Manual of Gestalt Practice in the Tradition of Dick Price

By The Gestalt Legacy Project

This is the eBook version of the manual of Gestalt Practice in the tradition of Dick Price, compiled by The Gestalt Legacy Project.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257166787

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Manual of Gestalt Practice in the Tradition of Dick Price

Manual of Gestalt Practice in the Tradition of Dick Price

by

John F. Callahan for The Gestalt Legacy Project

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Manual of Gestalt Practice in the Tradition of Dick Price

Revised Edition

ISBN: 978-1-257-16678-7

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Copyright © 2009, 2014 by John F. Callahan for The Gestalt Legacy Project

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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Do not publish or sell in any form, by itself or as part of another work, without express written permission.

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Foreword

Many great ideas get lost. This manual is designed to prevent that from happening in one important instance.

The tradition of Gestalt practice that was started by Dick Price is at risk of being lost. Dick was co-founder of Esalen Institute and a student of Fritz Perls, the man who initially developed Gestalt Therapy. At Esalen, Dick took Gestalt out of the therapist’s office. He broadened it into something that he called Gestalt practice, based upon what he had learned from Fritz, and also upon his experiences with East Asian religions and meditation practices. But Dick left no written record of his ideas. This text is designed to preserve Dick’s largely oral tradition, which has been refined over the last twenty-five years by Gestalt practitioners who have been part of Dick’s legacy.

Gestalt[1] is a powerful practice that is accessible to anybody. The whole point of the process is to develop self-awareness, self-responsibility, and integrity. So, ideally, Gestalt becomes something that is a part of the way people encounter both themselves and each other, as stewards of their own integration and facilitators for others.

As Dick conceived it, a person doesn't need to have a clinical Ph.D. in order to start using Gestalt techniques. It is perfectly acceptable for somebody to do a Gestalt session with a partner while sitting in a meeting room at work, or in their living room at home. Anybody can start doing Gestalt practice right now. But, like meditation, everybody needs a little guidance to get started.

This text will inform the uninformed about how Gestalt practice works, so they can begin to do Gestalt on their own, and so they can walk into a Gestalt group with some idea about what’s going to happen. Also, this manual is designed to give anyone who is thinking about leading a Gestalt group some basic ideas about how to get started and what to expect.

The concept behind this manual is to provide a thorough, yet accessible background for Gestalt work, along with practical exercises that everyone can try out immediately, either personally, with a partner, or in a group setting. But instead of expounding lengthy theoretical discussions about Gestalt, the objective here is to get people right into the practice as soon as possible, both as initiators of their own work, and as reflectors for other people’s work. That’s the way Dick would have wanted it.

The following manual is based upon the practice that Dick Price developed. It is derived, in part, from the teachings of Christine Stewart Price, Dick’s wife who carried on his tradition, Dorothy Charles, a practitioner who Dick trained, and Steven Harper, who was one of Dick’s closest friends. Ultimately, this manual is intended to be a transmission, from these Gestalt practitioners to the future, about the tradition that Dick Price began. The following text will explain the basics of Gestalt practice - what to do and how to do it - so that, later on, new practitioners will be able to build upon Dick’s ideas and methods.

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[1] A definition of the word Gestalt, from the perspective of practice, appears in the Gestalt Glossary.

Dick Price - A Dedication

Dick Price was handsome, innovative, charismatic and sometimes crazy. Because of his friendship with Michael Murphy, Dick was able to start Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. For many years, up until his death, Dick ran Esalen as a center for healing and experimentation. He made the place work with his genius for process and with his genuine physical labor. In the 1960s a short, fat, and occasionally obnoxious German therapist named Fritz Perls brought a new brand of psychotherapy to Esalen Institute called Gestalt Therapy. For about twenty years after that, Gestalt Therapy was popular among mainstream psychotherapists. Then it faded into the background during the cognitive revolution that popularized CBT. But, by this time, Dick Price had already borrowed many of Fritz’s techniques, and combined them with what he had learned about meditation practice. Dick stirred this mixture in the pot of California counter-culture and produced a new form of personal exploration, distinguished from therapy by the name Gestalt practice, and this became the most enduring product of Dick’s Esalen experiment.

