A Background to "The Field"

Jean-Marie Robine, Ph.D.
(Translated from the French by Karen Vincent Jones)

Jean-Marie Robine is a Gestalt therapist and trainer and the founder of the Institut Français de Gestalt-thérapie (the French Institute of Gestalt Therapy). He is the author of six books on gestalt therapy that have been translated into several languages. Unfolding Self (Gestalt Press, to appear) and On the Occasion of an Other (Gestalt Journal Press, in print) will soon be available in English.

Editorial | Gaffney | Kim | Robine | Greenberg | Philippson | Articles of Interest

Gestalt!
Volume 11; Number 1
Winter, 2011
Published by
The Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy

Edited by

Charles Bowman, MS

Dan Bloom, J.D.; LCSW

Philip Brownell, M.Div.; Psy.D.

Dan Bloom, JD, LCSW
(212) 674-0404, www.djbloom.com

Training and Supervision in Contemporary
Gestalt Therapy

NYC and Internationally on Skype

Training and supervision in New York City and internationally on Skype:

• Bi-weekly series: 1 ½ -hour workshop/seminars reviewing basic gestalt therapy theory and practice with a focus on the original 1951 model in Gestalt Therapy, by Perls, Hefferline and Goodman.

• Bi-weekly series: 1 ½ -hour workshop/seminars in the development of contemporary gestalt therapy. This workshop considers gestalt therapy’s relationships to phenomenology, existential psychotherapy, developmental psychology, contemporary psychoanalysis, and cognitive neuroscience.

• Monthly 6-hour NYC workshops: These workshops include the above topics in an expanded intensive format. This format allows attention to group development.

• “Learning Gestalt Therapy ‘By the Book’ ”: Monthly international Skype group that closely reads PHG as it was originally taught at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy.

• Supervision in individual, couples, or group psychotherapy.

These are experiential and didactic workshops and seminars. Also, they will offer opportunities to discuss actual clinical cases from participants’ practices.

More complete detail is on my website, www.djbloom.com.
Contact me by email, dan@danbloomnyc.com,
or phone (212) 674-0404.

Gestalt Therapy: Advances in Theory and Practice (Advancing Theory in Therapy) Edited by Talia Levine Bar-Yoseph (New York, NY: Routledge)
Gestalt Therapy: Advances in Theory and Practice is a collaboration of some of the best thinkers in the Gestalt therapy approach. It offers a summary of recent advances in theory and practice, and novel ideas for future development. Each chapter focuses on a different element of the Gestalt approach and, with contributors from around the world, each offers a different perspective of its ongoing evolution in relation to politics, religion and philosophy.

Talia Levine Bar-Yoseph B.A., M.A. (Hons.), D. Psych. is a co-founder of the Jerusalem Gestalt Institute; past-head of the M.Sc. programme in Gestalt psychotherapy at Metanoia Institute, London; registered clinical psychologist since 1981. Talia is a business consultant in Israel, Europe, USA and Asia and an international trainer. She has published numerous journal essays and is a member of the IPA (Israeli Psychological Association).

Abstract

When Perls and Goodman refer to ‘the field’ they make it clear that they are referring to the organism/environment field. In doing so, they take for granted what is implied but not adequately spelled out in this expression. What I intend to do here is to unpack it, without attempting to elaborate it or develop it in new directions. Every field is the “field of...” Here, of a given organism and its environment. “THE field”, as such, is merely an operational concept because the field has to be defined in relation to somebody or something. The field always has an organising principle: the visual field of the eye, the field of consciousness of a mind, the psychological field, a domain organised by the discipline of psychology, the battlefield of a particular war, and so on...

When Perls and Goodman refer to ‘the field’ they make it clear that they are referring to the organism/environment field. In doing so, they take for granted what is implied but not adequately spelled out in this expression. What I intend to do here is to unpack it, without attempting to elaborate it or develop it in new directions.

Every field is the “field of...” Here, of a given organism and its environment. “THE field”, as such, is merely an operational concept because the field has to be defined in relation to somebody or something. The field always has an organising principle: the visual field of the eye, the field of consciousness of a mind, the psychological field, a domain organised by the discipline of psychology, the battlefield of a particular war, and so on.

