GESTALT THERAPY

Gestalt Therapy

Gestalt Therapy

Introduction

Gestalt psychology was primarily concerned with identifying the laws or principles governing how behavior and phenomenological experience are organized such as 'figure- ground distinction, contrast, and closure. This led it to pay particular attention on the one hand to visual perception and on the other to problem solving and cognition. While holistic, Gestalt theory was underpinned by a belief that the structure of subjective experience was isomorphic with underlying physiological processes, which led W. Kohler into speculations about brain processes. It Is a type of psychotherapy that does not derive directly from Gestalt psychology, although it makes use of the totality gestalt of a patient's experiences, sensations, emotions, and memories in its group therapy sessions. Conflicts experienced by individual patients are often explored by role play and in weekend workshops in the belief that the holistic approach can release the tensions and remove the impediments to growth that are making the patient ill. (K. Koffka, 496). Gestalt therapy was a new and influential configuration of many disparate and distinctive ideas. Perhaps most importantly, Gestalt therapy introduced an epistemology to psychology that challenged the prevailing mechanistic, technical and outcome-oriented approaches of the 20th century.

Discussion

Gestalt psychology

As a psychologist who knows more about Gestalt psychology than about therapy, It has nothing to say about neurosis or mental disturbance. It deals with the way we see the world around us. The most important theme derives from our desire to impose order on what we see, even when it is actually disordered. We are so good at filling in the gaps in a picture where parts are missing that often we do not realise that the picture we are presented is incomplete , we see only the completed whole. This tendency to complete things is the key to the Gestalt view of the way psychological problems arise and the way they can be resolved (Woldt, A, n.d.)

We have an overwhelming tendency to complete the unfinished business of our interactions with other people. When these interactions are unsatisfactory, as they so often are when we are children than we make what Gestalt therapists call a “creative adjustment” to our view of the way the world works. Psychological problems arise in adulthood when our thoughts, emotions and behaviour are adversely affected by creative adjustments that we made as children and are no longer appropriate in adult life. Creative adjustments can be fairly straightforward. A child reprimanded for throwing tantrums may develop the view that it is inappropriate to express emotions. Creative adjustments often involve the child assuming responsibility for the situation. This can have damaging effects: a sexually abused child may come to identify with his or her abuser, and may subsequently abuse other children.

The view that today's psychological difficulties reflect our past experience. However, Gestalt therapy is not concerned with uncovering and resolving past conflicts but with understanding and adjusting to the present. The past only features in the form of maladaptive behaviour based on past creative ...