I look at my potential choice of essays to write this morning and it reminds me very much of my 'old Gestalt Therapy days' going back to between 1979 and 1991.
My first Gestalt Therapy Group session was, I believe, in 1979, before The Gestalt Institute even moved to Cecil Street, the latter of which was located around College and Spadina, in downtown Toronto.
The Gestalt Institute, before that, if my memory serves me right, was around Bathurst and Harbord, it's coming back to me now, I believe on Markham St., just behind Honest Ed's (which was only a few blocks away from the Cecil site as well).
This is where I found the Gestalt Institute as I was still finishing up my Honours Thesis in Psychology at The University of Waterloo in 1979. And this was where I had my first Gestalt session, I think it might been a 'Pot Pourri' weekend -- and one of my sessions was with the leader and executive director of The Gestalt Institute at the time -- the famous (at least in Gestalt circles) and well-travelled Jorge Rosner who I believe actually studied with Fritz Perls (yes, I just confirmed that on the GIT's website where they give a brief history of The Gestalt Institute of Toronto -- and Jorge Rosner's crucial role in it.)
After around 1991, The Gestalt Institute moved to its current location at Carlton and Parliament, 194 Carlton St., Toronto, Ontario. Google...The Gestalt Institute of Toronto or 'GIT') I just received a letter last week from The GIT -- as an 'alumni (or potential) alumni member' -- so perhaps that is at least partly why I am thinking of the GIT now.
Let's test my memory a little further seeing as I can't find my copy of 'Ego, Hunger, and Aggression' (EHA), 1947, F.S. Perls, which my girlfriend seems to have moved when she cleaned up the house the other day (I'm not complaining; it just could take a while to find this book in some random location in the house. One person's 'treasure' is another person's 'trash'. What was 'organized' for me when I had the book buried in a box of books I was using close to my computer here was 'disorganized' for her when she came into the house and wanted to better 'organize' it. Perspective is everything.)
This is my DGB rendition of 'The Gestalt Cycle' which Perls started to put together in his first book (EHA, 1947) listed above. My Honours Thesis, in 1979, just before I found The Gestalt Institute in Toronto -- as if by some combination of 'good luck', 'chance', 'creative intuition', 'fate', and/or 'magic' and started to study Gestalt Therapy seriously for the first time -- was a 'Cognitive-General Semantic' rendition of 'The Gestalt Cycle', and of what Perls had first written about 32 years before me. So when I first started reading 'Ego, Hunger, and Aggression', to put it mildly, I was pleasantly and emotionally shocked by what I was reading, while at the same time, starting to absorb some new lines of thinking -- particularly relative to the concept of 'homeostatic balance' and 'organismic self-regulation'. (The latter concept may have been more fully articulated in Perls major work with Hefferline and Goodman, 'Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality' (1951).
The Gestalt Cycle starts with 'creative indifference'. (Here Perls was influenced by the work of Salomon Friedlander.)
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From the internet...The Historical Roots of Gestalt Therapy...Rosemarie Wulf...
In Berlin, Fritz Perls had frequented left-wing intellectual circles and also moved in Bauhaus circles. There he met the expressionist philosopher Salomon Friedlander, whose central philosophical motive gave Perls orientation in these times of confusion. Perls emphasized that Freud's Psychoanalysis and Friedlander's philosophy with the concept of "creative indifference" were his main spiritual sources. The point of creative indifference or void or point of balance is a point from which the differentiation into opposites takes place, since all existing things are determined by polarities. The basic assumption is that the split that man creates in the world through his consciousness, which he experiences as inevitable and painful, i.e., the separation between me and the world, between subject and object, is merely an illusion. This can only be abolished by understanding the world from a zero point, the no-thing of the world, the absolute, the creator, the origin. The zero point is the condition of the possibility of difference. In modern terms: I make the difference that makes the difference. The world is an action of the I ("The miller only hears his mill when it stands still" or "we only sense what contrasts in some way"). Perls regarded Friedlander's philosophy as the western equivalent to the teachings of Lao-tse. In Gestalt psychology and in Goldstein's organismic theory Perls found a terminology that corresponds to Friedlander's basic theses: the concept of homoeostasis, top dog and under dog, contact and withdrawal, figure and ground.
