Abstract: Gestalt therapy stands out from other experiential psychotherapies through its unique attention to figure/ground emergence and the sequence of contact within the phenomenal field of the therapist and patient. This is the “essence” or heart of gestalt therapy. It is achieved through the application of a modified version of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method. This paper will describe this process and offer a clinical example for elaboration.
Key words: gestalt therapy, phenomenology, Husserl, epoché, reduction, bracketing, life-world, figure/ground, eidetic reduction, intentionality, psychotherapeutic intentionality, sequence of contact, intersubjectivity, lived-body.
There are two significant yet often neglected strands in the praxis of gestalt therapy: pragmatism and phenomenology.[2] Gestalt therapy borrows many ideas from pragmatism, including the concept of the creative process of human experience, its incarnate unity, and even the “gestalt experiment” by which insights are encouraged to emerge and be tested within the creative activities of the therapy session. Nevertheless, phenomenology informs the basic psychotherapeutic attitude of gestalt therapy as an experiential psychotherapy.
This paper proposes that the application of a modified version of Edmund Husserl’s[3] phenomenological method clarifies how gestalt therapy stands out from the general field of experiential psychotherapies to reveal its particular “essence” or essential qualities, which identify it uniquely as a psychotherapeutic modality in which both therapist and patient are in readiness for the emergence of figure/ground from their common, co-created, life-world. This readiness for gestalt emergence is the heart of gestalt therapy, distinguishing it from all other experiential psychotherapies. Such readiness is achieved with the modified phenomenological method of Husserl described here.[4]
Any psychotherapy may be experiential if it privileges what is experienced in a session. It becomes phenomenological if it separates (brackets) “raw” or naïve experience from the psychotherapeutic stance. A modified deployment of the phenomenological method in respect of naïve experience turns experiential psychotherapy into gestalt therapy, that is, into a psychotherapy that explores the emergent patterns (i.e. gestalten) within embodied experience as the figure/ground process in the sequence of contacting (Perls et al., 1951, p. 404). The concepts from Husserl’s phenomenology that find their way into gestalt therapy praxis are the natural attitude, the phenomenological reduction[5] (including the epoché or bracketing), intentionality, the lived-body, and the life-world. I will discuss these complex concepts and show how they are central to gestalt therapy—even if gestalt therapists are unaware that they regularly use them. “Psychotherapeutic intentionality” will be introduced as way of understanding contacting within a gestalt therapy session. A clinical vignette will be offered.
A brief history leading to the development of Husserl’s phenomenological method is a necessary platform for this paper’s themes.
Franz Brentano (1838-1917) made the first systematic inquiry into phenomenology; he is actually claimed by both philosophy and psychology as a pioneer in their respective fields. Brentano considered the qualities that distinguish mental or “psychic” phenomena from physical phenomena. Brentano reached back to the Scholastics for the term “intentionality.” Intentionality is the “aboutness” of mental phenomena. Physical phenomena do not have this quality. “To think” always is to think “of” something. All thought[6] has an object, either inexistent or actual. One can think of an inexistent unicorn or of an existent house. Brentano was a direct influence on Sigmund Freud and, of course, on Husserl, both of whom were his students.
The name most associated with phenomenology is Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). With him, phenomenology became a philosophical movement. Initially, Husserl studied the nature of logic as a mental process and attempted to find the non-empirical basis for knowledge—and consciousness—by deploying a specific technique of inquiry, the phenomenological method, to which will be discussed below. Husserl was directly influenced by William James’ Principles of Psychology (1981), as well as by the method James himself used to describe meticulously his own experiences as the basis for his psychological insights. Arguably, Husserl deepened James’s project by taking it into more complex philosophical waters. James never completed his final work, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1987), which was to have been an exposition of the philosophical implications of his psychology. Since pragmatism and phenomenology are important background influences on gestalt therapy, it is fascinating that their own development is related.
