Kurt Goldstein regarded the brain correlates of mental patterns to be system-like and structured, functional wholes of dynamic character. (Goldstein, p.294) He saw human beings as complete organisms functioning in systemic fashion, fields unto themselves which were in turn comprised of fields. When he wrote The Organism, he also believed that there was no way to prove that these brain processes actually had such a structure or that there were any such physical systems at all. He wrote in theoretical metaphor about the world of organisms and their relationships to their environments.

Goldstein upheld a field theoretical approach to the treatment of brain injury, advocating the creative adjustments he saw whole people making in the face of traumatic neurological injury. His work, as most Gestalt therapists realize, significantly influenced the inspirational foundation for what became Gestalt therapy, as developed by Frederick Perls and others.

Thus, there is precedent as well as historical lineage in checking back with neuroscience in order to understand how people experience. When that is done utilizing contemporary research, one discovers that Goldstein has been updated. Now, for instance, we do have physical evidence of neurological systems correlating to experience. People can trace routes in the brain by which phenomenological processes unfold.

One person who has done this to a great extent is Joseph LeDoux, professor at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. LeDoux's research into the brain systems correlating to fear gave new insight into the ways in which anxieties come about and are perpetuated. His point of view on the ways in which field effects influence phenomenological process showed how influences in the field become one's experience. Since then, others have built on his initial discoveries. Greenberg, Rice, and Elliott (1991), for instance, utilized LeDoux's research to conclude that some affective signals need no interpretation of their own and automatically organize experience. Contemporary research of this nature has provided what Goldstein longed for – physical evidence for what was otherwise mere theoretical metaphor.

The Emotional Brain is an easily read overview of Joseph LeDoux's research, and this book is important to Gestalt therapists because the insights of such neuroscience take us out of the realm of speculative philosophizing and ground us more firmly in substantive research.

LeDoux summarized his book nicely in the preface when he admitted it was "...about how the brain detects and responds to emotionally arousing stimuli, how emotional learning occurs and emotional memories are formed, and how our conscious emotional feelings emerge from unconscious processes" (p. 9). He wrote nine balanced chapters that totaled just over three hundred pages, and he inluded extensive notes and bibliography. For most of the book he avoided the jargon that usually characterizes neuropsychological texts, but when it was necessary to be precise, he produced specific terminology. Consequently, this book is not a sophisticated grafting of the psychology of emotion onto brain function; it's a study of brain function that allows one to understand emotion as a neuropsychological process.

The building blocks of emotions are neural systems that mediate behavioral interactions with the environment, particularly those responses that attend to basic matters of survival. In this regard Joseph LeDoux found himself in sympathy with the attribution theories of Richard Lazarus (1991). He also stated that all animals have some version of this survival system in their brains, but feelings occur only in those that also have the capacity for consciousness. (p. 125) He followed William James in holding that emotions begin with unconscious processing of envrionmental stimuli, accompanied by bodily response, and that one's consciousness notices, as it were, what is taking place in the body and organizes the experience into feelings. He provided substantial physiological research to support such theses.

One of the nice by-products of this book is that it summarized the field of emotions theory, describing the various alternatives while citing both well known and lesser theorists.

In reading The Emotional Brain Gestalt practitioners may well feel wooed, inticed to apply LeDoux's insights to Gestalt process. They may even feel challenged. For instance, when referring to his work with Michael Gazzaniga on split brain study, LeDoux stated:

We concluded people normally do all sorts of things for reasons they are not consciously aware of (because the behavior is produced by brain systems that operate unconsciously) and that one of the main jobs of consciousness is to keep our life tied together into a coherent story, a self-concept. It does this by generating explanations of the behavior on the basis of our self-image, memories of the past, expectations of the future, the present social situation, and the physical environment in which the behavior is produced. (LeDoux, p. 33)

This describes the forming of the self at the contact boundary, of the meaning making associated with raw experience, hence one's phenomenology, and it hints at the contact styles people formulate over time. Certainly, it alludes to the organism interacting in its field.

