Gestalt Therapy

Advances in Theory and Practice

Talia Bar-Yoseph Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136586309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

The Gestalt approach is based on the philosophy that the human being is born with the healthy ability to regulate needs and wants in relationship with the environment in which she/he lives. Heightening of personal awareness and exploration of needs is enabled by the therapist who actively engages in supporting and assisting the therapeutic journey of the client.

Gestalt Therapy: Advances in Theory and Practice is a collaboration of some of the best thinkers in the Gestalt therapy approach. It offers a summary of recent advances in theory and practice, and novel ideas for future development. Each chapter focuses on a different element of the Gestalt approach and, with contributors from around the world, each offers a different perspective of its ongoing evolution in relation to politics, religion and philosophy.

Incorporating ideas about community, field theory, family and couple therapy, politics and spirituality, this book will be of interest not only to Gestalt therapists but also to non-Gestalt practitioners, counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. Counselling, behavioural science and psychotherapy students will also find this a valuable contribution to their learning.

Chapter 1

Gestalt in the new age

Jay Levin and Talia Bar-Yoseph Levine

Gestalt-based therapy is too good to be reserved only for therapists. Its philosophical underpinnings bring into play a wide array of concepts in a novel way that combines radical ideas in a creative amalgamation. This unique coming together of different perspectives – a unique epistemological and ontological position that devolved from its adherence to three foundational sources, namely field theory, phenomenology and dialogue – has implications far wider than the field of psychotherapy and invites fresh and innovative viewpoints in the field of human activity. We have called this Gestalt-based approach the “Gestalt philosophy of being” in order to emphasize and affirm its breadth and depth in the area of human efforts. We believe it has been a reliable guide to understanding human concerns since its inception in the middle of the 20th century and into the 21st century.

Gestalt therapy based in a “Gestalt philosophy of being”

Currently the frequent and familiar term used to describe this approach is “Gestalt therapy.” This is a commonly used generic term for addressing a wide variety of Gestalt-based thinking and practice, be it organizational consultancy, psychotherapy, or relationship in general. “Gestalt therapy” is used as an umbrella expression, an overall concept describing any application derived from Gestalt-based thinking. Indeed one might say that historically Gestalt was predominantly an approach to psychotherapy. Most training establishments and Gestalt practitioners identify themselves primarily as psychotherapists.

This stance, however, minimizes the breadth, the depth and the beauty of Gestalt as an overall “philosophy of being.” The Gestalt philosophy of being can stimulate, inspire and encourage a different view of human nature – a more human vision of and for the future. The Gestalt philosophy of being traverses cultural restrictions and different languages and offers a healing through meeting in a diverse cultural universe as ours currently is (Bar-Yoseph Levine 2005). It is through the conviction of Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman (1971) that organismic self-regulation by way of Gestalt formation-and-destruction provides the basis of a coherent and significant understanding of living organisms in relations to their environment. As a philosophy of being, Gestalt therapy makes accessible this principle by which human beings can live their lives in a wide array of conditions and situations. In other words, the Gestalt philosophy of being is uniquely predisposed and ready to cultivate our humanity and humanize our culture in our new world.

Some of these implications have generalized Gestalt’s original basic psychotherapeutic orientation into what Bar-Yoseph Levine suggests calling a “Gestalt philosophy of being” – an approach to maintaining and sustaining relationship. By philosophy of being, we mean that the Gestalt-based approach can contribute a unique understanding of living as autonomous beings in relationships. The concept “Gestalt philosophy of being” recognizes that persons use the same philosophical and practical guidance wherever they go, it contributes to who they are; it becomes part of their individuated make-up. Within the “Gestalt philosophy of being,” we find every form of practice that deals with human relationships, for example, psychotherapy, organizational consultancy (Bar-Yoseph Levine 2008; Gaffney 2009; Melnick and Nevis 2010), educational critiques and initiatives (Goodman 1972; Neill 1962), the contribution of Gestalt therapy to a model of development (McConville 1995; Oaklander 1978; Stevens 1994), as well as the way people live in their community, and its value as a lens for viewing community work (Lichtenberg 2002; O’Neill 2009; Polster, in O’Neill 2009), in their family (O’Neill this volume) and with themselves. It guides the way people conduct their lives in a variety of capacities and contexts. For example, using the Gestalt philosophy of being, Bar-Yoseph and Zwikael (2007) take a refreshing view of dealing with change in the engineering profession. This is a welcome demonstration of the wide application that its theory of change offers.

