Georges Wollants - Gestalt Therapy: Therapy of the Situation

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Gestalt Therapy
Therapy of the Situation

Georges Wollants

Georges Wollants 2008, 2012
Originally published in 2008 by Faculteit voor Mens en Samenleving This version published 2012

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I first encountered Gestalt therapy in the early 1970s while a graduate student at Duquesne University, whose psychology program was firmly rooted in European Existentialism and Phenomenology. At the time, we read Perls, Hefferline and Goodman (PHG) in passing, and were shown some films of Fritz Perls in action. But none of my professors seemed to take Gestalt therapy very seriously. They seemed intrigued by its emphasis on immediate experience, and nodded approvingly of its effort to anchor its methodology in a field model of psychological phenomena. But PHG was found lacking on account of the polyglot nature of its theorizing, particularly in its on-again, off-again invocation of a homeostatic biological model. It seemed a noble attempt at challenging traditional psychotherapy, but through the lens of existential phenomenology, we judged it insufficiently radical.

When I look back at my first encounters with PHG, I think mostly I found the book confusing. In some places, the text seemed to be proposing a radical phenomenology of experience and behavior (for example, in its theory of self), while in other places it seemed too close to the natural scientific models that have long characterized American psychology. It is perhaps no surprise that Gestalt therapy came to be associated in those early days, not with its ambiguous theoretical propositions, but with the highly distinctive intervention style of Fritz Perls. And this, it seemed to me at the time, was both Gestalt therapys strength and its weakness, because Fritz was indeed captivating and instructive to watch, even if I was at a loss for grasping a coherent theoretical framework for how he practiced.

My early dismissal of Gestalt therapy began to change on several accounts. The first was when I came to Cleveland and had an opportunity to watch several master practitioners of Gestalt therapy in action, most notably Sonia Nevis and Joseph Zinker. Here was something that really caught my attention; I might even say, stopped me in my tracks. When they demonstrated Gestalt therapy, there was an uncontrived simplicity and elegance to their interventions, a grounded directness of their method, and an impact on their clients that seemed at once transparent and magical. Here, indeed, I felt I was witnessing existentialism and phenomenology in clinical practice, and I was astonished by the simplicity and power of their work. It was clear to me that practitioners of Gestalt therapy knew something I didnt, something missing from my own training, and I wanted to learn what that was. I returned to PHG humbled, and began a long journey of trying to make sense of it.

I can see now, in light of Gestalt therapys continued evolution, that I was by no means alone in my disquiet with its original theoretical framing. Indeed, there has developed over the years a tradition of scholars who have ambitiously taken on the challenge of addressing the ambiguities and contradictions of PHG, separating the wheat of Goodmans radical phenomenological field model, from the chaff of Perls biological metaphors and self-in-isolation motif. The names of Gary Yontef, Malcolm Parlett and Gordon Wheeler come to mind as key architects of this ongoing project of retrofitting the genius of Gestalt therapys praxis with a theoretical infrastructure that could both adequately frame its origins, and coherently support its continued development. To this list of important Gestalt phenomenological thinkers, I think we can now confidently add the name of Georges Wollants, whose present text firmly and dramatically situates Gestalt therapy within the context of its proper historical and theoretical framework.

Wollants stated purpose in this book is to embed Gestalt therapy in its original European ground, in which he includes the Gestalt psychology of the Berlin School, and the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology. He pays homage to the important phenomenological recasting of Gestalt therapy by Yontef and Wheeler, and indeed his re-formulations of Gestalt therapy are similar to theirs in many respects. But his explicit intention is to reconnect Gestalt therapys theory to the European intellectual traditions that are its rightful wellspring and home. A quick scan of Wollants references shows that he means business: names like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Binswanger and Buytendijk, to name a few. I was especially delighted to find that Wollants is familiar with J.H. van den Berg, among clinical phenomenologys most lucid exponents, but whose name is conspicuously absent in Gestalt therapys literature.

Wollants pre-figures his thesis in the very title of this book, and again in its opening pages, where he tells us that the proper domain of Gestalt therapy is the situation, the irreducible intertexture of interactions of a human being and the environment that is relevant to him . He offers this as a correction to the inherent ambiguity of PHG, whose double reading, he points out (echoing Wheeler), shuttles between views of human psychology as intra-personal (i.e. as a self-in-isolation) and as interactional, relational and situational.

This double reading reveals an even deeper philosophical confusion, one that is perfectly reflected in Gestalt therapys use of the term field. For, as Wollants points out, the expression field theory tends to be an umbrella term for different approaches to reality. It can refer to the transphenomenal, material, physical field of a physical organism and that organisms physical environment, or it can denote the phenomenal, experienced, behavioural, psychological field of a perceiving person and his phenomenal world (p. 3).