A Response to
“Schema Therapy: A Gestalt-Oriented Overview” from the
Perspective of Foundational Gestalt Therapy

Dan Bloom

President of the Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy
A Fellow and Past President of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt!
Volume 10; Number 1
2009
Published by
Gestalt Global Corporation and the Gestalt Training Institute of Bermuda

Consult also:
Gestalt! Discussions for continued dialogue on issues of interest arising from articles in the journal

Stuff2Know for news of events and announcements of interest to gestalt therapists, consultants, and coaches.

Contents of 10(1)

Home

Schema Therapy: A Gestalt-Oriented Overview

Response to Schema Therapy... from Dan Bloom

Response to Schema Therapy from Iris Fodor

Response to Schema Therapy from Philip Brownell

Kellogg Response to Bloom, Fodor, and Brownell

GO TO DISCUSSION BOARD FOR THE CONTINUED DIALOGUE AND TO JOIN IN THE DISCUSSION YOURSELVES

Working Corner

Initial information about Continuity and Change: Gestalt Therapy Now

ABSTRACT

This is a response to Scott Kellogg's paper on schema therapy and its use of gestalt therapy. This response provides an orienting view of foundational principles in gestalt therapy and points out a difference between a technique drive approach to psychotherapy and one based on a coherent theory of the self. This response further contrasts an intrapsychic with a phenomenological understanding.

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Introduction:
“And what kind of therapist are you?” I was asked in a breezily curious way at a cocktail party that had its fair share of psychotherapists gnawing canapés. I answered, “Gestalt therapist,” smiling and expecting, “What is gestalt therapy?” (the usual, and impossible, follow-up). Instead, the questioner turned to the person next to me, also a psychotherapist, a buddy: “And you?”  “I,” answered my friend in a overfull tone for which he is known, “I am eclectic. [Pause] I do whatever works.” “Oh!” The smile faded from my face with this implication that I might be an ideologue, more interested in the purity of my approach than the results of my work. This anecdote hovers as background when I consider schema therapy from the standpoint of my gestalt therapy perspective and risk, once again, appearing to be more dogmatic than practical.

I am nevertheless glad to offer my response to Scott Kellogg’s interesting paper, “Schema Therapy: A Gestalt-Oriented Overview.” Their essay covers a good deal of practical ground, shows their creative synthesis of contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches, and attempts to integrate gestalt therapy itself into their work. My response will examine this attempt.

“Traditionally,” writes Kellogg, “Gestalt therapy has emphasized experience and awareness, while cognitive therapies have emphasized belief and interpretations. It is our perception that schema therapy is in fact, bridging the two.” They do a yeoman job at making a strong case for the effectiveness of schema therapy. Their effort to offer it as a bridge from gestalt therapy to cognitive therapies is a laudable task.

Gestalt therapy is a field phenomenological and intersubjective psychotherapy of process; cognitive therapy is psychodynamic and intrapsychic. Gestalt therapy proceeds through experiment, invention, and discovery; schema therapy proceeds through interpretation, introjection, and technique. To envision a bridge between these two modalities stretches my imagination. For such a construction project to succeed would require amputating body parts from gestalt therapy--or at least from the body of gestalt therapy that I understand. What would remain of such a body would not be recognizable as gestalt therapy by me.

When the author proposes that Kellogg (2004) was impressed by the 1969 Fritz Perls as a “modifying therapist” whose style of “direct and confrontational work” and attention to “polarities and integration” was a “kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy...," he is conflating personal style and technique with therapeutic modality. His hoped-for bridge is more of a bridge to this technique-centered approach than to what Dr. Kellogg correctly observe to be the predominant contemporary model, what I call the Foundational Model, with its roots in works of Fritz Perls, Laura Perls, and Paul Goodman.

In this review, I will propose that the meta-theory of the Foundational Model offers a satisfying phenomenological description of their psychodynamic schema therapy. Rather than bridging our modalities, I will suggest that parallel yet different perspectives are reflected in foundational gestalt therapy and schema therapy. Hopefully, Dr. Kellogg will find the theoretical richness of this version of gestalt therapy complementary to the schema therapy approach.

