Dedicated to the women, children and men who have been harmed by men's familial use of violence, and its intergenerational impacts.
In this essay, I argue that gestalt therapy's anti-realism can make it difficult for our tradition to account for things that exist independently of individual human perception, such as social structures, institutions, and material resources. I suggest that the skillful navigation of many of the most pressing issues facing contemporary psychotherapeutic communities - including issues of equality and social justice - depends on a collective capacity to acknowledge the independent reality of the social world, on the one hand, and phenomenal experience, on the other hand. I join a growing group of authors who believe that contemporary realist philosophies (e.g., critical realism) could provide a flexible and encompassing meta-theoretical framework for gestalt therapy, as they accommodate both ontological realism, as well as the epistemological relativism that is so central to the practice of gestalt therapy.
This article is adapted from a Literature Review submitted as part of requirements for a Master of Gestalt Therapy degree at Gestalt Therapy Brisbane in 2017.
Why write? It's a question I ask myself often enough, and facing up to a deadline or worse still waiting for the inevitable email from an editor who has lost all patience and the remaining shreds of their generosity, I wonder at this process that in equal measure evokesdread and delight. In the moments of questioning though, it's always the dread, and dread often mixed with a sense of failure and inadequacy. It's a process, familiar enough by virtue of it being a long and oftrepeated struggle, and one I mostly manage to find my way through. But does this make it any easier? Maybe, but on a bad day I'd probably hedge my bets.
This edited collection aims to advance the research tradition in Gestalt therapy, as the editors see this as integral to the advancement of Gestalt therapy (Roubal, Francesetti, Brownell, Melnick, & ZeleskovDjoric, 2016). Some in the Gestalt community will intuitively accept the logic of this argument, and for those people this text provides both a useful articulation of why research into Gestalt therapy matters, as well as a resource to support their engagement in this work. For other prospective readers the value of engaging in research may be of little interest, and some from this group may harbour misgivings about the perceived inherent incompatibility between the scientific method on the one hand, and the Gestalt therapeutic process on the other. This text acknowledges and explores these concerns, and it seeks to engage this group of research agnostics and atheists in dialogue. For example, in the preface by Leslie Greenberg, he questions whether the term ‘research’, if replaced by ‘investigation’ or a continual process of ‘re-search’, might be a more acceptable frame for opening conversations.
This paper is based on the chapter 'Useful Methodology in Gestalt Therapy', written for an upcoming book on gestalt theory, practice, and research, as well as a cross-cultural study conducted in prison. The research study presented here has been published in the book Towards a Research Tradition in Gestalt Therapy.
This article is adapted from a Literature Review submitted as part of requirements for a Master of Gestalt Therapy degree at Gestalt Therapy Brisbane.
Zish: So, hello Brenda. Brenda: Hello. So we've been invited to do this thing and I'm not sure where we start. I read the list of possible places to go and I thought, good grief, we could be here until breakfast
Gestalt therapy is situated within a significantly changed and changing culture since the publication of Perls, Hefferline and Goodman's seminal text in 1951. One the features of the changing culture is described in the sociological literature as globalisation, which has homogenised (and Westernised) the production of knowledge through an almost unimaginable development of communication technology, transport technology and the loosening of national boundaries (Altbach and Teichler, 2001; Castells, 2010: Gacel-Avila, 2005). The extent of the homogenisation of knowledge in the Gestalt context has to my knowledge not been well researched although it seems we can not agree on field theory or 'self' as shown in recent edited collected works (see Bloom and O'Neil, 2014). However, Dr Pablo Herrera Salinas' narrative about the history, context, current situation, and future challenges of Gestalt therapy in Chile has highlighted for me some points of similarity and differentiation to the Australian Gestalt context. Herrera notes that the linguistic barrier in Chile is a major factor in shaping his country's Gestalt practice and this may have filtered global Gestalt influences beyond other Spanish speaking counties. Our context in Australia and New Zealand has been, I think more broadly influenced by mainly UK and US writings in the English language, and more recently some European texts that have been translated into English. The remainder of this commentary explores some of the themes from Herrera's article especially in relation to the practice of Gestalt therapy and the training of Gestalt therapists in the Australian context compared to that of Chile. These themes are: the different influences on Gestalt therapy theory and practice in Australia and New Zealand, the different impacts of these differences on the practices within training institutes (including research), and the similar tensions and imperatives apparent in the interplay of the undergirding vales of Gestalt therapy theory and some of the demands of the contemporary culture.
I remember my first direct experience of Gestalt, in Santiago de Chile, back in 2003. Before then, I had seen a couple of books in my father's library, and took a class in my undergraduate psychology studies. But I had never really experienced gestalt therapy.
Gestalt therapy is well grounded in its daily practice, however the field of Gestalt therapy is still in the process of developing a research tradition to support this practice. There is an active movement in Gestalt therapy nowadays, which strives to get Gestalt therapy clinically and academically well established and recognized. The text describes the current development of the movement towards the research tradition in Gestalt therapy.
Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, PhD, is the Director of the Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy (Siracuse, Palermo, Milan): Post Graduate School of Psychotherapy. Margherita is a psychologist, Gestalt psychotherapist, international trainer and author. Her most recent book The Now-for-Next in Psychotherapy: Gestalt Therapy Recounted in Post Modern Society (2013) has been translated into English, Russian, French, Spanish and Romanian. She will be the keynote speaker at the 10th International Gestalt Australia New Zealand (GANZ) Conference 2016 on 7, 8 and 9 October, 2016 at University House, Australian National University, Canberra.
Review(s) of: Yes, we care!Social, political and cultural relationship as therapy's ground, a Gestalt perspective (2nd Edn.), by Netherlands, Human Rights and Social Responsibility Committee (HR and SRc) of European Association of Gestalt Therapy, 229 pages, ISBN 978-90-823365-0-4.
During the inaugural joint conference of the European Association of Gestalt Therapy (EAGT) and the Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy (AAGT) held at Taormina, Sicily in September 2016, I found myself sitting at a round table overlooking the Mediterranean enjoying delicious Sicilian food and engaged in intense conversation. Those around the table included Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb (Italy), Les Greenberg (Canada), Phil Brownell (USA), Jan Roubal (Czech republic), Mark Reck (USA), Gianni Francesetti (Italy), Vincent Beja (France), IlliaMstibovskyi (Russia), Pablo Herrera Salinas (Chile) and Joe Melnick (USA).
This essay is about this world, the world around us, and the crevices of society where asylum seekers and refugees exist. In 2009 there were already 40 million people worldwide who were victims of war, political oppression, and torture in all their insidious forms and humanly devised demonic variations (Di Tomasso, 2010). This showed a huge increase of asylum seekers and refugees compared to 9.9 million refugees worldwide in 2006 (Murray, Davidson, and Schweitzer, 2008, p. 5). Asylum seekers and refugees are disenfranchised people whose lives are dominated on a daily basis by fear, shame, guilt, and terrorized nightmares, flashbacks, or unwanted memories of painful, life-threatening experiences they have been through. They are individuals wrestling with feelings of hate and love, searching for safety, trust, and respect somewhere in the world, far from their homes. It is about people who were confronted with evil and who tried to rebuild their lives in unknown, new surroundings, facing another culture, language, norms, and values. It is about existence in societies often indifferent to their hardship and marginal lives.