Dick Price was born in Chicago in 1930. Herman, his father, was a Lithuanian Jew who changed his last name and became a prosperous success-oriented Sears executive. Dick’s mother, Audrey, was a Dutch-Irish woman from Indiana, who was troubled by issues of family background and status, like so many other matrons in the confused nouveau riche social world of the North Chicago suburbs. Dick decided to attend Stanford, where he graduated in 1952, with a degree in psychology. Dick started graduate school at Harvard, but dropped out after becoming frustrated with the research-oriented faculty. Then Dick joined the Air Force and moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area. His armed forces assignment can only be described as silly. So Dick ended up spending most of his time at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, where he found Stanford Professor Frederic Spiegelberg, and other fringy luminaries. Dick also hung out in North Beach with people like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. At the same time, Dick married his first wife Bonnie, a dancer, in a Zen ceremony that offended Dick’s parents. His Beatnik lifestyle finally caught up with Dick when he flipped out, experiencing a manic episode in a pub on Grant Avenue. He was taken away in an ambulance, hospitalized, and wrongly diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Eventually he was discharged from the Air Force.

In 1956 Dick ended up back in Chicago. Herman had Dick committed to a private mental institution in Connecticut where he was essentially tortured with electroshock and insulin shock treatments. Audrey had Dick’s marriage annulled while he was institutionalized. Dick escaped briefly, and was finally released with Herman’s consent.

In 1960 Dick returned to San Francisco, where he ran into a fellow Stanford graduate, Michael Murphy. Michael’s family owned an old hot springs resort on the coast, south of Monterey. In 1962 these two friends started Esalen Institute there, with the help of people like Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and Gregory Bateson. Dick’s objective was to create an alternative environment where people could live through whatever process they needed to, in safe isolation from mental hospitals and misguided professionals. The rest is history...as they say. Dick became a master of Gestalt. Esalen ran on the sweat of Dick’s brow, until he was killed in late 1985, working on the water supply back up in a canyon.

1. Gestalt Practice

We Gestalt students were drawn to the approach not only because of the theory and method but also because of the implicit belief that we were going to change the world for the better. --Ed Nevis

Gestalt practice is not just another form of psychotherapy. Currently, psychotherapy is a collection of cognitive, behavioral and pharmacological methods for the treatment of carefully diagnosed symptoms. In contrast, Gestalt practice addresses the suffering that arises from a poverty of being.[2] The distinct advantage of this approach for Gestalt practitioners[3] is that they are liberated from the culture wars of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, as well as the marketing strategies of pharmaceutical companies.

Gestalt practice is a phenomenological-existential process of self discovery. (See Section 14 of this Manual for a brief explanation of phenomenology and existentialism.) Basically, Gestalt is an awareness practice in which the experience of present sensing, perceiving, feeling and behaving is emphasized over interpretation. In Gestalt practice, analysis is considered less reliable than the direct experience of life.

The objective of a Gestalt reflector is to facilitate the work of a Gestalt initiator, to assist them in the process of  becoming more fully alive - free from the unfinished business and intrapsychic blocks that inhibit satisfaction, creativity and growth (initiator and reflector are defined in the Glossary). To accomplish this task, Gestalt practice concentrates upon those aspects of an initiator’s experience that are considered most important - namely, the initiator’s awareness in the present moment, the initiator’s capacity for self-regulation and satisfaction of their needs, and the initiator’s relationships, including the model relationship with the reflector. The overall objective is to help the initiator become more aware of their needs, so they can take responsibility for satisfying those needs in a transparent way.

Here and Now

Gestalt focuses upon what exists here and now. Initiators of Gestalt work are alerted to the difference between talking about what occurred in the past - be that yesterday or their childhood - as opposed to experiencing what is happening right now. In Gestalt practice an initiator learns to discriminate between their memories and the present, between habitual patterns of behaving and new ways of being.

