Gestalt Therapy

100 Key Points and Techniques

Dave Mann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351656733
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Gestalt therapy offers a present-focused, relational approach, central to which is the fundamental belief that the client knows the best way of adjusting to their situation. This new edition of Gestalt Therapy: 100 Key Points and Techniques provides a concise, accessible guide to this flexible and far-reaching approach. Substantially updated throughout, topics discussed include:

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• The theoretical assumptions underpinning gestalt therapy.

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• Gestalt assessment and process diagnosis.

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• Field theory, phenomenology and dialogue.

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• Ethics and values.

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• Evaluation and research.

As such this book will be essential reading for gestalt trainees, as well as all counsellors and psychotherapists wanting to learn more about the gestalt approach.

Part I

Maps for a gestalt therapy journey

Laying the ground, theoretical assumptions

1

Gestalt therapy: A VERY BRIEF HISTORY

All therapies and theories emerge from a background just as all human beings emerge from a background. I make no apologies for beginning this book with such an obvious statement, as in gestalt therapy paying attention to the obvious is a central working principle of the approach.

Gestalt therapy is the weaving together of a wide collection of theories and concepts into an integrated whole. In common with its co-founders – Laura Perls, Frederick Perls and Paul Goodman – it has a colourful, radical and rebellious history since its birth during the writing and publication of the seminal text, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in Human Personality (Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951, hereafter referred to as ‘PHG’). The web of influences that converged to form the creative synthesis that was to be known as gestalt therapy followed the lives and trainings of its three founders and the relationships they formed prior to their collaboration in writing the seminal text that first named gestalt as a therapy. Gestalt therapy’s worldview evolved from Gestalt psychology, which was based on phenomenology and a framework of holism known as field theory.

Let us begin where the Perls and the word ‘gestalt’ hail from, namely Germany. Having attained his medical doctorate, in 1926 Frederick ‘Fritz’ Perls moved to Frankfurt – a thriving centre for philosophy, the arts, psychology and creative intellectualism – where he assisted Kurt Goldstein, a principal figure in holistic psychology in his work with brain-damaged soldiers. At the University of Frankfurt Fritz (as he was later known to his students) met his wife Laura who was a student of Goldstein’s. She studied with, amongst others, the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger, the gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer and the existential theologians Paul Tillich and Martin Buber. Both Laura and Fritz undertook training in psychoanalysis. Fritz’s training analyst was Wilhelm Reich whose work on body armour shaped Perls’ clinical thinking. Further influences were the philosopher Sigmund Friedlander, from whom Perls developed the concept of creative indifference, and the analyst Otto Rank who stressed the importance of re-experiencing and establishing meaning in the here and now. The analyst Karen Horney further reinforced a more present and environmentally focused approach to therapy. Both Fritz and Laura were captivated by the popular Gestalt psychology movement’s views on perception and integrated wholes that flew in the face of reductionism. It provided them with the organising principle for gestalt therapy as an integrating framework (Yontef, 1993). The social psychologist Kurt Lewin undertook work with the gestalt psychologists before developing his ideas on field theory that were integrated into gestalt therapy.

Frankfurt’s hotbed of creative thinkers was blown asunder by The Third Reich’s rise to power. Laura and Fritz fled to Holland where after a brief stay they moved on to South Africa where they worked as psychoanalysts. They met the South African prime minister Jan Smuts, author of Holism and Evolution, in which he considered the organism to be self-regulating and containing its past as much as its future in the present (Smuts, 1926).

The dogmatism of classic psychoanalysis never rested easily with the Perls and in 1947 the first statement against the approach was published, ‘Ego, Hunger and Aggression’ poignantly subtitled ‘A Revision of Freud’s Theory and Method’. Although published under F.S. Perls’ authorship, Laura Perls certainly had considerable input into the work as her varied influences since the couple’s meeting at a Goldstein lecture shone through.

The end of the Second World War saw the Perls emigrate to New York where there were shades of the Zeitgeist they experienced in Frankfurt. They set up the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy and enjoyed many visitors, but probably the most significant was Paul Goodman. Fritz and Laura were already familiar with Goodman’s revolutionary social and political beliefs, his prolific writing and education over a broad range of fields. Amongst his writing was an acknowledgement of the debt developing psychotherapies owed Sigmund Freud: ‘First he explored the flowery fields of hell, then the fierce deserts of heaven. An unfinished enterprise. His achievement is to be achieved’ (Goodman, 1977: 6). Goodman was hired to co-author Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in Human Personality. Ralph Hefferline, a professor at Columbia University was also recruited; his contribution is generally understood to centre on his student’s participation and reports on exercises in the text.

The New York Institute’s ideas began to interest others in the USA. Subsequently the Cleveland Institute was created, and with input from members of the New York Institute they developed an intensive training programme delivered by, amongst others, renowned gestalt therapists Joseph Zinker, Erving and Miriam Polster, Sonia and Edwin Nevis and Elaine Kepner, who took gestalt therapy further afield theoretically and geographically.

Fritz continued to deliver a circuit of training and therapy groups but grew frustrated. He found his home on the East Coast in California where at the Esalen Institute he attained celebrity status. Unfortunately some of his work at this time led to misconceptions and simplistic ideas about gestalt therapy, such as it being solely technique based and lacking theory. Many merely copied what they saw Fritz doing. The mid-1960s saw an explosion in the popularity of gestalt fuelled by the counter-culture of the time. At the centre of the growth movement was Esalen and Fritz whilst back in New York Laura Perls, Paul Goodman and others continued to practice in accordance with the original text.

