theory of adolescent development and behavior (Lewin. 1997). In contrast with other approaches, which tended to partialize development according to biological, psychological, or social causality, Lewin proposed a model that integrated these dimensions. Most theories of human development tend to emphasize one dimension of functioning-say, intellectual operations (Piaget, 1950), psycho-sexual maturation (Freud. 1962), social learning (Bandura, 1977), or cognitive information processing (Siegler, 1986). Most theories, in other words, are theories of a part, and accordingly tend to reduce the growth of the whole to the development of some part function.

Lewin saw the biological, psychological, and social as dimensions of an integrated field, which he called the life space; and it is this field, the life space, that Lewin envisioned as the proper subject of developmental theory and research. The life space represents a map of the developing person’s phenomenological field. It incorporates, in the words of Ernest Hilgard (1948), “the space in which I live psychologically…[and] corresponds in many ways to the world around me… [but is also] a space that somehow exists within me.”

In this concept of the life space, in other words, we have a model that undercuts the dualistic split of inner and outer, and brings to our attention that ground of experience and behavior from which “inner” and “outer” emerge. It includes the genetic and physiological givens, the familial, social, cultural, political and geographical contexts of development, and the experiential domains of thought, need, fantasy, feeling and personality organization.

In Lewin’s conceptualization, the field, or life space, is continuous in space and time. “Using the field approach one thinks of living, moving, changing, energetic interacting … the forces of a field are of a whole and develop over time” (Yontef, 1993, p. 301, emphasis added). In other words, because the psychological field is dynamic and evolving, a field approach to human behavior is by definition an implicit model of development. The child-environment system is in a state of temporal dynamic tension, a tension of movement or becoming. The researcher or clinician is presented fundamentally with an unfolding (or the interruption of an unfolding) that magnetizes the field of the child and her environment and orients that field in a certain developmental direction.

Having established the psychological life space as the proper unit of analysis, Lewin identified three major parameters of its development. These are:

(1) the extension of the life space;

(2) the increased differentiation of the life space;

(3) the change in organization of the life space.

We will consider each in turn, with special attention to the power of Lewin’s theory for illuminating the phenomena of adolescence.

Extension of the Life Space

“The psychological world which affects the behavior of the child seems to extend with age,” (Lewin, 1997. p. 242). And this expansion shows itself in several ways. First, there is throughout development a general increase in the scope and range of the life space. In the psychological present, as it evolves over time, there is an increase in the “space of free movement”-the region, both geographical and psychological, that the child finds accessible. This trend reflects both the emergence of new abilities and potentials for the developing person as well as an evolution of the mix of environmental supports and prohibitions related to these emergent behaviors. A client of mine, age fifteen, would occasionally, without his parents’ knowledge or approval, take the train from his suburban neighborhood into the center of downtown Cleveland. There, he would buy a pack of cigarettes in one of the shops and smoke as he wandered the city streets. Often, he would sit in one of the outdoor malls, smoking and reading a paperback, usually William Boroughs or Friedrich Neitzsche. With this ritual, he pushed beyond the constraining boundaries of his familiar life space--geographically, behaviorally, intellectually, and relationally, by taking himself beyond the boundary of parental cognizance and approval. And at the same time, he was exploring new “internal” space, in the sense of becoming ‘a person who does such things.’ Developmental change, in other words, subtends the child-environment system, and requires new environments (in this case, an urban center where little is thought of a fifteen year-old buying cigarettes, and where his various modes of wandering were treated with an accepting indifference) as much as it requires new interests and impulses bubbling up within the adolescent himself.

Lewin points out that this expansion of the life space is anything but linear and orderly for the adolescent. For one thing, as some areas are made available (driving a car. for example), others are closed off (e.g., turning to adults for protection when being teased by a bully). Furthermore, the areas of the life space that are opening up are at best unfamiliar and vaguely determined and, in many cases, ambiguously permitted and prohibited at the same time. For example, many adults expect adolescents to experiment with tobacco and alcohol, and precisely because of these expectations, intensify their efforts to discourage and prohibit such behavior.

Lewin contends that many of the characteristics traditionally understood as a function of the adolescent as a self-in-isolation, (and ascribed in most theory to “internal” causes such as hormonal change or archaic superego function), are best understood as expressions of a disequilibrating field. It is, to take a familiar example, as much a social field which is frightened and intensely ambivalent concerning adolescent sexuality, and which accordingly provides little coherent support and structure for the emergence of sexual experience, as it is the adolescent’s surging hormones that co-construct the phenomenon labeled “sexual impulsivity.”

The second extension of the life space cited by Lewin is temporal, as its “psychological time dimension” expands to include increasingly more distant representations of past and future. This aspect of development is nowhere more dramatic than in adolescence when the field of experience becomes polarized between the all too familiar ways and means of childhood and the daunting expectations and possibilities of becoming grown up. Time seems to open up for the adolescent, not merely as a cognitive construct, but as an existential reality, but as a force-field which alternatively pulls in opposite directions. This is probably most salient as adolescents approach the end of high school or near their eighteenth birthday. The protracted future, which seems relatively insubstantial to the younger adolescent, becomes a palpable organizer of the older adolescent’s reality. When my downtown sojourner passed his seventeenth birthday, his wanderings gradually lost their satisfying allure, and he would find his dreamy trances interrupted by troubling observations and thoughts. “What do these people do,” he found himself wondering as he walked the busy streets; “How will I make it out here in this world?”

Differentiation of the Life Space

Lewin’s description of the differentiation of the life space represents one of his most important contributions to developmental theory, and he spells out the nature of this process with careful precision. Differentiation means, first, that the child’s behavior displays greater variety over time. New actions are added to the motor repetoire, emotional expression becomes more variegated, and social behavior becomes more articulated in its forms of relatedness. In short, the number of dynamic “parts” within the dynamic whole of the life space increases with development.

In addition to the greater variety of experience and behavior, differentiation also refers to the relations between the emerging parts of the life space. He writes: “…the term differentiation can refer to relations of dependence and independence between parts of a dynamic whole. In this case increasing differentiation means that the number of parts of the person which can function relatively independently increases; i.e., that their deg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• The Editors
• The Contributors
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I: Toward a Theoretical Framework
• Part II: Applications in the Field