The Gestalt Outlook Introduction Gestalt Therapy

Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality Frederick Perls, Ralph Hefferline, & Paul Goodman

Indispensable

– both for the writing and the thorough understanding of this book – is an attitude which as a theory actually permeates

the content and the measure of this book. Thus the reader is apparently confronted with an impossible task: to understand the book he must have the “Gestaltist” mentality,

and to acquire it he must understand the book. Fortunately, the difficulty is far from being insurmountable,

for the authors have not invented such a mentality. On the contrary, we believe that the gestalt outlook is the original,

undistorted, natural approach to life, that is, to man’s thinking, acting, feeling.

The average person, having been raised in an atmosphere full of splits, has lost his Wholeness, his Integrity.

To come together again he has to heal the dualism of his person, of his thinking, and of his language.

He is accustomed to thinking of contrasts – of infantile and mature, of body and mind, organism and environment, self and reality,

as if they were opposing entities. The unitary outlook which can dissolve such a dualistic approach

is buried but not destroyed and, as we intend to show, can be regained with wholesome advantage.

Page xxiv

Gestalt Outlook The organism grows by assimilating

One of the themes of this book is assimilation.

The organism grows by assimilating from the environment what it needs for its very growth.

Though this is obvious to everyone in regard to the physiological processes,

the stages of mental assimilation have, for the most part, been overlooked.

Only by thorough assimilation can heterogeneous substances be unified into a new Whole.

We believe that by assimilating whatever valuable substance the psychological scienses of our time have to offer we are now in the position to put forward the basis

for a consistent and practical psychotherapy. Intro PHG (1994) page xxiv

Preference to the term “Gestalt”

Why do we give preference to the term “Gestalt”

when we take equally into account the Freudian and para-Freudian psychoanalysis,

the Reichian armor theory, semantics and philosophy? To this we have to say:

we were not benevolently eclectic; none of the disciplines mentioned have been swallowed wholesale

and artificially synthesized. They have been critically examined and organized into a new whole,

a comprehensive theory. In this process it emerged that we had to shift concern

of psychiatry from the fetish of the unknown, from the adoration of the “unconscious”,

to the problems and phenomenology of awareness: what factors operate, and how do faculties

that can operate succesfully only in the state of awareness lose this proconflictperty?

Intro PHG (1994) page xxv

Awareness is characterized by Contact

Awareness is characterized by contact, by sensing,

by excitement and by Gestalt formation. Its adequate functioning is the realm of normal psychology;

any disturbance comes under the heading of psychopathology. Contact as such is possible without awareness, but for awareness contact is indispensable.

The crucial question is: with what is one in contact?

The spectator of a modern painting may believe he is in contact with the picture

while he is actually in contact with the art critic of his favorite journal. PHG (1994) page xxv

The formation of Gestalten

Sensing determines the nature of awareness,

whether distant (acoustic), close (tactile) or within the skin (proprioceptive). In the last term is included the sensing of one’s dreams and thoughts.

Excitement seems to be linguistically a good term. It covers the physiological excitation

as well as the undifferentiated emotions. It includes the Freudian cathexis notion, Bergson’s elan vital,

the psychological manifestations of the metabolism from Mongolism to Basedow, and it gives us the basis for a simple theory of anxiety.

Gestalt formation always accompanies awareness. We do not see three isolated points, we make a triangle out of them.

The formation of complete and comprehensive Gestalten is the condition of mental health and growth.

Only the completed Gestalt can be organized as an automatically functioning unit (reflex) in the total organism.

Any incomplete Gestalt represents an “unfinished situation” that clamors for attention and interferes

with the formation of any novel, vital Gestalt. Instead of growth and development

we the find stagnation and regression. PHG intro (1994) page xxv

Gestalt: Meaningful Organized Whole

Configuration, structure, theme, structural relationship (Korzybski)

or meaningful organized whole most closely approximate the originally German word Gestalt,

for which there is no exact English equivalent. As a linguistic example: pal and lap contain the same elements,

but the meaning is dependent upon the order of the letters within their Gestalt.

Again, bridge has the meaning of a game of cards or a structure joining two river banks.

This time the meaning depends upon the context in which bridge appears. The color lilac looks bluish against a red background,

red against a blue background. The context in which the element appears is called

in Gestalt psychology the “ground’ against which the “figure” stands out.

PHG (1994) intro page xxvi

Disturbed Elasticity

In neurosis, and much more in psychosis,

the elasticity of the figure/ground formation is disturbed. We often find either a rigidity (fixation) or a lack of figure formation (repression).

Both interfere with the habitual completion of an adequate Gestalt. In health the relation between figure and ground is a process

of permanent but meaningful emerging and receding. Thus the interplay of figure and background becomes the center of the theory as presented in this book:

attention, concentration, interest, concern, excitement and grace are representative of healthy figure-ground formation,

while confusion, boredom, compulsions, fixations, anxiety, amnesias, stagnation and self-consciousness are indicative

of figure/ground formation which is disturbed. PHG intro (1994) page xxvi

The Defensive Function of the Armor

Reich’s idea of the motoric armor is doubtless the most important

contribution to psychosomatic medicine since Freud. We are at variance with him (and Anna Freud) at one point.

We regard the defensive function of the armor as an ideological deception.

