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Gestalt Therapy
Maggie Down
Psychotherapist & Counsellor
GESTALT THERAPY, originating around the middle of the last century, stands as one of the major foundation psychotherapies. It is a powerful experiential approach for healing past issues, and for growth - the fulfilment of human potential.
'Gestalt' is a German word which, roughly translated, means configuration, or whole form. The Gestalt approach in therapy is one that embraces a person's physical, psychological, intellectual, emotional, interpersonal and spiritual experience in an holistic way.
Gestalt therapy represented a radical departure from the traditional psychoanalytic model developed by Freud. Fritz Perls, a German-born psychiatrist, was the principal originator of gestalt therapy. He rebelled against psychoanalysis which he saw as intellectualising and limiting of the potential of the client.
Where Freud sought to interpret the client's unconscious mind, Perls' interest was to assist the client to discover personal understanding and meaning by eliciting the client's experiential awareness. As such, this startling new approach, phenomenological rather than interpretive, empowered clients by engaging them much more actively in their own healing and growth, and, in so doing, created a more equal and collaborative relationship between therapist and client.
Gestalt therapy was at the forefront of the human potential movement, which centred around Esalen Institute in California in the sixties. Gestalt drew on a number of influences and represents a synthesis of many earlier or simultaneous developments in psychology and psychotherapy. These include analytic, existential, phenomenological, humanistic, behavioural, dialogical, holistic, and systemic approaches, as well as gestalt psychology (which is separate from, but often confused with, gestalt therapy).
Subsequent therapies have in turn 'borrowed', or developed upon, many of the principles of gestalt therapy, such that many gestalt techniques and understandings are now commonplace therapeutic tools and perspectives used by counsellors and psychotherapists from many traditions. However, despite this evolutionary intermingling of ideas, gestalt therapy in its maturity remains a unique and distinctive therapeutic approach.
In addition to being a form of psychotherapy, gestalt is also a philosophy for living. The gestalt approach means living life 'alive' and being as fully oneself as one can be. It means trusting the integrity of one's inner processes, and taking risks to enhance meaning and connection with self and with the world.
Principles of Gestalt Therapy
The key principle in gestalt therapy is the bringing of experience into the here-and-now through the use of conscious awareness. The client's attention is brought to what s/he is doing in the moment. This applies whether the client's concern is in the past, present or future. Talking 'about' personal matters, without awareness, is unlikely to result in significant change. Choice, and therefore self-responsibility, exist only in the present.
With this in mind, the gestalt therapist will endeavour to invite the client to be more present in the therapy session, through creative experimentation. Within a context of safety, the client will be encouraged to take risks, to try something new, so that awareness is heightened. Risk-taking can be on a micro or macro level. The risk could be as subtle as taking a breath at the moment of avoiding feeling, or of saying a word that describes what is being avoided. Of utmost concern to the gestalt therapist is the development within the client of self-support which will facilitate healthy risk-taking.
Free-flowing awareness is a process of continuous evolution. Very often we learn to deaden, or interrupt, our awareness flow through coping mechanisms learnt in childhood. What is outside our awareness cannot be resolved or healed.
"The game we play is let's pretend, and pretend that we are not pretending.
We choose to forget who we are, and forget that we have forgotten." R.D. Laing
Often the awareness work in gestalt therapy is directed towards how the client blocks perception and expression of feelings and thoughts and impulses. Through directed focus on these processes, new organic possibilities of feeling, thought and action emerge. The undoing of the interruption to awareness allows for a natural completion of that specific response. This is healing in action. Then the individual's natural flow of awareness and experience can resume. It is the process, more than the content, which holds most importance in gestalt - not what the experience is but how it is processed by this particular individual.
Through the facilitation of process work in gestalt therapy, the client is empowered to release old blocks, to discover lost parts of the self, and to find new solutions to old dilemmas.
It must be remembered that gestalt is not primarily technique-based. Rather its focus is a dialogical one. Authentic, meaningful contact between therapist and client is paramount. The gestalt therapist brings to the work an aware, authentic, responsive self that is, in itself, a powerful therapeutic context and tool, which facilitate the client's development of a greater capacity for genuine relationship with the self and others.
Gestalt Therapist
If you choose to see a qualified gestalt therapist, you will be working with someone who has undertaken intensive psychotherapeutic training for 3 or 4 years on a part-time basis, in addition to generally holding prior qualifications within a related professional field.
The training will have been predominantly experiential, and the therapist most likely will have undertaken continuous personal therapy throughout the total period of training - as an additional requirement of training - and will hold a deep commitment to lifelong growth and personal development.
© Copyright Maggie Down 2003
Further reading
James Oldham, Tony Key, Yaro Starak "Risking Being Alive" 1978 Pit Publishing Bundoora
For further information contact Maggie Down on 9385 5553
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