Gestalt Formation

Figure Formation: The Shape of Contact

Contacting, the way we work with the environment to create the most satisfying solutions, has a special organization and structure. Influenced again by Gestalt psychology, Gestalt theory describes in detail the way in which experience and action in the world are inevitably and inherently structured. It is an organization which shapes our phenomenology. It is called gestalt formation, or figure formation, or, more fully, gestalt or figure formation and destruction.

The Gestalt psychologists identified many characteristics governing the formation of visual figures in their attempts to understand figure formation. One researcher was able to find 114 of these laws, but there are perhaps a dozen basic ones. These include good organization, definite outlines, satisfying (good) form, closure, stability, balance, and proportion. These formulations are essentially aesthetic in character. Gestalt therapists have adapted and modified them in order to be able to characterize the entirety of experience, not only the perceptual aspect. Therefore, Gestalt therapists speak as well of figures which have power, liveliness, vigor, unity, and clarity, figures which are rich, compelling, satisfying, complete. Good figures have these qualities sufficiently or abundantly, bad ones have them less, or lack them entirely. At a certain point, the dearth of these characteristics turns poor figures into nonexistent ones. Perhaps these illustrations will clarify this point.

Any group of people--a class, a therapy group, a professional association, a nation--linked richly and often by interactions and interchange, with strong feelings among the members or a task which engages them all, is a good figure: clearly defined, lively, well organized, cohesive. An apathetic group, without much common purpose, is not. At the extreme, an apathetic group is no group at all, but simply an aggregate of individuals--elements in the field, but no figure at all. Acting as though an aggregate is a group--perhaps because you think you should be involved with them, though you do not care to be--makes for a bad figure.

If you do not like the movie you are seeing and lose interest in it, the accompanying experiential figure will be diffuse, lacking clear outlines and vitality. Perhaps it will lack a sense of coherence altogether. You begin to think of walking out or slip into reveries of other situations or things you would rather do. Making yourself pay attention is no solution; it forces the figure, a contradiction in terms (a split figure, not a unified one).

The concept of marriage is a good figure, well defined and vital, though the outlines are not always clear, and for many it is not a figure of interest. A particular marriage may be a good or a bad figure. A "bad" marriage may be a bad figure: ill defined, dull, and at the same time rigid, but even with an abundance of antagonism and difficulty, it may be full of excitement, vitality, definition, good outlines, and so on.

Figure Formation: Health and Its Absence

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings, it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

We consider the ability to form and destroy good figures paramount to health. The ability to create lively, well-formed, clearly defined figures which make the most adequate use of the resources of the field is health itself. This is called free functioning. It is called free functioning because we can range anywhere in the field, through all of our abilities and knowledge and experience and everything present in the environment, to find those things which will make the most apt contributions to emerging figures. Our freedom consists not in being free to choose whatever suits us individually, because it is not only our personal needs, wishes, desires, and interests that control how figures best emerge and grow. The figure's needs determine the best figure. Free functioning is the freedom to seek out anything which will contribute to what is emerging, freedom to contribute whatever the figure requires, and freedom to follow the figure wherever it takes us, giving ourselves over entirely to its working.

Ill health, by contrast, is functioning which is not free. It is figure formation in a field so impoverished that good figures become impossible; or, it is figure formation in a promising field--but one in which we cannot partake freely, because we must avoid or are ignorant of elements in it which are at the same time essential to emerging figures. Instead of being whole, we are cut off from our essentials. We become split in two, into the parts of ourselves we can acknowledge, and those parts we suppress and disown. And we see the world in the same way. There is good and there is bad, heaven and hell, moral and immoral, us and them, body and mind, black and white, round eyed and pure, Jew and Arab. And then we reinforce this fragmentation so as to maintain it, ignoring what does not fit our conception of things and fabricating sometimes intricate deceptions which support it. If we are clever, we end up not seeing what is fight in front of us. The author Saul Bellow expressed the paradox of this wonderfully, saying, "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."

The result is figures which are incomplete. Either they do not complete themselves because the requirements of each phase are not met--they are skipped over or ignored--or because field elements which would make adequate figures are not available. The result is unfinished figures, unfinished business. If health is the wholeness signalled by the creation and destruction of good figures, then its absence is the loss of our wholeness and the presence of these splits, poor figures, and unfinished business.

Our understanding of figure formation gives us a standard for judging the depth and reality of experience which, while not isolated from social values, is also not determined by them. We exist in a field which is social and cultural, but when the figure is weak, dull, graceless, confused, we know there is some difficulty. On the other hand, figures which display the qualities of good figures---definition, coherence and cohesiveness, vitality, grace, and the rest--signal health. We do not need to look elsewhere--to social mores or biblical injunctions, for instance--to reach this conclusion.

This autonomous criterion, making good figures, provides a counter weight to the other ways we determine who is well and who is sick. Normality as defined by psychologists or other experts is not necessarily the same as health; nor is social adjustment as defined by legislators, your teachers or your children's teachers, or religious or political authorities. And conversely, deviations from what is socially or politically or morally acceptable to others do not necessarily mean there is something wrong with us.

