Shamanism can offer Gestalt work a wider map of who is in the room. It locates the deepest self, Soul, in the Lower-World and in nature; it treats some of the rules we swallowed as intrusionsIntrusion. 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, and some lost parts of us as gone altogether, needing soul retrievalSoul retrieval. Finding an exiled soul-part and inviting it home. In the modern psyche the fort-holder who sent it away must consent first, and the retrieval itself is a beginning: the real work is integration. Read the full answer rather than dialogue; it recognises that not every voice in the chair is a part of the client; and it sees healthy adulthood as interdependence with the whole web of life rather than standing on one’s own two feet.
What does Gestalt already share with shamanism? #
More than its reputation suggests. Fritz Perls was strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism, and in Gestalt Therapy Verbatim he wrote of the élan vital, the life force that permeates all living beings, saying that the centre of the personality “is what used to be called the soul: the emotions, the feelings, the spirit.”1 His co-founder Paul Goodman worried that modern mass society teaches conformity, so that people lose their own authentic judgement.2
Therapeutic Shamanism tells a longer version of Goodman’s story. DomesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this, and then the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, asked people to suppress their individuality to a degree unknown in the previous hundreds of thousands of years of human history, and the more complex a culture becomes, the more 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 it needs to keep people in line.3 And it gives the soul a home. Our real self, our authentic Soul, is of the Lower-World: it is part of nature, the wild and free human being we were born to be. The persona, the mask we wear, is a middle-world construct of stories, wonky-thoughts, beliefs and scripts, and in most modern lives the gap between the two has grown very wide.4 So where Gestalt speaks of a vital centre in the person, shamanism offers ways of meeting that Soul directly, in the Lower-World, and of growing into it. See What did the Fall do to us?
What does shamanism add to work with introjects? #
Two things Gestalt does not have: extractionExtraction. Drawing a foreign body (an intrusion) out of a person and packing the hole with something healthy. The iron rule: only ever foreign bodies, never a part of the self: extracting a genuine part of self creates soul-loss. More about this, and soul retrieval. In shamanic healing an introject that no longer serves us can be treated as a kind of thought-formThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this that has become an intrusion in the psyche and body, such as a teacher telling a child they are stupid and the child taking it in and believing it, and so as something that can be extracted.5 Extraction only lasts, though, when every part of the person is ready to let the introject go. The part that took it on in the first place may still be holding on to it, and if its concerns are not heard, it will simply put everything back as it was. Here shamanism and Gestalt’s patient work with resistance need each other.
Introjects also explain much soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer. A child repeatedly criticised, shamed or punished for a part of themselves has to block that part off to survive. Psychotherapy would say the part was repressed. Shamanism holds that sometimes something more startling happens: the part is not just repressed but leaves altogether, and so is no longer in the room to be dialogued with, in any chair. Finding it and bringing it home is what soul retrieval does. See What is an intrusion, and what is extraction? and What is soul retrieval?
Is every figure in the chair, or the dream, a part of us? #
Not on the shamanic account. Perls held that all the people, objects and places in a dream represent parts of the dreamer,6 and chair work usually treats whoever is imagined in the empty chair the same way. Psychotherapy’s default is to reduce the spirits to sub-personalities, parts of a person’s psychic whole.7
Shamanism experiences the spirit world as real. Lower-World Guides are not figments of the imagination or parts of the psyche but autonomous beings, with whom a person can have a close, personal relationship.8 And some of the “demons” a client describes are disowned parts of themselves, whilst others are real beings that do not belong in them. Telling the two apart matters: treating a possessing being as a part to be welcomed and integrated could mean a therapist unwittingly helping it possess the client further.9 So shamanism offers Gestalt practitioners a question to keep open in every session: is this a part of the person, or something other? See How does Therapeutic Shamanism relate to IFS, Voice Dialogue and Gestalt? and What is possession, and what is de-possession?
What does shamanism add to the Gestalt idea of maturity? #
Interdependence. Fritz Perls described maturity as the move from early dependence to mature independence. Goodman, unusually amongst the founders, also valued a healthy letting go of the boundary of the self, in creative union and flow.10
In an animist tribe, being Adult was about interdependence, not independence. The qualities of an Adult describe a role within a community, and that community includes the other-than-human Peoples.11 Even in a moment of anxiety, the Adult does not stand alone: a person stepping into their Adult self can sense their Power Animal by their side, because a true Adult is an interconnected being.12 Shamanism offers Gestalt a picture of maturity that reaches past the human relationships in the therapy room to the land, the animals and the whole web of life. See What does it mean to become a True Adult?
Who leads the work? #
In Gestalt, the therapist and client together, through experiments in the here and now. In shamanism, the Guides. The power of a shaman comes not from the shaman but from their ability to hollow out and from the depth of their connection with their Guides, and Therapeutic Shamanism is a Spirit-led practice through and through.13 For a Gestalt practitioner, this offers a different kind of support: help that does not depend on the therapist’s own skill or insight alone. See What are hollowing-out and stalking our stories?
