Awareness, Dialogue and Process

Preface to the German edition, by Gary Yontef

In the five years since the publication of Awareness, Process and Dialogue: Essays on Gestalt
Therapy there has been a growing movement to a relational Gestalt therapy. This trend is
represented in some of the essays in the book, especially the chapter on shame. Relational
Gestalt Therapy considers the therapeutic relationship crucial and focuses on the causes of
disruptions in the relationship and on the effects of these disruptions.

There has been an increasing recognition of the power of the relational aspects of therapeutic
work in promoting growth, healing severe disturbances, but also for inhibiting growth and even
harming patients. While contact is the basic unit of relationship, i.e., contacting establishes
relationship, the relationship also shapes contact. The impact on the patient of the therapist’s
attitude, behavior, and meta-messages is just now beginning to get the attention it needs.
There is now an established Gestalt therapy shame literature that calls attention to iatrogenic
triggering and enhancement of shame in psychotherapy and in training.

Relational Gestalt therapy has moved to an attitude that includes more support, more emphasis
on kindness and compassion in therapy, and that combines sustained empathic inquiry with
crisp, clear, and relevant awareness focusing. It has moved beyond the confrontation, catharsis,
and drama emphasis of the 1960’s and 1970’s. It has moved beyond the more camouflaged
shaming by therapists who are insensitive to their shame-triggering attitudes and behaviors.

In Gestalt therapy theory the essential nature of self is relational. The self is defined as the
interaction of person and environment; self is the “system of contacts necessary for adjustment
in the difficult field...Self ...is not itself isolated from the environment; ...it belongs to both,
environment and organism (Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman, p. 151)”.

Although Gestalt therapy has always been a relational approach, the relational principles and
their implications have often been ignored, treated in a cavalier manner, insufficiently developed,
or inadvertently violated both in theory and practice. Although Gestalt therapy theory defines the
self as totally relational, theoretical statements abound in which the self is treated as separate
from the organism/environment field and patients are often treated as if their behavior in
therapy is separable from the relational field of therapist and patient.

Of late this problem is being addressed and the principles and implications of the Gestalt therapy
relational theory are being discussed more thoroughly and cogently. There is also a budding
trend toward discussing how these relational principles are enacted or violated in what therapists
actually do. Relational Gestalt therapists have found that disruptions in the therapist-patient
relationship are the source of most therapeutic blockages.

With systems, as with individuals, growth is relational. Therefore, relational Gestalt Therapists
tend to welcome exchange with relational forms of psychoanalysis, especially the intersubjective
self and relational approaches. Relational Gestalt therapists tend to treat dialogue between
Gestalt therapy and other therapy systems as an opportunity for mutual learning and growth
and eschew approaching Gestalt therapy as self-sufficient. The current trend in relational Gestalt
therapy has been influenced by this interchange.
The relational perspective is at the core of the each of the three philosophic pillars that are the
bedrock of Gestalt therapy, i.e., field theory, existential (psychological) phenomenology, and
dialogic existentialism. Even our biological inheritance is influenced by and shaped in a relational
context. For example, the basic human genetic inheritance can be altered by toxins ingested by
mother or father even before conception. Individual taste preferences can be influenced by what
the mother eats during pregnancy. The biological inheriat “reality”, indeed all perception and
memory, is co-constructed. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology contradicts his earlier work
and certainly is not consistent with the phenomenology of either Gestalt psychology or Gestalt
therapy.

Transcendental phenomenology has never been a part of my understanding of the theory

of Gestalt therapy or its inheritance. Gestalt therapy is based on the non-Husserlian
phenomenology of Gestalt psychology and existential (psychological) phenomenology, which
is not based on transcendental phenomenology. Bracketing in Gestalt therapy is not meant to
provide complete absence of suppositions or objective. Rather it is a method for therapists to
systematically be as aware as possible of their biases, to stay cognizant of the truth of multiple
realities, and the lack of purely objective or purely subjective perception.

I object strongly to claims of objective or absolute truth by anyone, especially by therapists.

I agree with Sapriel’s criticism of transcendental phenomenology on this score. But I believe she
erroneously reads transcendental phenomenology into Gestalt therapy theory -- and then wants
to eliminate what was not in the theory to begin with. It is transcendental phenomenology that
is inconsistent with field theory and not psychological phenomenology. Both field theory and
psychological phenomenology make knowledge of the perspective or frame of reference of the
observer essential.

