Abstract

This article provides Gestalt Global's understanding of Gestalt therapy constructs, with expanded definitions, quotes, and cross references. The constructs are arranged in a nested fashion, with associated terms coming under larger ideas and cover the larger categories from "G" through "P.".

Ground - contextual background supporting the formation of figure

Group - more than one; includes couples, small and large groups, and organizations

• therapy - dynamics in support of growth and purposive change
• process - dynamic flow of individuals in a "community" of relationships
  • "...a series of waves of contact and withdrawal through which there is an ebb and flow of energetic surges and rest and consolidation. Each stage or wave provides the necessary ground for the next emergent figure of group development." Mackewn, 1997, p. 240
• consulting - meeting to consider, assess, support, have purposive influence, or effect change with regard to an area of expertise or an organizational structure and process

Holism - nature/existence as a unified whole; people perceived as undivided and greater than the sum of their descriptions

• "Every contacting act is a whole of awareness, motor response, and feeling - a cooperation of the sensory, muscular, and vegetative systems - and contacting occurs at the surface-boundary in the field of the organism/environment." Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, 1951, p. 258
• "By holism (field conception) Perls referred to the whole being greater than a sum of the parts, to the unity of the human organism, and to the unity of the entire organism/environment field." Yontef, 1993, p. 86
• "Gestalt therapists understand and work therapeutically with their clients as persons who live organismically in a number of inseperable and interpenetrating dimensions, i.e. who - often simultaneously - live bodily, cognitively, emotionally, purposively, aesthetically, spiritually, interpersonally, socially, and economically. Thus, we make no real distinction between mind, body, feelings, values, and purposes. These are understood as interpenetrating aspects of the living of the human organism, which constantly and reciprocally influence each other." Crocker, 1999, p. 17
• "...some thirty-five years before Perls, Goldstein had stated, 'The organism, we assume, is a unit.' He meant that no system within a person can be understood in an isolated laboratory, apart from it’s normal function in the human body. Not only that, but he also extrapolated that no individual person could be understood, as an individual organism, apart from his or her social-cultural context, their function in society. So his understanding of holism was quite advanced and anticipated field theory. Holism affirms that people are undivided and greater than the sum of their descriptions. Gestalt therapy utilizes the same term. Holism resists reductionistic characterizations, labels, or diagnostic simplicity. Echoing Goldstein, in 1962 Gendlin asserted, 'In some respects the body is an interpenetrating system in which every aspect of order involves every other aspect.' Thus, if something is obvious in one domain of experience, such as one’s thought life, it is connected to a less obvious, but corollary experience in other domains of experience, such as one’s spiritual life..." Brownell, 2000

Phenomenal/phenomenology - individual experience/ study of experience and human meaning - the interpretation of the experience of being in the world

• "What is studied in a field approach is phenomena which is given in experience, rather than noumena the forces assumed or infered to be behind the presenting phenomena...The Gestalt field approach is phenomenological. It studies the 'field' as experienced by a person at a moment. Phenomenology takes as its only data what is immediately and naively experienced at a moment." Yontef, 1993, p. 242
• The Gestalt approach is a form of phenomenological field theory. Gestalt shares the concerns of phenomenology, which are to study the multiple possibilities of a given field or situation as it is experienced subjectively by the people cocreating it at any moment in time. It shares the phenomenological premise that it is not possible to establish a single objective or absolute truth but only to be open to a multiplicity of subjective interpretations of reality, for each of us experiences a uniquely interpreted reality - because people form highly individual impressions of situations and endow events with subjective meaning." Mackewn, 1997, p. 58-9

Phenomenological Method - technique for investigating the quality of another's experience

• observing - tracking the individual visually, kinesthetically, and auditorially
• bracketing - noticing, but setting aside one's own internal process
• describing - saying out loud to the one observed what one notices and/or experiences in their presence

Polarity - product of reducing an otherwise complex field to two opposite extremes in a continuum, influencing contact and experience of self, thus the sense of one's self.

Process of Therapy - the sequence and development of a healing, growthful experience resulting in change

• through layers of neurosis - often encountered patterns in the process of change, often viewed as sequential (from Philippson, 2002)
  
  • cliche - avoiding the issue, missing what is important
  • role-playing - relying on a fixed and known/predictable role, encouraging the therapist to play a complementary role
  • impasse - glimpsing beyond the role to the possibilities outside, causing (existential) anxiety
  • implosion - stuckness - not wanting to stay with the limitations of the fixed role, but not knowing what else to do
  • explosion - emergence of feeling and authentic action, based on the client's own new integration of the situation rather than the stuck, fixed movement
• context of interrelated components of Gestalt therapy and counseling (from Mackewn, 1997, p.2-3)
  • attending to beginnings and initial conditions
  • understanding and exploring the holistic field
  • developing a dialogic relationship as the crucible for growth
  • observing process and developing diagnostic perspectives
  • exploring awareness and contact
  • integrating creative, experimental, and transpersonal dimensions
  • working with body process, energy, resistance and impasse
  • attending to support and background processes
  • shaping counselling over time

Resources:

• Brownell, P. (2000) A Theoretical Matrix for Training and Practice. The Australian Gestalt Journal, 4(1), p. 51-61
• Crocker, S. (1999) A Well-Lived Life, Essays in Gestalt Therapy. Cleveland, OH: Gestalt Institute of Cleveland Press.
• Mackewn, J. (1997) Developing Gestalt Counselling. London, UK: Sage Pulications.
• Perls, F., Hefferline, R., Goodman, P. (1951) Gestalt Therapy, Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. London, UK: Souvenir Press.
• Philippson, P. (2002) Contemporary Challenges in the Application of Perls' Five-Layer Theory. Gestalt!, 6(2). Available on-line http://www.g-g.org/gej/6-2/layers.html
• Yontef, G. (1993) Awareness, Dialogue, and Process, Highland, NY: Gestalt Journal Press.

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