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So the Gestalt Cycle -- or 'The Evaluation Cycle' in my 1979 DGB terminology before I knew any such concept as 'creative indifference' -- starts with the phenomenon of creative indifference, a 'phenomenological and existential zero point where we might say we are perfectly in homeostatic balance. Unless we are dead, this state or zero point is not going to last for long -- maybe a matter of seconds before the Gestalt or Evaluation Cycle starts in motion again'.
Sensory perceptions impinge us from the outside world -- slowly or quickly they come to our attention or not depending on whether or not they are viewed and interpreted with any evaluative significance. Likewise, sensory perceptions may or may not come to our awareness from our 'inside world' as well -- our world of both mental and bodily experiences and functions.
Jorge Rosner used to have a classification system for these three 'zones of awareness' -- it went something like this: 1. our external, environmental zone; 2. our internal, emotional and bodily zone; and 3. our middle, mental, or conceptual zone.
Connecting this classification system to the work of Carl Jung (and/or one of his followers), we might say that an 'introvert' tends to spend a lot of time in his or her 'middle, mental zone' whereas an 'extrovert' tends to spend much more time in his or her 'external, environmental zone'.
With my being at least partly a 'narcissistic middle zone introvert' -- the 'philosopher-psychologist' in me -- my challenge in Gestalt Therapy was always to 'take a risk, to give up my wanting to intellectually control everything', and to 'get more in touch with and share my inner emotional-bodily zone' -- to 'get out of my head and into my senses' to use a famous Perls line, to 'become more in contact with my underlying ("Dionysian" or "Underdog") wishes and desires rather than constantly censoring or "retroflecting" them under the censorship of my ("Apollonian Topdog") and interconnected system of intellectual knowledge/defenses/resistances'.
For the most part, I probably failed more than I succeeded -- maybe it was just not meant to be at that time and place, or maybe I just didn't have the 'courage to be and/or become' (maybe I still don't) to 'jump from one Nietzschean cliff ('Apollo's Topdog Cliff') over the Nietzschean Abyss (with that gaping and seemingly endless void gaping below) to the Nietzschean Cliff on the other side (Dionysus' Cliff). Or maybe I didn't have the courage to 'walk or climb the Nietzschean Tightrope across the Existential Abyss to the other side'. The Abyss was too forbidding. Maybe I still don't. Maybe the Abyss is still too forbidding.
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And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
A subject for a great poet (philosopher) would be God's (man's) boredom after the seventh day of creation.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
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In my opinion, Fritz Perls, in many ways was a 1960s version ('reincarnation') of Friedrich Nietzsche. I would put Wilhelm Reich in this category too bridging the gap between Nietzsche and Perls. Perls was definitely influenced by Reich -- directly. His Nietzschean influence may be less direct, less talked about, but it seems just as apparent. Indeed, I would view Fritz Perls' Gestalt Therapy as by far the closest 'existential psychotherapy' to Nietzsche's underlying 'Dionysian-Superman Philosophy'.
Personally, as I have stated in at least several essays before this one, I would have preferred if Nietzsche had stayed closer to his 'Birth of Tragedy -- Apollonian-Dionysian Homeostatic Balance Formula' instead of basically 'abandoning Apollo' altogether -- and at times I have had the same complaint about Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy as well -- but that is either 'water under the bridge' and/or 'food for another essay'. Until then, I am 'back to my point of creative indifference'.
I have 'released some creative tension' and re-established my creative homestatic balance. I sat down at this computer this morning thinking that I was either going to write an essay on 'Obama's angry reaction to AIG's latest bonus scandal' or alternatively an essay on Hegel, built from the essay before this...
But like a good 'hot seat' in Gestalt Therapy, I like the fact that I can change my 'figural ground' and 'background' easily and 'go with the flow' -- 'go with the dominant figural stimulus'.
And today that was an essay on Gestalt Therapy.
I liked where it started. I like where it ended.
I'm finished for today.
-- dgb, March 17th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
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From The Gestalt Institute Website...
