Gestalt Counselling in a Nutshell

Gaie Houston

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781446208380, 9781446208373
• eBook ISBN: 9781446290316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

New to the bestselling Counselling in a Nutshell Series, this pocket-sized book is the beginners guide to the essentials of Gestalt Therapy, from its principles to practice. Assuming no previous knowledge of the subject, the book introduces:

- the origins of the approach

- the key theory and concepts

- the skills and techniques important to practice.

Written in an accessible, jargon-free style, this book includes vivid case examples, end of chapter exercises and a glossary of terms to help aid understanding.

Gaie Houston is a writer, UKCP-registered psychotherapist and senior lecturer at The Gestalt Centre, London.

ONE

Human Nature and Gestalt

Note: There will be many references in this book to what is properly called gestalt therapy theory. As this phrase is cumbersome, I will generally shorten it to just the word gestalt.

‘When will you, at last, become that which you truly are?’ Maria Theresa of Austria [in a letter to her daughter Marie Antoinette twenty years before the guillotine came down].

Most of us have some notion of that which we truly are. Plato saw this as an aspiration, an ideal that could never be fulfilled, but which showed a direction to aspire to. Somewhere in every counsellor, whether it is overt or not, is a belief about what we call human nature. In fact it is rare indeed for anyone to be without various convictions about what we are really like, or what makes us tick. It is one which has to be the starting place for all therapy, the more because different people have different assumptions about what makes us behave as we do. So we can begin by reminding ourselves, by raising our awareness, of some of these different beliefs, all immensely powerful in how they shape people’s behaviour.

Fritz Perls, influenced by his wife Laura, and the first writer about gestalt therapy, said, ‘Man seems to be born with a sense of social and psychological balance as acute as his sense of physical balance’ (1978: 27). He was a psychoanalyst whose first book, Ego, Hunger and Aggression, was subtitled A Revision of Freud’s Theories (1969[1947]). This revision was in some instances a rebellion; in other parts it supported some of Freud’s method and insights. And he searched for an improvement to the theories already there, even calling gestalt ‘the psychology of the obvious’. And he embraced ideas from many sources in Eastern and Western thinking, taking them further, into his powerful and optimistic view of human nature. Rather than offer the gestalt therapy view straightaway, we can look very briefly at some of the many others.

Religions can seem the authorities on the subject, and all religions that I have heard of provide their own answers to this question. For Buddhists we are creatures condemned to recurrent life on this earth, in various forms, depending on how virtuously we live each of these lives, until we achieve the highest good. Christianity contains a story of self-sacrifice for the general good, and a list of socially useful prohibitions, intended to promote acceptable behaviour. As in many religions, these advocate social awareness and responsibility. They have needed to do this, supposedly, because they originated in times and places where there was plenty of the opposite.

Psychology is a formalisation of this study of what we do and what makes us do it. It is a study with which humans have no doubt been busy since they could first string concepts together, and which most of us embroider, as we try to account for our own or other people’s behaviour. Unlike many religions, professional psychologists study behaviour and motivation as it occurs, rather than saying what everyone ought to be doing. They look at what does happen or seems to happen, rather than what ought to happen.

We are all psychologists. We all study behaviour and have our personal theories of human nature. He’s trying to wind you up. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. You can’t trust women. You can think of dozens of confident statements like this. Philosophers from ancient times have written theories of human nature, often with some prompts about how to be good, virtuous, the right kind of person. They evidently felt the urge to add morality to psychology. In ancient Greece there was a long study of virtue, and the virtuous man. Women were not always an important part of this ethos. Neither were slaves. On the other hand, homosexuality and pederasty were accepted, and heterosexuality sometimes seen as a necessary evil. Here is just one example of how human nature is quite differently construed at different times and in different places. Truth, rather than being the universal archly stated by Jane Austen, is contextual, only valid according to circumstances.

Anthropologists and many others puzzle still over whether there is universal human nature, shared by everyone, as they notice all that is culturally bound, belonging just to particular groups. In this important search for understanding us, Plato (Meno: 77e) suggested that nobody knowingly wants anything bad. This statement has been contested by many later thinkers and observers. But he went on to conclude that it is lack of knowledge that leads to bad behaviour. This powerful belief underlies gestalt therapy. The raising of awareness, which is the access to knowledge, is made the task, the cornerstone of this new therapy.

Awareness and the unconscious

When Plato spoke of knowledge, it looks as if he was thinking of what is or can be in awareness. This means, to a great extent, knowing about things like riding a bike, how to eat artichokes, or build a nuclear reactor. Nobody is born knowing how to do these things. A good deal of rationality is needed in order to learn them.

There is on the other hand a great deal that we do without seeming to learn, like digesting food, pumping blood, mending wounds, finding what work we really want, or where we know we want to live, and with whom. Even before birth, the human embryo seems to grow through the stages of evolution of the whole species. In other words, somewhere in us there is this vast memory, the working knowledge of how to become a human at the first stages of development. We know how to evolve from a few-cell organism stage, through the reptilian, and on, so that we emerge into the world as one of a very sophisticated, a highly evolved, species. It is common, and understandable, to call these growth processes, and many of the maintenance processes we carry on throughout life, unconscious. We tend not to notice them, at least if they are functioning well. But here we are, and so here is the proof that we know how to become and remain our changing selves.