In developing this, I will first describe my version of the Foundational Model. I offer this dense overview of a complex theory as the frame for my discussion of schema therapy. I will then discuss some aspects of schema therapy from this perspective. My understanding of the Foundational Model owes much to many contemporary writers. My simplification of it for this review necessarily neglects the many differences we colleagues continue to address. My brevity will fail to do justice to the model’s complexities. I fear this is inevitable. However, I hope it will be sufficiently inviting to encourage readers to study more deeply those ideas briefly mentioned.

Foundational Gestalt Therapy’s Meta-Theory:
The foundational gestalt therapy model was first articulated through the writings and practices of Fritz Perls, Laura Perls, and Paul Goodman some 60 years ago. It established its own stream of development through the further teachings of Paul Weisz, Isadore From, Richard Kitzler, and their many students who internationally continue to refine this model, providing a meta-theory of gestalt therapy that informs its continuing practice. This Foundational Model, however, is rarely drawn upon by practitioners of other modalities when they claim to integrate gestalt therapy into their work by using so-called expressive gestalt techniques. For decades, serious attention to this model languished while the so-called 1969 Perls model became increasingly popular. The familiar hallmarks of gestalt therapy, imagery, chair work, and role playing (the heritage from Fritz Perls’ background with Max Reinhardt’s theatre company and Jacob Moreno’s psycho-drama ),were often absorbed by other modalities searching for expressive techniques.

contact sequence and process:
Central to foundational gestalt therapy is the notion that experience advances through a sequence of figures and grounds in the organism/environment field. Self emerges from this meeting of organism and environment in a system of contacts as the agent of growth.  The meeting of organism and environment is called the contact-boundary. This sequence of figures and grounds is referred to as the contact sequence. If there is any single concept that holds this model together, it is contact itself as a phenomenon co-created at this contact-boundary. Contacting is the basic unit of experience. Contact is an indivisible whole, uniting the traditional categories of body, mind, and external world, into wholes of sensation, perception, feeling, cognition, and action. In short, contacting is the entire process of human experiencing.

The contact process is sometimes described as a loose temporal sequence including fore-contacting, contacting, final contact, and post contact, each bearing experienceable attributes.  There is rarely, if ever, a single contact process. This may be impossible. Most typically, many such processes are simultaneously at play in our moment-to-moment experience. Further, the so-called “stages” of this sequence are merely descriptions of our experience of this process, not abstractions; and they are not discrete steps in a normative linear direction. Contacting is a process that integrates organism and environment. It emerges from the social field.

Here gestalt therapy shows its indebtedness to many sources, from the radical empiricism and pragmatism of William James and George Herbert Mead, to the gestalt psychology of Wolfgang Koehler, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Lewin; to the organismic neurology of Kurt Goldstein; and to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and most especially to Maurice Merleau-Ponty whose incarnate self is the crux of phenomenal experience.

This crucial relationship between individual and social dimensions of experience is the relationship of the individual as a figure against the social as ground. Just as “figure” is inseparable from "figure/ground,”  “individual” is inseparable from “individual/social.”   In contemporary parlance, then, gestalt therapy is not a single person psychology, but a two person, absolutely intersubjective, epistemology–if indeed “intersubjective” makes sense in this field-emergent model of experience. Recent neurological discoveries of mirror neurons, which apparently stamp empathy onto our neurology, support the fact that humans are biologically determined to be of a social field. “Intrapsychic” has no application in field phenomenology, since self is a social event, inclusive of individual and social elements.

creative-adjusting, being-in-contact, contact-making:
Contacting is also understood to be how the human organism creatively adjusts in the phenomenal world: to find, invent, and create meaning in the face of existential certainties. Contact usefully is understood to include “contacting making,” an out-going deliberateness of experience, and “being in contact,” the aware support or background from which contacting may emerge. Support, then, is a necessary, implicit dimension of experience; it is both the somatic ground for experience, and the social fiber of what some call the intersubjective matrix.

self as structure and function:
There are further aspects of the foundational model relevant to my discussion of schema therapy.  Self emerges as an on-going process and function of the organism/environment field. It is a process, and like each and every noun used in gestalt therapy terminology, “self” does not refer to a “thing” but to aspects of process. Self function emerges by field circumstances or contingencies. This self process in the contact sequence is understood by many of us to include dimensions referred to as id functioning, ego functioning, and personality functioning.

