In a therapeutic situation the therapist brings to the meeting with the client a ground of learning and experience, and this influences what she notices as important in the revelations of the client, suggests working hypotheses as to what is going on with the client, and gives rise to spontaneous dialogic responses by the therapist and/or decisions about how to intervene in a practical way.

Similarly, the therapist’s verbal and nonverbal responses to the client introduce novelty into the client’s phenomenology, yet these are also altered to some degree by the ground the client brings to the meeting. Therefore, each subsequent response by both therapist and client bears the marks both of what each reveals and the effect on these revelations of the ground which each participant brings. This mutual influencing by revelation as well as ground is why dialogue is a “speaking through” rather than mutual “speaking at” or “speaking to”. True dialogue is therefore an authentic form of interpersonal relationship, in contrast the more frequent kinds of relating which are primarily ways of being-alongside.

What the client reveals can be taken in at different levels of reception. If a therapist primarily takes a practical stance toward the client she will listen for certain anticipated cues, cues which either suggest interventions or which enable the therapist to access theoretical structures which feed an interpretation of the client’s experience. In contrast, a Gestalt therapist who is committed to true dialogue operates within a paradoxical framework. On the one hand, the overarching agreement between therapist and client is that the client wants change and the therapist agrees to help him achieve it. On the other hand, the Gestalt therapist practicing this kind of dialogue operates primarily within a non-practical framework of caring curiosity, where the meeting of persons and the self-revelation of the client are primary.

Indeed, caring curiosity is the informing motive for the phenomenological method. Here, within a context in which the therapist has shown that she cares about the client, the therapist increasing shows a welcoming openness and a genuine curiosity about what goes on in the client’s life and living. As the therapist takes in what the client reveals, she permits her curiosity to influence what is said as she asks questions about what happened, how the client felt/feels, then what? and so on. As the client becomes more and more convinced of the therapist’s caring and her genuine interest in him, he becomes increasingly willing to “pull back the veil” which hides how he actually lives his life and reveals how he lives at increasingly deeper and more truthful levels. This occurs as the therapy goes on over time.

In his “Essay on Truth” Heidegger points out that the Greek meaning for “truth” is alethea, which literally means “unveiled”. What-is, as every Gestalt therapist knows, is most often hidden behind any of a variety of protective masks which no doubt have served a number of practical purposes during the person’s lifetime. Moreover, we also believe that healing can come only if we can first face what-actually-is—the well-known paradoxical principle of change. This means that the processes of change require progressively radical truth-telling, an increasing willingness to pull back the veils which hide the truth of how a person actually does business with the world.

Human beings will rarely show how they “really are” on command, or with cajoling, or through their own practical intention. Rather, we are usually unwilling to show ourselves most truthfully unless another person shows genuinely caring curiosity, a non-moralistic receptivity, and an unconditional openness to whatever and however we are able to reveal ourselves. And this is precisely the nature of the phenomenological method of psychotherapy.

The phenomenological method is the direct methodological implication of the paradoxical principle of change, and it is equally paradoxical. When a Gestalt therapist practices this method, she is open to receiving whatever and however the client shows himself, both verbally and nonverbally. This receptivity results from the therapist’s caring for the client as a person and her genuine curiosity about how the client lives now and has previosly lived through time and circumstances. On the other hand, the therapist is not a “blank sheet” upon which any and ever revelation makes an impression—that would be a rather sterile phenomenalism, that is, a descriptive account devoid of understanding. Rather, phenomenology involves a logos, an understanding of what reveals itself which draws on a theoretical framework.

In contrast to essentially practical and interpretive approaches, the phenomenological method uses theory only to organize and to explore what is revealed, honoring the revelations themselves as primary and the therapist’s thoughts about them as secondary. A Gestalt therapist using this method constructs working hypotheses about what the client reveals, being willing to put aside any hypothetical construct which is not borne out by further revelations as the therapy goes on over time. The therapist’s theoretical ground is thus used in the service of making vague figures stand out in relief, uncovering and exploring the implications of what and how the client reveals himself, and working with significant figures and patterns. The therapist knows that she can never know more about the client’s experience than the client does, and thus the therapist employing this method remains open, humble, and respectful in the face of what the client shows of himself.

