I begin by defining advanced training, especially in relationship to the principles of genuine dialogue. Then I discuss how the contact cycle can be usedin advanced training to develop students’ capacities to be in genuine dialogue. This is followed by a description of Tom Anderson’s Reflecting Team, including its theoretical origins in Bateson, Maturana, and Varela. I then compare GRT with thepresent model in structure and process. Finally, I discuss the difference between the present gestalt training model and GRT in relation to field theory, phenomenology, and genuine dialogue.

The GRT model originated in response to the request of the second year students of the Gestalt Institute of the Berkshires for a system that would support their creative evolution as gestalt therapists. The group consisted of experienced therapists and a filmmaker, all sensitive, skilled, highly motivated individuals who were deeply interested in the process of growth within themselves and others. We had spent a year together reading the philosophical basis for the gestalt approach, practicing in dyads and triads, and discussing my demonstrations. They were, we believed, at their creative edge as psychotherapists - at the point at which they needed to synthesize their knowledge, skills, and personalities into a comfortable style and to discover and grapple with any psychological difficulties that could limit their capacity to facilitate change. We were looking for a culture that could support and encourage members to expose their hidden strengths and weaknesses as therapists and feel free to be fully honest with each other. As I tried to meet their needs, I realized that the training was moving away from a teaching mode and more toward the area of personal growth. In keeping with Jacob’s thoughts on “the art of therapy,” the training was developing into a step in our becoming. (Jacobs, p. 17)

What is Advanced Training?

Yontef’s description of the qualities needed to do “the therapist’s job in Gestalt therapy” (Yontef, p. 230) is a very fine characterization of the capacities that advanced students need to acquire in gestalt training. A good psychotherapist must have both technical skills and relating skills. The technical skills that he mentions, “being an experimental phenomenological experiential guide” and “getting an accurate and holistic clinical picture of the patient’s character,” fall into the category of abilities that can be taught in an “I-It” mode, didactically, and through practice and supervision. Even though the learning involves personal experience, the method of relating or teaching is indirect and objectified. However, the qualities of relating that Yontef includes in his description, those attributed to genuine dialogue, that of commitment to dialogue, presence, inclusion, confirmation, all of the aspects of a dialogical attitude, must be learned differently. They must be learned dialogically.

What are the qualities of a dialogical therapist and how are we to teach them? It is most important that the therapist have a deep understanding, an “ontological belief that the ultimate basis of our existence is relational or dialogical in nature” (Hycner, p. 29) rather than solely intrapsychic, and that therefore healing happens through relationship. “For the inmost growth of the self is not accomplished as people like to suppose today, in man’s relation to himself, but in the relation between the one and the other...” (Buber, p. 61) The therapist must be a “steward of the dialogical.” (Hycner, p. 33) S/he must view the patient’s problem as a tear in his/her relationship to the world and the healing to a large extent as a repair of that tear. Thus the student must come to understand that s/he is not simply an observer or outside facilitator. In his/her being-in-relation-to-the-patient s/he is essential to the process of change.

In addition to understanding the significance of relationship, a student must begin to develop his/her capacity to be in genuine dialogue. A student needs to explore and have an opportunity to develop his/her ability to be present. Presence involves being genuine in contrast to “seeming,” proceeding “from what one really is” rather than from “what one wishes to seem;” (Buber, p. 66) being fully aware of his/her thoughts and feelings, fully responsible, and able to bring this full self into the relationship to the extent that it is useful to the psychological unfolding of the patient. The therapist who is present can be deeply touched by the patient and can allow the patient to be deeply touched by him/herself. (Yontef, p. 223)

A student needs to explore and begin to develop his/her capacity to be inclusive. Inclusion is the ability to perceive the wholeness of the other, to be able to comprehend the special uniqueness in every expression, to “imagine the reality of the other.” (Jacobs, p. 74) This involves bracketing off one’s biases, judgments, and beliefs. The therapist’s understanding of the other must go beyond what is apparent. S/he must be able to comprehend the hidden problems and potential, even the patient’s future capacity to participate more fully in the dialogue. At the same time that s/he confirms the patient’s existence through inclusion, s/he must also confirm his/herself and therefore not be in need of confirmation by the patient. The therapist must maintain his/her center and not be invested in the patient joining in the dialogue or being anything other than who s/he is. Jacobs states of Gestalt therapists, “They can only be present and authentic, and through the dialogic attitude refuse to forsake their own “I” or the potential “I” of the other while maintaining respect for the actuality of the other.’ (Ibid.)

