Christianity and Gestalt Therapy

The Presence of God in Human Relationships

Philip Brownell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138478992
• eBook ISBN: 9781351014052
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Christianity and Gestalt Therapy is a unique integration written for psychotherapists who want to better understand their Christian clients and Christian counselors who want a clinically sound approach that embraces Christian spirituality.

This book explores critical concepts in phenomenology and how they relate to both gestalt therapy and Christianity. Using mixed literary forms that include poetry and story, this book provides a window into gestalt therapy for Christian counselors interested in learning how the gestalt therapeutic model can be incorporated into their beliefs and practices. It explores the tension in psychology and psychotherapy between a rigid naturalism and an enchanted take on life.

A rich mix of theory, philosophy, theology, and practice, Christianity and Gestalt Therapy is an important resource for therapists working with Christian patients.

PART 1
Being Present

1
Existing and the Conditions of Contact

Sometimes like a mist upon the skin.

Sometimes like a scent I smell.

Sometimes like a rock that hits one in the face,

Is it there or can I tell?

What perceptions will I allow

To come to me as given?

What experience will I bid myself,

“It’s only me and how I’m driven?”

Bear with me here at the start. I want to lay a ground for what it’s like to exist and have the experience of living in a world among others.

In Christianity one must believe that God exists and that He rewards those who diligently seek Him.¹ Everything in Christianity follows upon trusting that God is not a fairy tale told to young children. The grand story of the Bible, the story of the experience of God in this world, is true. It is told from a phenomenological perspective, the experience of human beings, so it is related to questions of philosophy as well, but it is true.

In life philosophers have devoted themselves to thinking carefully about matters related to existing and having a life. In philosophy, for instance, the question of which takes precedence, existence or essence, has been debated at length. It matters to Christians as well, because the issue of what kind of God exists follows immediately the issue of His existence.

The topic of existence is of passing interest here, for my main concern is with contacting and experience, but existence does need to be acknowledged. If nothing actually exists, then contacting (an essential issue in gestalt therapy) doesn’t happen and experience does not emerge. Existence is the condition of contact.

Unfortunately, I do not have the space to develop it at length. Follow these bulleted points:

• Some say a thing could not exist unless the logical composition, the essence of what that thing is, preceded its formation. The schematic of the widget comes before the building of the widget. Put that way, however, such a template would constitute a categorial intentional object—an abstraction or conception (such as “justice” or “grace”) that exists as a construct but not as a physical object. Its conceptual existence precedes its corporeal existence, even if it has no actual physical existence. As such it still exists, posing another wrinkle in the issue.
• All categorial intentionality is a product of the rational thought of human beings who already exist. In fact, such categorial intentions are accidental and contingent, relative to the essential beings giving them life. Until the widget is made, the existence of the widget is entirely conceptual. After the widget is created, however, the existence of the widget is actual. It is then a physical object—not just a real thing (i.e. a real concept), but an actual thing (i.e. an objectively existing thing—an “extant”).
• Put another, and more customary way, the essence of an extant is its existence. According to a summary by Edith Stein² (2002) of Aristotle’s ten categories of being, the first, and essential category, is what the thing is, that is, that it is. The rest of the nine categories are accidental, being contingent on the first. Aristotle’s term for essential existence is ousia, which has been translated “essence.” Thus, the primary consideration is not really essence at all, because the essence of anything that exists is its existence. Essence is captured by existence.
• The real meaning of ousia is “being.” Ousia is a form of the Greek word for being—eimi. I am. You are. He, she, or it is. That is our primary essence, and everything else about us follows. The same is true of God. When Moses asked God who he should say sent him, God replied, Yahweh (translated “I am that I am”); “tell them I Am has sent you.”³ I AM—the existing one.
• In John 8:48–59 Jesus is in conversation with Jewish leaders and He states that before Abraham came into existence, He (Jesus) existed in an ongoing state (πρὶν Ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι ἐγὼ εἰμί = before Abraham was, I am). It is not just coincidence that those words harken back to Exodus 3:14. And the Jewish people in His presence understood His claims to deity based on the same infinite existence that Yahweh suggested to Moses; they started to stone Him. The essence of Jesus was His existence as equal with Yahweh.
• There is an important difference between the existence of God and the existence of every other thing that exists. The source of God’s existence is found in Himself, but the source of our existence is found outside of ourselves, and in Christianity that is further defined as being in God. In God we live, move, and have our being—esmen (the present plural, active, indicative of the verb “to be,” eimi, in Greek), exist.⁴ The present tense indicates an ongoing existence. Gestalt therapists would put it “in the here and now,” in the current moment we continue to exist in the sphere of God’s existence—from one moment to the next, the primary consideration not really being time but the nature of an ongoing, continuing existence. Our essence is that we exist in Him; our existence is contingent on the existence of God.
• That last point is an important difference in perspective that will linger throughout this book. Heidegger claimed that human beings are concerned for our existence. At any moment we strive to exist, to live. That concern for existence is ontical, and it is also ontological (Mulhall, 1996), meaning that we build systems of meaning and think about our existence so that we live, move, and have our being in the evolving and continuous interpreting of our existence. I have described this as a process of interpreting our experience. However, for a Christian this meaning making is only a condition of the overall context of life that is living in the sphere of God’s existence and His perspectives on our existence.