Other, related dimensions of the Gestalt perspective need to be mentioned in this discussion of health. We think they have equally profound and far-reaching implications. The impairments of free functioning are called variously illness (disease), neurosis, sickness, craziness, and also spiritual hunger, anomie, madness, and sometimes normality. These disabilities interrupt, inhibit, and constrain our creative abilities, the workings of free functioning in the field. We are willing to label this area of investigation and clinical work abnormal psychology if it is entirely clear to the reader that the field perspective prevails here, as elsewhere. These interruptions, inhibitions, and constraints are field phenomena, in the same way that free functioning is. None are entirely of our own making, even though they may come to be predominantly our own doing.

We are embedded in the field, but are not its creation. We exist in it along with the environment in an interplay of creative forces which allows certain possibilities and forecloses others. We are more likely to function freely in circumstances in tune with us than in straitened ones. Ranging widely over the riches of the field requires bounteous possibilities. In impoverished circumstances, our figures may be impoverished--both the best that can be achieved and unsatisfactory as well. Crazy times make it difficult, though not impossible, to be clear-headed; they will, however, make it impossible to be fulfilled or contented.

It is possible to be disabled and troubled in a generous setting and there is certainly a limit to the extent to which we can be fulfilled in a disturbed one. In any setting, it is essential to have a criterion for health which gives adequate weight to our native structures. These observations are vital to Gestalt therapy because they flow directly out of its deepest concerns; because therapists journey frequently in the dark, rolling waters of our unrecognized and unfulfilled selves, which lie beyond the mainstream; because we see how common it is to notice only the landscape above ground, pretending there is nothing underground; and because psychotherapy is all too easily and too often a handmaid of the dominant groups in any culture. If the reader thinks of "sick societies" such as Nazi Germany and the Communist oligarchies, where the honest and innocent are imprisoned and the thugs run the government, he or she may well find it easy to understand and accept this. But the dull emptiness, conformity, emotional subjection, covert violence, indifference to both feeling and intelligence, shallow excitements, and materialistic excesses of everyday life in the United States are more what we have in mind.

How is free functioning lost? Given the creative tendencies which are our birthright, how does it happen that we make poor figures, living out lives of quiet desperation or ruinous destructiveness, or sleepwalking through it all?

The discussion above suggests an important part of the answer--the largest part. We learn to lose touch with it. "How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid?" asked Alexandre Dumas, fils. "It must be education that does it." We teach our young and ourselves ways of living which ignore the imperatives of figure formation and avoid important parts of ourselves and the environment. Sometimes our feelings are the first to go ("Don't cry; you're not hurt"), and our integrity ("Don't fight with Julie; share your toys") is besieged soon after. Sometimes our creative tools are attacked directly ("Make up your mind--right now!"). While figure formation is a given for us, even at birth, our ability to form adequate figures must have the opportunity to develop as we grow. If it does not, we do not mature to meet the challenges which larger vistas provide, and we come to lack the gifts we need to make the most of what is available.

Perls, Hefferline and Goodman put it this way, emphasizing the personal fragmentation and self-estrangement which make free functioning and good figures impossible:

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 as though they were opposing entities. The unitary outlook which can dissolve such a dualistic approach is buried. [195 I. p. viii]

This attack on our ability to participate in figure formation undermines our willingness to experience the loss of our sense of ourselves which is an essential part of the creation of good figures. This phenomenon, which will be described in the sections on figure formation and the self, becomes an attack on the ground of our being. It creates doubt and fear in us, and we universally try to counter this by insisting upon our own existence. Dedicated to creating the experience that we exist, we become pervasively willful and thus willful at the wrong moments, and we do our best to avoid those aspects of figure formation in which the loss of our sense of ourselves is paramount. As a result, we become disabled. Amiel put it well: "At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction...and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness".

But Why? Do we believe parents are monsters and the society in which we live is inhumane? We know parents are often responsible for the disaffection of their children; they are usually the single most important influence on a child's development. We know the values which cultures encourage are often substituted for finding our own compass. It is possible, even, that there is an irreconcilable conflict between our species' newly developed and increasing requirements for social harmony and individual fulfillment. All these contending requirements are exceedingly difficult to reconcile.

On the other hand, our native gifts for creating meaningful wholes include the capacity to adjust these demands in the course of finding our own best solutions. Some ways of raising children are infinitely better than others. They allow us to come closer to our own best impulses. And some ways of treating each other and living together make it much more likely that our promise will be realized. At the same time, even the best situations we have able to create have their share of an unhappiness which never seems inevitable, though it often seems unavoidable. Our magnificent abilities leave us far from perfection. Neurosis appears to be as much our human condition as figure formation, and greatly more than does free functioning.