Husserl developed Brentano’s concept of intentionality into a fully developed, nuanced, philosophy of consciousness. His central insight that “consciousness was the condition of all experience; indeed it constituted the world” (Moran, 2000, p. 61). Among many other elements, his philosophy describes the relationship of the conscious subject to the “external” world within consciousness. Objects constituted by consciousness are “intentional objects.” Objects do not merely appear to us, but they are constituted as appearances (phenomena) by us within our consciousness as “intentional objects.” Intentionality describes the relationship of knowing subject to the known. It comprises both its quality or noesis and its object or noema (Husserl, 1999; Spinelli, 2005, p. 59; Zahavi, 2003, p. 58). Most importantly, Husserl developed a phenomenological method involving the epoché or bracketing and reduction (see below), which attempted a new approach to the philosophy of experience. This method gave the person who deployed it the ability to put aside the ordinary way of viewing the word—the natural attitude—and begin to see and describe what actually presents itself to experience. Over the course of his many years of scholarship, Husserl’s ideas went through variations and further expansions. He later developed the ideas of the lived-body, time consciousness, the life-world, and intersubjectivity; I will mostly focus on those ideas relevant to psychotherapy.
The following cannot be overstated. Perhaps it is even a caveat. Any–every—summary of Husserl is insufficient because of the breadth of his writings; every summary is inadequate because the complexity of, and contradictions within, his ideas lead to misinterpretations and varied interpretations (Moran, 2000, p. 62).
Husserl scholarship is a century-old academic industry. It continues to be enriched by newly released papers from the Husserl archives; some 35 volumes have been published to date. New studies reinterpret the early Husserl through the lenses of the later and posthumous Husserl, and these interpretations are not without controversy (Zahavi, 2003, 2005; Dreyfus, 1982; Sokolowski, 2000). Scholars examine the entire Husserl corpus to “solve” some of the “problems” presented by his earlier ideas. They often find textual support for their studies, since Husserls’ later ideas are often foreshadowed in his earlier works. Our choice is either to think of “segmented Husserls” and remain loyal to each discrete, internally consistent, segment of his intellectual development, or follow the trajectory of his own development and integrate his ideas into our own study, using reason as our guide. I follow the second alternative, along with other contemporary writers (e.g., Wertz, 2005; Zahavi, 2003, 2005). This approach affirms the plasticity of ideas as they may be applied to our present situations.
Husserl’s first objective was to help clarify the foundation of positive sciences by extracting metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions from it (Zahavi, 2003, p. 44). The phenomenological method was intended to transform the pre-reflective or natural world into a philosophical, phenomenological world (Sokolowski, 2000, p. 49) where the ideal essence or eidos can be revealed through what is sometimes called the eidetic reduction (Hintikka, 1995, p. 101) or eidetic intuition (Moran, 2000, p. 134). In other words, rather than being a psychological method, the phenomenological method initially was intended to transcend, go beyond, psychology and psychologism (i.e. the psychologizing or personalizing of experience). Phenomenology could then enter into a “pure” world without the confusion of mundane sensation. The philosophical world of the ideal, of essences, is not the world of psychology. But later in his career, Husserl attempted to bring his method to bear on questions of science.
Consequently, the phenomenological method has been effectively applied in both psychology and psychotherapy. (Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003, Wertz, 2005, Ihde, 1977). Ernesto Spinelli, in The Interpreted World (2005), describes a phenomenological psychotherapeutic method, which begins with the straightforward rule of suspending initial biases and prejudices so as to attend to immediate experience, and follows other simple “rules” distilled from Husserl (Spinelli, 2005, p. 20). Gestalt therapy adopts a similar method (Yontef, 1993) (Crocker and Philippson, 2005, p. 67). These are useful approaches. Yet, gestalt therapy does not merely track experience as in experiential or in phenomenological, as all gestalt therapists know. We can discover more about the unique experiential process of gestalt therapy by taking a closer look at it through the lens of Husserl’s method.
Specifically, gestalt therapy is achieved with an “as if” turning back of Husserl’s method onto itself, that is, by “doubling back” to what is left in the natural attitude but now including what is bracketed within a broader horizon of the developing moment. The “natural attitude” to which gestalt therapy returns is now significantly changed. It is a perspective towards Husserl’s life-world, “the universal field into which all our acts, whether of experiencing, of knowing, or of outward action are directed” (Husserl, 1999, p, 376). Doubling-back echoes the later Husserl’s’ instructions to scientists for the “epoché of objective science” (Husserl, 1999, p. 371). Doubling-back differs from the reduction in that it does not entirely exclude or change the bracketed natural attitude. In fact, the word “reduction” means “a return” to experience without—the bracketed presuppositions. “Doubling-back” is a play on that word and is defined here as a doubling-back to experience with the bracketed presuppositions as available active background in the modified perspective of an altered natural attitude.
