GESTALT RECONSIDERED Titles From GICPress ORGA:'-IIZATIONAL CONSULTING: A GFSTALT APPROACH Edwin C. Nevts GFSTALT RECONSIDERED: A NEW APPROACH TO CONTAcr AND RFSISTANCE Cordon Wheeler THE NEUROTIC BEHAVIOR OF ORGANIZATIONS Uri Merry and George /. Brown GFSTALT THERAPY: PERSPECTIVFS AND APPLICATIONS Edwin C. Nevis THE COLLECTIVE SILENCE: GERMAN IDENTITY AND THE LEGACY OF SHAME Barbara Heimannsberg and Christopher J. Schmidt COMMUNITY AND CONFLUENCE: UNDOING THE CLINCH OF OPPRESSION Philip Licluenberg BECOMING A STEPF AMIL Y Patricia Papemow ON INTIMATE GROUND: A GFSTALT APPROACH TO WORKING WITH COUPLFS Cordon Wheeler and Stephanie Backman BODY PROCFSS: WORKING WITH THE BODY IN PSYCHOTHERAPY James I. Kepner HERE, NOW, NEXT: PAUL GOODMAN AND THE ORIGINS OF GFSTALT THERAPY Taylor Stoehr CRAZY HOPE & FINITE EXPERIENCE Paul Goodman and Taylor Stoehr IN SEARCH OF GOOD FORM: GFST ALT THERAPY WITH COUPLFS AND FAMILIFS Joseph C. Zinker THE VOICE OF SHAME: SILENCE AND CONNECTION IN PSYCHOTHERAPY Robert G. Lee and Gordon Wheeler HEALING TASKS: PSYCHOTHERAPY WITH ADULT SURIVIVORS OF CHILDHOOD ABUSE Jame, I. Kepner ADOL£SCENCE: PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE EMERGENT SELF Mark McConville GEIlING BEYOND SOBRIETY: CLINICAL APPROACHFS TO LONG- TERMJlECOVERY Michael Craig Clemmens INTENTIONAL REVOLUTIONS: A SEVEN- POINT STRATEGY FOR TRANSFORMING ORGANIZATIONS Edwin C. Nevis, Joan Lancourt and Helen G. Vassallo IN SEARCH OF SELF: BEYOND INDIVIDUALISM IN WORKING WITH PEOPLE Cordon Wheeler THE HEART OF DEVELOPMENT: GFSTALT APPROACHFS TO WORKING WITH CillLDREN. AOOLfSCENTS. AND THEIR WORLDS ( 2 Volumes) Mark McConville and Gordon Wheeler BACK TO THE BEANSTALK: ENCHANTMENT & REALITY FOR COUPLFS Judith R. Brown THE DREAMER AND THE DREAM: ESSAYS AND REFLECTIONS ON GFSTALT THERAPY Raineue Eden Fantz and Arthur Roberts GFSTALT THERAPY-A NEW PARADIGM: FSSA YS IN GFSTALT THEORY AND MErHOD Sylvia Flemming Crocker THE lJr'.'FOLDING SELF Jean-Marie Rabine GESTALT RECONSIDERED A New Approach to Contact and Resistance GORDON WHEELER, Ph. D. The Gestalt Institute of Cleveland Press COPYRIGHT © 1991, 1998 by GICPress All rights reserved Published by GICPress, Cambridge, Massachusetts Gestalt Institute of Cleveland: 1517 Hazel Drive, Cleveland, Ohio, 44106 Distributed by The Analytic Press, Inc. , Hillsdale, NJ. Library of Congress Card No. 90· 32243 ISBN O· 88163· 248· 1 For Sonia and Edwin Nevis inspired and inspiring mentors, colleagues, friends Acknowledgements for the Second Edition The introduction to the first edition of this book acknowledges stimulation and contributions from a small number of mentors and colleagues-<>f whom I am sad to say a number have since died. Of these I particularly miss my friends and teachers Rennie Fantz, Walter Grossman, and Murray Horwitz. By contrast, my life and work over the last seven years have been enormously enriched by the presence, creativity, support and criticism of a great number of new conversational partners in the Gestalt world, including Penny Backman, Talia bar-Levine Joseph, Jacques Beugre, Michael Borack, Michael Clemmens, Nicole de Schrevel, Eric Erickson, Mariah Fenton-Gladdis, Jay Ferraro, Iris Fodor, Isabel Fredericson, Cynthia and Leo Oudejans Harris, Lynne Jacobs, Dan Jones, Jim Kepner, Mary Ann Kraus, Joel Lamer, Bob Lee, Maryse Mathys, Mark McConville, Joe Melnick, Violet Oaklander, Malcolm Parlett, Arch Roberts, Jean-Marie Robine, Paul Shane, Allan Singer, Taylor Stoehr, and Deborah Ullman. Most of all I want to acknowledge the generous support and gracious community and personal leadership of Edwin C. and Sonia March Nevis, who separately and collectively have taken leading roles in founding the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland itself, the GIC Center for the Study of Intimate Systems, GICPress, GISC and the annual GISC Gestalt Writers' Conference (now in its tenth anniversary year), the Gestalt Review, and not least, the New England Gestalt Study Group. Sonia and Edwin have mentored and stimulated several generations of Gestalt students, teachers, and practitioners now around the globe, and certainly my own work could not be what it has been and is, without their inspiring support and challenge ( in particular, practically everything I have written in the field traces back in one way or another to the stimulation of an argument or discussion over terms and concepts with Sonia) . This new edition of Gestalt Reconsidered is gratefully dedicated to Edwin and Sonia, in fond recognition of their many direct and indirect contributions to my work, my life, and my community. As I wrote in the acknowledgements to In Search of Self, each of them embodies and exemplifies that rarest of all hallmarks of mature generattvlty: the gift for nurturing many children, and then setting them free. Finally, this new edition is particularly graced by the addition of a Preface and an Epilogue, contributed respectively by two gifted and stimulating colleagues in the Gestalt world. Malcolm Parlett is well-known as one of the most