A Gestalt practitioner assists an initiator to directly experience their ongoing process of being-in-the-world. Gestalt practice teaches a person how to manage their internal and external awareness so they can become more self-supportive within the horizon of their own environment. Through here-and-now experiments, awareness is enhanced, and the initiator of work discovers their capacity for self-regulation and self-responsibility.

The Gestalt goal of direct awareness is more potent than abstract discussion. Most therapeutic systems encourage intellectualizing - talking about the irrationality of thinking and beliefs, or talking about behavioral changes. Instead, the Gestalt method utilizes active techniques. Experience is the focus of continuing experimentation. In Gestalt practice the objective is to enhance the process of awareness by expanding the horizons of experience, rather than through thinking about the content of experience.

Process

The process of life is an ongoing rhythm of equilibration between needs and satisfaction. All living beings process energy and information. Process is fundamental to life. For this reason, Gestalt practice depends more upon process - the living experience of what is happening right now - rather than what that experience means. So the emphasis is upon what is being done, sensed and felt in the present moment, instead of what might be or should have been. The goal for an initiator is to learn how to become aware of what they are sensing, what they are feeling, what they are doing, and how they are doing it, and, at the same time, how to enhance their capacity for awareness. Dick Price’s maxim for Gestalt practice was, Trust process, support process, and get out of the way. Following this maxim, a Gestalt practitioner does not attempt to program the initiator’s experience.

Inclusion

In order to accomplish these basic goals, a Gestalt reflector creates an environment of inclusion for an initiator. The practitioner does this by attending to their own presence, while allowing freedom for the initiator to become present as well. The practitioner fully accepts the initiator’s current ongoing process, yielding to whatever takes place, rather than attempting to control what happens. This practice of inclusion involves accepting with equanimity the initiator’s manner of making contact, whether aggressive, defensive, compliant or superficial, without surrendering either personal autonomy or self-respect. Practicing inclusion supports the initiator’s genuine existence, just as they are, along with whatever resistance they may display, as an affirmation of their being and worth.

Gestalt uses the mutual presence of reflector and initiator, together in a relationship based upon genuine contact and empathy. A Gestalt practitioner shows up as an authentic human being, instead of merely assuming a role. Analytic ideas about transference are not pursued in Gestalt practice. Interpersonal issues that may arise between the initiator and reflector are explicitly confronted by encounter, with both practitioners present as real people. Besides engendering a sense of inclusion, such encounters generate heightened awareness, and serve as models for healthy relationships.

Gestalt process minimizes the practitioner as an authority figure, in order to support the initiator’s self-discovery. Idealized, authoritarian or charismatic psychotherapists can actually impede an initiator’s personal growth. Furthermore, there are no should-s in Gestalt. This approach contrasts with therapeutic techniques in which a therapist knows what a patient should do. Instead of emphasizing what should happen, Gestalt practice emphasizes awareness of what is actually happening, right now.

Gestalt practice values holism. Its aim is integration. Gestalt works with the full range of biological, emotional, environmental and extrasensory experience. It uses all the physical, perceptual, cognitive and spiritual aspects of both practitioners’ existence. Healthy attachment and interactions with others are essential to a full life. Thus, Gestalt practice addresses the whole person, embodied in relationship and transcendence.

Foundations

The three main foundational elements of Gestalt practice are phenomenology, existentialism and encounter. Phenomenology is a philosophical discipline that serves as an important underpinning for awareness practice. Phenomenology is a technique that allows a person to reorient their usual frame of reference, so that they can directly experience the objects of their awareness, without the interference of preexisting ideas and interpretations. Gestalt practice regards what is subjectively perceived in the present moment as that which is real and worthy of attention. This contrasts with a therapist’s approach that treats a patient’s troubling experiences merely as symptoms, either attempting to remodel them, or using interpretation to deconstruct them.

