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The Phenomenological Method of Gestalt Therapy: Revisiting Husserl to

Discover the “Essence” of Gestalt Therapy

Article · January 2009

DOI: 10.5325/gestaltreview.13.3.0277

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The Phenomenological Method of Gestalt Therapy:
Revisiting Husserl to Discover the “Essence” of Gestalt Therapy1

Note: I offer this paper as a memorial to my mentor and friend, Richard Kitzler
(1927 – 2009), without whom none of my words or ideas would have had life.
Dan Bloom, J.D., L.S.C.W.
©
ABSTRACT

Gestalt therapy stands out from other experiential psychotherapies through its unique attention
to figure/ground emergence and the sequence of contact within the phenomenal field of the
therapist and patient. This is the “essence” or heart of gestalt therapy. It is achieved through the
application of a modified version of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method. This paper
will describe this process and offer a clinical example for elaboration.

Key words: gestalt therapy, phenomenology, Husserl, epoché, reduction, bracketing, life-world,
figure/ground, eidetic reduction, intentionality, psychotherapeutic intentionality, sequence of
contact, intersubjectivity, lived-body.


There are two significant yet often neglected strands in the praxis2 of gestalt therapy:
pragmatism and phenomenology.3 Gestalt therapy borrows many ideas from pragmatism,
including the concept of the creative process of human experience, its incarnate unity, and
even the “gestalt experiment” by which insights are encouraged to emerge and be tested
within the creative activities of the therapy session. Nevertheless, phenomenology informs the
basic psychotherapeutic attitude of gestalt therapy as an experiential psychotherapy.
This paper proposes that the application of a modified version of Edmund Husserl’s4
phenomenological method clarifies how gestalt therapy stands out from the general field of
experiential psychotherapies to reveal its particular “essence” or essential qualities, which
identify it uniquely as a psychotherapeutic modality in which both therapist and patient are in
readiness for the emergence of figure/ground from their common, co-created, life-world. This
readiness for gestalt emergence is the heart of gestalt therapy, distinguishing it from all other
experiential psychotherapies. Such readiness is achieved with the modified phenomenological
method of Husserl described here.5

Experiential Psychotherapy and Gestalt Therapy

Any psychotherapy may be experiential if it privileges what is experienced in a session.
It becomes phenomenological if it separates (brackets) “raw” or naïve experience from the
psychotherapeutic stance. A modified deployment of the phenomenological method in respect
of naïve experience turns experiential psychotherapy into gestalt therapy, that is, into a
psychotherapy that explores the emergent patterns (i.e. gestalten) within embodied
experience as the figure/ground process in the sequence of contacting (Perls et al., 1951, p.
404). The concepts from Husserl’s phenomenology that find their way into gestalt therapy
praxis are the natural attitude, the phenomenological reduction6 (including the epoché or
bracketing), intentionality, the lived-body, and the life-world. I will discuss these complex
concepts and show how they are central to gestalt therapy—even if gestalt therapists are
 2 2
unaware that they regularly use them. “Psychotherapeutic intentionality” will be introduced as
way of understanding contacting within a gestalt therapy session. A clinical vignette will be
offered.

