| Background
 We are awed by Gestalt therapy's radical innovation: the recognition that we live in our bodies, that we live in the moment. But this approach was the creation of a particular group of mostly men in New York nearly 50 years ago, and it is important to look to the context for embedded background assumptions - something we have learned as feminists and as Gestalt therapists. The theory, particularly as expressed in the defining text, Gestalt Therapy by Perls, Hefferline & Goodman in 1951, emerged from a traditional Western European male-centered culture. Influences from other cultures, such as Taoism and Buddhism, were just beginning to be felt. Women's issues, however, were unrecognized, so when the book described the "basic neurotic dichotomies" that our society suffers from, gender was not on the list.
The New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy was founded in 1952 as a membership organization with large monthly meetings as well as smaller training groups. From the beginning these large meetings were dominated by male conflicts, particularly between the founding Fellows, who debated points of theory with acrimony. This style of gladiatorial combat continued for decades to the dismay of many of the women members - some of whom left in disgust.
In the 1980's, the entire structure of the Institute was called into question. As the Fellows became less dominant, a democratic organization was developed based on consensus. However, we women were still unhappy with the large meetings. Some of us experienced a lack of support to speak up, while others were uncomfortable with the intellectual style of argumentation required to make oneself heard. In 1991 we began to meet in a women's caucus as an experiment to discover what style of interaction would emerge when we were not in reaction to this dominant mode.
We found that we were interested in balance. Gestalt therapy is supposed to be free of gender bias, yet we as women could see that aggression was valued in our training to the detriment of cooperation. We discovered we wanted to include other facets. We wanted to attend both to the needs of the individual and the group, to feelings as well as intellect, to relationship as well as individual assertion. Through our Women's Caucus meetings, we developed a ground of connection and support that carried over to the large meetings, gradually increasing our ability to speak up and address the quality of dialogue occurring there. Then we made two pivotal presentations at large meetings that highlighted how women's voices had not been included in Gestalt therapy. They had a profound impact and were instrumental in changing the entire culture of the New York Institute. The whole Institute started to embrace the values of balancing, of respecting feelings and relational statements as well as theoretical assertions. Now we all share a concern that everyone's voice be heard.
Then as AAGT was being formed, the Caucus became the foundation for that organization's Women's Issues in Gestalt Therapy interest group. We have continued to have local meetings in New York, and the group has expanded beyond its New York Institute beginnings. We have discovered a shared experience of tension between our contemporary self-awareness as feminists and our professional conversation as Gestalt therapists and theorists. On the one hand, Gestalt therapy has been in the vanguard of supporting women to be assertive and empowered, contrary to the prevailing culture. On the other, we have experienced resistance to valuing and learning from female experience. We address you here now in an attempt to contribute our voices to the development of Gestalt therapy by offering you a presentation based on one of the those that we originally gave at the New York Institute in 1993.
Creating the Atmosphere
We believe that being in a group that embodies our values is different and extraordinary. As women, we speak from our ways of being, of knowing and of organizing - grounded in our bodies. How do we communicate an experience that is vivid and alive, based in our sensual wisdom? The process of finding the language to express this is difficult, for language can only approximate our experience. And it is vital that we do this - that we share, extend and expand out into the larger Gestalt community.
We, the presenters, have been meeting for years and so come to the workshop with a sense of connection with one another. This history has helped establish the ground and sets the tone of the group. We sit interspersed throughout a large circle of empty chairs. As people enter the room, we welcome them warmly, feeling an excited anticipation about sharing this presentation with other Gestalt therapists from around the world.
The workshop starts with a small group. We move at a slow pace, introducing ourselves. We begin our presentation by focusing awareness on our women's bodies. This organic grounding, long undermined by our socialization, is our natural birthright. So we sound a call into our bodies, inviting the sensory, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual connections this may bring.
We listen openly, with respect. People continue to arrive throughout the workshop so we keep enlarging our circle, expanding to welcome the newcomers, including them in our process. We support everyone in speaking - honoring and validating each experience. This quality of attentive listening allows each of us the possibility of deeply sensing and authentically sharing our embodied experiencing. Everyone has an equal place and each expression adds to the creating/emerging whole. Through the texture of the our interactions, the flowing rhythms, our openness to one another - touching and being touched, we realize a sense of community and of belonging.
Experiment and Response
We have written the story of our experiment and responses in a way that will allow you also to hear and be touched by the voices of those who were present at the workshop. We invite you to participate with us as you read this by noticing your own feelings and reactions.
Each woman in our group of presenters chose a quotation, from a Gestalt therapy text, that was personally evocative and in some way highlighted the gender bias. She then read her quote as a woman's voice from the shared silence, changing male pronouns to female. The following is a selection from our readings, including some of those which evoked the most powerful and encompassing responses:
"Essentially, the poet's is the special case where the problem is to solve an 'inner conflict'...: the poet is concentrating on some unfinished subvocal speech and its subsequent thoughts; by freely playing with her present word she at last finishes an unfinished verbal scene, she in fact utters the complaint, the denunciation, the declaration of love, the self-reproach that she should have uttered; now at last she freely draws on the underlying organic needs and she finds the words. We must therefore notice accurately that the poet's I, Thou and It are in her present actuality ... Her 'I' is her style in its present use, it is not her biography." -Perls, Hefferline and Goodman (1951/94, p.102).
