BRITISH Volume 12

Nnm ber 2
December 2003
-
pp 73 148
JOURNAL ISSN 0961 - 771X

MALCOLM PARLETT Editorial

DES KENNEDY The Phenomenal Field: The Homeground

of Gestalt Therapy
LYNNE JACOBS Ethics of Context and Field: The Practices
of Care, Inclusion and Openness to
Dialogue
WILLIAM I?. CORNELL The Impassioned Body: Erotic Vitality and
Disturbance in Psychotherapy
LEANNE OTSHIEA Reflection on Cornell: The Erotic Field
MTCHAEL VlNCENT MILLER Reflection on Cornell: The Aesthetics of
Sexual Love
Letters 50 the Editor:
JON FREW Gestalt ih a Cognitive Behavioural World
- Still Here at Least for Now
BUD FEDER International Gestalt

KATY WAICELIN Embodiment and Language: A Response to

James Kepner
PAT LEVITSKY Martin Buber and Bi-Nationalism in
Palestine: A Response to Peter Schultness
KATHLEEN HOLL The Society We Live Within: A Response
to Peter Schulthess

Book Reviews:
JOHN KlRTI WHEWAY Self in Relation by Peter Philippson
CETRISTINE SHEARMAN Handbuch der Gestalttherapie, edited by
Reinhard Fuhr, Milan Sreckovic and
Mactina GremmEer-Fuhr
Opinion:
GALE HOUSTON Orthodoxy or Integration - or Both?

Notices:
B R i h Gastall Jwmal
20W,Vd.12, no. 2, pp 74-75
The British W t Jmmd has a reputation for high
quality, innovative writing at the cutting edge. The present
issue lives up to this reputation. You are in for some
enjoyable reading.
We begin with Des Kennedy, writing with his
distinctive depth and passion. The article draws on
Kennedy's ground-breaking RLD. dissertation, in which
he argues that field ideas need to be grounded in the
phenomenology of lived body experience. Kennedy
draws inspiration from the French phrlosopher, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and weaves some different-from-usual
patterns for Gestalt therapy. Those unfamiliar with
Merleau-Ponty's work will discover how Gestalt-friendly
is the thinking o f this noted phenomenologist, who
arguably deserves to be 'our' (that is Gestalt's)
philosopher of choice. This article raises profound
questions for Gestalt therapy and itq -on, for instance
in the non-use of 'perception" a concept; and the notion
of 'primwdial contact'.
We are delighted to be publishing a new article from
Lynne Jacobs, whose contributions have been much
appreciated by readers in the past. This one tackles ethics
in the context and the field. It draws upon a vivid and
recognisable clinical vignette. Once again, Lynne Jacobs
is very open about her process - which makes her writing,
theoretically sophisticated as it is, also very human and
approachable.
Next is an article by Bill Cornell, titled 'The
Impassioned Body'. He spoke at the UKCP Humanistic
and Integrative Psychotherapy Section Conference in
h d o n last year and a reader of the BGJ, Chistine Uden
(to whom 'thank you'!), sent us a copy of his paper, We
were so impressd by it that we did two unusual things:
we set aside one of our usual criteria that would have
excluded Cornell - in general, our policy is to publish
only those writers with a background in Gestalt; and,
second, we invited Leanne O'Shea and Michael Vlncent
Miller to 'reflect aloud' reganling Come1l"s argument -
that contemporary therapy writing seems to bypass, gloss
over, or render innmuous the dangerous, all-involving,
bodily reality of sexual loving, passion, desire, and lust.
The subject gets hedged around and treated in a less and
less e m w e d fashion.
The three articles together make for very rekshing
reading. I suspect they will be read and referred to many
times. The writing is alive and pungent and Cornell's
thesis is provocative and welcome. O'Shea and Miller do
not disagree with it, but add other dimensions and
insights.
As I have said, this- is she first time that the BGJ has
included a structure where others' reflections are
published dongside an article. We may do this again, but
have no intention of gving up Letters fro the Editor as the
primary vehicle for responses and debate. We issue n
particular invitation for readers tn join in the discussion
started by Come11 and his respondents by writing a Letter
with your own views and vignettes.
In the pmmt issue, there are five interesting letters -
h m Jon FEW, Bud Feder, Katy Wakelin, Pat Levitsky,
and an extended one from Kathleen HBII. This last: is a
response to the Opinion by Peter Schulthess in the last
issue, on Gestalt and Politics' in which Kathleen Holi
writes about the contemporary global scene, democracy,
anarchism, and the need for therapsts to acknowledge tlx
socio-economic-political foxes that are at work in the
global field. All the letters deserve attention.
A review follows, by John Kirti Wheway, of Peter
PhiIippson's recently published book, Self in Relation.
Peter filippson has been a strong supporter of the BGJ
and frequent contributor. We are glad to honour his
writing and thinking with a review of hrs new baok which
matches Peter's own provocative and intelligent
standards.
Christine Shearman, a German speaker, reviews (in
English!) a major German publication that has not been
translated but constitutes one of the most ambitious
Gestalt books to be published in recent years. This kind of
review is a new venture, and one that hzfds the policy of
making the best non-English GestaEE writing available, at
least in some form, to our readership.
Finally, Gaie Houston offers an Opinion, based on a
recent talk to the Gestalt Association UK,where in
characteristically lively and feisty fashion she questions
certain Gestalt trends and fashionable assumptions that
she considers have weakened rather than strengthened the
approach. It is a g d and timely read.
Although there is no special focus to this issue, there arc
interweaving themes and synchronicities. 'Field' is a
cenaal tam;the dead hand of playing safe is a theme; and
last issue's fxus on 'EmMying' is continued...
Sadly, Judith Hemming has tetired s deputy editor of
the Brilish Gestalt Journal. Judith became an assistant
&tor after the f H issue, and has since played a central
and influentid part in the life of the Journal. Her ddeparnrre
is n great loss to the Mitor Team,yet no one can begrudge
her retirement: she has contributed time, thought, skill,
a d energy in abundance,for tweIve years.
Judith came to the BGJ well prepared. Both her parents
once edited journaIs, and so does her husband. She
understood what was required, shared in articulating
editorial policy and dimdun, and insisted that we did not
compromise quality. She has been a stalwart editing
colleague and friend, after the retirement of Pat Levitsky
(in 1997) and before the formation of the present Editor
Team.
 I think of the many different kinds of contribution
Judith has made. Her intemationa1 Gestalt connections
have been invaluable. Her eye for page design led to early
changes that became standard layouts. She has
contributed high quality interviews, reviews, and
sometimes editorials. She has cast a shrewd eye over
countless manuscripts, assisted writers struggling to get
their writing up to BGJ standards, shown finely tuned
editwial judgement at key choice points, and spent (in
total) many days in the last frenzy of proof-reading,
paghation, final checlung etc. Most of a l l we shall miss
her often unconventional wisdom.
I thank you,Judith,not just for what you have given me
personally by way of support, encouragement, and
insight, but also on behalf of readers, who may not realise
how much they have been benefiting from your efforts
behind the scenes. Since you are not retiring from
working and teaching,the usual retirement messages are
inappropriate. We can,however, wish you many years of
enjoyable reading of the BGJ in the future, this time just
for pleasure. Finally, I am glad that you have agreed to
stay as a consultant to the editor, albeit with the
understanding that the consuItations will be infrayem
the appointment: the person who beM,rnes deputy editor
cwld become joint editor w editor when it comes for me
to retire. So we are looking for a first sate cmrlldate in a
genuinely open competition. We are also open to third
party suggestions ofthose who might be invited to apply.
Appointment of individuals to leadership positions dms
not eclipse the need fm teamwork We now have in place
a flourishing team of associate editors, and there is more
sharing of editorial responsibility. Within the last two
years the Board of Editorial Advisers has been
meamlined and is more effectively used than before. The
board of ~ t of mGestalt Publications Ltd. has revived
under the leadership of Gaie Houston. And the financial
position of the BGJ has improved significantly, thanks to
the F r i e d of the British &st& JowmaL.
On the subject of fmances, 1would like to make it clear
that while the financial p i c m is favourable, we still need
the Friends - to pay for capital expenses and to build a
contingency fund. Readers are reminded of the benefits -
including participation in an ambitious Friends' Day in
2004, following an excellent day with Joseph Melnick
last month for the 2003 Friends.

BGJ Deve50pmm&, I m E h g u S m h for a N m

Deprrty Ea%or
A notice appears below regarding the vacant position of
deputy editor, following Judth Hemming's retirement.
That we are advdsing inkmationally as well as within
Britain is a sign of several things. First,it underlines that
though published in Britain, the BGJ has readers and
writers world-wide. Second, in the global village, it is
now @cable that m s t of the editing can be done at a
distance. Third, it underlines the possible sigmficance of
We like to hold previous issues in stock, not least to
enable new students to build collections. However, often
they cannot afford to buy them. We have therefore
decided to Tsduce prices drastically, for a limited pen@.
Please bring this to the attention of those who may wish
to take advantage of the offer. The details appear at the
end of the Journal and also, in more detail on the website
(www.britjshge~taltjoumal.com).

DEPUTY EDJTOR
Following the retkment of Judith Hernming, the British Gestdt Journal is looking to fill the position of
Deputy Editor. We are looking for someone who has some (preferably all) of the following: relevant
experience and ability as a writer andm editor; international Gestalt mmations; a passion for the Gestalt
approach; and readiness and enthusiasm to take on a major oommitment. She will be expected to share
responsibility with the Editor for c m r d i d g the editing and production process in oollahtion with the rest
of the Editor Team, and for continuing to raise the Journal's standards. The person appointed will be qualified
to succeed to the Editorship in a few years' time. Given that it is an international journal, applications Esom
overseas candidates will be considered.

Inquirk (inconfidence) to Malcolm Parlett ( m k o h ~ e t t @ ~ or ) I to The Editor, EJ,

t write
Box 420, BridoE BS99 7PQ.Applications to be received by hlapEh 21st, 2004.
British Gestalt Journal Copyright 2003 by Gestalt Publications Ltd.
2003, Vol. 12, No 2, pp 76-87

THE PHENOMENAL FIELD: THE

HOMEGROUND OF GESTALT THERAPY

Des Kennedy
Received 9 May 2003

Abstract: This article attempts to open up the subject of the area of operation proper to
Gestalt therapy. If we can view Gestalt therapy as a modality of perception, then we can
bring the analysis of Merleau-Ponty to bear on the question and view it in the light of
what he has to say about the phenomenal field. This concept embraces what is
sometimes called the ‘unconscious’ but in Merleau-Ponty’s view it is the lived body
fully present with all its relationships. The phenomenal field as the lived body is part of
phenomenology and carries all the richness and promise of what we call ‘field theory’.

Key words: lived body, contact, existential, Gestalt, intervention, the kiss of the world,
perception.

Introduction the love of my wife Rosemary, trailing associations with

When someone decides to come for therapy with a
Gestaltist or to train in Gestalt counselling, she needs to
be aware that she is entering a different world, one
where the light is quite different, where she is inviting
intervention in her life at a level quite oblique to what
she could expect in consulting her general practitioner.
This difference was brought home to me recently when
I heard on the BBC Today programme (3rd February,
2003) that a research team directed by Professor Edzard
Ernst at the University of Exeter had found that the
popular belief in the healing power of arnica was just an
illusion. ‘I hope,’ announced the triumphant but
benevolent professor, ‘this research will help people to
look for more effective treatments’. The news that this
humble homeopathic pill had failed wretchedly under
the glare of scientific examination set me to asking
questions. What is the difference between the arnica that
the Exeter team were testing and the arnica that
befriended me in my nose operation in July 2002? Are
we, perhaps, talking here about two different arnicas?
The professor was looking at an arnica that was just a
chemical, stripped of all human ties and history, isolated
and naked. The arnica that helped me came loaded with
friends, steeped in the lore and history of healing.
The professor’s heuristic – his template for coming to
knowledge – was to study cause-and-effect; my
heuristic, as a Gestaltist, was phenomenology – to
permit the thing to give itself to me, carrying the
environment which is at the end of my gaze; in other
words arnica was given to me in the phenomenal field.
We have two different arnicas because we have here
two different human bodies. The body the Professor was
studying was the body of the institute of physiology.
The body I am talking about is quite different – it is the
lived body, laden with its history, enmeshed by its
relationships. This last is the body of Gestalt therapy
and is the project of this paper.
I shall urge that the area of operation proper to Gestalt
is immediacy,1 the ‘here and now’, because it is only in
the ‘here and now’ that I am realised – that I become
real – and that realisation of me is my lived body. I use
the word ‘proper’ here in the sense derived from the
Latin word ‘proprium’ meaning ‘belonging to’ or
‘special to’. This is the level of a person’s existence
where Gestalt therapy is best designed to intervene.
When I speak here about immediacy I am not talking
about licence to blurt out insults or exhibitionism of any
kind. I am concerned with perception that proceeds

