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Frederick Perls, Ralph F. Hefferline and Paul Goodman: Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. London: Souvenir Press

Gestalt therapy is probably one of the most misunderstood approaches in counselling. Most counselling students (unlike Gloria!!!), after watching the 'Gloria video' are horrified by Perls's technique.

In fact, Gestalt therapy is just as a humanistic approach as many others and an attentive reader of this book will agree with me. However, attentive reading is required, as the book, especially the second part is not very accessible - one cannot read it like a novel.

The book consists of two distinct parts (or volumes as the authors call them). The first volume is more practical: it discusses the technique and exercises in Gestalt Therapy. The second part sets out the philosophical and theoretical foundations of this approach.

The Central European roots of the therapy (Gestalt means constitution in German) are everywhere. Let me list a few of them:

• The theory has strong traces of dialectics (unlike those approaches that emerged in the Anglo-Saxon word), for example, the way Perls interprets the relationships between figure and ground and the human interacting with them could have come directly from a dialectic logic book.
• Although Perls's version of Gestalt emerged from the critique of Freud, in the second volume one finds that Perls approved a large proportion of Freud's theoretical propositions.
• The strong interest in the context is evident in the way Perls describes pathological phenomena: none of these are pathological in isolation, only in relationship with the context.
• Many of the exercises are based on authority relationships between the therapist and the client. When conducting (but only then!) the exercises, the therapist is not simply Mr. Perls, but a superior or authority.

However, it would be false to overplay the Central European influence in Gestalt. The way Perls perceives human nature and needs is through and through Anglo-Saxon and, as most approaches, it became a public success in the USA.

As I mentioned before, Gestalt is in fact a humanistic approach. Its main concern is not simply the client, but the relationship between the client and the reality (thus, unlike in many cognitive approaches, reality has an independent existence in Gestalt) - for Gestalt the aim of therapy is to remove the obstacles from the healthy interaction between them, thus the obstacles to growth.

I can only hope that both practitioners and students will find at least elements of the approach and its techniques interesting and worth a thought.

© Dolores James

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