Impressions of the Sixth European Conference of Gestalt Therapy

My lasting impression of the EAGT Conference in Santa Flavia on Sicily, Italy, is enrichment on a personal level and an expanded sense of connectedness towards a larger Gestalt community. Coming from a fairly small Swedish Gestalt Community, it was an adventure diving directly into the agitated waves of European cultural differences. My immediate experiences during the conference was quite chaotic; there were so many levels of communication (and very poor acoustic support for the level of noise in the conference hotel). The other side of this, however, is that the cross-linguistic problems makes it clear that Europe has a deep and complex evolution of different Gestalt cultures - which is interesting and enriching. That enhances my respect for our differences, when we try to formulate our common ground of Gestalt values - in practice as well as in theory.

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The conflict between Experiential and Academic approaches to the communication of Gestalt therapy values and practice seems to be part of the evolution of Gestalt therapy worldwide. It also adresses a significant complexity in that it seems like the psychological establishments in different countries increasingly tend to raise regulations against anything but academic training standards. This became explicit at a huge panel discussion at the conference, with participants from 17 European countries; a representative of the German Gestalt Community reported the sociopolitical situation in Germany as catastrophic for the freedom of practicing Gestalt Therapy.


	6th European Conference of Gestalt Therapy, October 1-4, 1998: A Complex and Enriching Experience By Lars Berg, Gestalt practitioner and Artist Stockholm, Sweden My lasting impression of the EAGT Conference in Santa Flavia on Sicily, Italy, is enrichment on a personal level and an expanded sense of connectedness towards a larger Gestalt community. Coming from a fairly small Swedish Gestalt Community, it was an adventure diving directly into the agitated waves of European cultural differences. My immediate experiences during the conference was quite chaotic; there were so many levels of communication (and very poor acoustic support for the level of noise in the conference hotel). The other side of this, however, is that the cross-linguistic problems makes it clear that Europe has a deep and complex evolution of different Gestalt cultures - which is interesting and enriching. That enhances my respect for our differences, when we try to formulate our common ground of Gestalt values - in practice as well as in theory.
	[ Last updated, 11/19/03 ] Gestalt! ISSN 1091-1766 Volume 3; Number 2 Fall, 1999 Published by Gestalt Global Corporation Indexes of Gestalt! Introduction \| Editorial \| Review: A Well-Lived Life \| Opening Lecture \| Work with a Seriously Disturbed Patient \| Impressions of the 6th EAGT Conference \| About the EAGT \| About Studies in Gestalt Therapy \| Looking Ahead to the 7th EAGT Conference \| Home Gstalt-L An email discussion group devoted to Gestalt therapy and the community of its practitioners Gestalt Bookmarks A place to begin researching the field of contemporary Gestalt therapy on the world wide web Gestalt! Ejournal of Gestalt therapy and the field of Gestalt practitioners Photographs by Philip Brownell and Lars Berg Nordiska GestaltJournalen "The Nordic Gestalt Journal" * Lars Berg Egenart * Gestalt inFormation * Nordic Gestalt Journal * EAGT Newsletter Box 4204 S-102 65 Stockholm Sweden Tel. +46-(0)8-641 55 44 Fax. +46-(0)8-642 73 70 E-mail. lars@berg-egenart.se Editor and designer of the Nordic Gestalt Journal, EAGT Newsletter and Web publications: Gestaltterapi i Sverige, (in Swedish) Gestalt Gallery, Personal Web Presentation
			I attended the conference on several levels: As a "plain" attendant; As a photographer, aiming at documenting the atmosphere of the conference As Chair of a panel on Gestalt Journals in the World, with editors from several significant Journals As panel participant in a panel on "The Æsthetic Language as an Hermeneutic Paradigm of Gestalt Therapy" As member of an intimate group of Swedish Gestalt practitioners, chosing to attend this conference as part of our 10th aniversary, and also having vacation together. For weeks after this conference I had a bad cheek, with an agonizing ache spreading over half of my face and down through my neck. Finally, after coming home to Stockholm, I succeeded in letting go of my controlling tightness with the aid of acupuncture, zone therapy, aroma therapy and massage - all in one long, beautiful session. No need to say it; I had overestimated my capacity to flow between these different levels of attendance (attentional dance?). As usual I had been taking on too much and I learned a lot from it (finally). Why do I mention these pains of mine? Partly because I want to be honest with you, as an account of what kind of lens I view my impressions through, and partly because I believe my tightness reflects an underlying tension from a conflict between academic and experiential ways of communicating Gestalt - something that went on in me as well as in my "conference field". A collegue who also attended the conference, grounded mostly in Gestalt Theory and Gestalt Psychology, commented: "I always thought WE were the fundamentalists, that we were sometimes overemphasizing the theoretical line. There was an overemphasis on constructs (instead of phenomenal experience as the foundation and judge of the usefulness and validity of all theoretical constructs)". It's interesting that he mentioned the "fundamentalistic" tunes at the conference. I happened to find myself in the midst of a strong polarization concerning the way a Discussion Panel on ideas of Gestalt therapy are supposed to be constructed. As part of the panel on "The Language of Æsthetics as an Hermeneutic Paradigm of Gestalt Therapy" I chose to extend my knowledge about this subject through inviting the audience into an experiential exercise, making the core of my ideas evolve from each persons own life experiences. The immediate outcome of this was strong and beautiful - and several in the audience reported personal experiences that, in my view, was congruent with a deep understanding of the Language of Æsthetics. However, another of the panel's participants, who was grounded in the academic world, strongly emphasized a solely theoretical perspective and tried to bring the situation back to "the real purpose" of the panel. The conflict was obvious and there was no time for resolution, so we couldn't make our points meet in any fruitful way. In my reflections on this, afterwards, I realized that it would have been a good idea to collect the experiences from the excercise (which was a short guided imagery) and put som theoretical light on what all this meant. But the conflict was too paralyzing for any of us in the panel to use our creativity. The audience was better at this, though, trying to express their feelings around what happened in the room. I suppose this experience talks directly to the split between the old "outsider position" of Gestalt therapy, emphasizing experiences before theories, and an academic approach where scientific research and validation of practice into theoretical argument is the only way. It's an interesting discussion - and I believe there is room for both approaches (as we obviously are equipped with both emotional and intellectual resources for understanding). The conflict between Experiential and Academic approaches to the communication of Gestalt therapy values and practice seems to be part of the evolution of Gestalt therapy worldwide. It also adresses a significant complexity in that it seems like the psychological establishments in different countries increasingly tend to raise regulations against anything but academic training standards. This became explicit at a huge panel discussion at the conference, with participants from 17 European countries; a representative of the German Gestalt Community reported the sociopolitical situation in Germany as catastrophic for the freedom of practicing Gestalt Therapy. I won't go into that here, but I know there is a lot of work going on in EAGT, in terms of making Gestalt Therapy known and accepted in respective countries and also in developing training standards* that balance the two learning modes - satisfying established treatment regulations and simultanously nurturing the "soul of Gestalt". Not an easy task, but probably necessary in the long run, for the survival of our method. * [The reader may be interested in a discussion of ethics and models of training ]