A student needs to explore and develop his/her commitment to dialogue. This is the capacity to relinquish control of the direction or outcome of the meeting and to allow what happens between the two persons to evolve. The student needs to learn to be non-hierarchical. Hierarchy, by its nature, involves the imposition of external values and therefore the introduction of a false element into the relationship.

A student needs to explore and develop these capacities in order to be able to fully meet the patient in an I-thou moment, the moment, according Buber,where healing takes place. The therapist must be fully present, fully open to the other, yet maintain his/her center, be non-hierarchical, and let go of control for there to be the possibility of full contact or an “I-thou” moment. If the primary goal of the therapist is to meet the patient in his/her wholeness, the need to change the patient becomes irrelevant, as it should be if healing is to take place.

As I have mentioned earlier, most teaching is done in the “I-It” mode, yet it is impossible to teach the capacities of genuine dialogue in the “I-It” mode. One cannot just explain or describe “presence,” for example, and consider one’s students taught.

Advanced gestalt training must therefore include an opportunity for each student to experience, and experiment with, being in genuine dialogue.

In my experience as a student of gestalt psychotherapy genuine dialogue was practiced in the Clinical Practicum. We each took turns as therapist or patient, and we struggled to be genuine with each other within the frame of the contact cycle, while the other members of the class watched. Afterwards the class offered feedback. I had great difficulty with this arrangement. I feared criticism; I needed to protect my image as a therapist. I imagined my classmates had the same fear and need. Therefore, I could not be genuine as either therapist or as a class member offering feedback - and I was not alone. Years later, at GIB, my students made the same complaint.

In my search for something different I realized that a large part of the problem was structural. The present Clinical Practicum is structurally performance based. In learning Gestalt Psychotherapy we traditionally watch our gifted mentors demonstrate their expertise in front of our eyes. How could we, mere apprentices, risk exposing our imperfections in this performance model? How could we as class members expose our own doubts and confusion or criticize a friend’s? Instead of encouraging openness and creativity, the traditional Clinical Practicum limited self exploration and honest feedback.

Yet students need to explore and discover their relational strengths and weaknesses. We need a different model, a model that encourages self exploration and honesty, a model that supports risk-taking. The inhibiting performance - audience format must be replaced.

What replaces it, in GRT, is an overlapping gestalt contact cycle system. In the new design the therapeutic dyad works in front of the class, as in the old model, with the specific goal of meeting in an I-thou moment. However, in addition, and simultaneously, the student/therapist is also patient of the class, forming a second contact cycle. The student/therapist is asked to pinpoint his/her dialogical difficulties and the class becomes the psychotherapist that supports the working through of the
problem. The class is therapist rather than critic.

Through opening themselves to this difficult process, through exposing their own humanity and seeing that of others, students can become more fully prepared to be in a “gestalt dialogical relationship.”

How could the class as a whole become therapist? The problem was solved through the use of the ReflectingTeam Model from Family Systems. Within the new contact cycle, the student/therapist became “I” and the class/reflecting team became “Thou.”

Reflecting Team

Anderson’s Reflecting Team Model, as described in his book, The ReflectingTeam, Dialogues and Dialogues About the Dialogues, is a product of the evolution in family systems thinking in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, from first order cybernetics, a theory that viewed change as something imposed by an outside observer, to second order cybernetics in which the observer is included within the system and change occurs through a reorganization of the organism. Von Foerster’s research on neural nets, Maturana’s experiments on the physiology of vision, and Varela’s theoretical inclusion of phenomenology made it clear that “learning is not a mapping of outside objects into some location in the brain but is a way that the organism computes a stable reality.” (Hoffman, p. 384)

Living systems are like homeostats where the organization of the entity is itself the critical variable that has to remain constant. The components may change many times over, as happens when body cells die and renew themselves, but the identity of the unit - which is the same thing as its organization - remains the same. (Hoffman, p. 385)

...the challenge posed to cognitive science is to question one of the more entrenched assumptions of our scientific heritage - that the world is independent of the knower. If we are forced to admit that cognition cannot be properly understood without common sense, and that common sense is none other than our bodily and social history, then the inevitable conclusion is that the knower and known, mind and world, stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or dependent coorigination. (Varela, p. 150)

