Exploring Masculinity, Sexuality, and Culture in Gestalt Therapy

An Autoethnography

Adam Kincel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000298567
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Exploring Masculinity, Sexuality, and Culture in Gestalt Therapy is an invitation to explore social and political issues within the psychotherapeutic framework. It describes and analyses the author's journey of becoming a gestalt therapist in Poland and England through analyses of masculinity, sexuality, relationality, and culture.

This book addresses the collective gestalts exploring the psychotherapeutic taboos of sexual transference, same-sex attraction, use or lack of touch, gender equality, and inter-cultural conflicts. Each chapter is an exploration of prejudices embedded in our cultures and therapeutic work, and provides a theoretical challenge to current practices within gestalt therapy and beyond. The author advocates for a more collective understanding of embodied sensations emerging in the therapeutic context as collective gestalts.

Through the use of autoethnographic research methodology, this book shows how personal embodied experiences are intertwined with the social, political, and material context. It is essential reading for gestalt therapists, as well as readers interested in gestalt approaches.

Chapter 1
Welcome

I am struggling to write today. The book is almost completed, but the introduction is proving to be the most difficult part. I spent the whole day checking my emails and convincing myself that I have more urgent things to do. I don’t stick to the plan that I created for this very luxurious week that I reserved for writing, but my feelings are shouting that I am not ready. I am not ready to become an author. I am afraid of exposing myself, of the reactions or perhaps rejection of the text as it talks about sexuality and cultural prejudices, and at the end, who am I to publish a book?

Would notes like that have any value for research and gestalt writing? We all make these notes. Sometimes they are mental notes, while sometimes we may even write them down. More often, we would discuss similar feelings with our friends or support groups, but can we use them in research that can contribute to current knowledge and develop gestalt therapy? Before I attempt to answer this question, let us explore what this text can offer. It is undoubtedly an intimate text, a disclosure that is often shared with people who are close by. Autobiographical writing brings about an intimacy that is hard to obtain in more recognisable research studies that use questionnaires or a series of interviews. This text shows specific issues that are relevant to me but can also be applicable to some readers: the struggle to find time for writing, fears of exposure and shame when exploring sexuality, a critical, shaming voice when exercising creativity, and integrating the new identity of an author. My assumption is that I am not writing only about myself, but that readers may identify with some of these themes. The method that I applied to my research and want to promote in this book is called autoethnography. It provides a method of analysing personal reflection from the perspectives of individuals embedded in them. In gestalt language, autoethnography looks for the background that created the figure, and the figure is the author’s own becoming. Writing the text changes the author and, in this exercise, a new identity is created; this is why I always see it as becoming rather than who has become.

This book started as an experiment of embodiment that gave no guarantees. By attending to my body, the body of a gestalt therapist, various feelings, thoughts, contexts, and theories were born and recorded. Chapter after chapter, the focus and pattern started to emerge which eventually created a critique of the embodiment of culture, sexuality, and masculinity within gestalt therapy. As we are always embedded within a culture, this book suggests a revision of how therapists engage with clients from an inescapably prejudiced place. It is an invitation to therapists to deconstruct the “safe therapy” (Samuels, 2003) that avoids difficult subjects such as sexuality, gender, and culture by providing examples of the therapist’s prejudices, heteronormativity, and hegemonic (the rigid, strong, sexually assertive, and dominating) masculinity from the therapy room to the researcher’s private life. All theory is illustrated by personal examples, family photographs, and drawings to show the inseparability of the private and the cultural.

The purpose of this book can be encapsulated in three aims. The first one is to broaden the understanding of the relationship between body and culture within gestalt therapy. It is important for me, however, that this knowledge is not only theoretical but also able to be applied practically. Hence the second aim is to provide several examples of how to work practically with what is cultural in the intimacy of one-to-one therapy or larger group settings. The third aim is to familiarise gestalt therapists with autoethnographic research methodology that fits with gestalt therapy philosophies, while allowing us to find yet another way of communicating the beauty of our work to a wider group of researchers.

This book explores my embodied experience as inescapably cultural. Although gestalt therapy uses phenomenology to study embodied sensations, the focus here is on embodied sensations as a way to gain an understanding of our emotions in relation to the other. The work presented in this study extends the usual understanding of phenomenology in gestalt therapy, discussing how embodied sensations, breathing patterns, body posture, sense of space, awareness or lack of awareness of sensations, and other embodiments are dependent on collective political and social circumstances.