Gestalt therapists begin with and return to the psychological, phenomenal field in order to attend to figure/ground emergence. This is the essence, the core, of gestalt therapy. More will be said about this point below.
Gestalt therapy attends to the structure of the emerging figure within a psychotherapy session (Spagnuolo Lobb, 2005). Whether this is the awareness continuum (L. Perls, 1992), the sequence of contacting (Perls et al., 1951, p. 403), or the Cycle of Experience (Nevis, 1992), the therapist and patient engage together in such a way that what emerges in their shared phenomenal field becomes the focus of the session. While gestalt therapists usually describe therapy as a figure/ground process, where figures and grounds proceed sequentially, it may also be described in more directly phenomenological language as a core/fringe process (Ihde, 1977, p. 60; Kitzler, 2008). Gestalt therapy does more: it attends to the patterns, gestalten, of the stream of experience as they emerge in contacting. The gestalt therapist should be sensitized to notice this phenomenon by training. The aesthetic qualities of contacting, which are the felt, sensed, perceived, observed, known qualities, are at the heart of the psychotherapy (Bloom, 2003). Inhibitions to this process, either as restrictions to spontaneity or other forms of fixities referred to as “interruptions” to contacting (Perls, et al., 1951), are the material for psychotherapeutic insight. These become known in gestalt therapy through a version of the phenomenological method.
The natural attitude is the world as taken for granted (Moran 2000, p. 144). As Husserl expressed it, “we begin our considerations as human beings who are living natural, objectivating, judging, feeling, willing ‘in the natural attitude’” (1999, p. 60). This natural world is our surrounding world (Husserl, 1999, p. 61), not a world of mere things, but a practical world. “I simply find the physical things in front of me furnished not only with material determinations but also with value characteristics, as beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, agreeable and disagreeable” (Husserl, 1999, p. 61). Or, according to Robert Sokolowski, a contemporary phenomenologist, “The natural attitude is the focus we have when we are involved in our original, world-directed stance, when we intend things, situations, facts, and any other kinds of objects. The natural attitude is, we might say, the default perspective, the one we have before anything else” (Sokolowski, 2000, p. 42, emphasis added). Naïve appearances compose the matter-of-fact sphere in which we find ourselves. The natural attitude is the domain of ordinary conversation, too. It is the natural world of social banter between the psychotherapist and patient, which must come to an end for the psychotherapy to begin.
Husserl posed the following question: How can this natural world with its “factually existent actuality” (Husserl, 1999, p. 63) be the basis for knowledge—scientific, psychotherapeutic, or philosophical—if its appearance is so subject-dependent? The aim of the sciences belonging to the natural world is to “cognize ‘the’ world more comprehensively, more reliably, more perfectly in every respect than naive experiential cognizance can [and thus] solve all the problems of scientific cognition which offer themselves within the realm of the world” (Husserl, 1999, p. 63).
Furthermore, how can science—or psychotherapy—reliably get beyond naïve experience if it is embedded within the very world it is studying? Since the sciences implicitly and unquestioningly accept the natural attitude, the assumptions of daily life, they must use his phenomenological method. Husserl’s phenomenology is “a new, critical, and rigorous science” whose task is to “thematize and elucidate the core questions concerning the being and nature of reality.” (Zahavi, 2003, p. 44).
Instead of Descartes’ use of doubting to find an indubitable ground of being, Husserl suggested that, “[w]ith regard to any positing we can quite freely exercise [the] epoché, a certain refraining from judgment which is compatible with the unshaken conviction of truth, even with the unshakable conviction of evident truth. The positing is ‘put out of action,’ parenthesized, converted into the modification, ‘parenthesized positing’; the judgment simpliciter is converted into the ‘parenthesized judgment’. . . . [E]very positing related to this objectivity is to be excluded and converted into its parenthetical modification” (Husserl, 1999, p. 64, emphasis added).
