An Introduction to Gestalt

Charlotte Sills, Phil Lapworth, Billy Desmond

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781446290606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

This thoroughly revised edition of Gestalt Counselling introduces the fundamental concepts of Gestalt and systematically demonstrates how to apply and use these in practice. Taking a relational perspective, the expert authors explore how Gestalt can be used in a wide variety of ?helping conversations? from counselling, psychotherapy and coaching to mentoring, managing, consulting and guiding.

A Each chapter contains case examples from the therapeutic world and a ?running case study? featuring ongoing coaching work moves throughout the book, with diagrams and lists for further reading making this the ideal text for use in training. The accessible, engaging writing style will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates alike.

Charlotte Sills is a practitioner and supervisor in private practice, a tutor at Metanoia Institute and a tutor and supervisor of coaching at Ashridge CollegeBusiness School. She is the author or co-author of many books and articles on therapeutic work.

Phil Lapworth is a counsellor, psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice near Bath and has written extensively in the field of counselling and psychotherapy.

Billy Desmond is a Gestalt psychotherapist, executive coach and organisational development consultant. He is a member of Ashridge College and a Programme Director of Partnering and Consulting in ChangeHead of the Gestalt Department at Metanoia Insititute, and tutor and consultant at Ashridge Business School.

PART I

BACKGROUND

1

A Brief History of Gestalt

In this first chapter we will provide some context to the emergence of Gestalt therapy and Gestalt as a philosophy for living our daily lives. If you are new to Gestalt, we suggest that you turn first to Part II. This will give you a better idea of the immediacy of the Gestalt approach. Later, you could return to Part I in order to see where it all came from.

The Gestalt approach to therapy was first developed by Frederick Perls (known as Fritz) with his wife, Laura, and other colleagues, in particular Paul Goodman. They brought together a number of different psychological concepts and approaches to develop a method of working with people that was a major challenge to the traditional models of the time, and one that was in tune with the anarchic and free-thinking, anti-establishment mood of the 1960s. Goodman in particular held a view that Gestalt therapy was not to be limited to the individual. He believed therapy had a responsibility to be inclusive of the wider social environment to facilitate the creation of social institutions that support the human potential for growth, compassion, freedom and connection. Since its inception, there have been many developments and refinements of its central theories. Indeed, it continues to develop, as Gestalt theorists and practitioners continue the tradition of questioning fixed models, and looking at what is rather than what is thought to be.

A concept central to the Gestalt approach is wholeness. In fact the word ‘Gestalt’ roughly translates from German as ‘an organised whole’. It emphasises looking at whole and integrated experiences – be they communities, organisations, groups, objects or individuals – rather than dissecting them into their analysable parts. For example, one could analyse a root, stem, leaf, petal, stamen and pistil, but this would not capture the totality of the flower growing in a garden. In therapy, we can explore a person’s feelings, thoughts and sensations but we also need to consider the whole of the individual and their relationships with their family, community and the society they live in. The essential message is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is only by attending to the whole that we can also understand the parts. We will be talking more about wholeness later in this book. For the moment you, the reader, are faced with the first major Gestalt of the book – that of the approach itself. It is made up of many and diverse parts which together constitute the unique whole of Gestalt.

The story of Gestalt therapy starts with Fritz Perls. He was born in Berlin and lived in Germany until 1933. His early life experiences – being a Jew in a non-Jewish area, his anti-Fascist views, his rebellious personality as well as his many areas of study – were all later to affect the approach he developed. After qualifying in medicine, he began training as a Freudian psychoanalyst, which he completed in Vienna in 1928. During this time, and afterwards, he underwent several analyses himself. His psychoanalytical training had enormous influence on his later ideas. Many psychoanalytic concepts form the foundation of the Gestalt approach. These include the belief that our childhood experiences affect our adult lives; that ‘pathological’ behaviour has a meaning that may be unconscious but that can be brought into awareness; that humans have natural drives; and that people have an innate tendency towards homeostasis or equilibrium.

Perls was especially influenced by those theorists, sometimes known as ‘interpersonal psychoanalysts’, who were developing and expanding Freud’s ideas towards a more person-centred and holistic approach to clients. These theorists included Fromm, Adler and Sullivan, and more radical analysts such as Reich, who was developing his theory that human problems are manifested not just psychologically but also physically, in ‘body armour’, and whose work focused on the body and the importance of cathartic expression.