The use of the term “organism” rather than “person” or “subject” implies that this field is defined by the body within it. No environment has meaning except through the body, in the flesh, via continual contact.
The “organism/environment field” is not the same as the “self/world field”, that is, this expression does not imply exclusive reference to the self. Hence it is possible to speak of the field of a particular person or client (organism) and his or her environment. Here we are faced an apparent paradox which is, in fact, merely one aspect of the complexity of the Human Sciences: as Edgar Morin (Morin, 1986) put it, we are part of but not part of. As he pointed out, in order to be able to see ourselves as part of nature, we have to “withdraw from it” (p, 194). We have to be actor AND observer. I may be able to conceive of the other as an organism with an environment, but I experience him or her only as environment, part of my own environment. The constructivist approach has to be linked to the objectivist approach in a dialectical to-and-fro tension, rather than merged together in some impossible synthesis.

Using the term “organism/environment field” emphasises that there is a link between the organism and its environment, expressed by the diagonal slash. The location of this experience between the two poles of the field is called the “contact boundary” since it is the site of the movements of differentiation and integration that animate the field, and simultaneously unify it as a totality and limit it by delineating its borders. It is these operations that Gestalt therapy refers to as “contact”, which is a concept fundamental to the Gestalt approach.

Field or field of…

We have Gestalt psychologists such as Köhler, Koffka and Wertheimer to thank for introducing the concept of field into the Human Sciences in general, and psychology in particular. They borrowed it from physics in order to emphasise that percepts (perceptual entities) can only be understood with reference to a larger perceptual field. Each percept is meaningless except in relation to others, and the perceptual field has to be seen as a whole.

It later fell to Lewin (Marrow, 1977), a colleague of theirs at the Institute of Psychology, to expand this concept in the area of social psychology. He defined the field as “a totality of coexisting facts seen as mutually dependant” (Lewin, 1951, p. 206). One of the consequences he drew from this, the source of much debate at the time, was his assertion that behaviour can be defined as a function of both the personality and the environment, and even that the environment is a function of the personality and the personality is a function of the environment. These assertions are almost axiomatic for the modern Gestalt therapist.

Lewin describes the field in terms of a number of principles. Malcolm Parlett (1991) has elaborated five of the essential principles that I should like reader to review with some care. I shall therefore only outline some additional considerations here.

For Lewin, the concept of field means a “life space” as lived phenomenologically by a given subject. He sees this life space, with all the ambiguities associated with the idea of space, as an affective space; hence, anything occurring within this life space is immediately perceived as desirable or not. The field is constructed by the valences of beings and objects: valence is a force which attracts or repels. But Lewin located valence “inside the head” (Lewin, 1951) of the particular subject rather than within the environment as such or in the interaction between organism and environment. Hence it would not be a particular person who was desirable or who had a certain valence, but the desire, sexual for example, of a subject for that person. Here we can see once again the opposition between the “id” conceptualised in Freudian terms as a drive, and Goodman’s concept which relocates it as the “id of the situation”. This is why I draw on the work of Gibson (1977), who built on Lewin’s ideas, in developing the concept of the “id of the situation” (Robine, 2004). Gibson refined the concept of valence by adding the notion of affordance, that is, the desirability, accessibility, availability, and usability of elements of the environment (Gibson, 1977, pp. 67-82).

For Lewin, the human or animal organism enjoys freedom of movement within its field. Here we see again the ambiguity mentioned above which leads inexorably to the conflation and confusion of two types of space, phenomenological life space and physical space. But, as a number of commentators have pointed out, it is life itself, and not Lewin, which frequently superimposes our experience of space on our experience of the field.

As the field is composed of an organism (in perpetual movement) and an environment (also perceived dynamically), it is animated in a constantly changing process. This change owes as much to the movements imprinted on it by the organism as to variations within the environment and the changing nature of situations. Thus behaviour should be seen similarly not as a direct result of the past but as the outcome of the totality of the current situation (the principle of contemporaneity; i.e., simultaneous occurrence).

The field is made up of everything which is relevant to a subject at a specific time. That is, what is relevant in the field is that which has consequences (Lewin, 1935). But since Lewin was well aware that subjects do not always have knowledge of all possible factors which might be relevant and affect their experience, he was forced to acknowledge that the field (which he believed to be subjective and “in the head” of the particular subject) might involve elements completely outside of the person’s psyche. I can illustrate this by taking the example of asbestos whose effects within the “life space” of numerous people were completely unknown and imperceptible for a long time. Nevertheless, asbestos formed part of their field. Some argue that the same holds true of the radio waves and microwaves which constantly pass through us due to the proliferation of emitters and receivers around us. Is a particular subject’s field limited to his or her field of awareness or can it be extended to the experiential field, if we posit that, like the Moebius strip which has only one side and one boundary component, there is no separation between conscious and non-conscious experience?