This phenomenological attitude neither negates nor doubts the world. It merely excludes any judgment of “its spatiotemporal factual being” (Husserl, 1999, p. 65, emphasis added), so that knowledge may be based on pure intuition (Zahavi, 2003, p. 44, emphasis added). Such judgments related to this natural world are excluded so that transcendental knowledge (knowledge beyond simple judgments of time and space, beyond the natural attitude) becomes possible. Thus, the epoché is referred to as the transcendental reduction.
After deployment of this epoché, according to Husserl, a world without presuppositions becomes available for study. We are now faced with the things themselves, the Eldorado of his phenomenological philosophy. The epoché is an abrupt suspension of the natural attitude; the transcendental reduction that follows is the “thematization of the correlation between subjectivity and the world” (Zahavi, 2003, p. 46). We can then know the constitutive nature of consciousness. Consciousness now functions transcendentally composed of both the object that is intended (noema), and the object (of consciousness) as it is intended (noesis) within consciousness (Moran, 2000, p. 156). That is, consciousness has both thematic and functional aspects: a person is conscious of something and can be conscious of being conscious (Zahavi, 2005, pp. 51, 52).
Husserl made it clear that consciousness is incarnate and interlaced with the world (Ricoeur, 2007, pp. 55, 56); this point is critical to a discussion of Husserl and gestalt therapy, since it addresses a potential clash between gestalt therapy’s monism and Husserl’s potential Cartesian dualism: “. . . kinaesthetic and perceptual appearances are related to one another through consciousness” (Husserl, 1999, p. 227). That is, consciousness unifies sensation and perception. “The lived-body (Leib) is constantly there. . . functioning as an organ of perception, . . . an entire system of compatibly harmonizing organs of perception. The lived-body is in itself. . . the perceiving-lived body” (Husserl, 1999, p. 227). Consciousness is embodied consciousness. Every worldly experience is mediated and made possible by embodiment (Zahavi, 2003, p. 99). The lived-body and embodied consciousness appear within the phenomenological attitude assumed after this epoché. Husserl’s phenomenological method takes another step after the epoché. To move to the eidetic world of nonsensuous, non-empirical, universal meaning, Husserl proposes the eidetic reduction, the transcendental turn to the transcendental ego. In Husserl’s words, this “new kind of experience” is “transcendental inner experience,” which “opens up the limitless transcendental field of being” (Husserl, 1999, p. 331, emphasis added) and “the invariant essential structures of the total sphere of pure mental processes” (Smith, 1995, p. 326).
Through this eidetic reduction, “[essences] have to be distinguished in phenomenological analysis from the sensory mass in which they are given” (Mohanty, 1995, 101). The eidetic reduction looks to essential forms: it “is different from the transcendental, which turns us from the natural attitude to the phenomenological” attitude (Sokolowski, 2000, p. 184). Only after this reduction would it be possible to engage in the kind of philosophical analysis that would find the essential qualities of things, their eidos, their essences (Wertz, 2005).
In response to criticism that his theory of the transcendental ego described monadic subjects floating in worlds of their own, each isolated from the other, the later Husserl developed the concepts of empathy, intersubjectivity, and the life-world. Husserl proposed that empathy and intersubjectivity were always implicit to his phenomenology. The life-world is the social world “pre-given naturally. . . the source of what is taken for granted” (Husserl, 1999 p. 363). The life-world is a kind of other layer uncovered by the reduction: “As conscious beings we always inhabit the life-world; it is pre-given in advance and experienced as a unity. The life-world is the general structure which allows objectivity and thinghood to emerge in different ways” (Moran, 2000, p. 182); it is the world of human consciousness, embodied life, and the world of human cultures. Husserl developed this concept in an effort to address what he referred to as the “crisis” in European sciences stemming from, among other things, the mathematization of the world, the imposition upon the life-world of scientific constructs that smothered human breath, although the idea itself was present in his early philosophical writings. He offered the “epoché of objective science” as a remedy to the “crisis” (Husserl, 1999, p. 377). In this epoché, “any critical position-taking which is interested in the truth or falsity. . . of the objective sciences or knowledge of the world” are bracketed (Husserl, 1999, p. 371). The life-world is then revealed and available for study. The “pre-given” world is before us. As Husserl described it,
nothing shall interest us but precisely that subjective alteration of manners of givenness, of manners of appearing and of the modes of validity in them, which, in its constant process, synthetically connected as it incessantly flows on, brings about the coherent consciousness of the straightforward ‘being’ of the world (Husserl, 1999, p. 377).
