What is Gestalt Psychotherapy?

How to answer someone who doesn’t know the first thing about it.

Two years ago, I started studying Gestalt psychotherapy and since that time numerous people have asked me what it is. I sputter like an old boat motor trying to gain traction in the water. The challenge is, Gestalt doesn’t focus on one central idea or theme. The purpose of this post is to educate and increase the knowledge of what Gestalt psychotherapy is.

First, let’s start with the word Gestalt. It’s German, pronounced guh-sht-awlt.

What does the word Gestalt mean? In its simplest form, Wikipedia describes it as form or shape. Dictionary.com provides us with additional insights.

A configuration, pattern, or organized field having specific properties that cannot be derived from the summation of its component parts; a unified whole.

The following is from Malcolm Parlett from the British Gestalt Journal 18:1 2009. Parts of it have been condensed for the purpose of this post.

The Difficulty in Describing Gestalt

Everybody in Gestalt has the same difficulty: how to convey something about what Gestalt is, for the benefit of someone who has no direct experience of it nor has read anything about it.

The following is based on an unpublished manuscript geared to a readership concentrating on the ‘personal practice’ aspect of Gestalt, not on its characteristics as a form of psychotherapy. This is a sample, a taste and not a comprehensive overview or definitive statement.

What is Gestalt?

Gestalt is more than just a mode of psychotherapy to use with others who seek help and who identify themselves as ‘disturbed’ or are so labeled by others. It also provides a down-to-earth philosophy to live by for the relatively undisturbed, a method of self-exploration and personal stress management which is available to all, although it has to be directly experienced for such statements not to sound vacuous.

There is a particular discipline involved (in the sense that Yoga and singing are disciplines) that features strongly in Gestalt and it is this discipline which, in a way, patients learn in therapy (arguably they should be called ‘students’); and it is the discipline which also enables, for anyone willing to go into it deeply, lifelong exploration of one’s reality and capacity for a full life.

Gestalt as Truth-Telling

The discipline of Gestalt is the cultivation of truth-telling or, at least truth-acknowledging, to oneself. In order to know the truth of my own experience I must first recognize what I do habitually and without consciousness (running on auto-pilot). I need to attend to my thoughts, feelings, wishes, heartfelt longings, all my reactions and my conscious experience, much of it in the background, or on the fringes of my consciousness. As I do this I also become progressively more aware of the ways in which I cut off or pretend to myself or try to override certain inner states, thoughts, imagined realities.

Gestalt as Real Physical Beings

Gestalt involves attending to the fact that we are real and tangible physical beings and not simply minds perched on top of bodies. We are instinctual, organismic beings. Our emotions, feeling states, hunger, aversions all have physical bases, and we react to others, whether in fights, sexual encounters, warm conversations, loving moments, or however, with the whole of ourselves — physical reactions, thoughts, and feelings intertwined. The discipline of Gestalt acknowledges, and involves tuning into, our physical sensations and inner feeling states and releasing ourselves into fuller physical experience and expression.

Gestalt as New Ways of Thinking

The discipline entails opening ourselves to non-verbal, intuitive, metaphorical ways of thinking as well as rational, logical, and clearly articulated ways of thinking. We can expand our creativity, intuitive powers, and our aliveness generally if we recognize that living is the ultimate form of art, in which we seek to give expression to what is most alive and energizing within us, what satisfies us to the depth of our being. And in the difficult process of managing life’s complex choices, the realities and obstacles, we need to have multiple channels of appreciation and expression, including the imaginal, the aesthetic, the capacity to separate the beautiful from the ugly.

Gestalt as Means to Wake Up from Political and Cultural Constructs

The discipline is about waking up politically and culturally, realizing how indoctrinated we are, having absorbed — along with language — the assumptions of our families of origin, our schooling, our community, our national culture. And the process continues: perpetual propaganda through advertising and media assaults us — relating to politics and peace and war, food and what is healthy, fashions in clothes and artifacts, materialism and spirituality. We are easily mesmerized, confused, awash in a sea of options. Discovering what is true for us, what we believe, what we will stand against or for, requires a lot of work — tasting and learning to chew rather than immediately swallow, to spit out as well as to take in.

Discovering the Quality of Our Interactions

Gestalt as a discipline involves attending to the quality of interaction, our meetings with the world, reality, other humans. In meeting you, how do I stop myself being fully myself and how do you stop yourself? nd what has to happen so that we can meet each other with all our individuality recognized and incorporated in our meeting? When I am fully in touch with another at the same time that I am fully in touch with myself, there is a transcendent moment of absolute recognition — often, indeed usually, beyond words: I recognize your intrinsic humanness, and mine is recognized too. What is, at the moment, is that we are. We might even call it a love.

Malcolm Parlett concludes with his certainty that in order to work with others in the Gestalt way, practitioners need to know and live, its discipline. The quality of the work we (students) do with others is inextricably linked with the extent of our discoveries.

It is near impossible to describe Gestalt in one or two sentences. Gestalt psychotherapy is a multi-dimensional modality where “ many pieces make the whole”. And, at its core, Gestalt is truth-telling. The practice asks us to look at ourselves as real physical beings. It offers new ways of thinking and to “wake” up from the political and cultural constructs in our lives. Gestalt is also a method to discover the quality of our own interactions.

It is my personal objective to spread the knowledge of Gestalt psychotherapy to the general public and to inspire people in their quest for deeper personal and external relationships.

Contact Gestalt

INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy European Association for Gestalt Therapy Gestalt International Study Center Istituto di Gestalt Italy

UNITED STATES NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS BY STATE

CALIFORNIA Gestalt Associates Training Los Angeles Gestalt Institute of San Francisco Pacific Gestalt Institute

LOUISIANA Gestalt Institute of New Orleans

NEW YORK Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy New York State Office of the Professions

NORTH CAROLINA Appalachian Gestalt Training Institute

OHIO Gestalt Institute of Cleveland

PENNSYLVANIA The Gestalt Therapy Institute of Philadelphia Pennsylvania Gestalt Center

CANADA Gestalt Institute of Toronto

OTHER GESTALT RELATED LINKS Gestalt Journal Press The Gestalt Therapy Page Gestalt Review Gestalt News and Notes

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