All of us will be unhappy, disappointed, and aggrieved in the course of our lives, more than we would wish. The condition is an existential one for us; it is part of being alive. We will choose to love, for instance, although we will suffer the loss of those we love--unavoidably. And beyond this, we believe that each of us will bear another large measure of disappointment, pain, and sorrow in our lives, well beyond what our human condition seems to warrant. This seems an inescapable conclusion, based on the evidence of human life on this planet. Expecting more than this is probably paradisal longing, composed of one part yearning for the realization of our potential and one part recognition of the immensity of the loss we all suffer because our potential will, all too often, not be realized. Perhaps it is enough, though, to ask that the world we live in support us enough that our wounds heal, that the loss of our gifts is not irretrievable, and that all of us have it within our power to pursue our fulfillment with passion and diligence.

The Phases of Gestalt Formation

Gestalt or figure formation and destruction proceeds in a manner which is probably best thought of as a spiral. While the phases of figure formation circle back on each other--the last phase is followed by the first--the end of any specific cycle of figure formation and destruction is growth, something novel which has been assimilated. Because of this, the actual starting place for another new figure is different from anything that has existed previously. And, it is not simply the individual which is changed by the growth. The field is a web of linked elements; change in any of its aspects means that the entire organism/environment field is new.

The four phases of figure formation are forecontact, contact, final contact, and postcontact. In forecontact, while the elements of the field are present, there is no figure. It is not correct to say that all is background, for background implies foreground. Rather, the field is not differentiated into figure and ground. Contact, with its inevitable division of the field into what is relevant to the emerging figure and what is not, is missing. There is no focus of interest, and in that sense, because nothing matters, nothing exists.

In the next phase, the contact phase, the figure begins to form and then to develop. The undifferentiated field falls out into the primal polarity, figure/ ground. Some elements of the field become identified with the coming center of interest and are included in it, contributing their energy to the formingfigure. Other elements, alien to the forming figure, stay in the background, the remainder of the organism/environment field.

Characteristic of the contact phase is a mounting excitement, the thunder which accompanies the lightning of the emerging gestalt. Novelty initiates the phase. It provokes the emergence of the figure by initiating contact and awareness. Generally, what is novel are needs, urges, appetites, curiosities, pains, desires, wishes, requirements, circumstances. They may originate anywhere within the field, in the individual or the environment.

The momentum of the creative synthesis which is forming culminates in the phase called final contact. Here, the figure attains its mature form. The characteristics which define it are fully realized. In recognition of this, the phase is sometimes called full contact--but it is the figure which is full, not the contact. It is the final phase of contacting, hence its name. In this phase, as the figure develops, the background becomes less important. It recedes, sometimes disappearing entirely, experientially. At this time, we are fully absorbed in the figure, and our sense of ourselves recedes or even disappears.

The fourth phase is postcontact. It is the phase where the figure is destroyed. New growth is integrated, what is used up is discarded, and the field adjusts to the new situation. This is assimilation. On the metabolic level, it is ingestion, assimilation, and elimination, turning what has been experienced and achieved into nourishment. The early part of this phase may include a certain amount of aware savoring and reevaluation, but most of postcontact goes on unawares; hence its name. It is a time when excitement ebbs and generally when activity ebbs as well. Much of postcontact is vegetative. Let me sleep on it, we say, knowing that our inner intelligence will be integrating what has been experienced and give us the fresh perspective born of growth and learning. While the entirety of figure formation is concerned with learning, it is in this phase that we begin to realize what we have learned. The course of the figure was, perhaps, thrilling, consuming; now, in this fourth phase, it is seen in its context, as significant but not the total picture. At the same time, the ending of a figure may have pathos or tragedy. If the figure that is being destroyed is a relationship with someone just recently dead, the mourning (itself its own figure) may be wrenching; the vegetative reworking of the ground of being may spill into awareness.

It is useful and apt to think of figure formation and destruction as a process of birth and death, akin to the turning of the seasons. There is a distinct continuity to it, and at the same time, each season has a quality all its own. Sometimes it is hard to know when one season ends and another begins. Spring leads to summer, seeding to fruiting, the phases sometimes overlapping--yet the sense of new birth characteristic of spring is entirely different from verdant, lush summer. Some years it seems that summer nevercame at all, or it was hard to tell if December was autumn, or winter coming in. In some climates it is hard to find winter at all, and summer seems to last forever.

The workings of figure formation are closer to enlightened play than they are to problem solving. "To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand." Spontaneity, adventure and playfulness are its hallmarks. Though it eventuates in growth, figure formation is not directed toward any end. Rather, as Kant so well put it, we proceed "with a sense of purpose, without a purpose." In forming and destroying figures, we bring the entirety of our being to it. Not just our brains, but all of ourselves: heart, body, soul, mind, intellect. Perhaps it can be conceived of as thinking with the whole body.

Each phase of figure formation is itself a figure, and is composed of many figures, each with its own forecontact, contact, final contact and postcontact phases. A life is a figure, and within it are larger figures, such as adventures, creative acts, and a career; and smaller ones, such as a day, a concert, and an encounter--figures within figures.