Gestalt Therapy And Hypnosis
The Gestalt coming to therapy can be termed "phenomenological-existential" as it is concerned with an awareness of the here-and-now, working away from concepts and towards pure awareness (Clarkson, 1989). By the client becoming aware of their thoughts, feelings, etc the goal is for the individual to perform comprehension into the situation under examination. As Yontef (1993) writes, comprehension is gained by learning the phenomomenological focusing, experimenting, reporting, and dialogue of the client. The religious doctrine behind this coming is that most habitancy do not function in the world based on how the world, along with themselves, is, but straight through a filter of self-deception, whereby one does not have a clear photo of oneself in relation to the world. Living that is not based on the truth of oneself leads to feelings of dread, guilt, and anxiety (Yontef, 1993).
Gestalt Therapy And Hypnosis
The historical antecedents of Gestalt therapy are the experiences of its co-founder, Fritz Perls. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Perls rebelled against the dogmatic style of Freud's coming (as had other famed founders of schools of psychotherapy, Jung and Adler. In the preface to the 1969 edition of "Ego, Hunger and Aggression" Perls wrote of this duration of time as follows, "Started seven years of useless couch life." (Perls, 1969)), and incorporated aspects of holism into the belief that finally the individual is responsible for creating his or her existence.
Additionally, the early decades of the 20th century are famed for their refutation of Newtonian positivism and its transfer with phenomenology. These two themes were then combined within the scaffolding of Gestalt psychology to produce an coming centred on the individual's connection to their existence. The structure that Gestalt psychology offered was that perception should be carefully as the recognition of patterns and relationships in the middle of items in the perceptual world which fulfils the central human need of giving meaning to perceptions, experiences and existence (Clarkson, 1989).
Reductionist approaches could neither catalogue for the richness of perception, and its immediacy (for example, see Koffka, 1935; Gibson, 1966), nor take into catalogue the significance of the observer. This led Perls to the idea that the actual awareness of an individual is more trustworthy than an interpretation of any data that a someone might contribute a therapist with and is primarily a description of movements in the middle of 'figure' and 'ground'. The form is the item of attentional focus at any one time, and the ground is the remainder of perceptual awareness. These movements, or 'cycles of experience' can come to be disrupted by being incomplete or unresolved and it is this 'unfinished business' which Gestalt therapy attempts to address. These ideas probably did not constitute a therapeutic coming until 1951 when Perls opened the New York institute for Gestalt Therapy, despite the fact that the first recognisable Gestalt therapy book was published in the 1940's (Perls, 1969).
Accompanying this mixture of ideas, based on the mental of Gestalt psychologists, philosophers (e.g., Lewin, 1952), and politicians (e.g., Smuts), was the fundamental idea of the someone as basically healthy, striving for balance, health, and growth (Clarkson, 1989). The unfinished firm referred to earlier is seen as an obstacle to these processes, restricting the person's capability to function fully, often termed by Gestalt therapists as 'dis-ease'. Van de Riet (Van de Riet et al., 1980) encapsulates the idea that dis-ease is a consequence when habitancy do not experience themselves as being psychologically and physiologically in balance with their environment.
"As action, contact, option and authenticity quote condition in gestalt therapy, so stasis, resistance, rigidity and control, often with anxiety, quote the state called 'dis-ease'"
The stasis, resistance, rigidity, and operate forestall graceful flow straight through cycles of experience.
Having briefly outlined the core of Gestalt therapy it is principal to reconsider some of the techniques that Gestalt therapists use in order to reconsider how they might be incorporated into hypnotherapy. Although there are techniques that are closely connected with a Gestalt approach, there are two caveats we must bear in mind. First, as Berne (1970) noted, gestalt therapy does use any techniques exclusively:
"Dr. Perls is a learned man. He borrows from or encroaches upon psychoanalysis, transactional analysis, and other systematic approaches. But he knows who he is and does not end up as an eclectic. In his option of definite techniques, he shares with other 'active' psychotherapists the 'Moreno' problem: the fact that nearly all known 'active' techniques were first tried out by Dr. J. R. Moreno in psychodrama, so that it is difficult to come up with an customary idea in this regard" (Berne, 1970: 163-4).
Second, that in Gestalt therapy, technique is carefully secondary to the connection advanced in the middle of the therapist and the client, as Resnick (1984) writes:
"every Gestalt therapist could stop doing any Gestalt technique that had ever been done and go right on doing Gestalt therapy. If they couldn't, then they weren't doing Gestalt therapy in the first place. They were fooling colse to with a bag of tricks and a bunch of gimmicks" (1984: 19).
Based on these two caveats we might argue that whatever of an 'active' nature which is incorporated into hypnotherapy would constitute Gestalt, or alternatively that without explicit training in the Gestalt client-therapist connection there is nothing we could do which would be Gestalt. However, as the spirit of Gestalt therapy is very much identified by its use of definite techniques that is the coming that will be taken in the following discussion.
