Gestalt
Gestalt Therapy is about helping you to understand your purpose in life.
Gestalt is the Zen branch of psychology, which allows clients to become centered in the present moment, freed of the shackles of the past and fears of the future. The therapy is gentle; the gestalt therapist is never demanding or controlling. In gestalt, the client integrates the fragmented parts of self, while the therapist acts as a guide.
Gestalt transcends time and space, bringing all of life's experiences into the now. If a client still experiences emotional pain from past events, involving long-dead or lost relations, this is no obstacle to healing. Gestalt therapy offers the support and guidance necessary for the client to resolve themes such as love, anger, forgiveness, shame, and so on, getting it straight inside. For this reason, gestalt is a good choice for people struggling with ex-partners. The client may call one of the ex-partners into the empty chair for a confrontation, gaining the satisfaction of an actual successful encounter. If you were to eventually run into a person you talked to in the empty chair, you would handle the situation with complete clarity, because you have put the matter to rest within yourself.
In a gestalt session, the client begins with a dream, an art object, or simply a memory. Through talking to the people, or even the elements of the art object or dream, the client begins to recognize the buried emotions that come to the surface. The emotions reside within the consciousness of the client. Thus, gestalt teaches that they may be resolved within the individual. In fact, parts of the dream are projections of the dreamer. The focus of therapy is to play out the parts to reintegrate them and the emotions they represent.
Many of the psychology schools represented in today's society promote the theory that we create our own reality. Gestalt is one of the cornerstones of creating our own reality. Even though I may not believe literally that I create all of outside reality, or that I'm totally responsible for every ache and pain inside, there is still something to the hypothesis. There are definite outside forces like other people, the Earth, nature, corporations and governments that impact my reality, but the way I react to them is totally under my control. Gestalt therapy brings us face to face with the present moment and attempts to bring us to peace within the moment.
Dr. Frederick S. Perls is the father of gestalt therapy, which he formulated and developed in the mid-twentieth century. He theorized that if a person brings together all their fragmented parts, they will become a complete whole of the form they were meant to be; more than the sum of their own parts. Perls took up where Freud left off in using dreams. Perls developed the theory that all parts of the dream represent the dreamer. Thus, instead of rejecting a frightening image from a dream, Perls (like Jung) believed that all the parts need to be processed and integrated.
Perls directed hundreds of training sessions in which individuals took the "hot seat" to explore their dreams with input from the therapist. Perls said that to become a "wholesome person, which means a unified person, without conflicts, what we have to do is put the different fragments of the dream together. We have to re-own these projected, fragmented parts of our personality, and re-own the hidden potential that appears in the dream". Actually, though, gestalt was not a new thing. The ideas were already circulating in Germany and Perls himself (and Jung) were freely borrowing and reshaping philosophy from the Buddhist tradition. Here Perls explains: "We can re assimilate, we can take back our projections, by projecting ourselves completely into that other thing or person. What is pathological is always the part-projection. Total projection is called artistic experience, and this total projection is an identification with that thing in question. I give you one idea, for instance. In Zen, you are not allowed to paint a single branch until you have become that branch. "
Along with Perls were several other prominent gestaltists. Perl's wife Laura worked side by side with him. Another important figure was Janie Rhyne, who invented the gestalt process of working with art. The gestalt art experience has become a fundamental part of gestalt therapy due to her influence. Rhyne led hundreds of gestalt art experience training sessions with thousands of people from all walks of life. She explains, "Not until I met Fritz Perls in 1965 did I learn that he had applied some concepts of gestalt psychology in formulating a practice of gestalt therapy in a way that paralleled my own applications of gestalt psychology theories in the kind of art experience work I was doing. In training and working with Perls and other gestaltists, I learned more about how they did what they did: they were finding ways to facilitate therapeutic growth by showing people how to get out into the open feelings that had been walled off inside themselves".
Although every field of psychology has some way to use for art, I believe art's most stunning application is in gestalt therapy. Rhyne explains the gestalt art experience,"Gestalt, as I use it here, means the ability to perceive whole configurations -- to perceive your personality as a totality of many parts that together make up the reality of you".
Gestalt art experience, then, is the complex personal you making art forms, being involved in the forms you are creating as events, observing what you do, and hopefully perceiving through your graphic productions not only yourself as you are now, but also alternate ways that are available to you for creating yourself as you would like to be.
That's how I describe the work I do now.
In the gestalt analysis of an art therapy piece, the therapist may ask probing questions, but will never try to interpret the piece on their own terms. Their symbols are never dictated from a fixed list; nor does the therapist look for tell-tale signs of dysfunction as a recovery therapist might do. They simply want the person to acknowledge and integrate all parts of the artwork.
Healthy children are naturally gestaltists -- they live in the present; give full attention to what they are doing; do what they want to do; trust their own experiential data; and, until they are trained out of it, they know what they know with direct simplicity and accuracy.
Gestalt is a specialization, in a category by itself, but most psychologists have studied gestalt methods and have integrated these into their practices.