Current Trends in Gestalt Therapy

The strands of ideas and individuals that have been woven together into Gestalt therapy coalesced into a defined theory and practice in 1951 with the publication of Gestalt Therapy. Within 20 years, it had become the most frequently named alternative to psychoanalysis among psychotherapy professionals in the United States. The statements and writings of its best known practitioners, preeminent among them F. S. Perls, and a narrow sampling of its techniques were familiar not only to professionals but to many others as well.

In the ensuing years, the spotlight of public attention has swung away from Gestalt therapy, as it has generally swung away from the psychological preoccupations of the 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, as Gestalt therapy enters its fifth decade, it continues to grow. Some of the enthusiasm which greeted it in the United States can be seen in Central and Eastern Europe, in Canada, and in Latin America, where dozens of institutes are training Gestalt therapists.

At the same time, some facets of the outlook and practices of Gestalt therapy have been assimilated into the work of psychotherapists of many persuasions. Chief among these are the greater emphasis on the present moment and a readiness to open the therapeutic process to examination. Gestalt therapists were involved in some of the earliest aural and visual recordings and transcripts of sessions, which are increasingly common today, and they have done a preponderant number of them. Significant, also, is a greater understanding of field concepts, recognizing that the therapeutic process includes the environment outside the therapist's office, an increased willingness on the part of the therapist to take a more prominent role in the therapy, and a commensurate willingness to ask the individual in therapy to be more active on behalf of his or her own growth. The subsequent interest in strategic and family therapies, the growth of psychology self-help books, and the pervasiveness of workshops and other activities intended to promote personal growth are reflections of different influences from Gestalt therapy.

The greatest single trend in the development of the theory of Gestalt therapy is away from a virtually singular reliance on the person, utterances, and work of Frederick S. Perls to a more thorough and rigorous adherence to the theory created by him and others in Gestalt Therapy. F. S. Perls, the most visible of Gestalt therapists until his death in 1970 and an enormously effective and charismatic teacher, was of course a central figure in Gestalt therapy's gestation and growth. During the late 1960s and until the early 1980s, he had become preeminent, determining Gestalt therapy's tone, practices, and framework almost single-handedly. But his writings, talks, teaching workshops, and therapy demonstrations were designed for promotional as well as didactic purposes. The simplifications almost unavoidable in such circumstances promoted distortions or misunderstandings of Gestalt theory or principles at odds with it as well as therapeutic practices which were inconsistent with it.

For instance, F. S. Perls's "workshop method" for doing psychotherapy, in which one individual works with a therapist while both are being observed by others, was suited to demonstrations but virtually ignored interactional field phenomena, and it abetted the notion that Gestalt therapy was a psychotherapy for individuals only, inapplicable to group and family work. Another example is Perls's claim that healthy people had "lost their minds and come to their senses." This ran directly counter to Gestalt therapy's holistic commitment to embracing everything the individual could contribute to the emerging figure: the intellectual and spiritual as well as the physical and the emotional. In the contexts and ways in which this claim was offered, it also became part of a commonplace conviction of the time, which Perls both fostered and refuted, that significant and enduring growth could be attained quickly and easily.

Though Perls was himself widely read and keenly sensitive to intellectual influences in tune with his interests, his antipathy to intellectualizing extended sometimes to discouraging serious thought altogether. His manner and actions sometimes encouraged his students to imitate him, emulate his methods, and repeat his words thoughtlessly, introjecting him at the expense of finding their individual, considered responses to his teachings. At the same time, also following his example, others decided for themselves what constituted Gestalt therapy without distinguishing ideas from slogans.

