This is an introduction to Gestalt Therapy, invented by Fritz Perls, presented by Glenn Berger, PhD. I learned the method at the Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy in New York, under the auspices of Alan Cohen. I cover the discovery of Gestalt, contrasts to analysis, Field Theory, Figure/Ground, Contact Boundary, the Need Cycle, Layers of the Personality, Awareness, I/Thou, existential phenomenological method, and the goals of Gestalt therapy.

1. Gestalt Therapy
An Introduction

2. What are you aware of right now?
• Body
• Environment
• Thoughts
• Feelings
• Stories
• Judgments

3. How Fritz Perls Invented Gestalt
Facing reality is the cure.

4. Fritz Perls 1893 - 1970

5. A Reaction to Analysis
• Contactful/Isolating
Health comes from full contact. The therapy
room is a place to experiment with contact.
Analysis removes contact, believing that if you
isolate something you can experiment on it.
Gestalt view is that everything exists within a
field, and you cannot remove a person from
their surround.

6. A Reaction to Analysis
• Relational/Transference
Exploring fantasies based on the past keeps
people in unreality.

7. A Reaction to Analysis
• Present-Centered/Historical
Gestalt is interested in how you interrupt, not
why.

8. A Reaction to Analysis
• Active/Passive
It is a misconception of human reality to reify
processes into things. You can go to the book
club about heaven, or go to heaven.

9. A Reaction to Analysis
• Experiential/Cognitive
Learning happens through experience. Cognitive
understanding has a limited effect on changing
patterns of being.

10. A Reaction to Analysis
• Holistic/Analytical
Analysis separates. Gestalt unifies
mind, feeling, body, spirit.

11. A Reaction to Analysis
• Process/Content
The analytical method of focusing on content
keeps the person out of contact with themselves
and others.

12. Figure/Ground
Gestalt Psychology - We form wholes out of data
• Man is the meaning making animal
• Figures form in a process
• A clear figure is formed on the basis of need, and
freedom of the apparatus
• A clear figure leads to need satisfaction
• Truth is emergent
• The formation of a clear figure, or gestalt, is the
cure.

13. Figure/Ground
Langer, in Philosophy in a New Key stated that ". . . the
brain is actively translating experiences into symbols, in
fulfillment of a basic need to do so. It carries on a
constant process of ideation." In fact, "symbolization is
the essential act of mind." That which occurs at the
meeting place of self and environment is mediated by a
symbolic process. As James Hillman put it, ". . . this
concatenation of inner and outer . . . we (called) a
symbol." This is where experience occurs. Experience
and perception is an active process, and, each of us
creates a representation of self and other.

14. Figure/Ground
Gestalt Psychology - We form wholes out of data
• Man is the meaning making animal
• Figures form in a process
• A clear figure is formed on the basis of
need, and freedom of the apparatus
• A clear figure leads to need satisfaction
• Truth is emergent
• The formation of a clear figure, or gestalt, is the
cure.

15. Figure/Ground
A figure is the result of our natural process of organizing complex
experience into meaningful wholes through delineation and
differentiation. The figure is what results from separating an
interactional pattern between world and self out and making it
something particular. By the nature of the figure’s complexity it
reflects desire and gives rise to emotion. It is pervaded with a
quality of identity. It can motivate action. When fully realized
the figure results in a unity and completion. This realized
representation of a need, thought, emotion, action and
satisfaction pattern is what is called a gestalt, where gestalt
means a complete form or figure.

16. The Gestalt
• The gestalt is the whole that is more than the
sum of the parts.
• The tendency of mind to form data in patterns
with meaning.

17. Figure/Ground
Gestalt Psychology - We form wholes out of data
• Man is the meaning making animal
• Figures form in a process
• A clear figure is formed on the basis of need, and
freedom of the apparatus
• A clear figure leads to need satisfaction
• Truth is emergent
• The formation of a clear figure, or gestalt, is the
cure.

18. Figure/Ground
The greater our capacity for gestalt
formation, or the realization of highly delineated
and differentiated figures, the greater our
awareness and the deeper our experience of
self, and the more capable we are of
meeting, and interacting with, the other. Such
figure formation activity leads to
identity, agency, meaning, understanding, and
significance.

19. The Gestalt Goal
The capacity to form clearly
delineated, differentiated, complex figures spontaneously
in an interactive process of meeting the environment is
one way of defining the realization of the human being.
As Perls, Hefferline and Goodman put it in Gestalt
Therapy, ". . . the achievement of a strong gestalt is itself
the cure . . . the contact is heightened, the awareness
brightened and the behavior energized. The figure of
contact is not a sign of, but is itself the creative
integration of experience."

20. The Gestalt Goal
Our freedom comes from our ability to not be
limited by rigid, stereotypical interpretations of
ourselves and the world, but to continuously
expand our repertoire of possible
interpretations, and to see ourselves and the
world in more and more nuanced and complex
ways.

21. The Need Cycle
• Need
• Emotion
• Action
• Satisfaction

22. The Contact Boundary
• The figure rises out of the background field at
the place where our need meets the
surround. This process point, where “inner”
interacts with “outer,” is called the Contact
Boundary.

