O ften people will ask, "What is gestalt therapy?" or "What does 'gestalt' mean?" Since this is the way I practice psychotherapy, and since this theory undergirds much of what we do at the Gestalt Training Institute of Bermuda (by way of training, organisational development, and coaching), I will try to answer without making things impossibly difficult to understand.

First, the word "gestalt" is a German word for which there is no single and accurate translation. It means, roughly, a whole pattern. Thus, a dangling sentence is an incomplete gestalt and eleven out of twelve is not only lacking a dozen, but it is also an incomplete gestalt. Conversely, knowing why one is coming for therapy can be a good, well-formed gestalt, because one has a firm grasp on the nature of the problem.

Gestalt therapy is an approach that focuses on the current, aware experience of a person, the relationship between the therapist and the client (and the way the client relates to others more generally), and the overall contexts of life in which the person lives out his or her existence. It is also an experiential approach, meaning that we don't just sit and talk about detached events that happen "out there" somewhere in the past; we move to action where people learn and matters change in the present.

A few critical ideas keep reoccurring whenever people have discussed gestalt therapy over the years. Bear with me while I provide a rough historical sketch and include some of the technical terms used by gestalt therapists to describe essential concepts related to what they do (I will explain them later).

In 1973 Erving and Miriam Polster identified contact, awareness and experiment as central to gestalt therapy. In 1993 Gary Yontef identified clinical phenomenology, dialogue, and field theory as essential to gestalt therapy. In 1997 Bob Resnick and Malcolm Parlett conducted an interview that appeared in the British Gestalt Journal, and Bob asserted that the core of gestalt therapy was comprised of a phenomenological method, dialogue, and field theory. Also in 1997, Jennifer Mackewn identified the field, dialogic relationship, awareness of contact, experiment and embodiment as core constructs in gestalt therapy. In 1999 Sylvia Crocker identified field, contact, dialogic relationship, and experiment as prominent among many elements involved in gestalt therapy. In 2000 Joel Latner identified current awareness, contact and gestalt therapy's theory of self as central constructs. In 2003 Gaie Houston identified awareness of the present moment, contact, and attention to the forming figure in its context as central to gestalt therapy. In 2005 Gary Yontef and Reinhardt Fuhr asserted, "Change happens in Gestalt therapy by a practice methodology that follows three principles: (a) field process thinking; (b) experimental phenomenological method of awareness work; (c) existential dialogical attitude in contact and ongoing relationship." All that can feel rather mesmerising, having to deal with terms that are not easily understood.

Now, I will try to make some of these concepts more clear. In 2009 I stated in a chapter for the Professional Counsellor's Desk Reference "…(1) the therapist and the client are always in some form of meeting, (2) they each have some degree of awareness around that, (3) for each there are various factors affecting how they experience what is going on, and (4) the entire interaction is alive and flowing through time in a fairly unpredictable fashion." That reflected my assertion that the core of gestalt therapy was, as stated in the Handbook for Theory, Research, and Practice in Gestalt Therapy, a phenomenological method, dialogical relationship, field-theoretical strategy, and experimental freedom. So, let me unpack those terms.

The phenomenological method concerns an individual's phenomenality, that is, the subjective experience that a person has. What is it like to be you at this very moment? If, for instance, you are feeling nauseated reading this philosophical jargon, that is something you are experiencing in a way that no one else has access to or can know just as you know it. It includes what you think, feel, value, intend, suspect, sense in your body, etc. It is the way you experience yourself and make meaning out of your experience.

The dialogical relationship concerns the way a person makes contact, or meets others, including the environment in which such meetings take place. It distinguishes between treating other people as human beings or as objects to be utilised in order to get one's business accomplished. So, if you feel that you are being used by your boss, that will not facilitate a common and collegial participation on a working team at the job, and it connotes a poor interpersonal relationship.

The field is the psycho-social context in which everything that currently affects a person is present and active. It is complex rather than simple. However, it sets up and supports everything a therapist might do in helping the client, because, as one gestalt therapist put it, "nothing disconnected ever happens." So, if you change one thing about the way you operate as a husband and father in your family, a ripple goes out that results in changes in family dynamics that one could not have imagined.

How does the core thus identified harmonise various constructs and tenets like the ones mentioned by those various gestalt writers mentioned above? Immediate subjective experience emerges through awareness of contact in the environment, and self forms at the boundary of that contact (the meeting between what is me and what is not me). All the functions of self manifest in a person-in-contact as an experience of a given situation. Relationship is contact (the meeting mentioned above) over time in which the contact between two people is "non-independent," or a two-person field, which itself is sensitive to wider field dynamics. The field is the situation, that psycho-social context, in which individual experience emerges in the midst of overlapping spheres of influence and this fact sets up the therapeutic strategies of the therapist. The move to action that brightens and makes one's experience more clear, reveals a person to him or herself and to others, and it gives existential form to the safe emergency that permeates all of therapy. The four core elements above are interrelated through practice such that one cannot factor one out and apply it without immediately involving the others.

So, that's gestalt therapy. If you have an interest or more questions, contact the training institute at 296-1414.