Sustainability in a Fragile Ecological Era: A Gestalt Therapist's Response

Abstract

This article provides a Gestalt therapist's perspective on the ways we can understand individuals' responses to the current ecological crisis and the challenge of sustainability. Some of the underlying assumptions that appear to shape our creative adjustments are insufficient in and of themselves. The author develops aspects of Gestalt therapy theory's radical epistemology, elicited by field theory and the wisdom of the body, as an alternative to the prevailing rationalised and reasoned view that has informed current responses. Hope is maintained that our Gestalt therapy practice may foster novel responses that sustain and nourish our planet and all who inhabit her by: (1) extending the field to include a wider ecology of relational interactions; (2) moving from configuring our ecological problem as a crisis to one of supporting creativity; (3) attending to our sensorial, animating intersubjective bodies rooted in a relational field; (4) fostering a practice of radical inclusion.