Melnick seems to yearn for that type of marginality that characterized those founding years by saying, "our challenge is to hold onto our marginality in the future" The problem is exactly as he points out: The kind of marginality we have is the kind that makes us invisible not the kind that is reveling outside the box.
He then introduces a series of articles presumably selected to offer some direction and excitement for the future.
The first is an interview with an Israeli organizational consultant. She is very specific about the difficulty of teaching Gestalt to Arabic groups - "the values of gestalt are very strange to them," she says. But they are very strange to everybody. At least they were when we were marginal in the yearned-for sense. The reason, I suspect, that they may not seem so strange is that we have abandoned the values and principles ( for example, the excitement of novelty) for post-modern relativism.
CONSIDER THIS: The power of gestalt is not to support multiculturalism but to subvert it! From my first encounter with gestalt in the early seventies, I thought that its uniqueness and great potential lie in the fact that it could help one shed cumbersome cultural shackles. That alone would assure Gestalt of both notoriousness AND marginality.
The next article is by the venerable Ed Nevis. "Choices for the Future," it is entitled. Nevis asks the right question: Is the Gestalt paradigm of 60 years ago appropriate for the next 60 years? He offers the observation that "our model may lack relevance for today's times." But, it is "not clear" to Doctor Nevis what would be more relevant.
He proposes the growing interest in ground as perhaps a "revolutionary direction." Ground , he reminds us, includes developmental history, assimilated skills and knowledge, and the context of the moment. But unless one is still convinced that the human organism is born a tabula rasa, ground is far more than that. A psychology informed by evolutionary theory presents a strong case that neonates (humans and other species) come into the world with a lot of preparation. For humans, that preparation was set in the genome by the Stone Age and much of it considerably earlier. We have babies prepared to encounter the Pleistocene and only marginally (there's that word again) the 21st Century. It seems to me that an understanding of how and why that is would be important to therapist in the next 60 years because it will be a major source of angst, misunderstanding, bewilderment, and violence - just as it is today.
This segues nicely into a discussion of the "educational consultant" role of future therapists. The essential requirement to be an "educational consultant" is to be well-educated. Here the emphasis called for seems to be in the arts and humanities. Also to be encouraged is an expansion of awareness and contact in political, community and ecological areas. He highlights the salient contribution of Sara and Lane Conn in the latter field. However it was John Swanson and Bill Cahalan who introduced ecopsychology into the Gestalt community.
What is lacking in this vision of a broadly educated gestalt therapist is knowledge of biology: pharmaceuticals, neuroscience, new understandings of consciousness and Self, Evolutionary Psychology - just to list a few domains. In my opinion, it would not be possible to update "intrapsychic awareness training" without the revelations of modern brain science.
Finally, Nevis calls for the enhancement of "multiple realities". It sounds depressingly like more Post modernism.
Three articles on Phenomenology complete the main body of this issue of Gestalt Review. Two of these by Mark McConville and Kenneth Meyer, respectively, are critical responses to one by Vernon Van De Riet . They are all advocates of the traditional views of Phenomenology developed especially by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. McConville and Meyer offer some criticism of Van de Riet's choice of emphasis of Husserlian Phenomenology. My criticism of them all is that they seem untouched by the fact that we have entered an Age of Biology. Thus researchers such as Antonio Damasio, Gerald Edelman, and an increasing number of others are throwing a great deal of light on the concrete nature of consciousness. Combined with the so-called materialist philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, the literature is compelling - but of course only to those who are reading it.
Husserl had only an idea of consciousness. He had no idea of what neuroscience would reveal about consciousness and the kind of speculations that could be made in the 21st Century.
For example, it is a dubious assumption that a person gains more relevant and pertinent knowledge of him or her self and others simply by allowing "experience to organize". To evaluate "observation" with "experience" is ignoring what intervenes in between: for one thing, hundreds of microseconds - ample time for the workings of motivation, deception, self-deception, belief systems, and inclusive fitness.
I don't believe, any more, that a client is "expert" in understanding his own experience. The mechanisms of deception and self-deception, in the service of inclusive fitness, are too powerful.
It certainly seems wise for a therapist to "set aside erroneous assumptions and interpretations" (an example of bracketing) particularly those that are a hundred years old. Here's one: that "relational" and "biological" are a contrasting pair. That is an egregiously outmoded notion. But why would one set aside (in an effort to bracket off interpretive impulses) what we know today about , for example, consciousness, perception, and motivation ? In the early days of Gestalt Therapy Fritz convinced us that Freud's interpret ions of human behavior were baseless and perhaps pure fantasy. It is the nature of experience, he said, that deserves the attention of psychology. But Fritz and even Paul Goodman thought that a new therapy and a new psychology should be grounded in Biology. We can do that, now.
If Phenomenology means suspending judgments, that removes all value from the fundamental tool that all creatures must have. A huge percentage of human mentation is made up of judgments, second-by-second: this I like, this I don't like. From the moment of your birth the environment is making judgments of you. Does he or she have five fingers and toes, Does he or she look healthy ? Does he or she resemble the putative father? At which point the family rushes in to reassure everyone that, indeed, the baby looks just like the dad. And the dad beams and the mother is relieved.
If it is true that Husserl wanted to know "the process by which objects present themselves in awareness and how those objects are transformed into meaningful experience," then what should be emulated is not his speculations, but his curiosity.
The human mind/brain, or any trait of any organism, could not have evolved except as a response to the real world. Organisms that didn't are not your ancestors. How to explain, then, this "subjectivity" that inspires so much speculation among humans - or some humans - is more than just an interesting question. It may hold the key to true understanding of human behavior.