WILHELM REICH – Reich’s early work greatly influenced the development of bodywork in Gestalt, partly as a result of Fritz Perls having been psychoanalyzed by Reich. Unlike orthodox psychoanalysts who sat behind their clients laid out on the couch, the Gestalt Therapist sits facing the client allowing them to incorporate body language with the talk therapy. From this position it is possible to observe the whole person – posture, gesture, musculature and movement as well as listening to what he or she says. This allows the Gestalt Therapist to work with obvious contradictions between what is said verbally and the body language. Also, it allows the therapist to read the client in terms of Reich’s concept of body armoring. That is, to see where emotion has been inhibited or locked in the body because it was deemed socially unacceptable to express it.
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From the internet...Google... Online Features/Filmprint, I see you've got a gun: A conversation with JoAnne Greenham (current executive director of The Gestalt Institute of Toronto)
I see you've got a gun: A Conversation with JoAnne Greenham
by Darya Farha
JoAnne Greenham, the director of the Gestalt Institute of Toronto, is much in demand as a psychotherapist, consultant and teacher. She has over thirty years experience in the field and has worked with many people in the arts including directors, actors, writers and visual artists. She herself studied at the Ontario College of Art (now Ontario College of Art and Design) and has a special interest in creativity and dreamwork. I wanted to interview Greenham about creativity because she is perhaps the most creative and unpredictable person I have met. Studying with her has been a fascinating and rich experience, characterized by playfulness and an inclusive attitude to life. We met twice over the summer for the purposes of this interview.
DF: What is creativity?
JG: It's making something out of nothing. It's a process of making a whole, a formation. Genesis.
DF: And when we say a person is creative, what are we saying about them? Often I'm not even sure what I mean when I use the word.
JG: Well, I think everyone has their own meaning for these words, their own associations. I tend to think of it as what a person does with the available resources.
DF: Why is it so interesting? There are so many books trying to explain it.
JG: It's the surprise. The unexpected. The suspense.
DF: I'm curious about what it takes to do that, to manipulate resources and materials in the environment and make something new. I know I've often felt an element of fear in myself and seen that in other people too.
JG: It has to do with destroying. I look behind you there on the sofa and there's a big pile of stuff. I really should go through it and throw things out--it's been there for a year. There's something about disturbing and dismantling that's upsetting for people. The creative person has to dismantle. And I don't believe that many people can do that without anxiety. I'm so stuck on the order and the rules about not mixing. You find out what's disturbing to you. It's your sense of what's allowed. There was a student here who started to mix dry pastel with oil. And it made me nervous--I told her it wasn't going to work. Well, she wasn't afraid to try it, and it worked beautifully.
DF: So we block ourselves?
JG: When you think about it, there are blocks to contact that go on in the neurotic. They interrupt themselves. There's the stimulus, the awareness, the excitation, the action, the approach, the resolution and then the withdrawal when it's finished. Some people might do something with a couple of sticks and say that's lovely. They're satisfied. Their process is interrupted by the speed with which they do it in so that they don't go through a sensory experience. In some ways, if we were to involve a Gestalt model to creativity, we would say that it is a process that must involve the unknown. So that when writers have writer's block they get stuck somewhere, and it must have something to do with the fear of the unknown. They struggle with not being able to proceed and how they screw around at that point, how they struggle and frustrate instead of trusting the emptiness that must be part of the creative process. The not-knowing is the place where something new is forming.
DF: And so how would you work with the block?
JG: I did it in the first exercise on the first day. [I had just co-lead JoAnne's Art Therapy and Dreamwork workshop. JoAnne is referring to an experiment in which participants were asked to draw a picture using all their most rigid and frightening expectations and standards. Paradoxically, they were drawing attention to the demands and criticisms that artists usually experience as background noise. By bringing that noise to the foreground, participants could incorporate it consciously into the artwork and see how it shaped their work. The resultant drawings were precise, accurate, somewhat tight likenesses of various objects in the room.] That's the exciting part. You introduce the stoppers, the blockers, the weapons you use to freeze yourself, and then shine a light on it. It's like saying, "I see you've got a gun." (laughs)
DF : Right. The idea is to exaggerate the problem or symptom in order to reduce its power. Instead of trying to smash through the problem, you make the problem central to the artwork...When you suppress it you make it worse. [ To the reader: Try it for yourself. Next time you feel blocked, don't try to loosen up. Instead try to tighten more, and learn how you tighten yourself.]
JG: Yes, and the person with the gun gets a little disarmed. "Yeah?!", they say when you point it out. It's stating the obvious, working with the obvious, instead of what ought to be.