Historical Background

A brief history leading to the development of Husserl’s phenomenological method is a
necessary platform for this paper’s themes.
Franz Brentano (1838-1917) made the first systematic inquiry into phenomenology; he
is actually claimed by both philosophy and psychology as a pioneer in their respective fields.
Brentano considered the qualities that distinguish mental or “psychic” phenomena from
physical phenomena. Brentano reached back to the Scholastics for the term “intentionality.”
Intentionality is the “aboutness” of mental phenomena. Physical phenomena do not have this
quality. “To think” always is to think “of” something. All thought7 has an object, either
inexistent or actual. One can think of an inexistent unicorn or of an existent house. Brentano
was a direct influence on Sigmund Freud and, of course, on Husserl, both of whom were his
students.
The name most associated with phenomenology is Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). With
him, phenomenology became a philosophical movement. Initially, Husserl studied the nature of
logic as a mental process and attempted to find the non-empirical basis for knowledge—and
consciousness—by deploying a specific technique of inquiry, the phenomenological method, to
which will be discussed below. Husserl was directly influenced by William James’ Principles of
Psychology (1981), as well as by the method James himself used to describe meticulously his
own experiences as the basis for his psychological insights. Arguably, Husserl deepened
James’s project by taking it into more complex philosophical waters. James never completed
his final work, Essays in Radical Empiricism (1987), which was to have been an exposition of
the philosophical implications of his psychology. Since pragmatism and phenomenology are
important background influences on gestalt therapy, it is fascinating that their own
development is related.
Husserl developed Brentano’s concept of intentionality into a fully developed, nuanced,
philosophy of consciousness. His central insight that “consciousness was the condition of all
experience; indeed it constituted the world” (Moran, 2000, p. 61). Among many other
elements, his philosophy describes the relationship of the conscious subject to the “external”
world within consciousness. Objects constituted by consciousness are “intentional objects.”
Objects do not merely appear to us, but they are constituted as appearances (phenomena) by
us within our consciousness as “intentional objects.” Intentionality describes the relationship
of knowing subject to the known. It comprises both its quality or noesis and its object or noema
(Husserl, 1999; Spinelli, 2005, p. 59; Zahavi, 2003, p. 58). Most importantly, Husserl developed
a phenomenological method involving the epoché or bracketing and reduction (see below),
which attempted a new approach to the philosophy of experience. This method gave the
person who deployed it the ability to put aside the ordinary way of viewing the word—the
natural attitude—and begin to see and describe what actually presents itself to experience.
Over the course of his many years of scholarship, Husserl’s ideas went through variations and
further expansions. He later developed the ideas of the lived-body, time consciousness, the
life-world, and intersubjectivity; I will mostly focus on those ideas relevant to psychotherapy.
The following cannot be overstated. Perhaps it is even a caveat. Any–every—summary
of Husserl is insufficient because of the breadth of his writings; every summary is inadequate
 3 3
because the complexity of, and contradictions within, his ideas lead to misinterpretations and
varied interpretations (Moran, 2000, p. 62).
Husserl scholarship is a century-old academic industry. It continues to be enriched by
newly released papers from the Husserl archives; some 35 volumes have been published to
date. New studies reinterpret the early Husserl through the lenses of the later and posthumous
Husserl, and these interpretations are not without controversy (Zahavi, 2003, 2005; Dreyfus,
1982; Sokolowski, 2000). Scholars examine the entire Husserl corpus to “solve” some of the
“problems” presented by his earlier ideas. They often find textual support for their studies,
since Husserls’ later ideas are often foreshadowed in his earlier works. Our choice is either to
think of “segmented Husserls” and remain loyal to each discrete, internally consistent, segment
of his intellectual development, or follow the trajectory of his own development and integrate
his ideas into our own study, using reason as our guide. I follow the second alternative, along
with other contemporary writers (e.g., Wertz, 2005; Zahavi, 2003, 2005). This approach
affirms the plasticity of ideas as they may be applied to our present situations.