At the same time, Perls was also interested in other movements in Germany, including Gestalt psychology, from which the name Gestalt psychotherapy derives. He married a Gestalt psychologist, Lore Posner (later known as Laura Perls), who taught him much and who contributed greatly to his subsequent work. From Gestalt psychology Perls drew many of his ideas on perception: our perception is geared to seeing wholes, and making sense of the world in whole images or experiences; what is more, of all the potential stimuli we could notice at any moment, we will tend to focus on those which make up a ‘whole’ relevant to us at that moment according to our perceived needs. For example, the hungry man, faced with a wide variety of items in the kitchen, will notice the bread, cheese and butter, because they will immediately suggest ‘sandwich’ to him. It might be only later that he sees the note his wife has left him saying his supper is in the fridge. A greater awareness of the situation could have helped him in his quest for food. The same applies in organisational life. In our current times of change, people in organisations feel anxious, fearing for their job security. To alleviate this they focus only on the task, keeping busy but forgetting to attend to their relationships with colleagues where there may be the possibility of support that could prove to be beneficial for them, the task and the organisation as a whole. This focus on immediate need has enormous implications for us in our lives, and certainly in therapy and coaching.

Another major idea from Gestalt psychology was the ‘Zeigarnick effect’. Zeigarnick, a psychologist, first drew attention to the phenomenon that is commonly known as ‘unfinished business’. If we have only some of the elements of a situation or Gestalt, we will have a natural urge to provide the rest in our minds, in order to have completeness. We ‘fill in the gaps’. For example, if we write ‘elephan’ here, you will probably automatically add a ‘t’ in your mind. We are unsatisfied with incompleteness, and things that are not finished for us. Whether they are events, conversations, feelings or even our sense of ourselves, they seem to haunt us in our personal and professional lives and have the potential to stop us focusing wholeheartedly on what is happening in the present. This is often a reason why individuals come to therapy or coaching. For example, Jacqui, a chief executive of a national charity was finding it difficult to focus on getting the five-year strategy engagement process underway. She was preoccupied and feeling unusually apathetic. In coaching she became aware the last time she initiated such a process it was very unsatisfactory, but she never had an opportunity to reflect on and understand the reasons it did so. Once she attended to this historic event and made some sense of it, she felt energised and called a meeting of her board to initiate the strategy process.

Perls studied existential philosophy, which was also to influence his work. He was very affected by the existential notion that human beings, though connected to each other and to every living being, are, in another sense, fundamentally separate and alone. This sense of individual aloneness is a sort of freedom that we do not usually acknowledge, imagining ourselves bound to other people in a variety of ways. Being aware of that freedom can lead to anxiety and despair. But it can also lead to another sort of freedom – the freedom of living authentically without false constraints and obligations, taking responsibility for one’s own personal meaning. In Gestalt therapy the idea of responsibility is often presented as ‘response-ability’, where individuals have the choice, freedom and ability to respond to situations with awareness. Earlier, we were stressing the importance of wholeness; here we are emphasising the separateness of existentialism. It is interesting that both wholeness and separateness are central to Gestalt, where the dance of dependence, independence and interdependence is promoted in the work. The tension between our fundamental connectedness and our sense of individual agency can be seen in the development of two different streams of Gestalt (see below).

Perls was also involved with phenomenology, the study of perception – things as they appear to be. Phenomenology offers a method of becoming aware of and understanding the meanings we are making. It stresses that the only truth we can know is that which is happening in the present moment. This leads to the importance of the ‘here and now’, which we will expand upon later.

In 1933, the Perls left Germany and after a year in Holland moved to South Africa. Following their exposure to Kurt Goldstein’s (1940) organismic theory in Germany they became interested in the ideas of holism put forward by Jan Smuts (1996 [1926]), the then South African prime minister, in his book Holism and Evolution. Holism underlines the interconnectedness of all things, as does Lewin’s (1952), field-theory and these have become fundamental in Gestalt. Field-theory is the bedrock of the approach. It stresses that everything has a context and nothing can be understood separate from its context. Holism also focuses on the natural drive of humans to make wholes and therefore connects well with Perls’ views on working in a Gestalt way.

In South Africa also, Fritz and Laura wrote Ego, Hunger and Aggression (Perls, 1992 [1947]). Based on Freudian and other theories, the book was the first to put forward Perls’ innovative ideas about therapy. It takes the activity of eating (biting, chewing, spitting out, swallowing, digesting) as a metaphor for a person’s relationship to the world. Aggression is described as a healthy drive to reach out and take from the world. This book introduced many of the ideas that became core elements of Gestalt Therapy in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fritz and Laura Perls left South Africa in 1946, when, mainly owing to dissatisfaction with the political situation, they moved to New York. Fritz Perls was then 53. In America they worked with many people who were to be important in the growth of Gestalt therapy, amongst them the philosopher and writer, Paul Goodman, who along with Laura and Fritz is seen as one of the co-founders of Gestalt therapy. Perls also met Paul Weiss, who introduced him to Eastern spiritual traditions and philosophies. Perls was particularly attracted to Zen Buddhism with its emphasis on awareness being the path to enlightenment. The importance of ‘awareness in the present moment’ complemented the ideas gleaned from existentialism and phenomenology.