from the lived body, endowed with structures ‘which
precede knowledge’: the body as reservoir of
inexhaustible possibilities of living which emerge from
my total immersion in the world as my only home.
Until you start thinking about it, immediacy and the
lived body look obvious enough as the area of operation
of Gestalt therapy; but then questions begin to arise.
‘Immediate’ means ‘nothing coming between’ and you
ask: is this ‘between’ person and person? How can that
make sense? Are we here talking about perception? Is
Gestalt therapy just a special form of perception? If it is,
then how can we speak about its having a special domain
– is that not to limit perception? Gestalt therapy focuses
on ‘process’ and takes place in ‘time’: are these identical?
The here-and-now, like every note in a symphony, makes
sense only when it emerges from what went before and
promises what is to come. So, what way is the past and
the future present in the ‘now’? Is what we call ‘time’, in
fact, the process of the lived body? (You cannot have time
without someone counting change!) Is my process
identical with my lived body – a recognisable style of
being, totally special to me yet totally dependent upon the
support of the world about me? My best hope here cannot
be to answer all those questions but to open them up for
further discussion.
Introducing Merleau-Ponty
Above, I have raised philosophical questions which
affect profoundly the foundations of Gestalt therapy and
are a cue for me to introduce 2 the reader to the
philosopher whom I have found to be enormously
congenial to Gestalt therapy thinking. He is Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). He was a philosopher of the
human body, deeply influenced by Husserl and Heidegger
yet firmly going his own way. His father died in the First
World War. He himself served as an officer in the Second
World War, was taken prisoner, released and was then
active in the Resistance. Merleau-Ponty was for many
years an ardent Communist until, in the late 1940s, he
became disenchanted by the brutality of Stalin and
distanced himself more and more from his Marxist
colleagues. This, and other philosophical differences,
occasioned an open breach between himself and his
boyhood friend, Jean-Paul Sartre (Stewart, J., Ed., 1998).3
Merleau-Ponty had been eight years in post as professor
in the Collége de France when he died suddenly of a heart
attack on 3rd May, 1961.
He published his first major work in 1939: The
Structure of Behaviour. This is a profound rebuttal of any
attempt to explain behaviour reductively in terms of
objective variables and functional relationships: a
rejection of stimulus-response theory. The influence of
Kurt Goldstein’s researches 4 is acknowledged and
apparent throughout the work. Themes outlined by
77
Merleau-Ponty were elaborated upon in his main work:
Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1986).5 This latter is
the one most relevant to Gestalt therapy philosophy.
I find between Gestalt therapy and the philosophy of
Merleau-Ponty a hugely promising congeniality: Gestalt
therapy is a body-centred therapy and the philosophy of
Merleau-Ponty is a body-centred philosophy. A salient
characteristic of Gestalt therapy is its consistent refusal to
go along with the traditional dualism of subject and
object, to split the person into body and mind, to make a
sharp division between client and therapist, to speak as if
there was an interior and an exterior person. The Gestalt
therapist invokes phenomenology as the agent of this
holism. Merleau-Ponty, as is apparent even in the very
layout of his Phénoménologie (1945), never wavered in
making the lived body the centre of his work; his
unrelenting polemic was against those who would see
people as machines or as minds – as in Empiricism and
Idealism. It is from his critique of these systems that his
own positive teaching emerges. His project is, he says, to
demonstrate the body’s role in perception which
traditional systems have signally failed to do. Some of us
could legitimately say of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy
what he says of phenomenology: ‘it is not so much a
question of encountering a new philosophy as of
recognising what [we] have been waiting for’ (Merleau-
Ponty, 1986, p viii).
Gestalt Therapy as a Mode of Perception
An assumption underlying my whole approach to
Gestalt therapy is that it is a mode of perception. I am
glad to be able to find Perls on my side in making such an
assumption.
When he made his crude statement about the three
classes of verbiage, Perls was, it seems to me, marking a
distinction very important to Gestalt therapists (Perls, F.,
1971, p 31). He was saying: Look out! Your knowledge
can get in the way of you experiencing! He was
distinguishing between perception and cognition.
Perception is a much broader term than cognition and
embraces the whole cognitive/linguistic realm, our
capacity to experience space and time and all bodily
sensations – including that mysterious sense by which we
judge how much a person is present to us. This broader
sense is the way in which the phenomenologists
understand perception.
Thus, Merleau-Ponty sees perception as inseparable
from the lived body, as the lifelong activity of the person,
ranging from pre-objective experience through
intersubjectivity and motility right up to the
cognitive/linguistic level. He sees perception as the
abiding source of cohesion in a person’s life and, indeed,
constitutive of it:
78
I am not myself a succession of ‘psychic’ acts, nor
for that matter, a nuclear ‘I’ who brings them
together into a synthetic unity, but one single
experience inseparable from itself, one single ‘living
cohesion’, one single temporality which is engaged
from birth, in making itself progressively explicit,
and I confirm that cohesion in each successive
present. (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 407)
Interestingly, he places our ‘sense of the real’ at the
heart of perception and he identifies perception and
awareness as the act of contact. Perception is the
realisation of my access to the world. No further proof is
possible. Even if I am deluded I still access the world. It is
its own guarantor.
Perception is inseparable from the consciousness
it has or rather is of reaching the thing itself.
(Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 374; italics mine.)
Therefore, following Merleau-Ponty, let us take
‘perception’ as indicating a ‘conscious engagement with
the world in a dialectical way’. The key event in our
perception – which we commonly refer to as ‘contact’ – is
the emergence of an immediate world for us as we engage
with a phenomenon. For example, as I write this I engage
with a display of bright daffodils in front of me, and a
whole world of colour and growth and springtime gathers
about me. It is another way of saying that I come to
realisation in the here-and-now.
Although the word ‘perception’ itself is seldom
mentioned, this broad meaning of perception is constantly
implied in the discourse of PHG (see footnote 1) in both
parts One and Two. Early Gestalt therapy writers were
very shy in their use of the word ‘perception’. Instead, we
find much use of the term ‘awareness’. I would agree with
Yontef when he talks about the particular meaning that
applies to awareness as it is used in Gestalt therapy: ‘The
awareness that cures is the awareness that forms a clear
gestalt with a figure organized …’ (1993, p 182). Here he
links awareness with thinking – and I agree with his
emphasising that link – although, as we shall see further
on, this link with thinking can be the undoing of Gestalt
therapy: thinking tends to dismantle the unity not only of
my own body but of the person in front of me. It is
apparent that Yontef is well aware of possible ambiguity
and avoids the word perception entirely. He references
‘awareness’ 154 times, and ‘contact’ 172 times, and yet
makes no reference at all to ‘perception’. Yet it is plain to
me that Yontef – like the authors of Gestalt Therapy –
implicitly views Gestalt therapy as a mode of perception.
If we do not see Gestalt therapy as a mode of
perception then it is difficult to find a concept around
which to unify the theoretical structures. This is especially
Des Kennedy
true when we come to the question of integrating the body
as the locus of Gestalt therapy. It is precisely because
some Gestalt therapists have not integrated Gestalt as a
mode of perception that they tag on ‘bodywork’ as a kind
of ‘therapy supplement’ instead of its being at the centre
of the work, as it was with Laura Perls (1992), and is
presently with James Kepner (1987 and 1995), Ruella
Frank (2001), and some others.6
That it makes sense to see Gestalt therapy as a modality
of perception can be further shown by a consideration of
the terms in which Gestalt therapists describe their work.
Consider some of the terms we find frequently in the
literature: authenticity, awareness, boundary, dialogue,
embodied, field perspective, and holism. When we look to
the meaning of these seven terms we notice two things: (i)
unless they are seen in terms of perception they become
meaningless. And (ii) each one finds its meaning
adequately only in the body as the locus of perception.
To complete this point let us consider what happens in a
situation of therapy. When someone arrives in my office
and ‘therapy’ begins, we mutually engage in a process of
seeing, hearing, sensing one another, struggling to
appreciate and to understand and make sense out of what
is going on between us. We endeavour not to get blocked-
off from each other by the clichés of socialisation and the
effort to be ‘nice’. We judge how present each of us is to
the other as a vital reality check. This looks to me like a
process of ‘perception’ – moreover, a perception that
heals. Somehow, that act in which I touch the world and
the world touches me in a dialectic of co-creation changes
and transforms me and transforms the world.7 The area
within which we work is called ‘the phenomenal field’
(Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 52.). What Merleau-Ponty says
of the task of phenomenology applies to us:
Our task will be … to rediscover phenomena, the
layer of living experience through which other people
and things are first given to us, the system ‘self-
others-things’ as it comes into being. (Merleau-Ponty,
op. cit., p 57; italics mine.)
Teaching Phenomenology?
The exploration that we follow here cannot be ‘taught’;
that is to say, the only way of understanding it is to do it
for yourself. Phenomenology is learned only by doing. As
Merleau-Ponty says, ‘we shall find in ourselves and
nowhere else the unity and true meaning of
phenomenology’ (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p viii). This,
you will recall, was what Perls said to his critics who
demanded ‘proof’: ‘Verify for yourself in terms of your
own behavior’ (PHG, p 31; italics original). We need to
experience the coming-to-be of the world in our own
bodies rather than take it second-hand on the word of
The Phenomenal Field
others, and continually allow ourselves to be corrected by
experience;8 a second stage is when we think about the
experience, which is our quest for meaning, and allow our
understanding to comprehend what has happened. Such a
process as I describe requires of us in relation with our
clients a very fresh look at the emerging world, to re-
discover in ourselves and in them a country once
glimpsed and then lost in the obfuscating fog of introjects,
to contact that purity and innocence with which our world
originally gave itself to us; this is the locus of the impasse
and the level of organismic self-regulation (PHG, p 294),
where Gestalt therapy comes into its own.
Intervention at the Level of Existence and
the Unity of Being
To intervene in the here-and-now is to intervene at the
level of the client’s process – the level of the phenomenal
field. If someone comes to me whose life is crippled with
debts, and I undertake to sort out his financial
embarrassments, I am not necessarily intervening at the
level of his process – even if such sorting out is precisely
the intervention my client wants from me. The level of the
phenomenal field is the ‘how’ of his world actually
emerging for him in his awareness. The disadvantage of
intervening at a non-existential level, the content level, is
that my intervention may be at best ineffective and at
worst harmful to my client. I may even be reinforcing his
fixed gestalt (Mackewn, 1997, pp 17, 23, et passim). In
any case, I shall not be able to call on the support of those
theoretical structures and strategies of awareness, which
undergird my work and make Gestalt therapy the
powerful and effective instrument that it can be.
An intervention on the other hand at the level of the
phenomenal field will bring into his awareness the
unreflecting9 nature of his lifestyle: ‘How is it that I allow
a world to-come-to-be around me which makes me so
unhappy?’ His present condition did not happen by
chance nor was he born with it. His habits of borrowing
money that he could not pay back, of purchasing things
he could not afford, of disregarding the credit card bills
that flopped through his door every month, these habits
took root in him because the ground of the world already
laid down in him accommodated such an unthinking
lifestyle. To throw him a lifeline and haul him out of debt
may give him and others a lot of relief, but that simply
scratches the surface of his predicament. Between him
and that primordial contact10 with the world which we call
in Gestalt ‘organismic self-regulation’, lie layers upon
layers of pseudo-solutions to his life problems. These
layers are not just in his mind but are actually laid down
in his lived body, which carries the whole of his history.
His default position is to be unthinking and that will
manifest itself in any specification of his existence – in his
movement, in his talk, in his relationships, in the way he
79
structures and perceives the world. The intervention that
moves this man to question his basic existential stance
will, in some fashion, confront him with his
thoughtlessness, his flight from reflection, his distance
from the reality of his life and his need of support.
Because of the unity of being, an intervention at any
existential level will be an intervention at every existential
level.
So, as I engage with him at the level of his talk – his
hurried breathlessness – I am also engaging with him at
the level of his intersubjectivity and at the level of his
motility and at the level of his perception. These are all
operative in the Now. This intimate interconnectedness
will remind us of field theory; and it serves also to remind
us that what we call field theory is simply a statement of
phenomenology – of how the world comes to be for us. In
saying all this, I am, as I stated above, framing Gestalt
therapy as a modality of perception. This assumption is
central to my analysis and calls for further explanation.
Gestalt Therapy as Dialectical
The modality of perception that constitutes Gestalt
therapy is dialectical, that is to say, the traffic on this path
is two-way: our perception of the client heals their
perception and their perception in turn heals our
perception. The clinging residues of social, race, religious,
sexual and gender prejudices may be healed in me by
experiencing closeness with someone who is utterly
different from me. It is the chastening beauty of
phenomenology that it requires me to return constantly to
the phenomenon – the client-in-my-presence – and check
that what he is saying to me is really coming from him
rather than from some mediated version of me talking to
myself.
In order that perception may be healing it must proceed
from that place in us where we are at one with ourselves,
one lived unity – not a body and a soul that are joined
together – and address that place in the client where his
unspoilt world comes to be around him. So, if a client tells
me how he hated the holiday as he bottled up his
resentment with his companion out of a feeling of social
obligation, he is beginning to speak from that ‘unspoilt
world’ in revealing himself to me. In other words, we
address the client in his heart’s desire, ‘while knowing the
darkness of his heart, but with a knowledge that is also a
loving’ (Dunne, 1985, p 130). This brings us to the
phenomenal field.
A Description of the Phenomenal Field
Only a human subject creates a phenomenal field about
him. Without a subject there is no phenomenal field, no
sunset emblazoning the evening sky, no awe-inspiring
magnificent ocean, no cohesion of things, no terror at the
80
smell of a hospital, no succession of events. Just as
through our perception we imbue the world with order
like woman imbues a room with the fragrance of her
perfume, so by isolating any part of that world, even with
the best of intentions, we can take apart that phenomenal
field and skew our vision. So if I tell my client of the
unhappy holiday that it was delayed mourning for his
mother who died two months ago, I am isolating a part of
the field and giving it a privileged position in the field.
The phenomenal field is the world already informed by
meaning, before I come to it, and carrying a history.
While fishing you trawl up a coloured stone from the sea
bed. Its surface, somewhat smoothed by the movement of
the sea, is speckled with barnacles, and its fissures are the
dwelling place of tiny creatures; it smells of the sea; it
evokes in you that sense of an alien watery world; the
stone displays itself as carrying a meaning and a history.
Suppose you take it home and bath, scrub, polish and
mount it – there emerges a lovely coloured stone; but now
you have shorn it of its history and of that world of the
ocean, which it trailed. You can go further, of course, and
split it with a chisel and have it disclose the hidden beauty
of its grain. And now you have a different object
displaying itself. Notice what has happened. At first, in
that stone from the sea you engaged through your senses
with the sounds, the feel, the smell of the ocean world;
then in your desire to know more of the stone’s beauty
you processed it and finally split it open. You withdrew it
from the phenomenal field of your relationship as ‘a
stone-from-the-ocean’ and lost its original world. The
phenomenal field challenges us
… to understand these strange relationships which
are woven … between it [the stone] and me as an
incarnate subject and through which the object can
concentrate in itself a whole scene or become an
imago of a whole segment of life. Sense experience is
that vital communication with the world which makes
it present as a familiar setting of our life, it is to it that
the perceived object and the perceiving subject owe
their thickness [épaisseur]. It is the intentional tissue
which the effort to know will try to take apart.
(Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 53.)
To engage with the client in her phenomenal world is to
engage with her through my senses. To engage with a
client’s voice, her smell, her walk, her gaze, the pace at
which she moves and breathes, will be to engage with the
process of her life. This is the subject speaking from
herself. The challenge then, is to allow the world she trails
about with her to emerge – come into being – not just in
my office but, rather, in me. My body responds to her self-
presentation and this is the basis of our dialogue. If this
threatens me too much – or if I have grown too
Des Kennedy
‘experienced’ and too ‘professional’ to be affected by her
– why then I can ‘get to know her more’ and ply her with
questions or turn my thinking to the categories of the
DSM4; and then I shall find that the desire to know takes
apart the phenomenal field. And the client will disappear
like the stone from the sea, and I shall be left with a
‘case’.11
‘The world is not what I think but what I live
through’ (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p xvii)
When a small child hugs a bit of blanket and refuses to
go on holiday without it, we are dealing with the
phenomenal field. The relationship which he has with this
piece of woven cloth is complex and manifold. It means
so much to him that in its possession and closeness he
feels secure and comforted, and in his separation from it
he suffers all the agonies of bereavement, as if he had lost
a friend. His world is, in some mysterious way, stitched
into the very fibres of the thing. His blanket seems to
carry the secret of his identity and reminds him
powerfully of who he is. To call this phenomenon ‘a
transitional object12 attachment’ may be very good
shorthand but it omits the huge richness of the child’s
experience. In the phenomenal field: ‘Vision is already
inhabited by a meaning [sens] which gives it a function in
the spectacle of the world and in our existence’ (Merleau-
Ponty, op. cit., p 52).
The phenomenal field is ‘the lived world’ – that is, the
world as I live through it rather than the world as I think
about it. To ‘live through’ means that I allow myself, my
bodily self, to be affected by the situation. When I take
time out to think about a problem, I withdraw somewhat
from the experience, and in dampening down my
affective involvement I suspend my sense of reality. This
withdrawal is a very helpful and necessary procedure at
times for us all; and the price we pay is a withdrawal from
reality – which brings about our absent-mindedness and
all its inconveniences. I am no longer affected by what is
going on around me. This suspension of reality entails a
withdrawal of my body from the situation – I cannot be
aware of my body while I am absorbed in thought,
because I am not really in a world of space and time just
then: ‘The world is not what I think but what I live
through’ (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p xvii). In fact, the only
way I can live through a situation is in my bodily
existence. Talking about working is not the same as
working; and thinking about someone is not the same as
relating to someone – although there will always be some
thinking in relating. Gestalt therapists are skilled in
knowing well when the balance of their session is towards
talking about and when the living through of the here-
and-now shrinks to vanishing point (cf Arendt, 1978, p
69).
The Phenomenal Field
‘Body Language’
While I live through a situation my body speaks to me.
If someone is caught up in a fire, then he lives through it
by the smell and taste of the acrid smoke, the clamour of
the fire engines and the sounds of shouting and the
inundation of fear and desperation to get to safety. He
may say to himself: ‘This cannot be happening to me’
which is his sense of reality kicking-in. This means, of
course, that the phenomenal field is, in fact, my body and
living through it means allowing my body to speak to me.
Because the world in which we find ourselves is a world
of display – I display myself to the world and the world
displays itself to me – the only thing my body can tell me
is what it sees, feels, is affected by. It is only in terms of
the other – what is not me – that I can know myself. So,
here is a paradox: the only way the man in the fire can
know himself is in the language of his body which, in
order that it may speak to him has to become what is ‘not
him’! (A too hot, half-suffocated, terrified, thing.)
Body Extension – A New Situation
‘To live through’ a situation is not as easy as it sounds.
For one thing many of us can be more or less absent from
ourselves. This makes living through a situation difficult.
We can be distracted, impatient, and numb. We can be
preoccupied with our worries or just plain tired. In such a
condition the sense of reality is slipping away and our
presence becomes problematic. So also, a person who is
drunk cannot properly be said to be living through his
situation. What my body says can be drowned out or
ruled out. My body – which is the meeting place and the
storeroom of all the structures, relationships, influences
and inheritances that constitute my lived-through world –
announces its presence only through articulation.
Wherever my body is, it tends to extend itself into
everything around it, and a whole new world informed by
meaning and carrying my history, gathers about me – like
the smile of a woman which changes the atmosphere of a
meeting. ‘Where is the field?’ someone asks. ‘It is all
there,’ I reply, ‘incarnate in the bodies of the people!’
Where else could it be? ‘The problem of the world, and to
begin with that of one’s own body, consists in the fact that
it is all there’ (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 198).
The Intimacy of Perception
So, the child’s blanket is an extension of his body, like a
blind man’s stick is an extension of his body. This
extension of the realm of our body into things can be
disconcerting. It is why people become jealous of a
particular place in the church, why people get a liking for
sitting in a particular chair, or feel they have not arrived
81
home until they have put on their slippers. A client will
feel more at ease as the therapy room becomes an
extension of his body and it is why the ambience is so
important. The things of my world tend to become an
extension of myself. An airline captain told me how the
plane becomes an extension of his body – as soon as he
sits in the pilot’s seat and handles the controls he can
sense if there is anything amiss. While this sensing
exercise in no way dispenses him from the careful
checking required of him, he will not hesitate to delay
take-off until he feels at ease with his aircraft. This sense
of ‘something amiss’ is in his body although the thing
‘amiss’ seems to be ‘outside, somewhere’.
Notice this trick that perception plays on us: that it loses
itself completely in the object and we begin to think that
what we perceive is wholly outside of ourselves. And this
gives rise to the view that the world of my experience is
apart from me. If it was really apart from me, in the sense
that it was in no way affecting me, then I would not
perceive it at all. The effect that a client is having on me
is the presence of that client in my world. The pilot knows
there is something amiss because the plane is literally
talking to him in his body; this would not happen unless
the plane had become an extension of the pilot’s body.
Similarly, the therapist responds to the movements in the
body of the client – his unspoken anger, his persistent
anxiety – because of body speaking to body in a shared
world (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 352). This is called
‘contact’– our most favourite Gestalt word. It is not
constituted by physical contiguity but by dialectical co-
creation – an exchange.
‘Dialogue’, we also call it: here we are not concerned
with significant sounds or ‘phonemes’, but with the logos
– an utterance which makes present what is talked about
(Heidegger, 1973, p 56). The way we use a client’s name,
the way we look at her, the way we respond, will not have
its full impact unless it proceeds from that place in us
where our world is emerging. As for the air pilot, the
knowledge we get from our body is of a different quality
from that which we get from going through checklists.
Lived body knowledge does not derive from the domain
of inferential judgements, but from looking at how our
bodies are present in the world.
If, along with Merleau-Ponty, we conceive of our body
and the world as constituting one system then we have a
theoretical resolution which is in line with our Gestalt
experience and practice.
Our body is in the world as the heart is in the
organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly
alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly
and with it forms a system. (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p
203.)
82
In order to perceive something I have to live it, in a
sense I have to become it, or rather it becomes me – the
plane becomes aware of itself in the pilot, the client
becomes aware of herself in me. Similarly, the child
becomes his blanket and the blanket becomes the child;
but now instead of being an inert, lifeless and ultimately
meaningless thing-in-itself, the blanket is gathered up into
the humanity of the child and thinks and feels and
remembers. We see this in a more heightened way when
we consider the relationship which develops between us
and our animal pets. This relationship is contact – the
dialectic of co-creation – and it constitutes the
phenomenal field.
Discernment in Therapy
Intervention at the level of the phenomenal field means
discerning the vulnerable place in the client. It may be
that he says to you how stories of someone being found or
someone being abandoned or of someone struggling to
survive, affect him more deeply than ‘one would expect’.
It can appear as an area in the client’s life which is by-
passing the usual programming, where everyday chitchat
seems out of place. When a person is engaging at the
level of the phenomenal field, this will manifest itself in
the body of both the client and the therapist. To ask the
client to describe what is going on in his body will be to
move to that place in the dialogue immediately before
reflection. To do all this without stampeding the client or
setting his agenda calls for skill, insight and openness on
the part of the therapist – openness to the presence of the
client and openness to experiencing his own darkness.
The ‘Moment’ of Primordial Contact
At this pre-reflective level we engage with that
primordial contact with the world with which every
human being’s life begins. This is that ‘moment’ in which
the person is given a world – and this prior to all learned
categories and concepts.
To ask when this ‘moment’ of primordial contact
happens, to wish to determine it exactly, to catch it by
itself and place it in a before-and-after, is to subsume it
under the category of things that can be counted where it
does not belong13 and make it into something it is not.
Such a question is like asking a therapist how many
sessions it will take to cure a depressed person; or like
geometrising a man working in a wheat field on the
hillside by holding up a pencil and measuring off his
height against the length of the pencil and then saying:
‘That is his size’. To get stuck because we cannot answer
the question ‘When?’ in regard to primordial contact is to
endeavour to define primordial contact by what becomes
possible as a result of it. Chronology, the counting of
Des Kennedy
movement according to before and after, makes no sense
apart from the presence of a subject. (So, when we say
such a star is sixty billion years old, we have sneaked in a
counting subject – my own lived body – without which
the expression is meaningless.) But then, it makes no
sense to try to explain subjectivity (primordial contact) by
what becomes possible through subjectivity. It makes no
sense for me to explain my gaze, my vision, in terms of ‘a
horizon whose distance from me would be abolished … if
I were not there to scan it with my gaze’(Merleau-Ponty,
op. cit., p ix).
Such is the intimacy of our belonging in the world that
Merleau-Ponty speaks of it in religious and sexual terms:
we find ourselves ‘dedicated to the world’ [voué au
monde] (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p xi); ‘… every
perception is a communication or a communion … a
coition of our body with things’ [un accouplement]
(Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 320). This belonging is the
follow through of that event which he calls primordial
contact. This is, to use a metaphor, the marriage of our
living bodies to the world. There is neither ‘world’ nor
person in existence before this marriage because they co-
create one another. This relationship is henceforth the
situation of all situations and the ultimate support of every
other relationship which features in my life. Just as the
elaborate superstructures of our cities, our roads, railways,
power supplies ultimately depend upon the stability of the
earth – that it is there and will not move away – so, the
great structures of my relationships depend upon my
body being rooted-in and responsive-to the structures of
the world. A therapist rightly becomes alarmed when a
client cannot feel his feet upon the ground or expresses a
preference for therapy in an upside-down position. This
primordial attachment to the world is called by the
Existentialists the moment of ‘thrownness’ (Macquarrie,
1973, p 149). This is the pre-reflective way in which we
find ourselves in a world where we belong because it is
like us. ‘The core of the idea of thrownness is that there is
meaning in the world before I initiate it, but at the same
time this meaning discloses my “connaturality”, that is to
say, that the nature of myself is the same as the nature of
the world’ (Mallin, 1979, p 42). This is to the individual
what, according to some astronomers, the ‘Big Bang’ is to
our universe. And, just as this originating explosion
continues to reverberate around our cosmos, so this
original revelation continues to inform our every
perception. The movement of my hands and the
articulation of my thoughts on this paper are a continuing
specification of that primordial faith in the world.
It is through primordial experience that we explain how
my body has been given knowledge of the world that is
not ordinarily accessible to my thinking, and it is upon
this body-knowledge that my thinking is founded. A
client’s awareness of a pain or sensation in his chest and
The Phenomenal Field
lower spine is not the result of his rational inferences. Of
course, his thinking will take this up so that it begins to
make meaning for him.
Where is the Phenomenal Field?
Where is this area of primitive contact with the world?
Again, if we try to geometrise it we are in trouble. If, after
the fashion of the neuroscientists we point to this or that
area of the brain, we are in trouble. As Gestalt therapists
we need to be aware that once we start down the road of
explaining our therapy by cause and effect, by the
retailing of data – even in a very disguised way – we are
undercutting the very foundations of our work. We are
essentially concerned with perception and it is only
through perception that we can begin to discover the data
of perception. If we reverse this order we are abandoning
the phenomenal field because in every step we take in our
explanation we invoke that which we are trying to
explain.
Now here the data of the problem are not prior to
its solution, and perception is just that act which
creates at a stroke, along with a cluster of data, the
meaning which unites them – indeed, which not
only discovers that meaning which they have, but
moreover sees to it that they have a meaning.
(Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 36; italics original)
This is it here – my lived body! We sometimes imagine
that on the one hand we have ‘the world’ and on the other
we have ‘my body’ and then the two ‘things’ come
together and we get ‘contact’. Such a view brings with it
impossible problems. For one thing, it assumes a world
of sensation already going on in me independent of world.
For another it falls back into a mechanical view of
sensation, long ago discredited by the Gestalt
psychologists. To explain contact, the two-world view is
no help to us Gestaltists. In order that I may perceive
something it must in some way be part of my lived body.
Looking further at the situation we can say: this contact
is my body – precisely these structures which are my
senses; these senses must have a ‘pre-personal status’
(Mallin, 1979, p 41). The smell of the gorse on the
moorland does not depend on any personal act of mine.
The sensible gives back to me what I lent to it; but
this is only what I took from it in the first place. As I
contemplate the blue sky I am not set over against it
as an acosmic subject; I do not possess it in thought
… I abandon myself to it and plunge into this
mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me’, I am the sky
itself as it is drawn together and unifed, as it begins
to exist for itself… (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 214)
83
The Gift of Existence
This ‘primal acquisition’ is that ‘marriage’ of myself
(my body) with the world, my thrownness which
disclosed to me, albeit without self-awareness, my
connaturality with the world. Because of its primitive
richness my experience is not clear to itself. This
connaturality is ‘the great reservoir’ (Stern, 1985 p 67)
from which all subsequent contacts with the world draw
their abundance. Possibilities for action (contact) beckon
me all day; and are inexhaustible. The world in its
infinitude is the ever-present horizon against which these
invitations can become figure. This is why I discern an
ineluctable ‘givenness’ about my experience – it does not
originate with me. If it did originate with me then I would
expect my DIY operations to run more smoothly; as it is
the hole is always the wrong size, the bit skids
abominably on the screw, the wood is the wrong width
and even the simplest operations take a disproportionate
amount of time to complete. Furthermore, in the context
of therapy, if my experience did originate with me I
would not have to be so careful about bracketing off my
own stuff while attending to a client because it would all
be crystal clear to me already. Not only does my
experience not originate with me but a great deal of it
seems to be going on in a world parallel to my own. My
reflex movements seem to carry on quite independently
of me. Their course and results can be observed by my
awareness without its being really involved with them.
My eye does not wait for a consultation with me before
shutting down to lock out an inquisitive fly. Yet these
processes are not blind: ‘they adjust themselves to a
direction of the situation, and express our orientation
towards a “behavioural setting” … It is this global
presence of the situation which gives a meaning to the
partial stimuli and causes them to acquire importance,
value or existence in the organism’ (Merleau-Ponty, op.
cit., p 78).
In the paper chase of a daily life which is tightly
scheduled, our awareness can very easily suffer partial
eclipse. What generally drops out is our sense of intimate
connection with the world – which is another way of
saying that I lose contact with my body; because my lived
body is where the world is for me. Every moment of my
life is lived out in a situation and it is my body that creates
the situation. You wait in the restaurant for your woman
friend and then when she arrives her bodily presence
creates a new situation. The ‘situation’ is our dialogue
with the world. It is easy to see how, in a busy life, a
person may habitually interrupt this dialogue with the
world which is the condition of our continuing health. If I
am so taken up with thinking and working things out,
absorbed in a great deal of conversation, focused on
planning schedules, frequently checking my watch to see
‘have I time to fit in this or that?’, then I can easily begin
84
to live at a distance from my body. So, when the life of
sensation is factored out of such a crammed schedule,
people can forget to eat, do not notice their tiredness, pay
no attention to a nagging pain in their wrist, and even
become unmindful of their need to defecate. This means
that life becomes superficial, the person loses contact with
the tissue that connects her to the world and which is the
source of our life and energy. The lived body is degraded.
Notice how Merleau-Ponty gathers up subjectivity into
the anonymous gratuity of existence:
By means of sensation I am able to grasp on the
fringe of my own personal life and acts, a life of
given consciousness from which these latter emerge,
the life of my eyes, hands and ears which are so
many natural selves. Each time I experience a
sensation I feel it concerns not my own being, the
one for which I am responsible and for which I
make decisions, but another self which has already
sided with the world, which is already open to
certain of its aspects and synchronised with them ….
Between my sensation and myself there stands
always the thickness of some primal acquisition
which prevents my experience from being clear to
itself. I experience the sensation as a modality of a
general existence, one already destined for a
physical world and which runs through me without
my being the author of it (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p
216).
The Kiss of the World
If we speak about primordial contact as ‘an experience’
we have inserted some kind of ‘content’ or ‘intentionality’
into it. It has no content, no specified intention, but is that
timeless ‘moment’, as I said earlier, when my belonging
in the world discloses itself; the world is my only home
and is the ever-present horizon of every perception and,
therefore, the ultimate validation of whatever I hold to be
true. The world is the source of such certainty as I must
have to carry on my life, because the world in general is
the only absolute certainty I possess (Merleau-Ponty, op.
cit., p 297). It is this most general presence of being in
primordial contact, which will, for the rest of my life,
adhere to every single movement of my perceptual region
of existence.
My first perception, along with the horizons that
surrounded it, is an ever-present event, an
unforgettable tradition; even as a thinking subject, I
still am that first perception, the continuation of that
same life inaugurated by it (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit.,
p 407).
Des Kennedy
Primordial faith therefore undergirds the first coming-
to-be of a world for a new being, as it undergirds every
subsequent perceptual act: it is as if the world, in all its
richness, gathers around this new being in welcome and
says to her/him, as people say when a baby is born: ‘You
are beautiful and you belong here’. We could well call this
moment the ‘kiss of the world’.
I feel sure there are people to whom this expression of
primordial faith or contact must seem too idyllic, too ‘out-
of-touch’ with the realities of the life. But if you think
how your pet collie welcomes you home and has to be
restrained in his desire to lick your face, and if you further
recall that your collie is the material world become
articulate, then you see what I mean. I feel sure also that
such behaviour on the part of your collie could be
explained in such terms that it loses its ‘thickness’
(épaisseur)(Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 53). Such a
reductive explanation raises the same problem as we met
with the arnica at the start. Although we use the same
word for it the Exeter scientists and I are speaking about
two different realities – or, if you grant that a view creates
a world, then two different worlds.
The phenomenal field opens up to us a world quite
different from the taken-for-granted-world of our natural
attitude. This can be a problem for the Gestalt therapist.
Epilogue
The reader will recall that right at the start of this article
I said how, in Gestalt therapy, the light is quite different
from that in the general practitioner’s surgery. I pointed
out how, in the changed light of Gestalt, the arnica I used
after my surgery was transformed into something quite
different from that examined and dismissed by professor
Edzard Ernst and his researchers. The metaphor of light in
this context is not original to me; I gladly acknowledge
my borrowing it from the great Theodore Fechner (1801-
1887). He used it to describe the transforming experience
that happened to him in the sunshine of a Leipzig garden
when he was ill and in his mid-seventies. The story is
beautifully narrated by Jan Hendrik van den Berg (1980).
Fechner was a gifted and dedicated scientist. He was
one of the founders of what is called Experimental
Psychology. So dedicated was he in his quest for
knowledge, that his experiments on after-image led him to
look at the sun and damage his eyes, so that he was
threatened with blindness. Between the ages of seventy-
two and seventy-six he underwent four eye operations. It
was those same diseased eyes that caused him to write a
book, published in 1878, under the strange and puzzling
title The Daylight View as Opposed to the Night View.
He tells us himself how he came to write that book:
‘“To give my damaged and sensitive eyes a bit of rest, I
took a seat on a bench in a park in Leipzig. I was sitting
The Phenomenal Field
beside the lawn, the sun was shining, butterflies fluttered
above the flowering grass, birds twittered and sang in the
bushes”’(van den Berg, 1980, p 23). As he sat there
enjoying himself he began to censure himself: how could
he, as a scientist, be so uncritical of that beauty? After all,
from the scientific viewpoint there is no beauty and no
ugliness in the world around us. In the natural sciences, he
recalls, the world is at once silent and without light. All
this beauty is just subjective illusion lacking the rigour of
scientific proof! Strange that ‘lay-people’ are so unaware
of this!
But then, Fechner, looking around at the beauty of the
garden, realises that the great edifice of knowledge which
is Science is constructed upon just such an experience as
he was having in this garden in Leipzig. He calls into
question the superior place given to scientific knowledge
over everyday experience and this gives him the theme of
his book: ‘Much stranger is the fact that … even a
scientifically trained man (like him) has learned to believe
in the Night View’, and for this world of beauty that
caresses his senses in that park ‘substitutes another world,
a humanly empty, meaningless and silent world’ (op. cit.,
ibid).
I reflect that while everything that I can see around me
now as I write demonstrates the power of the world of the
Night View as an investigative tool, the area of operation
proper to Gestalt is the world of the Daylight View where
we enter the world of actual human experience.
We have seen in this account how that most pervasive
of all human activities – perception – is a carrier of
destiny. In its specialised form – Gestalt therapy – it
becomes a magnificent healer, not just of the soul, but of
the whole person. A person is healed by perception when
he is permitted to become and display himself as from
himself and not from another. This is not the process of an
isolated body-subject, but an unfolding in the loving
presence of another, so that his lived body will return to
him from the eyes of another. In this is captured what we
have called the welcoming kiss of the world. Although
this concept is introduced by Merleau-Ponty to give
epistemological foundation to his philosophy, it validates
also the emphasis upon immediacy in Gestalt therapy, and
also the principle that we each of us carry ‘an innate and
unsuppressible need for wholeness, for aliveness’ (Korb,
Gorrell and van de Riet, 1989, p 44): our life-thrust in the
direction of health.
Notes
1. Immediacy is such a prevailing theme right through the
classic foundation-book – Gestalt Therapy (Perls,
Hefferline and Goodman, 1951/1973) – that
referencing it to pp 15,190 and 276 and adding passim,
might lead the reader into missing just how
85
fundamental to the whole of the work is this concept.
Indeed, we might justly summarise Gestalt therapy by
two dynamic words: immediate and integrating. In this
article I shall reference the above text as PHG.
Pagination refers to the 1973 edition.
2. An introduction is necessary because Merleau-Ponty is
not well known amongst Gestalt writers. For example,
the preceding issue of this journal (12,1) contains not a
single reference to him – not even in Richard
Wallstein’s excellent interview with Jean-Marie
Robine, a foremost French Gestalt therapist. Robine’s
own writings are profoundly philosophical. And yet,
even his splendid essay on postmodernism and Gestalt
therapy (1999) contains no reference to Merleau-Ponty.
3. Jon Stewart’s book deals exhaustively with this very
significant debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
It is one of the series from Northwestern University
Studies in Phenomenology. It contains a wealth of
primary texts and documents in translation.
4. We recall that Goldstein also profoundly influenced
Fritz Perls (who was his laboratory assistant for a time)
and Paul Goodman (who briefly taught Goldstein
English when he come to Colombia University as a
refugee from Hitler in 1934).
5. Phenomenology of Perception was originally published
as Phénoménologie de la Perception by Gallimard in
1945. It was translated into English by Colin Smith and
published by Routledge in 1962. It first found a review
in the British Philosophical Quarterly (14.57) in 1964.
There it was scathingly reviewed by Mary Warnock
who wondered if it would ever see another English
edition. Since then it has been reprinted eleven times in
English – the most recent being in 2003. In this article I
am using the 1986 printing of Colin Smith’s translation
and the unchanged 1945 Gallimard French edition.
6. Merleau-Ponty, unlike Yontef, does not link awareness
with thinking but identifies it with existence itself:
‘Consciousness is being-towards-the thing’ (Merleau-
Ponty, op. cit., p 38) – through the medium of the lived
body. He sees it as a kind of light that draws no
attention to itself but points to the ‘things’ it displays. It
is that in me which ‘enables “things” to be constituted’;
awareness ‘forgets its own phenomena in favour of
things’, a bit like a mother forgets herself in favour of
her children, ‘because [awareness] is the cradle of
things’ (Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p 58) and can recall its
own phenomena. He does not separate
consciousness/awareness from the existence of the
person. This way he avoids any tendency to reify
‘awareness’. (Colin Smith always translates la
conscience as ‘consciousness’ never as ‘awareness’.)
7. This transformation, of course, is not invariably
positive. It can be destructive, as happens in war or
domestic violence. Sometimes to be perceived is to be
86
injured and suffer lifelong disablement – as happened
to a woman whose father never missed an opportunity
of telling her how ugly and cumbersome she was. For
that young woman, to be perceived by her father was
to be shamed and hurt. His perception robbed her of a
world in which she could move and feel beautiful and
where she belonged.
8. This is a favoured theme of the Existentialists: e.g.
Kierkegaard, Journals, 1834-1854, p 53.
9. I am very influenced by Hannah Arendt’s reflections
on ‘thoughtlessness’ (1978, Introduction).
10. I shall explain this notion later on in the present essay.
For now let me say that the phrase ‘primordial contact’
describes a notion fundamental to the epistemology of
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy; he uses different phrases
to describe it such as ‘primordial attachment’
(Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p.327), ‘primordial
experience’ (ibid., p 242), ‘first-hand value’ (ibid., p
241). It refers to an event at the beginning of each
person’s life in which that person – entirely without
any previous thematic formation, ‘finds’ herself in a
world in which she belongs because her structures are
also the structures of that world. We are of the same
substance as the stars. Epistemologically, we
experience that our present makes sense because it
emerges from a past, and this present is intentionally
informed by the future. Without this threefold
movement there could be no personal process and
therefore no time – because they are one and the same
phenomenon. Although he does not use the term
‘primordial contact’, Daniel Stern uses a very similar
notion when he speaks of the sense of an emergent self
(1985, p 67).
11. Although Perls and Goodman were innocent of the
terminology of phenomenological analysis, they knew
from their experience that thinking about can become a
substitute for experiencing; this, I speculate, would
have played a part in the anti-intellectualist phase in
Perls’ life. For an example of this cf. Perls (1971, p 46).
12. This is the term Winnicott uses to describe the
phenomenon. He discusses it extensively (1971/1982).
13. To count people is to reify them. The Irish language
has two different counting systems, one for things
which begins a haon (one), a dó (two); and a second
system for people: duine (a person), beirt (two
persons).
References
Arendt, H. (1978). The Life of the Mind, Vol. I: Thinking.
Secker and Warburg, London.
Clarkson, P. and Mackewn, J. (1996). Fritz Perls. Sage
Des Kennedy
Publications, London.
Dunne, J. (1985). The House of Wisdom. SCM Press,
London.
Heidegger, M. (1927/1973). Being and Time. (Trans.
Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, F.) Basil Blackwell,
Oxford.
Kierkegaard, S. (1969). The Journals of Kierkegaard,
1834-1854. Collins Fontana Books, London.
Korb, M.P., Gorrell, J., and van de Riet, V. (1989). Gestalt
Therapy (Practice and Theory). Allyn and Bacon,
Boston.
Macquarrie, J. (1973). Existentialism. Penguin Books,
London.
Mallin, S.B. (1979). Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy. Yale
University Press, New Haven.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la
Perception. Collection Tel Editions, Gallimard.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/1986). Phenomenology of
Perception. (Trans. Smith, C.) Routledge and Kegan
Paul, London.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1983). The Structure of Behavior.
(Trans. Fisher, A.L.). Duquesne University Press,
Pittsburgh.
Perls, F. (1971). Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Bantam
Books, New York.
Perls, F., Hefferline, R.F., and Goodman, P. (1951/1973).
Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the
Human Personality. Pelican Books, London.
Robine, J-M. (1999). La Gestalt-thérapie va t’elle oser
s’engager dans la voie post-moderne. Les Cahiers de
Gestalt-Thérapie, 5, pp 59-82. College Francais de
Gestalt-Thérapie, Tarbes.
Stern, D.N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant.
Basic Books, New York.
Stewart, J. (Ed.), (1998). The Debate Between Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty. North Western University Press,
Evanston, Illinois.
Stoehr, T. (1994). Here Now Next. Gestalt Institute of
Cleveland. Jossey Bass, San Francisco.
van den Berg, J. (1980). Phenomenology and
Psychotherapy. The Journal of Phenomenological
Psychology, 11, 2, pp 21-48.
Winnicott D.W. (1971/82). Playing and Reality. Penguin
Books, London.
Yontef, G. (1993). Awareness, Dialogue and Process. The
Gestalt Journal Press, New York.
The Phenomenal Field 87

Des Kennedy BA, PhD, Dip.GPTI, is a teaching and supervisory member

of the Gestalt Psychotherapy and Training Institute, and a UKCP registered
Gestalt psychotherapist. Presently, he runs an extensive private practice in
therapy and supervision and is a guest trainer at the Institute for Arts and
Therapy in Education in Islington, London. He has recently defended
successfully his PhD thesis at the University of Derby. The thesis is
entitled: Healing Perception: the Application of the Philosophy of
Merleau-Ponty to the Theoretical Structures of Gestalt Psychotherapy.

Address for Correspondence: Shalom, 36 Hillside Road, West Kirby,

Wirral, CH48 8BB, UK
Email: deskennedy@freezone.co.uk
British Gestalt Journal Copyright 2003 by Gestalt Publications Ltd.
2003, Vol. 12, No 2, pp 88-96

ETHICS OF CONTEXT AND FIELD: THE

PRACTICES OF CARE, INCLUSION AND
OPENNESS TO DIALOGUE

Lynne Jacobs
Received 4 September 2003

Editor’s Note: In this article, which will be published in a collection of writing on

relational issues applied to ethics, Lynne Jacobs, prominent Gestalt therapist and writer,
develops a model of ethics which arises from examination of the field and context in
which therapy takes place. She uses vivid examples from her own experience and
clinical practice to show how therapists might focus their awareness on the ethics of
their practice, primarily by attending to the issues of care, inclusion and openness to
dialogue. She describes how this stance can be challenged by circumstance both distal
and proximal, by events both in the consulting room and in the wider world; and she
illustrates how these are inevitably linked. By attending to ourselves and to our work
with this in mind, she suggests, an ethical practice that develops authentically from the
therapeutic dialogue can inform and guide us, perhaps more helpfully than one imposed
somewhat arbitrarily from the outside.

Key words: Gestalt therapy, ethics, care, inclusion, dialogue, context, therapeutic task.