This is also referred to as the scientific reduction (Giorgi & Giorgi, p, 247) or psychological phenomenological reduction (Wertz, p. 168).
A contemporary critic of phenomenology and Husserl, however, raises a significant objection worthy of brief mention. Are the phenomenological, transcendental reductions, or reduction of the objective sciences predicated on an atomization of experience—a splitting of wholes of experience? Gestalt theory and contemporary psychology support the notion that experience is presented as wholes, and not constituted from its parts (Brown, 2008). This criticism the subject of heated controversy.
Within the literature of gestalt therapy, Lynne Jacobs and Robert Stolorow have recently challenged gestalt therapy’s alleged reliance on a uncritical acceptance of Husserl’s phenomenological reductions. The epoché splits mind from body, perhaps person from the world. Bracketing disrupts the very process that gestalt therapy purports to explore. Husserl’s approach is transcendental rather than existential and, as such, separates the subject from its surround. Stolorow & Jacobs urge a hermeneutic approach instead (2006, p. 58). Husserl’s attempt at establishing a transcendental presuppositionless perception was futile since all perception must “be an act of interpretation, perspectivally embedded in the interpreter’s own traditions.” There can be no “pure” phenomenology (Stolorow & Jacobs, 2006, p. 57).
Jacobs’ and Stolorow’s suggestions do not give sufficient heft to Husserl’s life-world, the centrality of the lived-body in any perspectival experience (Zahavi, 2003, p. 98), to the importance of the epoché without the eidetic reduction, nor to “the epoché of the objective science”—all of which are necessary to experience the figure/ground contacting process in gestalt therapy—and without which gestalt therapy would remain indistinguishable from any other experiential psychotherapy.
The rules of description and horizontillization ( Spinelli, 2005, p. 20), which are central to phenomenological psychotherapy, simply tell us to keep an open mind in psychotherapy, to attend to the concrete developments in a session, or to avoid abstract explanations. (They do no more than state the givens of experiential psychotherapy.) Jacobs’ and Stolorow’s preference for “a hermeneutic approach… [that emphasizes] our context embeddedness, that understanding is emergent from continual encounter with our pre-judgments. . . and that understanding involves a circular dialogic process in which neither partner has privileged access to a more ‘pure’ perspective” (Stolorow & Jacobs, 2006, p. 59) is consistent with what is proposed here. But their approach is much closer to experiential psychotherapy’s rules of description and horizontillization (Ihde, 1977; Spinelli, 2005, pp. 20, 21). Where is the gestalt therapy in Jacobs and Stolorow’s hermeneutic approach? Of course Jacobs and Stolorow are correct: there are no presuppositionless or “pure” perceptions. But it is precisely the phenomenological method that makes “impurities” figural in gestalt therapy.
The eidetic reduction leaves behind the presuppositionless world and enters the realm of essences. Such a realm is the realm of philosophy; it is not gestalt therapy’s praxis. The eidetic reduction is a philosophical method for the “empirical ego” to become the transcendental ego. The ego of gestalt therapy is the ego functioning of self [Willson—italics?? (Perls et al., 1951, pp. 377 ff)—as empirical an ego as there can be. In gestalt therapy, the therapist and patient are engaged with the processive concrete actuality of the sequence of contact. Frequently, patient and therapist exercise imagination or fantasy. But this is neither the “free variation” (Wertz, 2005, p. 173) nor the “imaginative variation” (Stokowlowksi, 2000, p. 179) that follow the eidetic reduction in order to reveal universal essences. Even as used in phenomenological psychology, these methods decontextualize an actual event (Wertz, 2005, p. 173), inappropriate for psychotherapy.
