In Search of Good Form

Gestalt Therapy with Couples and Families

Joseph C. Zinker

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135061685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

With In Search of Good Form, Joseph Zinker emphasizes seeing and being with as keys to a phenomenological approach in which therapist and patient co-create and mutually articulate their own experiences and meanings. He considers Gestalt field theory, the Gestalt interactive cycle, and Gestalt concepts.

PART ONE

Theory

1

Our Common Ground

When Rabbi Noah, Rabbi Mordecai's son, assumed the succession after his father's death, his disciples noticed that there were a number of ways in which he conducted himself differently from his father, and asked him about this. “I just do as my father did,” he replied. “He did not imitate, and I do not imitate.”

— Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlaw

This book is about fully seeing and apprehending couples and families: a step-by-step building of skills. The first skill is to be fully present with one's full vision and compassionate related-ness: being there. Only when we have taken the time to be moved by others and their experience of being related (or disconnected) can we have the privilege of telling them, in the most compelling way, what we experience in their presence. After people become fascinated with themselves by feeling both heard and seen through the eyes and ears of another, they will usually consider

Note: The author wishes to thank the following people for helping with this chapter: Riley Lipman, Donna Rumenik, Roberta Tonti, Ed Harris, Penny Back-man, Joe Melnick, and Paul Shane.

changing their behavior. The family has honored us by allowing us to sit with them as a witness to their struggles. This “sitting with” and articulating what we experience is an aesthetic and spiritual ritual. Besides enabling us to experience the beauty of the unfolding of healthy human interactions, therapeutic interventions also have aesthetic and spiritual dimensions that nurture this unfolding. A clear and powerful observation emitted from one's loving heart is magnetic, compelling, difficult to brush aside, and beautiful to behold.

This book teaches therapists how to create, develop, and complete this ritual. We learn how to sit with people, “to squint” so that we can behold them in their many forms: as an organism, a living being, a metaphor, a lovely or awkward dance. We learn to make the “dance” inside of us so that through our creativity we can evoke changes in “human choreography” to empower a couple or family to move with sure footing on the solidity of anchored strength. A “sick” couple or family are poor actors, and watching them is deplorable theater: they cannot rise above their habitual patterns into the excitement of dramatic authenticity; they cannot let go into the joy of their own comedy; nor can they reach down into the depths of their own souls for real tragedy. We teach them how to live authentically— the truthful spontaneity of immediate improvisation — from their hearts and guts, from their longings and laughter. And, in turn, we experience their revealed beauty.

We teach people how to live beautifully.

The creative arts of theater, dance, literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture—all of these are more than just metaphors for the witnessing, participation, and articulation of living human interaction. The creative aspect of bearing witness to life and doing this work is a stance; a perspective; a visceral, motoric, and intuitive response.

Since the study of the soul was first proposed by Aristotle and others, the old armchair debate has existed about the definition of the psychotherapist's true role—what we really do. Is what we do a science, a discipline, or an art? This professional identity crisis became an especially thorny one not long after psychology fled the realm of philosophy in the late nineteenth century and modeled itself after physics in order to assume its rightful, independent place among the sciences. One's point of view in this debate seems to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you believe it is a science, you tend to approach it as a technician (one who is preoccupied with technique or numbers and measurements offered up to the twin gods of “reliability” and “validity”); if you think it is a discipline, you necessarily become a disciple (one who endlessly practices at becoming a “master”); if you experience your work as an art, you are an artist (one who is a creator-witness). There probably is no one pure type, for if there were, it would mean being only partially human, since all three viewpoints are different sides of the same investigation of human reality. Indeed, in the present work you will see all three stances combined, but I gravitate toward that of the artist. This is because an essential premise of this book, flowing like an underground river through our teaching of how to work with couples and families in the Gestalt approach, is to communicate that an aesthetic validity exists in all psychother-apies and in the moment of human interpersonal contact.

Becoming aware of being human is a creative adventure; assisting the growth of this awareness is an adventurous creation.

Most of my attitude comes from my long professional and scholarly experience, but some comes from the distressing observation that psychotherapy, in its historical struggle for recognition as a “physics of the psyche,” has lost touch with its own name: the study and healing of the soul. Much of this has happened because its graduate curricula have slowly drifted away from classical education, the humanities and the arts in particular, toward empirical technology.

