I believe this omission stems, in part, from a theoretical loss of Gestalt holism in favor of a focus on verbal content in the GATLA approach to Gestalt. Gestalt holism involves attention to the content as well as the manner in which a client tells his/her story and interacts with the therapist. As Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman (Gestalt Therapy,1951) say of "self-discovery," which they assert as the aim of Gestalt therapy: "To observe your self in action--ultimately, to observe your self as action--calls for techniques strikingly different from those you may have tried already and found wanting; in particular, introspection." (p.3) A few pages later the authors explain "The patient is taught to experience himself. 'Experience' derives from the latin source--experiri, to try--as does the word 'experiment,' and the dictionary gives for it precisely the sense that we intend here, namely, 'the actual living through an event or events.'" (p.15) "What is essential is that the therapist teach the patient how to learn about himself. This involves his becoming directly aware of how, as a living organism he does indeed function." (p. 15-16) The Gestalt experiment serves to heighten and, importantly, to explore the client's awareness of his bodily and affective responses to the story he/she tells. The self reveals itself in how it acts, in the several dimensions in which it reveals itself. Gestalt holism asserts that human change requires aware involvement of the whole person: cognition, feelings, and the responses of the body. As the authors assert a few pages later: "What he [the client] is after is relief--and this not a verbal matter." (p.21) In my experience, the method of Gestalt therapy that is taught in GATLA's training is primarily focused on the cognitive content--the verbal dimension--of the client's story, with little attention to the other dimensions of the client's experience.
This, in my opinion, represents a narrowing down of the Gestalt approach as presented in Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman and as taught by Laura and Fritz Perls and many others. In the British Gestalt Journal (1995, #2) Bob Resnick, GATLA's chief trainer, asserts that the three foundational elements of Gestalt therapy are field theory, phenomenology, and dialogue. He mentions neither organismic holism nor experimentation, and this, together with what I view as a narrowed understanding even of the three elements he does mention, accounts for the version of Gestalt therapy which is taught in GATLA's training. These five foundational elements--organismic holism, field theory, phenomenology, experimentation, and dialogue--reciprocally influence each other, and the omission of any one of them or an overly narrow or overly broad interpretation of one or more of these elements, necessarily has a significant impact on the way in which the processes of Gestalt therapy are understood and practiced--and, of course, taught.
Resnick correctly states that because of its field-theoretical approach Gestalt therapy holds that a client must be seen within his/her environmental context. However, there are a number of elements of the therapeutic field which Resnick largely ignores and which do not carry much weight in GATLA's training. Both therapist and client bring to the therapeutic meeting a personal ground of experience, habitual responses, and a system of beliefs about what-is and what-is-possible in the world, and especially as this bears upon the self. Whatever happens in therapy will, to some degree, be influenced by each person's ground. Both client and therapist will respond bodily to the process, and each will be aware of internal thoughts and feelings which occur as responses to what is happening in the therapeutic situation. Because the therapist brings to the meeting a ground of theoretical understanding and experience, he/she will pay more attention to some things than to others, will spontaneously wonder about the client's non-verbal behavior, will feel curious about the implications and connections of certain aspects of the situations the client describes, and will develop, in a tentative way, working hypotheses as to the therapeutic significance of what the client reveals. These are real elements in the therapist-client field, and they have an important role to play; without such internal phenomena the therapist would be no more helpful than an untrained friend. This ground of theory and experience which the therapist brings to the therapeutic meeting, in other words, is the basis of all of the therapist's interventions - including, but not limited to, therapeutic experiments--and of the overall direction which the therapeutic process takes. Yet all of this is ignored by Resnick, even disdained on the basis of his understanding of the phenomenological method.