Introduction paralysed? Was he on a stairwell, oblivious to the worse

After September 11, 2001 I became interested in
understanding hate and the negation of otherness. I am
not trying to guess what the hijackers and planners
actually thought and felt, but the effects of their actions
could easily be understood as hateful, hostile negation. I
became interested in this phenomenon, not to
understand the hijackers better, but because the events
of that day began to bleed over into my clinical work. I
am sickened by the fact that I became hateful and
negating towards some of my patients.
After the first week, when I was simply mute, as
though words were useless and without meaning, my
body and skin felt raw. This rawness became
problematic to my patients because I found myself
unable to tolerate even the smallest acts of negation, as
if the negations were scratches on my raw skin.
Each of us is, I suspect, haunted in particular ways by
the events of that day. My nephew, who lost his best
friend in the WTC collapse, is haunted by questions and
imaginings. What were the last moments of his friend’s
life? Was he helping others? Was he shocked and
horror that was about to engulf him?
Among other things, I am haunted by the image of
passengers in the planes that were used as missiles. I
imagine the gut-wrenching realisation that they were
being made involuntary accomplices in terrible mass
murder. Such use of them was an ultimate assault on
their agency, their dignity. Not only would they die, but
they would be used to kill others. An ultimate negation
of their will, their ordinary goodwill.
So in my consulting room, I became highly sensitive
to how, at least from my perspective, I was being used
and misused. If I had any sense that my patient was
engaged in acts of negation, however minute, I reacted.
It was as though I had decided that life was not worth
living if we engaged in acts laced with contempt,
disdain or hostility. I was fighting to make life
meaningful again.
I lost my footing and stopped practising inclusion. I
had no inclination to understand from the patient’s
perspective what was going on. I only reacted to the
impact on me. And the ‘me’ here was a person who was
desperate to be accorded a dignity that could restore my
Ethics of Context
faith in human connection. My experiential world (or
phenomenological field1) had been disrupted, even
shattered.
Ironically, I became caught up in a spiral of mutual
negations. My reactions to being negated were defensive,
moralistic, shaming, in other words, negating! So my
patients defended themselves by more defensiveness,
which I then experienced as further negation.
A Patient and Me
It has taken me a long time to regain my balance with
patients. One patient in particular, Isabel, had the bad
fortune of beginning to work with me within days of the
murderous attacks of September 11. She is a college
administrator with a background in linguistics. Her prior
therapist had retired suddenly for health reasons. She was
very attached to her former therapist, and was enormously
distraught over having to leave him before she was ready.
He had recommended that she see me, and she agreed,
having seen and liked my manner when I gave a
presentation at a class she attended. However, she was
terrified of working with a woman. She fully expected
that a woman therapist would use the power of her
position to dominate her. She also dreaded the collapse
she would suffer if the therapist got angry with her, and
yet she had chosen me in part because she admired and
wished to emulate my confident expression of a wide
range of feelings, including anger.
Our trouble began within the first few sessions. I
quickly found that I was characterising Isabel in terms of
what I saw her ‘doing to me’ rather than in terms of what
she was trying to establish for herself. She seemed to
ignore or deflect statements I made, and questions I
asked. She also acted somewhat imperiously, as though
she was perfectly entitled to have whatever kind of
interaction she wanted with me, regardless of my own
inclinations. It was as if I was one of the passengers in the
plane, my own agency having no meaning to the
patient/hijacker. I felt threatened as I experienced Isabel
being subtly demanding and subtly hostile. The subtlety
left me at a loss as to how to make these dimensions of
our interaction figural.
All of these ‘mere descriptions’ carried judgements I
was making, not giving her the benefit of the doubt, but
presuming at the outset that her behaviour was directed at
distancing and negating me. I was assessing her as aiming
more at getting her needs met through direct action rather
than using the therapy as a place to explore her needs.
More disturbingly, I also found myself irritated, annoyed,
even righteously indignant that I was being ‘managed’
and ‘manhandled’ rather than being well met and well
used by her. And then, more disturbing still, and most
crucially, I did not even try to understand what might be
going on for her that evoked such noxious (to me)
89
behaviours. I stayed centred in my own negative
reactions, and confronted her quite often.
Obviously, human behaviour and interaction is
inherently ambiguous and open to multiple
interpretations. But roughly speaking, beyond the obvious
communicative and expressive dimensions, the meta-
level of functions of interactions can be usefully looked at
as being simultaneously aimed at both self-regulation and
at influencing the other. While these two foci are not
really separable in action, one or the other of the aims
may be more figural at any given moment. Self-regulation
involves especially trying to maintain one’s emotional
equilibrium and to maintain a relatively stable sense of
self-esteem. For instance, one may be careful not to
interact in ways that increase the chances that one may
feel ashamed. One may wish to influence others both to
enlist the other in regulating one’s own self-states, but
also to participate with the other in a way that enhances
the other’s wellbeing also. These two functions may be
operating largely out of awareness. It is often the case that
people may regulate their emotional states with
behaviours that shame or in other ways disrupt others, and
yet since their intent was so focused on self-regulation,
they have little or no awareness that they are doing so by
influencing the other to retreat from the interaction. In
fact, generally people are only minimally aware of, or
interested in, their impact on the other if their self-
regulation is jeopardised. I have often found that they
cannot make use of exploration of their impact on others
until they develop confidence that the therapeutic pair will
be able to provide the necessary emotional regulation that
they used to rely on themselves alone to provide. My
imbalance, motivated by my own jeopardised self-
regulatory process, was that I found myself listening and
responding too frequently from the following listening
stance: ‘what is the patient doing, or trying to do, to me?’
My preferred predominant listening stance is more: ‘what
is the patient trying to do for herself, and how am I
expected to contribute?’ Is the patient mainly aiming at
influencing me by negating me? Or is the patient mainly
aiming at regulating her own disrupted emotional
process? Buber made this same point by stressing the
importance of inclusion, and asserting the necessity for
the therapist to know viscerally, bodily, what it is like to
be the patient in relationship to the therapist.
I described what Isabel was doing as negating me, and
I pressed her to look at what was motivating her to do so.
The more I picked up on the negations of me, the more
urgently Isabel needed to continue to regulate herself in
whatever manner she could muster, thereby foreclosing
on a chance to learn about mutual regulation. She needed
to protect herself in ways that further negated me, because
my insistence on being recognised constituted a threat to
dominate and negate her. My own despairing ‘self-
regulation-through-blaming’ interfered with her chance to
90
develop in such a way that she would have been less
likely to negate me!
Our interactions became governed as much by
desperation and hate as they were by our therapeutic task.
These are shadows that fell over our disrupted connection.
Poor contact and connection threatened to impoverish, if
not annihilate us, and each of our desperate self-
preservative actions became a vicious cycle of further
disruption and defensiveness.
I had lost my way as a therapist, and was practically
torturing a patient. How was I to find my balance and
restore our chances for therapeutic dialogue? In part I
turned to meditations on field theory and contextualism
for a stabilising anchor.
I will return to the story of Isabel and me later.
Contextualism
Let us start with a dense statement; one that sets the
stage for all that follows. Human subjects are situated,
embodied agents, inhabiting, and inhabited by, a non-
indifferent world (see Taylor, p 22). We are situated in that
we come into being at a certain time in history, in a certain
familial, ethnic, national, and cultural landscape, and
within a certain set of language and action practices. As
Merleau-Ponty elegantly established, we are embodied
agents in that our experiential world exists in relation to
us, and specifically in relation to us as a field of potential
actions. That is, our perceptual field has a structure which
orientates us. Things are near, far, up and down, and all in
relation to our functioning as an agent in a gravitational
field. Without gravity, without body, and without agency,
the notions of near, far, up and down are without meaning
(Taylor, p 23). This last statement also points to how our
world is a non-indifferent one. Figures of interest form.
Figure formation is a continual, involuntary process, and
figures are emergent phenomena of our situation, and of
our agency.
So our existence as human subjects is thoroughly
contextual. This is the most fundamental assertion of field
theory. All schools of thought that are trying to break free
of the atomistic, isolationist legacy of the Cartesian
worldview are emphasising the contextual nature of
human existence in one way or another. In Gestalt theory,
phenomenological field theory is our particular handle.
Field Theory and Contextualism
There are some valuable aspects of using field theory
as our contextual theory, but also some problems. I find
valuable some of the principles derived from the amalgam
of phenomenology, Lewin’s thought, Gestalt psychology,
and even, to some extent, how fields are thought of in
quantum physics. These include the notions of
Lynne Jacobs
contemporaneity, horizontalism, and the interrelatedness
of phenomena (Parlett, 1991; Yontef, 1993).
One problem is that ‘field’ seems to be defined
differently by different theorists. Some people adhere to
the Husserlian concept of field as a descriptor of one’s
experiential world: a phenomenological field
(McConville, 2001). That is my preference as well. An
extended quote from McConville’s article, ‘Husserl’s
Phenomenology in Context’, elaborates the
phenomenological roots of field theory for Gestalt
therapy:
... apart from an engaged, bodily perceiver, nothing
[no figure] can stand out from anything [ground].
There is no field, in other words, unless we are
referring to a field that includes, as a co-constitutive
pole, an engaged subjectivity. Writers in Gestalt
therapy often leave out this phenomenological
rudiment of field theory, speaking of fields as if they
existed in themselves…
The point here is that Husserl’s phenomenology is
… the groundwork, the founding basis for Gestalt
therapy’s radicalisation of field theory. Fields cannot
be spoken of properly as existing in themselves, in
nature, apart from a co-constitutive human
subjectivity (McConville, pp 200-201). (Parentheses
mine.)
Others prefer to define field in more reified terms, as a
‘thing’ that is out there. There are field influences that
operate on us, that are beyond us but that are part of the
constitution of our experiential worlds, or our
phenomenological fields. I think this is better described as
our embeddedness in contexts.
We swim in contexts, as I described above. Our
phenomenological fields are emergent from these
contexts, and are shaped by them. What has the potential
to influence us is also at least potentially accessible to
awareness, even if that awareness can never be
completely fulfilled. And yet it is a bit misleading to refer
to ‘one’s’ phenomenological field, because that can be
easily misconstrued as a solipsistic, subjectivist assertion.
Actually, that is far from the case. Our phenomenological
fields are also shared fields, despite their uniqueness. This
ranges from the most abstract communality of shared
language, culture and various ‘forms of life’, as
Wittgenstein described, but also more directly, in that my
being-in-your-world and your being-in-my-world yields
co-constituted and broadly overlapping fields. This is the
most basic inclusion.
We are born into historical, cultural, language and action
practice contexts, we come into being in them and we also
contribute to the shaping of these very contexts. These
contexts obviously constitute our experiential worlds,
Ethics of Context
albeit largely without our awareness. They are the
necessary pre-condition for the existence of our
phenomenological fields. They are the ‘ground’ that
makes the ‘figure’ of ‘experiential world’ possible.
A contextual ontology and a contextual epistemology
are infinitely regressive. By this I mean that no matter
what you know, you can never fully know the
preconditions that made such knowing possible.
Whatever you are aware of requires a ground from which
that figure has emerged, and the ground is necessarily
vague, indistinct, and unknowable. All knowledge is
therefore partial, incomplete, and subject to continual
revision (Wheeler, 2000). Even if you try to study the
conditions that give rise to a certain figure of interest by
making the conditions figural, those figures will also
emerge from an ultimately unknowable ground. It is
much like trying to get a fixed and full understanding of
the concept of ‘self’. Or more pragmatically, it is like
trying to get a fixed knowledge of one’s own self. The
very act of pointing at it changes it, and creates infinitely
more to know.
Contexts nest, one within the other, and some also
collide. Our immediate history is nested in our less
proximal history. Individual history and subjectivity nest
inside language practices. One’s tennis swing is nested in
action practices having nothing to do with sport. Some
contexts are incompatible with one another. An abstract
example is that the current interest in postmodernism, or
in post-Cartesian thought, is nested in a long practice of
Western philosophy. And much of our theorising about
individual psychology is nested in Cartesian language
practices that have influenced every aspect of our lives.
On the other hand, a phenomenological worldview, which
is also nested in and emergent from Cartesian thought,
collides with Cartesianism, giving rise to slippages and
disjunctures in philosophical thought that affect us today.
Ethics of Context and Field
There are some ethics that are inherent to a field
perspective. I suggest they are intrinsic also to a
contextual perspective, in that I believe contexts can be
described as organising along the same principles by
which our fields organise. To me, many of the ethics
follow from a basic proposition: fields organise according
to the principle of Praegnanz. That means that fields
organise into figures and grounds in the most
sophisticated, complex, differentiated and unified manner,
given available resources of our field. In experience-near
terms, the quality of your life and mine depends on the
richness of the fields of which we are emergent.
In the crude differentiation of ‘organism/environment
field’, where I am the organism, the quality of my
existence is utterly interdependent with the richness of the
environment. My environment is rich if it contains a
91
broad diversity of nourishments and attractions and
supports that can allow me increasingly complex,
differentiated and satisfying experiences, and if I bring
my full richness to the interaction of myself with my
environment.
Three major corollaries follow from my proposition.
They can be summarised by the practices of care,
inclusion, and openness to dialogue. Each of these
practices is a manifestation of what Buber called
‘dwelling in love’. Care towards myself necessitates care
towards my environment, although that way of phrasing it
is not apt. The phrasing I offered is individualistic,
atomistic, as if my existence is separable from my
environment. Rather, I am trying to convey that care for
my environment is also an intimate care towards myself
(this conceptualisation is very much in line with, and
influenced by, Gordon Wheeler’s writings, 2000). Also,
the quality of my life will influence the quality of my
environment. We exist not only in reciprocal
differentiation from each other, but also in reciprocal
influence. Care, which in the case of interhuman dialogue
might mean a respect for, and sensitivity to the dignity of
the other, is most likely to be a mutually enriching shared
situation, one in which knowing self and knowing another
feed upon each other.
Inclusion follows from the idea that the richer my
environment, the more possibilities for richness and
resources there will be for us all. My description so far
sounds like a utilitarian approach to the ethics of care and
inclusion. Actually, I am trying to reach for something
more than a utilitarian ethic. I am speaking about
something more intrinsic to our interrelatedness. My
experience of my personhood is brought into being, and
flourishes, when I can participate with others in a way in
which we are all enriched. So it is not just that if you are
enriched, it increases the possibilities that I can be
enriched as well. It is more fundamentally that my
enriching influence on you, and yours on me, is a defining
feature of our humanity, our personhood.
Openness to dialogue is most easily described by
looking at the most compelling field for us, our
interhuman field. Through the centuries in which a
Cartesian model of reality shaped us, and we lived with a
split between subject and object, there was a question that
seemed impossible to answer: How do we know an
‘other’? But when Gestalt therapy rode the wave of
phenomenology, and the field theory that is intrinsic to it,
the emphasis of the question changed. The question is no
longer, ‘how can we know the existence of other
subjectivities?’, but rather, ‘how, or in what way, will we
get to know the other?’ The change in emphasis takes for
granted that there is no way not to know other
subjectivities, but it is only through others that we come
to have a subjectivity ourselves. Our ‘how’ is meant to
ask, ‘What shall be our approach to knowing another?’
92
Because the ‘how’ of how we approach another will co-
constitute the knowing, and it will co-constitute the
conditions of our existence. Do we study the other as a
specimen? Or do we enter into a ‘shared situation’
(Gadamer, 1975) in which our empathy and theirs
together create the knowing?
Dialogue has two faces to it. The first face is the
givenness of dialogue as the lived process of coming into
being in relationship. We come into being in the
irreducible interrelatedness of the organism/environment
field, and most importantly in relationship to other people.
The other face is that dialogue is also a method, or a
means whereby the ethics of care and inclusion can be
brought to life. That is why I called it openness to
dialogue. Through dialogue with what is new or strange
or unknown to us, we expand our experiential worlds to
include more and more of the otherness of others, and we
can only do that through a commitment to a caring
dialogue. But the commitment must be renewed over and
over again, because it is always tempting to sink into the
comfort of whatever the current language and culture
practices may be.
If we accept the idea that various contextual grounds
shape our phenomenological field, and that these
contexts, while making figure formation possible at all,
limit our horizons of experience such that certain realms
of knowledge or understanding lie at the edges of, or even
outside of, our lived contexts, then it is only through such
experiences as confusion, surprise, a sense of nonsense,
that our horizons may expand. This becomes possible
through dialogue. For instance, one contextual variable
that shapes, limits and helps create our knowledge, is the
linguistic world we inhabit (and which inhabits us). For
example, for many people the word ‘American’ is
synonymous with ‘white’. If this is the case then there is
no place in our context for people of colour with whom
we supposedly share this American land and idea. So
black Americans may exist in our physical, even
historical and cultural context as ‘things’, or as factors in
our history, but not as ‘Americans’. This, despite the fact
that many of their ancestors shaped America long before
many white Americans’ ancestors arrived here.
If we take a closer look at the context for such a narrow
vision, we certainly can discern a history of racism and
racial exclusion which has dominated our language and
action practices. But we can look even further. We can
look beyond the physical boundaries of America, to the
idea of America. Anglo and European immigrants came
to America for a variety of reasons, but few came with
excitement about the colour and culture mix we are. They
came to a ‘white’ country. My point here is that, no matter
how thoroughly, broadly, deeply we look at the factors
which contribute to the link between white and American,
we will never exhaust the exploration.
Lynne Jacobs
Bafflement and Exclusion
McConville (1997), a white Gestalt therapist, has
written beautifully how his own racial ground is
illuminated (which then alters his ground, of course)
when he experiences moments of bafflement. These are
moments when he becomes surprised and confused about
the difference between his self-experience and how others
perceive him when he is in mixed-race conversations. It is
tempting to dismiss such moments, and the people who
evoke them. But it behoves us to be open to exploring our
bafflement, especially as therapists. It is our chance to
encounter something we would never find on our own.
Acts of negation, and its hateful effects large and small,
are the counterpoint to the values of inclusion and care
and openness to dialogue. Clinging to one’s narrow
horizons excludes and negates otherness.
I have had moments of bafflement and confusion many
times myself, and have also had experiences of
bafflement when I have been at the effect of the limits of
what our language would allow us to conceive.
For instance, when I was about 11 years old I wanted to
play baseball in a summer league sponsored by our local
Parks and Recreation Department. I was pretty good at
first base. I was left-handed, lanky, the perfect body-type.
Except, I was female. I wandered onto the playing field
with the other players, all boys, ranging in age from 10-
12. I thought I fitted in perfectly, my own femaleness
being of no consequence, as far as I was concerned. What
did that have to do with playing games?
I stood at first base and started to participate in the
warm-up, a ball toss-around, with everyone else. Then we
started more serious practice. It dawned on the boys that I
was there to join the team, and their looks became
hardened as they stared at me. In the practice session they
gunned the ball at me as hard as they could throw it. I
relished the challenge of catching what they threw my
way, and I began also to relish the challenge of proving to
them that a girl could play. I assumed that if I played well
enough, they would get over their initial distaste and
accept me on the team. I ended the day with a sore hand,
but I was also excited about the chance to join the team,
which I had earned.
I was wrong about the team. The boys did not want me
to play. They railed and whined at the coach, insisting that
girls were not good enough to play. The coach said I
could play, but unfortunately he had not seen me practise
and had no idea of my skills. He let me play because it
was an informal league, and his job was to help all kids
use the park facilities. But he, too, lacked confidence that
a girl could play.
Obviously, this is a tale from the dark ages.
At any rate, we went to our first game. The score was
close, and in the late innings the coach decided to put me
Ethics of Context
into the game. The boys rolled their eyes. He put me into
right field, a position kids are sent to when the coach has
no confidence in their ability. I was crestfallen, and felt a
shroud of shame and humiliation draped over my
shoulders as I slunk out to the field. Two balls were hit
my way. I missed them both. I was stiff and
uncoordinated, and felt a sense of wretchedness at
knowing how unwanted I was.
That was the end of my attempt to play organised
baseball.2
That experience has given me a profound respect for
people who are somehow able to perform well, even in
conditions of hostility and negation. I am reminded of
blacks who have been hired through affirmative action.
Their cohorts often disdain them, expect them to do
poorly, and when they do not fare well, the failure is
attributed to the idea that they were unqualified in the first
place, not to the idea that it is hard to perform well when
one’s environment is hostile. The shame-evoking nature
of such an environment may be just too hard to overcome.
It was for me.
The exclusionary attitude I was exposed to meant the
resources of my environment were diminished. Support
from my team-mates was inaccessible. And my team-
mates each suffered an impoverishment as well, in that
my poor play diminished the aesthetics of the game, and
contributed to our loss as well. Our reciprocal influence
was a cycle of mutual impoverishment and diminished
capacity.
What led to such an exclusionary attitude? One factor is
that in my childhood there was no linguistic construct,
‘girl athlete’. Our language and cultural practices did not
support the emergence of a figure of a girl athlete. There
was no language, no concept that could make sense of
who or what I was. This is where openness to dialogue
becomes crucial. Dialogue becomes the means whereby
care and inclusion become expanded to engage, and
eventually include, that which has been beyond one’s
horizon. There was also no interest in engaging with me
in a new discourse, a dialogue, through words and
actions, which might broaden their capacity to think that a
girl could play baseball.
At around that same age I was stunned by another
rejection that had nothing to do with what was required
for the activity I wanted to pursue. I was passionately
interested in politics and government, and I wanted with
all my heart to be a US Senate page. Pages were teens that
served as messengers in the Senate. I told my parents I
wanted to apply for this position and they said it was not
possible because only boys were allowed to serve as
pages. The bafflement that McConville described radiated
through my body like a nauseating shockwave. It was as
if I had been running full speed and suddenly careened
into a glass wall that I had not seen coming. I could not
93
comprehend what about my gender made me unqualified
to be a page. They might as well have said they only
accept people who have a birthmark on their right hand. I
burned with humiliation and ached for my loss.
From here it is a small leap to understanding why
attention to shame is such a central part of the therapy
process. Shame is a signifier that an aspect of one’s self-
experience has not found a welcome reception, perhaps
not even recognition, in one’s experiential world. The
patient’s shame can signal the therapist’s current limited
capacity to receive the patient’s experiential world, and it
can also signal what has in the past been beyond the
horizons of the patient’s family and culture.
I think about the notion of internalised homophobia.
That concept implies that the self-loathing one finds
amongst some gays and lesbians derives from the
homophobic context in which their experiential worlds
form. Their fields are shaped by (infected by) the
homophobic context. I suggest that something even more
profound may happen for some. Some gay and lesbian
people have grown up in contexts that had no conceptual,
language, or action practices at all regarding
homosexuality. At least homophobia acknowledges the
existence of homosexuality. But in some contexts, the
hetereosexism is so powerful that the notion of
homosexuality exists as a tiny whisper if it exists at all.
For the gay or lesbian person who comes of age in that
context, they cannot find their existence reflected at all. I
think that leaves a huge hole in one’s sense of being and
belonging. This idea is similar to Wheeler’s (2000)
assertion that needs are emergent phenomena of the
interpersonal dialogue. That is, a patient may not be able
to identify a need that has no chance of being recognised
by the limited horizons of the therapist’s capacity to listen.
Agency and Acts of Conscience
If we are made by our context, then are we merely the
passive end product of the shaping influences of our
various contexts? I think we can rightfully assert not.
Human being is an emergent phenomenon, meaning that
one’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes in response to any
particular situation cannot be predicted in advance,
however much they can be read as ‘obvious’ in retrospect.
We exist as agents, with choice and responsibility as
central dimensions of our selfhood. How do we account
for that in a thoroughly contextual ontology?
Our phenomenological field is continually being
reshaped by discourse across many contexts. Some of
these contexts overlap each other, some are quite
separated from each other, some are nested one inside the
other. Our agency, limited though it may be, derives from
our continual, on-going living amidst multiple contexts.
Every time we engage in a discourse across contexts, we
94
open ourselves to difference. With difference comes the
possibility for choice, and therefore, agency. However, for
choice to be available, one must be open to a dialogue
across contexts, one wherein one seeks out the
contradictions between contexts. Only then may our
horizons expand.
As therapists, we allow ourselves to become deeply
immersed in an on-going dialogue that is often intense
and absorbing. We can sometimes lose perspective,
become unmoored. One way we regain our footing is by
reaching beyond our most local and immediate context of
the particular dyad, and we bring in a third conversational
partner, be it an actual supervisor, or more frequently, our
imaginary supervisors, the ideas and sensibilities of our
professional communities. Or we broaden our
perspective, we re-situate our relationship within the
context of the therapeutic task.
For instance, we have all probably had the experience
of feeling bruised and abused by patients. Sometimes the
relationships we develop with certain patients are volatile,
urgent, full of wild mood swings, impelling us towards
actions we might later regret. What enables us, calls on
us, really, to withstand the surges of emotion, the calls to
action, the wishes to retaliate or to rescue? I believe it is
that we have a deeply felt commitment to something that
is beyond the immediate context of two people in a room,
engaged in an intense struggle for psychological life and
death (such as the one I describe with Isabel). We are
profoundly committed to a task, the task of being a
generative influence in the life of the other. Our love of
this task is more compelling, most of the time, than are
our difficult feelings towards the patient (it may even
allow us to have certain positive feelings for this difficult
patient), and this love of the task pulls us into contact with
other contexts beyond the most immediate one of this
particular encounter.
I have previously referred to this as taking our task as a
‘thou’. By doing so, one is in dialogue not only with one’s
patient, but also with one’s traditions and generative
attitudes as they are embodied in our task:
It is the dilemma of the therapist that one
encounters the patient with the attitude and
involvement of dialogue, yet does not seek to be
confirmed through the direct human encounter. The
therapist’s confirmation comes through the
expression of oneself in the service of the task.
Friedman [1985, p 19] has suggested, and I agree,
that while therapists do not seek confirmation from
patients, they must be open to the possibility as
inherent in the dialogical relation. In fact, the
therapist is confirmed when a patient allows him or
herself to receive help.
Yet ultimately, the therapist’s … faith in the ‘truth’
Lynne Jacobs
of the task, in the liberation of both people that the
task will allow, enables him or her to hold aside the
wish to be confirmed by the other, and instead to be
confirmed through knowing that the task is most
creatively served in this way. (Hycner and Jacobs, p
75)
We are pulled into imaginary and live conversations
with our professional ideals, our theories, people who
support our endeavour. I remember a time when a patient
and I locked horns over whether I would meet with him
for 50 minutes or 45 minutes. I experienced him as pushy
and demanding. I stiffened my back and resisted. We
ended the session with my saying I would think about it,
and he said my decision would determine whether or not
we could continue together. I walked into a colleague’s
office to let off steam. She heard my story, and then
calmly said that I was letting my pride get in the way, and
that the therapy was more important than my hurt pride
for now. She was right, and she helped me to re-centre in
what was important to me, rather than get lost in the
immediacy of my reactions (the useful sequel to this
interaction is described in Hycner and Jacobs, pp 136-7).
The Importance of ‘Broad Context’ in Relation to
Ethics
Returning to the story of Isabel that I told at the outset,
how were Isabel and I to alter the spiralling negations that
had engulfed us? Obviously, the major responsibility falls
on the therapist. The key word here is ‘therapist’. That is,
there is a certain role I assumed, and that role not only
placed me in a position of responsibility, but it opened an
avenue for recovery and repair. The role established a
different context for me to engage with, one beyond the
one I seemed to be operating from, which had devolved
into a personal fight for psychological survival. Actually,
it seems to me that we became locked in an irresolvable
struggle because I had decontextualised our relationship. I
had lost sight of our relationship as residing in the context
of a therapeutic endeavour.
What had happened? One way to characterise what had
happened is that the two of us had become entangled in
our conflicting ways of responding to trauma. The
experience of trauma reduces our self-regulatory
capacities. We react rather than reflect and respond, we
think in simple either-or terms instead of complexly, and
we are usually tense and alert for more danger, narrowing
the range of interpretive possibilities of our engagement
in our world. Isabel had suffered a traumatising loss of her
former therapist. I had suffered the same fate 10 years
previously, and I had, at the time she entered treatment,
just completed writing my own story of loss, which was
evoking painful memories. We were both traumatised by
Ethics of Context
the overwhelming violent deaths of so many others, and
the sense of loss that flowed through the streets of the
country at the time. I needed to withdraw and to be treated
gently. She reached for me to attend to her suffering
through direct ministration to her needs so that she would
no longer feel afraid or pained – a style that I have
difficulty responding to even on a good day – so I was
brusque, confronting, and my caring heart was closed off
to her. The more I reacted by ‘digging in my heels’, the
more insistent she became. Her escalating neediness was
a meaningful response to her sense that I was increasingly
unavailable to her. She was fighting to have her needs
recognised and taken seriously, I was withdrawing and
fending her off to protect my raw skin.3
By placing our struggle within the larger context of a
therapeutic endeavour, I was able to remind myself
repeatedly of my task, and by embracing the task with all
my heart, I could begin to put our struggles into a
different context, freeing me from my sense of being
engaged in a fight for survival. Now, instead of my
personal survival being at stake, my love of the task
allowed for new figures to emerge. I began to understand
how my own traumatised state of mind was playing a
much larger role in our interactions than I had at first
considered. I renewed my efforts to get the supports I
needed to restore my balance emotionally, and to get the
supports I needed for understanding Isabel through the
practice of inclusion instead of by observing and judging
her from a self-protective distance. My esteem for myself,
and care for Isabel’s development, became attached to
doing my task well, whereas when I had become lost, my
survival had been defined as getting my patient to see
(and stop!) what she was doing to me.
The biggest impediment to acting in a way that reflects
the ethics of a field epistemology, I believe, is our
immersion in a single, local context such that we have lost
touch with anything beyond the most immediate,
narrowly prescribed momentary context. We might even
say that the problem is that one’s sense of one’s context
has become so narrowed that the context has been lost (as
often happens with trauma). The interactions have
become decontextualised, much like a figure divorced
from its shaping ground.4 We lose perspective when we
do not reach beyond the immediate context for dialogue
with something that is beyond the most immediate figure.
In moments such as this, the figure becomes all
compelling but actually narrow and overly simple. It has
lost the quality of ‘thick presence’ which is given to it by
our appreciation of it as informed by its most immediate
ground, but also by larger contexts. Our openness to
examining the contexts that provide the ground for the
current gestalt provides a stability that the current moment
itself cannot provide.
I believe that hate and negation, the frantic assertions of
95
one whose sense of self is highly threatened, stand in
opposition to inclusion, care and dialogue – which can be
loosely clustered as love – and are by-products of
reduction or decontextualisation. A commitment to ever
more inclusive attention to the contextual influences
shaping any interaction, any language, culture and action
practices, is at once the enactment of inclusion, care and
dialogue, but is also the ground from which greater
inclusion, care and dialogue are likely to emerge.
When we are lost in the most immediate moment, we
are most likely to act in ways that are shaming and
hateful. This was my problem with my patient Isabel. My
slow recovery of my ability to work well with her came
from my commitment to keep dialogue as open as
possible. That was most difficult for me to do with Isabel,
but I could more readily engage in useful conversations
with colleagues, and with my own reflections on the
therapeutic process and my commitment to it. Those
cross-conversations enabled me to open up a more
inclusive dialogue with Isabel, which of course brought
me into closer contact with the terrible fears – hers and
mine – that locked us in our life and death struggle.
We are faring better now, much to my relief and hers.
We have had many conversations about our difficulties,
and about her disappointments (and mine) with my
reactivity. Recently, Isabel, who knows that I went
through analytic training (where I was closely supervised
on three ‘control cases’), told me that she had found
herself saying to her mother something I had said to her.
She wanted to know more about my orientation and my
views about therapy so that she could understand better
the broader meanings of what she had said. I cringed and
laughed and said, ‘Oh no, don’t read my articles or you
will see how much my ideas about therapy differ from
what I do with you! I am not doing good therapy with
you!’ She laughed also and said, ‘Aren’t you glad I was
not a control case for you? You never would have
graduated!’ Our troubles are not over, but we are working
them out together.
Acknowledgement
This essay will appear in the forthcoming collection,
The Values of Connection: A Relational Perspective on
Ethics, edited by Robert G. Lee and Gordon Wheeler,
Gestalt Press/Analytic, 2004. Available through The
Analytic Press/Lawrence Erlbaum Inc., Hillsdale NJ,
USA.
Notes
1. I will use ‘experiential world’ and ‘phenomenological
field’ interchangeably throughout this article.
2. At age 33 I joined an adult womens’ softball league. I
96 Lynne Jacobs

play first base! Psychology Approach. Gestalt Journal Press, Highland,

3. I am grateful to Donna Orange, PhD, for her insightful
comments about the role of my traumatised state of
mind in my work with this patient and with others.
4. Frank-M. Staemmler (1997) described this
phenomenon as regressive process. I tend to think of it
as a traumatised state of mind. Obviously, those two
notions bear a family resemblance.
References
Friedman, M. (1985). The Healing Dialogue In
Psychotherapy. Jason Aronson, New York.
Gadamer, H.G. (1975/1991). Truth And Method. Trans.
Weisheimer, J. and Marshall, D., 2nd ed., Crossroads,
New York.
Hycner, R. and Jacobs, L. (1995). The Healing
Relationship In Gestalt Therapy: A Dialogic/Self
New York.
McConville, M. (1997). The Gift. In McConville, M.
(Ed.) The GIC Voice, GIC, Cleveland.
McConville, M. (2001). Husserl’s Phenomenology In
Context. Gestalt Review, 5, 3, pp 195-204.
Parlett, M. (1991). Reflections On Field Theory. British
Gestalt Journal, 1, 2, pp 69-81.
Staemmler, F-M. (1997). Towards a Theory of Regressive
Processes in Gestalt Therapy. Gestalt Journal, 20, 1, pp
49-120.
Taylor, C. (1995). Philosophical Arguments. Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Wheeler, G (2000). Beyond Individualism. GIC Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Yontef, G. (1993). Awareness, Dialogue and Process.
Highland, Gestalt Journal Press, New York.

Lynne Jacobs PhD, Psa.D., is co-founder of the Gestalt Therapy

Institute of the Pacific. She is also a training and supervising analyst at
the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She is particularly
interested in relational processes in therapy, has authored numerous
articles and co-authored (with Rich Hycner) The Healing Relationship in
Gestalt Therapy. She teaches and trains nationally and internationally.

Address for correspondence: 1626 Westwood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA

90024, USA
Email: lynnejacobs@bigfoot.com
British Gestalt Journal Copyright 2003 by Gestalt Publications Ltd.
2003, Vol. 12, No 2, pp 97-104

THE IMPASSIONED BODY:

EROTIC VITALITY AND DISTURBANCE
IN PSYCHOTHERAPY

William F. Cornell
Received 21 March 2003

Editor’s Note: :We are glad to be publishing the following article by William Cornell,
which provides the basis for two Reflections, from Leanne O’Shea and from Michael
Vincent Miller, which follow. Cornell begins by discussing the marginalisation of
Wilhelm Reich – ‘someone who wrote of passion with passion’ – and then goes on to
argue that the ‘de-eroticisation of therapy’ has led to sentimentalising and loss of the
‘capacity to disturb’. The ‘holding at bay’ of the ‘darker passionate forces’ in therapy
can lead to ‘dried up therapy’. Erotic aliveness is present between parents and their
children, and between therapists and clients. Cornell speaks of how therapists can ‘enter
the realm of the erotic with our clients’. After all, ‘sweetness and idealization in a
therapeutic relationship are not sufficient if one seeks the capacity for passionate
attachments.’ He also writes about the ‘transference / countertransference interplay’,
loss, anxiety, and transgression. While not ‘leading the client into an erotic realm’,
therapists do need to ‘create an evocative and reflective space … a kind of erotically
charged space, to hold for our clients as they investigate realms of passion in
psychotherapy and out in the world’. The article is radical, stimulating, and
controversial. There is much for O’Shea and Miller to reflect upon, which they do, to
great effect, in the two contributions which follow the lead article.

Key words: passion, erotic transference, sexuality, therapeutic relationship, Wilhelm

Reich, mother/infant.

