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[ 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
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Gestalt!
Ejournal of Gestalt therapy and the field of Gestalt practitioners
Photographs by
Philip Brownell and Lars Berg
www.gestalt.it
Nordiska GestaltJournalen
Nordic Gestalt Journal
www.GestaltReview.com
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Redland, Bristol,
BS6 6PW, England
Tel/FAX: +(44) 117 907 7539
www.britishgestaltjournal.com
Visit the Portland Gestalt Therapy Training Institute
The AAGT Website
www.aagt.org
An international, refereed, Gestalt journal, based in Australia, the Australian Gestalt Journal is a premier vehicle of Gestalt Therapy writing and promotes the growth and development of Gestalt Therapy theory and practice. Orthodox, traditional or dogmatic views are welcome, as are the irreverent, anarchical and heretical. There is room for poetry as well as prose, for the artist, as well as the academic.
Editor, Publisher & Owner:
Bruno G. Just.
Editorial Advisors:
Andy Busuttil, Jim Jupp, Lee Owens, Gunter Swoboda, and Brian O'Neill (Founder).
Editorial Board:
Ari Badaines, Barry Blicharski, Don Diespecker, Ruth Dunn, Joel Latner, Alan Meara, Gabriel Phillips, Robert Resnick, Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, Frank-M. Staemmler, Yaro Starak.
Address: The Editor, A.G.J., 7 A Chesterfield Rd., Epping. 2121. N.S.W. Australia.
May 1997, Vol. 1, No. 1:
Staemmler, Evans, Meara, Erskine, Caradoc-Davies, Wheeler, Adams, Feldhaus, Just, Hamilton
October 1997, Vol. 1, No.2:
Wheeler, Philippson, Polster, Fonseca, Gunzburg, Staemmler, Diespecker, Swoboda
June 1998, Vol. 2, No.1:
Shane, Wheeler, Robine, Philippson, Polster, Starak, Roberts, Prosnick, Diespecker
December 1998, Vol. 2, No. 2: Diespecker, Latner, Braune, Spagnuolo Lobb, Salonia, Cavaleri, Sichera, Melnick, Nevis, Evans, Prosnick, Woldt, Kepner, Wagner, Park, Evans, Coe, Lucey, O'Neill, Just.
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- This is a particularly emotional and significant moment: it’s the point of arrival of two years of work in which, as President of the European Association for Gestalt Therapy, I’ve been gathering together the European Community of Gestalt therapists, so that we could share the various vicissitudes Gestalt therapy has gone through, in political and theoretical terms, with colleagues outside Europe too. And here’s the result: a gathering not just of European colleagues, but of colleagues from all over the world, who’ve paid their own way to come here for the simple pleasure of knowing and being known, of exchanging the work in theory, research and practice that each one of us is carrying on in her/his own context. So for me this is a magical, even poetic moment.
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- We’re all brothers and sisters, if only because we identify with a particular name; so let’s try to use our differences to grow, recognizing and respecting the passion we share for various aspects of our approach. Let’s try to compare what we are with the roots we grew up from, with the theoretical text that marked the birth of our approach. And let’s do this with due respect for the Founders’ perspective, their epistemology, and for our own requirements today, the clinical demands of the Gestalt therapy of the new millennium; in other words, let’s work hermeneutically.
The revolutionary linking of hermeneutics and clinical practice is part of the original heritage of Gestalt therapy. Here in fact, the theoretical approach is so strong, yet still so flexible that it can be continually reshaped by clinical practice, which - in its turn - cannot occur outside the framework of a hermeneutic theory of reference. We aim in this Conference to clearly demonstrate this long-standing link, in opposition to all distortion and dilution of the fundamental principles.
Hermeneutics is a branch of philosophy which aims at an understanding of the world not naively linked to the so called objective sciences. Hans Gadamer, the founder of modern hermeneutics, affirms that a text (like a person or a client, or an-other) can be known only within the relationship with it (or with her/him), rejecting neither the history of the relationship, nor the context in which it arose, nor our perception of it (him/her).