Very briefly, id functioning is the embodied felt sense of the situation–needs, urges, appetites, sensation–which organize as motivations for a person’s knowing, choosing, acting: the ego functioning. Personality functioning is that self function that provides continuity of personal history–memory of previous contactings. To the extent that past experiences continue to contribute to present functioning, and of course this is central to most etiologies of psychopathology, they are the domain of personality functioning. What other modalities describe as “character” may be described using these experiential self functions. 

These, then, are three aspects of the indivisible experience of contacting and are useful ways of describing the phenomena of moment to moment experiencing. These functions are not independent structural entities, but are interpenetrating dimensions of experience. They bear direct relevance to schema therapy, as I hope to describe below.

process psychopathology:
In foundational gestalt therapy, psychopathology is identified by inflexibility or rigidity of contacting. The method of gestalt therapy treatment is akin to that of phenomenological psychotherapy with the use of epoché, description, and horizontalization. (Spinelli, ). But the Foundation Model adds to this method its idea that the fluid and harmonious contact process is experienced as static, lifeless, and deadened when previous creative adjustments remain as incomplete tensions in the background which restrict the ability of new figures to emerge satisfactorily.  These are not unconscious processes, as in psychoanalytic theory, but non-conscious background events, potentially available for direct experience in a successful gestalt therapy.

When these non-conscious processes influence contacting, they are referred to in the gestalt therapy literature as contact interruptions or contact disturbances, directly experienceable and observable phenomena. Contact is evaluated in such a manner through use of the aesthetic criterion of contacting–the sensed attributes of the emerging figure.

For example, unfinished historical traumas persist in the non-conscious background of individual experience and are reflected in rigid personality functioning, id function disturbance, and impact on ego functioning as a sense of diminished possibilities, distorted perceptions, and maladaptive decisions. These losses of ego functioning are referred to as confluence, introjection, retroflection, deflection, and egotism.  They are sensed qualities of the figure forming with such disturbances. More thorough description of these phenomena is outside the scope of this review.

The gestalt therapist works by attending to the emerging figure of contact and directly noticing contact interruptions or disturbances as opportunities for psychotherapeutic interventions. The achievement of fluid gestalts is the goal of gestalt therapy. The techniques of the 1969 model are relevant to the method only insofar as they serve to facilitate contacting.

I will now turn directly to my consideration of schema therapy from the perspective sketched above.

Foundational Gestalt Therapy and Schema Therapy:
schemas and gestalts:
Dr. Kellogg remark that my colleague, Iris Fodor “has sought to make a connection between Gestalt therapy and the constructivist aspects of cognitive therapy. A central aspect of this work is the argument that gestalts are schemas. This is an important bridge concept...”  Yet, I am not so sure.

“Gestalt” originally was used in gestalt psychology to identify forms of perception. A “gestalt” is the German word for “form.” “Schemas,” writes Kellogg, “are interpretive structures that provide the individual with an understanding of the nature of the world and the nature of the self." There are immediate difficulties with transposing schemas from their cognitive epistemology into the phenomenological epistemology of gestalt therapy. While experience may be understood in terms of schemas and modes, a gestalt is what is experienced: it is the form of experience, as independent of interpretation as is phenomenologically possible.

“Schemas,” according to Kellogg, are ideas, or cognitive structures that become fixed patterns which impact the affective life of the person. They are “interpretive structures that provide the individual with an understanding of the nature of the world and the nature of the self.”  This reads very much like personality functioning in the foundational gestalt therapy model. Kellogg claims that schemas may lead to rigid functioning for which the authors prescribe schema focused therapies; or schemas may lead to the labile affectivity characteristic of borderline or other so-called primitive character structures, for which the authors prescribe schema mode therapy. 

Schemas are implicated in the whole functioning of the patient, yet are described as independent interpretive structures.  “Modes” the authors continue, “can be distinguished from the schemas in that they are manifestations of the mood or state that an individual is in any given time.” Modes are fluid, schemas more stable. “Modes that are particularly problematic may be accompanied by high levels of emotion and rigidity."