Erotic passions have had a precarious place in the
history and values of psychotherapy, including those
within the Reichian and body-centred traditions.
Sexuality and passion were at the very heart of
Reich’s work. I was first drawn to Reich’s work as
an adolescent. Here was someone who wrote of
passion with passion. His writings excited me. He
was relentlessly disturbing. While Reich’s
grandiosity and paranoia also tended to be woven
throughout his life and work, his was a passionate
madness. And there were truths strewn throughout it,
often uncomfortable truths. He confronted
colleagues, patients, social structures, sacred beliefs.
He provoked excitement, anxiety, and hatred – three
primary emotions so often linked in love and sex.
Throughout his lifetime, Reich returned again and
again to the nature and problems of sexuality. Why,
he wondered, is such an essential pleasure such a
source of personal anxiety and social sanction?
Reich was relentless in his confrontation of the
social control and repression of sexuality. He
asserted that the capacity for sexual vitality was
essential for emotional health and the achievement
of mature relationships. Decades after Reich’s death,
questions as to the place of erotic passions in life and
psychotherapy remain. The clinical implications of
Reich’s writings on sexuality have become too often
marginalised in the history and the work of body-
centred psychotherapy.
At the heart of the issues I want to raise in this
essay is a reconsideration of the place of passion and
of the erotic within contemporary body-centred
psychotherapies. I will examine some of the trends
in contemporary therapeutic culture that seem to
98
foster the disappearance of sexuality from the heart of
our emotional, relational and therapeutic landscape.
Muriel Dimen, a psychoanalyst, feminist and
articulate critic of the contemporary de-eroticisation of
psychoanalysis, points out that in much of the current
psychotherapeutic and object relations literature,
‘Sexuality has become a relation, not a force’ (1999, p
418). In this essay I want to communicate a sense of
the force of the body, the force of sexuality, the force
of desire. Passion suggests a union of love and
sexuality within a wish to create states of mutual
ecstasy, with an intensity that approaches the edge of
madness in the arms of another. At their best, these are
indeed moments of madness – the madness of union
and reunion, desire imbued with both aggression and
vulnerability, fugues of past and present realms of my
body with that of another.
A Vanishing Landscape
Why do we do psychotherapy these days? What are
clients looking for in seeking psychotherapy? A
review of the clinical literature of the past decade or
so would suggest that psychotherapists are responsible
for providing – and clients are longing for – an
experience of relatedness: a holding environment, a
supportive and empathic transference relationship.
Safety and compassion seem to have the upper hand
these days over conflict and passion within the
therapeutic process. Michael Vincent Miller, a
psychotherapist and social critic, comments, ‘I have
seen enough so-called therapeutic caring dished out on
the fringes of my professional life to conclude that
indiscriminate caring is just another kind of
carelessness’ (1995, pp 196-197). Centre stage in
contemporary American body-oriented and
psychodynamic psychotherapies are versions of object
relations and attachment-focused theories, feminist-
based models of mutuality and connectedness, trauma
and victim/perpetrator-centred theories and
techniques, and New Age spirituality and mysticism.
None of these models is overtly anti-sexual, but none
values sexuality or emphasises sexual passion as a
central and enduring aspect of human nature, personal
maturation or therapeutic outcome. Often these
theoretical paradigms suggest a none-too-subtle
anxiety about and distancing from adult sexual desire,
representing a domestication of erotic passion.
André Green, the prominent French psychoanalyst,
sees sexuality as linked in the most fundamental
fashion to human vitality. Green, invited to give the
Sigmund Freud Birthday Lecture at the Anna Freud
Center in 1995, delivered a provocative address
entitled, ‘Does Sexuality Have Anything to Do with
William F. Cornell
Psychoanalysis?’. In it he raised a series of questions
to his psychoanalytic colleagues regarding the goals
and intentions of contemporary psychoanalysis:
We should ask: what is important? What has
the greatest value? The price of life is attached to
what all human beings share and are longing for:
the need to love, to enjoy life, to be a part of a
relationship in its fullest expression, etc. Again,
here we are confronted with our ideology of what
psychoanalysis is for. What is its aim?
Overcoming our primitive anxieties, to repair our
objects damaged by our sinful evil? To ensure the
need for security? To pursue the norms of
adaptation? Or to be able to feel alive and to
cathect the many possibilities offered by the
diversity of life, in spite of its inevitable
disappointments, sources of unhappiness and
loads of pains? (1996, p 874)
In this talk and subsequent writing, Green
challenges the lack of attention within contemporary
psychoanalysis to sexuality in theory or technique. I
would suggest that this is true not only of
psychoanalysis, but also most contemporary
psychotherapies, including those within the neo-
Reichian, Gestalt, and bodywork traditions. It is as
though sexual passions have quietly vanished from the
therapeutic landscape, to be replaced by pre-oedipal
desires, traumatic intrusions (in lieu of traumatising
desires?), relational and empathic injuries, and
spiritual quests of one stripe or another. Within the
body-centred traditions of psychotherapy, sexuality
and pleasure were central premises in the foundation
of Reichian and bioenergetic modalities but do not
remain at the heart of our clinical theory and work
today. In my reading of much of the contemporary
therapeutic literature, I see the effort to sanitise life
and psychotherapy. All too often the role of the
psychotherapist now seems to be that of buffering the
client against the vicissitudes of psychic and relational
life, rather than entering into these experiences as part
of the therapeutic effort.
I think of how often my clients struggle with
disappointments in an idealised fantasy of tender,
romantic and selfless love. I see a version of this ideal
in Judith Jordan’s perspective on adult sexual love:
Women are often attuned to and want
sensitivity to feeling, while men tend to focus
more on action ... Often mutuality comes more
easily for women in woman-to-woman
relationships, which can provide wonderfully
sustaining mutual empathy and care. … in sexual
The Impassioned Body
engagement there is such a rich potential for
expression of exquisite attunement and the
possibility to give one’s attention in equibalance
to self and other. There can be mutual surrender
to a shared reality. It is the interaction, the
exchange, the sensitivity to the other’s inner
experience, the wish to please and to be pleased,
the showing of one’s pleasure and vulnerability
that that implies which distinguish the mature,
full sexual interaction from the simple release of
sexual tension. (pp 89-90)
This is a heady and subtly judgmental, one might
even say coercive, perspective. Who, we might ask,
can argue with a goal, a vision, of ‘exquisite
attunement’? Here we seem to have Kohut and self
psychology in the bedroom in addition to the therapy
session. To my ears, Jordan’s account of sexuality has
the ring of an idealised, rather sentimentalised, vision
of maternal tenderness and resonance. Where, I
wonder, is the aggressive component of sexual
passion, the capacity to excite and disturb, the desire
to get to and under a lover’s skin, to get into the other
in such a way that you will not be forgotten, to be
taken over by one’s lover, to impose oneself upon the
other, to penetrate and be penetrated?
We give the other, in our erotic bonds, the
opportunity, the power to know us in the most essential
ways, and in that knowing to unsettle, disappoint and
sometimes hurt us. We struggle to come to know the
other as different from us and in that differentness find
an object of excitement. Desire, vulnerability,
aggression and conflict are continually intertwined.
The willingness and capacity for surrender to one’s
own body, to one’s desires, in a passionate embrace of
another (and the other’s otherness) is at the heart of the
sexuality I believe to be the core of Reich’s work.
Anxiety
Reich came to understand the underpinnings of
characterological and muscular armouring as the
defensive effort to manage overwhelming childhood
anxieties and the lifelong conflicts between anxiety
and pleasure. Miller offers a particularly compelling
description of the defensive tapestry woven through
the relationship of erotic passion and erotic anxieties:
When passionate attraction or a sense of
common purpose has dried up in a marriage,
provoking one’s anxiety can serve to keep two
people thoroughly engrossed in each other. Thus
the manipulation of anxiety replaces love as the
99
chief means of social cohesion (1995, p 37).
… I am convinced that the decline of so many
modern relationships into enmity mostly has its
roots in the anxieties that wind themselves
around all love. … Because anxiety drives people
to attempt control of what cannot be controlled in
the hope of making things more predictable, it
creates stasis, sameness, and fixation that cause a
relationship to become clogged and rapidly
winded. Anxiety-ridden intimacy turns into stale
intimacy, life shared in a closet, and no one can
any longer grow from it (1995, p 61).
Reich wrote often of the continual interplay of
anxiety and sexuality. Miller ’s words are a
contemporary articulation of some of the most central
and enduring concerns in Reich’s work. While Miller
focuses on the drying up of marriages, I see the risk of
similar dried up outcomes in therapeutic relationships
in which therapist and client bond around the
management of anxiety and the healing of
disappointment while holding at bay the darker and
more passionate forces that threaten to emerge in the
therapeutic process.
Pleasure and Undoing
We can see in Reich’s writings, especially those on
the somatic relationship between mother and baby
(Reich, 1983), that he sensed the crucial importance of
the experience of pleasure for the mother with her
infant’s body and of an erotic aliveness (‘orgonotic
contact’) in the mother/infant couple. He never fully
articulated a theory of sexuality and intimacy separate
from Freud’s drive-reduction/catharsis model (Cornell,
1997). We now see in the infant research that the
experience of pleasure is absolutely central in the
baby’s organisation of a vital sense of self, not only in
relation to the parent, but also in relation to its own
body (Klein, 1972; Lichtenberg, 1989; Emde, 1988,
1999; Stern, 1990). Schore synthesises the
implications of contemporary mother/infant research
this way:
These data underscore an essential principle
overlooked by many emotion theorists – affect
regulation is not just the reduction of affective
intensity, the dampening of negative emotion. It
also involves an amplification, an intensification
of positive emotion, a condition necessary for
more complex self-organization. Attachment is
not just the reestablishment of security after a
dysregulating experience and a stressful negative
100
state, it is also about the interactive amplification
of positive affects, as in play states (in press,
unpaged prepublication manuscript).
Just as the parents of an infant or growing child
serve, amplify and delight in the vitality of this newly
emerging and organising organism, so too is the
therapeutic relationship a means of creating and
strengthening the capacity for positive (and
aggressive) affects, as well as the mitigation of
distress and negative affect.
Poet Sharon Olds writes of maternal delight and
eroticism:
Coming home from the woman-only bar,
I go into my son’s room.
He sleeps – fine, freckled face
thrown back, the scarlet lining of his mouth
shadowy and fragrant, his small teeth
glowing dull and milky in the dark,
opal eyelids quivering
like insect wings, his hands closed
in the middle of the night.
Let there be enough
room for this life: the head, lips,
throat, wrists, hips, cock,
knees, feet. Let no part go
unpraised. Into any new world we enter, let us
take this man.
(1984, p 68)
Poet Gary Snyder exquisitely extends the maternal
dyad into an erotic triad of mother, father and infant:
The hidden place of seed
The veins net flow across the ribs, that gathers
milk and peaks up in a nipple – fits
our mouth –
The sucking milk from this body sends through
jolts of light; the son, the father,
sharing mother’s joy
That brings a softness to the flower of the awesome
open curling lotus gate I cup and kiss
As Kai kaughs at his mother’s breast he is now
weaned
from, we
wash each other,
this our body
These boys who love their mother
who loves men, who passes on
her sons to other women
(1999, p 469)
William F. Cornell
The eroticism conveyed in the words of Olds and
Snyder propels the child forward into their bodies and
into a future of the body. These are the early erotics
that carry the child beyond the cocoon of infant/parent
comfort and nurturance to lay the foundation for all of
the intensities of adult relations.
The pleasure and eroticism Olds and Snyder convey
are not the experiences that bring most of us into
psychotherapy, especially not to body-centred
psychotherapy. Clients often enter psychotherapy
seeking compensation for their childhood and
relational wounds, wishing for an idealised, healing
relationship provided by an understanding and near-
perfect parent substitute. There can be a place for such
an arrangement, but I would argue that sweetness and
idealisation in a therapeutic relationship are not
sufficient if one seeks the capacity for passionate
attachments.
Mature adult relations are not safe and predictable.
Mann observes that ‘it is not in the nature of the erotic
to be cozy’ (1997, p 18). The erotic is invasive, naked,
contagious with the desire to be taken over. One
wonders with the other, who is doing what to whom?
Lucinda Williams (2000), in her song Essence,
portrays this desire in straightforward language:
Baby, sweet baby, kiss me hard
Make me wonder who’s in charge
Baby, sweet baby, can’t get enough
Please come find me and help me get fucked up.
The erotic is often messy. A mature therapeutic
relationship must also have the capacity to be messy.
In an essay on lust, Dimen exults in the ‘messiness’
of intimacy both in the psychoanalytic process and in
sex: ‘… intimacy, relatedness, and warmth as well as
complexity, confusion, and the half-lights of bodies
and minds growing into and out of each other – a viny,
complicated mess …’ (1999, p 430). Dimen
continues:
Way down deep, Lust means not the conclusion
of discharge but the penultimate moment of peak
excitement when being excited is both enough
and not enough, when each rise in excitement is,
paradoxically, satisfying. Orgiastic. I would not
want to do without orgasm – catharsis – myself.
But isn’t the pleasure of Lust equally central? A
need calling for satisfaction, a satisfaction
becoming a thrilling need? An excitement whose
gratification is simultaneously exciting? (1999, p
431).
The Impassioned Body
In being naked to another, we are continually invited
to undo ourselves and to revisit, undo and (hopefully)
redo the history of our loves, desires, dependencies
and moments of madness and fury. These undoings
and fragile redoings are the source of profound hope
and anxiety. Breaking down and letting in, opening up
and being penetrated, the ongoing interplay of
vulnerability and aggression in adult sexuality, are
rarely experienced without the accompaniment of
anxiety and/or shame.
Erotic Contagion: Transference and
Countertransference
The experience of erotic transference and
countertransference is an undoing, the force and forms
of adult desires emerging from the shadow of
disowned, disavowed and disorganising longings.
When we enter the realms of the erotic with our
clients, do we court disaster or invite possibility? Do
we dance on a knife edge between the two? Do we
allow the forces of erotic desire and fantasy to push
against the familiar, established order of therapeutic
limits? What is the nature of erotic transference? What
is there to be gained for the client? The erotic is
inherently contagious. It creates the confusions of
desire: ‘Whose feelings are these? Who started it?
Who are you to me? Who am I to you? Where are the
boundaries between desire and action?’ The erotic
moves not only the client but also the therapist into
realms of ambiguity, ambivalence, excitement, anxiety
and disgust. How can this be good for anyone? How
do I contain and use my erotic countertransference as
a source of information rather than a means of
contagion?
Davies observes that ‘psychoanalysts have contorted
themselves, their patients, and their understanding of
the psychoanalytic process in an attempt to minimize,
disavow, project and pathologize the sexual feelings
that emerge between the analytic couple in the course
of their emotionally powerful and most intimate
encounter with each other’ (1998, p 747). She sees
this anxiety as rooted in the fears and prohibitions of
sexual acting out between therapist and client and as
fostered by the lack of any intelligently articulated
theory of the ‘nature of normal adult sexuality and its
manifestations in clinical practice’ (p 751). She argues
that a sexual (I would say erotic) aliveness is inherent
and healthy in the later stages of an in-depth therapy.
She argues that these concomitant feelings of
aliveness and attraction are not to be avoided through
interpretations about pre-oedipal realms, lived in
silence, or eliminated through clinical consultation
101
regarding one’s erotic countertransference, but are to
be welcomed and examined.
Love, Life, and Loss
I return to Green’s words as he addresses the
tendency to defend against yet another aspect of adult
sexuality and genitality:
… it is most of the time because he has some
unconscious awareness that giving sexuality and
genitality their full importance would lead him to
greater danger himself, such as the impossibility
of accepting the slightest frustration, the torments
of disappointment, the tortures of jealousy, the
storms of having to admit that the object is
different from the image projected by him, the
disorganization of limitless destruction either of
the object or the self in case of conflict, etc. And
it is in order to avoid all these threats of
breakdown that the patient will disengage
himself from a full and total relationship, leaving
the field to other regressions which happily
enough for him do not involve the existence of
another object and the dissatisfactions that he, or
she, may cause. (1996, p 874)
Breakdown. Frustration. Disappointment. Loss.
Each and all are elements of a full and total intimate
relationship, coming truly to know and love another,
who will inevitably prove to be different from what
we have imagined. We cannot avoid the possibility of
loss in our passionate attachments.
The first loss for the infant is that of the constantly
available, perpetually gratifying mother. As Winnicott
emphasised, the mother must return to her own life
and in so doing must ‘fail’ the infant, no longer being
the perfect mother but now a ‘good enough’ mother. It
is in the now suddenly and seemingly empty spaces
left by the good enough mother that the baby has the
opportunity to begin to discover and explore the
liveliness, boundedness, and activities of its own body.
When all goes reasonably well, the baby learns that its
body stays alive and has differing states of pleasure
with and without the parent.
Loss continues as the toddler becomes upright and
mobile, now able to leave the parent, as well as being
left by the parent. The toddler’s vertical, walking body
becomes its own source of excitement and
exploration. Often in this stage the parents experience
a loss of the baby. How do the parents negotiate this
loss? Do they remain available for the toddler’s
returns? Does the growing child remain an object of
delight, love and sensuality for the parents as the child
102
becomes more independent? If so, the child learns that
separation is not equivalent to loss and that this
developing body can be a source of both independence
and intimacy.
The intertwining of loss and sexuality is inherent in
the passionate attachments of adult life such that we
can sustain love and excitement in the face of conflict,
disappointment, and loss. Olshan, in his novel,
Nightswimmer, provides an eloquent description of
this deepening of erotic desire, this intertwining of
one’s body/self with that of another, and the ever-
present possibility of irrevocable loss:
That first feast of another man’s body is both
joyful and confusing. I want to fill myself with
everything, every nipple and biceps and every
inch of cock, but I want to savor it and that
demands more than one occasion. When I know
a man for a while, when the parts of his body
become more familiar to me, as his own scent
that I carry on my clothes, on my forearms, when
he ceases to become just a name and becomes a
familiar man, that’s when the real sex begins. By
then he’s told me private things, and I know
something of his story; and when I reach over to
touch him in a bed that we’ve both slept in night
after night, nothing casual, no matter how
galvanic, can rival the power of that touch. For
that touch is now encoded with the knowledge
that I can lose everything, and movement by
movement, as I make love, I’m more completely
aware of what I stand to lose. (1994, p 64)
As adults we learn to sustain desire without the
promise or certainty of gratification. We can sustain
erotic desire and sexual arousal either in the arms of or
in the absence of another. But we cannot avoid loss.
Can we sustain or regain passionate desire after the
loss of a loved one, be it through separation, divorce,
conflict or death? I do not suggest that this is easy.
Meadow describes her own struggle:
… I know that now, as a single woman who
has lost a partner of many years, I must, to avoid
the deadness, direct my longings to another
human being with passion and love, and find a
person who will return these longings to me. I am
confronted with finding a person who wants the
same kind of sex at the same time. For me this
feels like a traumatic undertaking. (2000, p 175)
I think of my own struggle in leaving a 25-year
long marriage to resume a life of passion, to open
William F. Cornell
myself to another again. Sex was relatively easy to re-
establish. Passion was not. Opening to someone new,
unknown, was not. Such re-opening inevitably evoked
the pains, failures and anxieties of the disintegration
of my marriage, not to mention the losses of my
childhood lying in dark shadows to be torn into the
light by my decision to leave my wife. Such re-
opening was essential to resume a real life. It is a
central and enduring task of psychotherapists to invite
our clients to face their losses and failures and try
again to embrace another, to embrace life.
In Conclusion
What happens when we do not celebrate the bodies
of our clients, when we turn away from erotic fantasy
and interplay? I think of the disservice we do our
clients when we avert our gaze, our minds, our
language and the attention of our clients from the
realms of the erotic, be it the erotic aspects of the
transference/countertransference interplay or the
attention to the depth and pleasures of their sexual
relationships and desires. How often, I wonder, do we
offer our clients empathic relatedness, holding
environments and spiritual quests so as to avoid the
intensity, uncertainty and disturbance of sexual
passion? I am not suggesting that we need to lead our
clients into realms of the erotic. Our bodies, given
time and attention, will take us there perforce. Instead,
we need to examine the many subtle and not-so-subtle
ways that we may facilitate our clients avoiding these
realms, perhaps even leading them away. We need to
create an evocative and reflective space for our
clients, a kind of erotically charged space, to hold for
our clients as they investigate realms of passion in
psychotherapy and out in the world. Our willingness
to enter erotic realms of anguish, desire and delight
with our clients offers the opportunity to reclaim the
body in its full vitality from the deadness and
distortion of parent/infant eroticism gone awry or the
fears of passionate attachments and adult intimacies.
Adrienne Rich writes that:
An honorable human relationship – that is, one
in which two people have the right to use the
word ‘love’ – is a process, delicate, violent, often
terrifying to both persons involved, a process of
refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks
down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in so doing
we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count
The Impassioned Body
on so few to go that hard way with us. (1979, p
188)
It is in the nature of impassioned relations to excite,
disturb, transgress. Sexual passion has to do with the
capacity, the willingness, to be fully alive in one’s
own body and with the body of another. Love and lust,
at our best moments, when we do not turn away from
the heat of passions, come together to move us more
fully to each other and into life. Within our erotic
passions are a multitude of desires – pleasant and
unpleasant, regressive and progressive, soothing and
demanding. Here is both the hard work and the
excitement of love and of lovemaking.
In the heat of our erotic passions we need the other,
we want the other, we wish to be wanted, desired, to
be taken up, to be tender, to be unrelenting. We face
the other, we face ourselves, we hate the other, we
overcome the other, we are overcome by the other,
familiar gender roles and orientations begin to blur.
We are simultaneously thrown backward and forward
in time. We are excited and disturbed. We lust and we
love.
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City Lights Books, San Francisco.
Benjamin, J. (1995). Like Subjects, Love Objects.Yale
University Press, New Haven.
Billow, R.M. (2000). From countertransference to
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120.
Bollas, C. (2000). Hysteria. Routledge, London.
Bolognini, S. (1994). Transference: Erotised, erotic,
loving, affectionate. The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 75, pp 73-86.
Bonasia, E. (2001). The Countertransference: Erotic,
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of Psychoanalysis, 82, pp 249-262.
Cornell, W.F. (1997). If Reich had met Winnicott:
Body and gesture. Energy and Character, 28, 2, pp
50-60.
Davies, J.M. (1998). Between the disclosure and
foreclosure of erotic transference-
countertransference: Can psychoanalysis find a
place for adult sexuality? Psychoanalytic
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Dimen, M. (1999). Between lust and libido: Sex,
psychoanalysis, and the moment before.
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Dinnerstein, D. (1976). The Mermaid and The
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Malaise. Harper & Row, New York.
Emde, R. (1988). Development terminable and
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283-296.
Emde, R. (1999). Moving ahead: Integrating
influences of affective processes for development
and for psychoanalysis. The International Journal
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Ghent, E. (1990). Masochism, submission, and
surrender: I: Masochism as a perversion of
surrender. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26, pp
108-136.
Gorkin, M. (1985). Varieties of sexualized
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Green, A. (1996). Has sexuality anything to do with
psychoanalysis? The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 76, pp 871-883.
Harris, E. (2000). I don’t wanna talk about it now. Red
Dirt Girl. Poodlebone Music.
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and Surrey, J.L. (Eds.),Women’s Growth in
Connection: Writings from the Stone Center, pp 81-
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and Peterfreund, E. (Eds.), Psychoanalysis and
Contemporary Science: Volume I, pp 181-205. The
Macmillan Company, New York.
Lichtenberg, J.D. (1989). Psychoanalysis and
Motivation. The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ.
Mann, D. (1997). Psychotherapy: An Erotic
Relationship. Routledge, London.
McDougall, J. (1995). The Many Faces of Eros. W.W.
Norton & Co., New York.
McDougall, J. (2000). Sexuality and the neosexual.
Modern Psychoanalysis, 25, 2, pp 155-166.
Meadow, P.W. (2000). An excursion into sexuality.
Modern Psychoanalysis, 25, 2, pp 175-180.
Miller, M.V. (1995). Intimate Terrorism: The
Deterioration of Erotic Life. W.W. Norton & Co.,
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Knopf, New York.
Olshan, J. (1994). Nightswimmer. Simon & Schuster,
New York.
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Norton & Co., New York.
104 William F. Cornell

Schore, A. (in press). The effects of secure attachment
on right brain development, affect regulation, and
infant mental health. Unpaged, prepublication
internet manuscript.
Snyder, G. (1999). The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose,
Poetry, and Translations. Counterpoint,
Washington, DC.
Stein, R. (1998). The poignant, the excessive and the
enigmatic in sexuality. The International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 79, pp 253-268.
Stern, D. (1990). Joy and satisfaction in infancy. In:
Glick, R.A. and Bone, S. (Eds.), Pleasure Beyond
The Pleasure Principle, pp 13-25. Yale University
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Williams, L. (2001). Essence. Essence. Warner-
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Winnicott, D.W. (1989). Fear of breakdown. In:
Psychoanalytic Explorations, pp 87-95. Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA.

William F. Cornell, M.A., practises, teaches, and writes about

psychotherapy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He teaches, trains,
consults with, and learns from groups of psychotherapists from various
disciplines throughout the world. Coming from an academic background
in behavioural psychology and phenomenology, Bill discovered the
vitality of transactional analysis, psychoanalysis, and body-centred
psychotherapy and remains fascinated by the therapeutic process after 30
years in practice.

Address for correspondence: 36 Corbriwood Lane, Gibsonia, PA 15044,

British Gestalt Journal
2003, Vol.12, No 2, 105-110
REFLECTIONS
THE EROTIC FIELD
Leanne O’Shea
A Reflection on The Impassioned Body by William Cornell, published in the
British Gestalt Journal, 12, 2, pp 97-104.
Beneath your feet I cast my dreams
The shadows of my longing
The most secret of my desires.
Tread carefully
And dance with wisdom and grace.1
Even to begin to talk about the place of eros and
passion in psychotherapy is fraught. Beset by concerns
about the extent of sexual abuse within therapeutic
relationships, complex questions regarding boundaries,
concerns about what is and is not appropriate and the ever
present fear of complaints, few writers have dared to
argue for the importance of eros in clinical practice. For
this reason alone, Cornell’s (2003) intriguing and
provocative piece, The Impassioned Body, is a valuable
addition to the literature.
He raises a number of important questions and
challenges his readers to consider the cost of not creating
a space where clients can investigate ‘the realms of
passion in psychotherapy and out in the world’. But what
does this mean in practice and how do we as therapists
create and hold this space in a way that is both
transformative and responsible? These issues are
deserving of further attention. More particularly, what
does it mean to bring a phenomenological, relational and
field perspective to this matter of eros and its place in our
practice as Gestalt psychotherapists?
Eros is a coming to life in beauty in relation to both
body and soul (Plato).
In spite of its rich history of meaning in art and
literature, eros, in my culture at least, is used to refer to
sexual behaviour. It has come to be a descriptor of
pornography that makes some pretence to sophistication.
Think of an erotic film, or an erotic bookshop, usually
heavily curtained with a door draped in red velveteen. If
you remain unconvinced, try typing ‘erotic’ into your
internet search engine. It is not for the faint hearted! But
Copyright 2003 by Gestalt Publications Ltd.
what is lost in this reduction, and many would argue
corruption, of the idea of eros?
Defining eros in sexual terms alone is problematic. It
collapses the broader conceptualisation of eros and
sexuality to sexual activity and behaviour that is genital in
its focus. Eros understood in this way is relevant only to a
narrow margin of life, and takes its place in
psychotherapy as an issue or problem that clients need to
discuss, or fix. As such it represents a significant
contraction of the place that eros or even sexuality might
occupy.
However, I see this definition as problematic in a more
fundamental and troubling way in that it holds captive our
understanding of sexuality in a dualistic, Cartesian world-
view. From this perspective, sex is little more that an
event, a behaviour, something you either do or do not do,
have or do not have. Sex becomes a thing, a commodity
to be purchased, traded, given or exploited. As such it is
not just that eros is applicable to only a small part of life,
but that our ways of thinking about and playing with the
erotic are limited by our understanding and the meanings
that we are able to make.
However, what changes and what else becomes
possible if we move to a field-based or non-dualistic
understanding of eros? Conceived of in this way, eros
becomes an aspect of being and relating, a quality or
dimension of the phenomenological field. Rather than it
being an event or behaviour, eros and sexuality become a
part of experience, always present in some sense,
although in ways and degrees that differ according to
circumstance (Wheeler, 1999).
Jung once commented that although we tend to think of
eros as sex, ‘eros is relatedness’ (Moore, 1998, p 13). This
comes closer to the understandings of eros more typically
found in eastern traditions, where it is considered to be the
energy or force that binds together the entire universe.
Clearly, eros is something more than sex, but at the same
time, sex becomes something more that an act and is
understood as a profoundly important dimension of
spirituality. Gathering up the psychological implications
106
of this, Moore suggests, ‘in some ways sex is the facade
of the soul, and when we deal with it thoughtfully, the
whole interior cosmos comes into the foreground’ (ibid.,
p xii).
Eros as I understand it gathers up a great many things:
love, longing, and desire. It is a particular quality of
experience, always present, and always more or less
available to us. Clearly, eros often carries with it the
energy of sexuality, but not always so. Eros and erotic
engagement are an embracing of life and of relating that is
full of passion.
One of the aspects that Cornell picks up on is the
dimension of eros that is disturbing. He talks about the
qualities that eros provokes and evokes – e.g. jealousy,
longing, madness – and wants to convey something of the
force of sexuality. He makes the point that eros or passion
has embedded within it the possibility and risk of
transgression. This is a dangerous notion for therapists
and our ever present need to attend to boundaries.
However, I do not disagree with Cornell’s sentiment. It is
clear that part of what supports us to move beyond or
transgress the boundaries we make and impose upon
ourselves, boundaries built from introjects and habit, fear
or dread, is the often compelling force of passion or eros.
However, this is a rather pedestrian and conservative way
of restating Cornell’s point and I am only too aware that
the force of eros is its capacity completely to reconfigure
the relational field, in ways that are often chaotic,
sometimes catastrophic, and at other times utterly
transformative.
The Place of Eros in Practice
In defining eros in this way, the next question concerns
the place and appearance of eros in therapy. Is it so
important that eros, or passion, or sexuality should in
some way be privileged within psychotherapeutic
practice?
In reflecting on this question, a great many images of
clients come into my mind, all linked in some way by the
disturbing and stirring energy of eros. I see the face of a
young woman, the sense of her stretching towards her
sexuality. She is longing to step into her passion, for life,
for love, but is afraid – cautioned by too many remarks of
the ‘good girls don’t behave like that’ variety. Or I
imagine a man, so utterly trapped in his self-loathing that
his longing and yearning for contact with another can
only be expressed in endless and obsessive acts of
masturbation that have no capacity for self-pleasure. Or a
woman whose sense of being appreciated is grasped only
fleetingly in moments of sexual contact, and otherwise
eludes her, and a young man whose emerging sense of
eroticism brings him face to face with all that is forbidden
in his culture. And then there are the many clients who in
Leanne O’Shea
one way or another are seeking to enliven themselves, fill
themselves up with the joy and pleasure of life, and the
sense that comes from being engaged with and embedded
in a world that is deeply sensual.
My own practice is enough to persuade me that eros,
and all the longing, desire and wanting it carries with it, is
often present in the work that clients both want and need
to do. For some it is a journey that involves discovering
and stepping into their sexual and erotic selves; for many
others it is about the often painful work of untangling
ways of engaging that have become sexualised, in rigid
and often habitual ways that fail to take into account the
full breadth of erotic and relational possibility. But should
such work be privileged?
The idea that something should be upheld in this way is,
I think, fundamentally at odds with our Gestalt principles.
It is not our responsibility as therapists to decide what
work our clients need to do. However, it is our
responsibility to create a therapeutic relationship that
allows whatever work needs to be done to emerge.
Towards the end of his paper, Cornell makes this
crucially important point:
We need to create an evocative and reflective
space for our clients, a kind of erotically charged
space, to hold for our clients as they investigate
realms of passion in psychotherapy and out in the
world (p 102).
Cornell is making a bid for an erotically charged space.
However, without careful attention and awareness, the
risk is that this becomes part of the therapist’s agenda, a
provocative, rather than evocative, stance. Another,
perhaps less problematic way of putting this would be to
say that, as therapists, one of our challenges is to be able
to be present in a way that creates a relational field that
will allow for and have the capacity to tolerate the
emergence of erotic energy. To illustrate what I mean by
this, I want to give an example from my own therapeutic
journey.
Evocation of the Erotic
Very early in beginning with a new therapist, I had a
dream that was disturbingly erotic. It was not so much the
sexual content that unsettled me, but that in my dream my
longing and desire were directed towards my therapist
explicitly and unambiguously. I felt stripped bare by the
dream, and even though I understood it represented the
work I needed to do, I recall arriving at therapy that day
feeling vulnerable and ashamed. All I could manage to do
was allude to the dream, and even though I felt myself to
be in a safe place, I was unable to disclose its specific
content. The reasons for this are of course quite complex,
The Erotic Field
but in retrospect I have a sense that one of things that
inhibited me was the fear that my dream would be
interpreted in a particular way, specifically that it would
be understood as the expression of my unconscious
sexual desire for my therapist. Whether or not this was
true is, I think, irrelevant. It was more that somehow I felt
that my capacity to make meaning of my experience
would be lost in the interpretation that I knew would be
made.
One of the things this small story illustrates is that
without any explicit invitation on the part of my therapist,
eros emerged into the therapeutic space. I was clear when
going into therapy that I wanted to work on a range of
issues connected to my sense of my attractiveness and
ownership of my sexuality. I knew that in choosing to see
a male therapist I was inviting these issues to emerge
within the therapeutic relationship. In this very early
stage, all that my therapist needed to do to evoke this was
to provide an attentive and interested presence. It was the
background against which my fears and self-doubts about
my sexuality would inevitably emerge.
But how to work with these issues when they do
emerge is the more pressing issue. The unspoken images
of that early dream continued to inhabit the edges of our
work, just beyond what could be spoken about. I still felt
ashamed, and was unable to take the risk of naming this
possible attraction, even though I knew that to do so
would take me into the work I most needed to do.
The turning point in this journey occurred when I
arrived one morning in something of a rush. As I entered
the therapy room, I was acutely aware of the smell of
brewed coffee and made some comment about regretting
I had not had enough time to buy one on the way. My
therapist responded by wondering if I was saying
something indirectly about wanting his coffee, and
therefore by implication wanting him. I remember
protesting, probably too vigorously, ‘Sometimes a coffee
is just a coffee!’ I felt a deep sense of shame, and found
myself unable to move into an exploration of the issues
that in a way he was inviting me to explore. Central to my
inability to do this was my sense that this sexual attraction
was something I was creating. From experience I knew
my therapist would be unwilling to be in any way
transparent about his experience of me, and his
experience in relationship to me. I knew he would not,
and could not, meet me in the place that I needed to be
met and that my experience was being interpreted through
the lens of transference. I recall an odd mixture of shame
and regret; shame about my sexuality and regret at
bumping into the limitations of what was possible for me
to explore.
My therapist was not a Gestalt practitioner, but he could
have been. I have heard many a Gestalt therapist retreat to
the language and theory of transference and
107
countertransference when it comes to a matter of
attraction between client and therapist. In these instances
this theoretical framework is used not only to explain the
client’s attraction to the therapist, but also to explain away
the therapist’s attraction to the client.
I think there are a great many things that contribute to
therapists not being able to hold the kind of relational
space that allows clients to work with these often sensitive
and shame-filled issues of longing and desire. Cornell
highlights a number of trends in contemporary therapeutic
practice that make this exploration less likely, and of
course how comfortable a therapist feels about their own
sexuality will have a significant impact. However, what
we think about and how we understand the emergence of
the erotic will have a profound impact on our capacity to
welcome and work with its presence. For the most part,
the erotic has been viewed as part of the transferential
dynamic of therapy, and not always in ways that are
supportive. I think that in working with the erotic we have
been hamstrung by essentially pathological theories of
erotic transference that get in the way of us welcoming
the emergence of the erotic as an opportunity for
transformation and as something that lives between client
and therapist.
Erotic Transference and Countertransference
An intelligent, thoughtful review of the theory of
transference is no small undertaking and one that requires
more attention than can be given in this brief article.
However, some exploration of the issues is essential, both
in terms of how the theoretical framework of transference
impacts the ways meaning is attributed to experience, and
how transference fits within the practice of Gestalt
therapy.
Transference as classically understood is the
‘unconscious process of displacing onto a person in the
present feelings and responses that were originally evoked
by a person or relationship in the past. Therefore
transference responses are a repetition of the past and are
to some degree inappropriate to the present’ (Hilton,
1997, pp 184-185). As the central focus of psychoanalytic
practice, the analysis of the transference phenomenon is
the means by which the unconscious can be understood
and the cure effected.
Understanding the process of therapy in this way has
generally been problematic for Gestalt therapists. Not
only does it place authority in the hands of the therapist, it
diminishes the authentic relationship between client and
therapist. It is a way of working that is neither relational
nor phenomenological. In the development of Gestalt,
Perls shifted the emphasis away from transference.
Historically, projection and the concept of the unfinished
gestalt have been used to explain that which otherwise
108
would have been labelled as a transferential response.
In recent years, many within the Gestalt community
have re-evaluated the concepts of transference and
countertransference (e.g. Philippson, 2002). It seems that
this has occurred both because of the felt sense that
Gestalt’s theoretical framework lacks the sophistication to
explain the relational dynamics between client and
therapist, and as a consequence of shifts within
psychoanalytic theory.
Of these perhaps the most important has been the work
of the intersubjective theorists (Orange, Atwood and
Stolorow, 1997; Orange, 1995; Stolorow, Brandchaft and
Atwood, 1995). Rather than seeing transference as a
distortion or regression, they have argued that
transference is the expression of the way a client
habitually organises her or his relational field. However,
they take an important further step, eradicating the split
between transference and countertransference with the
term cotransference, where together client and therapist
form an indissoluble psychological system (Orange,
1995).
This understanding of cotransference, where therapist
and client are involved in a process of mutual influence, is
consistent with Gestalt’s field theory. Another way of
saying what is being argued is that client and therapist
together organise the relational field, and do so in ways
that emerge from their individual histories and life
experiences. From this perspective it is not that the client
projects or transfers an image of her cold and distant
mother onto the therapist for example, but rather that the
client, so habituated to responding in a particular way,
lacks the capacity to see what else is available. This also
resolves the problem of phenomenology. Because
transference has been understood as a distortion of the
past, it has been argued that transferential processes have
no phenomenological basis. However, seen in this way,
the client is responding to the phenomenological reality of
the therapist (as the therapist is to the client); it is just that
the client’s capacity to take in a broad phenomenological
perspective is limited. Put more succinctly, cotransference
is a particular and often limited organisation of the field.
The therapeutic challenge is to extend and expand the
relational field, making other ways of contacting and
other experiences possible.
However, I notice that even when therapists have
embraced this field-based view of cotransference, many
are still inclined when talking about sexual attraction to
revert to more traditional psychoanalytic descriptions. For
example, ‘when a client falls in love with a therapist, it is
almost always a transferential phenomenon’ (Joyce and
Sills, 2001).
This way of using language to describe experience
implies the kind of split which speaking of cotransference
attempts to avoid. It seems to me that the riskier question
Leanne O’Shea
to ask is ‘how am I as therapist, together with my client,
creating an erotic or sexualised relational field?’ What is it
telling me about the client’s experience and needs and
also about my own experience and needs? And what is it
telling me about our work and our therapeutic
relationship?
A Space for the Erotic
These are uncomfortable questions. Historically
speaking, erotic transference has been viewed
pejoratively, most typically seen as an indicator of the
client’s resistance to the real therapeutic work. Erotic
countertransference has an even more shameful heritage,
understood as the sign of an analyst’s immaturity (Mann,
1997). Neither view supports a welcoming of the erotic
into the therapeutic relationship. Beyond whatever
theoretical considerations we bring to the process, it has
been well documented that therapists often feel
uncomfortable when confronted – either with their own or
their client’s feelings of attraction. Moreover, they
generally feel under-supported in their training to work
with these feelings directly (Pope, Sonne and Holroyd,
1997).
It is little wonder, then, that it is difficult, challenging
and often confronting to evoke a space within the
therapeutic relationship where the client’s experience of
eros and sexuality can belong, as well as in the world
beyond. And yet, again and again, clients come longing to
address these issues of desire and intimacy, either to
discover and embrace their erotic selves, or to find their
way to healing from sexual experiences that have in some
way been damaging and traumatic.
If we are to take seriously the idea of cotransference,
which seems to me to be a logical progression from our
relational and field theoretical perspective, then the
challenge is to find ways of working with our clients that
take the phenomenology of eros and attraction seriously,
and also to be curious about what its presence means in
the therapeutic relationship.
I want to conclude by giving some case examples, but
before doing so, I want to make the rather obvious point
that to do this work well, and to do it responsibly, we need
to support ourselves with supervisory relationships in
which we feel free to say all that we need to say. Too
often I have had conversations with therapists, concerned,
ashamed or even distressed by issues of attraction with
clients, but who for one reason or another felt unable to
discuss their struggles in supervision. How we as
therapists, supervisors and trainers have contributed to a
culture in which it is easier to stay silent, is an issue sorely
in need of thoughtful and compassionate attention.
The other issue, again obvious, is that we need to attend
to the nurturing of our own erotic and sexual lives. How
The Erotic Field
well do we know our own longings, how able are each of
us to sit in, and with, the deepest and most secret of our
desires? The capacity of eros to disturb and excite should
not be underestimated. In writing this paper I have again
been reminded of how unsettling, provocative and
confronting it can be to sit in the fullness of all that I
crave, desire or long for. The need for honest and
unwavering self-reflection cannot be underestimated.
Some Case Examples
One of the things now very clear to me is that the sexual
or erotic energy that emerges in differing relationships
varies widely, and it is by paying careful
phenomenological attention to these differences that we
are best able to work with clients around these delicate
and often difficult issues.
Over the last twelve months, I have been working with
a man in his early thirties. He is intelligent, good looking
and demonstrates a range of characteristics that I would
normally find attractive. After working with him for
several months, I realised I had little or no sense of any
erotic energy, either in him or between us. While feeling
drawn to him, I had no sense of finding him sexually
attractive. Although I recall feeling a little puzzled, I did
not think any further about what this might be saying to
me, in part because we were busy with a range of other
issues. Some months ago, he had the opportunity to see
me in what was a very public, training-related context.
Part of what was acknowledged in this setting was my
capacity to name and work with sexuality. I recall his
response very clearly. He was both surprised and
delighted, and astounded that I had hidden, or at least that
he had not seen, this aspect of me in our work. In
exploring this together, his exuberance had all the
qualities of adolescent wonder. What I came to realise
was that the absence of any erotic energy between us was
largely developmental. His subsequent journey has
become a process a stepping into all that is wonderful and
terrifying about his sexuality. His emerging sexuality has
an expansive quality that as I sit with him feels life-
giving. In retrospect, I realise how easy it would have
been to shame this man, either by reacting to the
accusation that I had been hiding something from him, or
by seeing his exuberance as an attempt to seduce me.
In contrast, there is a client I have seen for many years.
Her struggle has been to find ways of connecting with
people which are nurturing, and not to repeat old patterns
of abuse. For many years her only way of keeping herself
safe was to withdraw and isolate herself. The risk of
making contact was too great. After I had been working
with her for about eighteen months, I noticed a sudden
and significant change. From a position of little or no
interest in sexual connection, she began to talk about a
109
man she felt attracted to and with whom she wanted to
explore some kind of relationship. At first I felt
encouraged. This was the first time I had seen her express
any kind of interest in moving towards engaging with
someone else. However, as I continued to sit with her, I
became aware of something that just did not feel right.
There was an odd kind of drivenness in her, and I had the
sense that rather than seeing more of her, I was actually
seeing less of her. The space she was in, and the
expression of her desire felt constricting and almost
compulsive.
As it turned out, the shift in her mood marked the onset
of a mild hyper-manic episode. At some level she
recognised this but was unable or unwilling to do
anything about it. She ended up having sex with the man
and the consequences for her were disastrous, taking her
to a profoundly shamed and depressed place. As painful
as it was, it precipitated a deepening of our work that has
been quite transformative. In more recent months she has
again begun to contact the part of herself that wants both
intimacy and sexual connection. However, this time my
experience of her is quite different. In a way that is similar
to the client mentioned above, her reaching towards her
sexuality has a more expansive and less compulsive feel. I
have the sense that this is something that she is choosing
and something that she wants. Although she remains
terrified of the consequences, what she has been able to
discover and take ownership of are her longing and her
need for connection.
There are other examples that I could give. A client
who struggles with her own arousal and all the shame that
evokes: I sense that my work with her will be to create a
space where she can be seen and heard and responded to
without judgement. Or there is another client whose
understanding of intimacy is organised primarily around
his sexuality. I know that with him, it is inevitable that his
way of organising contact will become part of the work
that we need to do.
The Provocative Space
While I think that as therapists it is crucially important
to create an evocative space in which the client’s needs
for healing can emerge, as a trainer I believe it is essential
to take a more provocative stance. New and beginning
Gestalt therapists need an environment in which they can
learn not only about the theory and practice of Gestalt, but
an environment which will stretch their awareness about
who they are and what they bring to the therapeutic
relationship. Their sexuality, particularly how they hold
and manage their sexual energy and how they respond to
the sexual energy of others, is a crucial part of what I
believe students need to know.
The training environment is one that is often erotically
110 Leanne O’Shea