As it abandoned the objective feedback model and moved toward a phenomenological field theoretical epistemology, the field of family systems rediscovered the ideas of Gregory Bateson, especially his notion of the immanence of mind and his idea that information is “a difference that makes a difference.” (Bateson, p. 459) “...we may say that “mind” is immanent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain, or that mind is immanent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body, or, finally, that mind is immanent in the larger system - man plus environment.” (Bateson, p. 317) In his discussion of Bateson’s influence on him, Anderson describes Bateson’s ideas about perception as follows:

We make a “picture” of a man as something distinct from his background. The picture contains both background and man. Man himself sees and describes his background in terms of the differences he sees. He will be acquainted with his background in terms of differences he can see and hear and smell and touch and taste. There are immanent differences in the background available for the searching senses. (Anderson, p. 16)

“...the net effect,” according to Lynn Hoffman, in her comprehensive article on the trend in family systems,Beyond Power and Control: Toward a “Second Order” Family Systems Therapy, “is to point the way to an overall framework for systemic change that is as much as possible nonhierarchical, noninstrumental and nonpejorative.” (Hoffman, p. 383.)

In this “ second order” of family systems therapy, Anderson incorporated the ideas of Bateson et. al., the ideas that perception is constructed by the observing system and that it emerges from noting difference, that different describers will perceive things differently and have different explanations of the same event, that learning is a process that involves sensing-knowing-acting, and that change can be either limiting or an evolution depending upon whether it is imposed or internally elicited. (Anderson, pp. 15-41)

From this basic foundation, Anderson and his colleagues in Norway developed a system of conversations and conversations about conversations. They brought their team of consultants, formerly hidden behind a one-way mirror, into the room with the family and invited the family to listen to the therapists’ conversation. The team of therapists became known as the reflecting team, the word “reflection” meaning, “something heard is taken in and thought about before a response is given.” (Anderson, p. 12) At an appropriate point in the therapy session, the members of the reflecting team would be asked to offer their thoughts and observations on the problem being discussed by the family. After the team completed their discussion, the interviewer and the family could have a conversation about the team’s conversation about the family’s original conversation. Through this indirect conversational system, family members could, if they so chose, create or discover a different meaning or explanation of their problem, and out of this new meaning, act differently, create a new reality.

The reflecting team learned a mode of conversation that was specifically designed to be nonpejorative, nonclinical, inclusive of themselves, speculative and open-ended, questioning rather than stating. The following is a discussion of the “general guidelines,” offered by William D.Lax in chapter 7 of The Reflecting Team:

These center on presenting comments within a positive or logical framework as opposed to a negative one, moving from an either / or position to a both / and or neither /nor position, presenting a “smorgasbord of ideas” versus correct “interpretations,” and offering ideas not as rigid explanations but as tentative thoughts. The team may also raise comments and questions that the therapist did not or contextually could not say in the interview...By introducing these issues with the family observing and listening, the team allows these ideas to be present in the room, like “sky hooks,” as a potential part of the ongoing conversation. The family and therapist then have the possibility of addressing them in ways that had not been available prior to this. (Anderson, pp. 133-34)

The Reflecting Team model had much to offer to the training in genuine dialogue. It was a method of organizing the class members into a therapeutic unit, a non-pejorative, nonhierarchical support that could offer honest feedback in a palatable form. As a product of the transformation in systems thinking, its theoretical foundations had become close enough to gestalt to make a good match. The reflecting team was an excellent “Thou” to the “I” of the student/therapist in the Gestalt Contact Cycle.

Clinical Practicum

Even though relational abilities can be and are addressed throughout the training, it is in the Clinical Practicum that advanced students are given the opportunity to define their style and discover any technical or emotional difficulties that might interfere with their power to facilitate change. As I mentioned earlier, it is in the Clinical Practicum then that the qualities of genuine dialogue should be addressed.

Present Model

The role structure and process of the present model are straightforward. The class members who are in the role of therapist and patient are seated in front of the class. The class is in the role of observing audience. The trainer acts as senior observer and at times as teacher / facilitator. The process is simple. The therapist and patient do psychotherapy, generally without interruption. When they are finished, the observing class and trainer offer feedback.

