Week 3- Gestalt Flashcards
Fieldtheory
Suffering/ pathology is seen, conceptualised and approached from the field theory
What is the field?
Systematic web of relationships
Continuous in space and time
Everything is of a field
Phenomena are determined by the whole field
Is a unitary whole: Everything affects everything else in the field
Therapist is a part of it
It is organized and our investigation concerns how it is organized
Creative adjustment
In order to survive unhealthy situations we will adjust ‘unhealthy’ habits, patterns and belief systems
As a ‘healthy’ at that moment, response to the unhealthy surrounding
Influence contact styles
A creative balance between changing the environment and adjusting to current conditions
Fritz’s way
Confrontational
Needs ground or else patient could regress to original situation
Laura’s way
Contact
Relational
Making ground
Babysteps
Introjects
Things that are swallowed easily without chewing on them
Think you have to be like this
When its healthy its okay but often times it is unhealthy
Projection
Something that I take without checking
Project from people we know, images, prejudice, bias and earlier confrontations
Deflection
Avoiding a topic that is hard
Retroflection
Withdrawing and going inside yourself
Confluence
Feeling together with your therapist
Egotism
Sometimes we have to make ourselves big to survive
Methodology of gestalt
- Observation
-What and how? - Concepts and awareness
-Contact style, creative adjustments - Work, suggestions by the therapist
-Ground?
Intersectionality
A lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where the parts interact and are intersectional
Equality
Everybody gets the same
Equity
Positive discrimination: Adjusting for people who are in marginalized positions
paradoxical theory of change
The more one tries to become who one is not, the more one stays the same
3 main concepts of gestalt
- Contact: Being in touch with what is emerging here and now. Ones experience of contact and withdrawal determines the quality of ones life and capacity for growth and development
- Conscious awareness: Being in touch with what is- Prerequisite for contact
- Experimentation: Act of trying something new to increase understanding
Personality according to Gestalt
Living organisms must be considered within the interaction with its environment
Self does not exist without the other
Experience does not exist without contact
Hysteria
When a figure changes so rapidly as to prevent satisfaction
Compulsivity
When a figure changes so slowly that new figures have no room to assume dominance
Mental illness- Gestalt
The inability to form clear figures of interest and identify with one’s moment-by-moment experience or respond to what one becomes aware of or both
Neurotic self regulation
The result of a creative adjustment that was made in a difficult situation in the past and then not readjusted as field conditions changed
Polarities in Gestalt
A figure against a ground
In neurotic regulation some aspects of ones ground must be kept out of awareness and polarities lose their fluidity and become hardened into dichotomies
Resistance (Gestalt)
Expression of the organisms integrity
Opposing the formation of a figure
impasse
When a persons customary supports are not available and new supports have not yet been mobilized
authentic existence
Experienced when someone stays with the experience of an impasse
Existence with minimal illusion, good self-support, vitality, creativity and good contact with human and non-human environment
Mechanisms of gestalt psychotherapy
Focusing
Enactment
Mental experiments, Guided fantasy and imagery
Body techniques
Loosening and integrating techniques
Holism
Humans are self regulating, growth-oriented and cannot be understood apart from their environment
Second order of awareness
awareness of ones awareness process
rule of abstinence
gratifying no patient wish
rule of neutrality
having no preferences in the patients conflict
support
anything and everything that facilitates assimilation and integration