It was around the time of Fritz’s death in 1970 that gestalt began to grow in the UK. Initially much of the training in the UK reflected the style of delivery in the United States. Regionalised trainings with no formal guidelines delivered their principal trainers’ favoured version of gestalt, before training became more formalised in the 1990s. In 1993 the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) was formed and many gestalt training programmes aligned their syllabuses with the requirements for UKCP registration. Institutes developed partnerships with universities and offered a range of qualifications up to doctorate level.

Gestalt had moved from the radical and rebellious towards the establishment where it stands, albeit a little uncomfortably, today. There are definite gains in that gestalt is now more widely accepted as a theoretically rigorous therapy. Part of the sacrifice, however, appears to be a loss of the adventurous, mischievous and wild creativity of the approach – the stuff from which genius and controversy emerge.

A version of this Point appears in the introduction of my chapter in The Handbook of Individual Therapy – Sixth Edition (2014).

2

So, what is gestalt?

I recall early in my career as a psychotherapist being asked by a woman facing me, ‘So, what is this gestalt then?’ I struggled to give an articulate answer. Whilst my struggle was in part due to a lack of familiarity with the approach, it was exacerbated by the fact that the term ‘gestalt’ is a German noun with no direct English translation, the closest equivalent single terms being pattern, form, shape, whole configuration. In German it relates to overall appearance and totality. We perceive things in whole forms rather than in separate constituent parts, Gestalt psychology shows that we organise patterns into meaningful wholes (see Point 4). When we look at a house we perceive a house as a whole rather than a separate collection of individual bricks, windows, roof tiles, drainpipes and gutters, and so on (Parlett, 2015). Our perception of this house as a whole will be shaped by numerous factors: our history, our need at the time, our cultural background, to name but a few areas. Consequently, as no two individual histories will be identical in gestalt, we believe that no two perceptions will be identical, similar perhaps but not the same. In that sense I begin this book with the conundrum that faces every gestalt therapist as they face fellow human beings in the therapy room, that in our individual uniqueness we can only ever get experience near to another, we can never completely and utterly comprehend the other’s experience. Yet our yearning is to be met in relationship and understood. To gain the best understanding possible of the other we need to appreciate the way they configure themselves in relation to their environment, the patterns they paint as they relate to their world and those they meet in their world, the way they form and shape their experience; how the individual forms and then moves on from one experience to another.

Many consider that ‘gestalt’ should be capitalised, as is the case with other German nouns. However, gestalt therapy did not arrive in the English-speaking world yesterday. It has been here since the founders¹ published their seminal work Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in Human Personality in 1951. One of its roots, Gestalt psychology, was in existence for 50 years prior to this. It is clear to me, as Bloom, Spagnuolo-Lobb, and Staemmler assert, that ‘it is no longer the proper name of a new modality. Gestalt therapy is one of many accepted approaches… and all are common name. Gestalt therapy appropriately has earned a lower case’ (2008: 7). Regarding the German noun argument, ‘gestalt is as English a word as frankfurter or sauerkraut’ (ibid.). Hence, throughout this book gestalt will appear in lower case² just as any reference to psychoanalysis, psychodynamic therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy would.

To explain what gestalt therapy is in just a few words is a difficult task. I would summarise it as a relational therapy that synthesises three key philosophies that have been described as the ‘pillars of gestalt’ (Yontef, 1999: 11), these being:

1.Field Theory – The persons experience is explored in the context of their situation or field (I will use the terms situation and field interchangeably).

2.Phenomenology – The search for understanding through what is obvious and/or revealed, rather than through what is interpreted by the observer.

3.Dialogue – A specific form of contacting (not just verbal) that is concerned with the between of the relationship and what emerges between therapist and client.

In the gestalt therapist’s work these philosophies weave in and out of one another and the relational perspective is at the core of each. Consequently, I see gestalt as a truly integrative psychotherapy. If any one of these ‘pillars’ is not being practised then gestalt therapy is not being practised. Gestalt is an experiential therapy and as such experimentation is key to the approach. The mind/body split so prevalent in western culture is actively discouraged within gestalt’s holistic view of the individual/environmental field that are seen as co-dependent. This and the approach’s radical view of self as forming in the process of meeting, rather than seeing self as something belonging to the individual, sets it apart from virtually all other psychotherapies.

In gestalt therapy we are exploring how a person reaches out to their world, how they respond to their situation and how past and present situations and future expectations impact upon their (and our) process of reaching out in the here and now. We do this whilst actively in the relationship with the client as part of their situation, paying careful attention to what happens in the dynamics between us. We aim to increase awareness through embracing the totality of everything the person before us is, was and can become. Gestalt therapy is exciting, vibrant and energetic. Over the coming pages, standing upon the ground of gestalt’s substantial history, this gestalt therapist will continue to give his view of all aspects that contribute to forming the whole that is known as gestalt therapy.

1The founder of gestalt therapy is often identified solely as Frederick ‘Fritz’ Perls. However, Perls’ wife Laura is considered to have played a major, largely understated, part in gestalt therapy’s development. The other co-founder was Paul Goodman, co-author of the seminal text PHG (1951). 2Exceptions will be where I am quoting oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Author’s note
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Maps for a gestalt therapy journey: Laying the ground, theoretical assumptions
• Part II Beginning the therapy journey: Preparations and initial assessment
• Part III The therapy journey: The three pillars of gestalt
• Part IV Becoming: Transitions along the journey
• Part V Ethics and values: Key signposts for all journeys
• Part VI Evaluating the approach: Destination and looking back
• References
• Index