What I have gleaned from this brief survey of Lewin’s approach to the field is that the field is always the field of someone or something. But saying that the field is someone’s field is not to claim that a person’s field means the field of consciousness. Just as a specialist may detect asbestos in the life space of someone who is not aware of it, an “educated arbitrator” may note elements or factors in a given person’s field which may affect their behaviour even though they are unaware of them.
I also note that some of Lewin’s formulations (field = space, for example) may encourage readers to think of the field as an entity capable of existing independently of the individual. Here my reading of Lewin differs slightly from that suggested by Frank Staemmler in “A Babylonian Confusion?” (Staemmler, 2006), and rather more from that of Gilles Delisle who writes about “introjected micro-fields” and thus transforms the field into a consumable object (Delisle, 1998, p. 99). The field has to be thought of as an experience. One cannot introject an experience since introjection itself is a form of experience.
Finally, if the field always has to be seen as “the field of” someone, it becomes unthinkable to maintain that one person may have a field in common with someone else. There may be common elements, for example in the visual field or the field of consciousness, but if we accept the definition of the field proposed by Gestalt psychologists cited above (that percepts have meaning only in relation to others and the perceptual field should be seen as a whole) or by Lewin or Gestalt therapists, these so-called common elements extracted from a unified and unifying whole are not enough to constitute a bi-personal field unless we move from a psychological to a sociological definition of the field.

Organism

The use of the term ‘organism’ may seem slightly disconcerting. However, we should remember that it was dear to Goldstein (Goldstein, 1999/1939; Hall and Lindsey, 1957), who was heavily influenced by Gestalt psychology well before Lewin, and to whom Perls acted as assistant for some time. We might be tempted to replace it by other, more familiar, concepts such as subject, person, agent, or individual. However, I can see how Goldstein’s use of this concept is linked to his desire to break with a purely mentalist conception of the field (Lewin’s “in the head” perhaps) and adopt an embodied position. Lewin, as we have seen, was already speaking of affect. Is it possible to think of affect without the body? He also wrote of the space within which the human or animal moves about. How can we conceive of motor functions without a body? The structuring of the field, also called the construction of the figure/ground relation, always has an element of movement, even if only directing one’s gaze or lending one’s ear.

We find the same concern in Merleau-Ponty who, through his concept of “flesh” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 54), stresses the body’s relationship with the world, particularly through perception and motor functions, which is what produces meaning.

The body is at the centre of all experience, it is the alpha and the omega, the irreducible dimension and essential component of the field which it forms with the environment. Replacing the concept of body with the broader concept of subject or person restricts the meaning of the expression. Similarly, replacing the concept of ‘environment’ by the narrower one of ‘the other’, even if the other is the most interesting figure in our lived environment, introduces a bias which gets in the way of a true understanding of the principle.
An idea which Gestalt therapists have begun to use ever since the concept of the “id of the situation” (Perls, Hefferline & Goodman, 1994/1951, p. 182) saw daylight, and which in my view rests on a misunderstanding, is that the id of the situation is a joint or common id not attributable to either party. It is true that there is a lack of differentiation in the id of the situation, but a lack of differentiation is not at all the same as communality since there is no such thing as a common field. The concept of the “id of the situation” as I understand it – although it marks such a rupture with our cultural paradigms that it is easy to see how misapprehensions arise – sees the origin of meanings, drives, appetites and meanings within the situation here-and-now and not in “the deepest recesses of the human being” where Groddeck and Freud located it with their hypothesis of a “reservoir of drives” (Groddeck, 1979/1923; Freud, 1960/1923). This delocalisation goes hand in hand with the principle of contemporaneity discussed above. But these desires, drives and appetites can only exist – etymologically, ex-sistere, be outside- to the extent that they are felt within the body in the form of sensations which will become orientations of meaning.

Another equally common error is to confuse the body, or even emotion, with the id. The body, and more particularly the desiring body, is certainly the foundation of all experience in any gestalt construction. But, adopting the expression Freud used when speaking of dreams, the “royal road” to the unconscious, I would say that the body is the “royal road” to the id. The road which leads to Rome is not Rome itself, the road leading to the id is not the id itself, and in any case the id will always escape because it can only ever be found in one of the forms constructed for it, particularly the personality-function of the self, and in contact with the environment.