But regardless of educational deficiencies and the variety of theoretical persuasions, I contend that there is an aesthetic side to all human interaction and every therapeutic style. Every school of thought is founded on a group of principles and techniques. The choice of principles and techniques by their preferred selection and application alone implies the direction of the course of therapy and what “good” or “healthy” human functioning looks like. To make progress in a particular direction during the therapy hour means that judgments must be made—what should be said, done, seen, heard, measured, recorded, and so on. That is, underlying each school of therapy is an un-articulated ideal toward which the work strives to carry its clients. This ideal, in turn, implies a set of values —what “good” is, what “healthy” is, what “growth” means, what a “family” is, and what a “relationship” is.

Thus, there is an “aesthetics of psychotherapy” as well as an “aesthetics of human interaction,” since aesthetics is dedicated to the study of the expression of values. Our search for the good form of human interaction and the practice of psychotherapy that uncovers that good form is subjective, intuitive, and metaphorical.

This book is as much about aesthetic values—the creative appreciation of the “good form” of human relationship and therapy—as it is about the presentation of the Gestalt approach to couples and families; indeed, my entire therapeutic approach is founded on this aesthetic premise. I did not happen on my own value of aesthetic appreciation by accident, nor do I emphasize it without reason. My view, along with my theoretical and technical principles, began developing many years ago when I first entered serious education and training as a graduate student. I am the heir and innovator of and in a variety of traditions and philosophies. And so before you begin mulling over and assimilating this book, I wish to introduce you to our common ground.

Common Ground

Following World War II, Fritz Perls, a German psychoanalyst living in South Africa, became interested in concretizing abstract psychoanalytic concepts.¹ Fully involved in studying the individual, he realized that the learning process is much like assimilating food. In discussing mental phenomena as processes of psychic and physical assimilation, Perls spoke of a mental metabolism² and described various mechanisms of defense in the language of physical digestion. For example, introjection—a revision of a Freudian term —was a failure to adequately chew mental food. Infants introject readily because they do not have teeth; that is, they cannot challenge a speaker or ask questions before taking things in. Infants can spit and they do, but that is a gross act, not a subtle sifting of what is presented. Develop-mentally, introjection is fitting for a six-month-old but less fitting for a sixteen-year-old. In adults, therefore, introjection is a failure to ask questions, to express doubt, to chew and taste. It is a way of swallowing whole, a swallowing without chewing. (Note that in the context of imbalanced interpersonal and political power, it is probably much safer to swallow a rigidly authoritarian environment, where questioning is a form of insubordination.)

Perls spoke about other resistances³ — brand-new ones — that had not been discussed in psychoanalytic literature. Retro-flection was a mechanism by which people held in what they were afraid to express to others — as in holding in anger or withholding an expression of love.⁴ Retroflection was not just a low-voltage brain transaction without awareness but an energy that constricted muscles and that was held in stasis. It caused actual physical pain and various secondary symptoms like headaches.

Even though this was clearly an interactional phenomenon—“I hold in what I want to do to you” — Perls's actual work was not focused on the interactional threat that caused the holding in, but on learning to undo the retroflection through movement and other expression. He helped his patients and students express anger toward an empty chair (the fantasized Other, such as a parent) or another person in a practicum, but he himself did not become fascinated by the living recipient's response to the anger as such. The recipient was a kind of dummy-volunteer, a blank screen, who was generally used in the service of helping others put forth whatever they retroflectively held in their bodies, causing the pain or anxiety.

Fritz and Laura Perls loved theater, dance, and other expressive experimentation in general, and so they both evolved into “improvisational behaviorists.” Here is an example of im-provisational work with retroflected anger.

If I am told that I am hurting someone and I have no awareness of it (other than perhaps a vague pain in my throat), it may be helpful to ask myself how and where I hold my anger in my body-self.⁵ If, then, I become aware of a tightness in my throat, and if, with some support and encouragement, I manage to make a sound —an angry sound toward my spouse —two things tend to happen at once:

1. My own experience of the sound coming out of my body teaches me on the spot how angry I feel (“I sounded like some kind of wild animal!”).
2. My spouse looks hurt and perhaps even frightened and I get an inkling of how, unaware, I impact him or her.

My insight about my anger is not something I have to take on faith from a therapist; it is something I bewilderingly discover in my voice, lungs, and belly and in the grimace of my spouse. This is a moment of what Gestalt therapists call contact—my contact with my own angry self and possibly the beginning of a contact cycle with my spouse.⁶ A socially enacted event holds incredible possibilities for my rapid transformation and the transformation of those involved with me.

Perls once told a story of a concert violinist-patient who complained of dizziness and lack of concentration while performing.⁷ After asking the man to bring his violin to the therapy session and play for him, Perls soon noticed that just gazing at the man felt aesthetically unpleasant. Attending more carefully, he saw that the man had littìe grace because he stood awkwardly, with feet held tentatively and much too close to each oth...