"Annihilating, destroying, initiative and anger are functions of good contact necessary for the livelihood, pleasure and protection of any organism in a difficult field." -Perls, Hefferline and Goodman (1951/94, p. 124).
"The opposite of the need for victory is 'creative disinterest.' We shall later attempt to describe this peculiar attitude of the spontaneous self. Accepting her concern and the object, and exercising her aggression, the creatively impartial woman is excited by the conflict and grows by means of it, win or lose; she is not attached to what might be lost, for she knows she is changing and already identifies with what she will become. With this attitude goes an emotion that is the opposite of the sense of security, namely faith: absorbed in the actual activity she does not protect the background but draws energy from it, she has faith that she will prove adequate." -Perls, Hefferline and Goodman (1951/94, p.132).
Changing male pronouns to female in these quotes prompted a number of women to express relief at not having to expend the energy they usually put into translating:
"What I was really struck with...was how often I automatically translate, and I do it constantly. It was so wonderful to realize that I didn't have to do that..."
"...(I)t made it easier for me to listen to, and be with, the experience (without having) to translate it (in order to apply it) to myself."
As people shared their reactions to the readings, aggression in its various forms emerged as a major theme. Many women felt that their experiences in Gestalt therapy and training reflected a model which emphasizes a form of aggression encouraging satisfaction of one's own needs at the expense of the other, rather than a recognition that one's own needs include connection and cooperation with others:
"I think one of the main things we can offer in a feminist voice is cooperation rather than the aggressive model. Now the aggressive model does not have to be alienating....though 'destroying' is used (in Perls, Hefferline and Goodman)....I, for many years, changed it to 'destructuring' because...you don't have to (let go of the old) in a violent way. But...no matter how we want to frame aggression, (Gestalt theory) still is lacking an emphasis on cooperation..."
One woman offered the actual definition of aggression, from the Latin agredere, meaning going towards. Another spoke of the creative aspect of aggression as a field experience which includes conflict, cooperation, and transformation:
"...(C)reating this...with all of you...is a field experience...we're transforming right now, every moment, the theory and ourselves....I want to thank you for bringing in the origin of aggression....I chose to leave aggression and conflict in...my readings because it's been so important for me...to keep that idea but create it and transform it, define it in our own ways..."
Others also made the point that the aggressive model does not have to be alienating:
"I'm feeling that there are two different kinds of aggression here...(one) which was (a) kind of violent...attacking aggression, and then your kind of aggression of just being able to have energy and liveliness and excitement."
"...(A)ggression is really the liveliness and spontaneity, and reaching forward, getting what we need, expressing our interest, relating with other people and creating. That's what aggression really is about in Gestalt therapy theory."
"I think that (aggression) is both going towards (meeting) our own needs...but...it also brings up the issue of cooperation and inclusion, that I also go towards, I need the other one..."
It was observed that the spirit of cooperation and inclusion was expressed in the way we welcomed late-comers into the circle and passed the microphone to one another so that everyone's voice could be heard on the tape:
"...(Y)ou were including the people who were going to buy the tape, who weren't in the room at all....that's relational thinking...to pass the microphone around. I feel very moved."
Many women expressed feeling sad, realizing that they had lost touch with their own aggressiveness because it was unacceptable to others. As they learned to inhibit that part of themselves, they also inhibited their energy, liveliness, creativity, and spontaneity, as well as their ability to move toward - and reach for - meeting their own needs:
"...I was a little girl who was quite aggressive...and my aliveness and brightness and aggressiveness was very much not all right. So, at five, when I was sent to a girls' Catholic boarding school, where I stayed until I was 13, all that liveliness and aggression went underground, and I feel so sad about that, and during the last 20 years I've been regaining that sense of my own vitality and aggression..."
In learning to inhibit aggression, women have learned to inhibit their physical beings as well: 'Don't be too big, too loud, too active.' Even in Gestalt therapy and training contexts, women's natural ways of expressing themselves have often been criticized. For instance, when one woman's beautiful, graceful hand gestures were acknowledged, she replied, "You can't imagine how people have tried to wipe that out."
Other women shared similar experiences:
"They've tried to do that with my voice also. I can't tell you how many hours I spent with Gestalt therapists trying to change how I speak....I guess it (doesn't) sound authentic to some people."
"And...also being big, and how I had to shrink in many ways, and need to fill in that process of recovery, rediscovering, reclaiming."