While the author writes persuasively about the role of schemas and modes in a variety of pathologies, they write of them as things or entities. Yet, nothing within the universe of gestalt therapy’s phenomenology can be considered in such a way. Gestalt therapy is a  psychotherapy of process. A “gestalt” is a transient form within the stream of experience.  A schema may be an interpretive structure, but a gestalt is a whole of experience. A schema may be an organization of fixed ideas or cognitions, a mode may be mood or affect state, but a gestalt is a unity of sensing, perceiving, feeling, thinking, and acting. Even a fixed gestalt is experienced this way, with the most fixed gestalt being experienced with the most diminished sense of this wholeness.  A gestalt is a larger, more embracing, form of experience than either schema or mode. These differences make the transposition of “schema” or “mode” to “gestalt” impossible.

If schemas, then, are limited to interpretive structures of cognition, of course the authors must seek a method for mobilizing those aspects of the person outside the schema box, as it were. The expressive techniques of the so-called 1969 gestalt model are tailor made for that task, and the authors show a mastery of them.  To look at the radical restructuring of psychotherapy across all its modalities from the 1950’s through the 1980’s, is to find many a frustrated clinician turning away from a conversational model and to include some techniques of expressivist dialog. But that does not mean that gestalt therapy was integrated into any of these modalities.

the question of introjection:
An important aspect of the schema therapy model is its use of specific interpretive labels in the therapy process itself.  It is unclear whether the author is simply using metaphors with these labels or if he is identifying and naming actual mental structures. His labels are colorful. In their conceptualization of Borderline Personality Disorder, for example, he identifies five basic modes, from the Abused/Abandoned Child to the Healthy Adult. These labels are used in the work. Patients are encouraged to use these labels. Schema therapy is therefore inherently an introjective process wherein the patient adopts the clinical scheme and language of the therapist. These interpretive schemes become the therapy narrative.

To some extent, introjection is inevitable in all psychotherapy; it is an aspect of learning. However, gtestalt therapy, foundational gestalt therapy, recognizes introjection as a temporary phase of the therapy. Gestalt therapy’s therapeutic stance attempts to prevent or minimize introjections. The therapy includes challenging these introjections, which is referred to as “de-structuring.”  Nothing in Scott Kellogg’s work, though, suggests that this is of concern to him.

So long as the therapist’s scheme is offered to be introjected by the patient as the core of the work, and not seen as something which must be dissolved as the therapy proceeds, schema therapy violates one of the essential aspects of gestalt therapy. This is not a trifle. The 1969 gestalt therapy style that has received so much contemporary criticism as being introjective, as artificially stressing an exaggerated individualism, has been replaced by relational or dialogic gestalt therapy. The latter, which I believe is intrinsic to foundational gestalt therapy theory, stresses the I-Thou dimensions of contacting. The power imbalance in which the patient is taught the therapist’s scheme–and some of Kellogg’s approach suggests this method–is inimical to gestalt therapy.

schema therapy and foundational gestalt therapy:
Here is Kellogg: “Mode therapy involves listening to patients speak about their lives and experiences and watching their emotions, energy, language, and position shift. This is probably closely related to the Gestalt approach of listening for what is figure for a patient. In the schema model, the shifts” are given names. This sounds like the gestalt approach, to a point. But in Gestalt therapy, names would not necessarily be given to the emerging figure; that might interrupt the process. Rather, the therapy would support focused attending to the figure, staying with what emerges in sensation, motion, and perception: by posture, attitude, word choice and rhythm, that is, the panoply of experience.  This means that the therapist is not merely listening and watching the patient, but likewise attends to his/her own experience as listener-observer and is able to use this experience as it informs about the developing therapist/patient field. This is essential: the therapy is not something done to the patient by the therapist, but is a function of the therapist/patient field. The therapist is the expert. But the work emerges out of the therapist/patient field.

Moments during which the flow seems to shift, whether, for example, by a tonally flat language or through a felt somatic impulse, are noticed as opportunities for further attention. These instances might be disturbances of contact; times when self functioning directly reflects fixed gestalts. And these provide directly experienced or observed phenomenal facts on which the psychotherapeutic interventions may be grounded.

