Gestalt Therapy

Perspectives and Applications

Edwin C. Nevis

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317758235
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Gestalt Therapy: Perspectives and Applications is a classic text which, when it was first released in 1992, signaled a renaissance of Gestalt scholarship throughout the world. In this volume, Edwin Nevis, one of the foremost Gestalt writers, thinkers, and practitioners of the last 40 years, skillfully draws together a diverse selection of essays from Gestalt therapists of every persuasion, united here by the clarity of their thought, and the constancy of commitment to the development and extension of the Gestalt model. Here you will find one of the finest overviews of classical Gestalt therapy theory and practice available: groundbreaking essays on such topics as diagnosis and ethics from a Gestalt perspective, and an assortment of pragmatic clinical essays of immediate value to the working practitioner.

Part I

Perspectives

1

The Theory of Gestalt Therapy

JOEL LATNER, Ph.D.

We believe that the Gestalt outlook is the original, undistorted, natural approach to life.

—Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman, Gestalt Therapy

THE THEORY OF GESTALT THERAPY takes as its centerpiece two ideas. The first is that the proper focus of psychology is the experiential present moment. In contrast to approaches which look at the unknown and even unknowable, our perspective is the here and now of living. The second idea is that we are inextricably caught in a web of relationship with all things. It is only possible to truly know ourselves as we exist in relation to other things.

These twin lenses, here-and-now awareness and the interactive field, define the subject matter of Gestalt therapy. Its theory provides a system of concepts describing the structure and organization of living in terms of aware relations. Its methodology, techniques, and applications, which are the subject of the remaining chapters of this book, link this outlook to the practice of Gestalt therapy. The result is a psychology and method with a rich and unique view of everyday life, the depths and difficulties which life encompasses, and “the high side of normal,” the ennobling and most creative heights of which we are capable. Gestalt therapists believe their approach is uniquely capable of responding to the difficulties and challenges of living, both in its ability to relieve us of some measure of our misery and by showing the way to some of the best we can achieve.

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF GESTALT THERAPY

The theory of Gestalt therapy has three major sources. First is psychoanalysis, which contributed some of its major principles concerned with the inner life. Humanistic, holistic, phenomenological and existential writings, which center on personal experience and everyday life, constitute a second source. Gestalt psychology, the third source, gave to Gestalt therapy much more than its name. Though Gestalt therapy is not directly an application or extension of it, Gestalt psychology’s thoroughgoing concentration on interaction and process, many of its important experimental observations and conclusions, and its insistence that a psychology about humans include human experience have inspired and informed Gestalt therapy.

Gestalt therapy emerged from the clinical work of two German psychotherapists, Frederick Salomon Perls, M.D., and Lore Perls, Ph.D. F.S. Perls, known to many of his students as Fritz, was trained as a psychiatrist. He worked with Kurt Goldstein, a principal figure of the holistic school of psychology, in his inquiries into the effects of brain injuries on veterans of the first World War. Later, in the 1920s, he trained in psychoanalysis with Karen Horney and Wilhelm Reich. Laura Perls—she adopted the anglicized spelling after she came to the United States—studied with the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger and was awarded a doctorate in psychology for her graduate studies. The most important of her teachers was the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. F. S. and Laura Perls fled Western Europe in 1933 ahead of the onslaught of Nazism to Johannesberg, South Africa, where they practiced until the termination of hostilities in 1945.

Ego, Hunger and Aggression was written during this period. The book, published under F. S. Perls’s name in London in 1947, is subtitled A Revision of Psychoanalysis. It included chapters reevaluating the analytic viewpoint on aggression. They suggested that Freud and his followers had underestimated the importance of the development of teeth, eating, and digestion, and that this developmental watershed was as important as the others noted by Freud. These suggestions constitute an early contribution to the development of ego psychology. The book also contained chapters from holistic and existential perspectives and chaptes describing therapy exercises. These exercises were designed to promote physical awareness rather than insight, and were called concentration therapy.