The Significance of Existence for Experience

In order to experience anything, one must exist. If one were totally alone, isolated, and there were no other things, one could not exist. So, there must be a sufficient environmental context to support life, and there must be a sufficient ground to support meaningful life. Thus, one must exist, one must be alive, and one must have contact with whatever is environmentally other in order to sustain the experience of living.

“Contact” is a technical term in gestalt therapy. It points to meetings, the fact of meeting, and the manner in which such meeting unfolds, including the aesthetic quality of that meeting. It includes the consequences of such meeting. Contact produces the experience of self, that is, the sense of being a person. Contacting generates experience.

These meetings are whole-person in nature. I used the term “person” here as when one says, “I see a person standing by the clock.” The person is the whole human being, or, as often referred to in gestalt therapy, the “organism.” So, meetings are whole-organism in nature. They are embodied physically and phenomenally. In a manner of speaking they can be physical before they are phenomenal, and they can be phenomenal before they are physical.

If you stand, for instance, in my “personal space,” you are standing in proximity to my physical body, but you are likely not yet physically touching me. I sense you there, and that comes with a “feel.” I start to make meanings about what is going on with you standing that close to me. I start to figure out what to do about it. In such an instance you would be in contact of my lived body—the sense I have of being a situated and embodied person in proximity to you, and my experience of self would be contingent upon contacting you, another person.

On the other hand, imagine you rounded a corner on a quick walk and ran full force suddenly into another person walking rapidly in the other direction. Your lived body (the experience of embodied self) would have to catch up to the physical collision, the physical meeting between your material body and the other’s. The experience of self in that situation would be emergent. That is, consciousness that you (the subjective “I”) had collided, and what you imagined that meant to everyone in that specific context would have arisen from the lower level physical functioning of your body and its sensory-motor pathways converging in the brain.

Self is a function of the situated organism contacting in the world. Here is an example:

Once Jesus was in a small boat crossing the Sea of Galilee with His disciples. A storm came upon them and the waves were crashing over the side of the boat. Jesus was asleep inside it, but the others felt the rain and wind in their faces, and they could see what was happening. They feared for their lives because they were in contact with the elements. They felt them physically, and their life worlds were filled with the knowledge of such storms. They woke Jesus and with some incredulity asked Him, “Don’t you care?! We are perishing.” Then Jesus rebuked the storm and it subsided. The men were thunderstruck, literally in awe. I have to ask myself, what must that have been like? I think the hair on my arms would have stood up. What kind of being is this, this one who commands the elements of nature? In fact, that is what they wondered. And this was all an episode of contacting the environment, being with others and meeting in the midst of a situation.

Gestalt therapists grow increasingly adept at monitoring the contacting styles of their patients and the concomitant support mechanisms they use to establish and maintain contact. Health is defined in gestalt therapy as the fluid ability to form figures of interest and to naturally pursue them in some way to satisfaction or resolution. That requires one to reach outward and toward an Other, whether that be an apple hanging on a tree when one is hungry, a smiling person when one is lonely, a burning bush that doesn’t burn up when one is attracted to its mystery, or a Savior when one knows he or she is hell bent for destruction.

The Dialogue of Contacting

Contacting can be conceived of in dialogical terms. Imagine a circle drawn on the playground. At any given time two children can enter that circle. Imagine one does. Now she waits, available for whomever might also enter the circle. She imagines a space there for another. She makes room for that potential other in herself, anticipating that someone might likely enter. When someone does, they meet in various ways. They look at each other. They make facial expressions. They speak, so they also hear, and they listen. They see one another. They step back and then draw closer. They touch one another. All these actions are dialogical as there is a process and a sequen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Being Present
• Part 2 The Pneumenal Field in Gestalt Therapy
• Part 3 The Experience of Contact With God
• Part 4 Risk and Trust
• Part 5 Change, Salvation, and Growth
• Index