Husserl’s Phenomenology

Husserl’s first objective was to help clarify the foundation of positive sciences by
extracting metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions from it (Zahavi, 2003, p. 44). The
phenomenological method was intended to transform the pre-reflective or natural world into a
philosophical, phenomenological world (Sokolowski, 2000, p. 49) where the ideal essence or
eidos can be revealed through what is sometimes called the eidetic reduction (Hintikka, 1995,
p. 101) or eidetic intuition (Moran, 2000, p. 134). In other words, rather than being a
psychological method, the phenomenological method initially was intended to transcend, go
beyond, psychology and psychologism (i.e. the psychologizing or personalizing of experience).
Phenomenology could then enter into a “pure” world without the confusion of mundane
sensation. The philosophical world of the ideal, of essences, is not the world of psychology. But
later in his career, Husserl attempted to bring his method to bear on questions of science.
Consequently, the phenomenological method has been effectively applied in both
psychology and psychotherapy. (Giorgi & Giorgi, 2003, Wertz, 2005, Ihde, 1977). Ernesto
Spinelli, in The Interpreted World (2005), describes a phenomenological psychotherapeutic
method, which begins with the straightforward rule of suspending initial biases and prejudices
so as to attend to immediate experience, and follows other simple “rules” distilled from
Husserl (Spinelli, 2005, p. 20). Gestalt therapy adopts a similar method (Yontef, 1993)
(Crocker and Philippson, 2005, p. 67). These are useful approaches. Yet, gestalt therapy does
not merely track experience as in experiential or in phenomenological, as all gestalt therapists
know. We can discover more about the unique experiential process of gestalt therapy by taking
a closer look at it through the lens of Husserl’s method.
Specifically, gestalt therapy is achieved with an “as if” turning back of Husserl’s method
onto itself, that is, by “doubling back” to what is left in the natural attitude but now including
what is bracketed within a broader horizon of the developing moment. The “natural attitude”
to which gestalt therapy returns is now significantly changed. It is a perspective towards
Husserl’s life-world, “the universal field into which all our acts, whether of experiencing, of
knowing, or of outward action are directed” (Husserl, 1999, p, 376). Doubling-back echoes the
later Husserl’s’ instructions to scientists for the “epoché of objective science” (Husserl, 1999, p.
371). Doubling-back differs from the reduction in that it does not entirely exclude or change
the bracketed natural attitude. In fact, the word “reduction” means “a return” to experience
 4 4
without—the bracketed presuppositions. “Doubling-back” is a play on that word and is defined
here as a doubling-back to experience with the bracketed presuppositions as available active
background in the modified perspective of an altered natural attitude.
Gestalt therapists begin with and return to the psychological, phenomenal field in
order to attend to figure/ground emergence. This is the essence, the core, of gestalt therapy.
More will be said about this point below.
Gestalt therapy attends to the structure of the emerging figure within a psychotherapy
session (Spagnuolo Lobb, 2005). Whether this is the awareness continuum (L. Perls, 1992),
the sequence of contacting (Perls et al., 1951, p. 403), or the Cycle of Experience (Nevis, 1992),
the therapist and patient engage together in such a way that what emerges in their shared
phenomenal field becomes the focus of the session. While gestalt therapists usually describe
therapy as a figure/ground process, where figures and grounds proceed sequentially, it may
also be described in more directly phenomenological language as a core/fringe process (Ihde,
1977, p. 60; Kitzler, 2008). Gestalt therapy does more: it attends to the patterns, gestalten, of
the stream of experience as they emerge in contacting. The gestalt therapist should be
sensitized to notice this phenomenon by training. The aesthetic qualities of contacting, which
are the felt, sensed, perceived, observed, known qualities, are at the heart of the psychotherapy
(Bloom, 2003). Inhibitions to this process, either as restrictions to spontaneity or other forms
of fixities referred to as “interruptions” to contacting (Perls, et al., 1951), are the material for
psychotherapeutic insight. These become known in gestalt therapy through a version of the
phenomenological method.
Beginning of the phenomenological method: the natural attitude
The natural attitude is the world as taken for granted (Moran 2000, p. 144). As Husserl
