Gestalt Therapy Theory Research Articles

In and out the gender pail

"Abstract Like Gestalt therapy, gender is not to be explained, but to be engaged with, and to engage with anything or anyone requires curiosity. For many of us, exploring our relationship to gender is arduous, messy, non-linear, personal work with no shortcuts. It can’t be made into generalised statements that would spare the person enquiring from doing the work of their own understanding. I believe some of the curiosity regarding gender is missing in our Gestalt-therapy community and we risk oversimplifying and polarising a complex phenomenon. As a Gestalt therapist who happens to be trans, my invitation is to move away from problematizing gender as if it only belonged to the trans community and begin to engage with it as something that concerns us all. Though gender is more figural for some clients than others, it is ever-present in our fields. Because it is always present, it is either organising our perceptions from the shadows, or being consciously held, named and worked with to deepen contact. I will start by describing current field conditions as I perceive them. I will share my own path to my current identity to illustrate how gender can be entangled in our hardships and growth. Using my personal narrative, I will outline implications for Gestalt therapy theory – exploring biopsychosocial and intersectional lenses to gender, differentiating self from gender identity, touching on gendered introjects and gender synthesis, and linking ontological insecurity with certain identities. Lastly, I point to more pragmatic implications for clinical practice, to support other Gestalt therapists as they will inevitably encounter clients for whom gender is figural. Keywords gender, Gestalt therapy, transgender, biopsychosocial, intersectional, gender identity, gendered introjects, gender synthesis, ontological insecurity "

Psychopathology of the Situation in Gestalt Therapy: A Field-Oriented Approach (2023) Edited by Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb and Pietro Andrea Cavaleri. Routledge. ISBN: 9781032322025

Reviewed by the founder and former co-director of Gestalt Therapy Brisbane, Psychopathology of the Situation in Gestalt Therapy: A Field-Oriented Approach (2023) addresses the suffering experienced by people in a post-pandemic world. Representing the work of the Italian Gestalt Institute, this book is applicable to all psychotherapists. It is written in two parts. The first part advances an exciting, relational gestalt therapy theory that can inform modern practice. The second part offers in 11 chapters case studies and theoretical discussions to working with clients in difficult clinical situations. Moving beyond the intra-psychic to a holistic, embodied perspective, this collection of works by experienced practitioners and researchers blends practical applications with theories encompassing neuroscience, identity, diversity, reciprocity, aesthetics, anthropology, phenomenology, and sociology.

Psychopathology and Atmospheres: Neither Inside Nor Outside

Psychopathology and Atmospheres: Neither Inside Nor Outside

A psychotherapist’s lived experience in-session with an asylum seeker and translator: An autoethnographic case study

ABSTRACT Featured in this article is a psychotherapy case study recounted from the lived experience of the psychotherapist working with an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, with the help of a translator. The method applied is an aesthetic inquiry adapted from Autoethnography which engages the practitioner as the researcher who enters the ‘field’ of the therapy situation. The reflexive writing of the case story, which is integral to the method, sets off a heuristic process, integrating research and practice. Reading this case study, one may grasp the nuances and the atmosphere of an otherwise linguistically challenging therapeutic situation. The story and Gestalt therapy theory are weaved together, which makes palpable, intangible aspects of the therapeutic process.

Field Theory in Contemporary Gestalt Therapy Part Two: Paradoxical Theory of Change Reconsidered

ABSTRACTConceptualization of change processes presents a significant source of therapist’s self-support in demanding clinical situations. Three perspectives on understanding the process of change used in Gestalt therapy are set forth in a systematic way: mono-personal, bi-personal, and field theory. Changes in psychotherapy in clinical practice, conceptualized from a field theory perspective, are addressed in order to support both the growing edge of contemporary Gestalt therapy and to add a Gestalt therapy contribution to the current emphasis on field theory in psychotherapy. The Paradoxical Theory of Change, as the leading theoretical concept for Gestalt therapy theory of change, is reconsidered from a field theory perspective, and the consequences for clinical work are addressed.