LeDoux's concept of processes operating unconsciously that effect our experience was alluded to early in the book and provided a delicious forcast to what came later. In successive chapters he built a persuasive argument, with evidence from his physiological research, that such unconscious processes not only exist, but also substantially effect phenomenology. What this means is that people encounter what Perls called the objective world, and they have an experience of it. Whatever effects them from this objective world Lewin termed the boundary, and what LeDoux proposed in his book is that much of this effecting may often be unconscious. Thus, while these boundary effects would be part of a person's field, because they have effect, they would not be part of a person's awareness, what many Gestalt practitioners call their experience, or their phenomenology.

LeDoux believes what he does for many reasons, but among them he stated the following (p. 69-70):

Sometimes neurological damage results in the loss of the capacity to appraise the emotional significance of objects, even while maintaining the ability to perceive them.

The emotional meaning of a stimulus can be appraised by the brain, initiating concommitant action, before the perceptual systems have fully organized what those stimuli are.

The physical mechanisms for the registration, storeage, and retrieval of memories of emotions are different from those involved with cognitive memories of the same stimuli.

Emotional appraisals are directly connected with systems involved in the control of emotional responses; once an appraisal is made by the neurological systems that pertain, responses occur automatically. In contrast, systems involved in cognitive processing are not so tightly coupled with response control systems. That is why one experiences less control over one's feelings than over one's thoughts.

There are several places in the The Emotional Brain where LeDoux became more precise, describing various connections between brain structures and their corresponding functions. One fascinating illustration is when he dealt with the Cannon-Bard theory of the emotional brain, stating, "And since the fibers descending to the bodily response systems and the fibers ascending to the cortex are activated simultaneously by the hypothalamus, emotional feelings and emotional responses occur in parallel, rather than in sequence." (p.84) Thus, the simple theory that what we think leads directly to what we feel is not supported by physiology; it's more complex than that, more dynamic and contextual. Further undermining the purely cognitive approach is the realization that the subcortical pathways, not capable of fine distinctions, produce learning that freely spreads to other stimuli; since the process is subcortical, conscious control over such subcortical processes is virtually impossible. This is a good reason for the application of more global, corrective experience, which holistic, Gestalt work provides.

Finally, this book provides helpful insights into the processes that unfold in panic attacks, PTSD, and other anxiety disorders. Given that recent rearch has indicated Gestalt therapy is at least as helpful as systematic-desensitiztion in the treatment of phobia (Johnson and Smith, 1997), it would be productive for Gestalt therapists treating these disorders to read LeDoux's research and incorporate applications of his findings in their process work with clients. Particularly interesting are LeDoux's discussions of stress factors that effect people in even more varied ways. He showed how, for instance, that stress "shifts us into a mode of operation in which we react to danger rather than think about it." (p.247)

There are many books on neural science and consciousness. People can find them under the cognitive science section of large bookstores; however, there are few books that provide holistic viewpoints that consider both the thinking and feeling, the conscious and the unconscious processes at work, and that honor the systemic nature of whole persons. Joseph LeDoux has done this, and therefore, he is in line with Kurt Goldstein, Kurt Lewin, and the early Gestalt theorists who began looking for ways in which people make creative, adaptive adjustments to their environments. That is why The Emotional Brain makes good reading to deepen one's understanding of, and appreciation for, phenomenological process taking place within the unified field.

Goldstein, K. (1995) The organism. New York: Zone Books.

Greenberg, L.S., Rice, L.N., Elliott, R. (1991) Facilitating Emotional Change. New York: The Guilford Press.

Johnson, W.R., Smith, E.W.L. (1997) Gestalt empty-chair dialogue versus systematic desensitization in the treatment of phobia. Gestalt Review 1:2, p. 150-162.

Lazarus, R.S. (1991) Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press.

Le Doux, J. (1996) The emotional brain, the mysterious underpinnings of emotional life. New York: Simon & Schuster.