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.