To summarize, Husserl’s phenomenological method begins with what is directly experienced in the natural attitude, brackets its epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions in the transcendental reduction, and further deploys the eidetic reduction toward the universe of essences. But the epoché does not depart from experience itself. The person remains of the world. Husserl’s philosophy proceeds across two planes: the transcendental and the empirical (Zahavi, 2003, p. 49; Husserl, 1999, p. 331). The transcendental and empirical are “theoretically equivalent” and parallel: “it is just the field of transcendental self-experience (conceived in full concreteness) which in every case can, through mere alteration of attitude, be changed into psychological self-experience” (Husserl, 1999, pp. 331-332). That is, the transcendental and psychological are different turns within the phenomenological method (Husserl, 1999, p. 332). The epoché of the objective sciences is a return to the life-world within Husserl’s own phenomenological method. The doubling-back proposed here combines elements of previously bracketed natural attitude with the emergent life-world.
This phenomenological method in gestalt therapy returns to the sensuous concrete experiencing of the lived-body within the relational stance of the therapist-patient by deploying the epoché that brackets the natural attitude, by doubling- back from the eidetic reduction that characterizes Husserl’s further method, and then by deploying gestalt therapy’s version of the epoché of the natural sciences, which as stated above, makes special use of the bracketed data. Bracketed presuppositions extracted from the natural attitude endure as living quotidian shadows, available and necessary for the developing figure/ground of the therapy session. They are not expunged from the phenomenal field; they are within the subjective phenomenal field of the psychotherapy, its contact-boundary, and available to the emerging process.
What remains is no longer the simple natural attitude upon which the epoché was deployed; yet it is not entirely removed from it. Pre-suppositions of “spatiotemporal facticity” are bracketed, but the naïve “objectivating, judging, feeling, and willing” (Husserl, 1999, p. 377) remain—as do value characteristics. The natural attitude within a gestalt therapy session may include the ordinary or social conversations that precede the actual dialogue. But what lingers of this natural attitude is now, post-epoché, within the embrace of the psychotherapy session’s framework—with their innocent givenness now parenthesized and bracketed. What might have been casual conversation post-epoché can be reflected upon and understood to reveal opportunities for deeper meaning, contact. What might have been unnoticeable background sensations can become available in the foreground since, now, after the epoché, they are of the lived-body and part of the sequence of contact. In addition, the intersubjective life-world stands ready to be revealed. The philosophical purity of presuppositionlessness is replaced with attention to the subjective changes in the “actual manners of givenness” (Husserl, 1999, p. 377). Gestalt therapy assumes that, for the purposes of its therapy, the only “reality” of concern is available in the emerging figure/ground of the therapy session itself.
In other words, by doubling-back to the life-world and embodied consciousness through which it is constituted (i.e. by not moving towards the non-empirical, non-sensuous realm of abstraction), gestalt therapy’s perspective prepares for the emergence of those forms of experiencing—gestalt forming and re-forming—that are the hallmarks of its method. The bracketed natural attitude persists as available—recallable—personal memory for both therapist and patient. This turning and re-turning or doubling-back towards the embodied psychological actuality becomes a radical changing of direction in the phenomenological method. This change of direction reveals the never-ending sequence of contacting (Bloom, 2009) within gestalt therapy. It brings therapist and patient into a relational “clearing” where together, in their co-created consciousness, they are in readiness for the emergence of novelty, which is the sequence of contacting.
Most importantly, this doubling-back uncovers intentionality within this consciousness. As a function of the therapy session, this newly-disclosed intentionality may be called “psychotherapeutic intentionality” as therapist and patient dialogically co-create the therapy as each together is open to what emerges. This consciousness—this psychotherapeutic intentionality—fires the sequence of contact within the gestalt therapy session.
Intentionality is a complex concept. Its qualities and intricacies were developed by Husserl and further elaborated many and continue to be studied in phenomenology, cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy (Dreyfus,1984; Searle, 2004, pp. 112-135). A clinical example may help clarify these points.
Told in the first person by the therapist
Max:
Max is a 43-year old man who has been in therapy for several years. His current complaint is that although he is in a committed intimate relationship, he regularly engages in impulsive, anonymous sexual encounters. Max is intelligent and verbal. He is an attorney. He has had many different psychotherapists throughout his adult life and has a detailed historical narrative about his “problems” gained from each of his therapy experiences.