charged, for a whole complex range of reasons, some of
which probably have to do with issues of power and
authority, and others more to do with the nature of an
experiential learning environment. As such it provides a
rich environment for students to learn and deepen their
sense of themselves in relation to the power of eros. Over
the years I have established a reputation amongst students
as someone who always talks about sex. In reality I have
done little more than consistently take up a position of
naming clearly and unambiguously what I see. Doing so
seems to have created a space in which students can more
easily raise issues and concerns that they might otherwise
avoid.
To be willing to enter into the realm of the erotic,
whether as client or as therapist, is to risk being provoked,
disturbed, excited, and aroused. It also offers us the
opportunity to reach for and embrace life with joy and
passion. Of course, it means that we shall engage with
loss: the pain of grief and the sublime pleasure of
connection and intimacy go hand in hand. But as with all
journeys worth undertaking it is one that demands much
and gives much.
As therapists we need to be wise enough to understand
that ours has become a culture somewhat afraid of eros
and sexuality. Political correctness has constrained and
limited the therapeutic field in ways that can make us
cautious and tentative. While we need to be ethical and
responsible in our practice, our challenge, I think, is to
find ways of working that supports our potency as healers
and cherishes a vision of the erotic field as a sustaining
and transformative possibility.
Notes
1. After Yeats, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. I
found a notation in a book I was using to scribble notes in
during a conference presentation saying ‘I have spread
my dreams under your feet. Tread softly … ’ I found it
when I was rereading my notes, liked it and re-worded it.
References
Cornell, W. (2003). The Impassioned Body. British
Gestalt Journal, 12, 2, pp 97-104.
Joyce, P. and Sills, C. (2001). Skills in Gestalt Counselling
and Psychotherapy. Sage Publications, London.
Hilton, V.W (1997). Sexuality in Therapy. In: Hedges,
L.W., Hilton, R., Hilton, V.W. and Brandt Caudill, O.
Therapists at Risk: Perils of Intimacy of the
Therapeutic Relationship. Jason Aronson Inc.,
Northvale, NJ.
Mann, D. (1997). Psychotherapy: An Erotic Relationship.
Transference and Countertransference Passions., NJ.
Routledge, London.
Moore, T. (1998). The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an
Act of Love. HarperCollins, New York.
Orange, D.M. (1995). Emotional Understanding: Studies
in Psychoanalytic Epistemology. Guildford Press, New
York.
Orange, D.M., Atwood, G.E. and Stolorow, R.D. (1997).
Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in
Psychoanalytic Practice. Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ.
Philippson, P. (2002). A Gestalt Therapy Approach to
Transference. British Gestalt Journal, 11, 1, pp 16-20.
Pope, K.S., Sonne, L.J. and Holroyd, J. (1997). Sexual
Feelings in Psychotherapy: Explorations for
Therapists and Therapists-in-Training. APS,
Washington.
Stolorow, R.D., Brandchaft, B. and Atwood, G.E. (1995).
Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Insubjective Approach.
Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ.
Wheeler, G. (1999). The Erotic Field: Gestalt, Tantra and
Sexual Experience. Unpublished paper.

Leanne O’Shea, MSc, BTheol, is a Gestalt psychotherapist living in

Melbourne, Australia. She works in private practice and is a faculty
member of Gestalt Therapy Australia. She is also a college member with
Gestalt Australia New Zealand (GANZ). Her particular interests include
the application of field theory and the place of the erotic in therapeutic
practice.

Address for correspondence: Gestalt Therapy Australia, PO Box 205,

Fairfield, Victoria, 3078, Australia.
Email: leanne@gestalt.com.au
British Gestalt Journal
2003, Vol.12, No 2, pp 111-114
THE AESTHETICS OF SEXUAL LOVE
Michael Vincent Miller
A Reflection on The Impassioned Body by William Cornell, published in the
British Gestalt Journal, 12, 2, pp 97-104.
I find myself in deep accord with William Cornell's
wish to restore sexual passion to its once venerable place
in psychotherapy. And I am glad that he writes about it
with considerable eloquent force. It is good to be
passionate about passion. I like to imagine that
psychotherapy is, among other things, about the
restoration of the freedom to be passionate – and not only
sexually passionate but also passionately curious,
passionately spontaneous and playful, passionately
interested in acquiring new skills, passionately absorbed
in the task at hand, etc.
So I join Mr. Cornell in deploring the fact that much
current psychotherapy has taken a turn toward restricting
itself to mild, safe, and pious sentiments, such as
mutuality, trust, empathy, caring, the relational, etc. These
all too often seem in the service of proving that the
therapist is a good soul, custodian of a hygienic theory of
human relationships, from whom one has nothing to fear.
The sanctimonious view of love in the quotation Mr.
Cornell chooses from Judith Jordan illustrates the point
perfectly. I am not claiming that these are bad ideas in
themselves; obviously they are all on the side of virtue.
But in so benevolent a setting how does one’s patient
open up and explore the darker fears of childhood, the
bottled up aggressive desires, the messy, effusive animal
of the body?
Consider a patient who has struggled to survive the
terrifying and often secret libidinous and violent impulses
– from parents and siblings, as well as from himself or
herself – threaded through family life. On the other hand,
take a patient whose family tolerates only harmony and
good feelings, so that there was no place to express
suffering, grief, hate, lustful desires, and other so-called
negative emotions. Neither of these patients is likely to be
in very good shape to make his or her way through an
adult world where, alongside opportunities for growth and
fulfillment, lurk predatory love, aggressive willfulness,
and sadistic authorities parading as experts who claim to
know what is in your best interests. To introject
therapeutic benevolence is not going to help patients in
Copyright 2003 by Gestalt Publications Ltd.
search of intimacy to learn to navigate the hidden shoals,
hungry marine life, and treacherous undertows that make
every deep erotic experience such difficult going.
What has happened to the Freud who was said to be
seen leaving a therapy session barely able to disguise an
erection? Or to the Ferenczi who wrote a brilliant article
entitled ‘Nakedness as a Means of Inspiring Terror’, as
well as a book called Thalassa which portrays sex as
paradise mixed with catastrophe, and who sometimes sat
a patient on his lap? Or Jung, who had an affair with Frau
Spielrein, his patient who began as a schizophrenic and
ended up a psychoanalyst? Or Otto Rank, who engaged in
a tumultuous and ambiguously close relationship with the
novelist Anais Nin and helped free her to become a
passionate writer? I am by no means advocating all these
behaviours – some of them crossed borders that probably
should not be crossed, although I do think that the whole
question of borders needs to be re-examined rather than
merely subjected to automatic assumptions of therapeutic
political correctness. For example, one might ask how far
a therapist can go in responding to a patient’s sexual
desire yet keep his or her (the therapist’s) needs from
muddying the waters. At any rate, I am impressed with
the early psychoanalysts’ willingness to risk engaging the
more volatile emotions inherent in intimate human
encounters. It is not difficult to guess how a culture, in
which sexual harassment and abuse by caretakers
(including therapists) and bosses number among our
prevalent crimes, would look upon the conduct of those
early analysts.
No doubt fallout from this cultural atmosphere has
helped make psychotherapy since Freud turn increasingly
pale in response to anything to do with sex and just about
everything else that might be charged with libido.
Another factor is the extent to which psychology, in
theory and practice, has either stripped the psyche from
the body or made the human body itself an abstraction, as
if to eliminate its sloppy ambiguities in the name of
squeaky clean science. The body was strongly present in
Freud's own theoretical musings, although its orifices and
112
portals (oral, anal, phallic) lost a good deal of their
physicality as they became psychological categories in his
developmental theory, and the vagina was not even there
– it was just an absence left behind from a missing penis.
The growing tendency to eliminate the body from
psychoanalytic thought is by no means only a product of
modern psychoanalysis. The body had already pretty
much disappeared from the view of the Freudian
revisionists, such as Eric Fromm and Karen Horney, who
tended to dissolve biology and instinctual life into
sociology. For them, human nature was equivalent to
social nature.
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the archangel Raphael is sent
to Eden before the Fall to chat with Adam – it is a kind of
top-down debriefing session on a variety of important
topics – the creation, free will, the laws of heaven, the
dangers of disobedience, and the war between good and
evil. But after they discuss these and other weighty
matters, Adam cannot resist a bit of sexual curiosity. In
elaborately circumspect terms, he asks Raphael whether
the angels engage in sexual intercourse. Raphael blushes
(he is more or less incarnate for the purposes of the visit)
and responds in the affirmative. But then he goes on to
explain that in heaven the angels are pure spirit,
unencumbered by bodies. When two angels are attracted
to each other, they can simply mingle essences, totally
and ecstatically.
So much for eighteenth-century celestial passion. I do
not get very excited by this ideal of sex between Platonic
essences. We cannot live by it anyway. Behind it lies the
Puritan’s distaste for the animal body, which gets lustful
now and then and eventually rots. You could say that
tame relational mutuality in therapy is our secular version
of this distaste. In our times we have also invented
another more general version of bodiless sex, which you
might call digital passion. Sylvester Stallone and Sandra
Bullock, in a sci-fi action film called Demolition Man
(1993), give a neat illustration of it. Stallone is an old-
fashioned (late 20th century) action hero who, for some
reason or other (I cannot remember why) had been
cryogenically frozen and is thawed out a century or two
later to help a future society take on evildoers. When the
Bullock character decides to have sex with him, she
brings out two complicated-looking electronic helmets.
They don these and sit across from each other, whereupon
they both begin moaning with delight. But the aroused
Stallone then wants to touch her. And she, repelled by
such a crude idea, explains that the mixing of bodily
fluids is a disgusting unsanitary habit from the past. It is
no longer practised because it led to lethal diseases like
AIDS and a subsequent host of even worse diseases.
At least they sit across from each other. In actuality we
have by now taken things further: with sex on the internet,
all physical presence disappears from the proceedings. Or
Michael Vincent Miller
if you wish, identity itself can be dissolved in cyberspace,
so that you can have anonymous passion made up of
nothing but throbbing electronic bits that find their way to
your screen. Diseases, computers, and religious beliefs
aside, one reason we have so much difficulty with
physical sexuality, either vastly overrating it as the road to
paradise (as in advertising) or banishing it from sight (as
in certain right-wing religions), arises from our denial of
death (see Becker, 1997). Sexual love not only holds out
the promise of blissful transcendence, but it also reminds
us that we die. The other, whom we desire and often come
to depend on, decays and dies, and so do we. This is why
the whole enterprise of sexual love is fraught with anxiety
and, at the extreme, can drive us mad.
Wilhelm Reich
An important exception to this whole cultural trend,
including the trend in therapy from Horney and Fromm to
object relations to relational psychoanalysis, was Wilhelm
Reich. Whereas the revisionists elaborated one side of
Freud – his view of conflict between the individual and
society – Reich took Freud’s theory of psychosexual
drives and mechanisms of defence directly back to the
living body and its vital energies. Years before his
involvement with Frederick and Laura Perls, Paul
Goodman, himself more than a little influenced by Reich,
foresaw how the loss of the body from psychology
implied a psychotherapy of social adjustment. If human
nature is social to the core, as Horney and Fromm
implied, then the individual is indefinitely receptive to
being shaped by society. Such was the thrust of
Goodman’s penetrating critique of the Freudian
revisionists in a debate with C. Wright Mills and Patricia
Salter originally published in Politics in July 1945
(Goodman, 1991). Thus the Freudian revisionists helped
set the stage for modern liberal social engineering.
It is a striking historical fact that both Horney and Reich
were personally involved in Frederick Perls’ development
as a therapist. From Horney he learned much about the
social behaviour of neurotic personality – how, for
example, it manipulates support from the environment by
presenting others with a carefully maintained inauthentic
façade. But he also (literally) fleshed out Gestalt therapy
by converting Reich’s theory of character armour into his
own theory of retroflections, which is a valuable guide to
understanding how the neurotic deforms and constricts
his own body to prevent feeling or expressing powerful
emotions. In this sense Perls brought back together the
two streams into which Freud’s thought had been split.
I consider Cornell on the right track in wanting what he
calls the impassioned body back in therapy and in
recruiting Reich to help get it there. I especially like his
insistence, taking a cue from Muriel Dimen, that sex is a
Aesthetics of Sexual Love
force not a relation. I hate the words ‘relations’ and
‘relationship’ applied to erotic intimacy – they are terms
that properly belong to mathematics, although I confess
that I cannot figure out how to avoid them altogether. But
Cornell also makes it quite clear, though I wish he had
gone into more specific detail, that he does not think that
our contemporary bodywork therapies offer a satisfying
vision of passionate love either. Again, I agree with him.
The very name bodywork hints at something that sounds
more like fitness training than preparation to grapple with
Eros.
We need a more passionate view of the body not only in
psychoanalytic and other psychodynamic therapies, not
only in bodywork, but in Gestalt therapy as well. Gestalt
therapy has its own revisionists who have seized on one
rich central theme in the work of Perls and Goodman –
the concept of the field – and have turned it into a rather
sterile landscape without fully incarnate inhabitants, as
though psychotherapy were akin to the study of
electromagnetism. (On this score, see Arthur Roberts’
fine essay in the British Gestalt Journal on the need to
cart the very soil as well as the flora and fauna back into
the field (Roberts, 1999).) On the other side of the
psyche/soma divide, Gestalt therapy also has its body
therapists, who take their cue from the work of Reich.
But for all its value, I do not think that the Reichian
body alone does a good enough job to serve as a basis for
reintroducing sexual love into psychotherapy. It can lead
us to better sex but by itself not necessarily to better love.
The reason I think so is because Reich has a great deal to
teach us about sexual release but very little about what it
takes to give form (in the way that an artist gives form to
expression) to this release. (I discussed this problem in
Reich’s work more fully in an essay a couple of years ago
(Miller, 2001).) Along this line, let me say a few words in
favour of restraint, an aspect of passion that Mr. Cornell
does not address, because it plays an important role in
shaping the forms of love.
Barriers and Restraint
In the first place, I do not believe that there is any
meaningful passion without restraint, just as it makes no
sense to speak of a brilliant summer day without the
contrast of winter cold in the background. Love is a
dialectic of release, which expresses the self, and restraint,
which respects the mystery of the other. With no restraint,
no limiting resistance, passion as mere release is a
surrender to nothingness. This comes close to what the
poet Robert Frost meant when he said that writing free
verse is like playing tennis with the net down. It is why
the passionate spontaneous improvisations of the jazz
musician are anchored in a structure of chord
progressions, which also enables communication with
113
others in the band. The Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka
gives a surprising example of what can go wrong when
there is no limiting resistance. He writes about a first-rate
German weight-lifting team that everyone was sure would
win the world championship. But at the championship
match, which took place in a brand-new sports arena in
Switzerland, the German team utterly collapsed and lost
by a wide margin. A Gestalt psychologist (of course!) was
dispatched to research the disaster. What he discovered
was that members of the team had been able to lift with
such power because they had learned to take a fix on the
opposite wall and and then lift against it. But in the new
arena the lighting was such that the glare made the
opposite wall seem to disappear. The team had nothing to
lift against except its own bootstraps. Herein lies a lesson
that can be applied to sexual intimacy: that the recalcitrant
differences of the other from oneself, no matter how far
one might penetrate them, constitute a limiting resistance
to self-expression. This is why it takes discipline and
artfulness to create a form of love that satisfies both
partners.
Every tale of romantic love contains forces that resist
the possibility of coming together. Sometimes these are so
overwhelming that they result in tragedy, such as the sea
channel that divides Heloise from Abelard and the feud
between families that violently opposes Romeo’s and
Juliet’s longings to be with each other. Sometimes they
produce comedy, such as the misunderstandings and
missed opportunities that keep Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan
apart in Sleepless in Seattle (1993), along with the lovers
in every other Hollywood (or Shakespearean) comedy.
The interplay or counterpoint of barriers and unions is
what holds our emotional interest in these stories,
reminding us that love, however desirable, is also tense,
uncertain, and threatens loss. The contact boundary in
Gestalt therapy can be understood as a limiting resistance
to our yearnings to merge with each other or with the
universe. Every contactful meeting with otherness
contains elements of both union and differentiation. From
the point of view of Gestalt therapy, contact leads to
moments of feeling merged, but these are preceded and
followed by awareness of one’s inevitable separateness.
So I want to supplement Mr. Cornell’s argument for the
impassioned body with my own plea for the aesthetic
imagination in sexual love. At one point Elizabeth
Costello, the title character in the South African Nobel
Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee’s latest work, is
standing at the railing of a cruise ship and ruminating
about the mouths of underwater creatures. She thinks to
herself, ‘Only by an ingenious economy, an accident of
evolution, does the organ of ingestion sometimes get to be
used for song’ (Coetzee, 2003, p 54). And, I would add,
the organ of elimination for love. But neither song nor
love is simply a matter of the body; they are also products
114 Michael Vincent Miller

of the creative imagination. The body is their instrument
of expression.
References
Becker, E. (1997). The Denial of Death. Free Press, New
York.
Coetzee, J.M. (2003). Elizabeth Costello. Viking, New
York.
Goodman, P. (1991). The Political Meaning of Some
Recent Revisions of Freud. In: Stoehr, T. (Ed.), Nature
Heals: The Psychological Essays of Paul Goodman, pp
42-70. Gestalt Journal Publications, Highland, New
York.
Miller, M.V. (2001). The Speaking Body (Or, Why Did
Wilhelm Reich Go Crazy?). The Gestalt Journal,
XXIV, 2, pp 11-29.
Roberts, A. (1999). The Field Talks Back. British Gestalt
Journal, 8, 1, pp 35-46.

Michael Vincent Miller, PhD., clinical psychologist, practises

psychotherapy in new York City, and Cambridge, Mass. He taught a
Stanford University and MIT, has directed the Boston Gestalt Institute
since 1972, and is consulting editor of the International Gestalt Journal.
His book Intimate Terrorism has appeared in many languages. A
collection of his writings, La Poetique de la Gestalt-therapie, was
published in France (2002).

