Complementary Sides of Gestalt Therapy
In the mid-Twentieth Century Fritz and Lore Perls, in collaboration with Paul Goodman and Ralph Hefferline, developed a radically innovative therapeutic approach. Drawing together threads from Gestalt psychology and Field Theory, Freudian psychoanalysis, and psychodrama they developed a new method in which the therapist helped a client discover conflicting inner “voices” and other introjects, and work through problems in living, in part by acting them out. That was if troubling old events, or current life conflicts, were occurring here and now in the time and place of the therapeutic session, to heighten their sense of reality and to bring into awareness details that otherwise might remain hidden. Sometimes this was done as if in a theatre production or a dance, as a full-body experience. And often it included identifying conflicting thoughts or feelings and then holding a dialogue between or among them, with the goal of increased awareness (an “aha!” experience) and the hope for some kind of resolution growing out of that awareness. Such work often took place in the context of a Gestalt group of perhaps ten or fifteen people who were witnesses, and sometimes even participants, in the therapeutic process. But unlike psychodrama, in which the client invited others in the group to represent other persons in the inner drama, Fritz Perls invented the “empty chair” (he called it “hot seat”) procedure in which the client enacted both (or sometimes all) of the conflicting voices and conducted an explicit dialogue between or among them.
The paragraph above describes the Gestalt Therapy that I learned from more than fifteen trainers at the old San Francisco Gestalt Institute and Esalen Institute’s San Francisco Center, and above all from Robert K. Hall with his strong somatic and movement orientation, and Laurence J. Horowitz who created and for two decades maintained the Ananda Gestalt Institute of Santa Rosa. Other who were especially influential for me included Erv and Miriam Polster at the San Diego Gestalt Institute, Abe Levitsky, Cyndy Sheldon, and Frank Rubenfeld. I call this “Classical Gestalt Therapy.”
At the same time, in the Eastern United States the New York and Cleveland Gestalt Institutes began to develop an alternative approach that placed less emphasis on the enactive character of the working process, and more emphasis on the relationship between the client and the therapist. Isadore From was a key figure in this “dialogical relational” approach. Today it is the dominant approach in the U.S. and Europe, while the classical approach is widespread in Latin America.
Some devotees of the dialogical relational approach suggest that it is “more modern” and even “better” than the classical approach. Some devotees of the classical approach maintain that dialogical relational work “throws the baby out with the bathwater.”
All opinions and loyalties to one method or another aside, the incontestable reality is that they are different. Classical Gestalt Therapy shares elements with theatre and psychodrama. Things can sometimes become obvious in five minutes of an enactment that might take months to emerge in discussion. Dialogical-relational work’s emphasis on the therapeutic relationship shares that element with psychoanalysis. Some clients can comfortably maintain a conversation with a counselor or therapist who would be embarrassed and reluctant with an enactive approach. Others, with a little push, appreciate an enactive experience. Both Gestalt approaches share an existential, phenomenological, field-oriented and direct awareness based perspective and methodology. Many of Gestalt Therapy’s specific working methods can be used with either a classical or a dialogical-relational approach. (I say “a” rather than “the” because either approach will be transformed to some degree by the person who is using it.) And some practitioners, such as Erving Polster, are equally at home with either approach and choose a way of working that seems to them best suited to a given client. I have found that it does not take long to find out which approach is better for a given person. What works best for me is whatever works best for the client. And it might even be one approach in one session and a different one the next time.
Gestalt group process work can incline toward either of the two perspectives described above and is not exactly the same as either one.
Fortunately most Gestalt Therapists and conference program organizers have seen fit to embrace a “large tent” view in which diverse views and approaches are welcome. Thereby Gestalt therapy has largely avoided a history like the one in which first one and then another innovator was driven from the “small tent” of Sigmund Freud’s brilliant but more ideologically restrictive psychoanalysis.
Today most Gestalt Therapy writings in English incline toward the dialogical-relational approach. Here you’ll find the opposite. Most writings below express a classical approach. Fortunately, due to the inclusiveness of Gestalt thinking expressed in the very idea of “Gestalt” itself, some of the working methods describe here contain ideas and methods that can be used in either context, and indeed even incorporated into other therapeutic modalities as well.
Written for this website, 8-2-2020