During the last few sessions, Max had been relating how he cannot understand why he seems unable to resist these impulses, which seem to overtake him “as if by storm,” especially when he is bored. He can readily recite his own history as etiology for his symptoms: father and mother in constant marital battles; mother idealizing him as her savior from the marriage; older brother developing schizophrenia when Max was a young teen; Max being the good, healthy son and rejecting the role of caretaker of his brother. Max can recite this conscious story with some actual feelings, which usually soften rapidly to low level anxiety and then to his lament, “I know all of this. Nothing changes.” Over our history together, we have experienced a mutual sense of trust, evidenced by the warmth of our gaze, which we sometimes acknowledge to one another when we consider how the therapy has been progressing.
Today, he comes in with a bounce in his step and announces that he is feeling “really good.” He has not had impulsive sex for three weeks and is proud of his accomplishment. He describes how good his life is, but he notices that he has an ache in his leg, diagnosed as a pinched nerve by his chiropractor. This is our friendly social exchange that both of us know and appreciate as we adjust to one another in the earliest minutes of our meeting. “News of The Week.”
I ask him if he might want to change positions to become more comfortable. He lies down on my couch.
He begins to speak again and tells me how happy he is—his life is a good life. His voice is softer.
I notice that his leg seems stiff.
“How is your leg?”
“It is better, but it still hurts.”
“Would you settle into the couch, feel how it is holding you up and let your attention go to your leg? (Pause.) Can you tell me what you imagine your leg looks like inside?”
“It is all red and tight.”
“Just notice it, and let me know any changes.”
(Pause.)
“I feel better. (Pause.) Funny, I am beginning to feel sad. What do I have to be sad about?”
“Who’s asking?” He understands what I mean and allows his background sadness to enter his awareness.
He remains sad and then tells me about a friend whose life is falling apart, and how he wonders what he should do about it. I, too, have become sad.
“I am remembering your brother right now,” I say, as the image of his schizophrenic brother enters my imagination.
“Huh!”—sadly.
The session continues, now with Max in touch with his sadness, the tragedy of his brother, and then his feeling frightened when, as a boy, he heard his mother and father fighting in the other room.
“Maybe the reason I can’t let myself be bored is that I am afraid to feel these feelings.”
“Yeah,” I said. This was not the first time we had this discussion, but there was a palpable sadness that both of us felt. The figure of contact was dazzling in its brightness.
There are many aspects of gestalt therapy praxis illustrated by this example. Of principal concern is its phenomenological method.
Both Max and I begin the session in the natural attitude. The ordinary, characteristic colloquialisms of everyday conversation, the chit-chit as the session begins, with gestures and comments naively unexamined, as they always are and must be, as they are the stepping stones upon which people trod to get from here from there, naturally, functionally, naïvely.
This is the natural attitude. Then comes the epoché. Perhaps a moment of silence, the taking of a few breaths, and the settling into chairs, mark the threshold over which patient and therapist cross in the deployment of the epoché. In this first reduction, all the quotidian assumptions that marked the previous, natural attitude, the social clichés, the judgments—all the presuppositions relating to this specific meeting—are parenthesized and bracketed. The session can proceed as if without them, but they are not gone.
I initiate the epoché in this session when I ask Max if he would like to be more comfortable. Importantly, the epoché is not something done by me apart from him: his response by stretching out was his reciprocally joining in this process. We deployed it together.
We have both bracketed our social banter—gently shifted it to the background. Our everyday social identities are parenthesized but not forgotten or blocked. We are now poised for the emergence of figure/ground, which is the essence of gestalt therapy. Our dialogue continues, but now our words, our gestures are capable of new meaning.
He tells me that his life his good, and I notice his stiff leg: all of a single emergent figure. At this point, we (therapist and patient) double-back from the next reduction, which might have taken us into a non-empirical, non-sensuous, potentially transcendental consciousness. We are now in the situation as it emerges—in both the re-formed natural attitude and the life-world. The social banter of our meeting can now be transformed into a felt sense of mutual trust. He knows who I am, and he knows that over time I have come to know him, sufficiently. It has been in our gaze, the memories of which are bracketed as background, not forgotten. We now turn to what can emerge. This second turn is the doubling-back of our attention to the actuality of the figure/ground process, but this is now consciousness with intentionality as if laid bare within the therapist-patient life-world, a world he and I co-created over our time together. This is psychotherapeutic intentionality, since it is contextualized by psychotherapy. Our emerging consciousness is now “about” the emerging figure of contact, as yet unclear. But that will be the “work” of the session as the sequence of contacting proceeds. In gestalt therapy, intentionality is the “engine” of contacting (Bloom, 2008).