Body-to-Body Intimacy: Transformation Through Love, Sex and Neurobiology

Body-to-Body Intimacy: Transformation Through Love, Sex and Neurobiology

Preamble: A Cluster Contacting the Other

Gestalt Review celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary with this issue. We, in this cluster of the journal, feel honored to participate in this event.The journal engages Gestalt therapy theory and practice at the highest level. Its debut edition in 1997 was edited by Joseph Melnick with articles by Arnold Beisser, Judith R. Brown, Petruska Clarkson, Helga Matzko, Joseph Melnick, Malcolm Parlett, and Joseph Zinker. If you are lucky enough to have the volumes of this journal in your library, take a look at them now. You will see articles that cover the breadth and width of Gestalt therapy, from clinical theory and practice in various settings with various populations to Gestalt therapy's expansion into organizational development, social policy, and education. You will see how the journal searched out and developed various themes in Gestalt therapy. You will see articles that first appeared here and became part of the curricula of training programs everywhere: they are part of the foundation of our theory and practice.As a cluster coordinator, I select a theme and choose writers from among the multiverse of expert Gestalt therapists. This anniversary issue appears in a world undergoing the weight of COVID-19 and sociopolitical transformations. This anniversary issue of the journal is also special by way of this world-historical event. As such, it is part of Gestalt therapy's response to this world, this place, and this time. You will take ideas from these essays written in a pre-COVID world into your current Gestalt practices.I was asked to choose a theme in the world prior to COVID-the-disrupter, prior to racial and social awakening across a fold in the lived-historical field. This was not too long ago in terms of time as marked by calendars, but eternities ago in terms of the lived-time of our experiential field. I chose “contacting the other” because the concept is central to our theory and practice. In the time between my choice and its realization in this journal, the theme I selected is developing even more relevance as the world shudders under the rolling disruptions of COVID-19, climate catastrophes, and continuing social and political reconfigurations. New dimensions of otherness are being thrown at us. The coronavirus hijacks people's DNA and turns them into potentially lethal others. Strangers, friends, and even loved ones could be dangerous. Our homes are engulfed by flaming forests and turned into furnaces. We are awakening to how we have brutalized our neighbors and ourselves through the silent atrocities of centuries of racism. We, Gestalt therapists, are trained in the clinical art of contacting the other. When we focus our trained eyes most widely across the time and space horizon of the field, we can see how our skill at contacting the other can illuminate the darkness that seems unremitting on a personal, social, and global scale. Gestalt therapy has been at the front lines from its natal day.My article, “From the Night Before Being,” is the final essay of this cluster as a postlude in the sense that it addresses contacting full-on and from a relational perspective. Contacting is the heart of Gestalt therapy, and the other is implicit in contacting. Consequently, to consider “contacting the other” is essentially to consider contacting at a granular level. By attending to the qualities of contacting at this level, we can locate our fit or misfit with ourselves-and-others in-the-world. Radically, then, contacting the other is the existential and relational core of Gestalt therapy. My essay's theme makes explicit the implicit theme linking all the previous essays: contacting the other.The other essays that follow consider contacting the other from different perspectives. The authors represent the global presence and varied approaches to Gestalt therapy. The article by Ruella Frank (New York City), “The Lived-Body: A Moving-Feeling Experience,” describes how, through phenomenological attention to contacting in terms of the author's developmental and somatic approach, we can see the ways in which we always exist in relation to the other. With close study of phenomenology and Gestalt therapy in “Sensing the Other: The Pathic-aesthetical Dimension of Human Experience,” Monica B. Alvim (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) contributes to our understanding of the pathic aesthetic dimensions of contacting. In “On Being Seen Doing,” David Picó (Valencia, Spain) focuses on the other in the experience of stage fright in terms of contemporary Gestalt therapy and proposes innovative clinical approaches. The essay by Leanne O'Shea (Melbourne, Australia), “Fat is a Therapeutic Issue,” discusses the implications of obesity in therapy from the perspective of her own experience. My article, “From the Night Before Being,” concludes the section.We, in this cluster, are proud to be included in this celebration of our journal's silver anniversary. This extraordinary time now, and this unforeseeable place here, both underscore the need for Gestalt Review to continue on. We hope our contributions to this issue are justifying this claim.