expressed it, “we begin our considerations as human beings who are living natural,
objectivating, judging, feeling, willing ‘in the natural attitude’” (1999, p. 60). This natural world
is our surrounding world (Husserl, 1999, p. 61), not a world of mere things, but a practical
world. “I simply find the physical things in front of me furnished not only with material
determinations but also with value characteristics, as beautiful and ugly, pleasant and
unpleasant, agreeable and disagreeable” (Husserl, 1999, p. 61). Or, according to Robert
Sokolowski, a contemporary phenomenologist, “The natural attitude is the focus we have when
we are involved in our original, world-directed stance, when we intend things, situations, facts,
and any other kinds of objects. The natural attitude is, we might say, the default perspective,
the one we have before anything else” (Sokolowski, 2000, p. 42, emphasis added). Naïve
appearances compose the matter-of-fact sphere in which we find ourselves. The natural
attitude is the domain of ordinary conversation, too. It is the natural world of social banter
between the psychotherapist and patient, which must come to an end for the psychotherapy to
begin.
Husserl posed the following question: How can this natural world with its “factually
existent actuality” (Husserl, 1999, p. 63) be the basis for knowledge—scientific,
psychotherapeutic, or philosophical—if its appearance is so subject-dependent? The aim of the
sciences belonging to the natural world is to “cognize ‘the’ world more comprehensively, more
reliably, more perfectly in every respect than naive experiential cognizance can [and thus]
solve all the problems of scientific cognition which offer themselves within the realm of the
world” (Husserl, 1999, p. 63).
Furthermore, how can science—or psychotherapy—reliably get beyond naïve
experience if it is embedded within the very world it is studying? Since the sciences implicitly
and unquestioningly accept the natural attitude, the assumptions of daily life, they must use his
 5 5
phenomenological method. Husserl’s phenomenology is “a new, critical, and rigorous science”
whose task is to “thematize and elucidate the core questions concerning the being and nature
of reality.” (Zahavi, 2003, p. 44).
The phenomenological method
The task of getting beyond the natural attitude in order to get to those core questions is
neither easily done nor said. The purpose of Husserl’s phenomenological method was to
deploy a series of reductions to extract consciousness from the naïve mundane world and
achieve a transcendental consciousness (and intentionality) freed from the limitations of the
presumptions of the nature attitude in order to discover universal essences.
Bracketing (Parenthesizing) or the Epoché
Instead of Descartes’ use of doubting to find an indubitable ground of being, Husserl
suggested that, “[w]ith regard to any positing we can quite freely exercise [the] epoché, a
certain refraining from judgment which is compatible with the unshaken conviction of truth, even
with the unshakable conviction of evident truth. The positing is ‘put out of action,’
parenthesized, converted into the modification, ‘parenthesized positing’; the judgment
simpliciter is converted into the ‘parenthesized judgment’. . . . [E]very positing related to this
objectivity is to be excluded and converted into its parenthetical modification” (Husserl, 1999,
p. 64, emphasis added).
This phenomenological attitude neither negates nor doubts the world. It merely
excludes any judgment of “its spatiotemporal factual being” (Husserl, 1999, p. 65, emphasis
added), so that knowledge may be based on pure intuition (Zahavi, 2003, p. 44, emphasis
added). Such judgments related to this natural world are excluded so that transcendental
knowledge (knowledge beyond simple judgments of time and space, beyond the natural
attitude) becomes possible. Thus, the epoché is referred to as the transcendental reduction.
Epoché and Beyond
After deployment of this epoché, according to Husserl, a world without presuppositions
becomes available for study. We are now faced with the things themselves, the Eldorado of his
phenomenological philosophy. The epoché is an abrupt suspension of the natural attitude; the
transcendental reduction that follows is the “thematization of the correlation between
subjectivity and the world” (Zahavi, 2003, p. 46). We can then know the constitutive nature of
consciousness. Consciousness now functions transcendentally composed of both the object
that is intended (noema), and the object (of consciousness) as it is intended (noesis) within
consciousness (Moran, 2000, p. 156). That is, consciousness has both thematic and functional
aspects: a person is conscious of something and can be conscious of being conscious (Zahavi,