Furthermore, the embodiment of collective experiences is not presented only as a theoretical construct; this study also concerns the practicalities of attending to collective situations in the consulting room, psychotherapy training, and even the psychotherapist’s private life: how therapists can zoom in and out to see the interplay between the current relational aspects and the wider socio-political situation. Through various examples, this research study examines the opportunities for dialogue, be it a large group, an intimate psychotherapy session, a training group, or personal relationship that build the necessary safety and trust to discuss but not avoid our prejudice. The concept of safe emergency (Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, 2003, pp. 277–289; Swanson, 1982) is central to the argument and means a way of creating safe conditions for attending to the uncomfortable political struggles that emerge as phenomenological sensations within current psychotherapeutic situations. As embodied cognition starts with the sensation, the body is for embodied research and the psychotherapist as a microscope is for the microbiologist.

Research methodologies are languages in which various tribes of researchers can understand each other. Autoethnography is not only a language that gestalt therapists can easily learn but also a language that has some words and grammar structure that we may want to adopt. This research methodology sees the individual as always embedded in the field of relationships and aims at deconstructing, unsettling the “I”. Although talking about oneself may seem narcissistic, autoethnography invites us to show vulnerability, an authentic way of relating, to critique oneself and be open for other people’s critique – actions that will scare people who are invested in maintaining a fixed image of themselves.

In the remaining part of the opening chapter, I am going to briefly introduce those readers who have not studied gestalt therapy to this modality, introduce autoethnography, which will be further discussed in Chapter 7, say a few words about my family who consented to this research study, and provide an overall structure and guidance about this book and how to read it.

1.1 Case study as an introduction to gestalt therapy

As an introduction to gestalt therapy and my work, I will present a short case study from training that I facilitated in Tbilisi, Georgia. Although the ethical issues are more widely discussed in Section 7.4, it is important to mention that all people and situations described in this book have been anonymised and consented to when possible. I trained in Georgia as a part of an international gestalt training institute that started one of the first ever training centres for gestalt therapy in the Caucasus. Gestalt therapy has been summarised as an approach that pays particular attention to five explorations: responding to the situation, interrelating, embodying, self-recognising, and experimenting (Parlett, 2015). In its essence, gestalt therapy focuses on the embodied co-creation of each situation. It starts with the here-and-now response to the situation that is inevitably embodied and interrelated; it invites us to self-recognise and to experiment with what is new or familiar. Although the five explorations are continuously entangled and changing, I will apply them to different aspects of this group as it was happening.

The group I facilitated was truly international with the trainer being Polish and members coming from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. There was an interpreter translating into Russian and even before coming there, I wondered how the group members would feel speaking in the language of a country that dominated this region for years. This was mirrored in my shame that my Russian is so limited and that I would use English, a language popularised through physical and cultural colonisation as another form of dominance.

The training institute where I work offers certification from the European Association for Gestalt Therapy and so our four-year training is based on their requirements. Throughout the training, the trainee therapists are obliged to experience over 200 hours of personal development. In the United Kingdom, this means an hour of therapy per week in each year of the training, but in Georgia at that time they did not have enough gestalt therapists that could provide this; therefore, trainees are required to have at least 50 hours of Skype therapy and three personal development groups lasting 50 hours each. I was invited to facilitate one of these groups that lasted for ten hours a day for five days. The brief I received was that although it is the third year of their training, members of this group have not started to organise personal therapy via Skype. I had some fantasies that perhaps they could not afford it or did not give themselves permission to access the support.

I decided to start the first day gently by getting to know the group and introduced exercises where they could notice what they sensed in their bodies as they reconvened as the whole group. My aim was to make visible any possible conflicts within the group and start building relationships with each of the individuals. However, after the first day, I did not have a sense that I knew anyone in this group. In the evening in my hotel room, I took a pen and paper, wrote the names and started to gather information about each of the participants. I was aware that I missed clarity about each of them and the group as a whole. I also felt some irritation that they seemed not to be forthcoming enough. What situation was I responding to?