One of the applications of the Gestalt philosophy of being is to further examine the notions of differentiation, difference, personal, private, community and coexistence. It contains much of the foundation needed to take the next step towards a better world. For example, its outlook indicates that investing in a meeting of differences leads to a contactful relationship which can lead to growth and healing. This is a perspective which overcomes a tendency either to ignore or even obliterate personal, national, cultural and social diversity and differences or exaggerate them into enmity (Lichtenberg 2002).

A process model of growth: the contact episode

In the 1950s what we are referring to as “the Gestalt philosophy of being” challenged established Western notions of normalcy and illness and proposed “organismic self-regulation” as an autonomous criterion of health (Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman 1971). From its beginnings in the 1940s (Perls 1969) this approach to existence has endeavored to articulate a fresh vision of what it means to be a person and what is entailed in living a human life. The authors suggest that the world and the person are in continuous relatedness and each is subject to influence, change and growth by the other. It is the primacy of field theory (in which we include the concepts of holism and organismic self-regulation); phenomenology and dialogue – the three pillars supporting the standpoint of the Gestalt-based approach – that is the basis for a comprehensive process model of growth (Resnick 1995).

The Gestalt philosophy of being is based on the immediacy of experiencing. “Here” refers to embodied sensory experience. “Now” refers to the temporal propinquity (closeness or immediacy) of contact. The “here” and “now” of Gestalt-based thinking refers to the occurrences and transformations of embodied sensory experience in which the non-personal environment is personalized and incorporated into support through contact.

Contact is an experience of difference that both separates and connects. The experience of difference is essential for connection. There is no sense of connectedness without a concomitant sense of difference. This touching of difference is called awareness in Gestalt-based therapy and the engagement of these differences is called contact. In other words, movement leads to difference which leads to awareness which leads to contact. Change and growth takes place in the contact (engagement of difference) between the organism and its environment.

Growth by way of relatedness becomes the epitome of personal and collective effect of experience. Growth initially evolves from and then builds on human experience, and returns repeatedly to confer unwavering power and authority on human experience. It is this unvarying return to originality that makes the Gestalt philosophy of being a blueprint for our times leading us into the future. The Gestalt philosophy of being introduces an epistemology that challenges the prevailing mechanistic, technical and outcome-oriented approaches of the 20th century. In other words, “Gestalt therapy” was not only advanced for the 1950s – it is still advanced in the new millennium.

The constant ongoing process of identifying and satisfying an organismic need is called self-regulation. Organismic self-regulation occurs at the point of contact between the organism and its environment. Polster and Polster (1974) refer to this process of organism/environment adjustment as a “contact episode.” Contact provides meaning and context by “grounding” the organism in its historicity and situatedness (Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman 1971).

A contact episode is marked by situatedness, temporality, irreversibility, and growth (or stagnation). The level and quality of contact varies and can be adjusted when consciousness is heightened. The organism/environment contact boundary is marked by change and growth that incorporates the unknown into the known.

Typically, a contact episode has a beginning, middle, and an end. These temporal moments are discernible by 1) the initial experience of a need; 2) the accurate identification of the need; 3) recognizing and modifying the resources that will meet the need in an assimilable form for the organism; and 4) the organismic satisfaction of the need and its incorporation as support for further contact.