But what does it mean to consider the link between hermeneutics and clinical for a Gestalt therapist? It means just what Paul Goodman pointed out: that we cannot know "reality" in itself, but only that part of reality we are experiencing in the here and now - in his and the Founders’ terms the contact making and withdrawal of a human animal organism with its environment. This part of reality makes its moment-to-moment meeting from the fusion of horizons of the people involved (perceptions, which are the result of learnings from past contacts, actual wishes, physiological needs, etc.). The capacity to stay in the ceaseless equilibrium of the moment and let ourselves go to the uncertainty of the moment-to-moment truth of the relationship is the typical quality of a Gestalt therapist.
Let me quote for a moment my friend Antonio Sichera’s article about a comparison between Paul Goodman and Hans Gadamer:
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- Goodman writes in a style which is both direct and immediately of insuperable difficulty. Ideally, he wishes to draw concentric circles round the reader, who is constrained, willy nilly, to accept the hermeneutic logic of circularity. This means that the reader is faced with "an impossible task: to understand the book he must have the 'gestaltic' mentality, and to acquire it he must understand the book" (P-H-G, 94, XXIV). There are so many possible ways through it ...indeed at times contradiction seems almost to be deliberately taken into the heart of the text. This being so, the only thing to do is to go along with it.
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- May we assume that there is a discipline among sciences which does not possess the characteristics of objectivity, publicity and controllability of results obtained? (P-H-G, 94, 257). Gestalt therapy contests any such formulation of the problem, first because it arises from the prestige that the word ìscienceî has achieved in our society, to the point where whatever is not science is actually dogmatically considered not credible; and second because behind the questions raised is concealed, in reality, a unilateral vision of what ìscienceî is. The scientific method arose in the context of the investigation into inanimate nature, but can what is animate be treated in the same way? Or is there another way of practicing ìscienceî, a way which is unique, unrepeatable? In hermeneutic terms we would say that the role of life and of history - Husserl’s Lebenswelt - cannot be managed by systematic knowledge, but rather acts as its inevitable presupposition.
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It’s this fundamental question that we must aim to solve today: how can we orient ourselves in the actual problems of our clinical practice (for example, treating borderline syndromes, narcissistic characters, psychosis, alimentary disorders, addictions, couple and family crisis, organizational problems, etc.) with the tools that our Founders left? How can we observe and at the same time stay in the experience of contact making (not making) and withdrawal of the person or group we are dealing with as psychotherapists?
The temptation to go elsewhere, using epistemological principles which are different (and clearer!) than the ones stated by the Founders, is great. It’s very difficult and stressful to be continuosly creative, every time create a different relational meaning of an event and use it to restore an interrupted spontaneity of contact making.
So many colleagues have drawn away from the tradition of our approach and have put what in their view ramained of Gestalt therapy (in the last analysis, only its techniques) side by side with other approaches which offered more schematic categories of observation (which of course are safer), and in the process lost what is most specific and intimate in our approach.
We must fight stoutly today against those forms of 'revision' of Gestalt therapy that fail to keep the tradition in mind. Gestalt therapy has a wonderful starting point, its founding text, a text which leaves no doubts about the epistemological principles which made it necessary to set up a new psychotherapeutic approach, but at the same time deliberately leaves open - in the sense of 'undefined' - all the necessary clinical applications, from the theory of psychopathology, to the diagnostic tools, to the developmental theory which is so closely linked to them. This text actually arose as a generator of ideas, not as the definitive construction of an approach. Quite the contrary: to structure something definitively is absolutely contrary to the spirit of Gestalt Therapy. What fascinates anyone who approaches Gestalt therapy and decides to stick with it, is precisely that free spirit, that acceptance of everything that happens, the development of an unexpressed potential and the banishment of all those closed schematizations that effectively predefine reality.
But this fascination implies a challange, which isn’t always recognized by those who have to face it: the challange of finding ever-new meanings, linked to the here and now, and so the challenge of undergoing a continuous creative effort which leads to only momentary 'truths,' marvelous relational moments which are never ends in themselves, which inevitably lead to something else, which the therapist must promptly 'understand'. In much of the development of Gestalt therapy from the Fifties on, this attention to the procedural flow of experience has been understood as the uselessness of signification, as a codified permit to do without diagnosis, for instance, or without an evolutionary theoretical model, consistent with hermeneutical presuppositions.
It’s not easy to meet this challange, and it’s a hard task to construct a developmental model, one, for instance, which takes into account the here and now of the relationship which the child and the adult live through from moment to moment. It’s certainly easier to say that Gestalt therapy doesn’t have these tools and that it’s therefore best to integrate it with something else.