2005, pp. 51, 52).
Husserl made it clear that consciousness is incarnate and interlaced with the world
(Ricoeur, 2007, pp. 55, 56); this point is critical to a discussion of Husserl and gestalt therapy,
since it addresses a potential clash between gestalt therapy’s monism and Husserl’s potential
Cartesian dualism: “. . . kinaesthetic and perceptual appearances are related to one another
through consciousness” (Husserl, 1999, p. 227). That is, consciousness unifies sensation and
perception. “The lived-body (Leib) is constantly there. . . functioning as an organ of perception,
. . . an entire system of compatibly harmonizing organs of perception. The lived-body is in
itself. . . the perceiving-lived body” (Husserl, 1999, p. 227). Consciousness is embodied
consciousness. Every worldly experience is mediated and made possible by embodiment
(Zahavi, 2003, p. 99). The lived-body and embodied consciousness appear within the
phenomenological attitude assumed after this epoché.
Husserl’s phenomenological method takes another step after the epoché. To move to
 6 6
the eidetic world of nonsensuous, non-empirical, universal meaning, Husserl proposes the
eidetic reduction, the transcendental turn to the transcendental ego. In Husserl’s words, this
“new kind of experience” is “transcendental inner experience,” which “opens up the limitless
transcendental field of being” (Husserl, 1999, p. 331, emphasis added) and “the invariant
essential structures of the total sphere of pure mental processes” (Smith, 1995, p. 326).
Through this eidetic reduction, “[essences] have to be distinguished in
phenomenological analysis from the sensory mass in which they are given” (Mohanty, 1995,
101). The eidetic reduction looks to essential forms: it “is different from the transcendental,
which turns us from the natural attitude to the phenomenological” attitude (Sokolowski, 2000,
p. 184). Only after this reduction would it be possible to engage in the kind of philosophical
analysis that would find the essential qualities of things, their eidos, their essences (Wertz,
2005).
Life-world and the “epoché of objective science”
In response to criticism that his theory of the transcendental ego described monadic
subjects floating in worlds of their own, each isolated from the other, the later Husserl
developed the concepts of empathy, intersubjectivity, and the life-world. Husserl proposed
that empathy and intersubjectivity were always implicit to his phenomenology. The life-world
is the social world “pre-given naturally. . . the source of what is taken for granted” (Husserl,
1999 p. 363). The life-world is a kind of other layer uncovered by the reduction: “As conscious
beings we always inhabit the life-world; it is pre-given in advance and experienced as a unity.
The life-world is the general structure which allows objectivity and thinghood to emerge in
different ways” (Moran, 2000, p. 182); it is the world of human consciousness, embodied life,
and the world of human cultures. Husserl developed this concept in an effort to address what
he referred to as the “crisis” in European sciences stemming from, among other things, the
mathematization of the world, the imposition upon the life-world of scientific constructs that
smothered human breath, although the idea itself was present in his early philosophical
writings. He offered the “epoché of objective science” as a remedy to the “crisis” (Husserl,
1999, p. 377). In this epoché, “any critical position-taking which is interested in the truth or
falsity. . . of the objective sciences or knowledge of the world” are bracketed (Husserl, 1999, p.
371). The life-world is then revealed and available for study. The “pre-given” world is before
us. As Husserl described it,
nothing shall interest us but precisely that subjective alteration of manners of
givenness, of manners of appearing and of the modes of validity in them, which, in its
constant process, synthetically connected as it incessantly flows on, brings about the
coherent consciousness of the straightforward ‘being’ of the world (Husserl, 1999, p.
377).
This is also referred to as the scientific reduction (Giorgi & Giorgi, p, 247) or psychological
phenomenological reduction (Wertz, p. 168).
A contemporary critic of phenomenology and Husserl, however, raises a significant
objection worthy of brief mention. Are the phenomenological, transcendental reductions, or
reduction of the objective sciences predicated on an atomization of experience—a splitting of
wholes of experience? Gestalt theory and contemporary psychology support the notion that
experience is presented as wholes, and not constituted from its parts (Brown, 2008). This
criticism is the subject of heated controversy.