With the end of the war, the Perlses emigrated to the United States. They settled in New York City, in a community of artists and intellectuals versed in philosophy, psychology, medicine, and education. Several years of collaboration with members of this group resulted in the training of the first generation of Gestalt therapists, a comprehensive formulation of the theory, methodology, and practice for this new approach, and a book describing it. Published by the Julian Press in 1951, the volume was entitled Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Authorship was credited to F. S. Perls, along with Ralph Hefferline, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, and the writer Paul Goodman, perhaps best known for his subsequent best-seller, Growing Up Absurd (1963). Half the book consisted of reports of the results of exercises in awareness which Hefferline administered to his students. The other half was their statement of their new approach. Goodman wrote this section, basing his work on a manuscript by F. S. Perls and reflecting the common ground achieved by the collaborators. Goodman’s keen and prolific mind—he wrote more than 30 books and hundreds of shorter pieces (novels, plays, poems, articles, short stories, and books of shorter essays in the fields of literature, psychology, philosophy, and social and educational criticism)—is reflected in the volume. His special respect for the many contributions to psychology of Otto Rank, perhaps especially the importance of art and the artist in understanding daily life, for Reich, and for communitarian philosophers like Kropotkin also find a place in Gestalt Therapy, and he is responsible for a large measure of its completeness and power. Gestalt Therapy remains the basic book of the theory and practice of Gestalt therapy, a cornerstone of the Gestalt approach.

AWARE RELATIONS

Here and Now: Primacy of the Present Moment

In its theory, is methodology, its practice, and its applications, Gestalt therapy is a present-centered approach. Both of the central concepts upon which Gestalt therapy is based—awareness, and the field—have meaning only in terms of the present moment. All of the important strains of philosophical, spiritual, political, scientific, and psychological thought which underpin Gestalt therapy’s concentration on the phenomenology and problems of awareness share this, though some simply take it for granted while others put it front and center.

Gestalt psychology, for example, is concerned with the nature and structure of perceptual experience. This work is unavoidably present centered: By definition it is about what is perceived in the present moment. Many areas of inquiry and knowledge are present-centered in this same way: physics, chemistry, biology, architecture, and nursing are examples. In contrast, others such as astronomy, sociology, anthropology, and political science, look to a significant extent at the past, while another group—history itself, of course, but also geology, paleontology, the law, archeology—turn their attention as much or more to the past as to the present. Holism, akin to Gestalt psychology, is another scientific and philosophical field which has made an important contribution to both the central ideas of Gestalt therapy. It is present centered in the same way as Gestalt psychology, because it is impossible to conceive of the holistic perspective without its present-centered focus.

This is also true of phenomenology. Phenomenology takes as its subject matter the study of the objects and events we perceive and the development of thorough and comprehensive methods for observing and examining them. The philosophical school called existentialism takes as its main concern modern (and present-centered) questions about the nature and meaning of living, death, and personal relations, and the nature of our relation to authorities, including God. Even psychoanalysis betrays a recognition of the importance of the here and now, in concepts such as transference and countertransference, which are ways of characterizing phenomena in the psychotherapeutic present moment, and in its current interest in what they call “the real relationship” in therapy. Reich’s seminal analytic work on character analysis, where the therapy centers on the body and bodily experience in the present moment, was a step further forward in that same direction.

What does this mean, “present centered”? In essence, it means that what is important is what is actual, not what is potential or what is past, but what is here, now. What is actual is, in terms of time, always the present; in terms. of location, it is what is here, in front of us. Hence this familiar phrase: the here and now. Behind this idea is the conviction that studying, describing, and observing what is available to us now will allow us to comprehend it satisfactorily. In Kierkegaard’s famous phrase, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” A present-centered approach is distinguished from a historical one, in which the present is seen as a consequence of past causes. The historical point of view stands inevitably in the present, looking backward to the past. A present-centered approach stands in the present and looks at it, here and now.