There are at least three illustrations of the contacting process that are described in Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman 1971), which have been used for heuristic purposes. For example, Gestalt Therapy (1971) uses the distinctions of pre-contact, contact, final contact and post-contact to describe the process of contact that occurs between initially experiencing an organismic need and its satisfaction. Of course, being on a continuum, these points are arbitrary. In addition, Gestalt Therapy (1971) offers another view to describe this process in terms of embodied transformations of excitement. The creative adjustments of id, ego, and personality describe procedural embodiments of the self as the organism progresses through a contacting event. Another perspective, this time from the standpoint of the ego, explores how interruptions to contact (anachronistic “creative adjustments”) articulate disruptions in the continuum of awareness in a contact episode. These interruptions to contact are also portrayed on a continuum in Gestalt Therapy for describing the “layers” or stages of “resistance,” called “boundary disturbances.” They can be – and have been – described in other ways.

In addition, other formulations of the process of the contact cycle abound in Gestalt therapy. Burley (unpublished paper) has examined psychopathology in terms of interruptions of figure-formation utilizing a framework which has implications from neuropsychology – the undifferentiated field, emergence of need/interest, figure sharpening, scanning, completion, undifferentiated field. Gestalt formation and destruction has also been variously conceptualized by Smith (1994: 100), Zinker (1977), and Clarkson (1989) and others. Less formally, Perls (1974: 59ff) has identified five phases, or “layers of the personality,” which are contacted and resolved in the process of identifying and satisfying organic needs: the cliché (or phony) layer; the synthetic (or phobic) layer; impasse; implosion; and explosion.

Irreversibility is another attribute of a contact episode. Change implies irreversibility – for better or worse. The process of Gestalt therapy is not a rehearsal for practicing what needs to be performed “outside” of the consultation room. The embodiment of organismic self-regulation in a contact episode is not a “dummy run” without consequences (for both therapist and client). In other words, the work itself is a therapeutic journey at the end of which the client has a new and aware behavior as part of being.

Growth or decay is the consequence of change. A contact episode can be more – or less – successful in identifying and satisfying a need. Successful identification and satisfaction of a need can be described as an ingathering and appropriation by the organism of the unknown aspects of the environment. Latner refers to this process of growth as “befriending the field”:

This is, in a way, a process of continually befriending aspects of the field. As we are involved in the coming figure and its resolution, we put parts of ourselves in an interaction with other parts of the field – other people, plants, animals, objects. In this interaction, they are inside our self-boundaries. We are identified with them. Our relationship with them is no longer (in Buber’s terms) one of I and It; it becomes one of I and Thou. In this way, we assimilate the field, changing it by changing our relation to it.

(Latner 1974: 78)

More successful contact episodes lead to growth while stagnation, and ultimately death, marks the outcome of less successful episodes. Each episode, leading to growth or stagnation, becomes incorporated (assimilated and accommodated) into the background for the next emerging figure of the need and imbues that (new) figure with renewed meaning and significance (Wheeler 1991).

Every contact, even of a poor quality, involves movement. Even a sense of stagnation includes the fact that something has occurred and (at least for a while) that there has been some movement, a “meeting.” Addressing the process and exploring the sense of stagnation is an essential part of the therapeutic journey. It suggests that if the smallest movement exists, then change is possible and hence there is hope. Once movement/change is noticed, the question is of learning more and the development of good quality contact.

Contact and change

Since its inception over 100 years ago, psychotherapy has been hijacked by the narrow empiricism of the medical model. The authority of the medical model, with its cures for various illnesses and its place of prestige in the hierarchy of social values, is sanctioned by an epistemology that defends the mechanistic, technical and outcome-oriented approaches of the 20th century.

“Medical psychology,” under the influence of positivistic science, embodied the conventional wisdom of 20th-century epistemology and ontology as “correct” theory and practice. This approach later came to be the benchmark of “good psychology,” in concert with psychoanalysis, behaviorism and the “human potential movement” (also known as humanistic psychology). Under the auspices of this medical model, the goal of psychotherapy has essentially remained to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Advancing Theory
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Gestalt in the new age
• PART I. Gestalt therapy and theory
• PART II. Aspects of Gestalt practice
• PART III. Epilogue
• Index