Perls challenged the common use of the words unconscious mind. It is indeed an odd concept, defining something by what it is not. He laid great emphasis on the raising of awareness. But a confusion of language and meaning can follow from that.

The words conscious and aware are generally used interchangeably. Yet the word conscious has a root meaning that does not have to imply awareness. It means ‘with knowledge’. Describing what are sometimes called vegetative processes, of digestion and growth and so on, it is clear that there has to be a species of knowledge, indeed highly detailed knowledge, to enable such things to happen. I have to know what foods disagree with me and need to be expelled fast. I have to keep a most exact watch on body temperature. And so forth. Some of this knowledge seems inherited, and some I clearly learn along the way, for instance in adaptations of the immune system as more hazards are successfully met through life. As I write I marvel at the extraordinary range and complexity of all this knowledge that Perls included in the term the wisdom of the organism.

This term acknowledges how worthy of respect are the infinity of contributions to our health, to our lives, that happen outside awareness. What a noble piece of work is man. In the chapter on theory there is more about awareness. What is written here first is by way of introduction to an aspect of the gestalt understanding of human nature.

Sigmund Freud came to his revolutionary ideas about human nature at a time when in much of the Christian world people believed firmly in original sin, in babies being born bad, and needing to be forced into goodness. It was a time when sex was a taboo subject of discussion, if rather the reverse in practice. In this context, he conceived the idea that two forces struggle within us, one towards destruction and death, the other towards love, creativity and life. He also decided that the aetiology, the origins, of all neurosis was to do with the sexual drive. These are large statements about our nature.

Fritz Perls, a Freudian analyst of a rebellious kind, grew restive in this belief system. He believed that the flow of life is at best between the excitement of new experience and growth, and achieving homeostasis, the return to balance, a temporary peace, after attending to a need. He insisted on the integrity, the oneness, of all that we have divided by language into mind, spirit and body, and importantly the environment, the context in which we are from moment to moment.

Perls said explicitly that mental activity seems to be activity of the whole person, carried on at a lower energy level than those activities we call physical (1978: 14). Hard evidence on this observation has now come from neuroscience, as we have been able to scan how thinking and imagining bring about vestiges of the same body behaviour that would be there in fully enacting whatever is going on in the mind. Though convention says otherwise, it is easy to understand that mind and body are indivisible. If there is no body, there is no mind. Mind can be defined as the hugely varied, almost magical functions of the brain. Once the brain is dead, so is the person. What may be harder to grasp, in such an individualistic society as exists in many parts of the world now, is that without the world, there is no I or you. At planet level, yes, that is obvious. But gestalt insists on our being indivisible from our surroundings. That is an idea that seems to challenge Western notions of independence. I am free. I decide. Yes, perhaps. But gestalt therapy will reveal how far that is a myth for anyone, how much our choices may be constrained in ways that are outside awareness. And as awareness grows, the gestalt belief is that all we choose to do becomes more rewarding to the doer and to whom and what forms her context.

One of Perls’ important new ideas about human nature was his insistence that our behaviour comes from needs, rather than instincts or drives. These needs are activated by emotion, which in its root meaning means no more than mover, that which moves. Like Abraham Maslow, he saw these needs emerging in a hierarchy, the most urgent first. An extreme example might be of a deer stopping grazing and fleeing a lion; then at a certain moment it has to stop to recover breath, even though the lion is near. The need to breathe comes at the top of the hierarchy. So, from the beginning of life, the whole organism of the person in her environment is seen in gestalt to be in a ceaseless and productive process of identifying needs, bringing them to awareness where necessary, and so allowing them to be fulfilled.

Field theory

By 1947 Perls had written his first book (1969[1947]) on his new understandings. He struggled to find a name for this therapy, and for a time called it concentration therapy. This referred to the method, which was to concentrate on the present. With his wife Laura, he finally chose the title gestalt. This German word, not obvious in pronunciation to English speakers, means, roughly, pattern, or organisation, or pattern-forming. It is an oblique reference to the field theory put forward by Kurt Lewin. Lewin was a social psychologist with high awareness of how human behaviour is a function of the field, of the person and her context. In his own exact but wordy description: ‘a field is defined as the totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent’ (1951: 240). He also warned: ‘It is particularly necessary that one who proposes to study whole-phenomena should guard against the tendency to make wholes as all-embrasive as possible’ (Ellis 1938: 289). The way this ‘totality of coexisting facts’ form a pattern or gestalt, a fleeting organised whole in anyone’s mind, seemed always to reveal a foreground need against the background that had created it. Field theory thus became one of the major shapers of this new theory.