Objections and Response

 7 7
Within the literature of gestalt therapy, Lynne Jacobs and Robert Stolorow have
recently challenged gestalt therapy’s alleged reliance on a uncritical acceptance of Husserl’s
phenomenological reductions. The epoché splits mind from body, perhaps person from the
world. Bracketing disrupts the very process that gestalt therapy purports to explore. Husserl’s
approach is transcendental rather than existential and, as such, separates the subject from its
surround. Stolorow & Jacobs urge a hermeneutic approach instead (2006, p. 58). Husserl’s
attempt at establishing a transcendental presuppositionless perception was futile since all
perception must “be an act of interpretation, perspectivally embedded in the interpreter’s own
traditions.” There can be no “pure” phenomenology (Stolorow & Jacobs, 2006, p. 57).
Yes, But…
Jacobs’ and Stolorow’s suggestions do not give sufficient heft to Husserl’s life-world, the
centrality of the lived-body in any perspectival experience (Zahavi, 2003, p. 98), to the
importance of the epoché without the eidetic reduction, nor to “the epoché of the objective
science”—all of which are necessary to experience the figure/ground contacting process in
gestalt therapy—and without which gestalt therapy would remain indistinguishable from any
other experiential psychotherapy.
The rules of description and horizontillization ( Spinelli, 2005, p. 20), which are central
to phenomenological psychotherapy, simply tell us to keep an open mind in psychotherapy, to
attend to the concrete developments in a session, or to avoid abstract explanations. (They do
no more than state the givens of experiential psychotherapy.) Jacobs’ and Stolorow’s
preference for “a hermeneutic approach… [that emphasizes] our context embeddedness, that
understanding is emergent from continual encounter with our pre-judgments. . . and that
understanding involves a circular dialogic process in which neither partner has privileged
access to a more ‘pure’ perspective” (Stolorow & Jacobs, 2006, p. 59) is consistent with what is
proposed here. But their approach is much closer to experiential psychotherapy’s rules of
description and horizontillization (Ihde, 1977; Spinelli, 2005, pp. 20, 21). Where is the gestalt
therapy in Jacobs and Stolorow’s hermeneutic approach? Of course Jacobs and Stolorow are
correct: there are no presuppositionless or “pure” perceptions. But it is precisely the
phenomenological method that makes “impurities” figural in gestalt therapy.
The eidetic reduction leaves behind the presuppositionless world and enters the realm
of essences. Such a realm is the realm of philosophy; it is not gestalt therapy’s praxis. The
eidetic reduction is a philosophical method for the “empirical ego” to become the
transcendental ego. The ego of gestalt therapy is the ego functioning of self [Willson—italics??
(Perls et al., 1951, pp. 377 ff)—as empirical an ego as there can be. In gestalt therapy, the
therapist and patient are engaged with the processive concrete actuality of the sequence of
contact. Frequently, patient and therapist exercise imagination or fantasy. But this is neither
the “free variation” (Wertz, 2005, p. 173) nor the “imaginative variation” (Stokowlowksi, 2000,
p. 179) that follow the eidetic reduction in order to reveal universal essences. Even as used in
phenomenological psychology, these methods decontextualize an actual event (Wertz, 2005, p.
173), inappropriate for psychotherapy.
To summarize, Husserl’s phenomenological method begins with what is directly
experienced in the natural attitude, brackets its epistemological and metaphysical
presuppositions in the transcendental reduction, and further deploys the eidetic reduction
toward the universe of essences. But the epoché does not depart from experience itself. The
person remains of the world. Husserl’s philosophy proceeds across two planes: the
transcendental and the empirical (Zahavi, 2003, p. 49; Husserl, 1999, p. 331). The
transcendental and empirical are “theoretically equivalent” and parallel: “it is just the field of
 8 8
transcendental self-experience (conceived in full concreteness) which in every case can,
through mere alteration of attitude, be changed into psychological self-experience” (Husserl,
1999, pp. 331-332). That is, the transcendental and psychological are different turns within the
phenomenological method (Husserl, 1999, p. 332). The epoché of the objective sciences is a
return to the life-world within Husserl’s own phenomenological method. The doubling-back
proposed here combines elements of previously bracketed natural attitude with the emergent
life-world.
The Core Argument Re-Stated
This phenomenological method in gestalt therapy returns to the sensuous concrete
experiencing of the lived-body within the relational stance of the therapist-patient by
deploying the epoché that brackets the natural attitude, by doubling- back from the eidetic
reduction that characterizes Husserl’s further method, and then by deploying gestalt therapy’s
version of the epoché of the natural sciences, which as stated above, makes special use of the
bracketed data. Bracketed presuppositions extracted from the natural attitude endure as
living quotidian shadows, available and necessary for the developing figure/ground of the
therapy session. They are not expunged from the phenomenal field; they are within the
subjective phenomenal field of the psychotherapy, its contact-boundary, and available to the
emerging process.
What remains is no longer the simple natural attitude upon which the epoché was
deployed; yet it is not entirely removed from it. Pre-suppositions of “spatiotemporal facticity”
are bracketed, but the naïve “objectivating, judging, feeling, and willing” (Husserl, 1999, p. 377)
remain—as do value characteristics. The natural attitude within a gestalt therapy session may
include the ordinary or social conversations that precede the actual dialogue. But what lingers
of this natural attitude is now, post-epoché, within the embrace of the psychotherapy session’s
framework—with their innocent givenness now parenthesized and bracketed. What might
have been casual conversation post-epoché can be reflected upon and understood to reveal
opportunities for deeper meaning, contact. What might have been unnoticeable background
sensations can become available in the foreground since, now, after the epoché, they are of the
lived-body and part of the sequence of contact. In addition, the intersubjective life-world
stands ready to be revealed. The philosophical purity of presuppositionlessness is replaced
with attention to the subjective changes in the “actual manners of givenness” (Husserl, 1999, p.
377). Gestalt therapy assumes that, for the purposes of its therapy, the only “reality” of
concern is available in the emerging figure/ground of the therapy session itself.
In other words, by doubling-back to the life-world and embodied consciousness
through which it is constituted (i.e. by not moving towards the non-empirical, non-sensuous
realm of abstraction), gestalt therapy’s perspective prepares for the emergence of those forms
of experiencing—gestalt forming and re-forming—that are the hallmarks of its method. The
bracketed natural attitude persists as available—recallable—personal memory for both
therapist and patient. This turning and re-turning or doubling-back towards the embodied
psychological actuality becomes a radical changing of direction in the phenomenological
method. This change of direction reveals the never-ending sequence of contacting (Bloom,
2009) within gestalt therapy. It brings therapist and patient into a relational “clearing” where
together, in their co-created consciousness, they are in readiness for the emergence of novelty,
which is the sequence of contacting.
Most importantly, this doubling-back uncovers intentionality within this consciousness.
As a function of the therapy session, this newly-disclosed intentionality may be called
“psychotherapeutic intentionality” as therapist and patient dialogically co-create the therapy
 9 9
as each together is open to what emerges. This consciousness—this psychotherapeutic
intentionality—fires the sequence of contact within the gestalt therapy session.
Intentionality is a complex concept. Its qualities and intricacies were developed by
Husserl and further elaborated many and continue to be studied in phenomenology, cognitive
psychology and analytic philosophy (Dreyfus,1984; Searle, 2004, pp. 112-135). A clinical
example may help clarify these points.