Although this may seem paradoxical, locating our therapeutic practice within a field perspective makes us pay closer attention to the body, particularly to sensations (proprioceptions), perceptions and motor activities. Here again, taking into account the somatic (bodily) dimensions of experience goes hand in hand with the principle of contemporaneity, that is, seeing bodily experience as both shaped by and shaping the situation.

In this respect, we can better understand Gestalt therapists’ attention to what is felt from moment to moment. Bodily sensation is in fact the starting point for lived experience (even if it originates within the situation) and it takes form within and through contact, that is, emotion, sentiment, thought, image, gesture, action, representation, fantasy, creation and so forth. I should like to adopt Malraux’s (1949) term “coherent deformation” which, as taken up by Merleau-Ponty (1964), becomes: “There is signification when we submit the data of the world to a ‘coherent deformation’” (p. 54).

If we accept Lewin’s hypothesis that the field is a constantly changing process then whatever is felt must be constantly changing too. However, fixations, systems of habits, and the fixed representations the subject may have of him or herself will considerably reduce the possible meanings that can be given to sensation. That is why focusing on what is felt, stripped of the form and meaning imposed on it by the personality function (insofar far as this is possible), reopens the field of what is possible and the possibility of encountering the novelty that transforms.

This transformation is also what Perls and Goodman called the transition from the physiological to the psychological. When certain Gestalt therapists describe what they sometimes refer to as the “contact cycle” – and which I prefer to call the sequence of gestalt construction-destruction – they frequently use the example of hunger, the feeling of hunger which triggers contacting. That is, the operations needed for satisfying this hunger, leading to final contact and resulting in the organism’s survival. But this brings us close to the behaviourists’ simple description of the reflex arc. What is omitted here is a crucial stage: transformation of hunger into appetite, that is, the move from physiological ground to psychological figure. The notion of appetite brings in the psychological dimension of the organism and enables it to become a totality once more. Hence we are no longer limited to what Goodman refers to as ‘abstractions’ such as the body, the psyche, or the environment, abstracted from their context and which can only exist in the organism-environment totality from which they have been extracted in order to examine them. The same argument could be advanced in relation to the transition from sight to gaze, as Maldiney (1994) has shown.

A self/world field?

Speaking of the “organism/environment field” is not to speak of a “self/world field” but to recognise that no organism can be separated from its context. Henceforth it is crucial to take into account that each and every patient exists in their own life context, a field composed of the patient and their environment. I cannot of course witness this experience, but during our therapeutic encounter I can observe some of the ways in which this experience takes on structure, and I may eventually make inferences about how it is structured outside this situation, through the patient’s accounts and through positing the unified transfer of process.

Our primary interest lies in superimposing the accounts produced by the patient during the session with the immediate experience that emerges in the session. Certainly the patient’s account can be seen as content, but like all content it is organised by a process that the therapist can implicitly treat as a figure (and treating the content as such as background) even if this content will remain the figure as far as the patient is concerned.

The analysis of the processes set in motion in gestalt construction is thus a constant to-and-fro: the analysis of sequences in the here-and-now may throw light on sequences in the there and/or before, just as processes in the past or elsewhere may enable us to understand certain processes co-created by the patient and the therapist during the session. I am tempted here to use the photographic term “depth of field” which refers to the area within which different figures need to be placed in order for the eye to accept it as a clear image. One’s history and aspirations, past and future are enfolded within the thickness of the present moment.

And, as we shall see later, while the greater part of the transformational work of therapy definitely takes place within the here-and-now, it still seems to me particularly clumsy when certain therapists try at all costs to ensure that the patient gives voice almost exclusively to what is lived in the present of the relationship with the therapist. This misunderstanding of a so-called therapeutic approach based on a field perspective also suggests that there is a confusion between work focusing on contact, which is specific to Gestalt therapy and work on the relationship, which does not form the backbone of our approach (unless the two concepts are confused!).

Organism/environment contact

Of course the diagonal slash which links organism and environment is only in rare cases a material entity. Perls and Goodman suggest the skin as an illustration of such an entity, but in most cases this “place” is not physical: we call it the contact boundary. It is a no-man’s-land, and as such, belongs to neither one nor the other, but is part of both at once, the organism and the environment, without either being able to claim proprietal rights. To talk about “my” contact boundary is nonsense because the boundary belongs to nobody. It is possible to talk about “my experience at the contact boundary,” but I fear that the expression is superfluous since all experience is experience at the contact boundary. Husserl taught us that “consciousness” as such does not exist, only the consciousness “of…” Being conscious of something means bringing both that something and my consciousness into existence. Being conscious of my fingers on the keyboard makes the keyboard exist, and at the same time reveals the existence of my fingers, and, furthermore, of my consciousness.