Finally, in exploring the roots of Gestalt, it is important to mention the theatre, which had always been a love of Perls. With his penchant for the dramatic, he was very drawn to the work of Moreno, the originator of psychodrama, although the two men did not get on personally. In Part III of this book, you will see how Gestalt ways of working can sometimes use the dramatic to heighten the potency of the experience.

Between 1946 and his death in 1970, Perls and his colleagues were involved in the founding and establishing of Gestalt therapy, with important centres in New York, Cleveland, Esalen in California and Cowichan in Canada. His lifetime of travelling made him unwilling to settle in one place, so every few years he moved on to found another centre, leaving his followers to continue the work.

A Fork in the Path

At this point, as Mackewn writes (1994: 105), ‘two distinct branches grew out of this integrative and dynamic beginning’. One of these was led by Fritz Perls. He became famous for what he called his ‘circuses’, where he demonstrated his unique and charismatic form of therapy to full lecture theatres, inviting participants to come and sit centre-stage in ‘the hot seat’ to work with him. Perls was widely admired and revered for his innovative and iconoclastic ideas and methods. However, while he was described by some people as tender, generous and sensitive, he was much criticised by others for his high-handedness, his arrogance and the abrasive and confrontational manner which could often seem persecutory to his trainees. All in all, the man – like the therapy he founded – was an intriguing, multifaceted whole. If you wish to read more about Perls and the work he did, see Clarkson and Mackewn (1993).

Earlier, we described the tension in Gestalt practice between existential connectedness and a sense of ultimate aloneness. This first branch of Gestalt heavily focused on individual experience and agency. The second branch of Gestalt therapy put more emphasis on existential connectedness as well as retaining more of the rich diversity of sources. Mackewn (1994) lists Gestaltists such as Laura Perls, Fromm, Simkin, Erving and Miriam Polster and Kepner as being significant in the growth of Gestalt in the 1960s and 1970s. Additionally, the philosophical tradition of Gestalt therapy is also worth noting, embodied in the work of Laura Perls who studied with the existential theologian Paul Tillich, a German protestant, and the philosopher Martin Buber, a German Jew (Serline and Shane, 1999). Laura presented Gestalt therapy as an existential and phenomenological approach beyond technique, emphasising the experiential and co-created relationship. Since then, they and others have gone on to develop it further, in terms both of theory and of practice. This has evolved into what has become known as ‘relational’ Gestalt therapy. Although Gestalt therapy has always had a focus on relationship to self and other at its core, the emphasis on relational mutuality has been placed in the foreground. This is what Paul Goodman would have called ‘social therapy’, where person and environment are interdependent. It is a vital and continuing source of many recent international trends and growing edges, where we as individuals, groups and organisations are embedded, connected and participate in the wider world in which we live.

Gestalt in the World

In these few short pages it has been impossible to convey the depth and complexity of the development of the Gestalt approach or the profound effect that it has had on the practice of counselling and psychotherapy. The year 1977 saw the founding of the American The Gestalt Journal, a forum for Gestaltists to debate and develop their ideas. Over the course of the last three decades, Gestalt has taken a significant place amongst therapeutic approaches in Europe, and European writers are making important contributions to the development of the Gestalt approach. The excellent British Gestalt Journal was started in 1991 and is one of 11 Gestalt journals in the English language today. Additionally there are several national and international organisations whose aim is to promote Gestalt in counselling, psychotherapy, coaching, and organisational development. These associations, such as the United Kingdom Association for Gestalt Therapy (UKAGT), European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT) and Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy (AAGT), are underpinned by many of the principles we have mentioned above, and encourage novel ways of working that challenge practitioners to take the Gestalt orientation and way of living into the wider world.

Gestalt in Organisations

In 1954, Edwin and Sonia Nevis established the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland and in the 1960s Sonia started the process of translating individual Gestalt therapy theory and praxis to couples, families and ev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• PART I: BACKGROUND
• PART II: GESTALT THEORY
• PART III: GESTALT PRACTICE
• Afterword
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Bibliography
• Index