Gestalt Therapy and Spirituality... in the Beginning

“ Within the past few years there has been a growing interest in spirituality among therapists, counsellors and others who work with people. Many of the therapists with whom I have had discussions about spirituality say they experience something deeply spiritual in the processes of therapy…”

A Life Well Lived: Essays in Gestalt Therapy
Sylvia Fleming Crocker, page 309

Perls Hefferleine and Goodman - In the Beginning

I have left until now to write about the therapy I know best and which I still consider as a “strange case” in the realm of spirituality.

Without being, hopefully, too generalised, I would offer that there are those therapies which have clearly attempted to address spirituality and religion. We have seen this already with Underhill and James, Jung and Assagioli, Tart and Ornstein, Frager and Taylor. And there are those therapies which rarely if ever refer to spiritual concepts or terms. Gestalt therapy does not fit either of these classes and in several ways stands alone.

Many people associate Gestalt therapy with one of the founders, and perhaps the most charismatic of them, Frederick (Fritz) Perls. Perls in fact saw himself not so much as a “finder” of Gestalt therapy but a re-finder, in that he had described processes which were universal and had been “found” in many different forms.

As we've seen previously most psychotherapies are founded by people (usually men) and the person who founded it becomes the "label" for the therapy, such as Freudian, Jungian etc. Jung made the classic remark regarding this in saying he was glad he wasn't a Jungian.

Gestalt therapy for a time was associated with Fritz Perls, and for many people still is, however it has been diverse and robust enough to develop into the 21st century as a therapy without a personal name attached therapy. The attachment to Fritz still remains though.

He began as a German doctor and psychoanalyst who founded the first South African psychoanalytical institute with his wife and collaborator Laura. However in the aftermath of World War II they left South Africa and moved to New York where they developed their work with a small group of innovative thinkers, specifically Paul Goodman, Ralph Hefferliene and Isadore Fromm.

While Fritz Perls had already published a book which was a transition between Psychoanalysis and Gestalt therapy (Ego, Hunger and Aggression), the first manifestation of this new therapy approach appeared as a collaborative work between Goodman, Perls and Hefferleine titled “Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality”.

It remains today the classic seminal text in Gestalt therapy and is referred to by many Gestalt therapists simply as “PHG”.

If we begin to look for spirituality as part of Gestalt therapy in this early “bible” we are sadly disappointed. The table of contents and index contain no reference at all to spiritual or religious terms and one must dig deep and hard to find words such as “soul”.

However in a more recent Gestalt therapy text by Sylvia Crocker (which does include a chapter on spirituality) we find an excellent critique of PHG where the underlying ground of the authors shows a spiritual influence. Paul Goodman in particular was influenced by Zen Buddhism and the notions of reality of Plato and Aristotle. Crocker argues that the Greek notion of the soul as the animating principle which empowers living organisms deeply influenced Goodman and his writing in PHG.

“ Goodman’s position that the self is that aspect of the soul which involves awareness is well within this view of the soul”

A Life Well Lived: Essays in Gestalt Therapy
Sylvia Fleming Crocker, page 166

So while there are no mentions of theology or transpersonal experiences (such as we find two decades later), the very ground of PHG is imbued with a description of the self which has a spiritual resonance.

This echo of spiritual life is found in the view of reality which PHG propounds. In a return to a holistic paradigm as opposed to the reductionist descriptions of self found in most psychologies of the 1950’s, PHG offers a new language to challenge the fixed fabric of words which create our sense of self as separate and disconnected.

The Organism/Environment Field

The reductionist scientific paradigm had dominated our world view in the 19th and 20th centuries and languaged a reality of separate individuals. In a dramatic break from way of seeing the self and personality, this new psychotherapy described the person as a fluid part of an organism/environment field.

In simple terms this was a shift from seeing people as rocks (fixed and measurable) to seeing them as rivers ( mercurial and fluid). This is like the Buddhist metaphor where the personality is like a rain drop which seems separate but is really just part of the ocean which it will rejoin. A figure which emerges from the ground to be full and then melt back into the ground again.

Like a rain drop in an ocean, PHG described the person as an organism/environment field. The field is all there is, and like a clear figure which emerges from the ground, the organism is always part of this field and is defined by the field. Hence the definition of self is as follows:

“The self is a system of contacts in the organism/environment field”.

Like a Zen Buddhist koan this little mantra at first makes little sense to the uninitiated in Gestalt therapy. It needs to be unpacked - to define terms “system” and “contact”. In many ways this definition of self reminds me of the elusive and paradoxical definitions we have discovered already in the Tibetran Book of the Dead, in the Bhagavid Gitta, Swedenborg, Underhill and the later work of Tart.

Yet while this spiritual flavour and ground of existence is at the core of the first Gestalt therapy text, there is no written link to these earlier spiritual psychologies with no mention of any of these authors or books.

It is only in finding out more about the background of Perls and Goodman do we start to see the various influences in their life, through later authors such as Crocker, Sheppard, Wheeler, Clarkson and Perls himself.

For PHG was not written as a spiritual text by any means but as a psychosocial treatise offering commentary and even salvation from the mind numbing life of mainstream America in the fifties. In many ways it is a cross between a psychological text book and a sociological and anthropological “call to arms”- the stuff of social revolution with a goal of “saving the world”.

Replies:

Re:Gestalt Therapy and Spirituality... in the Beginning, by Bob Harman, 06/16/04 Re:Gestalt Therapy and Spirituality... in the Beginning, by Brian ONeill, 06/17/04

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