For a historical perspective the critical animating force is the question, Why? What caused these present conditions? The answers have to do with past events. This necessarily turns one’s eyes away from the present moment. “To understand,” wrote Poulet, “is almost the opposite of existing.” A present-centered approach raises different questions: How? What? What is this? What is the experience of this? Of what does it consist? How is this for me? How is this organized? From this point of view, the past is here, now. It is embedded in the present. The present contains everything. Memories, dreams, reflections are all present activities. They take place in the now. They concern events which occurred at some other time, as do anticipating, planning, preparing. But remembering is done in the present, planning is done in the present, reflecting is done in the present. It cannot be otherwise.

In the Gestalt present-centered approach, our interest is as much or more in the experience and awareness of remembering as it is in what is remembered. A present-centered approach leads more to attempts to embrace the present, to encompass it, and to appreciate it than it does to questions about the past (even the past in the present). A present-centered psychotherapy almost inevitably becomes a way of making it possible to better embrace the present moment, as well as a way of illuminating how we manage to miss so much of the present. Some present-centered philosophies come to despair in the recognition that our present lives are all there is. It is perhaps an article of faith in Gestalt therapy—or maybe just a profound commitment to its conception of our own human nature—that the present moment, should we be fully attuned to it and absorbed in it, is sufficient. It will allow us to make lives that are not only the best that can be lived in the circumstances, but also, granting some measure of decent circumstances, good enough.

The Nature and Shape of Awareness: Awareness as Creation

We usually think awareness is an indiscriminate, random, and passive process—that waves of light touch our eyes, that waves of sound touch our ears, that our awareness of events and people is controlled by the way they capture our attention. In our view, this is only a partial description of the character of awareness. It is a description of its passive aspect. Gestalt therapists consider awareness as an interplay in which both the individual and the environment participate. Each is both active and passive in turn.

Take this example. You are beginning to lose interest in your work, having become aware that you are hungry. Your textbooks and papers, your desk and chair fade out of your awareness as you begin thinking about the things in the refrigerator and whether the local pizza delivery place is still open. Opening the refrigerator door, you sort out its contents with your hands and eyes, shifting bottles and containers. Notice how your awareness is shaped by what is important to you, and how you shape your reality accordingly. You see what is interesting and important to you now, at this moment—this hungry moment—reaching out into the field with your eyes: you seek out and see the refrigerator, not the dishwasher, the cans of beans, not furniture wax. Conversely, the things that are not important at this moment—your studies, your family, your sexual appetites—are phenomenologically insignificant. For the moment, they do not exist; you have caused them to disappear.

Or take this different example. It is early morning. You have been up late last night past the hour when you can count on having a good night’s sleep. Sure enough, when your alarm goes off, it interrupts your sound sleep and wrenches you awake. From your point of view, your awareness is suddenly awakened by the sound of your alarm clock, as though the clock has thrust itself under your nose or shaken you by your collar. Here, the environment is active—vigorously so—from the phenomenological point of view. You, on the other hand, are positively pushed around by the force of the interruption in this particular interplay of individual and environment.

What Is Awareness?

Awareness has five distinct qualities. They are contact, sensing, excitement, figure formation, and wholeness.

Contact is the meeting of differences. For us—that is, from the point of view of our own experience—it is coming up against the other, what is different from what we think of, or feel, or experience as us. (This is discussed in the next section.)

Sensing determines the nature of awareness. Close sensing is sensate, touching or feeling; far sensing is visual and auditory perception. Although these last two are functions of our organs, they are experienced at a distance. Although most close and far sensing occurs outside us, sensing can also occur within us, where it is called “proprioception.” Thoughts and dreams are included here, as well as body sensations and emotions.

Excitement covers the range of emotional and physiological excitation from the most diffuse hum of well-being through the sharper alertness and interest to the most shrill and concentrated. If we turn to see someone on the street who reminds us of a close friend, our awareness includes contacting the person we see, the stranger in the environment. It also includes our memories, the proprioceptive contacting of ideas and feelings. Our interest, a form of excitement, might be just a mild murmur of attentiveness or it might be an arresting swell, felt as deep breathing or pleasure, tingling or flushing, or an impulse toward action. When we speak of our experience, it is usually these qualities, awareness, sensing, and excitement, and figure formation to which we are referring.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Perspectives
• Part II Applications
• Index