Excuse me while I share with you some thoughts about working as a psychotherapist.Psychotherapists are at a disadvantage compared to psychiatrists. If the psychiatrist wants to, he or she can assume the medical pose, wrap up in the doctors “white coat”, and talk about medications. That, then, becomes a discussion of symptoms, dosage, and side-effects.

The psychiatrist need share nothing of him or her actual self, but a psychotherapist must constantly monitor his or her self-disclosing.

To be fair, some psychotherapists hide behind professional distance, and some psychiatrists extend themselves to relate as one person to another with their patients. Older and more “classic” models of psychotherapy (think Freud) stress the role of detachment so as not to affect the client with the therapist’s life and issues.

Increasingly, however, those who think about how psychotherapy is done have realised that we are affected by others, even when those others try as hard as they might to remain neutral.

The simple fact that someone is observing can change the way people behave, and that has become so understood that it has been given its own name — “the Hawthorne effect”.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s a few people trained in Freudian analysis revised psychoanalysis to accommodate these kinds of realisations.

At first, they called their revision “concentration therapy”, but eventually they hit upon the name of gestalt therapy. When these people pieced together their reformulation, they assimilated core theoretical elements of existentialism (rejecting the nihilistic thinking of Sartre in favour of Kierkegaard), physical field theory applied to the social sciences (adopted from Kurt Lewin), the perceptual research of the gestalt psychologists (Wertheimer, Kohler, Goldstein and others), the holistic thinking of a number of people at the time and the relational philosophy evident in Martin Buber.

All these things, and more, were woven together by Paul Goodman and Frederick Perls in a book that became the darling of psychotherapy in the 1960s. Perls moved on from training groups in New York and Cleveland to sit in residence at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California, where his demonstrations of gestalt therapy became known to the popular culture. Indeed, he became something of a guru for the pop culture of the sixties; rock stars, actors, and other creative and politically active people were exposed to him there.

That, however, became a problem gestalt therapists have been attempting to live down ever since. His demonstrations of gestalt therapy became identified with the actual practice of gestalt therapy, completely missing its rich theoretical base and obscuring the often gentle and respectful way gestalt therapists actually work.

Gestalt therapy became known as a bag of therapeutic tricks for confronting people in an often rude and abrupt manner and, more or less, forcing upon them rapid and deep psychological change. Accordingly, people today still often believe gestalt therapy to be too disturbing for some patients.

Those who witnessed such things at Esalen saw Perls the entertainer, but not Perls the therapist. While he was in California, his wife, Laura, with whom he developed gestalt therapy to begin with, remained behind in New York teaching the much more profound and powerful approach, which is gestalt therapy, and she affected many more therapist trainees than Fritz ever did. One of them, Dan Bloom, was elected president of the Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy during their international conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, this last August.

That gestalt approach is a very user-friendly way of supporting and investigating each person’s unique experience of being in this world, the relational styles and patterns people utilise in being with others, including the various contexts of life in which we navigate, and it does so using not only the talking approach, but also the doing approach — enactment which often provides a corrective experience of some kind in itself.

These days gestalt therapists no longer really think much about the demonstrations in California during the middle of the last century. The theoretical base of gestalt therapy has been explored in an explosion of contemporary writing about gestalt theory and practice, and gestalt therapists in North America, South America, Australia and New Zealand, Russia, Asia, Europe and the United Kingdom have produced professional journals and have been meeting in conferences to refine and discuss both the practice of gestalt therapy and the training of gestalt therapists.

In April of 2007, for instance, my wife and I will attend two important such conferences — the Roots of Gestalt Therapy III, to be held in Rome, and the Going Deeper conference for leaders of gestalt therapy training centres globally, to be held in Spetses, Greece.