Gestalt therapy
Gestalt Therapy is a
psychotherapy, based on the experiential ideal of "here and now", personal responsibility, phenomenology, gestalt psychology, and the humanistic potential for self-healing. It was co-founded by
Fritz Perls,
Laura Perls and
Paul Goodman in the 1940s-1950s.
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Cover of the seminal 1950 book Gestalt Therapy, 1994 edition from Gestalt Journal Press. |
The school of Gestalt therapy was co-founded in the late 1940s to early 1950s by
Fritz &
Laura Perls, both of whom were originally trained as traditional psychoanalysts; and
Paul Goodman, a political writer and anarchist. The seminal work was
Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, published in 1950; co-authored by Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, and
Ralph Hefferline (a university psychology professor, and sometime patient of Fritz Perls). As it turns out, most of the original part II of the book was written by Paul Goodman from the chaotic notes of Fritz Perls, and contains the meat of the theory. It was supposed to go first. The publishers decided that Part II, written by Hefferline, fit more into the nascent self-help ethos of the day, and made it Part I, making for a less interesting introduction to the theory. Isadore From, a leading early theorist of Gestalt Therapy, taught Part II for an entire year to his students, going through it phrase by phrase.
Gestalt therapy had a variety of psychological and philosophical influences, and in addition was a response to the social forces of its day. It is a therapeutic approach which is holistic (mind/body/culture) present-centered, and related to existential therapy in its emphasis on personal responsibility for action, and on the valuing of the I-thou relationship in therapy. (In fact, its creators considered calling Gestalt Therapy existential-phenomenological therapy.) The objective of this form of therapy, in addition to helping the client overcome symptoms, is to enable the client to become more fully and creatively alive and to be free from the blocks and unfinished issues which may diminish optimum satisfaction, fulfillment, and growth.
Gestalt therapy (GT) has its roots in
psychoanalysis. It was part of a continuum moving from the early work of
Freud, to the later Freudian ego analysis, to
Wilhelm Reich and his notion of character armor. Add to this the insights of academic
gestalt psychology about perception, gestalt formation and the tendency of organisms to complete the incomplete gestalt, to form "wholes" in experience. Then Fritz Perls, Jim Simkin and others threw into the mix a strong dash of existential thinking about the I-thou relationship as it applies to the therapist-patient interaction, and the emphasis on personal choice and responsibility. Finally, the late 1950's-1960's movement toward individuality vs. conformity and the human potential movement fed into and was itself influenced by the Gestalt Therapy approach.
Interestingly, when Fritz left New York City for California, there began to be a split between those who saw Gestalt Therapy as a therapeutic approach with great potential (this view was best represented by Isadore From, who practiced and taught mainly in New York, and by the members of the Cleveland Institute, co-founded by From) and those who saw Gestalt Therapy not just as a therapeutic modality but as a way of life. The former wing of this first generation of Gestalt Therapists were often appalled by the notion of Gestalt Therapy leaving the consulting room and donning psychedelic robes...or doffing them, a la the
Gestalt prayer. The split continues between what has been called "East Coast" GT and "West Coast" GT. However the way-of-life view seems to be fading with our memories of the 1960's, psychedelic garb and "do your own thing."
Esalen is still functioning in Big Sur. The widow of Dick Price, Christine Price does Gestalt workshops there, but Esalen now conducts workshops in many very different areas, and Gestalt therapy occupies a very small percentage of its activities.
A core concept in Gestalt therapy is the unifying idea of "contact". Contact is where one person meets another person, or meets the outside world. Thus, there can be physical contact, but mostly what is meant by the term is metaphoric. If contact is not interfered with by what Perls-Goodman called disturbances of the contact boundary, the individual can grow, through assimilation of new experiences. In therapy, the patient/client is encouraged to experience his or her own feelings and behaviours in the here and now, and attention is brought to bear on the way contact is interrupted. The way in which he or she interrupts contact with the present environment is considered to be a significant factor in creating and maintaining dysfunctional patterns of behavior. Some of the contact interuptions occur through projection (seeing outside one's self what belongs to one's self), introjection (swallowing whole instead of assimilating, chewing, digesting); retroflection (directing impulses towards the self that rightly would be directed to the other, as in anger directed toward self causing depression or psychosomatic symptoms); confluence (making the self-other boundary go away and merging with the other). A disturbance introduced by Miriam and Erv Polster is "deflection," referring to a means of avoiding contact by jumping around from one thing to another and never staying in the same place for very long. All of these disturbances have a pathological and a non-pathological aspect. It is appropriate for the infant and mother to become confluent, for example, or two lovers, but inappropriate for client and therapist. When the latter pair becomes confluent, there can be no growth because there is no boundary at which the one can contact the other; the client will not be able to learn anything new because the therapist is simply an extension of the client, so to speak.