A study of the process by which one becomes aware is crucial to any complete phenomenological investigation. A phenomenologist studies not only the content of awareness, but also the awareness process itself. Similarly, Gestalt practice uses guided awareness exercises and experimentation. By using these practices, an initiator learns about the process of becoming aware, and how to direct bare awareness.

The phenomenological method is designed to systematically avoid the effects of preexisting cognitive dispositions, through the repeated practice of observation and inquiry. The method initially sets aside bias or prejudice in order to suspend preexisting assumptions. It emphasizes description rather than explanation. It favors immediate and specific observation, abstaining from interpretation. Every detail of the description of an experience is treated as having equal value and significance. This avoids any comparative assignment of importance that might cause details to become categorized or privileged. The goal of this phenomenological practice is simple awareness without judgment.

Field Theory

One aspect of the phenomenological approach that has become especially relevant to Gestalt practice is known as field theory. The phenomenal world of an individual can be conceptualized as a field, having both an environmental dimension and a personal dimension. The environmental dimension consists of the external milieu in which an individual lives. Alternatively, the personal dimension consists of cognitive, sensory and perceptual experiences, including all subjective phenomena. The totality of a person’s experience is characterized by shifting awareness within the unified field of their external and internal worlds. Ideally, a Gestalt practitioner becomes attuned to the field dynamics of an initiator, in order to work effectively with the way they organize their awareness.

From the perspective of field theory, the self is a phenomenological concept that organizes awareness. This self concept is created by interaction between self and other. Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychologist, adopted a phenomenological perspective to develop his theory of the self concept, which he described as the total Gestalt of all the ways people experience themselves and others. How the other is experienced depends upon the experience of self, and visa versa. The continuity of selfhood is a characteristic of the field, rather than something inherently inside the person. For Rogers, psychological maladjustment exists when the organism denies awareness of those experiences that consequently cannot be organized into a Gestalt of the self. However, according to Rogers, when a person is able to accept all their experiences, they are able to form an integrated self concept. From the Rogerian perspective, maladjustment is the rigidity of an underdeveloped self concept, existing within an indistinct and truncated field of experience. In Gestalt practice, the operant paradigm is the unbiased exploration of all experiences that might contribute to an initiator’s phenomenal field - whether or not those experiences are troublesome or pleasurable, boring or exciting. The objective of this method of practice is to facilitate the ability of a person to become an integrated self, embedded in their field.

Existentialism

Just as phenomenology is at the foundation of existentialism, Gestalt is fundamentally an existential process. Existentialism focuses upon immediate existence - the challenges of life as directly experienced, including the experience of relationships with others. Most people function in the abstract context of conventional thought that obscures or avoids acknowledging what actually exists. This is especially true of one’s awareness of the world and one’s choices in it.

Self-deception is the basis of an inauthentic life - a life that is not based upon the truth of one’s existence in the world. Inauthentic living leads to feelings of emptiness and guilt. The existential ideal assumes that people endlessly reinvent themselves by means of the choices they make. There are always new challenges and new opportunities to be encountered. By developing their capacity for awareness, people become able to choose. Then they can begin to meaningfully organize their own existence. Gestalt practice teaches people how to become authentic, and how to take responsibility for their choices.

Relationship

Another important foundational element of Gestalt practice is the relationship between reflector and initiator - a relationship that ideally models transparent interpersonal contact. Based upon an existential understanding of relationship, encounter forms an essential part of Gestalt methodology.

Contact is the experience of the boundary between self and the other. It is the experience of interacting with the other, while maintaining self-identity. Through contact, people grow and develop identity. Through encounter, relationships grow out of that contact.

Encounter cultivates skills for healthy contact. Gestalt practice teaches people how to develop adequate support for encountering others. This support provides the resources that make contact possible - including physical support, breathing, clear perception, excitement, empathy, and straightforward talking. Adequate access to all of these resources is necessary for maintaining satisfactory contact.