Address for correspondence: 254 West 15th Street, Apt. 3C, New York,
NY 10011, USA.
Email: mvmiller39@aol.com
The British Gestalt Journal
2003, Vol.12, No. 2, pp 115-123
: faculty colleagues. The primary justification for this
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
GESTALT IN A COGNITIVE
BEHAVIOURAL WORLD – STILL
HERE AT LEAST FOR NOW
Jon Frew
Received 20 August 2003
Dear Editor,
I read with interest your editorial comments on
collective insecurities and contraindications regarding the
standing of Gestalt therapy among other approaches in
academic and professional settings. Having recently made
a shift from part- to full-time teaching in a school of
professional psychology in the US, I have gathered
considerable experience and evidence that suggests our
insecurity is warranted, for positive notes about the status
of Gestalt therapy are being overshadowed by the
growing status of empirically supported treatment
approaches, especially the popularity of cognitive-
behavioural ‘therapy’.
My anecdotal evidence that Gestalt therapy as an
orientation has dropped off the face of the academic earth,
or at least fallen out of favour as a legitimate and
respectable approach in US graduate training
programmes, is limited to one doctoral training
programme. This said, I am certain my story is common
to many institutions in the US and beyond.
I’ve been teaching for some fourteen years. One of the
courses I’ve taught over the years has been a Gestalt
therapy seminar. As a part-time faculty member, able to
teach my favourite subject, I was somewhat immune from
the stark reality which greeted me last September when I
began my full-time duties.
A Significant Bias
Students entering the doctoral programme engage in
intensive coursework for one year to prepare them to
begin seeing clients in subsequent years of practica and
internship. These first year courses train students to do the
basics of intake interviews, assessment, writing treatment
plans, notes, with some mention of orientation to ‘case
conceptualisation’ and intervention. Such courses, with
few exceptions, are taught with an exclusive cognitive-
behavioural emphasis. This emphasis is ‘preached’ with a
rigidity and fervour by a significant majority of my
Copyright 2003 by Gestalt Publications Ltd.
emphasis is the familiar refrain that these are the only
approaches that have been empirically validated. In the
CBT world, clients and patients who are unlucky enough
to be on the receiving end of non-empirically supported
treatments are doomed to hell or at least to a life without
hope or symptom relief. Then there are the practical
arguments. Students must prepare for their clinical
comprehensive exams which are modelled after the state
licensing exam. The only way ‘safely’ to approach and
pass these exams is to ‘go CBT’.
The second year of doctoral training includes client
contact at a clinic run by the university which offers
therapy services at reduced fees. Second year students
work under the scrutiny of the faculty and are organised
into supervision teams. Part of my expanded full-time
faculty duties is to supervise one of these teams, known at
the clinic at the ‘Gestalt team’. The question of whether
you must be orientated toward Gestalt therapy to be a
member of the Gestalt team is moot, as the only training
the students have coming into any of the teams is CBT.
I remember, in an early meeting, one of the students
tentatively asking if you could actually write a treatment
plan or case conceptualisation from the Gestalt
perspective. Many years of writing reports to insurance
companies to request additional sessions has taught me
the fine art of transposition (a key change in music), that
there are as many ways to slice the apple or, to use a
Gestalt metaphor, to peel the onion. Using my best Gestalt
‘presence’, I leaned forward to address my team members
and wisely said, ‘of course’.
As the year unfolded and students spoke more freely, I
got a sharper sense of the dilemmas they faced. While all
five grew to ‘… shift, open up, and light up, as a result of
their exposure to a Gestalt education’ (Parlett, 2003, p 3),
simultaneously they were taking classes from professors
who went as far as to tell them that not practising with an
exclusive eye to the empirically supported treatment
models was at best ineffective and treasonable and at
worst downright unethical. They were also hearing from
third and fourth year students that it was far too risky to
‘come out’ with a Gestalt orientation in the programme,
and that they would never pass ‘clinical comps’ unless
they went, using current student jargon, ‘straight CBT’.
Those Gestalt therapists who make a living based on
decisions made by insurance company executives, and
academic deans who cite that there is no compelling
reason to believe that Gestalt therapy really works, have
cause for concern. For if we cannot demonstrate that our
approach is effective, third-party payments and teaching
positions will be distributed to those who can.
Throughout a year of full-time activity and contact with
my colleagues, it was not insecurity that I noticed, but
rather my irritation and anger. Although I have yet to be
116
directly confronted by my colleagues, my projection
informs me they do not respect my work nor believe
Gestalt therapists can assist clients and patients, except
under the narrowest of circumstances. I confess to a
certain outrage about this attitude which I pick up in
thinly veiled comments, such as, ‘If your family doctor
was doing the same thing he was doing fifty years ago
and didn’t keep up with the research, would you continue
to go to see him?’
One of the contraindications to the gloom and
impending demise of the teaching of Gestalt therapy in
today’s academic institutions, is the magnificent
transformation that occurs when students have the chance
to taste and chew the theory and practice of Gestalt
therapy. In a previous article (see Frew and Zahm, 1998),
students who completed a Gestalt therapy class in this
programme spoke very positively about that experience.
The Gestalt therapy class continues to be offered once a
year in the programme and students who have the
opportunity to observe demonstrations and participate in
practica with other students as both therapists and clients
uniformly open and light up. We hear comments such as,
‘this is so refreshing’, ‘I’m learning about process and
how the relationship itself is crucial’, and ‘I realise now
that therapy is not just symptom relief’. The class
enrolment has grown exponentially in recent years and is
now cut off at twenty-five, with students being turned
away. The course has gained a ‘you must take this course’
reputation on the student grapevine. The students’
response to the Gestalt therapy course and its growing
popularity is exciting and affirming, but it is not enough.
A Personal Synthesis and Embryonic Plan
Historically, Gestalt therapy has been cast in the role of
the iconoclast, the anarchist, the non-traditionalist. I know
that role has suited me and many of us who were attracted
to an approach that was not mainstream, not about
adjusting to the prevailing wisdom of the times. A few
years ago, I might have said, ‘Who cares about our
reputation in the world outside Gestalt therapy? We know
that what we do works and has a profound impact on
many of our clients. I have no desire to make the case for
Gestalt therapy to others.’ This year’s experience has
changed my attitude and position.
I have come to the conclusion that I must rise to the
occasion and find my own ways of challenging the
zeitgeist described in this letter.
Gestalt therapy has never been and never will be a
mainstream orientation, but it deserves recognition and
respect. I have come to the conclusion that unless a
significant number of Gestalt therapists heed the call to
produce evidence of the effectiveness of our work, we
may be out of the stream completely. The ramifications in
the academic world (already evident) will be that Gestalt
Jon Frew
therapy will no longer be taught or represented in
textbooks or on faculties.
My own plan is taking shape. I will continue to teach,
train and supervise from a Gestalt perspective. There is
nothing so gratifying as watching (as I did this year with
the five students in my supervision group) the layers of
awakening and ‘getting it’ that unfold when students are
immersed in this approach.
Gestalt therapy will never fit into efficacy studies (to
make it fit would render it not Gestalt therapy), but its
effectiveness can be demonstrated. I have dabbled in
qualitative research in the past. I am now taking (auditing)
the course taught by one of my colleagues because in the
world of qualitative research we can make our case.
Students who are approaching me to chair their
dissertations also want to find ways to demonstrate and
contribute to a body of literature which confirms the
effectiveness of Gestalt therapy. As I learn more about the
field of qualitative research, I will help them design and
carry out reputable studies and research projects.
That is my plan. In my opinion, Gestalt therapy can no
longer afford to rest on its laurels. I am inspired by my
anger and outrage, by the enthusiasm and excitement our
theory and practice still incites in my students and by my
belief that qualitative research methods can be harnessed
to demonstrate the impact of the work we do. I used to
believe we had nothing to prove. I also used to absolutely
hate being taken out of a basketball game when the
outcome was on the line. Gestalt therapy is losing its
place and stature as a respected player in some important
arenas and I hope to make a few shots while there is still
some time left on the clock.
References
Frew, J. and Zahm, S. (1998). Responses of doctoral
students to a psychology course on Gestalt therapy.
Gestalt Review, 2, pp 315-320.
Parlett, M. (2003). Editorial. British Gestalt Journal, 12,
1, pp 2-5.
Jon Frew PhD is an associate professor in the School of
Professional Psychology at Pacific University in Portland,
Oregon, USA. He is the one of the founders and directors
of Gestalt Therapy Training Center Northwest and has a
private therapy and organisational consulting practice.
Address for correspondence: c/o Counseling Psychology
Dept., Pacific University, 511 SW 10th, Suite 400,
Portland, Oregon 97205, USA
Email: frew0447@pacificu.edu
Bud Feder, Katy Wakelin
INTERNATIONAL GESTALT
Bud Feder
Received 22 August 2003
Dear Editor,
It’s hot, sunny and muggy on this summer day here in
Northern New Jersey, USA. So I decide to take my recent
BGJ into the backyard and sit in the shade of the
mulberry tree to read it. I read your Editorial. After I do
so, making a few notes, I look up and pay attention to the
magnificent stand of bamboo which straddles the fence
between this yard and the next. I bet it’s from China. A
truly international as well as inter-neighbourly stand of
graceful, swaying, stately bamboo.
Which brings me meanderingly, as befits the day, back
to your Editorial. Although you throw down the gauntlet
(‘This assertion, like some others in this Editorial, may
provoke some rejoinders in the Letters column!’), I can’t
pull up any provocation. What I do experience is a lot of
‘Right on!’
I do, though, want to reinforce one of your points,
namely that there is a lot more international interaction
and enriching within the Gestalt community than before.
The New York Institute, of which I’m a member, in
addition to its recent conference which featured many
Europeans, has been nurturing a relationship with Italian
Gestalt therapists for quite a while.
The Association for the Advancement of Gestalt
Therapy (AAGT), of which I am the current president,
has elected an Australian as our next president, even
though most of our members are Americans. One of the
most valuable parts of our conferences are the
contributions of Europeans and Australians and at each
conference we provide scholarships for needy therapists
and students from outside the USA: Russia, Turkey,
Israel, Ireland, Africa, etc. Their presence has been
invaluable to us and, I’m sure, very memorable to them.
Our next annual meeting may be in Canada. And we
have fostered a relationship among the newsletter editors
of the European Association of Gestalt Therapy (EAGT),
AAGT and GANZ, one result of which is that each
newsletter will have a column from each of the other two
organisations with news, announcements and other
information of general interest.
I have also been in touch with the presidents of EAGT
and Gestalt Australia and New Zealand (GANZ) and
have proposed that we consider cross-memberships as
well as, down the road, a joint conference.
Thanks again for your fine journal and spectacular
Editorials.
117
Bud Feder is a psychologist in private practice in
Montclair, NJ, USA, a longtime member of the NY
Institute for Gestalt Therapy and currently president of the
Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy
(AAGT).
Address for correspondence: 37 Brunswick Road,
Montclair, NJ 07042, USA
Email: bfeder@comcast.net
EMBODIMENT AND LANGUAGE: A
RESPONSE TO JAMES KEPNER
Katy Wakelin
Received 22 September 2003
Dear Editor,
I found James Kepner’s article ‘The Embodied Field’
(British Gestalt Journal, 12. 1) so inspirational and
thought provoking I started jotting down thoughts and
responses while I was reading it. As a result, this letter is a
collection of haphazard thoughts that may not be very
fluently connected but I decided not to let that stop me
trying to communicate them.
First of all, I want to say that on the whole I completely
agree with Kepner’s essential point that we live in a
‘profoundly disembodied culture’. Yet at the same time I
strongly believe that this denial takes place only at the
surface level of our communication. We don’t
acknowledge embodiment explicitly, in fact much about
our culture will try to deny our existence as bodies, but on
any deeper level we communicate all the time at the
embodied level. What we learn as therapists is not to
communicate in an embodied fashion – we all do this all
the time – but rather to make this knowledge explicit, to
become aware and to acknowledge and to put into words
this embodied communication.
Words are such blunt instruments for transmitting this
kind of experience. How about some examples? A
situation we all know: I don’t like someone, I always say
the right thing, and I think I act as if I like him/her but
somehow the person figures out I don’t. Of course, this
works in reverse, I can’t put my finger on how, but I pick
up a bad feeling from someone. William Maxwell puts
this beautifully:
The light in the human eye, the sudden change in
coloring under surprise and emotion, the stiffness around
118
the mouth, the movement of the hands were all, he
discovered, essentially truthful; as if, in those moments
when people were most anxious to deceive, they were
also desperately eager to convey to him, to anybody, that
they were lying. (p 165.)
Of course, as Gestalt therapists we look for this non-
verbal communication and we learn to make this type of
response the subject of therapy; but we have been
communicating on this level all our life, what we do is
make an existing ‘body conversation’ explicit. Even our
language has not been completely disembodied, we use
images from the body to express feelings. For instance,
the use of ‘heartache’ and ‘butterflies’; these are of course
metaphors, but they are metaphors for our embodied
experience.
In his article, Kepner uses the example of us greeting
each other and how fleeting and disembodied this
greeting can be. But there is also another interpretation of
the greeting ritual and that is how it acknowledges the
importance of us as bodies, and how we chose literally to
embody contact: touch is codified into most greetings in
most cultures indicating that we are bodies greeting each
other. Almost all greeting involves physical contact; in
some cases this is strictly laid down – the double kiss, the
hug, the handshake – whereas in others it may be more
informal. But I can often feel that I haven’t met someone
until we have touched. Yes, these greetings may be with
or without presence (for want of a better word) as can all
contact, verbal or eye contact: but this is to do with the
quality not the nature of the communication.
The Mind-Body Split
This brings me to a dilemma: by defining verbal contact
as disembodied (two minds meeting?) we are of course
falling into the old trap. All direct face-to-face contact is
embodied, our voice is part of our body so that even
phone conversations are embodied. When Kepner writes
(on page 12) that we ‘privilege the cognitive over the
embodied’ it feels to me that language once again trips us
up. The mind/body split is so embedded in the way we
use words and ideas that it is impossible to write about it
without implicitly accepting the split (I’m sure I will have
done so in this letter). Of course, the ‘cognitive’ is
embodied, our minds are in our bodies, our understanding
and speaking involve brain synapses, we are all body.
Finally, on page 8, Kepner wrote that commenting on
the embodied self is ‘taboo’ in Western societies, yet I can
think of plenty of examples when this takes place in
everyday conversation: ‘you look tired/tense/
happy/blooming/excited’. I agree that in general people
rarely go on to explain how they picked up these visual
impressions (I noticed your breathing was deeper, etc.),
Pat Levitsky
but to comment on appearance is not taboo, we
communicate on this level all the time, we just don’t
really think and articulate how we have arrived at this
understanding. The process I am describing seems to have
more to do with awareness than disembodiment: we are
not aware of being a body, and of our daily body-to-body
communication, but that does not mean it is not taking
place. Just as not being aware of, or able to articulate, our
emotions does not mean we don’t experience them.
I hope that I have managed to communicate some of
my thoughts on this exciting article. I spent much of my
time reading the article nodding my head in agreement
and I believe Kepner has done much to open up an
interesting debate.
References
Maxwell, W. (1948/1998). Time Will Darken It. The
Harvill Press, London.
Katy Wakelin completed a PhD in economics at the
European University Institute, Florence, then worked at
the University of Maastricht, the National Institute of
Economic and Social Research, London, and the
University of Nottingham. She is now in the fourth year
of an MSc in Gestalt Psychotherapy at the Sherwood
Psychotherapy Training Institute in Nottingham. She
currently works with children and adults.
Address for Corresponence: 17 Thorncliffe Road,
Nottingham NG3 5BQ, UK
Email: katywakelin@hotmail.com
MARTIN BUBER AND BI-
NATIONALISM IN PALESTINE: A
RESPONSE TO PETER
SCHULTHESS
Pat Levitsky
Received 31 October 2003
Dear Editor,
I truly welcomed Peter Schulthess’ Opinion published
in the last issue of BGJ (12, 1) regarding Gestalt
psychotherapy and politics. It was good to be reminded of
the political links in the history of Gestalt therapy, and of
Kathleen Höll
the political views and involvement of its founders. I also
enjoyed reading his explanation of how the various
concepts of Gestalt theory have political and social
implications and absolutely agree with him when he says
that Gestalt therapists can play a role in political life.
I would, however, like to clarify one thing that struck
me about what he writes regarding Martin Buber’s
philosophy of Dialogue and its political implications.
In his article, Peter writes (quoting Stahlmann) that
Buber, influenced by the anarchist Gustav Landauer, ‘had
a vision of a socialist utopia for the Jews going to live in
Palestine’ and that he ‘fought against the foundation of
the state of Israel and argued for living in free
communities without the need of a state authority’.
This caught my attention because I have always
understood that Buber’s main idealistic belief was that the
Arabs and Jews would cooperate and live together in a bi-
national Arab-Jewish State in Palestine. Buber was
originally a Zionist and edited a Zionist weekly
publication (Die Welt) at the age of 23 (in 1901). He then
resigned as editor because he disagreed with the official
Zionist policy calling for a totally Jewish State. Later, in
1938, he emigrated to Palestine and became a leader of
Ihud (‘Union’), a political movement calling for bi-
nationalism.
For those of us (as I was) who were involved in the
socialist Zionist movement in the 1940s, Martin Buber
was our hero. Unfortunately, as we all know, political
events after the establishment of the State of Israel in
1948 made bi-nationalism impossible. In view of current
events in the Middle East, I think this is all historically
quite interesting.
References
Magnes J. and Buber M. (1947). Arab-Jewish Unity:
Testimony before the Anglo-American Commission of
Inquiry.
Pat Levitsky trained in Gestalt in the USA and is
now a Gestalt therapist in private practice in Penn,
Buckinghamshire, UK. She was an associate editor of the
British Gestalt Journal from 1991-1997 and is currently
consultant to the editor.
Address for correspondence: Sportsman’s Cottage,
Beacon Hill, Penn, Bucks HP10 8NJ, UK
Email: jplevits@dial.pipex.com
119
THE SOCIETY WE LIVE WITHIN: A
RESPONSE TO PETER
SCHULTHESS
Kathleen Höll
Received 9 October 2003
Dear Editor,
Peter Schulthess, in his Opinion on ‘Gestalt Therapy
and Politics’ in your last issue (BGJ, 12, 1, pp 62-66),
raises a number of interesting and important themes. I
want to extend the discussion in your Journal by
reflecting on ‘democracy’, and the implications of today’s
global developments on how we think and work as
Gestalt therapists.
We lack key concepts and ideas about what kind of
society we live within. In particular, our ‘Western
Democracy’ seems anything but a clear figure. Here I
shall point to some characteristics of recent European
history, which in my eyes seem to have been important
for the founders of Gestalt therapy, and for some of their
successors who established Gestalt therapy here in
Europe. I shall also raise the question of how today’s
‘globalisation’ may have an impact on Western
democracies and also on what this could mean for the
concept and practice of Gestalt therapy.
First Political Background: The First Half of the
20th Century
As Schulthess reminds us, both Fritz and Lore Perls had
to deal with deep, sometimes revolutionary, changes in
their time (Perls, 1969b). They witnessed aggravating
class struggles, and the clash of the Western democracies
with the central European empires during World War I.
They fled from a terrible fascist dictatorship and the
holocaust. They left South Africa to avoid contact with
apartheid. In the USA they witnessed McCarthyism and
supported the civil rights movement and the students’
rebellion.
They gave a political slant to their developing concept
of Gestalt therapy: to offer a means whereby individuals
could come to their senses and develop their capacities for
creative adjustment. This was aimed at fostering not only
individual psychic health but also the growth of
responsible citizens who would be less susceptible to
dictatorship than were conformists (Perls, L., 1992).
Goodman widened this concept with ideas of political
changes being achieved in small steps through solidarity
in groups and communities (Goodman, 1980). The three
120
of them were influenced by the Jewish tradition of
community spirit and pleas for a fair society on this earth,
and they learned from philosophical anarchism, especially
from Gustav Landauer (1987) and Kropotkin (1976).
Second Political Background: Post 1945
In Germany and Austria, the post 1945 era began with
material reconstruction and recovery. In the political
sphere a programme of education in democratic values
and structures was established. I remember lessons and
ceremonies in school full of sympathetic descriptions of
democracy, which treated this new form of government as
sacred. Our headmistress’ reports on American schools’
ceremonies, where the flag was presented every morning,
likewise intensified the impression of democracy as a
supreme institution. In my studies of political science, I
was offered lessons on norms and ideals (which were not
designated as such), and on constitutional topics. There
was very little space given to explore actual political
practice. An idealised picture of a secular, rational world
was presented, which manifested itself politically in a
democratic constitution. The Nazi dictatorship was
regarded as an inexplicable break of civilization. From
now on Democracy would make possible a just and
rational world for all.
The facts – though most young people were not aware
of them – were more ambiguous. For instance, many
members of the old elites remained in their positions,
because of strategic considerations at the beginning of the
Cold War. Political police members and weapons experts
(such as Wernher von Braun) were imported by US
authorities.
The relationship between the theory and practice of
democratic government was not straightforward – even
from the beginning. The 1968 generation raised searching
questions about this, but then resorted to Marxism as a
countermeasure, itself an idealised system of norms.
During the Cold War, anti-communism was pushed hard;
and this helped even more to idealise democracy as the
only alternative to the ‘totalitarian regimes’ of fascism
and communism – now put under one hat and made to
look alike, as if there were no important differences
between them. The breakdown of the Soviet empire
seemed to confirm these ideas. Fukuyama (1992) wrote a
bestseller, The End of History, suggesting a worldwide
victory for liberal democracy.
Contemporary Trends
I suppose that most of us identify with democracy being
the best form of government. My thesis here is that
Western Democracy as a political regime does not
represent a clear figure in the Gestalt psychological sense
Kathleen Höll
– in our thinking we do not ‘see clearly’. Without this, it is
difficult to establish a clear political profile for
contemporary Gestalt therapy; and an impression is given
of vagueness and cautiousness. Furthermore, our political
ideas play little role either in mainstream professional
discussion or in Gestalt therapy training.
Actually we are, all of us, witnessing immense and
revolutionary developments, from the extent and speed of
telecommunications and the world wide web to an
explosion of world trade, all identified as aspects of
‘globalisation’, and only having an appearance of being a
clear figure. But the impact of globalisation is far from
clear. Its historical precursor was the breakdown of the
communist bloc and a self-authorised legitimisation by
the West to overrun all borders and establish a ‘free’ trade
and a worldwide financial market.
By degrees, drawing upon old and new methods,
governments and big industrial complexes are
implementing their own interests against the interests of
less armed and less developed countries, thus proving the
ideal of Western democracy to be in fact an ideology. The
results for the weak and discriminated against all over the
world, and especially in the so-called ‘Third World’, are
devastating. In both the East and the West, the political
elites act in similar ways, making little contact with the
population at large, and concentrating on their own
games.
At the same time, the nation states are losing influence
to business organisations, and the big industrial
complexes do not practise democratic rules. The policies
of the World Trade Organisation are discussed and
decided without participation of the public. Across the
political systems of the North and South, religious
fundamentalists are advancing. Wars are conducted below
the state level. Domestication of violence by so-called
legal means is increasing. The ‘exemplary democracies’
of the USA and Great Britain are losing political and
moral credibility around the world through their war on
Iraq. All this could put Goodman’s radical critique on
democracy (Blankertz, 1990) in a new light.
Is our idealistic world view now disintegrating? Is our
ideological certainty with regard to having the best
possible form of government (democracy) eroding, after
the breakdown of ‘real’ socialism and the vanishing of
our ‘antagonist’? Do we have to think twice about the
‘real’ democracy of the West?
The Enlightenment in Europe promised life to be
guided by reason, with separation of state and religion,
and overcoming of superstition. However, the conflict
between religious and secular was never finished. The
gestalt was never closed, but put aside instead, because
the states could not do without the support of the
obedience of citizens, which was fostered by Christianity.
Values and life goals were split into materialistic and
Society We Live Within
religious areas. Some people speak of religion as a
superstition, whereas others talk about the coming
kingdom of heaven. The churches still play dominant
roles through their presence as dominant buildings, with
churches and domes in the centres of villages and cities,
crosses everywhere, the feasts dominating the seasons of
the year. Like a double bind, the Christian world view
exists alongside a secular world view (Buchner, in
Pietschmann, 1980).
Today, at the beginning of the 21st century (which is
also religiously defined), the continuing influence of
religion in the West is present to an extent which is
alarming – at least to me. In Great Britain, it may not be
really surprising because the Queen is head of the
Anglican Church. In the Catholic countries, the Pope’s
influence in the media and in politics is visible. For me, it
is unsettling to realise that in the remaining superpower
and model of Western Democracy, the USA, its central
institutions are under the influence of fundamental
Protestant sects. The old superstition is vivid – as are
stereotyped phrases such as ‘The battle against Evil’. The
separation of religion and the state seems to disappear. A
strong indication of this was the Pope’s campaign to
mention his God in the proposed new European
constitution (Noll and Welan, 2003).
What is the International Situation About?
We seem to have a problem with the monotheistic
religions – particularly around the suppression of women.
However, most of us have to deal with knowing very little
in this field, because our lessons about religion were not
comparative, and presented a one-sided picture of the
‘only true God’, which excluded all others: a relic from
pre-modern times. I think this is enough reason on its own
to scrutinise what we call ‘modernity’.
The bureaucratic states of the industrial North had –
despite the conflict between democracy and communism
– much more in common than was visible on the surface.
As Goodman pointed out (Blankertz, 1990, p 56), both
systems were created as utopian models to substitute for
feudalistic regimes, and were forced upon the population
by military and bureaucratic means.
Today, fundamentalist groups have available
unlimited amounts of weapons from huge to small,
through the willingness of Western business organisations
to sell this stuff to whoever wants to buy it. This creates a
complicity between those involved – some pre-modern
and some modern, both of them benefiting. The pre-
modern groups may regard themselves as legitimate,
given that fundamentalist circles in the USA are striving
themselves to gain political power.
We also have a problem with violence in general.
One has to agree with Giddens (1994), who pointed out
121
that this topic had been left out from the catalogue of
subjects that were worth knowing about in the social
sciences. War was, till the end of 20th century, spoken of
in almost mystical terms, as ‘unfathomable’, regarded as
having been there ‘since the beginning of mankind’,
almost as ‘part of being human’. Only during the last few
years is it becoming clear to more and more people that
there is an urgent requirement for research into this field.
We also have a problem with our democracy.
Goodman’s view as an outsider, as a non-mainstream
social philosopher, may become more understandable
today, more plausible and vivid: that there are
discrepancies between the rhetoric and reality. For
example: Western European governments before 1989
worked together with the Eastern ‘totalitarian’
governments, instead of supporting the oppositions. The
USA traditionally supports dictators, provided they are
compliant in respect to American strategic and economic
interests. The big combines act like robber barons of long
past times. The gap between the rich and the poor
continues to widen. Slavery, raping, trading of women
and children, the lack of solidarity with people seeking
asylum, violence of the stronger against the weaker, are
all widespread. Let us also not forget the everyday
Darwinism in the labour market.
All this, at least to me, means a rude awakening from
the illusion of an intact Western democratic world with a
lot of good, willing, and responsible representatives. This
image was implanted during my schooldays and has
lasted, in one layer of my consciousness at least, since
then.
The Gestalt ‘Heirloom’ of Anarchism
Fritz Perls once said that anarchism is the matching
political theory for Gestalt therapy as a political practice
(1969a, p 25). This statement made little sense during the
naïve democratic phase following 1945. Can it make a
new sense under the global circumstances of today? Some
Gestalt articles by political idealists like Petzold (2002),
Portele (1993), Blankertz 1983, myself (Höll, 2003) and
others, have been written but with few reactions. The
philosophical anarchism of Landauer and Goodman’s
pragmatic anarchism remain alien elements in Gestalt
theory.
Schulthess, in his Opinion piece (BGJ, 12, 1) comments
that the political outlook of Gestalt therapists does not
necessarily lead to anarchism; to him it seems more
realistic to support socialism and liberalism. For sure, I
think, provided that these theories are realistic themselves.
The main aim is to find a way through all these theories to
a clear figure of ‘reality’. As Parlett (2000) points out, one
aspect of this political reality is the complicity of Western
governments in the arms trade.
122
Since the end of the Cold War we have had a fight
against ‘left’ theories and a breakdown of ‘real Socialism’
since 1990. But the ‘final victory’ of democracy as the
vehicle for promoting ‘free trade’ seems to be eroding
since the Iraq war. This perhaps will lead to more
attention being given to so-called postmodern
developments, that have nothing to do with ‘right’ or
‘left’, and which have not attracted attention in
mainstream intellectual thinking. They include
phenomenological and existential approaches in theory
and practice, systemic views, ecology, Gestalt therapy: all
these offer respect for individuality and variety as being
complementary, and for holistic instead of dualistic
perspectives. Such views grow gradually and
continuously.
Far more visible are the world wide web and the
emergence of NGO’s (Non Governmental Organisations)
as global players of a new type: making new forms of
direct participation possible. They symbolise new means,
not dreamt of before, for the emergence of a worldwide,
cooperating civil society, which may learn more and more
the art of self-regulation of communities without such
steep hierarchies, and without dominance imposed
through strength, oligarchies, and violence.
This is exactly what was aimed for by Gustav Landauer
and Paul Goodman. A book was published in Germany in
1951, where the author, Heintz (1951), postulated a silent
revolution from an individual anarchism arising. So we
may have come to a point where we can redefine the
heirloom and reintegrate it in Gestalt therapy thinking.
What Can All This Mean to Gestalt Therapists?
During the last couple of years the main interest of
Gestalt therapists, at least in Germany and Austria, seems
to be settling down in the public health services. This has
to be respected as everybody has to work to provide a
solid material base for their life. The seduction is that the
smoother, the more non political, and more medicalised
one is, the more successful one becomes. Here and there
this means adapting to clinical diagnostics to a degree that
is antipathetic to the holism of Gestalt theory, as if there
were no wider consequences in doing so. Another
alternative is to overlook the clinical and professional
trends in the field of working with ‘severe psychological
illnesses’ and to focus on a personal development agenda
alone. As a compromise solution we may seek to
incorporate the dialogical attitude into clinical procedures
as something peculiar to Gestalt therapy. As a result,
existing elements of Gestalt theory, which could help to
understand the underlying dynamics of the diagnosed
diseases, are often ignored.
Lewin, in the 1920s and ’30s, was already arguing for
diagnostics based on concrete psychological situations
Kathleen Holl
instead of classical Aristotelian schemes. The continuing
research on trauma and abuses (often by sociologists)
deals with that unfilled gap between individual diseases
and socio-political reality, and writers point to the
continuing role of Darwinism, racism and violence in our
‘Western democratic societies’. Jacobs (2000) and Hewitt
Taylor (2002) have provided impressive examples of how
to face violence and racism in the heart of our
communities as a Gestalt therapist
Some concepts of Gestalt therapy, such as ‘field’ and
‘figure/ground’, could be most helpful to enlighten the
connections between macro- and micro-levels, and the
meta-level of collective world views, ideologies, beliefs
and values. ‘Field’ does not just mean a two-person
constellation. This reduced perspective deprives us of a
large portion of our means to understand reality. As long
as the political macro-level is not a clear figure for us, we
will not succeed in building a sufficient understanding of
its influence on the individual level, and vice versa.
We are specialists on the micro-level because we look
on society through its individuals and their relations to
each other. So, by revealing aspects of our work, we can
do field research on the impacts of socio-political
conditions on individuals, families and groups. And if we
do so, we cannot deny the impact of these conditions.
My conclusion is that we should attend much more to
linking phenomena described in the clinical field to the
underlying structures: conflict dynamics, their driving
forces and the power relations in our societies, with their
impact on individuals and collectively. Important
theoretical contributions by Petzold, Blankertz, Portele,
Parlett and others are lying on the table. We are
‘compelled by the situation’, as Lewin referred to it, to
contribute more explicitly than in the past 20-40 years to
creating broader foundations for the indispensable
guiding ideals of Western democracy: freedom, solidarity,
and Human Rights.
Possibly we can help to build new diagnostics which
are less oriented towards symptoms and more directed
towards emotional, mental and social patterns which by
pressurising and overstretching adults – and, even more
so, children – lead to temporary solutions like disease.
This would require focusing more on field conditions at
different levels and searching for that very level of
complexity (Smuts, 1926; Höll, 2003) where this problem
is rooted, because there we can find the most potential for
solution. This also requires us to import much that is good
from neighbouring disciplines like infant research, the
neurosciences, and critical social inquiry.
References
Blankertz, S. (1983). Kritischer Pragmatismus – Zur
Soziologie Paul Goodmans. Büchse der Pandora,
Society We Live Within
Wetzlar.
Blankertz, S. (1990). Gestaltkritik – Paul Goodmans
Sozialpathologie in Therapie und Schule. Edition
Humanistische Psychologie, Köln.
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History. The Free Press,
New York.
Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond Left and Right. The Future of
Radical Politics. Stanford University Press, Stanford,
CA.
Goodman, P. (1980) Anarchistisches Manifest. In:
Blankertz, S. and Goodman, P. (Eds.),
Staatlichkeitswahn, pp 77-139. Büchse der Pandora,
Wetzlar.
Heintz, P. (1951). Anarchismus und Gegenwart – Versuch
einer anarchistischen Deutung der modernen Welt.
Regio, Zürich.
Hewitt Taylor, J. (2002). Childhood abuse as experienced
by black women living in Britain – a
phenomenological exploration. British Gestalt Journal,
11, 2, pp 91-98.
Höll, K. (2003) Das holistische Naturverständnis der
Gestalttherapie und seine politischen Implikationen. In:
Maurer, M. and Höll, O. (Eds.), Natur als Politikum.
RLI-Verlag, Wien.
Jacobs, L. (2000). For Whites Only. British Gestalt
Journal, 9, 1, pp 3-14.
Kropotkin, P. (1976). Mutual aid – a factor of evolution.
Free Press, London.
Landauer, G. (1987). Aufruf zum Sozialismus. Büchse der
Pandora, Wetzlar.
Lewin, K. (1935). The conflict between the Aristotelian
and Galilean modes of thought in contemporary
psychology. Journal Gen. Psychol., 5, pp 141-177.
Noll, A.F. and Welan, M. (2003). Gott in die Verfassung?
Czernin Verlag, Wien.
123
Parlett, M. (2000). Creative Adjustment and the Global
Field. British Gestalt Journal, 9, 1, pp 15-27..
Perls, F.S. (1969a). Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Real
People Press, Moab, UT.
Perls, F.S. (1969b). In and Out the Garbage Pail. Real
People Press, Lafayette, CA.
Perls, L. (1992). Living at the Boundary: Collected Works
of Laura Perls. Wysong, J. (Ed.). Gestalt Journal Press,
Highland, NY.
Petzold, H. (2002). Goodmansche’ Gestalttherapie als
klinische “Soziologie” konstruktiver Aggression (Teil
3). Gestalt, 44, pp 19-30, 39-65.
Pietschmann, H. (1980). Das Ende des
naturwissenschaftlichen Zeitalters. Paul Zsolney,
Wien, Hamburg.
Portele, H. (1993). Anarchistische Grundlagen der
Gestalttherapie. Gestalttherapie, 2, pp 22-29.
Schulthess, P. (2003). Gestalt Therapy and Politics.
British Gestalt Journal, 12, 1, pp 62-66.
Smuts, J.C. (1926). Holism and evolution. The Gestalt
Journal Press, Highland, NY
Kathleen Höll, MA, studied political science and
sociology, followed by several years of research on
political participation and change of values at the
University of Vienna. She is a Gestalt therapist, currently
teaching at the ÖAGG, and has published articles on
political, gender and Gestalt topics. Kathleen is a member
of the working group on political psychology and senior
lecturer at the Institute for Political Sciences, University
of Vienna, Austria.
Address for correspondence: Schüttelstr. 77/27, A-1020
Vienna, Austria.
Email: kathleen.hoell@chello.at
British Gestalt Journal
2003, Vol.12, No 2, pp 124-132
BOOK REVIEWS
THE SELF INSIDE OUT
John Kirti Wheway
A Review of Self in Relation by Peter Philippson. Published by Gestalt Journal
Press, 2003, 255 pages. Price £29.99, (pbk).
According to Philip Lichtenberg, who provides its
Foreword, this book ‘is one person’s reading of the theory
and of developments in recent years around that theory’
(p vii). Its author himself claims he is ‘presenting here my
own map of Gestalt therapy, from its first principles in
philosophy to its expression in specific methods of
psychotherapy’.
Philippson wants to give other Gestalt therapists ‘a
sense of where I stand on various aspects of Gestalt
theory’ and to encourage others to make their own ‘maps’
and show how the theory hangs together for them’ (p vii).
His stance draws heavily on Perls, Hefferline and
Goodman’s classic exposition. He favours a Perlsian
perspective and style of working, and this influences in
particular his perspective on dialogue, biasing him
towards making himself a ‘strong other’ (p viii).
As Lichtenberg writes, Philippson’s map is ‘a broad
territory’, that includes and draws on physics, and chaos
and complexity theory, as well as philosophy, alongside
more familiar discussions of other therapeutic modalities,
and the incorporation of a developmental perspective
from Stern. He also has chapters on working with
individuals, groups, couples and families which I have not
had space to consider here.
In this review I have chosen to concentrate on his
particular exposition of a relational theory and the
idiosyncratic methods and attitudes to practice he
proposes in consequence.
Philosophical and Psychological Views of the Self
Philippson gives a too-brief but nonetheless useful
sketch of philosophical and psychological theories of the
self, in order to place Gestalt before presenting what he
sees as its original contribution.
He finds, in philosophy, a broad distinction between
dualism, which claims that the self is a thing independent
of (and of different stuff from) the body; and those, such
as Hume, the existentialists, Lao Tzu and the Buddha who
depict the self in terms of the flow of experiences and the
Copyright 2003 by Gestalt Publications Ltd.
primacy of living and dying. He places Gestalt in the
latter group,
Among psychotherapeutic theories, he depicts the self
of the psychoanalysts as ‘a growing structure within a
person through a sequence of developmental steps which
can be disrupted by bad parenting (p 4). In this context he
offers a huge oversimplification of Kohut’s idea of the
therapist’s role to ‘provide the parenting experiences
which the client never had’. (I mention this because later I
shall be taking issue with him over a cluster of issues,
about empathy, empathic attunement and the nature and
function of appropriate environmental support for the self,
the importance of which Kohut, Carl Rogers, and later the
intersubjectivists, have been vigorous proponents.)
Where the battle lines are for Philippson, this version of
history implicitly shows, on the one side, philosophical
idealism and psychoanalysis, on the other, empiricism,
existentialism, buddhism, taoism and Gestalt.
His book can be seen, in part, as a duel with dualism.
How Self Comes into Being
Philippson starts with physics. He writes ‘I want to
show how Gestalt theory can act as a map, taking us from
nothingness (i.e. the quantum field with its
interconnectedness and fluidity) to the emergence first of
identifiable structures and ‘things’, then to self-
identifications, and finally to the ways in which we
stabilise selfhood, and experience ourselves as ongoing
beings’ (p 13).
In the field, processes create relatively stable patterns,
which we see as substantial entities – as tables, people,
stars, planets. The total environment is one of
interconnected processes/things. The contact boundary is
maintained by the ecology of the whole field, whereas at
the contact boundary a living organism maintains its
individuality and finds ways of nourishing itself and
keeping alive in that environment.
A special instance of the emergence of physical entities
from the quantum field is how ‘my selfhood arises out of