Reflecting Team Model

Although the seating arrangement is only slightly altered from the present model, each class member, including the trainer, has a dual role. As in the traditional model, the student / therapist and student / patient are seated facing each other in front of the class. The trainer, however, sits next to and a bit behind the therapist. The student / therapist is both therapist to the patient and patient of the trainer and class. The class is both therapist / observer to the therapist and consultant to the trainer. The trainer is consultant to the therapist and receives consultation from the class. The patient is both patient of the therapist and source of feedback to the therapist.
The process is as follows:

• Before classes begin, each class member is required to write a self assessment that addresses the following questions: What do you consider your strengths and abilities? What do you consider your problem or difficulty? Where do you consistently get stuck? What can you do to support yourself when you get stuck or this problem occurs? What can the class do to support you?
• As each class member takes his/her turn as therapist s/he begins by reading his/her self assessment. The self analysis is fully discussed by the therapist, class and trainer. It is very important that both student / therapist and class define and clarify the problem. The therapist must have an awareness of visceral cues or know what s/he is thinking or feeling at the moment or moments before the stuck point occurs and s/he needs to have an idea of how s/he can support him/herself at that moment. It is also the therapist’s job to tell the class how they can be of support. Each class member must be clear as well. Mostly s/he needs to know what to attend to as s/he observes the therapeutic process, and how s/he needs to support the therapist.
• The self assessment discussion is the statement and clarification of need - the beginning of the contact cycle. The therapist takes ownership of his/her problem, connects mind and body, and begins to consider how s/he can be supported through his/her process. The action phase of the cycle follows as the patient and therapist begin to do psychotherapy. They work until the stuck point or the problem occurs. The therapist or trainer may interrupt the therapeutic process at this point. A conversation then ensues between the therapist and consultant / trainer further clarifying the problem. The trainer then turns to his/her consultants, the reflecting team. The team and the trainer converse while the therapist and patient observe. The team offers observations and speculations, keeping in mind the rules of etiquette for reflecting team conversation. When their discussion is completed, the trainer turns back to the therapist and patient and they have a conversation about the reflecting team’s conversation. Once that is complete, the therapist and patient return to the process of psychotherapy. The process of therapy, interruption of therapy, clarification, reflecting team conversation, and therapeutic team reflection on the reflection occur as needed until the therapy is concluded. At any point during this process, a moment of contact may occur - within the patient, between the patient and therapist, within the therapist, between a member or members of the reflecting team and the therapist or patient. After the process has ended, time is given to acknowledge the patient and therapist , for further illumination and to resolve any remaining issues or questions.

It should be amply clear that the Gestalt Reflecting Team Model is actually Gestalt Therapy for the therapist. The therapist is actually the patient and the reflecting team is actually the therapist.. GRT is a Clinical Practicum that creates a safe supportive environment, as safe as a gestalt psychotherapy session, for each student / therapist to discover his/her edge as a therapist and to work at this edge in front of the class, using the class as a form of support. Through the utilization of the rules of etiquette and the indirect reflecting method, members are given the permission and the room to offer honest observations and personal experiences in a supportive mode. The therapist and the patient have the freedom to choose from the smorgasbord of ideas offered by the team, accepting those that are useful and rejecting those that don’t apply. The reflecting team is woven into the fabric of the contact cycle to produce a new hybrid form of training that is rich in possibilities.

Field Theory, Phenomenology, Genuine Dialogue: A Comparison of Two Models of A Gestalt Clinical Practicum

To be effective in our psychotherapeutic work we must have a solid theoretical ground on which we stand. This ground should include a framework for studying the patient/problem, a method of exploration, and an approach to being in relationship. Together they form an integrated whole, a complete approach to our psychothera-peutic endeavor. For a gestalt psychotherapist the framework is field theoretical, the method is phenomenological, and the relationship is dialogical. Their integration is derived from a common world view - that wo/man is not an automaton viewing an objective world from which s/he is separate; s/he is of the world. We cannot know our patient as a being in him/herself. We can only know this person within a field of relationships of which we are a part. A field, according to Yontef, is “a totality of mutually influencing forces that together form a unified whole.” (Yontef, p. 297.)

Perls discusses the relational field view as follows: “Now in any biological, psychological, or sociological investigation whatever, we must start from the inter-acting of the organism and its environment. It makes no sense to speak, for instance, of an animal that breathes without considering air and oxygen as part of its definition...” (Perls et.al., P. 268.)

Yontef offers the relational basis of the phenomenological position: “...there is a world out there, but our knowing is part of our relation to the world and therefore the world we know is always in part determined by us.” (Yontef, Gestalt Journal, 84, p. 60.)