distinguished teachers, writers and editors of my own generation in the Gestalt therapy model­ roughly the third generation, if we start counting with Goodman and Perls as the first, and reckon their own gifted students, many of whom were my teachers, as the second. It is an honor to have his perspective here. The Epilogue, by Arthur Roberts, represents a voice from the next, or fourth generation, with considerable emphasis on where this book falls short by raising issues it does not fully answer, as well as on new potentials and pathways for development of the model in a number of creative new directions. It is a great pleasure to introduce this new voice from a new generation to the Gestalt world, and particularly gratifying to think that this book, through its limitations as well as any virtues, may have played some part in opening up or clearing the way for some of the new directions Roberts outlines so fruitfully here. CONTENTS FOREWORD by Malcolm Parlett v INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION v INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION 1 1: THE BACKGROUND IN GESTALT 12 PSYCHOLOGY Gestalt and the Associationist Model 12 The Gestalt School-Early Work 17 Elaboration ofthe Wertheimer Model 23 The Lewinian Model 27 Goldstein's Hierarchical Model 32 Gestalt Personality Theory 34 A Gestalt Model ofChange 35 2: THE EARLY WORK OF PERLS 42 3: GESTALT THERAPY: THE GOODMANI 58 PERLSMODEL 4: THE WORK OF THE CLEVELAND 84 SCHOOL The Experience Cycle 85 The Gestalt Experiment 93 The Interpersonal Perspective 99 Group Dynamics 102 Work with Systems 104 The Elaboration of the Perlsian Model 107 ofthe Resistances 5: THE RESISTANCES RECONSIDERED 110 6: THE STRUCTURE OF GROUND: 133 THE TWO CLINICAL CASES The Case ofJosh, or Scylla and Charybdis 133 The Case ofLinda, or Civil Wars 148 7: THE STRUCTURE OF GROUND 156 CONTINUED: TWO SYSTEMS CASES The Unresistant System 156 A Final Case: "Gestalt" Reconsidered 169 CONCLUSION 178 EPILOGUE by Arthur Roberts 181 REFERENCES INDEX F o R E w o R D THE PUBLICATION of Gestalt Reconsidered in 1991 was an event that will not escape the attention of future Gestalt historians. Among the welcome flow of new Gestalt writing in the 1990s, there was no other Gestalt book written in English of its kind. Something of a furor followed its publication. Detractors and enthusiasts appeared, veiled insults were exchanged, 'positions' taken up. It had the flavor of one of those rows which can rock an academic discipline, setting factions at each other's throats and producing a buzz even at the sleepiest of college high tables. The book led to no full fledged war, and of course (and alas) the academic world of Gestalt therapy is still a small one, so that it all proceeded on a tiny scale. Yet there were signs of fierce disagreement-predictable praise from certain quarters, and equally predictable disdain from others. I remember my first rapid reading of the book and the excitement which surged through me. This did not arise, I have to admit, because of Wheeler's ideas in themselves-all of which needed a lot more scrutiny and consideration on a second and slower read through-but because of the sheer scale of his revlsloning. Stimulating theoretical debate was bound to follow and a lor of feathers likely to fly. A certain kind of coziness which had settled over part of our collective thinking was being unsettled. I will not go down the various avenues of debate within the Gestalt community which followed. Two book reviews, one by Peter Philippson, British Gestalt Journal, Vol. 1, No.2, 1991, and another by Gary Yontef, The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XV, No.1, 1992, with responses by Gordon Wheeler in the following v Foreword « issues of each of these journals, are well worth reading. They display the disagreements and intensity of convictions on both sides. My purpose here is not to enter the lists but to celebrate the book's reappearance. I do not have to agree with everything Wheeler writes here. Some of it resonates very deeply while other parts do not. But I am heartily glad he wrote this book; I regard it as a notable addition to the Gestalt literature and a provocative stimulant to our collective intellectual life as a discipline of maturity. Specifically, I am pleased that he has returned to the beginnings of Gestalt therapy and to the roots of the tree which run deeply into Gestalt psychology and its history. This has never been done better. He has rightfully drawn Lewin and Goldstein from the relative shadows into the limelight. Within the scope of a single book, he has addressed both clinical and non-clinical applications of Gestalt thought (and the joining of these streams, I believe, is both necessary and inevitable as we head into the twenty-first century). He has expressed in a robust way values and practical priorities which should command-and largely do now­ general assent across the community of Gestalt practitioners, notably in his critique of episodic and facile exchanges which ignore the wider field.