Preamble

Preamble

How Can a Void Be Fertile? Implications of Friedlaender's Creative Indifference for Gestalt Therapy Theory and Practice

ABSTRACTFrederick Perls's reflections on Salomo Friedlaender's theory of creative indifference and differential thinking, beginning with Ego, Hunger and Aggression, will be discussed. This approach emphasizes working with polarities and the zero-point (pre-difference), the significance of contextualization of our patient's suffering, and meaning-making. “Not-knowing” is an essential aspect of this attitude, which allows the uniqueness of every therapeutic situation to be explored and encourages experimenting and the reorganization of a dysfunctional field. If we are able to give up what is familiar to us, we may become anxious and uncertain, but then we can enter a “weighty world of nothingness” from which infinite and surprising differentiations can emerge. Experiencing this fertile void, or phase of pre-difference, is crucial to the creative process of change. Novel insights and realizations are generated, and we become aware of new meanings. This is the “middle mode,” in which we are both active and passive, both doer and done to.

‘Endlessly worth understanding’: a phenomenological exploration of the experience of grieving

"Abstract: This paper offers an autoethnographic exploration of the phenomenology of grieving, arising from the author’s experience following the death of her close friend. The paper explores several themes which emerge heuristically from that individual experience, namely: grieving as an existential struggle; the embodied experience of grieving; how grieving challenges and destabilises language and theory; recognising grieving as an unfolding process and as part of the situation, rather than located in the individual; and grieving as a universal yet unique experience. The author’s personal experience is used as a springboard to reflect on the opportunities that Gestalt therapy theory and practice might afford grieving clients. The paper compares the Gestalt approach with a selection of contemporary grief theories. Keywords: grief, phenomenology, death, murder, existential concerns, embodiment."

Gestalt Psychotherapy and Coaching for Relationships

Gestalt Psychotherapy and Coaching for Relationships

The mundaneity of the body: (re)thinking the individualistic culture and its implications for gestalt-therapy

Solidified in modernity, with the emergence of individualism, the dichotomies mind x body, person x world, organism x environment, subject x culture emerge from the same process that, as the anthropologist Le Breton points out, anatomized man, separated him from his environment and from others and objectified nature. Both Gestalt therapy and the philosopher Merleau-Ponty propose an understanding of the human being who seeks to overcome these dichotomies. For Merleau-Ponty we are incarnated in a world, woven with it, affirming the mundaneity of the body. For Gestalt therapy, both the body and the notion of organism/environment field also points to this non-individualistic understanding of human being. The objective of this work is, from these interdisciplinary references, to reaffirm the non-individualistic condition of existence and to deepen this perspective in Gestalt therapy theory.

Historical vs concurrent approaches to development

"Abstract: Gestalt therapy theory has generally had to borrow a developmental conception from other theories. This article considers the differences between historical and concurrent approaches to development, and makes the case for utilising a concurrent approach to development. Kegan’s theory of development is presented as an example of a concurrent approach. The application of this approach is illustrated in a case example. Keywords: Kegan, Piaget, organismic self-regulation, embeddedness, introjects, impasse, developmental."

First steps into phenomenology: learning phenomenological comprehension of a therapeutic work

"Abstract: This paper explores the possibilities of phenomenology within psychotherapy and particularly within Gestalt psychotherapy. Two aspects of the whole are presented: apart from psychotherapeutic applications, the aspect of pedagogy and its potential is shown and demonstrated using the concrete example of the online available therapeutic work of Dr Robert Resnick. The basic notions of phenomenology as Husserl’s legacy are introduced in order to show their relevance for psychotherapy and its pedagogy. Since some notions taken from Gestalt psychology (e.g. figure/ground structure) have their origins in phenomenology, there is a question as to whether this could be a challenge for Gestalt therapy theory. Keywords: phenomenology, Gestalt therapy, experiential learning, phenomenological notions and structures."

