Gestalt
Therapy
Gestalt
therapy is a phenomenological-existential therapy founded by Frederick
(Fritz) and Laura Perls in the 1940s. It teaches therapists and
patients the phenomenological method of awareness, in which perceiving,
feeling, and acting are distinguished from interpreting and reshuffling
preexisting attitudes. Explanations and interpretations are considered
less reliable than what is directly perceived and felt. Patients
and therapists in Gestalt therapy dialogue, that is, communicate
their phenomenological perspectives. Differences in perspectives
become the focus of experimentation and continued dialogue.
The goal is for clients to become aware of what they are doing,
how they are doing it, and how they can change themselves, and
at the same time, to learn to accept and value themselv
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.
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.