Gestalt therapy is, then, a dialogic encounter; whenever psychotherapeutic interventions are deployed, they are deployed in this context where presence, genuineness, and inclusion guide the meeting. And these interventions themselves emerge from the qualities of the emerging figure, and, in gestalt therapy’s best practice, not from the theory-based presuppositions of the therapist.

schemas as intrapsychic and psychodynamic constructs:
In gestalt therapy self functioning, we might refer to what Kellogg calls schemas in a more expansive way, as fixities within self functioning–rigid personality functioning, disturbances of id functioning, and losses of ego functioning.  The figures of such self functioning would have the characteristics Kellogg describes as maladaptive schemas–an excessively rigid maladaptation with a likelihood of unstable moods. As personality functioning, schemas might be the story one tells to oneself about oneself, including the memory of traumatic events; seen from the perspective of id functioning, schemas might be directly experienced as the felt sense of oneself, urges, needs, appetites. And these schemas might appear as ego functioning in the kind of choices a person makes, the manner of identification and action in the world. In the meta-theory of self, a disturbance in any of its functions would affect the other functions. Schemas, as described by the authors, are wholly within the person’s psyche, internal, intrapsychic psychodynamic mechanisms.

Self functioning in gestalt therapy is a field event, a product of organism/environment meeting and as such, at the contact-boundary, and not “within” a psychodynamic mechanism.  My description of what might be called “schema equivalents” in foundational gestalt therapy is, I believe,  a more complete description of experience than the description of schemas in Kellogg’s model. I suggest that it widens the idea of schema by referring it to all the experienceable aspects of human functioning, and includes the social field. It takes a psychodynamic notion and translates it into a phenomenological-experiential description. It makes it directly experienceable within the therapist/patient field.

three phases of schema mode therapy;
Kellogg proposes that the work in schema mode therapy proceeds in three stages, and I will focus on this to suggest how this aspect of his work may also be described using foundational gestalt therapy.  To recast their entire model in the meta-theory of Foundational Model is a task too large for this venture.

First Phase

“The first phase of treatment is one in which the goal is the development of an affirming relationship with the patient.” This, of course, is the necessary initial step in any psychotherapy process. From a foundational gestalt therapy perspective, this could be called establishing the therapist/patient relationship as one in which the relationship provides sufficient contact as support for making contact in the progression of the work. The emphasis on support within the contact process comes from the teaching of Laura Perls, who took great pains to distinguish her attention to the therapy relationship from the style of her husband, Fritz, who often made brilliant interventions yet neglected to sustain them within a developing relationship.

Here is how Kellogg describes this first phase: “The aim is to be able to create experiences in which the [patient] and the psychotherapist are in contact.” Further, “the development of a bond is important because it will help both parties to withstand the stresses that are likely to come.” Or, from my perspective: the therapist/patient relationship is the support for the risk-taking, contact-making, that lies ahead in the progressing self of the therapy. Note that when restated in a foundational gestalt therapy manner, therapist and patient are expressed as two aspects of a whole developing social field:  contacting is of the field.

Second Phase

“The second phase of treatment is that of schema mode change” in which “[o]ne critical aim is to maintain contact with the Abused/Abandoned Child.” In this phase, various schemas emerge and the challenge is for the therapy to remain contactful. Again, Kellogg gives names to the successively emerging gestalts: Angry Child, Detached Protector, Punitive Parent, and Inner Critic.  Each one of these is part of a fixed gestalt. Each one of these is part of the emerging self function. To the extent each has a fixed sensed and felt affectivity, each may be seen as id function disturbance. Where each contains remembered history or fixed narrative about the person, each reflects rigid personality functioning. And to the extent that each of these fixed gestalts contain maladaptive behaviors, each reflects losses of ego functioning. Overall, these reflect disruptions in the person’s field, of course from the past, but significantly in the present moment as experienced and observed by the person and the therapist.

