The bigger story —
classical and contemporary Gestalt.
Gestalt today is more popular than ever, but it is not the Gestalt of the 1960s. Contemporary relational Gestalt extends what Fritz and Laura Perls began — sensitive to shame, attentive to support, dialogical, field-oriented.
A synthesis of many threads.
Gestalt Therapy was originated by Fritz and Laura Perls and developed in the USA in the 1940s with Paul Goodman and other members of the New York Group. A wide range of influences feeds both theory and practice — psychoanalysis, existentialism, Gestalt psychology, phenomenology, the work of Wilhelm Reich, psychodrama, and Zen Buddhism.
Neither flashy techniques nor clever interventions are seen as essential abilities for the Gestalt therapist. Rather, authentic relating, presence, clear self-awareness, and unfettered observation constitute the underpinnings of practice. The therapist is a midwife, assisting a process which has its own natural rhythm of unfolding.
Picture a jigsaw with only one piece missing: we have an inherent desire to fit that piece, and an innate sense of satisfaction when the picture is complete. This drive to wholeness — to Gestalt — is what propels us to deal with unfinished issues. Awareness identifies the incomplete parts, and new forms of behaviour, feeling, and thinking are experimented with in the focus of the present moment.
Five orientations that hold the work together.
Existential
Grounded in the here and now; each person is responsible for their own destiny; the client is the best expert on themselves.
Phenomenological
Starting with the ‘what is’, instead of interpreting through our own maps, we pay attention to embodied experience and the way reality is co-created.
Dialogical
The therapist is an active participant. Gestalt is therapy without resistance — willing to not have the answers.
Wholistic
The wider field is taken into account. The work re-opens all parts of the self.
Practical
Experiential learning; creative experiments embody abstract ideas; past and future are brought into the present.
How Gestalt has evolved.
The emphasis in relational Gestalt is not primarily technique-driven. It involves a profound grasp of the intersubjective nature of experience and a capacity to skilfully combine an I-Thou orientation with attention to the developmental process of the client.
- 01
Long roots
From Kierkegaard’s existentialism through Husserl’s phenomenology, Gestalt psychology’s holism, and the breadth of 20th-century philosophy — Heidegger, Sartre, Buber, Merleau-Ponty.
- 02
Perls and the New York group
In the 1940s and 1950s Fritz and Laura Perls, with Paul Goodman and the New York Group, wove existentialism, phenomenology, holism, social psychology, psychodrama, Zen and Taoism into a new whole: Gestalt therapy.
- 03
Esalen and the popular wave
Fritz’s work at Esalen made Gestalt wildly popular in the late 1960s — effective, dramatic, life-changing. Laura, on the East Coast, developed it more quietly, with a softer orientation toward support.
- 04
Evolution
In the last 25 years Gestalt has evolved beyond the heavy Perlsian stamp. It retains the non-analytical use of awareness, the existential “what is,” and the present moment — and has extended the dialogical dimension and field theory.
- 05
A relational turn
Greater attention to shame, support, attachment and co-creation. Less reliance on confrontation and on the two-chair technique. The therapist is more transparent, perhaps more humble. The Gestalt experiment now takes any form that fits the client’s ground.
“Gestalt has been described as the philosophy of the obvious. The therapist does not have privileged access to reality; the task is to learn about the client’s subjective view of the world. The paradoxical theory of change suggests that when we help someone become as they actually are now, opportunities and processes of change begin to emerge.”
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