In the interests of consistently maintaining a literary style that would discourage introjection in favor of active chewing (ruminatio) of intrinsically disturbing content, something was deliberately left open in the founding text; and this has been taken for actual theoretical and epistemological gaps. This is why many people thought they were doing Getalt therapy a favor when they added new principles, because, they said, it can’t respond to clinical demands like those I’ve mentioned; and so they ended up creating other models, more banal or more interesting than Gestalt therapy, it makes no odds, but anyway different, yet still calling them Gestalt therapy.
We know of the leaders of some schools who claim to have found the solution to those undefined aspects of Gestalt therapy, such as the theory of psychopathology, creating clear models which, however, have nothing to do with the hermeneutics of Gestalt therapy. Concepts like Buber’s 'betweenness', the relational nature, the elusiveness of the here and now of the relationship, must be maintained in any development which comes after Gestalt Therapy, otherwise we are going to lose the intrinsic and particular value of our approach.
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- From our point of view, the only map which is genuinely useful and not merely illusory still remains the concept of contact, the Grundkonzept of Gestalt therapy. ...But what is 'contact'? For Goodman it’s above all a boundary event, a happening which cannot be described either as purely a function of a ëpsychic subject’, solipsistically considered, nor as the result of a series of conditionings and factors external to that subject. To speak of contact means to refer to a space ñ relational space, in fact ñ where Newton’s law of action and distance does not hold, but where the interplay of forces keeps the field in ceaseless vibration, which momentarily appears as harmony and balance. We could say that we must start from the Zwischenheit, Buber’s ëbetweenness’, on our journey towards a definition of contact which is not merely banal. By insisting on this boundary, on the elusive, essential nature of ëbetween’, Goodman therefore defines ërelationship’ in a way that both includes and surpasses the theoretical efforts of Sullivan, Horney, Fromm, and even Lewin, while placing it beyond humanistic emphasis on the self-regulation of the organism. In effect, Goodman maintains that it’s the relationship that is self-regulating (not the organism). That’s why we have no need to refer to some internal structure (like the super-ego) or to some external structure (like society) to solve the supposedly irreconcilable relationship between individual and social group: it’s the process of relationship itself that enables us to draw up a frame of reference for an understanding of existence, its pathologies and its treatment, in a constant dialectic between the dimension of the individual and that of society. In Heidegger’s terms, in our ësojourn’ there is always, at the same time, the ëwhere’, ëwith whom’, and ëhow’ of relationship. This is the most recondite significance of contact, as a theory that tries to express an image of the living dynamism of existence, marked by the rhythm of encounter and pause. With their failure of contact when a person denies the implacable diversity of the other. There can be no great intuition and clinical experience, Perls and Goodman describe the various possibilities of genuine, nourishing contact without a dental destruction of false similarities and of artificial agreement, nor without withdrawal from a fusion and abandonment of self accomplished at this point. (Studies in Gestalt Therapy, No. 6/7, 1998, Editorial)
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- If we say that Gestalt therapy is attractive and interesting, but lacks certain principles, it means we have failed to understand it and we are sinking it in the banality of ignorance and of a narcissistic desire. I've heard some colleagues say that they have taken steps to add the principles that lack, and that they’ve thus set up an integrated model, one which is of course more complete than the original theory. Putting up with this attitude ñ or taking it on ñ inevitably leads to the destruction of our approach, to our death. Gestalt therapy has in it all the epistemological principles necessary for its evolution consistently with its own tradition. And if these principles, which already constitute a harmonic theoretical and methodological system, are not understood, don’t let’s replace ignorance with a false paternalism towards Gestalt therapy: it’s just a baby, it doesn’t have everything, let’s find a way to make it develop.
Our problem is understanding the epistemological principles which motivated the birth of a new psychotherapeutic approach, in the Fifties, among a group of highly educated intellectuals who had conceived the intuition of a new way of looking at human nature. Our problem is a hermeneutical one: we have to interrogate the text the Founders left to us, asking it the questions that arise from our own cultural and clinical horizons, letting ourselves be modified by the text itself, and so not snubbing tradition.