DF: You eventually bring your standards back in so that they don't just block you, they can help you to produce stuff that's good.
JG: Bring them in with awareness and drop the ones that are useless. When they're controlling me and running my life I can't respect myself, I feel worthless, I don't respect what I'm doing. For me, in my life, nobody expected me to be anything specific. There was nothing about perfection in my life except maybe the way my mother washed the floors. (laughs)
DF: You didn't have a lot of expectations put on you? Wow, that seems unusual to me. I don't know what we should do; I feel almost like we should make a scientific exhibit out of you or something.
JG: I don't have that anxiety about standards and perfection. I'm happy to be here. I'm just happy to have made the team.
DF: That's amazing to me—give me some of that! No, but seriously, I feel I haven't been a very good interviewer so far because I've been trying to figure out what the LIFT members would want to know from a psychotherapist, and obviously I can't possibly figure that out.
JG: It has to do with contact, being in contact with your own process and also our being in contact with each other.
DF: Yes, rather than being in contact with you I've been more in contact with my "should." But actually, that reminds me that I'd wanted to ask you about collaboration. For many people, filmmaking is collaborative and social, and you have to find the right people to work with. Do you have any thoughts on that? Sometimes it's so hard to know who would be the right person to work with.
JG: Well, it's about self-revelation, about saying "This is who I am." It's often a good idea to do that in another medium, not the medium you're working in. For example, you could get together and draw. That way you're in contact with each other as you do something. You could see how it goes and then decide whether or not to proceed. You don't want to get caught up in the content.
DF: I'm wondering about other sorts of blocks and problems. Gestalt is concerned with where you stop yourself. I'm thinking for example of filmmakers who get stuck in the pre-production stage, or film a lot and can't move on to editing.
JG: There's so much excitement. There's some satisfaction in the gathering of material. I think it's a bit addictive. And then people become gatherers rather than artists or filmmakers or whatever they want to be. When you're stuck, caught up in the gathering of data, you might lose interest, you can lose contact with your process. All they get is more and more instead of engaging their attention. For people with ADD, no pattern begins to emerge. They're caught up in the activity of gathering and aren't paying that much attention.
DF: What about people who focus on the end, on the product?
JG: That's the ambition, to be good, to be great. Ambition controls the art work. Unless you're stuck thinking you'll never get anywhere. Then the introduction of ambition can be an important component in the process. Ambition doesn't have to be neurotic.
DF: I also often have a problem concentrating. It's like I can't let myself become absorbed in my work. I can't let go of the social.
JG: It's another cycle of involvement that's upstaging the creativity. Something is unfinished, unresolved in your relation to the social. You don't have to resolve it, but you need at least to be aware of it and put it aside.
DF: And what is it when you can't detach from what you've made, can't let it go?
JG: If somebody has a baby, they want to show it. At first they want to talk about the labour, how long it was. Somehow they want to show the product. There's a reluctance to let go of the self. They're not yet ready to let the production speak for itself. And once they are, then they're free. There's all kinds of not knowing. For a baby you just have to wait and drink apple juice. Little effort and lots of love. Whereas the artist is responsible for every cell in the body of the work; the artist really struggles.
DF: What's the artist's struggle about?
JG: To fill their expectations.
DF: There were quite a few artists, people used to working with images, in the Art Therapy and Dreamwork workshop. What difference do you find between people who work with images and are used to drawing compared to those who aren't in terms of art therapy?
JG: The artists are very committed to the exercises. They're not worried about their drawings so they can get right to the feeling. They enter at a different place on the continuum. With those who aren't used to it, you have to start earlier. The trick is to outwit, so to speak. With the artists you've got to be creative enough to bypass what they're anticipating. By mixing up the figure/ground they get less active control of the process.
DF: I'm really interested in the program you're doing in the spring using video. Can you talk about that a little?
JG: I'm interested in the notion of projection. I wondered what it would be like to bypass all the verbal stuff and just see yourself. We put a lot of clout in our opinion of how we're perceived by others. In our young adult life we assume things about how we're perceived. My interest in video started years ago when I was in couples therapy with a therapist who used to videotape the sessions. What happened for me--it was quite profound--is that I stopped judging myself in terms of my appearance, of the kind of person I was, and I recognized myself. It was empathy for myself. I stopped indulging in so much self-criticism and self-evaluation. I don't know what will happen for the participants. One of the students who's in film is going to operate the camera, and the tapes will be destroyed when it's over. It will be an experimental program.