my physical contact with my physical environment, in a
way which does not violate the physical rules of that
contact (I can’t walk through walls), but which also has its
own psychological processes which can’t be reduced to
physics (e.g. commitment and choice)’ (p 5).
He uses a beguiling example of the elementary
emergence of a physical structure from the physical field.
If we heat a thin layer of oil wedged between two glass
plates, a honeycomb pattern of hexagonal cells of
convecting liquid forms. We cannot say that the pattern is
a property of the oil, or the glass, or the heating. It is a
property of all of them, of the interactive context or field.
A change in the field would change or destroy the pattern.
Self, he suggests, emerges at the contact boundary in just
this way. In other words, self is not a non-material thing
inside you and me, but is a property of the field.
Interestingly, committing and choosing he sees as part
of the ‘personality’ function of the self, which he sees as
being what enables us to have a sense of ourselves as
ongoing and unified beings. But personality, and these
psychological processes, do not emerge from the field
conceived of in terms of physics. Crucially, they involve
meanings, and meanings are peculiarly human and social.
I do not think, though, that we have to be dualists if we
admit this. The total field, at the very least, includes,
physical processes and meanings. It just is not only a
physical field.
Inner Self and Self at the Contact Boundary
One of the things Philippson wanted to do
philosophically in this book is to show that self is not an
inner self, a self arising inside me. In the context of
therapy, he is arguing for a Gestalt perspective in which
self is ‘a relationship process at the boundary of
interaction between therapist and client’ (p 27).
This boundary is not ‘created by some “self” and some
“other” coming together; rather the boundary is prior to
both “self” and “other”. At the boundary, therapist and
client co-create one another, and explore this co-creation’
(p 27). Difficulties in life inhere in the way clients
configure themselves in the world. In the therapy, the
client can experiment with new ways of relating, while
also looking at what it means not to do so.
I am puzzled about this boundary which is prior to self
and other. If it is prior to self and other, of what is it the
boundary? But let me consider why he might be saying
this. My guess is, it is in order to develop a view of
therapeutic practice as relational in the same way as
Buber’s view of dialogue, that is, as something larger than
either of the participants, and not controlled by either.
For Philippson, what happens between therapist and
client is a spontaneous interaction. Controlling it from the
therapist’s side is what he criticises constructivist
125
therapies such as NLP for; and, in my view, by
implication classical psychoanalytic therapy which sees it
as the job of the therapist to correct the patient’s
‘distorted’ view of reality from inside his own ‘accurate’
perspective. But he also objects to therapies which aim for
an empathic stance – again following Buber – on the
grounds that they demand that to enter the world of the
client, the therapist gives up his own perspective. For
Philippson, as for Buber, preserving the difference
between therapist and client is vital. This difference is
threatened in three ways: if the therapist tries to limit the
interaction to what he can conceive of and direct; if he
gives up his own perspective; and thirdly, if he yields to
the client’s attempts to manipulate him into meeting the
client’s unmet needs.
In Philippson’s model of therapy, client and therapist
co-create one another at the boundary. There are
difficulties for me in this way of putting it: ‘co-creation’
suggests some sort of co-operation. Certainly, co-creation
might be desirable as an ideal, but in practice, if we create
one another at the boundary it would seem that the ‘I’ you
create in relation to me will not always or even that
frequently be the same as the ‘I’ I create for myself; the
‘you’ I create will almost certainly be different from the
‘you’ you create. Much of the time, we would be as likely
to compete or come into conflict as we are to co-operate.
As well as being the product of our resistances to contact,
these difficulties, if we each create the other, would result
from the fact that each of us is limited to our own point of
view in the field. The problem here stems from
insufficient clarity in Philippson’s formulation of ‘co-
creation’.
What is muddling is talking of us each creating the
other as if it is from within a personal perspective that we
do this, that is, as a result of our individual intentions.
This muddle is perpetuated in talk of the therapist or the
client controlling the other. I think Philippson digs us
further into a hole when he formulates his practice as a list
of technical procedures and aims. Of course, it really is
not easy to avoid this,
Why do I think he needs to? I believe it is a
consequence of his relational model, the view that self is
the product of interactions at the boundary, that there, at
the boundary, not in some inner core, we find ourselves.
What I do not think he points out is that if I do not
produce myself out of my own intentions, then if my
intentions are part of the co-creation in any way, it cannot
be in any straightforward way.
A simple example: I make an intervention designed by
me to deepen the client’s experience of his sensations. I
communicate with the utmost delicacy and tact, but he
cuts off further from what he feels. He goes on to express
feelings of disappointment and shame in himself for not
making use of what I have offered. Neither of us, it
126
seems, is in control of what is happening. I intend to
facilitate his process, he intends to co-operate. Now, is it
that I have used the wrong technique? Maybe my timing
was bad? Each of us is having an experience of self that
was unintended by either. But, each of us is having an
experience of our own, and which would not have arisen
unless he and I were together, interacting. It seems I do
not have to intend an experience in order for it to be mine
Maybe this is what co-creating one another at the
boundary is like.
I appreciate Philippson’s intentions in his criticism of
other modes of therapy than his own to clarify by contrast
his relational approach. He aims to get away from
manipulation and control, to move towards a
spontaneous, process-based interaction in the field –
which he identifies with Buber’s ‘between’. I feel,
however, that in formulating a method based on various
preconceived models of psychological functioning and
types of pathology, he is paving the way to moving not
away from, but towards, control and manipulation of the
client. In other words, such an approach imposes on the
client the therapist’s meanings at the expense of the
client’s, and this is not a relational way to do therapy.
I enjoyed very much his rich attempts to depict how
self emerges from interactions in the field; but other
Gestaltists, notably Hycner, Jacobs, Sapriel, Wheeler and
Yontef, derive from the principle that self is formed in the
contact between self and other dialogical practices, which
do not insist on difference so much as try to understand it
so as to mitigate its potential to bring about negative
therapeutic reactions. This makes sense to me in the way
that Philippson’s approach does not.
For the intersubjectivists, who have influenced the
thinking of many of these other Gestaltists, therapy is the
mutual interaction of two worlds of experience. Like
Philippson, they recommend the practice of ‘inclusion’,
although they do not use this term, but speak of
combining empathy and introspection. The aim of doing
so is not to undermine the boundary between self and
other, but to clarify the way in which their differences
may lead to misunderstandings potentially traumatising to
the client. In other words, they recognise that they are
limited in their point of view and attempt to be as aware
as possible of those limitations and of their effect.
Let me return to my imaginary case example to show
how this might work. As a beginning therapist, I might
have been tempted to conclude that the failure to get the
result I wanted was the client’s fault. (I am not, by the
way, suggesting for a moment this is what Philippson
would do.) After all, my thinking might have gone, I was
applying a well-established manoeuvre in which I had
been thoroughly trained. My diagnosis was that the client
was out of contact with his experience and I was doing
something which directly addressed that. However, later
John Kirti Wheway
on, more able to admit that I am far from perfect, I
explore my perspective on this. When I discovered
sensory-awareness techniques, as a rather cerebral and
withdrawn person, having someone draw my attention to
bodily sensations was liberating. Feeling well-disposed
towards my client, I see him as being like me before this
development in my life. I want to share it with him. I
know he has been sexually abused, and I would be
extremely circumspect about offering him physical
contact. Restricting myself to a verbal intervention is
intended to respect these boundaries. Eventually,
however, it emerges that the mother who abused him
often began by drawing attention to his body, making
personal and sexually excited remarks about his physical
characteristics. Gradually we reach the understanding that
while for me, someone’s directing attention to my body
felt safe and expanded my sense of aliveness, for him, it
was the frightening preliminary to an assault. By
exploring both our perspectives, we draw emotionally
closer. I tell the client I understand how frightening my
intervention must have seemed to him, and he enters a
deep state of mourning that we share together in silence.
Self and the Personal Field
The personal field is personal in the sense that it is a
portion of the total field as seen from my perspective,
limited as a consequence of my living bodily in a
particular place and in a particular period in history, with
its own organisation of values and culture. Because I am,
and have, a body, I myself am subject to its limitations.
The total field, on the other hand, is the whole of
everything there is, unrestricted by my point of view on it.
Obviously, I cannot have access to this totality, I can only
imagine it, and conceive that I may feel the effects of it
all, though I cannot know that I do – I cannot for instance,
know that the movement of the wing of a butterfly in Java
has some influence on me, though I can concede the
theoretical sense of believing it.
I can also concede that the client and I co-create one
another as elements in the total field, but since I cannot
adopt the point of view of the total field, I cannot know
how it happens, or, indeed, that it does happen. Field
theory, like chaos theory, one of its developments, is a
theoretical construct.
But its usefulness and plausibility come from
recognising that ‘I’ am never present without a world that
is present with me, to which I respond, and which
responds back.
Peter Philippson puts this well: ‘I experience myself as
the one who sees the sunlight coming through the
window, who loves my family, who types on the
computer. My focus is on the window, the family, the
computer, not on the seeing, the loving, or my wanting to
Review of Philippson
type. As I move from the computer to my son, my self-
experience changes, as does his’ (pp 1-2). He says that
this experiencing suggests a self that is fluid and
relational: ‘Whereas an “inner” self characterised by
stability and independence, raises questions of “How does
self change?” and “How does self relate to the world?”,
relational self raises the question “How does self stabilise
itself?”’ (p 2).
These problems of the ‘inner self’ occur only if the
‘inner self’ is a non-material substance, a Cartesian
thinking thing. Is Philippson perhaps issuing an invitation
to regard what I am sometimes inclined to refer to as my
inner self as illusory, much as Perls regarded the mind as
an illusion produced by the low-grade emergency of
living in modern society? Conceiving myself as having an
inner self does not rest on an illusory belief in non-
material substances: it arises in the particular cultural field
I inhabit as an aspect of the organisation of self-
experience.
Let us just go back to the short extract from Philippson
above. None of the things or activities he mentions is
reducible to physical processes in a physical field only –
typing, loving, windows, computers, families and sons in
the form in which we engage with them all depend on
meanings and social practices in which they inhere.
Meanings imply practices, imply language, imply
thinking – mind as an aspect of self, though not mind as a
separate and substantial entity.
The Awareness/Thinking Split
Iris Fodor, (1998) points out that the first formulations
of Gestalt therapy were based on Gestalt psychology, ‘the
cognitive science of the time’, which for all its holistic
intentions, splits awareness from thinking – the most
exaggerated expression of this, useful for emphasis, is
‘Lose your mind and come to your senses’. Thinking
becomes part of the structuring activity of the self in the
conditions of living in a modern society, not an illusion at
all as Perls seems to have thought: the illusion would be
to conclude that to give value to thinking is to commit
ourselves to the existence of mental substance.
Modern advances in cognitive psychology suggest that
all experience is theory-laden, that grasping the world is
always via organising schemata. If this is so, dividing the
self up into realms each possessing a different
functionality, as in the Gestalt model of ‘Id-Ego-
Personality’, may not be a very helpful way of
representing how we indeed grasp the world. The ‘Id’
concept seems most problematic in this context,
envisaging a realm of unformed, unprocessed, raw
experience. Philippson borrows Perls, Hefferline and
Goodman’s account: ‘the Id is the given background
dissolving into its possibilities, including organic
127
excitations and past unfinished situations, and the
environment vaguely perceived, and the inchoate feelings
connecting organism and environment ... The Id then
appears as passive, scattered and irrational; its contents
are hallucinatory and the body looms large (quoted on p
34).
This account I take to be not a strict definition but a
poetic evocation of a state of primitive being that is prior
to any structuring. ‘Id’ does not organise experience; for
this, ego and personality functions are needed. ‘Ego’
organises experience into ‘me’ and ‘not-me’.
‘Personality’ is required to yield a sense of structured
ongoingness of self-experience, together with enduring
creative projects, and sustained commitment to
relationship.
By separating out and prioritising ‘Id’ as the source of
aliveness, Philippson is led to the conclusion that with
personality ‘What I lose ... is the exciting freshness of
new experience in each moment; what I gain is autonomy,
connectedness and intimacy, together with a reduction in
the anxiety inherent in the unfamiliar’ (p 38). The
implication here seems to be that ‘new experience in each
moment’ is somehow unattainable except in the abeyance
of personality.
I want to argue with the notion that there is this trade-
off, that it is this simple. Compare the cases of a three-
year-old infant and a mature concert pianist in their
experience of piano playing. As the infant comes to the
instrument for the first time, there may be extraordinary
quantities of delight and excitement in his experience; a
little later, taking piano lessons, the excitement
diminishes, and there are even patches of boredom – this
would seem to bear out Philippson’s claim; but as the
lessons have their effect, boredom once more gives way
to excitement and delight. What has happened? The child,
through learning, is enabled to have directly new and
exciting experiences which would otherwise not be
available. The development of character supports the
deepening and broadening of musical experiences. The
mature concert pianist can spend a lifetime relating
vividly to his instrument. This choice has tremendous
energy. A good musician does not trade off his powers of
commitment and capacity for high levels of self-
organising activity. Highly energised states are not
inhibited by, but are essentially a product of, these
powers.
I imagine that the model of self-functioning developed
by the founders of Gestalt therapy results in part from the
great insight following the time of Hitler, Stalin and mass-
industrialisation into how society, and thus socialisation as
a Self, can oppress human potential – hence ‘lose your
mind and come to your senses’. Perls, according to
Beisser, expected the USA under Nixon to develop into a
fascist state from which he was preparing to escape, just
128
as he had left Germany and South Africa. Carl Rogers, in
the same period, seemed to view the person as having a
natural potential which society, in introjected form as ‘self
concept’, could block. But this leaves out the facilitative
dimension of society and culture. Relational theorists such
as Winnicott, Bollas, the self psychologists and the
intersubjectivists all emphasise this facilitative dimension.
The stability and durability which Philippson attributes
to personality, I would argue, underpins self as a whole as
an ongoing process of organising experiences into
meaningful patterns which is initiated at the earliest stages
of post-natal life (and possibly earlier). This is not just a
verbal ‘map’ of the self, but is grounded in all our
interactions in the living field, notably the human field.
Existence in society, from the beginning, initiates the
individual into a tradition of selfhood, that is, equips you
and me with culturally derived fundamental procedures
for organising our experiences and taking individual
ownership of them. These are the ‘organising principles’
which the intersubjectivists see as constitutive of
particular selves, or ‘worlds of experience’.
The physical analogy of how hexagonal patterns form
in heated oil, beautiful though it is, presents us with a too
simple model of self in relation, and leads Philippson, and
perhaps led the originators of Gestalt therapy, with their
talk of ‘organism and environment’ to fall short, in spite
of their intensely political interests, of accounting for
human being in cultural terms.
My suspicion is that this emphasis, and the influence of
an outdated phenomenological quest for pure experience
unadulterated by preconceptions, may underlie the split
between awareness and thinking Fodor identifies: as if
awareness were separate and more fundamental than the
world grasped via culturally mediated schemata.
‘A holistic view of awareness process includes
sensory, emotional and conceptual processes
operating together to create the individual’s
phenomenological perspective of the world.’ (Fodor,
1998)
When we go beyond the context of the physical
organism in the physical field to consider the social field
as a field which pre-exists you and me as individuals, we
can allow that the self which the social field forms is a
self we experience as an inner self in the senses I
discussed earlier.
Self as a Practice
Just as marriage is a practice regulating sexual
experience and conduct, so is self a practice aimed at
organising experience into something owned by an
individual who feels herself to be autonomous and
John Kirti Wheway
ongoing. I would claim we are initiated into the practice
of an inner self, an individual self, via a relationship
process at the contact boundary. Loss of self may involve
‘disintegrating into unrelated parts; dissolving into others
or diffusing into the physical environment; feeling an
infinite inner deadness at the centre of one’s mind or soul;
losing the sense of being a subject and becoming an inert,
physical object; being inauthentic and unreal, a simulation
lacking substance; losing possession of oneself as one’s
thoughts and intentions are usurped by a foreign will; and
feeling such an extreme discontinuity in who one is that a
fragmentation occurs along the axis of time’ (Orange,
Atwood and Stolorow, 1997, p 49). These experiences are
‘inner’ – not literally, for the self is not a concrete thing,
but in the sense that they denote a breakdown in the
constitution of the self, the practices and conditions under
which the experience of a being a self coheres and is
maintained.
My subjective sense of self is not an illusion, but the
way I experience being in the world. Because I live in
Western Europe at a particular time in its history, I
experience myself as having a private world of
experiences, characterised by a sense of ongoingness and
relative coherence. In other words, I think I can believe
both that my self comes into being through a process of
interactions with otherness at the contact boundary, and
that that self, as I experience it, is inner, in the sense of
being private, directly accessible only to me, and my
property.
I experience myself, by and large, as autonomous, that
is, not only different from my surroundings, but also in
charge of myself. Taking this autonomy to be objective,
some psychological accounts of human development
promote it as the goal of growing up, reaching a state
where one does not need other people. One of the
corollaries of this view is that dependency is infantile.
This objectivisation, or reification of the experience of
personal autonomy, the intersubjectivists call the doctrine
of the ‘isolated mind’, and explain adherence to it as a
defence against the anxiety resulting from realising that
we are, from cradle to grave, dependent on what the
environment that surrounds us provides. However, the
subjective sense of autonomy, is supported by the very
fact that there is a good enough environment to sustain us:
so I can say the experience of being independent results
from the fact that there are in place objective field
conditions that promote and sustain my experience.
If Philippson had used a similar distinction, he would
not, I believe, have concluded that the sense of an inner
self is incompatible with the self as the product of the
contact boundary.
I wonder, too, if some of his hostility to empathy,
empathic attunement, and the importation of self-
psychological attitudes into Gestalt might come from an
Review of Philippson
implicit reification of the sense of autonomy that sees it as
incompatible with being dependent. This hostility
emerges in his discussions of practice, to which I now
turn.
The Consequences for Practice
He writes ‘Our clients come to us with “unfinished
business” from childhood and elsewhere, and have
become adept at finding spurious ways to finish it’ (p
152). He quickly sketches the techniques of avoidance
practised by ‘the neurotic’, ‘the borderline’, ‘the
narcissist’.
This way of talking reduces clients to the labels of their
pathologies, and the use of the word ‘spurious’ to describe
the client’s attempts to maintain support in the face of
environmental failure, suggests to me that Philippson is
weighing in with a moral prejudice, a kind of blaming the
client. I gain this impression also when he describes
nervous breakdowns as being ‘where people in effect
deny their own responsibility for their behaviour, and
even for their survival’ (p 155).
Elsewhere he tells us that dialogue, as practised by
Buber and Perls, in its emphasis on ‘contact and
differentiation rather than empathy and attunement ... was
not a soft option’ (p 148). This is a familiar strand in
Gestalt that in the past led to its widespread rejection in
this country. Philippson quotes with apparent approval an
account by Maurice Friedman of his handling of a
suicidal student, the point of which seems to advertise
Friedman’s true grit in not sparing the young woman
severe emotional pain. It is not an argument in favour of
their emphasis that Perls and Buber practised dialogue in
this way. What would be interesting is a case that shows
why empathy and attunement cannot be combined with
contact and differentiation. As it stands, there exist many
detailed accounts by Lynne Jacobs of case material in
which she does combine them.
The most important omission in this passage seems to
me the complete absence of any consideration of the way
in which these pathologies are increasingly seen as
involving, in therapy, iatrogenic features – the very
treatment evokes the pathology. ‘These are all avoidances
of the pain of saying goodbye to the hope of ever getting
what I wanted from the person I wanted it from’ (p 152).
It seems as if, for Philippson, the therapist can in no way
share responsibility for the appearance of painful and
dysfunctional states in therapy, a position hard to
reconcile with his view that therapist and client co-create
one another.
Philippson draws on the Perlsian five-layer model, with
its emphasis on despair leading to the ‘death layer’ and
liberation, and opposes it to ‘playing the replacement
parent, thus depriving the client of real contact’ (p 152);
129
and though he does acknowledge the need for ‘sensitivity
to the client’s need for pacing and grading of her giving
up’ (p 152), he writes as if when a client leaves therapy,
though it may sometimes be because the therapist has
mistimed interventions, ‘often it will be an unwillingness
to face the pain they begin to feel as being inherent in the
work’ (p 152).
Tobin is cited, describing how a client abandoned
therapy, returning three years later in despair telling Tobin
that though he had been right in what he said, ‘he had felt
so hurt by my comment that he didn’t think he could
work with someone who was so insensitive to him’
(quoted pp 152-3).
‘Tobin’s assumption is that his comment “hurt” the
client’, Philippson comments. This is inaccurate: the
client told Tobin he was hurt and Tobin took this
seriously. Philippson interprets that this client ‘made the
choice to leave therapy rather than stay with a therapist
who would not be confluent with his wish to avoid the
hurt’. This is not what either the therapist or the client
claim. Nor is this an example of a ‘spurious’ attempt to
withdraw from the pain of mourning, but a withdrawal
from one who is genuinely experienced as insensitive to
him and who thus hurts him now. This healthy choice to
withdraw is pathologised by Philippson. He further
interprets the client’s return as his link ‘to someone he
knew told the truth’. There is no evidence to support this,
and one might ask, whose truth? The moves Philippson is
making here are based purely on his own theoretical
preferences, which are allowed to override the meanings
of the participants. He is the expert who knows what is
really the case, and the views of Tobin and his client are
irrelevant at best; at worst, they are cowardly or soft.
Philippson goes on ‘And for this he only paid for one
session! Would that man’s life have been better if he’d
stayed with a therapist who “empathically attuned” with
him for three years instead?’ (p 153).
I would really like to be able to understand what is
behind Philippson’s stance here. He seems to espouse a
version of therapeutic neutrality, which elsewhere has
been described as ‘a grandiose defensive illusion to be
given up and mourned’ (Orange, Atwood and Stolorow,
1997, p 43), a comment which seems ironic in the light of
Philippson’s clarity about the client’s need to give up and
mourn lost hopes. In place of therapist ‘neutrality’,
Orange, Atwood and Stolorow propose a threefold
exploration: of the therapist’s and the client’s different
ways of organising experiences in their relationship and
of the psychological field created by the interplay
between the two.
If I discover myself, as I do, wanting to impose my
version of reality so insistently on a another, my first
move these days, under the influence of intersubjective
thinkers, would be to wonder why it was I needed to be
130
right and make the other wrong. Trying to differentiate
and understand the different perspectives of myself and
the client I regard as a significant part of the practice of
inclusion, and part of restoring a sense of contact when
my own perspective leads me to withdraw by invalidating
the client’s perceptions. This approach seems to me more
consistent with Philippson’s field theoretical view and
with Buber’s themes of inclusion and confirmation than
his own practice.
All too often in this book I get the sense that the author
assumes an expert stance. He is willing to examine what
the client brings from within his model of Gestalt, but
rather than holding this lightly, acknowledging that his
allegiance to Gestalt is at least in part because it suits his
own subjectivity, it is as if he holds a truth that only fools
and cowards would question. This does not seem to me a
recognisable expression of the view that therapist and
client co-create one another, but rather an example of the
therapist one-sidedly seeking to control the situation
through his superior knowledge.
Constructivism and Empathy
Constructivist therapies (such as NLP), according to
Philippson ‘see the world as essentially our construct,
which we can change at will by viewing it differently’ (p
6). He characterises NLP, with its view that the meaning
of a communication is its effect, as a dangerous reduction
of feedback to confirmation or disconfirmation that one
has got an intended response. Why dangerous?
The essence of Philippson’s criticism here is that this is
a manipulative, controlling way of relating, in which ‘the
achievement of my wants and needs takes precedence
over the making of contact’. By choosing to present my
communication in such a way as to get what I want, ‘I am
extending my selfhood and sense of agency into other
people’ (p 8). Philippson suggests that this extending is
ethically dubious, without quite saying why. Is it that he
feels in everyday situations, the subject may be unaware
of being hypnotised, and therefore cannot give consent?
More powerfully, he also suggests the ‘operator’ (in the
sense of ‘smooth operator’) who ‘introjects or becomes
confluent with another in order to exert control’
diminishes himself, for he is ‘controlled by the
requirements of that control and that introjection’. The
wish for control ‘feeds on insecurity and at the same time
enhances that insecurity by making true contact
impossible.’ He calls this an ‘insidious and destructive’
mindset.
I found the vehemence of this attack on NLP rather
puzzling and could not connect it with the central
argument in favour of self-at-the-contact-boundary, until I
realised that what Philippson really wants to bring out
here is the contrast between NLP and a way of relating in
John Kirti Wheway
which contact has a priority – a spontaneous interaction
between therapist and client co-creating one another, in
which attempts by either party to control or manipulate
the interaction are a potentially destructive interference.
I found this contrast a thought-provoking one, and
began to wonder where else these objections might apply.
Both empathy, as in Rogers, and inclusion in Buber,
involve an intention to extend oneself into another
person’s world. Rogers spoke of ‘reflection’ as being an
attempt to check out with a client whether he had
understood the client – to get feedback. Rogers does aim
to understand the client’s meaning – he has that much of
an agenda; and therefore we might say that he wants to
exercise control by shaping feedback to falsify or verify
his interpretations. Does he therefore control the client
into giving him what he wants? I do not think so. I think
he is aiming for contact, and his empathic reflections are
seen as a means to bring that about – to be congruent
himself, and to facilitate congruence in the client.
In false-self or incongruent mode, depending on a
withholding other to provide what I need and cannot
provide for myself, I suppress parts of myself that I
perceive as unacceptable to the other, and behave
according to her wishes, in order to get what I want and
need. In this sense, I am controlling the parent.
Insidious and destructive of authenticity and contact
indeed, but to attribute controlling and manipulative
relating to only one party in such relationships is to ignore
the relational context which produces it.
The client’s ‘manipulations’ in therapy are often
attempts to communicate real but long-thwarted needs. It
is not necessary to gratify these needs, only to recognise
them, with which empathic enquiry can certainly in my
experience help. Focussing on the manipulation rather
than on understanding the relational configuration that
prompts it can lead to disruption of the therapy and
shaming of the client.
Dialogue
Philippson, in my view, is complacent in his claim that
Gestalt is implicitly dialogical. ‘Self’, other, meaning,
awareness, all are, to use Carl Hodges term, events at the
contact boundary. A therapy based on such a relational
outlook cannot fail to be dialogic, i.e. to emphasise that
growth occurs in the contact and relationship between the
therapist and the client, rather than ‘internally’ in the
client. The contact boundary both joins and separates self
and other, organism and environment. The task of the
therapist is to act as an ‘other’ in relation to which the
client can explore and develop ‘ self’.
To claim that Gestalt cannot fail to be dialogical is to
ignore the fact that dialogue is not something automatic,
but something achieved by a special practice constituted
Review of Philippson
by presence, inclusion and confirmation.
Philippson’s version of inclusion is ‘willingness to try to
understand how the client sees the world, without giving
up on how I see the world’ (p 150). I think this tends to
turn dialogue into a one-way street, favouring the
therapist’s perspective over the client’s, and this militates
against dialogue. I can accept this definition insofar as it
reflects the distinction Buber made between empathy and
inclusion. Buber, as I understand him, was objecting to
the hermeneutic principle that in order to understand
another, we must set ourselves aside rather than engaging
in relationship with him. But does engaging in
relationship require that I hold fast to how I see the
world? I would suggest that it requires not a refusal to
give up my view, but a willingness to be aware of my
view as mine, and as therefore limited in its scope for
making sense of what the client presents to me, and,
crucially, openness to modification in the course of
dialogue. I cannot meet the client unless I have a
perspective from which to understand him, but I attempt
to take his perspective into account too, which may well
mean giving up some of my judgments about him as
based on principles appropriate to my experiential world
rather than his. I need in particular to accept his
perceptions of me as the ones that make sense of how he
relates to me, rather than insisting on my interpretation of
his actions as ‘manipulation’.
At the end of the book Philippson appends a moving
description by one of his clients of her experience of
working with him. Clearly this client was, and to some
extent remains, prone to fragmentation; yet one of her
main appreciations of Philippson is that he understood
her. She writes:
‘... ten years ago I was unable to experience
empathy for others because I had missed out on
experiences that were common to other people.
Essential parts of myself ... could not be reached.
You, in particular, recognised them and listened and
even reached out to them ... We felt seen by you. We
felt able to be ourselves. If we couldn’t speak, then
you listened in other ways. If we couldn’t be making
sense then you let us not make sense and did your
best. That was enough.’ (p 238)
This I find deeply reassuring. Clearly the therapist
Philippson is a good deal more willing to provide
selfobject responsiveness and empathy to his clients than
is the theoretician.
131
Conclusion
I have certainly experienced Philippson as a ‘strong
other’ in trying to review this book. At times, this has
been exciting; but at times I have been discouraged by the
sense that any views that seem incompatible with his own
are of not much interest. I have not had much sense from
these pages that Philippson has been listening to other
thinkers about self in relation. Among Tobin, Yontef,
Wheeler, Hycner and Jacobs, and Lola Sapriel, only
Tobin gets any discussion, and that is based on a paper
from 1982. Yontef is mentioned, but not for his
considerable work on dialogical Gestalt. Hycner and
Jacobs, who are unquestionably major contributors to the
debate Philippson has joined, are absent. Inexplicably,
Wheeler, with whom Philippson has elsewhere debated in
public, is only briefly mentioned.
But what a tremendous loss to this book this is. I feel
deprived of the clarity and challenge that might have been
there if only Philippson had admitted and given serious
consideration to these thinkers. Then there might have
been a real dialogue, instead of which he presents his
stance at times like a series of assertions, an effect which
results from hearing only one side of a potentially
vigorous conversation. Bearing in mind his declared
intent to look at recent developments in Gestalt theory,
and to encourage others to make their maps, I think this
exclusiveness inevitably weakens the book.
Peter Philippson’s thinking is a forthright riposte to
these writers on relational Gestalt, but needs to be read
alongside them to get a sense of the dialectic.
I had the luxury of engaging with the book on a daily
basis over a number of months. I found it a questioning,
challenging presence in my reflections on my own client-
work. I often found myself wondering what Philippson
would have made of my own way of working – and it
was extremely useful to have this imaginary dialogue. As
a result, I felt clearer about what I am doing, different
though it is from what Philippson seems to recommend.
He raises important and interesting questions with vigour
and quirkiness. I do not think anyone could read him with
indifference.
References
Fodor, I. (1998). Awareness and Meaning-Making: The
Dance of Experience. Gestalt Review, 2, 1, pp 50-71.
Orange, D.M., Atwood, G.E. and Stolorow, R.D. (1997).
Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in
Psychoanalytic Practice. The Analytic Press, Hillsdale,
NJ
132 John Kirti Wheway

John Kirti Wheway practises intersubjective-dialogical psychotherapy in

Bristol, England, and trains and supervises psychotherapists in this
approach. He has also studied Gestalt therapy. He is keen to develop
ongoing critical discussion of these ideas.