Another important aspect of contact, one which can be found in Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, but was neglected by almost everyone except the unfortunately writing-phobic genius Isadore From, was that contact-making can be deconstructed into stages. One can look at pathology of the contact making function and relate this to personality disturbances. An example would be that some people grasp onto people and experiences too quickly, without orienting themselves to what is out there. This would be a disturbance at the "fore-contact" stage, and would be part of an impulsive personality style. This aspect of GT is a neglected part of the theory that connect GT to the original work of the Gestalt psychologists on phenomenology and perception.
By focusing the individual on how contact-making occurs or is disturbed, new insights can be made and the fluid process of adequate contacting resumed.
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Fritz Perls' photo on the cover of an Hungarian edition of his book The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy (originally published 1973) |
Fritz Perls was a German
psychoanalyst who fled with his wife Lore to
South Africa to escape
Nazi oppression. After the war the couple emigrated to New York City, which had become by the late 1940's and early 1950's, a center of intellectual, artistic, and political experimentation.
Central to Perls' modifications of psychoanalysis was the concept of "dental or oral aggression." Dental aggression is discussed in Perl's first book "Ego, Hunger, and Aggression." Perls suggested that when the infant develops teeth, he/she has the capacity to chew, to break apart food, and by analogy experience, to taste, accept, reject, assimilate. This is opposed to
Freud's notion that only introjection takes place in early experience. Thus Perls made "assimilation", as opposed to "introjection" a focal theme in his work, and the prime means by which growth occurs in therapy. In contrast to the psychoanalytic stance in which the patient introjects the (presumably more healthy) attitudes/interpretations of the analyst, in Gestalt Therapy the patient must "taste" his/her experience, and either accept or reject, but not introject, or "swallow whole". Hence, the emphasis is on avoiding interpretation and encouraging discovery. This is the key point in the divergance of GT from traditional psychoanalysis -- growth occurs through gradual assimilation of experience in a natural way, rather than by accepting the interpretations of the analyst; thus, the the therapist should not interpret, but lead the patient to discover for himself. The Gestalt therapist contrives experiments that lead the patient to greater awareness and fuller experience of his/her possibilities. Experiments can be focussed on undoing projections or retroflections. They can work helping the client with closure of unfinished gestalts ("unfinished business" such as unexpressed emotions towards somebody in the client's life). There are many kinds of experiments that might be therapeutic. But the essence of the work is that it is experiential rather than interpretive, and in this way distinguishes itself from the psychoanalytic.
Perls also derived much from
Reich's emphasis on how defenses are embodied, and therefore paid a great deal of attention to
nonverbal behavior. This was consonant with Lore's background in dance and movement therapy.
Fritz and Lore (now Laura) founded the first Gestalt Institute in
New York City in 1952.
Isadore From became a patient, first of Fritz and then of Laura. Pretty quickly he was anointed a trainer. Isadore lived in New York until his death at 75 in 1993 and was known world-wide for his philosophical and intellectually rigorous take on Gestalt Therapy. A brilliant, witty and sometimes caustic man, From was definitely the philosopher of the first-generation Gestalt therapists. He was also acknowledged to be a supremely gifted clinician. Unfortunately, he was phobic of writing. The only things committed to paper are a few interviews, but they are worth reading.[
1]
Jim Simkin was a psychologist who also became a patient of Perls and then a co-trainer with Perls in California. Simkin was responsible for Perls coming to California where he attempted to begin a psychotherapy practice. Ultimately, being a peripatetic trainer and workshop leader was a better fit for Fritz' personality. Jim and Fritz co-led some of the early (for California) training groups at Esalen.
In the 1960's Perls became infamous for his public workshops at
Esalen Institute in
Big Sur. Isadore From referred to some of Fritz' several day workshops as "hit-and-run" therapy because of its emphasis on showmanship, but Fritz never considered these workshops to be true therapy. Jim Simkin went from co-leading training groups with Fritz to purchasing a property next to Esalen and starting his own training center, which he ran until his death in 1984. Here he developed a precise laser-like version of Gestalt Therapy.