In his introductory essay to Buber’s The Knowledge of Man, Friedman lays thesame relational foundation: “Only I-Thou sees this wholeness as the whole person in unreserved relation with what is over against him rather than as a sum of parts.” (Buber, p. 10.)

Finally, Yontef states, “The first reality is contact between. This is consistent with the existential dialogic belief that there is no “I” except of the “I-You” or the “I-It”, ie. there is no I except of an interpersonal field.” (Yontef, Gestalt Journal 84, p. 62.)

Field Theory

With this theoretical ground in mind I intend to apply the essential characteristics of field theory, phenomenology, and dialogic existentialism to the two forms of clinical practicum. Through this process I will show how the Reflecting Team Model is more illustrative of foundational gestalt principles than the present model.

Parlett’s “Five Principles of Field Theory” offer a sound means of comparison. They are:

1. The Principle of Organization
2. The Principle of Contemporaneity
3. The Principle of Singularity
4. The Principle of Changing Process
5. The Principle of Possible Relevance.

If we view each model as an organized field, which model contains more field theoretical properties? Parlett describes a field theoretical field as follows:

Instead of reducing complex interactive phenomena to separate component parts, the overall picture or total situation is appreciated as a whole, with its wholistic aspects recognized as such. There is a willingness to address and investigate the organized, interconnected, interdependent, interactive nature of complex human phenomena. What happens to something placed in this force field is a function of the overall properties of the field taken as an interactive dynamic whole. The field as a whole is also changed as a result of the inclusion of something new. (Parlett, p. 70)

The field of the present model of Clinical Practicum is quite rigid in its structure and process. The component parts are the therapeutic dyad, the group member observers, and the trainer. Each is confined to a role and a set function. These roles limit the interaction. Therapist and client do therapy and trainer and group members comment on the process.

Although there is a set structure and process in the Reflecting Team, roles are more fluid and complex. Each member of the group, no matter what role s/he plays, has an opportunity to both give and receive. Because of this, there is far more interaction among the members. As a team working together, they bring all of their varying experiences, life history, knowledge, observational skills to bear on the problem at hand, adding complexity, possibility, and dynamic life to the conversation. As they do this, adding a small piece of information to the picture or an observation from their own experience, there is a recognition of their own similarity and interconnectedness. Through this process of interrelating, there is more of an opportunity for members to be touched by each other, to discover new meanings to the problems presented by therapist, patient, and sometimes group members as they react to the situation (Principle of Organization), and therefore change to occur within anyone present.

In the present model, the focus of attention of the group members is on critiquing the therapeutic work. Most of the discussion occurs after the work is completed. There is little opportunity for change to occur when the moment of experience has passed. The focus of attention of the group in the Reflecting Team Model is on the problem as presented and experienced by the therapist at that moment in time (Principle of Contemporaneity). ...”we concentrate on “what is” rather than “what was” or “what will be.”(Parlett, p. 72.) We as a group are also all aware that what we are viewing is the therapist’s concept and experience of his/her problem right now; that in the next moment it will be different, and that we may view his/her dilemma from an alternative viewpoint (Principle of Singularity). Change is more possible within this field theoretical mode.

In the present model the process generally involves two steps - the therapeutic work and the commentary afterwards. It is a closed system with little room for continuity or the idea of moment to moment process. Since the Reflecting Team is
actually a gestalt contact cycle, the entire group process ( therapeutic work - clarification - reflections - reflections on reflections - therapeutic work - etc. ) is about change over time (Principle of Changing Process).

The present Clinical Practicum does not include an awareness of the impact of the group or the system on the therapist, the client, or the group members. Meta - discussion or discussion about the effect of the larger context on the individual members is not a part of the thinking of the present model. This awareness is inherent in the Reflecting Team Model (Principle of Possible Relevance). The whole idea of reflections and reflections on reflections - of small groups commenting on larger groups or the reverse and the emphasis on the expression of personal experience opens the door to looking at the effect of one on the other. To quote Yontef quoting Jacobs,...”the observed affects the observer, because there is the observed observations of the observer’s observing!!” (Yontef, p. 309.)

