Review: Gestalt Therapy Integrated: Contours of Theory & Practice

Gestalt Therapy Integrated: Contours of Theory & Practice by Erving Polster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gestalt therapy is an existential/experiential form of psychotherapy that emphasizes personal responsibility, and that focuses upon the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist–client relationship, the environmental and social contexts of a person's life, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of their overall situation. Gestalt therapy was developed by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls and Paul Goodman in the 1940s and 1950s. In the late 80s as a failing telemarketer, a manager introduced me to the dice puzzle Petals Around the Rose to try and disrupt my funk and improve my thinking. When I figured it out, I was told that thinking was "Gestalt". Well, I never became a decent telemarketer and I only now got around to trying to understand Gestalt.

OK, so this is second generation Gestalt, I take it. Authors Erving and Miriam Polster started a training center in La Jolla, California and played an influential role in advancing the concept of contact-boundary phenomena in the 1970s. They did this from very hands-on client sessions and scaled up to "happenings" like events and workshops.

You product differentiation for your particular target market. So, some of this book obviously required to differentiate from Freud which is basically done by saying Freud is about the infantile past and Gestalt is about the "now". Well, so often, the "now" seems to be about resolving childhood dysfunction from trauma or an aloof parent, etc. It is interesting that two competing approaches find themselves at the same task: working out issues originating in youth.

At a time when "Hippies and Cops" could be role-played in a coffeehouse, Gestalt sought to integrated the individual with a fracturing society.

Correspondingly, there is no point when a person becomes so well endowed with his own powers that he will never again want community attention to his psychological needs. The termination of therapy, for example, is the completion of only one form of communal aid. The traditional view of the terminated therapy is naive and mechanistic, counting on the delusion that once one is rid of his own faulty view of the world, the world will neatly fall into place. Of course, the world has never fallen into place in any age, and surely not in this one. Childrearing problems have existed since Cain and Abel; sexual dysrhythmia since Adam and Eve; environmental cataclysm since Noah; the rigors of paying the price since Jacob and Rachel; sibling rivalry since Joseph and his brothers; dysfunctional organizational behavior since the Tower of Babel. These tales record the many natural tortures which are the by-products of a human system of heterogeneous interests and contradictions. An ageless web forms in the interrelationship between the individual's needs and the group's needs and between two dissonant acts of the same person.

The consequent struggle calls for communal orientation, support and stimulation to guide or arouse behavior too difficult for solo performance. The community serves as a group ethos, providing mores, rituals, and instruction which give ease to the individual, freeing him from personally exploring everything under the sun to determine what is right for him...

What we need now are new rituals, mores, and instructions, sensitive to recurrent need but rooted also in present experience. Psychotherapists are finally beginning to take some responsibility in shaping some of the possibilities for living a good life.

The principles of gestalt therapy in particular apply to actual people meeting actual problems in an actual environment. The gestalt therapist is a human being in awareness and interaction. For him there is no pure patient-ness. There is only the person in relationship to his social scene, seeking to grow by integrating all aspects of himself.

Appendices give credit to two of my favorite researchers in the area: Carl Jung and Otto Rank as well as some actualized "new rituals" in coffeehouses and universities.

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