Gestalt therapy, founded by Fritz and Laura Perls with Paul Goodman, offers shamanic work a sharp practical focus on awareness in the present moment, a clear account of how we swallow other people’s rules whole, and chair work, a way of letting the different parts of a person speak to each other. All three sit easily alongside Therapeutic Shamanism, which also holds that awareness comes before change, that most of us carry introjectsIntroject. A foreign belief, message or story swallowed whole (often in childhood) and lodged inside as if it were our own; a type of intrusion. More about this that no longer serve us, and that our protective parts must be heard before anything deep can shift.
What is Gestalt therapy? #
A humanistic psychotherapy that grew up in New York after the Second World War. Its founders were the psychoanalyst Fritz Perls, the social critic Paul Goodman and Laura Perls, and its theory was set out in Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951), by Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman. Fritz Perls later made it widely known through his demonstrations at the Esalen Institute in California, whilst Laura Perls trained generations of therapists at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy.1
Gestalt works with what is happening now, in the room: what the client is feeling, how they are breathing and holding their body, and how they make or avoid contact with the therapist. Rather than interpreting the past, the therapist slows things down and invites small experiments, such as staying with a gesture or speaking from a different chair, so that the client can notice what they habitually do and try something new.2
Therapeutic Shamanism draws on many psychotherapies. See Why does Therapeutic Shamanism bring shamanism and psychotherapy together?
Why does Gestalt put awareness first? #
Because change starts with noticing. Gestalt slows a person down until the pattern they live by comes into view. One of its best-known moves is to ask a client to do the very thing they are doing a little more, not less: tighten the clenched jaw, exaggerate the smile that does not match the sad story. Feelings and memories tied up in the habit then surface and become available for change. The psychiatrist Arnold Beisser later called this the paradoxical theory of change.3
Shamanic work starts from the same place. The things that bind us, the entanglementsEntanglement. An unhealthy energetic tie hooking us into another person, a role, an object or a family story; released by disentanglement. More about this we have drifted into and the unfinished business we think is in the past, first have to be brought fully into consciousness, and only then can a considered choice be made about them. Awareness is the key to conscious choice and growth.4 In journeying, the same capacity is trained in a different way: by hollowing-outHollowing-out. The core, lifelong discipline of setting aside the middle-world self, its stories, agendas and preconceptions, so the Guides can work through us. The image: the shaman as hollow bone. Read the full answer, a person steps back from their everyday self and becomes an awareness that can travel the realms. See What are hollowing-out and stalking our stories?
What Gestalt offers here is craft: many small, careful ways of helping someone notice what they are doing in their body and their speech, moment by moment, which a shamanic practitioner can use when working with a client face to face.
What can the Gestalt idea of introjection offer? #
A way of sorting what we were given. In Gestalt, introjection means taking in other people’s ideas and rules without any stage of “chewing”: swallowing them whole, without reflecting on them, testing which parts fit, keeping what is nourishing and discarding the rest. Paul Goodman saw this as a danger of modern mass society, where authentic individual judgement is easily lost.5
Therapeutic Shamanism uses the same word. An introject (from the Latin for thrown into) is a should or a must not taken on from family, school, religion, advertising and society.6 Not all are bad. Some keep us alive, such as looking both ways before crossing the road, and others are simple good manners. But many were taken on to survive childhood and now hold us back in adult life: “I must never show weakness or vulnerability”, “I must not cry”, “I must always try harder”. Hunter-gatherer children had introjects too; it is the sheer complexity of modern civilisation that needs so many more of them to keep people in line.67
Gestalt’s picture of chewing gives shamanic practitioners a useful question to ask of any introject: was this ever really digested, or simply swallowed? What Therapeutic Shamanism adds, an introject seen as an intrusionIntrusion. Something lodged in us that should not be there, having entered through the holes soul-loss and Power-loss leave. Four broad types: unhelpful thought-forms, introjects, foreign-body energetic intrusions, and entity possessions. More about this that can be removed, is the subject of the partner answer, What can shamanism offer Gestalt work?
What does chair work offer? #
A simple, powerful way for parts of a person to meet. In Gestalt two-chair work, a client caught between two pulls, say a wish to speak up and a voice warning them not to, sits in one chair to speak as one side, then moves to the other chair to answer. The client may recognise whose voice the warning first was, a parent’s perhaps, and may find on spending time with it that it is more afraid than judging, more protective than punitive.8
That discovery matches the shamanic understanding of the fort-holderFort-holder. A protective part of the self that stayed behind to ‘man the fort’ when we were wounded: the inner critic, perfectionist, pusher, pleaser: the loyal soldier still fighting a war that ended long ago. Usually the part that sent an orphan away, so no deep healing holds without its consent; befriended, never extracted. Read the full answer: the part that stayed and coped when other parts of us were sent away. Fort-holders can seem harsh or obstructive, but they are doing their best to protect us, and nothing deep or lasting changes without their consent.9 Listening to them and reassuring them is more a psychotherapy-like approach than traditional shamanism, and chair work is one of the clearest ways of doing it. Each of us is a multitude, and a skilled listener can hear a person moving back and forth between parts as they talk.10 See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?
Chair work also raises a question most psychotherapy does not ask: whether every voice in the chair is really a part of the person. That is taken up in the partner answer, and in How does Therapeutic Shamanism relate to IFS, Voice Dialogue and Gestalt?
What does Gestalt bring to work with the body? #
Close attention to it, learnt partly from Wilhelm Reich. Gestalt holds that old conflicts are carried in the present, not only as buried emotions but as frozen or habitual tensions in the body. So a Gestalt therapist notices the clenched fist, the held breath or the smile that contradicts the words, and invites the client to stay with it until something new emerges. Often the first thing to emerge is tears.11
In shamanism the body is not a vehicle for the soul or a thing we inhabit; it has its own consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, needs and drives, and it is a member of the inner tribe in its own right.12 Gestalt’s patient, moment-by-moment attention to the body is a practical way of listening to that member of the tribe. See What is body armouring and what does Reichian work contribute? and What can somatic and body-centred therapies offer shamanic work?
How much research is there on Gestalt therapy? #
Less than on some therapies. Wheeler and Axelsson, writing for the American Psychological Association, acknowledge that outcome research on Gestalt is sparse, and that it is hard to test a method that has no fixed protocol and prizes creative experiment and the live relationship between therapist and client. Their reply is to cite the studies there are: a meta-analysis by Uwe Strümpfel (2006) found Gestalt therapy as effective overall as cognitive behavioural therapy, and the wider research on relational and experiential therapies shows benefits comparable with the more researched methods.13