It is in this phase that Kellogg turns most fully to expressive “techniques.” For example, “The therapist will ask the patient to verbalize what the oppressive voice [for example, Inner Critic] is saying and will then attack it.” This technique is grounded in the foundational idea that the fixed gestalt in question represents a frozen social structure, out of consciousness, yet persisting and which is experienced through harsh self-judgment. This can be understood with reference to the experienced dimensions of self functioning.  This rigid personality functioning is likely the maladaptive narrative involving an introjected parental authority continuing, repeating, the original events from which the “Inner Critic” was formed. Under such a narrative, the person’s relationship to urges, appetite, and sensations are disturbed; this is disturbance of id functioning. And this all leads to ego functioning interruptions, such as projecting such critical judgment on others, or clamping down on the person’s free initiative through retroflecting. 

This is all directly experienced by the person.  The self functions are experiential functions and have no independent existence. The language of foundational gestalt therapy is descriptive of actual process, and is useful to facilitate contacting. The technique to verbalize the oppressive voice in the context of a contactful therapy relationship, is the means to mobilize this person’s initiative, and to clarify the complex social world that inhabits a self so disturbed by fixed gestalts.  This technique mobilizes contacting: what has been non-conscious emerges in the spontaneous sequence of contacting. Childhood memories may become directly experienced as inhibitions relax. The maladaptive fixed-gestalt that was a creative-adjusting to traumatic situations dissolves in this contacting as the person experiences the “old” pain that now can be integrated in the emerging self.

Here is how Kellogg describes his dialog technique: “To start, the voice [Punitive Parent or Inner Critic] is turned into a mode and is given a name that is meaningful by the patient... The therapist will then ask the patient to verbalize what the oppressive voice is saying and will then attack it. In many respects, the therapist will be the voice for the Angry Child. The needs that were not met and the tight to have them met will be affirmed.” This dialogic technique is founded on self as containing the social world of the person. The fixed gestalt is named because it already has someone’s name, the name of one of the participants in the social world of the patient who may not perhaps fully be in the immediate awareness of the patient. By naming the punitive voice, the patient has begun contacting this fixed gestalt.

When Kellogg suggests that the therapist join the experiment by attacking the named voice, I become cautious. Unless there is a basis for this within the session itself, this intervention could interrupt whatever is emerging in contact. It could be a disconnected or irrelevant intervention by therapist-as-authority who is following the imperatives of his/her modality, and not then received as support for further contacting by the patient; it would be just another version of introjective authority, though presumably helpful. But if this intervention is grounded in the therapist’s felt sense of what is emerging; if the therapist has an experienced sense that he/she is temporarily voicing that which is actually emerging from the patient, then the therapist will be grounded in the intersubjective dimension of contacting; and such an intervention would be experienced as support for the patient’s further contacting.

Dialog and chair work, the most basic of expressive techniques, can be understood as ways in which the dimensions of self may be contacted. Since personality functioning is the self dimension that reflects the social history of the person, for good or ill, by explicitly personifying some of these memories through dialog is a way further to explore them, and to push the limits of what is consciously available memory into the areas that may be non-conscious yet still background to experience. When a person visualizes “someone” in an empty chair, the “someone” who is now in the empty chair had already been an aspect of the person’s self function. In this expressive technique, the person is directly stating the social field and is seeking to more sharply contact it. Any psychotherapy can use this technique. But when its use is based on a meta-theory of field emergent self and contacting, it is gestalt therapy. When Kellogg uses this technique, he does not relate it to such a theory.

Third Phase

The third, final stage of schema mode therapy is called “autonomy…. [where] the focus moves from the inner world to the external, interpersonal world.” Roughly this echoes the 1969 gestalt therapy model’s definition of health as the movement from environmental support to self support. But from the point of view of the foundational model, this phase, autonomy, is yet another dimension of self functioning–always “interpersonal” since self is a social field event. Kellogg indicates that in this phase, the work is principally concerned with interpersonal relationships and identity development. “The goal is for there to be balance and reciprocity” in interpersonal relationships. “Situations where the patient is receiving excessive amounts of disrespect or is rageful and demanding are problematic and will need to be addressed. Developing an assertive, strong, but respectful voice will be best.” It is not at all clear how and by whom this ideal of interpersonal behavior will be assessed. If the therapist alone is the arbiter, such authority exercise would be impossible in gestalt therapy. It would violate the dialogic and field emergent values of self.