Resnick's remarks on the phenomenological method in the BGJ (1995, #2) reveal, in my opinion, a flawed understanding of that method, and I believe this probably explains the absence of the therapeutic experiment in GATLA's training. He says: "It is a way of learning how to listen afresh by bracketing off as much as possible - our beliefs, values, theories, interpretations, 'knowledge' etc. - so as to be touched anew by the nomena [sic], the virgin experience; and so as to be able to describe rather than explain and to start with equal value to all observations. The phenomenological method is an attempt to neutralise the therapist's own personal refracting prisms as well as the refracted prisms taken from others, sometimes elevated to the level of theories and theorists." (p.4)
Resnick's assertion that Gestalt therapists bracket off "our beliefs, values, theories, interpretations, 'knowledge' etc - so as to be touched anew by the nomena [sic], the virgin experience, and so as to be able to describe rather than explain and to start with equal value to all observations" reveals a fundament misunderstanding of Gestalt's phenomenological method. In the first place, no one ever has an experience of noumenal, i.e uninterpreted, reality. One of the contributions of the Gestalt psychologists is that they gave experimental proof to Kant's assertion that all aware experience is organized and interpreted. Complete bracketing away of all presuppositions is both humanly impossible and therapeutically undesirable. Nor is anyone such a blank screen as to regard "all observations" as "of equal value." Moreover, phenomenology is far more than mere description, which would be mere phenomenalism; rather, phenomenology as a therapeutic method involves understanding the possible significance and connections--as well as a descriptive grasp--of immediate experience. Perls' dictum "lose your mind and come to your senses" is only half true: we attend to the surface phenomena - the words and the non-verbal gestures - of the client, but we also pay attention to our own responses, including our feelings and thoughts about what is happening with the client. The phenomenological method prevents the therapist from allowing his/her theoretical knowledge to act as a screen which lessens authentic contact with the client, but phenomen-ology is not a passive reception of phenomena but involves a meaningful organization of those phenomena. As a method, we can never bracket away what we as persons and as therapists bring to the meeting with the client--nor should we. By trying to "bracket away" the responses of the therapist to the client's revelations, Resnick leaves out the richest source of therapeutic interventions. Not that these are, in actual fact, absent from any therapist's behavior, but it is Resnick's conscious negation of them on the basis of a flawed theoretical understanding of the phenomenological method which contributes to what I regard as the narrowed version of Gestalt therapy which is taught in GATLA training.
I believe that a further reason for the absence of the therapeutic experiment in GATLA training is the result of a somewhat incomplete understanding of the nature of dialogue. In discussing dialogue as one of the three pillars of Gestalt therapy in that same article in British Gestalt Journal referred to above, Resnick says that dialogue has three requirements: the "therapist's presence," "inclusion" by the therapist of him-/herself in the client's phenomenological experience, and "a commitment to dialogue" Although Resnick omits the fact it is equally true that the client affects the therapist's phenomenology and is thus is included within it, I am certain he believes that this is the case. However, the omission seems significant to me since it ties in with what I see as an insufficient understanding of the phenomenological method and of the use of therapeutic experiments.
The prefix "dia" in the word dialogue means "through," to pass through; it does not mean "two," as some think. Unfortunately, the American Heritage Dictionary makes the mistake of dividing the word into di-a-logue, rather than as the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary and Websters Unabridged Dictionary, which both divide the word properly and in conformity with the Greek dia-logia [italics]. The root of the remainder of the word dialogue is "logia"[italics] which comes from the Greek verb legein, meaning to speak; what is spoken is a logos or "word." A dialogue is a conversation between two or more persons, in which each speaks his/her own word to the other(s). The "word" spoken--both verbally and nonverbally--by each person then runs through the person who receives the revelation and is unavoidably colored by his/her own apprehension of what the client reveals in all of the modes of self-revelation. Each "speaks" his/her "word" to and through the other; each person's word bears the mark of the other's word as it is spoken through him/herself, and each is affected by the exchange, though not in the same ways, since each person experiences through the unique personal ground he/she brings to the meeting.
The Gestalt therapist, using the phenomenological method, organizes his/her experience of the client, noticing some things as important and ignoring others, entertaining hunches and tentative or working hypotheses about the client and the meaning of what is being revealed, experiencing curiosity about the possible exploration and/or amplification of certain elements in the client's revelations, and developing ideas for one or another therapeutic experiment. How the therapist actually engages in the dialogue with the client will be affected by many of these internal phenomena the therapist experiences as he/she has contact with the client in the therapeutic process. Here the therapist shows that he/she is not simply the passive recipient of the client's revelations but is actively engaged in facilitating the client's awareness and understanding of the client's own experience.
In my experience, GATLA's understanding of the nature of the dialogic process, as reflected in its training program, is much narrower and more passive than its linguistic roots suggest and which is therapeutically most powerful. A more active understanding would, I believe, result in an new emphasis in GATLA's training program on teaching trainees how they as therapists can express their curiosities about various aspects of the client's story, inquire into the client's bodily experience, and generate therapeutic experiments. This would, in my opinion, act as a needed counterweight to what seems to me to an overemphasis in the GATLA training program on facilitating essentially cognitive and verbal processes, and would make that training at once more holistic and more deeply dialogic.
In my opinion, Gestalt therapy rests on five, not three, pillars: organismic holism, field theory, phenomenology, dialogue, and experimentation - all, of course, within the encompassing context of the caring presence of the therapist. These five form a true gestalt when they are properly understood, and that understanding represents Gestalt therapy in its fullest expression. Taken together in their reciprocal relations these five elements are the source of Gestalt therapy's great power to effect human change. I believe that GATLA's leading trainers would do well to revisit and to rethink their understanding of the foundational elements of Gestalt therapy. The result would be a fuller, richer, and much more powerful version of Gestalt therapy which they would then present to their trainees.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Fleming Crocker, Ph.D.
CROCKERSF@aol.com