Once an organismic need is condemned, the self returns its creative activity as aggression against the disowned impulse,

subduing and controlling it. A person would have to engage a lifelong nerve-wracking struggle

with his own instincts (many nervous breakdown bear witness to that)

were it not for the organism’s ability to form automatically functioning cordon sanitaires.

The ego is as defensive as Hitler’s Ministry for Defense in 1939. PHG intro (1994) page xxvii

Unable to relinquish self-control

However,

in shifting the accent from the recovery of the “repressed” to re-organizing the “repressing” forces,

we wholeheartedly follow Reich, though we find that in the recovery of the self there is much more

involved than the mere dissolving of the character armor. When we try to make the patient aware of his “means whereby”

he suppresses, we find an astounding inconsistency. We find that he is aware and proud of when he uses

many of his energies against himself, as in self-control, but we also notice - and this the therapeutic dilemma –

that he is for the most part unable to relinquish his self-control.

The Freudian tells his patient to relax and not to censor. But this is precisely what he cannot do.

He has “forgotten” how he is doing the inhibiting. The inhibiting has become routine, a patterned bahavior,

just as in reading we have forgotten the spelling of the single word.

PHG intro (1994) page xxvii

A Gestaltist Outlook Comes to our Rescue

Now we seem to be only slightly better of than Reich.

First, we were unaware of what was repressed; Now we are largely unaware of how we repress. The active therapist seems to be indispensable: he either has to interpret or shake the patient. Again a Gestaltist outlook comes to our rescue.

In an earlier book (Perls: Ego, Hunger and Aggression) the following theory was put forward:

In the struggle for survival the most relevant need becomes figure and organizes the behavior of an individual

until this need is satisfied, whereupon it recedes into the background

(temporary balance) and makes room for the next now important need. In the healthy organism this change of dominance

has the best survival chance. In our society such dominant needs, for example, morals, etc.,

often become chronic and interfere with the subtle self-regulation of the human organism.

PHG (1994) intro page xxvii/xxviii

The Neurotic’s Survival Outlook

Now again we have a unitary principle to work with.

The neurotic’s survival outlook (even if it appears foolish to the outsider)

requires that he becomes tense, that he censor, that he defeats the analyst, etc.

This is his dominant need, but he has forgotten how he organized it;

it has become routine. His intentions not to censor are as efficient

as an alcoholic’s New Year’s resolution. The routine has to become once more a fully aware,

new, exciting need in order to regain the ability to cope with unfinished situations.

Instead of pulling means out of the unconscious we work on the uppermost surface.

The bother is that the patient (and too often the therapist himself)

takes this surface for granted. PHG (1994) page xxviii

Blah-blah and real Concern

The way the patient talks, breathes, moves, censors, scorns,

looks for causes, etc. – this to him is obvious, is constitution, is nature.

But actually is the expression of his dominant needs, e.g., to be victorious, good and impressive.

It is precisely in the obvious that we find his unfinished personality;

and only by tackling the obvious, by melting the petrified, by differentiating between blah-blah and real concern,

between the obsolete and the creative, can the patient regain the liveliness of the elastic figure/ground relation.

In this process, which is the process of growth and maturing, the patient experiences and develops his self,

and we intend to show how he comes to this “self’ via the means at his disposal:

his available amount of awareness in experimental situations. PH intro (1994) page xxviii

The Whole Determines the Parts

The greatest value in the Gestalt approach perhaps lies

in the insight that the whole determines the parts, which contrasts with the previous assumption

that the whole is merely the total sum of its elements. The therapeutic situation, for instance, is more than just

a statistical event of a doctor plus a patient. If the doctor is rigid and insensitive to the specific requirements

of the ever-changing therapeutic situation, he will not be a good therapist.

He might be a bully or a businessman or a dogmatist, but he is not a therapist if he refuses

to be part of the ongoing processes of the psychiatric situation. Likewise, the patient’s behavior is dictated by many variables

of the interview, and only the 100% rigid or the insane (oblivious of the context in which they operate)

will behave in the consulting room as they do outside. PHG (1994) intro xxviii/xxix

The Desensitized and Immobilized Neurotic

Sensing and moving are both outgoing activities,

not mechanical responses, whenever and wherever the organism meets novel situations.

The sensoric system of orientation and the motoric system of manipulation work interdependently,

but as reflexes only in the lower layers which are fully automatized and require no awareness.

Manipulation is our (somewhat awkward) term for all muscular activity. Intelligence is adequate orientation, efficiency adequate manipulation.

To regain these, the desensitized and immobilized neurotic has to recover his full awareness; i.e.,

his sensing, contacting, excitement and Gestalt formation. In order to do this, we change the outlook toward the therapeutic situation by acknowledging that

every non-dogmatic approach is based upon the trial-and-error method of nature.

That way the clinical becomes an experimental situation. PHG (1994) page xxix

Explicit or Implicit Demands

Instead of putting explicit or implicit demands upon the patient

- pull yourself together, you must relax, do not censor, you are naughty you have resistances or you are just dead -

we realize that such demands would only increase his difficulties

and make him more neurotic, even desperate. We suggest graded experiments which

- and this is of the uppermost importance – are not tasks to be completed as such.

We explicitly ask: what is going on if you repeatedly try this or that?

With this method we bring to the surface the difficulties of the patient.

Not the task, but what interferes with the succesfull completion of the task

becomes the center of our work. In Freudian terms we bring out and work through

the resistances themselves. PHG (1994) intro page xxx