Similar ideas came from gestalt psychology, which struck Perls as a true description of perception. This was a German nineteenth-century movement. Max Wertheimer was among the first to suggest that we perceive in what could be called meaningful wholes (Ellis 1938: 2). According to our need at the time, we organise a selection of data into a dynamic pattern or gestalt. So, a gestalt is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

This is perhaps easier to follow in examples than just as an idea. Think of the score of a piece of music. It is not difficult to count how many quavers, minims and so on, and achieve the sum of the parts that make up, say, a movement of a symphony. But it is the organisation of those notes, their sequence and pattern, that becomes the symphony itself. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A symphony is the outcome of not only a talent but a need in the composer to produce a statement that to many people will be very beautiful, or in some special way significant. The whole is an integration of the parts that make it up, rather than a mere collection of them. A nineteenth-century banker, Charles Ephrussi, described a work of art as ‘a luminous unity whose separate elements melt together into an indivisible whole’ (De Waal 2010: 78). That was his inspiring perception. In a sense, every gestalt is an ephemeral work of art formed by whoever perceives it. It too can be a luminous entity, whose separate elements have melted together into an indivisible whole. Yet this whole is not static.

Embedded here are more inferences we can make about human nature. One is about pleasure in the aesthetic or what some people term the spiritual. This is something that defies much academic measuring but is emotionally real. There seems to be some locus of recognition in most of us, of what we variously perceive as a fine person or building or sunset or picture or piece of behaviour. But we do not all appreciate everything the same way at all. What is more, we have our own sense of when any work of art is complete. If the musicians suddenly stop playing before the last bar of our symphony, the discomfort in the audience will be great. There is a tendency to completion in our minds. We need to make something of it, in the common phrase, in this instance meaning to give a complete shape to whatever we are perceiving. Ovsianka (1928(2): 302–89) described this human tendency both to complete actions and percepts, as well to return to the unfinished. From the uncrossed ‘t’ in a piece of writing, to the never yet delivered message of farewell or love, the unfinished seems to nag or produce unease until it is dealt with.

An easy illustration of this is when I feel hungry. I may be called to the phone, have to catch the post, or for a thousand reasons need to postpone eating. But that need will come back in lively fashion for most of us, until satisfied, when the whole subject of food loses vibrancy. Done and dusted. For the time it has gone.

Where and when I feel hungry is highly significant. In a city street, I can play with the idea of a cafe or sandwich shop or grocery as a way of dealing with my need. How much I want to spend is also part of the gestalt, and how long I have free, and much besides. In other words, I deal with my need for food according to outer realities as well as inner ones, such as a loathing of white bread, or a special wish for cheese at that moment. My need is shaped by the environment. It cannot be separated from the environment, just as I cannot be separated from the environment. So, as already stated, the gestalt view of human nature is of its indivisibility from whatever surrounds us. And we are group animals, so we are always, in our minds if not physically, in relation to people. It is said that all action is reaction. As gestalt therapy has developed, more and more attention has been given to how what happens between people is generally a co-creation, modified by both or all.

In some psychodynamic training, the conductor of a small group will comment on whatever happens as coming from ‘part of the group’. It can be difficult for some members ever to acknowledge that what they do is a function of the field represented by that group. In an individualistic society, the myth is of separateness. That is a small illustration of the gestalt understanding, shared with Freudian thinkers, that the group may be acting through us as much as we are acting upon the group.

In much of what is called Western society, the idea of individuality is prized. So a notion of being dependent on, entwined, or embedded in anything may be inimical. Over recent years the indivisibility of people and their environment has been hotly disputed. Are we causing or accelerating global warming? Would it happen anyway? Whatever the answer, the consequence is the same. There is no way that we can forever rise above climate change and the natural disasters and food shortages that follow. If the planet goes, we go.

Choice

In gestalt, the therapist seeks to raise her awareness and enable the client to raise his, in the expectation that the client will then have a larger repertoire of responses available to him. In other words, he will have more choice. Fields of data in his mind will enlarge or alter, and will form new gestalts, new patterns. All this is a function of now, of the present. This optimistic therapy emphasises making choices that are energising and life-enhancing. One theoretical background to this is in existentialism, which is a strong influence in gestalt therapy theory. As far back as 1843 Kierkegaard, often called the father of existentialism, put forward the idea, still insisted on in gestalt therapy, of each person being responsible for his or her own actions. About eighty years later Martin Buber (1970 [1922]) added to this idea his insistence that the fundamental fact of human nature is relationship, experienced in the between of I and Thou.

Now, the present, is when contact happens. This belief is likewise intrinsic to this therapy. How data emerge into awareness, which is always the present, is for the gestalt therapist an indication of how to meet and work with the client. Merleau-Ponty enriched the philosophy with the depth of his thinking about phenomenology, while Husserl and Sartre are other existentialists of the first part of the twentieth century w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Chapter One – Human Nature and Gestalt
• Chapter Two – Theory of Gestalt Counselling
• Chapter Three – Assessment
• Chapter Four – Gestalt Dialogue
• Chapter Five – Excitement, Anxiety and Experiment
• Chapter Six – Integration and Evolution of Gestalt
• Glossary
• References
• Index