The therapeutic goals of this third stage may be stated in a gestalt manner: self functioning now proceeds through contact sequences where needs, appetites, and urges emerge and develop into figures of interest which motivate a person to contact what is novel and necessary for the continuing flow of living. Vivid, bright, clear figures emerge; the person moves on. Self functioning is dialogic; a person’s interests include the interests of other persons as the social field continues to unfold.

The final paragraph of the 1951 founding text, Gestalt Therapy, states this admirably: “In its trials and conflicts the self is coming to be in a way that did not exist before. In contactful experience the ‘I’, alienating its safe structures, risks this leap and identifies with the growing self, gives it its services and knowledge, and at the moment of achievement stands out of the way.”

Technique or Experiment?
I have been referring to these interventions as “techniques” in the same manner as Kellogg. He uses no other way to describe these interventions that he believes create a bridge to Gestalt therapy. I have discussed these “techniques” from the standpoint of foundational gestalt therapy and have alluded to a point I will now make more emphatically.

For interventions to be called “techniques” is to make them part of a model with a prescribed recipe to follow which achieves generally expected results. The schema mode treatment method seems sometimes to be a psychotherapy recipe, with the ingredients pre-labeled, the steps more or less laid out, the techniques deployed toward a fixed strategy. I suspect the approach will appear in well thought-out manuals and workbooks. At one point in his discussion, Kellogg indicates “so far there are 18 identified schemas." They sound like naturalists reporting on new species.

Yet what may be called “techniques” may better be called “experiments.” An experiment does not predict an outcome, but seeks to discover. This is the gestalt therapy method. An experiment arises out of felt and observed data from the therapist/patient relationship. This is the gestalt therapy method. Based on this direct experiment, the therapist may propose that the patient put “someone” in an empty chair and enter a dialog. Every gestalt intervention comes from an assumption of self functioning and some direct observation of self inhibition, or disturbance. A dialog is powerful because in disturbed self functioning the person disowns self-parts without awareness. “Chair work” is powerful because an inhibited self with limitations in contact-making often is perpetuating unfinished non-conscious social trauma and the chair experiment seeks to discover if the parties to this old story are alive in the present. The experimental method is a commitment to discovering and inventing attributes of ego functioning, and that is what is intrinsic to the process of contacting. Contacting is not a step on the way to a therapeutic outcome, but itself is the “curative” moment.

Speaking in 1977 before the European Association for Transactional Analysis, Laura Perls said, “[The] workshop approach has become widely accepted as the essence of gestalt therapy…Thus, gestalt therapy is reduced to a purely technical modality which, because of its obvious limitations, then is combined with any other technical modality that happens to be available in the psychotherapeutic armamentarium. So we get sensitivity training and gestalt therapy, body awareness and gestalt therapy….ad infinitum. All these combinations show that the basic concepts of Gestalt therapy are either misunderstood or simply not known. Gestalt therapy is neither a particular technique nor a collection of specific techniques . . . Gestalt therapy is an existential-phenomenological approach and as such it is experiential and experimental.[emphasis added)”

Conclusion:
I hope I have been amply clear how much I appreciate Scott Kellogg’s interesting work, and how I welcome him as a fellow clinician addressing complicated issues of treatment and practice. Yet, however effective schema therapy may be, by neglecting to cast his work within a satisfactory meta-theory, he does not offer a way to understand his work more deeply. He leaves us to imagine his work is effective in much the same way any psychodynamic work is effective. And he makes his powerful work appear to be a well-considered technique-driven recipe for psychotherapy. It is easy to see it effectively deployed in many different clinical settings.

That he wishes to build a bridge from his intrapsychic psychodynamic method to gestalt therapy’s experiential, field, and phenomenological model is a welcome construction project. The ideas he suggests from his effective treatment can easily be implemented within a gestalt therapy. We gestalt therapists can certainly add his suggestions to our treatment method. Yet, for Scott Kellogg to be able truly to forge a link to the gestalt therapy world, he needs to re-examine the meta-theoretical assumptions of schema therapy. One does not become a citizen of France by speaking French. The use of gestalt “techniques” does not a gestalt therapist make.  Perhaps some of the ideas of foundational gestalt therapy briefly indicated here might be sufficiently inviting to him to make this process possible.