The methodology of relational Gestalt therapy emphasizes the personal presence of the therapist
as a person. But, the subjectivity of the therapist is not likely to support patient growth in
the patient unless it is a presence honed by training, personal therapy of the therapist, and
receptivity to the different reality of the patient -- without any assumption that the patient’s
reality is inferior to the therapist’s. This is the essence of bracketing. Bracketing supports the
therapist in doing this. Bracketing does not give the therapist an “objective” or superior view of
the situation. It only gives the therapist a clearer and cleaner sense of his or her own process.

It is vital that therapists bracket their preconceptions as much as possible so that they can
be impacted by and respond to the unique person present at a particular time and place. This
facilitates growth by both patient and therapist. Much of what we do in therapy is guiding
patients to look at fixed gestalten, preconceptions, so they can be influenced by and influential
in the current organism/environment field. In effect the patient also learns to bracket.

Eliminating bracketing would be an unfortunate solution to the problem that some therapists,
including some well known Gestalt therapists, act as if their awareness of both the patient
and themselves is in a superior position, is correct and above criticism -- and the treatment of
patient’s criticism of the therapist as distorted because it is not consistent with the self-concept
of the therapist.

I think this is a very serious problem, and an illustration of how disruptions in the relationship
and in the progress of therapy often results from the therapist’s defensiveness, subjectivity, and
countertransference. This is a failure to bracket and practice inclusion. I do not believe that this
hubris comes from transcendental phenomenological principles in the theory of Gestalt therapy.
Most of the therapists that I know who show this defect in their practice know theoretically that
no awareness is objective and uninterpreted.
The naive belief that one’s own experience is not biased is an example of an initially given
subjectivity that has not sufficiently gone through phenomenological discipline and self-
examination. Discarding the concept of bracketing would discard the solution and solve the
wrong problem. The problem is not transcendental phenomenology in Gestalt therapy, it is the
failure by such therapists to truly face the existence and impact of their unbracketed subjectivity,
defensive shame-triggering, and so forth.

The “solution” of eliminating bracketing would be very unfortunate. Bracketing by whatever

name, is central to a phenomenological method, whether Gestalt psychological, intersubjective,
or existential phenomenological. Bracketing is crucial to dialogue and to field theory.

Some therapists protect their sense of self, their self-esteem, by acting as if their awareness
is in a favored position, as if the patient’s subjective sense of something in the therapeutic
relationship that is out of the therapist’s awareness could not be valid. For example, if the
patient feels shamed by the therapist and the therapist does not regard him or herself as
shaming, in superior therapy practice the patient’s subjectivity is respected and taken seriously.
By “taken seriously” I mean explicitly that the therapist be open to having his or her own
sense of the situation, his or her sense of self, and his or her sense of who is responsible for
therapeutic impasses changed by taking in the patient’s sense of the situation.

When there is conflict between therapist and patient, whether minor or acrimonious, and
therapists give the message that the problem is with the patient, not in the relationship of which
the therapist is a part, shame is usually triggered in patients. This defends therapists from being
aware of their part in the interaction, and often from their own shame.

An actual example: Patient feels shamed by the therapist and says so. The therapist responds by
saying that he or she will show the patient how she, the patient, shames herself. In this actual
situation the therapist did not take the patient’s experience seriously, was not open to examining
his or her own role in the exacerbation of the patient’s shame. The patient experienced an
intensification of her shame. I have heard many similar examples from patients and trainees.

An important relational clinical cue is when the patient says that the therapist does not
understand. I have often said that if the patient says the therapist does not understand, that the
patient is right. Sometimes this can be the therapist having a more positive view of the patient
or the patient’s future than does the patient. My own experience is that when I feel positively
about a patient but am willing to sit with the patient in their sense of self-loathing and despair,
that therapeutic blocks usually dissolve and therapy progresses. When I am convinced of the
truth of my positive regard for the patient, when it is too painful for me to walk the path of the
patient’s despair, i.e., the patient’s reality, patients are likely to feel not understood.

In relational Gestalt therapy the therapy is co-constructed by the therapist and patient. The
patient is not led somewhere by the therapist. We practice the paradoxical theory of change.
This does not mean that the therapist automatically accommodates to every aspect of the
patient’s subjectivity. The work is in bringing together the therapist’s actual experience and
expertise and the patient’s so that a true dialectical transformation can occur out of what
happens between them.

Gary Yontef
Los Angeles, January 1999