Address for correspondence: 86 Langton Court Road, Brislington, Bristol,

UK.
Email: jkwheway@bigfoot.com
British Gestalt Journal
2003, Vol.12, No 2, pp 133-136
GERMAN WORDS
Christine Shearman
A Review of Handbuch der Gestalttherapie edited by Reinhard Fuhr, Milan
Sreckovic and Martina Gremmler-Fuhr. Published by Hogrefe – Veralg für
Psychologie, 1999/2003, 1,245 pages. Price ¤49.95.
When I was asked to review this book I was a little
anxious at what seemed a daunting task. I knew only that
it was a large book of collected articles, written in
German. It was clear I would not be able to read every
word. I was assured that a phenomenological approach
would be fine! My anxiety increased when I received the
book. It is 2.5 inches thick! However the cover illustration
by Schwind-Eschert is a colourful, energetic abstract
which stirred something in me and, it turned out,
illustrates unity in diversity, a major theme of the book.
When I opened the table of contents all traces of anxiety
were lost immediately in the rush of excitement as I
looked at how the book is organised, the feast of contents
that awaited me. This is a breathtakingly exciting and
imposing volume on all counts.
It consists of a collection of wide ranging articles
spanning every conceivable aspect of the subject and its
founders: personal histories, historical development,
fundamental principles and their development,
theory(ies), methodologies, applications, specialisations,
future prospects. An aspect deliberately not included is
Gestalt therapy as a ‘quick fix’. An aspect I would have
liked to see is Gestalt therapy as figure in the ground of
the latest research into the neurobiology of the brain.
There are some names familiar to the English-speaking
world such as Ed and Sonia Nevis, Parlett, and many
others whose first language is German, a great pity for us.
For me the book made the debates about Gestalt theory
and practice figural against the wider fields of application,
philosophy, culture and history. As such I felt it stretched
my understanding and appreciation of the discipline. I
have reviewed the chapters that drew my attention first in
greater depth than others. Time and space did not permit
me to do otherwise. I hope I have not significantly
misrepresented anyone. The structure and organisation of
the book make it extremely reader-friendly and their
introduction makes it easily accessible to anyone with an
interest in Gestalt therapy to find articles which meet their
needs. Some of the articles have straightforward diagrams
which are most helpful in clarifying the subject matter.
The editors asked how the contributors could describe the
Copyright 2003 by Gestalt Publications Ltd.
divergent directions which nonetheless crisscross in a
larger unity.
The editors’ style offers exemplary clarity and lucidity
in the complexities and not infrequent contradictions of
the field. Their openness and inclusivity is a testament to
their willingness for pluralism in robust discussion and
debate across differences. There are five chapters with
unambiguous titles, each article listed according to subject
and content. I found it surprisingly easy to navigate
myself around, so that the apprehension I felt on first
acquaintance melted away.
The book is conceived of as a response to a perceived
need for a comprehensive review of Gestalt therapy in its
historical development, theoretical foundations, concepts
and methods, fields of application and research. It
becomes clear why the book is so thick! I did wonder
what had made the authors gather all these topics into one
volume, rather than issue a series of shorter books.
Personally, I was gratified to have all the articles gathered
together in one volume after all, although the book is
heavy and therefore unwieldy. The authors offer their own
views of the unity and diversity within the Gestalt
endeavour, outlining the common threads and divergent
directions. They offer a tripartite view of Gestalt therapy:
a) structure of theories, metatheorie-epistemological,
anthropological, etc.; b) theory specific to the approach –
development, personality, etc.; and c) theory of practice,
e.g. principles of practice and intervention. Although
some of what is written has already appeared in their
articles in the BGJ, they here amplify them.
Gestalt History and Development
Chapter One covers history and development. I cannot
possibly do justice to this fascinating chapter in a few
words. It is divided into four parts. Sreckovic’s account,
which really merits a book in itself, starts with the
political, intellectual and cultural situation in Germany at
the turn of the century, including those who influenced the
young Fritz Perls. For an English-speaking reader it is
interesting to see how this is expressed by a native
134
German-speaker. He uses a framework which has
particular resonance to Germans, from Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister.
In Part Two he turns his attention to the Perls’ training
years in Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna, using the word for
apprenticeship (Lehrjahre). He draws on several personal
communications from Perls including one about his
gradual disappointment in, and disillusionment with,
psychoanalysis. These aspects lend a freshness and
immediacy to the history which may be unfamiliar to us.
He certainly shows the early concepts which fired their
imagination embedded in the environment from the
inside.
Part Three covers the years of exile both of Goodman
and the Perls. In Part Four he turns to the New World and
the years of wandering (Wanderjahre) through the
locations Fritz worked in right up to a most moving
account of his death. He then traces Paul Goodman’s
journey showing the passion with which he embraced left
wing politics and his love of the environment through to
the disillusionment he experienced, and the bitter tragedy
of his son’s death. This work has a liveliness of
expression which was infectious to my interest.
Chapter Two is devoted entirely to the development of
Gestalt therapy in the USA and Europe. Israel makes an
exception. Each author represents her country. Great
Britain is represented ably by Gaie Houston. Included in
her piece is an account of some of the niches in the
National Health Service where Gestalt therapy has a part
to play. Talia Levine bar Joseph makes an interesting
contribution from Israel, the home of Buber of course. It
is fascinating to read how each country took the central
concepts and applied them.
Theoretical Foundations
Chapter Three, Part A, covers the theoretical
foundations of Gestalt therapy. Again, each chapter aspect
is presented by a different author.
The psychoanalytic and Gestalt psychological roots are
represented by Baulig and Portly, creative indifference by
Friedlander and field theoretical by Parlett. It is odd to see
Parlett in German, but the translation is good, so I think
German readers will not miss anything!
Petzgold’s piece on integrative therapy and Rumpler’s
on the cultural influences, while appearing at first sight on
the contents page to be uneasily at home here, do in fact
emphasise the field theoretical stance which the editors
have carefully taken to the theoretical foundations.
Petzgold’s piece presents an argument for Gestalt as an
integrative, not eclectic therapy. He traces the roots of
Perls’ attempts in this direction and places them in a wide
ranging and detailed way in the context of the broader
historical and current fields of Integrative Psychotherapy.
Christine Shearman
This article deserves much more space than I can give it.
Rumpler’s title is ‘Cultural Influences on Gestalt
Therapy’. Much of this offering is fascinating for anyone
unfamiliar with the wider European context: the journey
of Gestalt therapy from its inception in the America of the
Sixties, to Gestalt therapy in Europe, phenomenology and
existentialism, cultural aspects of the basic concepts, the
psychoanalytic roots. All are to be seen here from the
perspective of mainland Europe.
Part B ranges across models, principles and methods.
Gremmier-Fuhr presents an exposition of Gestalt
concepts in a thoroughly wide ranging and also lively
way that makes them fresh. Gestalt as a rivulet feeding
into the stream of non-dualistic thinking is presented
concisely and clearly. Her diagrams are well constructed
and interesting. She writes in the next article separately
about the dialogic relationship arguing that this is a
concept Gestalt therapy shares with other approaches. She
has separate sections on Buber’s notion of the I-Thou
relationship, and the way Gestalt therapists from Laura
Perls on have used the dialogic principle. These two
chapters are a feast of painstaking research of Gestalt
literature which any student would find most helpful and
clarifying.
Reinhard Fuhr’s article in this section is on Gestalt
therapy as an experiential, existential and experimental
approach, as he articulated in the BGJ. He draws the
distinction between the subjective nature of the Gestalt
phenomenological-hermeneutic approach and the
objective approach of empiricism. His first subtitle is a
delight: ‘Disciplined curiosity and phemonenological-
hermeneutic exploration’. He offers neat examples of
Yontef’s and Laura Perls’ work to illustrate this. ‘Bring
sense back into the senses’ might be a soundbite to
illustrate this serious and scholarly piece of work.
He then turns to the other aspect of his title and shows
with clear and simple examples what each implies. His
section on experiential exploration has a neat diagram
with examples of how exploration is approached from
each pespective:
• ‘How do I experience myself?’ – experiential.
• ‘How am I in my situation in life?’ – existential.
• ‘What happens when?’ – experimental.
This article fleshed out his previous work for me and
illustrates the subject in an accessible way to those
unfamiliar with Gestalt as well as to others. It is an
example of how the book continuously links theory to
practice.
Just as he reaches a position of going into techniques he
hands the baton to Staemmler whose article is devoted to
methods and techniques. He makes a nice distinction
between the two, the former being the path and the latter
Review of Fuhr et al
the steps along it. He outlines the dialogic, field
theoretical, phenomenological and existential paths with
examples and transcripts. There is little in this section
unfamiliar to Gestaltists, but the arrangement is concise
and lively, summing up complexity in an accessible and
fresh way.
For me this work fleshed out Gestalt in the context of
hermeneutics and phenomenology in a particularly clear
and educative way. The referencing is wide ranging and
thorough. There is no hint of any argument about what
constitutes ‘proper’ Gestalt, the differences are
respectfully observed.
Philosophical Roots and Reflections
Chapter Four covers the philosophical, sociological
and psychological dimensions of our discipline. Nausner
tackles the phenomenological and hermeneutic
foundations. She offers welcome expositions of Husserl
and Merleau-Ponty, which are fascinating and drew my
attention first. She quotes Merleau-Ponty: ‘philosophy
means in truth to learn to see the world afresh’. Substitute
Gestalt therapy for philosophy. She makes a plea for
closer inspection of this intellectual background. How
much Gestalt students have struggled with these two
philosophical giants! This is an approachable and
agreeable way in. Hopefully, this and other articles will be
translated soon. For those who have been intimidated by
philosophy and struggled with it, this is essential reading.
Mehrgard tackles the daunting problem of
epistemology adding to Fuhr’s contribution on this
subject. He poses the question: ‘How is truth arrived at in
psychotherapy and what does it rest on?’ He offers his
perspective on Gestalt answers to these questions of
which I give only the sketchiest examples: ‘The
subjective is rehabilitated. Knowledge (perception) is
something that happens between people.’ These answers
put Gestalt into a context, offering this perspective in a
gratifying way.
Höll covers the wider fields of political, social
psychological and ecological dimension of Gestalt
therapy, thus reviving Paul Goodman’s passion and
emphasis. Gremmler-Fuhr offers ethical dimensions of
Gestalt therapy, Carroll makes an interesting contribution
on child development and Gestalt therapy, while Fuhr
approaches a theory of development which reaches
beyond childhood. Ulbing shows gender specific aspects
of Gestalt therapy, and Frambach makes a most welcome
contribution to the spiritual aspects, in my experience
sometimes neglected.
Clinical Diagnosis and Research
Chapter Five is entitled ‘Clinical Gestalt Therapy’
135
with an introduction by the editors on diagnostic and
clinical aspects. Muller’s article offers a categorical model
and interestingly writes of the use of ICD-I0. He offers
examples of diagnosis of various personality disorders,
useful to any student and refreshing for the more
experienced. He makes the case for a dialogic process
oriented diagnostic. There are too many articles here to
mention every one, but my attention was drawn when I
saw neurotic suffering addressed (K and H Eidenschink);
structural disturbances (Votsmeier); psychotic
disturbances; borderline (Janssen); psychosomatic – the
body/mind unity; bulimia as a relational illness
(Wardetzki); trauma and violence (Wolf); family therapy
(Melnick and S M Nevis); supervision (Amendt-Lyon);
Gestalt approach with older people (Schneider); and
many other interesting and fine contributions. If a
clinician has a particular interest they are sure to find
something here to satisfy them.
Chapter Six is devoted to applications: Fuhr offers
Gestalt counselling, Fengler supervision, Isenegger team
supervision, Burow Gestalt pedagogics and adult
education, Looss organisational analysis.
Chapter Seven is on research. There are four thorough
articles. Two are on different aspects of empirical
research, one more general (Butollo and Maragkos), one
on a research project in practice (Pauls and Reicerts).
Another is on a research project on the treatment of
depression (Greenberg and Watson), and the fourth on
process research from the example of an examination of
existential moments in psychotherapy (Teschke). Each
article is supported by rich reference to the supporting
literature. This chapter makes a formidable and timely
reminder of the research efforts in Gestalt therapy.
Epilogue and Outlook
Chapter Eight is an epilogue and outlook. Rosenblatt
writes of the forgotten values of early Gestalt, of political
and social critique and a call to vitality and liveliness.
Kogan gives an account of his Gestalt story from early
beginnings in the Sixties, to England and wider Europe in
the Seventies, to Germany in the Eighties. This is a
unique account by a therapist and trainer who has gone
full circle with the development of the discipline. Such
personal experience lends further weight to the liveliness
of this massive tome. G and J Brown write a brief
epilogue about their efforts to counter the topdog
application of Gestalt therapy they found in Germany by
an appeal for caution against the reification of theory and
their efforts to follow this through. E Nevis writes on
alternatives for the future: he chooses the
institutionalisation, increasing interest in the ground and
learning about the differentiated global development. The
editors take as their subjects adaptation and resistance,
136 Christine Shearman

visions for a future Gestalt approach and tasks for the
development of Gestalt therapy. They end with an
assertion that the time is ripe for an intensification of the
discussion about the theoretical and conceptual
foundations of Gestalt therapy and a hope that this book
may act as a spur to these efforts.
It certainly helped this reader in her integration of a
broader view of Gestalt in the context of some of the
wider developments in thinking and therapy in the last
fifty years. It will come as a breath of fresh air to those
who seek to place therapy closer to the heart of the
political, social and environmental debates in the wider
environment. I think it is a book well worth investing in to
dip into at leisure. Of course, this is a German book,
published for German readers, so obviously the majority
of English-speaking readers will not have access to it. My
aim has been to convey something of the world of Gestalt
that lies outside the English language, and a little of what
this might reveal to us of German thinking about our
discipline.

Christine Shearman is an Associate Teaching and Supervising member

of GPTI. She was formerly assistant head of Gestalt at Metanoia
Psychotherapy Training Institute and part of the team working in Slovakia.
She has also worked in the Czech Republic and Switzerland. She is now in
part-time private clinical and supervisory practice in East London.

Address for correspondence: Hawthorn, 24 Hollybush Hill, London E11

1PP, UK
Email: Christine.Shearman@virgin. net
British Gestalt Journal
2003, Vol.12, No 2, pp 137-141
OPINION
ORTHODOXY OR INTEGRATION – OR
BOTH?
Gaie Houston
Editor’s Note: This is a revised and shortened text of a keynote address to the
Gestalt Association UK Conference, July 2003, titled ‘Celebrating Gestalt’.
Inconsistencies in the Field
Gestalt is to me the psychotherapy of choice. My belief
or faith in it is unwavering, and yet there are said to be as
many Gestalt therapies as there are Gestalt therapists. So
what really is it that we celebrate as Gestaltists?
Just as Christianity can be seen as a very different thing
from Churches, so Gestalt therapy in the intentions of the
originators may be a very different thing from all the
sects, sub-sects, revisions, accumulations and deviations
for which we are collectively responsible. I recall Carl
Rogers’ first words at a large conference I attended when
he was an old man, where he said ‘The first thing you
have to understand about me is that I’m not a Rogerian’.
Followers tend to seize on one interpretation of a
message and make it sacrosanct. The Catholic Church has
thought up a good device to take care of people’s
demonstrable, if questionable, desire for one immutable
truth. The Pope tells them what to believe. The nature of
Gestalt means that we have no Pope.
Our controlling behaviour around conformity or
orthodoxy is one of the many bizarre manifestations of
the human spirit. I want to be right and I want you to be
right the same way. Christians, Communists and
Freudians have all branched into factions favouring one
emphasis or another, one revision or another, and
portraying themselves as sole carriers of ‘the truth’. I am
not sure how near we are to schism ourselves.
‘Contemporary Gestalt’, ‘relational Gestalt’, ‘Gestalt for
organisations’: these and other titles are arguably
descriptions of temporary emphases in the one main
stream. Or are they new rivers welling up, with some
different tributaries? Will our beliefs stay compatible?
Does it matter?
Incompatibilities
Fred Pine (1990) wrote a very soothing book called
Drive, Ego, Object and Self, suggesting that these four
largely incompatible but very prevalent psychoanalytic
theories, psychologies as he called them, can all be used
with advantage, within every session of psychoanalytic
Copyright 2003 by Gestalt Publications Ltd.
psychotherapy. So much for core theory, for the piety of
adhering to one theoretical frame, or else the danger of
confusing or damaging your patient.
We all live by a stack of incompatible theories. I can
take part in an enlightened discussion on the origins of
superstition, and still touch wood if asked if I have had a
cold lately. People who favour free expression are
sometimes also strongly against that piece of free
expression called hitting each other. People who eat their
five portions of fruit and vegetables often also drink their
five doses or more of coffee or vitamin-dissolving
alcohol. I hope you will accept these as marks of ordinary
insanity, rather than something needing professional help.
Fritz Perls referred to the schizophrenic levels of the
mind, and we are left to make what sense we can of that
phrase. Maybe he was thinking of the sort of reality-
splitting I am quoting here. I am not particularly
encouraging such thinking. It is always absurd and at
times deplorable. Much of the time it is no more than
flitting lightly and appropriately from one viewpoint to
another. Yet William Blake said, ‘Whatever can be
imagin’d is a portion of the truth’.
When it comes to therapy theories there is a tendency
for us to become very righteous and rigid. For instance,
therapy is only believed by some to be therapy if it
happens at regular intervals for precise lengths of time.
This continuity is sometimes likened to the continuity of
maternal care. But seeing your child for fifty minutes a
week could be considered extreme deprivation or even
abuse. Taking a month off in the summer is also generally
allowable in this rigid system. Obviously, such
symbolism is inconsistent and a bit nonsensical.
Looking more closely at ourselves, it is said in some
quarters that it is ‘not Gestalt’ to deal at anything other
than the so-called ego-level. Yet we look for the ability in
trainees to work at depth. Similarly, phenomenological
dialogue is the key to the method, though Perls does not
exactly stress anything of the kind. He does not mention
it, in fact. Rather, he spoke about the present in the
present, and showed mastery at demonstrating how the
client’s present process can be a reflection of her inner
conflicts, life-script, contact style, or whatever you want
138
to term what the analysts call ‘the material’.
Then there are the Gestalt practitioners who see affect
as the only dependable evidence of internal truth. Clients
with schizoid tendencies come off badly with them.
Trainees whose focus has been more holistic may be
marked down by emotion-focusers. The search for the
immutable seems as ever a bit suspect.
Sometimes I stress how one of the beauties of Gestalt is
that anarchy is its orthodoxy. Anarchy is a political
system that has had a bad press since the word was first
coined to describe the inconvenient behavior of the rabble
in ancient Greece. More recently it has been seen by the
thoughtful as a desirable system, but one for which we are
by no means yet prepared. The key is that if there is no
rule – which is what the word means – then there must be
synergy, there must be awareness, a looking and walking
in the same direction, if any social system is to survive.
There has to be rather a lot of me doing my thing and you
doing your thing and us meeting. Perls said that would be
beautiful and so it is when it happens. Perls and Goodman
were deeply committed to sociotherapy via the individual,
in spite of the lamentable innuendo of The Gestalt Prayer.
Human behaviour is an indication, to me, that we are
social animals, contextually as well as idiosyncratically
defined. We are somewhat senseless, belligerent and
biddable, still devising ever more cunning and extensive
ways of destroying, killing, polluting and oppressing each
other. Part of the message of anarchy in Gestalt is a plea
for us to dispute when we need to at a personal level, and
then close the gestalt, resolve the dispute, rather than stack
up ill-feeling until it can be displaced into a bloodbath
against a manufactured enemy, preferably a long way
away. The recent, or rather still present, Iraq conflict is an
odious example of this displacement.
Change and Decay? Or Healthy Evolution?
The marked swing to the Simkin-originated dialogic
approach in Gestalt therapy seems to have caused us to
discard other aspects of our philosophy and method. For
example, I am not at all sure that that tenet of Gestalt, the
red anger, the quarrelsome, survives robustly in this
century. Acceptance of difference, and willingness to
listen and empathise, are two therapeutically desirable
attitudes that rather fly in the face of the disputatious
dialectic.
But ideas are shaped and adapted over time, for good
and for ill. Gestalt is not just a process psychology, but a
process in itself. One of its strengths is this
acknowledgement of fluidity and constant change. We are
the land from which the river of Gestalt is formed and out
of which it flows. The river in turn changes the land.
Nietzsche made a statement that I find very powerful,
and that serves as a reminder of the flow there needs to be
Gaie Houston
in the constant development of any art or science.
Truth is not something there, that might be found
or discovered – but something that must be created
and that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will
to overcome that has no end – introducing truth is a
process ad infinitum, an active determining, not a
becoming-conscious of something that is in itself
firm and determined (Nietzsche quoted in
Kauffmann,1982, p 38 ).
Whether or not you agree with Nietzsche’s statement in
all instances, it serves as a reminder to me of the need for
constant re-evaluation.
Part of what I would like to celebrate is our ability to
shape the truth of what we now and variously call Gestalt
therapy. How is the river now? What has drained out, and
what tributaries seem to have joined? Is any river
management needed?
I am remembering Plato’s notion that we are born
knowing everything, but have forgotten it, so we need
education, the drawing out of what is already there. I can
see what made him think that. I believe we know an
enormous amount that gets suppressed by social
conditioning, by psychotherapy training, and by
becoming adapted or contorted by years spent in the
privacy of the consulting room. Do we remember Perls’
own words? I don’t always. Not many Gestalt
practitioners seem to, for example when they eschew
interpretation with total horror. In PHG, after a long bit
about staying with the structure of the actual situation, and
behaving not just as a transferential object, the authors
write:
…it is absurd to think even for a moment of not
combating the resistances, of not rousing anxiety, of
not showing that a neurotic response does not work,
of not reviving the past, of withholding all
interpretation and discarding one’s science … what
is the reality of an interview in which one of the
partners, the therapist, inhibits his best power, what
he knows and therefore evaluates? (Perls et al.,
1951, p 286).
Perls wrote of ‘holes’ in people’s personalities, which
he alleged become evident as soon as you talk to them in
therapy. Some of these might be called developmental
deficits. Others may be conditioned blind spots, or
fortuitous blanks. As Gestalt therapy has grown up over
the last half century, it may be salutary to ponder whether
the same process has occurred in our theory and practice.
Perhaps we could play with the possibility that we have
variously filtered out and filtered into Gestalt therapy all
manner of beliefs, attitudes and methods. I do not see this
Orthodoxy or Integration?
as a matter for blame, but an inevitable part of living in
society – a matter for social history rather than putting
Gestalt in the dock.
Changes – Recent or About to Happen
Here are one or two examples of what I have noticed
has changed or may be ripe for change in this new
century.
Awareness Zinker’s ‘cycle of experience’, an
adaptation of something in Ego, Hunger and Aggression
(Perls, 1969), has often been a useful illustration or model
of the stages of gestalt formation. But now, advances in
brain-scanning mean we know that a good deal of
behaviour happens before it comes into awareness. Most
emergency reactions are of this kind. I will have
withdrawn my hand from a burning surface before
registering in awareness that I have been hurt. At some
levels of what we call unconsciousness people still
struggle against having their air-passages blocked. So
what is all this about contact being aware contact? In
these cases, awareness is clearly redundant.
Then again, there are neurologists who are playing with
the idea that awareness itself may be a psychic equivalent
of the appendix, an evolutionary anomaly not really
needed at all. I wonder if you are feeling as outraged as I
did when I first heard that idea? I use it partly to illustrate
that what seem like even the most solid foundations of
truth can be destabilised.
Paradoxical theory of change I’ll go on being
contentious. Recently I have been guilty of arguing
against another sacred tenet. I have alleged that the theory
of paradoxical change is not the only therapeutic focus of
change in Gestalt therapy. Perls’ own experiments with
participants in The Gestalt Approach and Eye-Witness to
Therapy or Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, are often to do with
deliberately trying out an opposite. That is not paradoxical
change. It is a valid kind of social training, in the cause of
self-responsibility.
Object relations Then, again, how much do we
misinterpret or underplay the psychoanalytic
underpinnings of Gestalt, and the ways our therapy
incorporated some and rejected other parts of that creed?
You will remember how Perls refers from time to time, as
I said earlier, to the schizophrenic levels of mind. He does
not explain much of what he means. But it is not hard to
make an association with Melanie Klein’s speculation
about the chaotic beginnings of mind, the fragments of
perception and racial memory not yet organised into
gestalten. Stern’s ‘emergent self’ can be read as a more
benevolent description of the same stage. It seems almost
absurd to suggest that Perls and Klein were thinking along
the same lines, but I now think that in some respects they
were. She, after all, was a prime mover in object-relations,
139
and Gestalt is the ultimate object-relations theory. In
Gestalt, all that is outside the self, not just other humans,
is acknowledged as object.
Transference An import to Gestalt that is almost
universal now is the transference. Patrick Casement uses
the word in a simple everyday way, to demonstrate how
we all carry bits of one scene into another, perhaps being
cross with a therapist because we were just upset by a
shopkeeper or whatever. I rarely hear Gestaltists use the
word like that. When I am teaching, I tend to argue that
the concepts of projection and introjection can be used to
describe such phenomena. In truth, transference is a lot
more handy, especially when describing present-day
rather than historic transference.
In psychoanalysis the transference neurosis is a central
part of the method. In Gestalt we do not, I hope, try to
induce such a phenomenon. But we go on about ‘the
transference’ and ‘countertransference’, rather than using
our own terminology of projection. Perls said specifically
that transference was not a useful idea in Gestalt. The here
and now manifestations of transference are enough data
for client and therapist. They do not imply that the scenes
that first evoked the transference should be the figure of
the therapeutic gestalt. Why go to the well when there is a
tap in the room? What is present now is the way that that
influence has been adapted and preserved for self-
torment. That is the orthodoxy. I have admitted my
heresy.
Dialogue and experiment The methods of Gestalt,
dialogue and experiment, are a matter for great
celebration. They are a unique, highly effective and
comprehensible combination from the client’s point of
view. It simply strikes me as both effective and, in a
horrible new word, user-friendly, to work primarily with
present process. And I am constantly struck with how
hard students and practitioners seem to find it to stay with
what is happening to both or all parties, here and now, and
to lead clients to make sense of this process. So I am not
surprised that more formulaic and alienated therapeutic
methods are popular. For example, supervisees often
report making surface-level Rogerian reflections, echoing,
rather than disclosing their own phenomenology. This is
not an attack on Rogerian methods, which are powerful if
not simply used in a surface, parrot-like way. What I am
suspecting is a hole, perhaps, in our training methods.
This provokes a challenge to find more effective ways of
moving students into astute awareness of now.
Holes in the Personality of Gestalt
The largest hole we are often deemed to have is in
developmental theory: a developmental deficit in theory
of infant development. To remedy this, the fascinating
work of Daniel Stern (1985) has been widely adopted into
140
Gestalt therapy.
But is there as big a hole as is alleged? What Perls
seemed to say time and again was, ‘to hell with the
aetiology; what is needed by this person in these
circumstances from this therapist now?’ This attitude is
deeply shocking to practitioners from the psychodynamic
schools, and to those many others who cleave to DSM4
or other psychological category diagnostic methods.
Now, if categorising a form of distress helps treat it,
then well and good. But much of the time, general Gestalt
treatment principles deal with whatever manifests. Some
or all of the following dicta may turn out to be appropriate
for therapy across the spectrum of mental distress. These
quotations, or remembered principles, may be to do with
treatment methods, or with an assumption about what
makes people tick, or with the philosophical intentions of
psychotherapy.
1. Give as much support as needed and as little as
possible.
2. Look for the significant missing element, and make
sense of what to do about it.
3. ‘To dissolve a neurotic system in one’s organism one
needs the awareness of the symptom in all its
complexity, not intellectual introspection and
explanations; just as to dissolve a piece of sugar one
needs water, not philosophy.’ (Perls, 1969, p 275).
4. Looking back at The Gestalt Approach and Eye-
Witness to Therapy, I was both fascinated and startled
to see how I do not consistently, or in one case ever,
use some techniques that Perls saw as intrinsic to the
method, and that I can see having considerable value.
The basic sentence with which we ask our patients
to begin therapy, and which we retain throughout its
course – not only in words but in spirit – is the
simple phrase, ‘Now I am aware’. The ‘I’ is used as
an antidote to the ‘it’, and develops a sense of the
patient’s responsibility for his feelings, thoughts and
symptoms. The ‘am’ is his existential symbol. It
brings home whatever he experiences as part of his
being and, together with his ‘now’, with his
becoming. (Perls, 1976, p 65)
There is one obvious limitation to the awareness
technique used alone. It would take years to achieve
its results, like most orthodox therapies. (ibid., p 86).
5. Contact style, the dialogue, interruption, self-
support, or self-responsibility via heightened
awareness, are some of the main therapeutic foci in
Gestalt. They are not categorical descriptions of the ills
Gaie Houston
of clients. An ill, or dysfunction, is an aspect rather
than the whole of a person.
We sometimes think we are the only ones who
believe in such an approach. Interestingly, psychiatry,
that discipline that can produce an automatic sneer in
many therapists, has in much training and practice
moved on from diagnosis and labelling. Psychiatrists,
like Perls, have medical training and thus an awareness
of physical signs that non-medical others may
overlook. And they have studied mental pathology, so
they know more than many psychotherapists about
extreme mental distress, which is in most cases only
quantitatively, not qualitatively, different from
everyday neurosis. Like psychiatrists, Gestalt therapists
do need to understand the nature of mental distress, and
its particular, idiosyncratic aetiology in whoever is in
front of them. But that is not enough. A symptom
cannot be left in the consulting room to be collected
next day, all clean and folded. The whole person
embedded in her context is there to be treated.
6. McHugh and Slavney (1986) produced a book called
The Perspectives of Psychiatry, which recommended
doctors to listen to their patients from four
perspectives:
– What they have: the symptom, what brought them to
the consulting room.
– What they are: family history, social history and so
on.
– What they do: behaviour in the room and as reported.
– What they tell: their story, the way they make sense
of themselves.
He argues that all four perspectives are needed to
arrive at a formulation, a statement of who you think
you are talking to, and what you need to do with and
for them. That sounds very Gestalt to me.
To Sum Up
What I have been talking about here is this construction
of a changing truth. All of us are likely to practise in our
own way, and arrive at a slightly idiosyncratic truth. Yet I
imagine that there are large overlaps of agreement as well.
What we think we need to do with clients in Gestalt
therapy is generally assumed to be to work at the contact
boundary, in the lively present of phenomenological
dialogue, interspersed as appropriate with other kinds of
experiment.
The two-chair dialogue is one of the most economical,
and powerful of these, and in my view greatly to be
celebrated when well used. But there is something
threadbare in the way it is sometimes applied. For
Orthodoxy or Integration? 141

instance, letting clients express only one side of the
dialogue, seems to me very often to be to leave them in
the hole they dug themselves into in the first place. The
process of the dialogue itself, its pace, the will expressed
or not expressed, is often a beautiful exposition of the
structure of the present contact with the therapist, as well
as a description of a lifestyle or of an intrapersonal or
interpersonal attitude.
How fluent do you feel we are with experiment in
general in Gestalt therapy? Tracking and staying with the
present is one technique, and one I witness being adhered
to by many people with whom I have contact. Then there
is fantasy and fooling about and rehearsing and re-
evoking in psychodrama and all the other deliberate
therapeutic acting out available to us in this method.
Experiment derives from the Latin verb experiri, to try.
It describes an attempt to confirm or disprove something,
such as a practical test designed to illuminate some
unknown principle or effect. This opens the possibility of
all manner of invention or re-cycling of an old idea, if that
contributes to effective therapy. I believe the licence to
experiment should only be given to those who understand
enough about themselves, about mental distress in its
many forms, about present science in the field, and about
the generic requirements of psychotherapy.
In Perls’ terms, the theorising I have engaged in is at
best ‘elephant-shit’. You may have a different word for it.
It is difficult for me to resist quoting what attracts me, so I
end with the statement in PHG:
Man transcends himself only through his true
nature, not through ambition and artificial goals. The
true nature of man, like the true nature of any other
animal, is integrity. Only in an integrated
spontaneity and deliberateness does he make a
sound existential choice … Awareness of and
responsibility for the total field, for the self as well
as the other, these give meaning and pattern to the
individual’s life. (Perls et al., 1951, p 188 )
That is a socially responsible psychology and
philosophy that looks to me worth celebrating.It is also a
friendly wave in the direction of integration in
psychotherapy itself.
References
Casement, P. (1985). On Learning from the Patient.
Tavistock, London.
McHugh, P, and Slavney, P. (1986). The Perspectives of
Psychiatry. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
Nietzsche, F. (1982). The Will to Power. Trans.
Kauffmann, W. Viking Penguin, New York.
Perls, F. (1969). Ego, Hunger and Aggression, Random
House, New York.
Perls, F. (1971). Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Bantam
Books, New York.
Perls, F. (1976). The Gestalt Approach and Eye-Witness
to Therapy. Bantam Books, New York.
Perls, F., Goodman, P. and Hefferline, R. (1951). Gestalt
Therapy. Excitement and Growth in the Human
Personality.
Pine, F. (1990). Drive, Ego, Object and Self: a Synthesis
for Clinical Work. Bantam Books, New York.
Stern, D. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant.
Basic Books, New York.

Gaie Houston is a member of the Gestalt Centre, London, and works as a

psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer in Britain and other countries. Her
Red Book of Gestalt and Red Book of Groups have been in print for more
than twenty years. In 2000, with Maja O’Brien she wrote Integrative
Therapy: a Practitioner’s Handbook. In 2003, Sage published her Brief
Gestalt Therapy. Being and Belonging: Group, Intergroup and Gestalt is
being re-issued in a new edition in January 2004, as The Group Alive.
Gaie is Chair of the holding company of the British Gestalt Journal, and a
member of the Green Party.

Address for correspondence: 8 Rochester Terrace, London NW1 9JN

Email: gaiehouston@btconnect.com