Gestalt therapy and the deployment of the phenomenological method:
Told in the first person by the therapist
Max:
Max is a 43-year old man who has been in therapy for several years. His current
complaint is that although he is in a committed intimate relationship, he regularly engages in
impulsive, anonymous sexual encounters. Max is intelligent and verbal. He is an attorney. He
has had many different psychotherapists throughout his adult life and has a detailed historical
narrative about his “problems” gained from each of his therapy experiences.
During the last few sessions, Max had been relating how he cannot understand why he
seems unable to resist these impulses, which seem to overtake him “as if by storm,” especially
when he is bored. He can readily recite his own history as etiology for his symptoms: father
and mother in constant marital battles; mother idealizing him as her savior from the marriage;
older brother developing schizophrenia when Max was a young teen; Max being the good,
healthy son and rejecting the role of caretaker of his brother. Max can recite this conscious
story with some actual feelings, which usually soften rapidly to low level anxiety and then to
his lament, “I know all of this. Nothing changes.” Over our history together, we have
experienced a mutual sense of trust, evidenced by the warmth of our gaze, which we
sometimes acknowledge to one another when we consider how the therapy has been
progressing.
Today, he comes in with a bounce in his step and announces that he is feeling “really
good.” He has not had impulsive sex for three weeks and is proud of his accomplishment. He
describes how good his life is, but he notices that he has an ache in his leg, diagnosed as a
pinched nerve by his chiropractor. This is our friendly social exchange that both of us know
and appreciate as we adjust to one another in the earliest minutes of our meeting. “News of
The Week.”
I ask him if he might want to change positions to become more comfortable. He lies
down on my couch.
He begins to speak again and tells me how happy he is—his life is a good life. His voice
is softer.
I notice that his leg seems stiff.
“How is your leg?”
“It is better, but it still hurts.”
“Would you settle into the couch, feel how it is holding you up and let your attention go
to your leg? (Pause.) Can you tell me what you imagine your leg looks like inside?”
“It is all red and tight.”
“Just notice it, and let me know any changes.”
(Pause.)
“I feel better. (Pause.) Funny, I am beginning to feel sad. What do I have to be sad
about?”
“Who’s asking?” He understands what I mean and allows his background sadness to
 10 1
enter his awareness. 0
He remains sad and then tells me about a friend whose life is falling apart, and how he
wonders what he should do about it. I, too, have become sad.
“I am remembering your brother right now,” I say, as the image of his schizophrenic
brother enters my imagination.
“Huh!”—sadly.
The session continues, now with Max in touch with his sadness, the tragedy of his
brother, and then his feeling frightened when, as a boy, he heard his mother and father fighting
in the other room.
“Maybe the reason I can’t let myself be bored is that I am afraid to feel these feelings.”
“Yeah,” I said. This was not the first time we had this discussion, but there was a
palpable sadness that both of us felt. The figure of contact was dazzling in its brightness.
Discussion
There are many aspects of gestalt therapy praxis illustrated by this example. Of
principal concern is its phenomenological method.
Both Max and I begin the session in the natural attitude. The ordinary, characteristic
colloquialisms of everyday conversation, the chit-chit as the session begins, with gestures and
comments naively unexamined, as they always are and must be, as they are the stepping
stones upon which people trod to get from here from there, naturally, functionally, naïvely.
This is the natural attitude. Then comes the epoché. Perhaps a moment of silence, the
taking of a few breaths, and the settling into chairs, mark the threshold over which patient and
therapist cross in the deployment of the epoché. In this first reduction, all the quotidian
assumptions that marked the previous, natural attitude, the social clichés, the judgments—all
the presuppositions relating to this specific meeting—are parenthesized and bracketed. The
session can proceed as if without them, but they are not gone.
I initiate the epoché in this session when I ask Max if he would like to be more
comfortable. Importantly, the epoché is not something done by me apart from him: his
response by stretching out was his reciprocally joining in this process. We deployed it
together.
We have both bracketed our social banter—gently shifted it to the background. Our
everyday social identities are parenthesized but not forgotten or blocked. We are now poised
for the emergence of figure/ground, which is the essence of gestalt therapy. Our dialogue
continues, but now our words, our gestures are capable of new meaning.
He tells me that his life his good, and I notice his stiff leg: all of a single emergent figure.
At this point, we (therapist and patient) double-back from the next reduction, which might
have taken us into a non-empirical, non-sensuous, potentially transcendental consciousness.
We are now in the situation as it emerges—in both the re-formed natural attitude and the life-
world. The social banter of our meeting can now be transformed into a felt sense of mutual
trust. He knows who I am, and he knows that over time I have come to know him, sufficiently.
It has been in our gaze, the memories of which are bracketed as background, not forgotten. We
now turn to what can emerge. This second turn is the doubling-back of our attention to the
actuality of the figure/ground process, but this is now consciousness with intentionality as if
laid bare within the therapist-patient life-world, a world he and I co-created over our time
together. This is psychotherapeutic intentionality, since it is contextualized by psychotherapy.
Our emerging consciousness is now “about” the emerging figure of contact, as yet unclear. But
that will be the “work” of the session as the sequence of contacting proceeds. In gestalt
therapy, intentionality is the “engine” of contacting (Bloom, 2008).
 11 1
This session shows unexpected sadness emerging where Max initially reported 1
happiness. Sadness emerges only when we engage in a dialogue in which I encourage him to
attend to his directly felt somatic experience and consciously to pay attention to changing
sensations. Both of us track the emerging figures of contact illuminated within
psychotherapeutic intentionality: hurting leg—to sadness—to wondering about a friend. Had
the experience in his foot been only a physical feeling, attention to it might not have revealed
an intentionality that led to this sadness. These moments in the session also exemplified
embodied intentionality (Bloom, 2008).
When I offered my own spontaneous thought, which was personally relevant to Max, a
more vivid figure of contact emerged. This thought was informed by historical information I
knew about Max, which I bracketed at the beginning of the session but which remained
available to me as living background to the emerging figure. Until that moment, Max’s sadness
had no conscious object. When I brought information forward which had been bracketed by
me, but which I felt was connected to the actual situation, his sadness moved forward in the
fullness of emerging contact and toward its intentional object, his brother. That was the person
about whom he was sad. The latter contacting had the force of emergent intentionality, that is,
sadness toward Max’s relationship to his brother.
Various experiences of the preposition “about”—the signature of intentionality—can be
seen to mark various moments of the session. It all occurs within psychotherapeutic
intentionality, the relational ground from which the figure/ground of gestalt therapy emerges.
Much of what is described in the clinical example is also generic experiential psychotherapy.
Yet it is not. It is gestalt therapy.