The phenomenological method involves a dialectic relationship with the client, a movement between I-Thou and I-It as the therapeutic process goes on. While discovering what-is in the client’s living is the central aim of the process, yet the task of the therapist is to find ways to facilitate the client’s ability and willingness to let what-is be revealed. Therefore, as the client tells his story, verbally and nonverbally, the therapist notices certain aspects of the story and the client’s manner which pique her curiosity and which suggest interventions which can highlight and/or explore these aspects. To the extent that the therapist is thinking about the client and deciding to use one or another intervention to facilitate the client’s self-revelation, the therapist is in an I-It mode. When she is receptively present and actively welcomes the client’s revelations, without an agenda or any fixed preconceptions about what-is with the client, she is in an I-Thou relational mode with the client. In Gestalt therapy, I-It always serves the I-Thou relationship. It is always and only for the sake of aiding and deepening the client’s revelation of how he lives and the ground which supports that living that the therapist resorts to any intervention or constructs any hypothesis about the client and the client’s behavior. The commitment to be-there as an actively caring and interested presence is the therapist’s central motivation throughout the therapeutic process; everything else is servant to this.

At the deepest level of a dialogic meeting between client and therapist, where the relationship is most fully I-Thou, there are moments when there is an intimate meeting of persons, a meeting in which each is known as the mysterious Other that each person is. Not that any of us can ever catch ourselves or anyone else in the very act of being who we are—that reality never enters our experience as an object, as a phenomenon. But within the context of an I-Thou dialogue therapist and client can enter into the presence of each other, not primarily as objects of experience but as truly meeting subjects. Perhaps this is the real source of therapeutic healing and growth.

Here is where the phenomenological method and the dialogue it informs become essentially spiritual. Human spirituality is a human capacity to have a certain kind of experience, just as physicality, emotionality, or rationality enable us to have specific kinds of experiences. What kind of experience do we have by virtue of having spirituality? As I view it, spirituality is our capacity to interact with a significant mystery, and to do so in ways which honor the intrinsic mystery that it is. A genuine mystery can be known only by its effects, the phenomena that result from its actions; it can never be known as it is in itself, nor can it ever be fully predicted or controlled.

There are mysteries all around us, in nature, in personal and interpersonal life, in the arts, and in religious and spiritual life. They are not often responded to appropriately, but are mainly dealt with as if they can be reduced to the level of what can be known, controlled, and predicted. However, the appropriate response to an intrinsic mystery is to be open to its revelation, to welcome that revelation, and to honor it as it shows itself in its own way and on its own terms. To meet such a mystery we must be willing to live with ambiguity and to be able to interact with it improvisationally, leaving what is fully understood and comfortable behind.

Is this not what we, as Gestalt therapists, do as we meet our clients by means of dialogue and the phenomenological method? Here we may draw on our theoretical ground and our experience of therapeutic methods in order to make the client’s revelations clearer, to draw out their implications, and to work with whatever emerges, but the therapist’s theoretical and experiential ground functions first and above all as servant to the client’s self-revelations, and to his subsequent self-understanding and his personal transformation.

In my opinion, the phenomenological method, and with it true dialogue, cannot be practiced unless the therapist employs her spirituality. Spirituality permits the therapist to lay aside pre-set agendas, preconceptions, and strict diagnostic categories, to welcome and to encourage the client to show himself truthfully, to pull back the veil which hides him as he actually is, and thus “to show his face,” ultimately to the world in which he lives. The therapist is thus further committed to be present as the client discovers how he can become, and supports him as he learns how to stand-out in his world as a clear figure, and begins to engage with that world in truth-telling ways. This is not to forget that the overarching purpose of the therapy is the practical goal of therapeutic change. But, paradoxically, this goal can be achieved only by looking away from it, in order to let what-is show itself just-as-it-is—and then as-it-can-be. When this happens, the work of therapy is truly a spiritual work, and the defining character of the process itself is deeply spiritual.

Bibliography

Beisser, A. (1970). “The Paradoxical Principle of Change” in Gestalt Therapy
Now, edited by Fagan, J. and Shepherd, E.L. . Palo Alto: Science and Behavior Books.
Crocker, S. F. (1999). A Well-Lived Life: Essays in Gestalt Therapy. Cambridge: Gestalt Institute of Cleveland Press.
Heidegger, M. (1949). “The Essence of Truth” in Existence and Being, edited by
Brock, W.. New York: Henry Regnery.