Gestalt Theory

KEY CONCEPTS
These concepts are key in that familiarity with them makes for easier understanding of material in the other sections in this theory section. Do you need to know about them in order to enter into Gestalt Therapy? Absolutely not.

THE GESTALT CYCLE: Also called the contact/withdrawal cycle; it might also be understood as “the cycle of life,” since it can be applied to every human activity.





For example, let’s say you were sitting reading...

Sensation: a dry throat
Awareness: “I’m thirsty”
Mobilization of Energy: attention shifts from reading to getting a drink
Excitement: focuses is now fixed on how to quench thirst
Action: get up and go to fridge for a soda
Contact: drink soda,
Withdrawal: with your thirst satisfied, you relax and withdraw.

This gestalt cycle is now finished and the next can begin, whether it is to return to reading, taking a nap or whatever. For a healthy individual, the Gestalt Cycle is a free flowing process.

Neuroses, however, interrupt the cycle and result in unfinished business. Such unfinished business ties up energy that ought to be available to put into life. There are four main kinds of neurotic "resistances".

RESISTANCES: Resistances are unhealthy or neurotic only when they are persistent and applied when they are no longer appropriate. Neuroses are responses that somehow get ingrained as habits during our upbringing. At the time of their inception, these responses were probably quite creative adjustments made by the child to the prevailing circumstances. They become inappropriate because the prevailing circumstances have changed. Continuing to use them in adulthood is a failure to live in the present in response to new realities. Old habits die hard, hence the need for therapists.

Introjection: the introjector has swallowed whole other people’s ideas about the world and how to live. Chronic introjectors never chew over their ideas to properly assimilate those they wish to keep and those they wish to reject.

Projection: the projector denies aspects of his or her personality that are unpalatable -- the ones they learned were "unacceptable" when they were growing up. Instead, they project these attributes onto other people. They live lives full of the experience of these very traits coming back at them precisely because they are so hyper-sensitized to this kind of behavior by the denial of the trait in themselves.

Retroflection: the retroflector does for him or herself what they wish that someone else would do to them (hugging themselves instead of asking to be hugged for example). Or, they do to themselves what they wish to do to someone else (for example stroking themselves rather than stroking the object of their desire). The retroflector directs his or her energies back upon him or herself like this because they fear the consequences of directing it outwards.

Confluence: occurs when two individuals do not make a clear distinction between each other. They end up leading a shared life in which differences of opinion, feeling, wants and needs are suppressed or modified to fit the common mean.

AWARENESS: Awareness is the key to healthy working of the Gestalt Cycle. It is awareness of sensation that allows a person to identify what he or she needs and awareness that informs them how to act. Since Gestalt is holistic, it deems that for healthy functioning, awareness needs to incorporate all the following:

- information from the five senses (outer zone awareness)
- feelings, emotions and bodily sensations (inner zone awareness)
- thinking processes: planning, imagining, remembering, analyzing, etc (middle zone awareness).

Our awareness is often over-abundantly fixated in thinking. Hence much Gestalt work is on reclaiming the contributions to being a whole human being by the feelings, the body and the senses.

CONTACT: Contact occurs at the boundary between a person and his or her environment (objects and other people). With objects, the contact boundary is usually formed by the skin and sense organs.

With people, the boundary is a flexible, shifting plane between persons - where “I end and you begin.” The contact boundary is where everything that is vital in human relationships occurs.

A person that avoids contact is said to have a contact boundary disturbance. Life for them is deadened; the contact boundary that has the potential to be so electrifying becomes instead leathery and dull – lifeless.

A life without contact is the existential nightmare of living in-authentically – basically playacting at who you are. As Harvey Freedman, founder of the GIT would say, “you have two choices in life; to be who you are or to be someone else.” Choosing to be who you are requires courage because some people will not like who you are. With courage and the support of a good therapist you can go through your own growth process to eventually become more aware and make the choice to change your life.