This session shows unexpected sadness emerging where Max initially reported happiness. Sadness emerges only when we engage in a dialogue in which I encourage him to attend to his directly felt somatic experience and consciously to pay attention to changing sensations. Both of us track the emerging figures of contact illuminated within psychotherapeutic intentionality: hurting leg—to sadness—to wondering about a friend. Had the experience in his foot been only a physical feeling, attention to it might not have revealed an intentionality that led to this sadness. These moments in the session also exemplified embodied intentionality (Bloom, 2008).
When I offered my own spontaneous thought, which was personally relevant to Max, a more vivid figure of contact emerged. This thought was informed by historical information I knew about Max, which I bracketed at the beginning of the session but which remained available to me as living background to the emerging figure. Until that moment, Max’s sadness had no conscious object. When I brought information forward which had been bracketed by me, but which I felt was connected to the actual situation, his sadness moved forward in the fullness of emerging contact and toward its intentional object, his brother. That was the person about whom he was sad. The latter contacting had the force of emergent intentionality, that is, sadness toward Max’s relationship to his brother.
Various experiences of the preposition “about”—the signature of intentionality—can be seen to mark various moments of the session. It all occurs within psychotherapeutic intentionality, the relational ground from which the figure/ground of gestalt therapy emerges. Much of what is described in the clinical example is also generic experiential psychotherapy. Yet it is not. It is gestalt therapy.
To be able to clearly differentiate a clear figure of contact is one of the hallmark values of gestalt therapy. Yet gestalt therapy may not have been able to claim this distinction for itself among other experiential and phenomenological psychotherapies that more or less follow similar norms and methods of practice.
This paper has argued that through deployment of a modified phenomenological method based on Husserl’s approach, gestalt therapy achieves a unique perspective that is able to attend to what is immediately present in the life-world, and to include that which is emergent yet had been bracketed from the natural attitude. Therapist and patient may now experience psychotherapeutic intentionality, which supports the sequence of contacting—the figure/ground process. Readiness for this emergent self-process in a psychotherapy situation prepared by this modified phenomenological method is the hallmark, the essence, of gestalt therapy.
With the modified phenomenological method described in this paper, gestalt therapy achieves its distinguishing mark that differentiates it from other experiential or existential psychotherapies. The figure of gestalt therapy may now appear as clear and distinct against the ground of other psychotherapeutic modalities.
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[1] A portion of this paper also appeared in P. Brownell (Ed.) (2008).
[2] Paul Goodman, one of the founders of gestalt therapy and co-author of its original text, Gestalt therapy, was familiar with the works of Edmund Husserl. Laura Perls, another founder, was a student of Paul Tillich and Martin Buber (Stoehr, 1994) and may have been familiar with the works Husserl and the phenomenologist Max Scheler. For the roots of gestalt therapy in pragmatism, see Kitzler (2006, 2007) and Hassrick (2003).
[3] Equally trenchant studies of gestalt therapy and phenomenology can be done from the perspective of other phenomenologists. Des Kennedy, for one, looks at gestalt therapy from the point of view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Something novel in gestalt therapy is revealed from every different angle we study it.
[4] Gestalt therapists employ this method without naming it. It is one duty of us as writers about gestalt therapy theory to explain the ways of our practitioners to one another.
[5] Edmund Husserl himself referred to this method in various ways: a psychological reduction, a phenomenological reduction, and a transcendental reduction, and a transcendental-phenomenological reduction (Moran, 2000, p. 147).
[6] It is tempting to be distracted by the verb “to think” and consider it to be purely cognitive activity. Following William James, “thinking” is that which the mind does, and it incorporates sensing, feeling, emoting, and so on (James, 1981, p. 186). While some may limit thinking to cognition, such a limitation is not warranted by the word’s use in epistemology. This point will become central to the notion of intentionality in gestalt therapy.