Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt theory is organismic and field-theoretical: a person cannot be described apart from their environment, because they are constituted by the exchange between the two. What we call self is not a thing inside the body but the process of contacting at the boundary between organism and field.

Figure and ground

Borrowed from Gestalt perceptual psychology: at any moment one need emerges from the undifferentiated background of all possible needs, becomes figural, organises perception and action until it is met, and recedes. A healthy organism forms clear figures and completes them. Disturbance shows as figures that will not form, or figures that will not close.

The cycle of experience

1. 1Sensation — something registers, pre-verbally
2. 2Awareness — it becomes identifiable as a need
3. 3Mobilisation — energy gathers toward it
4. 4Action — the person moves into the environment
5. 5Contact — the need is met at the boundary
6. 6Satisfaction and withdrawal — the figure recedes, ground restored

Interrupt the cycle anywhere and symptoms follow, and which symptom you get depends on where the interruption occurs. Someone who blocks at sensation is numb; at awareness, confused; at mobilisation, flat; at action, chronically frustrated; at contact, hungry in company.

Contact-boundary disturbances

Confluence

No boundary; the person merges and cannot tell where they end and another begins. "We think…" instead of "I think…"

Introjection

Swallowing whole what belongs to others — values, rules, judgements — without chewing. The Gestalt account of what cognitive therapy would call a core belief.

Projection

Attributing to the environment what belongs to the self, usually the disowned part.

Retroflection

Doing to oneself what one wanted to do to another, or doing for oneself what one wanted from another. The account of self-criticism, self-harm, and much psychosomatic tension.

Deflection

Avoiding contact by humour, abstraction, tangents, or looking away.

Egotism

Watching oneself have the experience instead of having it; spectatorship as a defense against spontaneity.

Neurosis, in this account, is chronic interruption of contact combined with unfinished business — figures that never closed and therefore continue to pull energy from the present. The person is not haunted by the past in the psychoanalytic sense; they are occupied by an incomplete gestalt that keeps trying to finish.

Unfinished business

A conversation never had, grief never expressed, anger never spoken. The organism keeps the figure open, and it recruits present situations to try to complete it — which is why people find themselves having the same argument with different people. The empty chair exists to let the figure close.

Top dog and underdog

Perls’ description of the internal split: the top dog is righteous, demanding, full of shoulds; the underdog is apologetic, evasive, and wins every time by sabotage. The two are locked in a game neither can end, which is why exhorting the underdog to try harder never works — it is simply a move in the same game.

The paradoxical theory of change, formulated by Arnold Beisser, is the tradition’s central and most valuable claim: change occurs when one becomes what one is, not when one tries to become what one is not. Efforts to be different install a top dog and produce a stalemate. Full contact with what is actually the case allows movement that could not be produced by intention.

1. 1Awareness is the primary agent. Not insight into origins — awareness of what is happening now, in the body, in the room.
2. 2Awareness must be experienced, not reported. Talking about anger is not anger.
3. 3The interruption is made explicit: how are you stopping yourself, right now?
4. 4The organism, no longer interrupted, completes the gestalt.
5. 5Full contact with what is produces movement that willpower could not.