gestalt

Portrait of Fritz Perl by Otto Dix

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts," is how my high school psychology teacher, Mr. Poythress, defined gestalt on an ordinary day in 1995. Mr. Poythress was big on teaching us the things that really mattered. He always said that he knew we would ultimately forget almost everything we learned in high school, so he was quick to throw a lesson plan out the window if a more pressing topic presented itself. I recall an entire lecture on hygiene which focused on the importance brushing one's tongue. In the realm of psychology, it is Mr. Poythress that first taught me about Wilhelm Wundt, Pavlovian Conditioning and, of course, Gestalt.

Or so I originally thought.

My father is a psychologist. As the daughter of a psychologist, I was raised with an intimate knowledge of Dorthea Dix, schizophrenia and multiple-personality disorders. I spent a small chunk of my childhood stuffing envelopes for the Friends of Saint Elizabeth's Hospital and going on family outings with patients from my dad's hospital. In this way, even the craziest of people have never seemed that crazy to me.

My dad was actually the first person to introduce me to Gestalt as a therapy. As a child, I had a hard time with decision-making (some things never change). On one occasion, I was trying to decide whether to do this or that and I started to worry about the people that would be affected by my decision. My dad advised me calmly and then recited the Gestalt Therapy Prayer:

"I'm not in the world to live up to your expectations and you're not in the world to live up to mine. If perhaps we meet, that's groovy. If not, it can't be helped."

And so, in honor of Gestalt, my dad, Dorothea Dix, Mr. Poythress, Ivan Pavlov and his dogs, Phineas Gage and anyone who has contributed to the obsessive study of unraveling the mysteries of the human mind, I am attaching an excerpt from Gestalt Therapy Verbatim by Fritz Perls (1969). Words to live by, if you can manage to.

1. Live in the here and now. Get in touch with yourself.

2. Listen, understand, be open. Look at what you avoid. Get close to the impasse (something you feel you won't survive, a fantasy of a psychological catastrophe), get into it, go through it. See the obvious, which has been eluding you.

3. Let go of your parents. Throw them into a metaphorical garbage pail, and forgive them.

4. Take risks. You can win as well as lose.

5. Change your questions, which are "hooks," into statements. Use the word how, not why. Turn it to I, nouns to verbs.

6. When stuck in resentment, express it, pretending that the person at whom it is directed is there, saying, "--, I resent . . . " Then express the demands that lie behind the resentment as commands. And last, express what you appreciate about the person.

7. Talk for five minutes about your awareness of yourself and another person, emphasizing the how (ongoing process).

8. If you are stuck, confused, or bored, try shuttling from here to there (some other place you imagine in your mind) several times, each time noting changes, until you "feel right" in the present and literally "come to your senses."

9. Relive your dreams (everything in your dream is an aspect of you), writing them down with all the details. Then "be" each element, creating dialogues, remembering what appeared in the dream. Talk to the dreams themselves: "Dreams, you scare me," for example.

10. Try the exercise of transforming yourself: first into someone else, imitating voice, expression, and so on; then into a road, a car, a baby, the mother of the baby, the baby again, the mother again, the baby again, a two-year-old, you at your present age.

11. Use appropriate behavior for each situation. Some require aggression, others withdrawal, for example.

12. Remember that changes take place naturally, not through some "program" you set up. Go into what you are; accept it. Change will happen by itself.