On the second day, one of the participants added to my sense of irritation when he made several generalised statements mainly about God and life, but did not seem to want to engage on a more personal level. I suggested that he looked at all the people in the room one by one and noticed what he felt in his body (embodying and experimenting). It was a pleasant experience for him, but with one individual he noticed slight tension that we decided to focus on (interrelating). He said: “I don’t think she likes me as I am Azerbaijani and she is Armenian”. I noticed that the group became silent and observed them carefully. I had heard about the Nagorno-Karabakh region military conflict somewhere in the news before, but had never discussed it with people from the countries affected. I inquired how many people in the group were personally affected by this, and some group members made some bitter comments and there was a palpable sense of unease spreading within the group. Usually, I would suggest that at this stage we build more support in recognising the challenging feelings this topic brings, but at that time, I decided to follow the momentum and what I perceived to be a lack of personal sharing (self-recognising) so far in the group and suggested that people who were affected by this conflict sit in the middle of the group together and share personal stories. At this time, the whole group started to speak in five different languages, my interpreter looked confused and stressed, and a Georgian member of the group left the room shouting in English: “If someone tortured your father, then you would not like to look them in the face”. I requested loudly and clearly that they return to their seats and speak slowly so that we can listen and understand each other. I assured them that it was a difficult topic and that is why it required special consideration and time. I requested that they do not engage in dialogue at this stage or a discussion about who is right or wrong, but for the next 30 minutes to talk only about how the war has affected them. I suggested this restriction to enhance the safety as I could see how upset they were and remembered my sense of irritation that I imagined was related to their sense of irritation with each other (responding to the situation).

The Armenian and Azerbaijani trainees sat in the centre and one by one shared their stories. Each of the stories was moving and deeply personal. Men went to the battlefield and never returned; their bodies were never found. Women were struggling to raise the children in post-communist blocks without fireplaces or any fuel to warm them in snowy winters. Threat, terrorism, rapes. Their universal meaning brought a sense of unity to the group that reached far beyond the cultural and political divisions. The person who left the room upset returned to notice these changes and the deep sense of unity and empathy in the group, and soon he and other Georgian group members noticed their own trauma (self-recognising). At that time, he was living in Ossetia and along with his family, experienced extreme cruelty when, in 2008, Russian soldiers took over that part of Georgia. We spent the whole remaining time processing the effects of trauma and its embodiment, noticing how many of the group’s behaviours – for example, a sense of detachment from the group – are linked with their war and post-communist history.

Although gestalt therapy cannot be explained in written form as it is a therapy of experience, the above section shows what the work may look like. Gestalt therapists focus on here-and-now contact that is already structured by past experiences and current political dynamics. By careful observation and felt sense of the intricacies of contact, therapists and clients are able to become aware of the way they structure that contact and increase the freedom with which they relate.

Working with this group, I was often reminded of my father, his German upbringing in wartime and post-war Poland, in the ability I saw in myself to stay in the middle of the conflict and get two sides to recognise each other and discuss their differences. The internal Polish-German dialogue that I often have in my head (see Section 2.2.1), the war trauma my parents experienced, as well as my upbringing in communist Poland helped me to be closer to this group and to the problems they presented. Before I move on to introduce my family and the research methodology that was a basis for this book, I will discuss the need for this book in gestalt literature and research.

1.2 Who is this book for?

It is easier to describe what this book is not rather than who is it for. This book is not an introduction to gestalt therapy or a comprehensive guide on how to work with the themes of sexuality, masculinity, and culture. It is, however, an invitation to dialogue, discussion, and disagreement, not for the purpose of finding truth, but of exploring the perspectives that underpin the way we think, embody, and subsequently work with therapy clients. Although some learning is necessary to build dialogue with diverse groups of people, the hardest lesson in diversity is to be able to step out of our privileged se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Welcome
• 2 Defining the collective gestalt: what I have learned from large groups
• 3 Masculinity and male sexuality: how did my teenage years shape the man that I am becoming?
• 4 Embodiment of heteronormativity: building the field for addressing collective gestalts
• 5 (Un)related bodies: collective gestalts that shape gestalt training
• 6 Philosophies that inspired this book
• 7 Culture as ground; personal becoming as figure: autoethnography and gestalt therapy
• 8 Conclusion
• References
• Index