The techniques that are connected with Gestalt therapy are closely connected to the idea that clients should want to work towards self-awareness straight through a mastery of their awareness processes. This is in difference to patients who firstly are indeed seeking relief from discomfort, although they may claim that they wish to turn their behaviour, and secondly clients who expect that relief will come via the efforts of the therapist. Thus, Gestalt therapy is "an exploration rather than a direct modification of behaviour...the goal is growth and autonomy" (Yontef, 1993). The techniques are modifications and elaborations of the basic question, "What are you experiencing now?" and the instruction, "Try this experiment, or pay concentration to that, and see what you come to be aware of or learn" (Zimberoff & Hatman, 2003).
Perhaps the most well known of all techniques that are identified as Gestalt is the empty chair. This is where clients project their representation of a someone or an object, or part of themselves into an empty chair and they then gift a dialogue in the middle of what is projected into the chair, and themselves. In some cases the client moves in the middle of the chairs, but whether way, the idea is that inner conflicts come to be expressed and so the client heightens their awareness of them. This in turn military the client to take accountability for their difficulties so that they can make choices to conclude the sources of unfinished firm (Stevens, 1975). As Becker (1993) writes, this is the whole point of Gestalt, to "take habitancy who are conditioned and self-operating and put them in some kind of aegis over themselves."
Similar to the empty chair, other tasteless technique is known as topdog/underdog. A dialogue is performed in the middle of two aspects of the client's personality, the topdog representing the introjecting demander of perfection, expressed by "should" and "must", and the underdog, which is a manifestation of resistance to external demands. straight through the dialogue "resolution, compromise, comprehension or permanent disjunction becomes possible" (Clarkson, 1989). This is attained by the individual becoming aware of their internal battles, which often lead to feelings of guilt, anxiety, and depression.
The Gestaltist focus on awareness is not confined to awareness of cognitive processes, such as dialogue, but also physiological processes straight through a process termed bodywork. This involves the client consciously noting where they experience tension in particular situations, or how their pattern of breathing changes. Once aware they can learn strategies to reduce these reactions, which have produced both bodily and mental discomfort.
As Zinker (1978) writes, "this may include the person's awareness of his body, its weight on the chair, its position in space, its miniature sounds and movements." Here the individual is taking accountability for their body and taking payment of choosing how they want to react. Sometimes these tensions are based on a preoccupation with earlier circumstances. If the client is not responding to the current circumstances then they are seen as projecting the past to the present, so old patterns of responding, rather than new, experimental approaches are dominating their life (Parlett & Hemming, 2002). Working to release the bodily manifestations of those old patterns can lead to greater engagement and awareness of one's thoughts and feelings (Zimberoff & Hatman, 2003). This coming is also known as establishing sensation function (Clarkson, 1989) and is carefully useful for clients who have come to be 'alienated from their senses' or those with narcissistic attributes who have 'experienced it all' (Clarkson, 1989).
The significance of bodywork is made clear by Becker (1993) who suggests that bodily expressions are closer to truth because the mind is engaged in deception and sabotage: Perl's basic assumption was that the body and its total processes are somehow former to and bigger than the mind. Gestalt conceives of the mind as an interference, as a way of blocking the total momentum of the organism in some way. Not only that, but the mind is not even the noble part of the organism that we all the time idea it was. For most habitancy the mind and the creations of the mind work against the body. They work against the best interests of the total person.
In line with other psychodynamic approaches, Gestalt therapy includes dream work. The Gestalt position is different to Freud, in that Perls did not think of the unconscious as an inaccessible region of the mind which dreams could contribute way to if interpreted correctly - Freud's 'royal road to the unconscious' was Perl's royal road to integration. His view was more in line with Jung, who saw dreams as existential messages for the dreamer. In dream work the client is typically asked to quote the dream in the gift tense as if they were experiencing the dream in that moment. From this the client develops an awareness of the existential message and how it consists of projected parts of the self.
The above descriptions of some of the techniques connected with Gestalt therapy should neither be carefully exhaustive nor exclusive. As cited earlier, Resnick (1984) amongst others clearly believes that Gestalt therapy is not and cannot be tied to particular techniques, it is about the connection in the middle of the client and the therapist.
An important part of this connection is that the therapist is acting to guide the client towards greater self-awareness, accountability and ownership of emotions, thoughts, sensations etc in order to unblemished any 'unfinished business' so that s/he may move smoothly straight through cycles of experience. The experienced therapist is able to adapt to the particular client in order to perform this, relying on a wealth of techniques and skills. This essence of Gestalt therapy allies it more closely with cognitive behavioural approaches than typical psychodynamic methods because it relies less on interpretation of the client and more on their active participation. It is perhaps this that makes it inherent to consolidate aspects of Gestalt therapy into hypno-therapeutic practice.