The Phenomenological Method

Throughout his life Edmund Husserl struggled to describe a method of analysis of the human psyche that would get to the essence of consciousness rather than merely scientifically describe external cause and effect phenomena. Kockelmans, in his comprehensive discussion of Husserl’s Phenomenology, states “... although it is true that empirical psychology is able to bring to light valuable psychophysical facts and laws, it nevertheless remains deprived of a deeper understanding and a definitive scientific evaluation of these facts as long as it is not founded in a systematic science of conscious life that investigates the psychical as such with the help of “immanent,” intuitive reflection.” (Kockelmans, p. 53.) The method that Husserl developed of gaining access to pure consciousness, which he called phenomenological reduction, involves a twofold process of first bracketing off the absolute meanings of objects and then methodically describing all experiences along with their unique meanings to the perceiver. “the world as such, the “world in brackets,” or in other words, the world, or rather individual things in the world as absolute, are replaced by the respective meanings of each in consciousness [Bewusstseinssinn] in its various modes (perceptual meaning, recollected meaning, and so on).” (Kockelmans, p. 113.)

In Gestalt Psychotherapy we utilize the phenomenological method to gain access to our patient’s experience. We bracket our biases, attitudes, etc. and focus on our patient’s total phenomenological field in the moment. The meaning of the experience to our patient emerges out of this process. “...considered as a discipline a phenomenological approach to psychotherapy means attending to experience in a way that allows the patient to be impressed by, impacted by, what’s obvious, with interpretation used very sparingly and in the service of seeing what is, experiencing what is. That takes the discipline of bracketing, to put aside beliefs about reality and principle and to look with fresh eyes each time you work.” (Yontef, Gestalt Journal, Spring 81, p. 9.) Through the use of the gestalt experiment and focusing on awareness within the contact cycle, the phenomenological field with its meaning comes to life and is relived in the present moment. The patient’s avoidances and blocks to awareness are experienced as well.

The major difference between the two clinical practica is that GRT utilizes the power of the phenomenological method to focus on and work with the student/ therapist’s relational difficulties, whereas in the present model this therapeutic tool is not applied to the problems of the student/therapist. Since the purpose of the practicum is to work with the students’ difficulties with being in genuine relationship, in GRT the use of the contact cycle enables each student/therapist to experience and grapple with the phenomenological field of his/her unique problem in the moment. The class/reflecting team/therapist has the opportunity to view the process and to practice being supportive therapists - being in relationship with each other as they react as genuine human beings to their patient’s problem rather than as critics.

Genuine Dialogue

As I mentioned earlier, the Clinical Practicum is the area of training in which the qualities of genuine dialogue should be addressed. They are addressed in the present model, but only within the therapeutic dyad. In GRT everyone in the class is practicing being in relationship simultaneously. The student/therapist is learning about him/herself in relationship, as in the present model, through struggling to contactfully meet the patient within the dyad. Additionally, as patient to the class with the identified need being a specific relational difficulty or strength, the student/therapist has the opportunity to utilize the empathy and experience of the class to deeply explore or experiment with a dialogical problem or capacity. Any asset or problem the student/therapist presents to the training class on the personal assessment will naturally fall into one of the categories of genuine dialogue.

In response, members of the class/reflecting team are also working on developing dialogical capacities. Each member of the reflecting team has the opportunity to notice the degree to which s/he is present by observing his or her own reactions and by observing him/herself in relation to other members of the team. S/he can notice his/her capacity to be inclusive by observing the closeness of his/her reflections to the experience of the therapist/patient. As the process unfolds s/he can observe his/her need to control or change what is occurring by observing him/herself in comparison to others as well. It is a unique experience for a gestalt therapist to be doing therapy side by side with others at the same moment in time.

In addition, the process teaches a non-hierarchical manner of relating because each person is equal and is checked by another through the duality of roles. The experience of the class is one of human beings in relationship, bringing their own perceptions and phenomenology to the task at hand, which is helping a fellow student surmount difficulties and knowing that they are in the same dilemma - the dilemma of being as real as one can be in a healing relationship.

Conclusion

By applying fundamental gestalt principles to the area of training, the Gestalt Reflecting Team offers advanced students an opportunity to explore and experiment with their unique style and/or difficulties in being in a dialogical relationship. In its adherence to the principles of field theory, GRT attends to the complexity and dynamic nature of human experience; in its phenomenological method, it focuses on the unique experience of the person in the moment. By weaving the Reflecting Team from Family Systems into the framework of the Gestalt Contact Cycle, an environment is created that allows students to take risks in self exploration and to be genuine, honest, and caring in their feedback. Since its origin five years ago, students have found GRT to be a rich, exciting learning experience.

Acknowledgements

I would especially like to thank Dr. Philip Pechukas for his wise counsel, patience, and endurance during this arduous writing.

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