23. Interruptions at the Contact Boundary
• Limited means of interpreting data that leads to an impoverishment
of awareness.
•
The normal fluidity of these processes becomes habitually
disturbed.
• Contact boundary disturbances describe habits in which a response
manifests in the individual even though the original circumstances
under which the disturbance may have had adaptive value
(e.g., threat of punishment for speaking out) are not present
(e.g., speaking the truth to others will not engender punishment).
When one of these contact boundary disturbances occurs, the
Gestalt Cycle is interrupted: a gestalt remains incomplete. . . .there
remains unfinished business.

24. Interruptions at the Contact Boundary
• Projection
• Retroflection
• Introjection
• Confluence
These processes narrow meaning, choice, and
action. Used stereotypically, they define
pathology.

25. Interruptions in the Need Cycle
• Lack of awareness of need
• Lack of awareness of emotion
• Non-action
• Non-satisfaction

26. Unfinished Business
• Example:
• I want to be in a relationship.
• My mother taught me I am
worthless.(Introjection)
• I imagine I will be rejected. (projection)
• I want to talk to that person, but I get drunk
instead. (retroflection)
• I leave the party.(unfinished business)

27. Layers of the Personality
• Games Layer
• Impasse Layer
• Hurt-Child Layer
• Death Layer
• Life Layer

28. Games Layer
Indirect, manipulative communication patterns.
Example:
She says: Did you check the kid’s car seat?
He says: That’s a stupid question!

29. Hurt Child Layer
Direct experience and expression of historical
“unfinished business.”
Example:
Whenever you ask me a question, I am reminded
of my mother beating me. I am scared you are
telling me I am doing something wrong and I will
be punished for it.

30. Death Layer
The deeply resisted mourning of the lost
existential opportunity.
Example:
I am grieving because I will never have the
mother I need.

31. Life Layer
The freeing of energy that was bound in the
resistance.
Example:
All things are possible now that I don’t need you
to be my mother.

32. Awareness
Phenomenological method
The goal of a phenomenological exploration is
awareness. This exploration deepens one’s self
concept, and provides freedom of choice.

33. Awareness
To promote this phonomenological method, the
therapist:
• Cultivates Beginner’s Mind
• No interpretation
• Authentic, non-hierarchical relationship
between therapist and client

34. Tracking Process
• Staying with the client’s experience.
So for you, you can’t imagine that you will ever find someone to
love.
• A deep entering of the client’s experience without judgment.
You have a core conviction that because you are so ugly you will
never be loved. Then, you suddenly feel hatred of your father.
• Observation of what is.
I notice you smile when you say that you want your father dead.

35. Operationalize
• If your smile could speak, what would it say.
• Could you say that directly to your father?
• Could you squeeze this pillow like you were
strangling him?

36. I/Thou
• The relationship between the therapist and the client is the most important aspect
of psychotherapy. Dialogue is an essential part of Gestalt therapy's methodology.
• Relationship grows out of contact. Through contact people grow and form
identities. Contact is the experience of interacting with the not-me while
maintaining a self-identity separate from the not-me. Gestalt therapists prefer
experiencing the patient in dialogue to using therapeutic manipulation (I-It).
• Gestalt therapy helps clients develop their own support for desired contact or
withdrawal (L. Perls, 1976, 1978). Support refers to anything that makes contact or
withdrawal possible. Support mobilizes resources for contact or withdrawal.
• The Gestalt therapist works by engaging in dialogue rather than by manipulating
the patient toward some therapeutic goal. Such contact is marked by
straightforward caring, warmth, acceptance and self-responsibility. When
therapists move patients toward some goal, the patients cannot be in charge of
their own growth and self-support. Dialogue is based on experiencing the other
person as he or she really is and showing the true self, sharing phenomenological
awareness. The Gestalt therapist says what he or she means and encourages the
patient to do the same. Gestalt dialogue embodies authenticity and responsibility.

37. I/Thou
Dialogical relationship
• Presence
• Authenticity
• Acceptance
• Validation

38. The Empty Chair
• Working With Polarities
• The top dog/underdog game
• Bringing the client to the impasse and leaving
them there

39. The Gestalt Ideal
An experiencing that is vital, free and
spontaneous, which inventor of Gestalt
therapy, Fritz Perls, would call aliveness itself.

40. Bibliography
• Frederick S. Perls, “Finding Self Through Gestalt Therapy,” The
Gestalt Journal under “Cooper Union Forum – Lecture Series: “The
Self” http://www.gestalt.org/self.htm (accessed December
26, 2009).
• James Hillman, Emotion (London: Routledge, 1999), 253.
• Richard Bandler and John Grinder, The Structure of Magic (Palo
Alto: Science and Behavior Books, 1975), 7
• “Gestalt,” Art Term
Glossary, http://www.khsd.k12.ca.us/bhs/Perry/art%20vocabulary.
htm (accessed December 27, 2009).
• Frederick Perls, John Goodman, Ralph Hefferline Gestalt Therapy (
Highland: Gestalt Journal Press, 1977), 232.
• Frederick Perls, The Gestalt Approach & Eye Witness to Therapy
(Ben Lomond: Science & Behavior Books, 1973), 102.

41. Glenn Berger PhD
www.GlennBerger.net
917 596 0650
GlennSBergerPhD@gmail.com

42. Resources
Gestalt Therapy Institute of Los Angeles
http://www.gtila.org/
Gestalt Institute of Cleveland
http://www.gestaltcleveland.org/index.php
Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy, New York
http://www.gestaltassociates.org/
Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California
http://www.esalen.org/page/our-story