Reply to Peg

• Welcome to the BOL Forum on Gestalt Therapy by John Grohol, 3/19/97
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    • Ethics/Morals by Peg , 9/13/98
      
      

Hello Peg,

It takes some courage to post on this, or any forum. Much applause to you. (and the crowd goes wild!!)

Yes sister. It is a question more of the ethics of the gestalt therapist but not because of licensure. Gestalt therapists are not issued licenses' to be able to practice gestalt therapy. They can be recognised by a sponsoring institute of gestalt as having graduated from a training program; but no outside final authority is as yet in existence to uphold or repudiate the graduation certificate issued. Each gestalt therapist is simply on his or her own to make or break it in the real world. Sometimes clients don't know this or even question it because most gestalt therapists do have a license to practice psycho-therapy which they gained from another descipline. Very few gestalt therapists hope to charge insurance companies for pure gestalt therapy alone since they are not licensed in the recognised manner. So then, a psychologist may give a client true gestalt therapy, but he or she will only likely get paid for it from HMO's because they hold a licensed degree in a psychology practice, and not because they are gestalt therapists; although they ARE using gestalt therapy with thier client. They don't lie to the HMO's, they just need to be (most cases)also recognised in another manner as well as Gestalt therapists. Go figure.

In any case, any therapist worthy of answering to being a therapist must be ethically and morally above the everyday housekeeping issues that attaining a license demand. License does not make a good therapist, but a good therapist does justify the issue of a license to protect not the client only, but also the therapist and the field of descipline which produced the therapist. Gestalt is a very undefined therapy methodology which justifies being licensed; it is just that not everbody in gestalt can agree with universal authority exactly which measuring stick to employ to identify what is "good" gestalt therapy or/and what is "bad" gestalt therapy.

It is quite a mess. But what is, is. Someday it will all come together. Will it be true gestalt therapy? Who knows? If that is what it is called when it comes together, then I guess it will be. It is like asking a room of completely deaf people this question:

'If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it; did it make a sound?'

warmly,

Dale

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