From roundabout to seesaw: Gestalt therapists working with partners of people who suffer with addiction

"Abstract: As a practising Gestalt counsellor, I noticed that I had an increasing number of clients who are not misusing substances themselves but are partners of people who do. I was struck by how little dialogue there is around this generally in the field of counselling and psychotherapy. The main support available to partners of people with addictions is support groups, but there is little understanding or consensus on how they may be understood and best supported in the counselling room. A UK-based research group contrasted six different perspectives on understanding the dynamic between partner and substance- misusing other, which were co-dependency, psychodynamic, systems, stress-coping, feminist, and community (Velleman, Copello and Maslin, 1998). Looking at this from a Gestalt therapy theory perspective has generally remained unexplored. This small-scale research paper is a result of dialogues I had with three Gestalt therapists who have had experience supporting a partner of a person who suffers with addiction. An overarching image emerged out of these conversations which I will use to describe the process these Gestalt therapists have gone through with their clients, in the hope of initiating dialogue around this, in and outside of the Gestalt community. Keywords: co-dependency, affected family members (AFMs), addiction, Gestalt therapy, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), confluence, creative indifference."

From Sentience to Sapience: The Awareness-Consciousness Continuum and the Lifeworld

AbstractThe awareness continuum and the organism/environment field have been the unexamined foundations for Gestalt therapy's theory and practice since its beginning in 1951. This article questions their adequacy. It argues that “awareness” with its minimal treatment of consciousness is too broad a concept to describe the experience of being human and proposes the “awareness-consciousness continuum” and “environment-lifeworld.” Persons as animal organisms, as well as relational, thinking, and meaning-making beings, can then be fully understood with this extended language of our modality. The terms by which we consider our work express our attitude toward our clients and therefore influence the clinical consequences of our work.

Introduction: Gestalt Therapy and “New Phenomenology”

Introduction: Gestalt Therapy and “New Phenomenology”

The Boundaries of Gestalt Therapy and the Limits of Our Imagination: Hermann Schmitz's Adolf Hitler in History and “New Phenomenology”

Abstract The author looks into the attempts to treat the theory of “New Phenomenology” as an essential part of, or as at least an improvement to, Gestalt therapy theory. Herman Schmitz's concepts are compared with core concepts of Gestalt therapy theory and found to be incompatible with them. The author advocates the further development of Gestalt therapy theory by employing the concepts inherent to the method. “New Phenomenology” and Schmitz's (1999) book, Adolf Hitler in History, are interchangeably figure and background for each other. Schmitz's philosophical opus must be read together with his alarming views on Hitler, since they are inextricably intertwined.

Lothar Gutjahr's “Nourishing Notions or Poisonous Propositions? Can ‘New Phenomenology’ Inspire Gestalt Therapy?”

Abstract An increasing number of colleagues consider “New Phenomenology” of the German philosopher Hermann Schmitz to be a good complement or even an improvement to Gestalt therapy theory. This commentator supports Gutjahr's (2018) critical view and complements it with a look at Schmitz's philosophical work, which offered new ways of approaching the issue, but soon narrowed itself down to outdated terms like “Leib” [felt-body]. She comes to the conclusion that these terms from Schmitz's “private,” premodern language are incompatible with Gestalt therapy. He dispenses with all the productive results of so many new fields of human and social research. His followers also negate Goldstein's (1939) concept of the “organism” and the broad approach of bodywork offered by the pioneers of Gestalt therapy.

A Study on Using Musicals from the Perspectives of Art Therapy based on Gestalt Therapy Theory

A Study on Using Musicals from the Perspectives of Art Therapy based on Gestalt Therapy Theory