Conclusion

To be able to clearly differentiate a clear figure of contact is one of the hallmark values
of gestalt therapy. Yet gestalt therapy may not have been able to claim this distinction for itself
among other experiential and phenomenological psychotherapies that more or less follow
similar norms and methods of practice.
This paper has argued that through deployment of a modified phenomenological
method based on Husserl’s approach, gestalt therapy achieves a unique perspective that is able
to attend to what is immediately present in the life-world, and to include that which is
emergent yet had been bracketed from the natural attitude. Therapist and patient may now
experience psychotherapeutic intentionality, which supports the sequence of contacting—the
figure/ground process. Readiness for this emergent self-process in a psychotherapy situation
prepared by this modified phenomenological method is the hallmark, the essence, of gestalt
therapy.
With the modified phenomenological method described in this paper, gestalt therapy
achieves its distinguishing mark that differentiates it from other experiential or existential
psychotherapies. The figure of gestalt therapy may now appear as clear and distinct against
the ground of other psychotherapeutic modalities.

Dan Bloom, J.D., L.S.C.W.
dan@djbloom.com


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Photo attached.

Dan Bloom, J.D., L.S.C.W., is editor in chief of Studies in Gestalt Therapy: Dialogical Bridges,
a fellow of the New York Institute of Gestalt Therapy (NYIGT), a member of the Eastern
Association of Gestalt Therapy (EAGT), and president of the Association for the
Advancement of Gestalt Therapy (AAGT). He is a psychotherapist, supervisor, and gestalt
therapy trainer in private practice in New York City.







1 A portion of this paper also appeared in P. Brownell (Ed.) (2008).

2
3
Paul Goodman, one of the founders of gestalt therapy and co-author of its original text,

Gestalt therapy, was familiar with the works of Edmund Husserl. Laura Perls, another

founder, was a student of Paul Tillich and Martin Buber (Stoehr, 1994) and may have

been familiar with the works Husserl and the phenomenologist Max Scheler. For the

roots of gestalt therapy in pragmatism, see Kitzler (2006, 2007) and Hassrick (2003).

4 Equally trenchant studies of gestalt therapy and phenomenology can be done from the

perspective of other phenomenologists. Des Kennedy, for one, looks at gestalt therapy

from the point of view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Something novel in gestalt therapy is

revealed from every different angle we study it.

5
Gestalt therapists employ this method without naming it. It is one duty of us as writers

about gestalt therapy theory to explain the ways of our practitioners to one another.
6
Edmund Husserl himself referred to this method in various ways: a psychological

reduction, a phenomenological reduction, and a transcendental reduction, and a

transcendental-phenomenological reduction (Moran, 2000, p. 147).

7
It is tempting to be distracted by the verb “to think” and consider it to be purely

cognitive activity. Following William James, “thinking” is that which the mind does, and

it incorporates sensing, feeling, emoting, and so on (James, 1981, p. 186). While some

may limit thinking to cognition, such a limitation is not warranted by the word’s use in

epistemology. This point will become central to the notion of intentionality in gestalt

therapy.

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