Some of the most compelling responses were stimulated by this quotation that related to touch:
"Taboos against expressive behavior begin early. Don't touch, don't fidget, don't cry, don't masturbate, don't pee; and so the boundaries are delineated. What began in childhood is continued as we grow up, only even more subtly than the original don'ts. We become more inclusive, even finding new situations where the early prohibitions can apply. The simple little childhood scenes which were involved in the boundary-setting no longer exist, but only the details change. For example, prohibition against masturbation - touching oneself lovingly - winds up as a boundary which excludes touching anyone lovingly. Consequently, when the child grows up, her lovemaking as a woman is conservative and limited. As a mother, she touches her children only when she has to and when a friend is crying she keeps her distance. In fact, even if she is the person crying, her resistance to touching may prevent her from getting the support that the closeness of another person could give her. As loving as she may be, touching is excluded for her as a means of expressing her affection." -Polster and Polster (1973, p.121).
One woman responded by speaking of the extent to which women have been alienated from their own bodies:
"...(I)t was a reminder of...the way I have seen girls handled, and this thing about not touching themselves. It made me feel like referencing female genital mutilation, in that there wasn't a physical act...but every time I have seen parents with a baby brought into the clinic, and if the baby reaches down...they're grabbing her hand saying 'oh no, don't touch that', and they say the word 'that' as if it is an object, and as if it is somebody else's object, and...it's associated with every other time I've heard women's' bodies referred to as 'it' or 'that'...it removed the self from that part of the body...'it' could become a thing and the permission to touch the thing can only be given to somebody else....I've seen women treated like the doctor can touch it, your husband can touch it, everybody else can touch it but you, and if you touch it you are bizarre...there's something wrong with you. So I don't know how they ever get around to taking care of their bodies because they don't have 'it'...and they'll even tell me 'I had a baby, but I don't know where it came out of,' because they never saw the 'it', there was never a mirror... and 'it' belongs to somebody else and...it struck me when I heard the reading that the mutilation I referred to is not physical mutilation, but how much more can you mutilate a child than to inform her...that her body is divided into these things that are okay for her to touch, like her hair and her face, but if she touches other places, that these things belong to somebody else..."
This response evoked deep sorrow which was expressed by one woman this way:
"...(R)ight now I'm still very caught up with the image of a woman having a baby and not having a sense of where that baby came from, how powerful the alienation of that is, not only the alienation from her own body, but I imagine a sort of alienation from that infant. The infant must also become an 'it' or a 'that' in the absence of the connection to the woman's body and there's such a desolation for me in getting in touch with what that would be like...."
One of the most powerful reactions came from the only man in the group:
"I want to respond from my whole experience here and particularly so from the impact on my body as well as just solely my mind. I feel very privileged to be here....What the experience has offered me this morning....is that I am very touched and opened....When I started, my head was very cloudy and my heart felt a bit sore....I've been hurt by...feminists who have attacked me as a man...and I felt that was a potential here, but...now my heart doesn't feel sore anymore. And what helped here is about the parent because I clearly realized that's not true for me, I love my two boys, and I touched them as infants, and I helped them be born and I also held my little daughter who was born dead, but I still loved her....I really thank you for being here. I feel... comforted being here. I'm glad...(about) the tapes...A lot of women...talk about...'no feminism' in Gestalt therapy....I can bring back these tapes for the men and women (in training). I think they'll really treasure this.... I feel connected to you....I really learned something about how...(women) experience the world different than men do....I do body work, but ...not like this...this is different."
This man's response movingly expresses our human need for touch and touching, and its intimate relation to love and connection. Many other responses confirm our longing for cooperation and inclusion. Our experience requires a reconfiguration of Gestalt therapy theory to honor these aspects of our humanity.
Conclusion
"Adding Women's Voices: Feminism and Gestalt Therapy" is a work in progress, a collaborative effort towards integrating Gestalt therapy and feminism. Most of us have been involved in both the women's movement and Gestalt therapy since the 70's or 80's. The women's movement has validated and expanded our experience as women and formed our feminist consciousness. Gestalt therapy has confirmed and supported us in reclaiming our natural aggression, and in exploring the full range of our experience. Paradoxically, until recently women's experience and perspective have not received serious attention in Gestalt theory and practice. This presentation is part of our attempt to integrate these two meaningful strands of our lives.
We have not done this work in isolation. Each of us has depended on contact with other women in our quest to fully develop ourselves, and we are all supported by one another's growth. When we come together in groups, we have the freedom to discover and define our own issues and struggles, as Gestalt therapists and as women. The quality of experience that emerges is often profound. Out of this, we are beginning to develop language for our concerns. We find that we value many different forms of aggression, and we value cooperation and yielding as well. Without cooperation, without the willingness to be open to hear and assist one another, we would not be here today. We encourage you to seek out settings with other women where you can try this experiment, and any others you devise, for yourselves. In enlarging this dialogue, we are all enriched, and Gestalt therapy becomes an even more powerful tool for human growth.
References
Perls, F. S., Hefferline, R. & Goodman, P. (1951/1994) Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (Highland, NY: Gestalt Journal Press)
Polster, E. & Polster, M. (1973) Gestalt Therapy Integrated (New York: Brunner/Mazel) |
