Relational Gestalt Practice: Key Concepts

By The Gestalt Legacy Project

This text is the eBook version of key concepts for Relational Gestalt Practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312138421

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Relational Gestalt Practice: Key Concepts

Relational Gestalt Practice

Relational Gestalt Practice: Key Concepts

ISBN: 978-1-312-13842-1

Copyright © 2014

John F. Callahan for The Gestalt Legacy Project

Dorothy Charles and Barclay James Erickson

All rights reserved. For private use only. This material may be reproduced for personal, non-commercial purposes if all copyright notations are retained without alteration. Not to be reproduced for profitable use or distribution. Do not publish or sell in any form, by itself or as part of another work, without express written permission.

Introduction:

Richard (Dick) Price was the co-founder of Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and the developer of Gestalt Practice. Dorothy Charles and Barclay James (Eric) Erickson were students of Dick Price. After Dick died in 1985, Dorothy and Eric went on to develop Relational Gestalt Practice. Both taught at Esalen Institute for many years. 

Eric Erickson died in Big Sur, California, in September 2013. In order to memorialize Eric’s work, the following teacher’s reference was transcribed from Eric’s notes with only minor changes, by agreement with Dorothy Charles and Eric’s inheritor. The text provides insight into Eric and Dorothy’s approach to Gestalt Practice, based upon intersubjective process theory. This approach can be understood as an extension of Dick Price’s message/program/filter theory of practice.

Dorothy Charles continues to teach Relational Gestalt Practice, as co-founder of a new Gestalt center called Tribal Ground Circle in Aptos, California. See: http://dorothycharles.com/

--John F. Callahan, April 2014

Key Concepts

Why is Gestalt Practice a Process?

One definition of the word process is to gain an understanding or acceptance of or to come to terms with.

Another, perhaps even more useful meaning of the word process for our purposes is to discuss the emotional meaning of something.

Using Gestlalt’s conception of figure/ground meaning, and especially emotional meaning, can be seen to be revealed, uncovered, or discovered in terms of the relationship between the figure and the ground, that is, between the current figure in a person’s awareness and the ground – here understood as the entire history of a person’s experiencing (the person’s experiential world).

From a process perspective, every thing that exists, exists in relation to other things. This being so, every thing that exists is always involved in an ongoing relational process. It is through its relationships to other things (i.e. the full context) that something is defined, never the thing per se, by and of itself.

A process view, assumes that relationship and interdependence are fundamental to understanding.

In Gestalt terms, any figure can only be understood in relation to its relevant ground or field (its context).

Another reason to take a process view is to align Gestalt with a post Cartesian or post modern epistemology (theory of knowledge) that has emerged in the sciences, philosophy, and psychology, which seeks to dethrone the Cartesian world view that is, perhaps, best encapsulated by Rene Descartes’ famous dictum cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am).

A post Cartesian world view seeks to replace the Cartesian idea that the mind is a rational, disembodied container of mental contents (a fundamentally non-relational, representational theory of mind) with a view of the mind as being fundamentally both embodied and embedded (a fully relational theory of mind in which a visceral subject is always acting in a relationally configured experiential world).

Thirteen Key Concepts in Relational Gestalt Practice

We will use the following thirteen key concepts in building a Gestalt Practice Model.

1. A Post Cartesian Epistemology (theory of knowledge)

2. Figure/Ground

3. Experiential Worlds

4. World Horizons

5. The Primacy of Emotion or Affect (in the organization of personal experience)

6. Organizing Principles

7. Transference (re-conceptualized as organizing activity)

8. Longings and Dangers

9. Resistance (conceived in terms of the need for psychological survival)

10. Support

11. Martin Buber’s Conceptualization of Genuine Dialogue

12. Perspectival Realism

13. Fallibilism

1. A Post Cartesian Epistemology (theory of knowledge)

Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am)

--Rene Descartes

When (human) Being directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximately encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always outside alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered … (A) bare subject without a world never ‘is’…

--Martin Heidegger

Cartesian Epistemology: The Doctrine of the Isolated Mind

The Cartesian Isolated Mind is the primary myth of our culture. (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992)

The myth of