A Gestalt Understanding of the Organism and the Self, Part 2
This second part of a two-part article explores the self as the meeting of organism and environment, and the role of that self in Gestalt therapy.
This post is a response to a recent article by Sarah Luczaj. (See Am I a Self or an Organism?.) It’s aim is to stimulate more discussion of what I think is an important and fascinating subject. (See “A Gestalt Understanding of the Organism and the Self, Part 1”.)
The Self
The Gestalt approach sees the self as the process of adjustment by the person to their situation. Put another way the self is the meeting of the organism and the environment. Another metaphor is that the self is the boundary: it defines both where the person finishes and where the situation begins. With a simple organism there is a cell wall which lets in ‘food’ and keeps out ‘poison’ from the environment — the cell wall is the boundary, the place of contact for the organism and its environment.
With people, the situation is far more complex. The boundary in the human situation involves thoughts and feelings and relationships. The person is in a situation where there are cultural codes and an array of sometimes extremely complex technologies. But in principle the organismic situation is the same: we draw on the situation we are in to maintain, protect and enhance our lives; we avoid or defend against what we perceive as poisons or threats.
With people there is a self — all those thoughts, feeling and actions that make up our relation to our situation. That is, in the Gestalt view, the self is what is in awareness.
Some of the actions we undertake in the situations that make up our lives become habitual. For Gestalt these are not part of the self, they are part of the organism. We once devoted a great deal of attention to learning to walk. Our self was engaged in this activity. For most adults most of the time, the self is not engaged when we are walking; instead we are aware of other things: the beauty or otherwise of our surroundings, planning what we will say at the meeting we are walking to, and so on. If we slip or trip, our self once again is engaged with walking, and our focus of attention shifts.
There are a great many things that our organism does that are not part of our awareness, not part of the self. This includes all manner of physiological processes as well as cultural accommodation, and learned skills. (In my view, our situation also has a spiritual dimension — this is not touched on in Gestalt therapy, which is another story.) All of this is not usually our self but can become so: we may get an upset stomach, we may shift cultures, we may need to expand or modify a skill.
For Gestalt, the self is not set, nor does it have a particular content — it is the fluid relation of the organism and the environment. Therapy is needed when this normally flowing relation is disrupted.
Gestalt Therapy
For Gestalt, therapy is concerned with the self, for the benefit of the organism, but the therapy is directed to the self and the person’s ongoing awareness of their situation.
For instance: a person may take a drug for anxiety. In the Gestalt view, the physiological action of the drug is not part of psychotherapy, but the person’s decision-making process about whether to take it is. If hypnosis was used to induce a deep trance where the person was unaware of their environment, this too wouldn’t be Gestalt psychotherapy — yet inducing a light trance to heighten awareness would be.
The purpose of therapy in the Gestalt view is to restore the function of the self. This is all that psychotherapy can do. There may be many other changes needed for the organism to thrive — readily accessible healthy food, political change, social innovation, or medical treatment to name only a few — but these are not psychotherapy.
A Couple of Concluding Notes
There is much more to Gestalt therapy than this. I’d love to go into it all in great detail (I’m a Gestalt fan) but this is already a long post.
There is a pattern to the organism’s relating to its environment. This is of great use in therapy, but this is also the topic of another post (or perhaps many).
Does this picture of the self as you adjust to what is going on around you make sense? Do you think it is a useful base for therapy (which is what counts as far as this blogger is concerned)? Looking forward to hearing from you.
12 Responses (4 Discussion Threads) to “A Gestalt Understanding of the Organism and the Self, Part 2”
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Thanks for this, Evan.
I like the Gestalt approach, it makes a lot of sense to me.
Seems that ‘self’ in gestalt, as you describe it here, is really synonymous with ‘self-consciousness’, or conscious attention?
While I’m sure that it’s only when there’s some kind of discomfort with the fit of our lives, experiences, organisms, selves, environments, etc that psychotherapy has a role to play, I am not sure that all psychotherapy can do is “restore the function of the self”. I would say it can also lead to the spiritual dimension you mention in passing as being missing in Gestalt. And I would also say that this spiritual dimension is not so concerned with self…
Hmm. I think in gestalt the self is synonymous with awareness or what is in consciousness.