Suppose a patient tells us: 'I've got a sexual problem: I don’t feel emotionally involved when I make love to the women I love', while another says: 'It all started with that film I saw at the cinema: I was fine before that. That scene where one man shot another through the heart and the blood was pouring out: I felt that shot in my own heart. Since then I’ve gone on moving about, working, I suppose I’m alive, but I don’t feel my heart any longer.' We can read these statements with the categories that the basic text, Gestalt Therapy, already offers. That’s to say, we can read the first example in terms of a disturbance of the personality function, and the second as a disturbance of the Id function; in both cases we ask ourselves what Ego function has been lost. We further ask ourselves how this patient sets out her/his contact in the time of our meeting and how s/he interrupts her/his intentionality of contact.
To step outside these parameters is to frustrate or abort our approach in favor of something else. Our hermeneutic understanding unequivocally influences our clinical approach. The purpose of this Conference is to experience the basic principles of our approach and to remain faithful to them without giving up the creativity necessary to any development.
These opening remarks are critical, yes, but not provocative, because I know who I’m talking to. I know that all of you here, just because you’ve chosen to take part in a conference called 'Hermeneutics and Clinical', are prepared to examine yourselves on the themes I’ve mentioned. In the 23 years I’ve been practicing and teaching Gestalt therapy I’ve gotten to know many colleagues: some of them serious people with whom I’ve had, and continue to have, scientific exchanges; some of them who are uncritical in front of the current famous Gestalt practioner; some, I’m sorry to say, who think they can improve Gestalt therapy by creating something else and calling it by the same name. These, I believe, are the most harmful to our survival.
As President of the EAGT, I ask all my colleagues here - Europeans and non Europeans alike - to take up a formal position, whether as individual therapists who believe in what they are doing, or as representatives of training institutes, scientific journals, national associations, international associations or associations for the development of Gestalt therapy - to formally oppose all those hybrid forms of 'Gestalt' which have unfortunately been approved by national legislation in certain countries, Austria among them. How can we possibly feel in front of the brochure for the World Conference of Psychotherapies (organized in Austria) which enumerates two Gestalt approaches, neither of which is called Gestalt therapy? Or in front of the crisis affecting our German colleagues, who’ve seen their state and their national health system deny recognition to Gestalt therapy? Do you understand what a risk these events represent for the Gestalt community in Europe and in the world? It means endorsing an epistemological and hermeneutic flaw of our approach and so pronouncing our own death sentence.
I know perfectly well that the community gathered here today is anything but dead. I can bear witness that in the past two years, while preparing this Conference, I’ve always met people who were alive, who were seriously interested in going more deeply into Gestalt therapy. May this Conference contribute to give us the strength that derives from our ground, from the feeling that we are a group, so that we can make ourselves heard seriously, and not only in this hall. May this sense of being a group give us the courage (so dear to Laura Perls) to speak out in official context too, pulling the rug out from under those whose only concern is to show themselves off, by taking advantage of spaces that have been left too empty.
In these two years I’ve had the great pleasure of being a container for all those realities that have turned to me to give their contribution to this Conference. I’ve felt, as I organized it, like a cook who has lots of first-rate ingredients at her disposal to make exquisite dishes. You have the menu: I hope you like it, or that at least you’ll have the chance to say what you don’t like. I’d like to tell you something about the ingredients, about our colleagues here who’ve agreed to make their own contribution to this event, because knowing who are can help us to contextualize the experience and to feel that we really are a group. It’s very difficult to name everybody and if I name some, I risk leaving out others. So I’d like to start by glancing at the world chart which our draftsman has prepared for us, and would the nations present please stand up as I name them.
Thank you.
As you know, the Conference will have group process as an underlying stream which supports the main events. I would like you to join a same language small group, and gather together twice a day with the help of a facilitator. It’s a way of attending to what you have to say and wouldn’t have the possibility to say in the large group, and using it for the sake of our Community. These small groups will in fact create the final choral moment of the Conference, on Sunday. Please follow the instructions in your folder about group process, which are also writen on several posters around here.
Finally, I want to introduce to you some people who have been very important in the organization of this Conference, with whom I had furious fight at the beginning (as in any good Gestalt tradition), and whom I learned to respect and love for their professionalism and dedication to this Conference: Servizitalia.
Therefore a few changes in the program: please check the posters with the daily program.
I hope you will have a meaningful experience and a good time.
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Sixth European Conference