Human Development
Gestalt therapy
Description:
The immediate aim of Gestalt therapy is the restoration of awareness, with the ultimate goal of restoring the functions of the organism and the personality, within a holistic frame of reference, in order to make an individual whole and to release his potentialities. It assumes that awareness itself is sufficient to bring about development and change, through [organismic self regulation]. In modern culture, however, the awareness of the average person of the integrity of his thinking, feeling and acting is fragmented. Gestalt therapy is the effort to heal individuals of their dualism of being and to redevelop the unitary outlook.Gestalt (approximated in English to imply configuration, meaningfully organized whole, structural relationship, theme) is the perception of a meaningfully organized whole of a figure and its background. The healthy personality has a permanent, meaningful emerging and receding figure and ground. Attention, interest, excitement, grace, concentration, and concern are characteristic of such a person's figure/ground formation as compared to the case of a neurotic for which such elasticity is replaced by either rigidity (fixation) or absence (repression) of figure formation, resulting in confusion, boredom, compulsions, anxiety and self-consciousness. The task of the therapist is to help the person complete the Gestalt by reintegrating attention and awareness.
A basic procedure in Gestalt therapy is to orient the person towards experiencing a continuum of awareness and to return constantly to any splits in attention and awareness which indicate that focused organismic attention is developing outside of awareness (for example, the person may be talking about one problem whilst sensing and acting in a number of other unrelated ways). A second technique is that of dramatization which allows the therapist to lead the person to identify and become aware of his unconscious alienated activity, particularly by taking up any alienated role, merging with his actions and feelings in that role, and having them express what they wish.
The artificial nature of the boundary between the self and the not-self, understood to be an illusory separateness from the stream of life, is held to lie at the root of all inner conflicts. Individuals are held to be living in only a fragment of themselves, holding on to a pre-established self-image and rejecting as not-self all that is conflicting with it or that is expected to be painful. Gestalt therapy suggests that the self-image be regarded as the figure in the figure-ground relationship that is involved in all perception. The therapeutic approach encourages the individual to reverse the figure-ground relationship involved in this self-perception and start experiencing himself as the background, namely not as the person who is unfulfilled in some way, but rather as that which causes this unfulfilment. Only by sensing how he does this reversal can a person cease to do it and to waste his energy. In this way different personality functions can be brought into relationship and integrated in a process of intra-psychic encounter. The integration of these fragments of the person's being, through the person's full acceptance of how he is (rather than of how he should be), leads to the possibility of change.
Broader:
TherapyHuman potential movement