What is the difference between Gestalt Therapy and Psychoanalytic Therapy?
Gestalt Therapy was born out of the classical psychoanalytic tradition of Sigmund Freud. Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, was trained in psychoanalytic theory in Europe and underwent years of psychoanalysis with the great psychoanalysts of his time, Wilhelm Reich and Karen Horney. But like a rebellious teenager, Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy found its own path.
Psychoanalysis is based on the psychological concept of transference or more accurately, the interpretation by the therapist of how the client perceives the therapist. This focus on the client’s experience, as seen by the therapist, places the therapist in the role of an expert on the client’s thoughts and feelings. Naturally, a hierarchical relationship forms, with the client beginning looking to the therapist as the source of knowledge and power. It is not surprising that a client may see the therapist as a powerful father or mother figure.
The Gestalt Therapist, however, is committed to suspending his or her judgments and goals, bracketing off his theoretical “intepretations” to be in authentic “contact” with the client. The client is not a person to be acted upon, or figured out, or studied, but rather he or she is a co-creator, and equal partner, in the shared experience of therapy. Recent research by Barry Duncan PhD, in his book “What Works in Therapy,” has supported this idea that interpretations of the client’s experience by the therapist are not helpful to real change. What does make real change occur? The client’s positive feelings about the therapist. If the client feels heard, understood and appreciated, change will occur. This, coincidentally, is the true essence of Gestalt Therapy. As Irv Polster, a talented Gestalt Therapist, who trained under Fritz Perls, so aptly says in a videotaped session with a client. “I’m not here to change you… I’m here to understand you! To get to know you.” This dialogic relationship is the heart of gestalt therapy; two people on a journey of discovery, working to be as authentic and vulnerable as possible. The existentialist philosopher Martin Buber called this the I-Thou Relationship. The Gestalt Therapist sees the client not as an object or “it” to be influenced or moved, but rather as another human being (a “thou”) with unique and un-categorizable characteristics.
The psychoanalytic therapist uses transference as a reflection of historical relationships, focusing the therapy away from the current “here and now” relationship towards past relationships. Like the ghost from “A Christmas Carol”, the psychoanalytic therapist often travels back in time with the client to revisit past memories. This is in contrast to the Gestalt therapist who is not so interested in causalities linking then and now, but rather is present to the unfolding “here and now” of the client’s experience. If the client so chooses to go back in time and look at unfinished business with a parent, the gestalt therapist may bring that parent into the room and allow for a discussion with that parent in the present. Not through a séance or family therapy session, but through a technique called the “empty chair.” The client imagines the parent in an empty chair and converses with them right then and there to become aware of current thoughts and feelings towards their parent. This experiment is a significant deviation from modern psychoanalytic therapy.
While psychoanalytic theory has changed since the days when the therapist was silent and stoic, a blank slate upon which the client could project their fantasies, modern psychodynamic theories invite the therapist to create a relationship with the client. And still, the psychodynamic therapist may limit self-disclosures, not bringing their full selves to the therapeutic relationship. The psychoanalytic therapist is present to the client’s experience, but not part of the client’s experience. Yes, they are in the room, but they may not be truly dialogic: authentic, vulnerable and available. The theory of neutrality prevents them from bringing themselves totally into the relationship for fear they may tarnish or spoil the client’s transference or fantasies. This is counterintuitive for the Gestalt therapist who understands that the “Field” of the therapy is interconnected and intraconnected, always in flux and changing, and it is impossible to divorce oneself from the client’s experience—so why even try. The Gestalt therapist makes himself fully available to the client through a dialogic relationship, understanding his authenticity is paramount. If he is emotionally unavailable one session due to a death in his family, should he remain distant and distracted? No. It behooves him to share his experience with the client to facilitate dialogue, contact and a deeper relationship.
Insight has always been the holy grail of psychoanalytic theories. Insight is the cognitive understanding of how the past may inform the present, or the “why’s” of our actions. Insight tells us why we are angry at our partners because of a past wound inflicted upon us by our mother, etc. While insight is important, it is much like watching a baseball game on television. We can see the action, but can’t “feel” the action. For the Gestalt Therapist, “Awareness” is the reason d’etre of treatment. Awareness is a 3D experience. It’s the roar of the crowd at the ballpark, the smell of hotdogs lathered in mustard, and the crunch of used peanut shells under our feet. Insight can happen in the present, but Awareness is the present. It is not something that happens now. It is now. And ideally, it happens in the therapy hour, in the magical space between the therapist and client. Awareness is not something the therapist does to the client, but rather is co-created in the field, at the contact boundary, and becomes an offspring of the “process” of therapy.
While Freud gifted the world with the concepts of Id, Ego and Superego, these rigid structures of psyche or self became vestigial to early Gestalt therapists and all but forgotten for modern gestalt therapists. Fritz Perls in his books “Ego, Hunger and Aggression,” published in the late forties and “Gestalt Therapy” mentions the ego in his fledgling theories, but by the seventies and eighties, Gestalt theorists had moved on from these psychoanalytic terms. Instead of seeing the self in a battle between the Id, Ego and Superego, Gestalt Therapists see the self as a being constructed at the contact boundary between organism and environment. This phenomenological approach of the organism interacting with its environment is the underpinning of Gestalt Therapy. As well, this concept of self that Freud thought as fixed is viewed in Gestalt Therapy as always in flux and ever changing. I can testify to this view. With every developmental stage of my life, a new field is formed, in which I must contact new people, new environments and new problems. With each stage, I have formed a new self that, looking back, does not resemble the old at all. When I see pictures of myself in college, I feel so distant from that person and from the self I created back then.
Fritz Perls and his colleagues Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman, in their book “Gestalt Therapy” outlined the idea that there are disruptions at the contact boundary where the self is created and maintained. One of these disruptions is borrowed from Freud. Freud developed the novel idea of “defenses” that individuals use to manage primitive Id impulses. He brought forth the notion of Projection, where our unconscious or unowned desires, needs or feelings are placed upon another. This revolutionary idea has maintained in Gestalt Therapy in much the same way. Perls et al believed that organism doesn’t have the self-support or energy to digest the belief, feeling or desire and thus finds a host to put it upon. In this small way, Freudian Psychoanalytic theory is honored and past on through the Gestalt Therapy lineage.