Interestingly Levendula (1963) suggests the view that a Gestalt therapist would be in a more advantageous position if he would consolidate his coming with hypnotic techniques. For example, the Gestalt therapist teaches the increasing of awareness straight through experimental exercises. The hypnotherapists can perform this much more indeed by directing the patient's concentration to come to be sharply aware of an idea or sensation or memory which thereby becomes a "bright Gestalt" while the rest of the perceptual field recedes into a background. The hypnotic state itself corresponds to the Gestalt-background principle, and the Gestalt formation becomes more or less an self-operating function of it. ...the mixture of Gestalt therapeutic law with hypnosis enriches both approaches.
From this it is clear that Gestaltists are being advised to consolidate hypnotherapy into their practice. The following conference will reconsider whether hypnotherapists can introduce aspects of Gestalt therapy into their work.
One of the central tenets of Gestalt therapy is that clients experience events in the present, that is they re-enact past events in the present. By re-living them they can focus on their experiences, both psychological and physiological and thus gain understanding. Awareness was carefully "the key to unlock comprehension and finally bring behaviour change" (Zimberoff, & Hartman 2003). Bringing the experienced past into the experiential gift is one important property of hypnosis.
Through hypnotic age regression, working with dreams etc clients can re-experience events that have occurred at some other time as if they were happening in the here and now. This is not merely a cognitive reliving of a copy of the event, but a fully nuanced resurrection of the experience. As Zimberoff, & Hartman (2003) state, "Keeping the client's awareness on concrete detail is a constant in hypnotic age regressions, because it promotes presentness emotionally and viscerally (emphasis in original). Of equal significance is that the client's awareness can be focused on different aspects of their experience straight through repeated re-experiencing of it, allowing for a detailed, and concrete re-living of the experience in all its customary force and from physiological and psychological perspectives. This then fulfils Rosen's (1972) view that "Patients move best when they are moved" (emphasis in original).
It is clear that the Gestalt concern with realistic, present, re-experiencing of events is an important aspect of hypnosis. The concerns of Gestalt therapy with direct insight, rather than comprehension straight through interpretation would be a novel increasing to hypnotherapy. To include this perspective is a philosophical and conceptual shift rather than a technical one and depends on the therapist's own preferences. However it is quite inherent to achieve.
Hypnosis is also useful in intensifying aspects of an experience, by directing the client to pay closer concentration to particular details. For example, someone who wishes to stop smoking might be asked to strongly feel the sense of relief and force from being able to take deep breaths of fresh, clean air. Greenberg and Malcolm (2002) have demonstrated that success in using such techniques as the empty chair are at least partially carefully by the degree of emotional arousal experienced while the use of this technique. Here we can envisage that the client can be asked to imagine a dialogue, or in the case of many actors in the re-lived scenario, a conversation, where they can consolidate on aspects of themselves or others that are blocking their capability to conclude past issues.
Many hypnotic techniques are relatively passive in that the client is asked to view an event, rather than to partake in it, but there is no conceptual surmise why this more active, practically didactic coming could not come to be a more integrated aspect of hypnotherapeutic practice. Indeed, in clients who are able to speak whilst hypnotised it might allow the therapist even greater comprehension of the experiences that the client is reliving, and for the therapist to take a more active, flexible role in directing the client's interactions.
As described earlier, Gestalt therapy makes use of experimentation in order for client's to experience new sensations, and to come to be aware of old patterns of responding. For this to work we are effectively asking the client to dangle disbelief, for example to dangle the idea that they cannot say something to their parent. This may be difficult for some clients, especially where they have advanced strong conscious strategies to safe them from unbelievable negative outcomes. Hypnosis, by inducing an altered state of consciousness, may be able to circumvent these strategies, allowing the client to eye options in a safe fantasy world that is experienced as vivid and real. S/he can then eye conversations with others, actions etc that may not be carefully options when in a non-hypnotic state.
As suggested earlier, this active participation of clients is not common, but there is no surmise why clients who have strong powers of visualisation cannot be directed under hypnosis to engage in experimentation. Usefully as a particular scene can be replayed many times under hypnosis it allows the client to perform a collection of experiments and to correlate and difference the resultant emotions etc. Simply they can also be directed to pay close concentration to the details of these new experiences, so that they can be vividly recalled post-hypnotically.
As Gestalt therapy is primarily concerned with the client's willingness to take responsibility, and the therapist's capability to institute novel ways in which the client can come face-to-face with aspects of their life they have projected onto others, or denied operate of, the main way in which hypnotherapy can consolidate aspects of Gestalt technique is twofold. Firstly hypnotherapeutic practitioners must be trained in Gestalt conceptual religious doctrine so they fully understand their role, and have the intuition and flexibility to carry it out in a range of situations and across a broad spectrum of clients. Secondly, just as Freud selected patients who were willing to accept his fundamental law of psychotherapy, perhaps the hypnotherapist must be selective at consultation with clients who show a motivation to turn and a willingness to take accountability for that change. Without these two features hypnotherapy cannot truly address "the key problem of habitancy in our times...inner deadness" (Clinebell, 1981).
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