Phil: Well, that brings up something. When I've run across your writing, your work, I keep encountering the term "experiential," and then sometimes you call it "experiential-process," and I've been curious at times, really trying to understand Gestalt, I've given myself with a passion to understanding that, and I come to your work and I say, "Hm. Is he just using another word for Gestalt, or how does he conceive of Gestalt. What is this?"

Leslie: It might help me to understand if you can just tell me a little bit of your background in Gestalt, and then I'll be able to relate.

Phil: Okay. Going way back, during the time you were moving into the Toronto area, I was in the San Francisco bay area, and I was in the Navy, working on the psych wards at Oakland Naval Hospital. I was exposed to Gestalt - they used Gestalt and transactional analysis on the units there - through some people who were doing training with Fritz Perls and Jim Simkin down at Esalen, who would bring back what they were learning and use it on the unit. I was young, and the impact was fairly significant. After the service, I went on to do other things; I was in the ministry but always had this experiential, existential flavor to everything that I did. Several years ago I got out of the ministry and enrolled in a Psy.D. program. I also started training in Gestalt with Maya Brand and Carol Swanson. Along with their training, they would bring in trainers from outside, mostly from Los Angeles, so I've been exposed to Todd Burley, Bob and Rita Resnick, Jan Ruckert, Lynn Jacobs, and in the process got involved with AAGT. I went to the conference in New Orleans, met Iris Fodor...

Leslie: Did we meet?

Phil: We met. We met at her workshop. As far as the theory goes, I have latched onto Bob Resnick's summary of it where he did that interview with Malcolm Parlett...The three main components are field, dialogue, and phenomenology.

Leslie: So, you had asked me what is this experiential label. And let me give you a sort of anecdotal answer. I went recently to this Gestalt writers' conference, and basically I put the following question to them, "Given that both Client-Centered and Gestalt therapy (and the humanistic therapies in general) have died in academia - I'm trying to revive them under the global title of experiential - and given that psychodynamic has many different sub-schools within it, how would people at this conference feel about being one of the schools under a broader label of experiential?" We had a discussion of that. I had a chapter I'd written, and at the time it was called "Experiential Psychotherapy: The Essence of Client-Centered, Gestalt, and Existential Approaches." In the discussion, people influenced me to call it "Experience-Centered Therapies: Gestalt, Client-Centered, and Existential."
Laura Rice introduced me to Gestalt psychotherapy theoretically. And I often joke that I'm one of the few people who probably learned about Gestalt therapy theoretically first. I read Perls, Hefferlne, and Goodman in a theories class, and I thought this was really interesting. I read Perls, and then I tried to seek out Gestalt trainers. So I really was introduced to it through books.
Then I found out there was a person in town by the name of Harvey Freedman, who was a psychiatrist, and he was running Gestalt therapy groups. I joined with Harvey Freedman; he worked in the Toronto General Hospital, and he ran groups, and I went into these groups for two or three years.

I was also in encounter groups at York University where people were coming up from Berkeley and doing things like that. I was training meanwhile as a counseling psychologist, seeing my own clients and so on.

Then Harvey Freedman was picked by Perls to run the Gestalt Institute of Canada on Vancouver Island. Harvey was getting ready to uproot here and go out there, and then Fritz died. The fallout of that was that Harvey Freedman started the Gestalt Institute of Toronto. He stayed there, and then I was part of the first group, the first-year training group, and I trained here for three years in a formalized training program. Different people came in: Laura Perls was one of the people, and a variety of others. So, I was exposed to a West Coast style of Gestalt Therapy, and I got my training there, but I always felt that they lacked a theory of relationship or any kind of view of empathy and therapeutic relationship. Meanwhile, I was getting a lot of that at my university training from a Rogerian perspective, and I remember like a critical thing at one point saying to Harvey, "You know you don't take the relationship and group process into account," and he said, "Show me where the relationship or group is." It was sort of a radical, phenomenological view, which was very "I" centered, and not "We" centered in any way. And so I always had this sort of theoretical divergence; I mean I was still very young, and it was all mixed up in my still trying to be recognized, but I always had this view that somehow this was a weakness in the practice of Gestalt therapy, and although the "I-Thou" relationship was said to be one of the legs, it wasn't really used or practiced in very strong terms. So I always saw it as a strong theoretical problem. Then I went to Vancouver eventually, because I got an academic job, otherwise I would have stayed here with the Gestalt Institute of Toronto.

I was always unhappy with the Perlsianism aspect of Gestalt therapy.

Phil: Which is what to you?

Leslie: Well, I saw it as pathological notions of radical independence. And I was always much more, although it wasn't articulated at that time, interested in a model of relational interdependence.

Phil: A sort of systems thing?

Leslie: Well, no. I guess it's a difference between self-sufficiency and self-support. I saw a lot of people in Gestalt as trying to be or believing in self-sufficiency.

Phil: Sort of independent?

Leslie: Right, the radical independence. Which is exemplified in the Gestalt prayer. And I believe that we need other people, and that that's actually an important part of being human, and that interdependence, as opposed to independence or dependence, is very important. My connections are a part of who I am and are important in understanding who I am; I can't understand myself without understanding my connections. And I believe that's very much what Buber was saying.

Phil: Would this be compatible with the idea of a constantly forming self?

Leslie: Yes, absolutely, but so could a radical independence view be a constantly forming self.