By the same token, when we use the term “contact”, we should systematically add “with” and even “how” we establish this contact. There are many modalities of contact which differ as to what they can create: seeing, hearing, touching, feeling, tasting, remembering, thinking, imagining, writing, speaking, anticipating, and dreaming are all modes of contact, as are planning, introjecting, retroflecting and so on. I like to remind myself regularly of the following observation from the general introduction to Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality: “The individual who looks at a work of modern art may think he is in contact with the painting whereas in fact he is in contact with the art critic of his favourite newspaper” (Perls, F., Hefferline, R.. and Goodman, P., 1994/1951 , p. xxv). This simple formulation contains several of the essential components of the concept of contact: (i) contact as a concept is quite distinct from that of “relationship”, (ii) it emphasises the need to know what is being contacted, and therefore (iii) the modalities will be different. The “contact” with the art critic mentioned here is mediated through thought, or even by a non-conscious reference (hence a non-conscious contact?), whereas “immediate” (unmediated) contact with the painting may be visual and conscious.
Experience might be seen as exclusively intra-psychic or internal, whereas Gestalt therapy delocalises it and places it at the contact boundary. This has important consequences for psychotherapeutic practice. The patient describes her lived experience in terms of guilt, shame, anger, hate, abandonment, rejection, conflict and so on, lived experiences which enable her to characterise her psyche, whereas it is possible to address them directly as contact experiences. The psyche is none other than the sedimented result of previous contacts and the particular form that this sedimentation has given to past contacts. Psychotherapy does not have the direct access to the psyche which might enable it to modify the psyche; it is only the patient who, on the basis of experience lived in contact, is able to assimilate its elements and thereby transform the content and organisation of her psyche.

The epistemology of the field which characterizes our approach is of crucial importance since it the human being in context within an environment, unlike most theories of knowledge which focus on the human being in isolation.

The field of consciousness and the organism/environment field

So can we superimpose these two concepts of field on each other? Our clinical experience has shown that a large part of our therapeutic work lies in enlarging our client’s field of consciousness so as to encompass material which might be implicit, unformulated, hidden, potential, added or created. Let us imagine that in my particular “organism/ environment field” there is no room for the influence of the astrological position of the planets on my daily life, but that my therapist believes in this, and succeeds in convincing me that they do have an impact on experience. As far as I am concerned, the position of the planets was not originally “in my field” but now it is. As far as my therapist is concerned, it did form part of my field – though I was not aware of it – and in fact exercised a considerable influence on my “life space”, as Lewin called it. We could say the same of the electromagnetic waves emitted by mobile phones, radioactivity and other phenomena which are not in my consciousness but which may have an impact on my experience.

In order to dispel this ambiguity, I am tempted to draw on a definition of “phenomenon” which may be derived from the work of Husserl and Heidegger: a phenomenon is something which is often hidden but which can be brought to light through certain operations; more rarely, it is already present (Tatossian, 1979). I would then say that a person’s organism /environment field may be partially concealed, partly undeveloped and so on, and that it may be enriched or enlarged by various means. One of these ways is through therapeutic work. And the other is the occasion of such work.

Conclusions for therapeutic practice: What does it mean to practice
within a field paradigm?

The consequences for therapeutic practice of locating Gestalt therapy within a field paradigm are far-reaching and are largely beyond the scope of this article. If the field is not a fixed entity, it is because it exists only in an ever-changing now, that is, a situation. Gestalt therapy’s rootedness in the now - which differs from the “present moment” espoused by Daniel Stern (Stern, 2004) - means that the practitioner focuses on the situation, on modalities of contacting, on the processes at work, and on the affects mobilised by both parties. This focus also enables us to glimpse the “id of the situation”, that is, the way in which desire emerges within the situation rather than being seen as emanating from some hidden source in the depths of the subject’s being.

The Gestalt therapist also makes use of fiction (the representations addressed to her by the patient) as a way of understanding the present contacting, and uses the contacting in the here-and-now in order to understand the representations the subject constructs of his own history.

The personality-function of the self provides ontological security by ensuring that one contact is linked to the next in a coherent process which rapidly becomes structure.

Psychotherapy thus provides the opportunity to deconstruct this safety in favour of opening up to the unknown of the now, that is, by taking into account parameters of the now which are “perceived but not known”.

References

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