Erv and Miriam Polster started a training center in
La Jolla which also became very well known. Dan Rosenblatt (b. 1925) was part of the early group around Laura. A Harvard-trained psychologist and intellectual, he practiced Gestalt therapy for over 35 years in Manhattan, seeing 30 patients a week in individual therapy and doing groups almost every evening. He did training workshops in Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, New Zealand, Italy for many years. Rosenblatt, who also wrote several books on Gestalt therapy, exemplifies the Gestalt therapist as practicing clinician, rather than would-be guru. All of these therapists had their own distinctive styles, but always with Gestalt Therapy's focus on immediate experience as a central theme.
Although Gestalt Therapy reached its zenith in the late 1970's and early 1980's and has since waned in popularity, its contributions have become assimilated into current schools of therapy, sometimes in unlikely places. For example,
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) shares much from Gestalt Therapy yet is considered to be a cognitive behavioral approach. Also, mindfulness is a buzzword as of 2006, yet much of mindfulness work is connected to Gestalt Therapy's emphasis on the flow of experience and awareness. You won't see too much emphasis on Gestalt Therapy in
clinical psychology programs in the US, however there are Gestalt institutes all over the world, including Asia and the South Pacific.
Dan Rosenblatt led Gestalt training groups in
Japan for 7 years and
Stewart Kiritz followed with public workshops and training workshops from 1997 through 2005. Gestalt Therapy is a very useful process for therapists-in-training of any persuasion because of its focus on the person of the therapist, barriers to full contact with others, self-awareness. And graduate students still seem to seek it out, even though it is not as recognized by the establishment as it once was.
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Wilhelm Reich's
psychoanalytic developments, especially the concept of
character armor and its focus on the body.
*
Jacob Moreno's
Psychodrama, principally the development of enactment techniques for the resolution of psychological conflicts
*
Max Wertheimer's
Gestalt Psychology , which this therapy derives its name from, influences the application of the concepts about perception to a broader theory about human needs and the relation of persons with their surroundings
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Kurt Goldstein's holistic theory of the organism, based on
Gestalt theory.
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Martin Buber's philosophy of relationship and dialogue ("I - Thou")
*
Kurt Lewin's field theory as applied to the social sciences and group dynamics
* European
phenomenology of Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
* The
existentialism of Kierkegaard over that of Sartre, rejecting nihilism
*
Carl Jung's
psychology, particularly the polarities concept
* Some elements from
Zen Buddhism* American
pragmatism of
William James,
George Herbert Mead, and
John Dewey#
Live now, stay in the present.#
Live here, be with the present.#
Stop imagining, experience reality.#
Stop unnecessary thinking.#
Express, rather than manipulating, explaining, justifying, or judging.#
Give in to unpleasantness do not restrict your awareness.#
Accept no "should" or "ought", other than your own.#
Take full responsibility for your own actions, feelings and thoughts.#
Surrender to being who you are right now.
Here we have a paradox, however, because "you should not have shoulds" is itself a should! Most Gestalt Therapists would not be very comfortable with these statements as rules, but more comfortable with the idea that by experimenting and choosing what fits, one can come to a fuller experience of one's being than by rehearsing, intellectualizing, justifying, excusing, etc.
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Gestalt effect*
Barry Stevens, who
Fritz Perls called "a natural born therapist."
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Cognitive therapy*
Topdog vs. Underdog*
Gestalt Therapy: An Introduction by Gary Yontef, Ph.D.
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Manchester Gestalt Centre Has many articles on Gestalt Therapy written by John B Harris and Peter Phillipson, Manchester Gestalt Centre, UK. Go to 'online articles'.
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The Gestalt Therapy Page sponsored by The Gestalt Journal Press.
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The Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy*
Gestalt! is an electronic journal with full-text articles, interviews, and information about Gestalt therapy, theory, practice, and practitioners.
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Fritz Perls: What is Gestalt Therapy? (Interview)*
Gestalt Institute of Toronto*
Istituto di Gestalt*
Gestalt Therapy Institute of Cologne, Germany
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Gestalt Therapy discussion at Behavior OnLine
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International Society for Gestalt Theory and Its Applications (GTA)
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Big Sur Tapes, audio recordings of Fritz and Laura Perls, James Simkin, etc.
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Association for Humanistic Psychology*
Brisbane Gestalt Institute*
Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy (AAGT)
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Achim Votsmeier-Röhr's English version of his (German) website about Gestalt Therapy*
GANZ Gestalt Australia & New Zealand GANZ Community Newsletter - a quarterly hard copy publication
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The New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, founded by Fritz and Laura Perls, 1952
