Exploring Gestalt Therapy through a field-emergent lens

In recent years, Gestalt therapists around the world have renewed their interest in a foundational but often overlooked perspective of our work: the field-emergent self. Rooted in the early writings of Fritz Perls and Paul Goodman, this orientation sees the self not as a fixed entity, but as something that emerges through contact – in the field, between self and other, in body and world.

About Us

A group of us have joined together as we have viewpoints in common that reflect a particular novel perspective on Gestalt therapy (while our approaches differ among us and our approaches are always developing), and that we, and others, could form as an emerging study group.

Our approach affirms certain core aspects of gestalt therapy that are sometimes being overlooked by others. Our perspective is holistic. We stress the embodied relational field in which phenomenality and physicality are of one whole rather than split into dualities.

Contacting itself is an emergent process of the field and we, as clinicians, are active participants in this emergent process. We maintain the importance of sexuality and aggression in human functioning.

Essential features of the approach

The co-emergence of self and other is a field process, otherwise called ‘contact’.

Thus contact is not between two pre-existing selves, rather self and other form in the contacting. This means that the therapeutic approach is inherently ‘two-person’ (Stern) or ‘two-power’ (Resnick), exploring the relational possibilities between therapist and client rather than the intrapsychic world of the client. A human being is an organ of choice and creativity of the field. The difficulties we are working with are a result of a limited relational world that involves the therapist rather than of a limitation in the client alone. Thus the primary need for growth is contact rather than mirroring, or enquiry, or attunement, which presuppose an objective self and a very limited presence in the therapist for the client to contact (it is worthwhile considering the power relationship inherent in the statement ‘I ask the questions’). Also, contact is to the whole physical world of experience: limiting our contact to other human beings makes no sense in a world of climate crisis. We emerge from, and can be endangered by, our relation to the whole experienceable world.

The lived body is an organisation of the physical.

What this means in practice is that my engagement in the world is the living of our body, and determines how we experience our body being alive. Therapy, even online, must involve movement, not just ‘talking heads’! What is more, how we engage in the world strongly affects the physical characteristics of our body and our experience of that engagement: our strength and balance, our skin texture and sensitivity, our relational neural development and thus how we process our experiencing. Far from supporting the emphasis on the lived body as distinct from the physical body and our primary focus of therapeutic and theoretical attention, we see that as a distinguishing feature of many problematic processes, including eating disorders and schizoid functioning. If the world was not able to support raw experience, there would be nothing on which to base an intuition of self and other: that is why Perls et al (PHG) begins with experience.

We take as central to our humanity the dialectic between our individuality and our emergence from collectivity.

We are as a species highly socially connected and aware, and yet capable of individual creativity and spontaneity, and to say ‘no’ to what is expected, and to what we have done before. We do not see the theory of relationally emergent self as incompatible with the human capacity of choice, aggression and will. The Gestalt theory of aggression points to the human capacity to continually approach the world in a way that changes it into something that fits our creative vision. If we are intentional, it is towards a ‘becoming-for-us’ that we contact in a way that changes it. This capacity is both creative and destructive, and we are capable of deciding that our world will be nicer if this rainforest or group of people were permanently removed! In this way, we are clearly the most aggressive species the world has ever seen, and that capacity is inseparable from our creativity.

Join our membership

There is a small annual membership fee of £45 (around €50) that entitles members to upload and access writings and videos to and from the website and organise and join events (but not the cost of formal supervision). People can choose their own level of engagement.

Benefits of membership would include:

Support for Gestalt therapists through peer discussions with like-minded colleagues

This could include people demonstrating their way of working with clients within the group. With permission, we could record these, as a basis for discussion.

Support for trainers, training institutes and supervisors

With training, peer contact and discussion materials.

Resource and a place to meet

This is an affordable resource for Continuing Education and Professional Development and a place to meet, professionally and socially, with Gestaltists in many different countries.

Resource for new publications

This study group is a potential resource for new publications to emerge. The publishing project (click title above) Peter has undertaken with Kindle and Kobo ebooks can be extended with other people contributing and/or translating articles.