Encounter is based upon the experience of another person as they really are, while showing one’s true self and genuinely sharing one’s awareness. Such contact is marked by caring, warmth, acceptance and self-responsibility. Encounter embodies authenticity and responsibility. Martin Buber said that a person (an I) has meaning only in relation to another person (a Thou or an It), either in a genuine I-Thou encounter, or in a manipulative I-It transaction. When a therapist manipulates the therapeutic process toward a specific behavioral goal, the patient cannot take charge of their own growth and self-support. For this reason, a Gestalt practitioner works with an initiator through a genuine I-Thou encounter, rather than by therapeutic manipulation.

The existential relationship established between initiator and reflector in Gestalt practice accentuates the empathetic characteristic of encounter. This requires the reflector to enter, as fully as possible, into the experience of an initiator without judgment, while simultaneously retaining a sense of separateness and autonomy. Empathy provides an environment of safety for the initiator’s work. By emphasizing the importance of their experience, empathetic contact helps to promote the initiator’s self-awareness.

Presence

Another characteristic of encounter is presence, which is the genuine experience of being. A Gestalt refector expresses their genuine experience to an initiator, by regularly communicating their observations, feelings, personal experience and thoughts. A Gestalt practitioner models reporting of their own awareness, which helps the initiator learn about genuine communication. If the practitioner were to rely solely upon theory-based interventions, rather than genuine personal presence, they would lead the initiator into dependence upon ideas, instead of transparent interpersonal relationships.

An additional aspect of presence is its existential quality as an immediate experience - being thrown into the ongoing fabric of time. Gestalt incorporates the idea that a genuine encounter is something actually lived, rather than something merely talked about. This kind of experience emphasizes energy, excitement and immediacy. Besides talking, the mode of such an encounter might include movement, song, touch, painting, or any other method of expression that communicates one’s immediate presence. Gestalt practice widens the margins of communication through the use of nonverbal expression, and in this way it encourages transparent sharing between real people.

Theory of Personality

The Gestalt theory of personality evolved primarily out of the clinical experiences of Fritz Perls. His focus was upon development of a model that supported the work of personal growth, instead of the formulation of an academic theory of personality traits. So the constructs of Gestalt personality theory are based upon here-and-now practice, rather than etiology. They are experiential rather than hypothetical.

The Contact Boundary

According to Gestalt personality theory, a person exists by differentiating self from other, and by connecting self with other. These are the two functions that take place at the contact boundary. In order to make good contact, it is necessary to discover one’s own boundaries and risk reaching out. Effective self-regulation includes contact. During the process of making contact a person becomes aware of novelty in the environment that is potentially either nourishing or toxic. Ideally, that which is nourishing is assimilated, and that which is toxic is rejected. This kind of differentiated contact leads to growth.

Needs, Discrimination and Homeostasis

In Gestalt practice, metabolism is used as a fundamental metaphor for psychological functioning. People have needs. They grow by satisfying needs - by taking in a piece of the environment, whether food, or ideas, or relationships. Then they digest what they take in, mull it over, and discover whether it is nourishing or toxic. Ideally, if it is nourishing, they assimilate it, making it part of themselves, and they grow as a result. Ideally, if it is toxic, they reject it, and expel it out of themselves. In psychological terms this process requires a person to be willing to trust themselves and their faculties of discrimination.

Discrimination requires active sensing of external stimuli, and processing of those stimuli, along with the internal responses they elicit. Thus, discrimination requires awareness of the boundary experience. The boundary between self and environment must be kept permeable in order to allow exchanges, yet firm enough to maintain autonomy. The environment may contain toxins that need to be screened out. And even consumption of nourishment must be regulated according to how much is needed.

These quasi-metabolic processes are governed by the function of homeostasis. The satisfaction of needs, by contacting and assimilating aspects of the environment, maintains homeostasis. Ideally, the most urgent need energizes the organism until that need is met, or until it is superseded by another emerging need. Living is a progression of needs, with satisfaction of one need achieving momentary homeostatic balance, followed by the next moment with its new need.