DF: I'm wondering though if maybe people have gotten used to seeing themselves, what with the accessibility of video technology now. I'm thinking especially that many independent filmmakers see themselves a lot; they're in their friends' films or artwork or even in their own. Will this be anything new for them?
JG: When you're doing it in your art you're controlling it and framing it. But this doesn't have that element. That's why we're calling it Through the Eyes of a Stranger. This use of video here will cut through our sense of aesthetics, aesthetics that often come from our crazy values.
DF: I know you've run a program for actors in the past. What kinds of issues come up when working with actors?
JG: The groups we did were quite amazing. We did therapy with them, a lot of the regular experiments. And we had them act out a scene from their own lives. Actors have issues around authenticity. What tended to come out was how much more authentic they were when they acted out their own lives. They played themselves in the scenes. In the old movies you see that the actors were hammy, corny, play-acty. Now we value reality, things have to seem real. So, nowadays, actors have to be able to be corny and giddy in order to get some relief from that pressure to be real. So we give them a chance to do that.
DF: It's a bit of a paradox, because you have to play at this incredible authenticity. You're saying that to get to authenticity you've got to go through artificiality.
JG: Yes. Another issue for actors is that they have trouble because they have to both suppress and express emotion at once. We had one actor here who had a lot of anger towards casting agents, because of the power they had over him. He was into kissing ass. And so we got him to go in to auditions and kind of curse the agent under his breath. By acknowledging his feelings he was able to access more emotion and energy for the audition itself. He could be more natural.
DF: And what about directors? Have you worked with film directors too?
JG: Yes, I worked with two very well-known directors in Scandinavia. They were opposites from each other. One had an idea, a vision, that guided him. The other worked with the actor, and with the actor's ideas.
DF: I was going to ask you why so many creative people are attracted to Gestalt; there are a lot of artists here, writers, designers, painters, I notice. But I suppose I could answer that myself: it's the use of art, psychodrama, improvisation, free association, metaphor, the emphasis on personal style, things like that.
JG: But that's today. In the early days, Gestalt was considered more New Age-y. George Rosner [the former director of the Institute] introduced art, and we ran with his idea; we sought it out.
DF: Before we finish, I wanted to ask you about your own creative process as a therapist. You know how gymnasts run and then do a tumbling line? You tumble but without running first. I can't see it coming—all of a sudden you do an aerial or something. You're not working linearly or through explanation.
JG: It probably comes from my recklessness. Because I don't really know how to tumble.
DF: I love it. To me you seem like a conceptual artist. You take huge leaps. I don't know how you get there but it's always amazing.
JG: What it is for me is that when I wade in and go carefully then I get so impatient. You have to lay the groundwork, but, eventually, I lose patience and I say "let's go for it." What's to lose, as long as you're willing to deal with it if you're wrong? That's important: to admit when you're wrong. If you don't, then you become a bully.
DF: Maybe that's why there's such joyfulness in your work, even when you're working with sadness or anger. There's something about joy and risk. They seem related to me.
JG: Yes, they do. Somehow, what it brings to mind is children. Children will find pleasure anywhere. That's what they do. If they're not given the opportunity for pleasure they'll make anything pleasurable.
DF: I'd never thought of that, but that's so true. Realizing that makes me feel a little sad, since so many children become afraid and lose that instinct for pleasure.
JG: Fear stifles creativity and risk-taking. Expression, if it's disabled, thwarts a person from expressing how different they are. We are unique, and we need an outlet to express who we are. Expression prevents ultimate destruction. Michael Moore, in his film Farenheit 9/11, talks about the creation of fear. Since he made that film people are leaping off his success, they're feeling liberated.
DF: But so many people are critical of him, even people on the same side.
JG: Yes, now they're getting picky.
DF: I think he's extremely courageous.
JG: Yes, it's a wonder he's alive.
DF: Thanks for your time JoAnne.
JG: I hope you got something there.
Darya Farha is a LIFT member and a student at the Institute. This is the second of two articles on creativity.
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