Phil: Okay

Leslie: That could be totally self-forming, self-organizing. And part of my view is that we need field support in order to constantly organize. And that what we are organizing is always a synthesis of inner and outer. The self that I'm organizing at the moment is a function of the field. So it's highly compatible with the modern interpretations of Goodman, with Wheeler's and subsequent sort of interpretation, or clarification of Goodman - that the self is forming at the boundary as a function of the field.

Phil: You're talking about Gestalt Reconsidered?

Leslie: Yes. And his subsequent pages on shame. These are some of the reasons why I was moving toward the label of experiential.

Phil: Yes. It seems that you're saying there was a lot in Gestalt that was tied up in this radical independence, associated with the Perls' mystique, and also that didn't get at some of the things you were seeing in the Rogerian empathic attunement - the relationship. I find it interesting when you say that you didn't find the relationship in Gestalt as compared to Rogers, because for me, coming to Gestalt in the midst of a program which is highly cognitive, and also listening to Iris talk (it was the relationship which was the aspect of Gestalt which was attractive to her), I have found relational things in Gestalt through the dialogical.

Leslie: Yes, but you see that dialogical has only formed in the last decade. So you see, that's my point, that now, in the last decade, Gestalt has really moved into its dialogical phase.

Phil: Would you say that that's been because there's been such cross-fertilization with Rogers?

Leslie: No. I think it's been because of cross-fertilization with Kohut and Stolorow. Lynn Jacobs has been very important, and Gary Yontef. And then, the influence of Kohut. I mean, the Gestalt therapists started reading Kohut in the '80s, and started picking up the notion of...I mean empathy was a dirty word to Fritz, and when I talked about empathy in the 70's in Gestalt it was regarded as bullshit. And so the modern Gestalt therapy is dialogical, but the Gestalt therapy that I grew up in was not.

Phil: Well, that's helpful for me to know, but you're saying that Kohut is the link?

Leslie: Yes, and Stolorow also, because he's in L.A. I think Stolorow's had a strong influence on Lynn Jacobs. You see I met Lynn in the 80's and this was like a soul mate in Gestalt therapy, and I had read her dissertation. And with this I agreed, but this had not been put out as Gestalt therapy in the way that I had been trained in it, or learned it, or been exposed to it. I went out to Cooper Island after Fritz had died, and somebody was running that, and it was very sort of radical independence. We arrived by ferry on this island and stood around for an hour, and there was a truck off to the side and there was somebody sitting in the truck, and eventually, after an hour, we went up to this person and said, "Can you tell us the way to the Gestalt Institute?" And he was there to pick us up!

Both: (laughter)

Leslie: He'd been waiting for us to ask him. Now, that was radical independence.

Phil: Well, that certainly gets the idea across.

Leslie: Yes. So, process-experiential is an attempt to integrate these different approaches.

Phil: Well, that clarifies the term "experiential," and you seemed to be talking at the Gestalt writer's conference about that, but what would you say is Gestalt? What is specifically Gestalt, today?

Leslie: Firstly, I'm disconnected now from the institute circuit, and I've just been doing my thing in academia, but I would see that Gestalt's field theory is an important meta-theoretical principle that defines it. And I actually see active experimentation and dialogue as the two components that make it Gestalt therapy. Client-Centered is lacking the active experimentation, having only empathy. And I'm trying to integrate the two, so I see Gestalt as having now both a dialogical and an experimental component and that's what makes it unique. I think its view of people working at the boundary to solve problems and satisfy needs is a unique perspective on human functioning.

Phil: I'm curious. I don't hear you bringing in the phenomenological, which to me is constructivist, a making meaning out of one's experience.

Leslie: Yes, but that's because I see that as baseline. I see that as common to Client-Centered and to Gestalt. It's clearly a phenomenological therapy, but there are other phenomenological therapies. I think phenomenology is at its core. That's the experience, but what makes Gestalt different and unique from the other experiential therapies is the use of active experimentation, plus dialogue, and it's view of people at the boundary solving problems.

Phil: Hm. We talked a little of this previously, but one of the criticisms I hear of Gestalt is that it doesn't have a developmental theory, a theory of self. Do you see that as a viable criticism?

Leslie: I am not impressed with the criticism that it doesn't have a developmental theory.. I mean, it doesn't, but I don't think psychotherapies really can adequately have developmental theories; I think they should be theories of functioning and theories of practice, not theories of development. I think that's a paper game.

Phil: (laughter)

Leslie: I think there's a whole discipline of developmental psychology, whose business it is to study development, and we can use that to inform psychotherapy, but because psychoanalysts happened to invent developmental things from listening to people I don't think that's a necessity. Clearly, that's a common criticism of Gestalt, but I don't think people sitting around doing psychotherapy can make developmental theories that are worth anything. Now, this issue of a self I think is different. I think having a more adequate self theory is important.

Phil: In what way?

Leslie: Well, I think what Rogers did, that Perls never did, was Rogers' attempt to be a systematic theorizer, and that made the theory open to both testing and refutation. I think Gestalt never had a systematic theory, and that's one of its problems. I think trying to develop systematic theory leads to potential advances, even if only in the refutation of the theory. So I think having a more explicit theory, rather than an intuitive theory, is very important.

Gestalt! (ISSN 1091-1766)
a chronicle of the developing application of Gestalt principles, Vol.1, No.1, 1997
Published by Gestalt Global Corporation.
Last updated 11/13/03
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