When the boundary between self and other becomes dissolved and unclear, or rigid and impermeable - in other words, when awareness is impaired - there is a disturbance of the distinction between self and other - a disturbance of contact. With good boundary functioning, people alternate between connecting and separating, between contacting and withdrawing. But this natural rhythm of contact and withdrawal can be upset by disturbance of the contact boundary.

The Resistances

The contact boundary can be lost, in opposite ways, by confluence or isolation. With confluence, the separation and distinction between self and other becomes so unclear that the boundary dissolves. (The standard example of confluence is a nursing infant.) There is only clinging. There is no withdrawal. But in isolation, the boundary becomes so impermeable that any connection is blocked, and the meaning of others for the self is lost from awareness. Need is repressed. There is no contact. Other contact boundary aberrations like these can be described as the resistances of retroflection, introjection, projection or deflection.

Retroflection is a split within the self, and a turning back upon the self. This substitutes self for environment, as in doing to one’s self what one wants to do to someone else, or doing for one’s self what one wants someone else to do. Self-inflicted harm can result from retroflected anger, otherwise properly directed toward another. The illusion of self-sufficiency is another example of retroflection, because it substitutes self for environment, and fantasy for fulfillment. This mechanism leads to isolation. However, retroflected behavior may be functional temporarily, in special circumstances - for example, when someone decides to hold their tongue instead of saying something damaging.

Introjection is a process by which an aspect of the environment is absorbed without discrimination or assimilation. Introjected values and behaviors are self-imposed limitations, adopted from others without independent evaluation. Typically, the child of an overbearing parent will adopt values that are not necessarily appropriate. Swallowing whole creates a false self. But, as with all boundary disturbances, swallowing whole can be either healthy or pathological, depending upon the circumstances and the degree of awareness with which it is done. For example, a student who crams before an exam may be able to memorize and regurgitate answers, at least temporarily, without fully assimilating the information.

Projection is a split within the self, accompanied by confusion of self and other, which results in attributing to an outside entity the split-off aspect that truly belongs to the self. In other words, we see in others (and sometimes other things) the split-off parts of ourselves. Of course, without some degree of projection there would be no communication, because we need to create an initial theory of what another person is like in order to make contact with them. But pathological projection results from not being aware of, and not accepting responsibility for, those facets of the self that are mistakenly attributed to the other. The boundary distinction is lost.

Deflection is the avoidance of contact by physical, rhetorical or emotional turning away. Typically, this happens when someone is evasive, instead of being direct. Deflection can be a way of not expressing needs directly, or it can be used by someone who is unable to receive. In the former case, the person is ineffectual, and is upset by not getting what they want. In the latter case, the person usually feels untouched by genuine human contact. Of course, deflection can be useful, if practiced with awareness, depending upon the needs of the situation - for instance, where a difficult interpersonal interaction needs to be avoided. Other examples of deflection include not looking at a person, verbosity, vagueness, understating, and talking about someone rather than talking directly to them.

Organismic Self-regulation

Boundary disturbances have negative effects upon self-regulation. To varying degrees personal regulation is either organismic, based upon a relatively full and accurate awareness of what is really happening, or it is mechanistic, based upon the arbitrary imposition of some inappropriate form of control. Ideally, there is only one thing that controls - namely, the situation - not some premeditated program of behavior built upon the failure of robust contact. Real self-regulation does not come from some kind of artificial program of self-control. Real self-regulation comes from open contact and awareness of the immediate situation, including one’s own present needs, rather than according to what should happen.

Needing, choosing and assimilation happen holistically through an organismic process of self-regulation - with natural integration of mind and body, thought and feeling - and with spontaneity. But in mechanistic regulation, rigid patterns of premeditated behavior over-control the response, and splitting of the self takes place. There is no longer an integrated sense of a being that functions as a whole. Instead, there is conflict.

Lack of integration is characterized by splits within the self - between mind and body, thought and feeling, good and bad, infantilism and maturity. However, Gestalt practice can stimulate an internal dialogue between these poles, and a relationship can be re-established between these split-off constituents of the self, bringing them back toward integration. With awareness, all these splits - for example, between the ideal self and the needy child, between