It’s my view that the spiritual dimension is an aspect of our experience that we can be aware of.
You could say that the gestalt understanding of self is not concerned with self – it is the contact with the environment. There is the notion of egotism in early gestalt – it is used in Gestalt Therapy (for some reason this term dropped out of usage . . . hmm . . . ) The idea here is that the past mastery of a situation or problem is demonstrated when it doesn’t address the current situation.
For me health is a kind of self-forgetfulness. Though in the experience of ‘flow’, being ‘in the zone’, there is a kind of self-awareness with inevitability. I don’t mean the kind of self-forgetfulness I experienced in Evangelical Chrisitianity – which was exceedingly self-preoccupied (How humble am I being?). But being absorbed in what we are fascinated with, not worrying about how we are appearing (unless we are involved in sorting out a performance or something). So, I think we agree that spirituality is not about being focused on our own success and performance.
Thanks for your comment.
agree with you on healthy functioning being self-forgetting, total engagement with the task, but I think spirituality is something ‘more’…
Could you say what this more is about?
well, there has to be a difference between entering a state of flow when driving the car and being in a deep state of communion with God through prayer, or deep state of meditation. That ‘more’ is what I mean :-)
I think I understand what you mean. I have a question: Could communion include a sense of vocation in your understanding of it?
sorry I missed this Evan – my personal experience of spiritual “communion” doesn’t include a sense of vocation, no, but if it did include that in anybody else’s, I would have no reason to disbelieve them!
My reason for asking about vocation was that it is usually seen as having a sense of individual address to it.
yes, I can see that. Not sure what else to say. If someone experiences individual address, then that is their experience. Personally I don’t – the sense of myself as individual tends to drop away. There are different religious and philosophical traditions supporting each experience.
When I write these blog posts I don’t mean to impart ‘the truth’ but look at possibilities…
Yes, I find the different traditions fascinating. I’m quite heady and grew up in the devotionally focused stream of Christianity called Evangelicalism (although the devotion is often expressed in a wordy way. Evangelicalism is notoriously insensitive to visual art.).
I guess my question was about integration – daily acts, picking up a straw for the love of god, the return to the marketplace after the dojo and so on; and the place of individuality seems bound up with this.
It makes sense to me that our spirituality is experienced with our temperaments and preferences. For me this means that spirit is a dimension of experience rather than a ‘thing’ that is the same in everyone.
I wonder if the contemplative can be taken into action – or whether it has the role of being the motivation for particular actions. I certainly haven’t found it possible to take the same quality of awareness I have when still into action. But this may just be lack of practice – and I don’t know that I see the need either.
Interesting that we’ve ended up in spirituality. I think this is still often missing in psychotherapy. Would you agree? And if you do; do you think that this should be changed?
I think access to a spiritual dimension happens through our temperamants, cultures, stages of development etc. But I don’t think that means it is in essence a different thing for everyone, more what joins us together.
It seems a bit abstract, a statement like “spirituality is often missing in psychotherapy” – I don’t know, as a therapist I try to be with my clients where they are.
There are plenty of psychotherapists around who will go into spiritual dimensions to the extent that the client does – and transpersonal therapy (Wilber) includes the spiritual as an explicit domain in its theory and practice – for those who are at that ‘stage’.
There are plenty of people who are not interested in spirituality at all, and they deserve good psychotherapy too.
Psychosynthesis I think also gives a place to spirit. There’s also Frankl – although he doesn’t use the term ‘spirit’ much in what I’ve read of him (admittedly very little, he wrote lots).
Like you I think everyone deserves access to good psychotherapy – one of the great merits of the internet in general and blogs in particular is that they can be fairly easy and cheap to access. Online psychotherapy also makes psychotherapy accessible to those who wouldn’t normally contemplate I think – it really is a very worthwhile innovation in my view.