It would not be accurate to attribute these attitudes within Gestalt therapy to antiintellectualism, personal foibles, and misunderstandings alone. It also reflects some things which are basic to it. Gestalt therapists have always mistrusted orthodoxies and encouraged each individual to find his or her own way of doing things. These attitudes, closely linked to its theory, work against whatever impulse exists within Gestalt therapy to set standards for its theory and practice. Far more important, though, is a paradox which lies at the heart of Gestalt therapy. On the one hand, it is a psychology consisting of a theory, methods, and practice which stands upon a foundation built on important psychological perspectives and material from philosophy and the sciences. These sources are reflected directly in the language in which it is couched and the influences it acknowledges. At the same time, it is based on something more than these important progenitors, something which exists parallel to them and to which access can be gained without even understanding the theory or practice of Gestalt therapy.

The authors of Gestalt Therapy acknowledged this in its introduction.

Indispensable--for the writing and the thorough understanding of this book--is an attitude which as a theory actually permeates the content and method of the book .... 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 unitary outlook...is buried but not destroyed and, as we intend to show, can be regained with wholesome advantage. [p. viii]

They are referring to the intrinsic processes of figure/ground, figure formation, the contact boundary disturbances, and the self. In his last years, F. S. Perls often spoke to the same effect. "Gestalt is as ancient and old as the world itself," he remarked. "The world, and especially every organism, maintains itself, and the only !aw which is constant is the forming of gestalts--wholes, completeness."

But if the Gestalt approach is the original, natural approach to life, it need not be spoken about in the terms which Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, and their collaborators developed. There are texts written before "gestalt" could be pronounced--the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist scripture, comes tomind--which demonstrate and even teach this approach. Gestalt therapy, then, is a particular manifestation of this original, ancient approach. In Gestalt Therapy, Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman produced a comprehensive statement of it in terms which were sophisticated and contemporary at the time it was written, drawing upon a vocabulary and concepts from modern psychology and modem philosophy. Their statement spoke to an educated, thoughtful audience, and for the most part a professional one.

In the 40 years since the publication of Gestalt Therapy, the constituency for books about psychology has changed dramatically as values and standards for popular, general, and professional education have changed. Many professionals find the book is beyond them. But those for whom the book is inaccessible can claim a different authority than Gestalt Therapy for understanding the Gestalt approach, based on a direct apprehension of the original approach. Though unmediated by Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman's text, they still call what they understand Gestalt therapy, perhaps because it is a modern home for this original approach within psychology. Some Gestalt therapists would characterize F. S. Perls himself in this way. Others within Gestalt therapy have used these same principles over the years, albeit sometimes, it seems, with less clarity and precision than they were used in Gestalt Therapy, and without convincingly demonstrating that they fully comprehend the book or even the approach. The result has been both the diversity which Gestalt therapists value and also conflict, contradictions, and confusion. The gestalt of Gestalt therapy has become diffused, something less than the vibrant, vigorously outlined figure Gestalt therapists would prefer.

A major trend in the last 10 years has been directed toward recognizing, remedying, and resolving this situation. Many Gestalt therapists have become convinced that Gestalt therapy, its practitioners, and the people who work with them, would benefit from the rigor, focus, and precision which a better knowledge of Gestalt theory would permit. This is a basic lesson about figures, of course: Any whole has added impact and vitality when it is consistent, clear, and coherent.

The consequences of this trend have included more discussion of the nature of Gestalt theory itself, and clearer demarcations between different ways of looking at Gestalt therapy. A significant number of the articles which have appeared in the past half-dozen years in the professional journal of Gestalt therapy in the United States, The Gestalt Journal, deal with theory or the relation of theory to practice, demonstrating how Gestalt therapists are attempting to come to grips with their theoretical underpinnings. (This chapter itself is a reflection of this trend, including the likelihood that some Gestalt therapists would take exception to some of its formulations.)

Another consequence of this trend has been more discussion among Gestalt therapists about Gestalt psychotherapy in relation to theory, and attempts to augment and refine both theory and practice. Chief among these last are projects intended to create a diagnostic nomenclature consistent with the Gestalt outlook and attempts to flesh out the developmental theory suggested by the concepts of figure formation and destruction and the mental metabolism.