Theory of Self in Gestalt Therapy

Abstract

The self, which is the hinge on which all psychotherapeutic approaches turn, is the main focus of the present text too. In it, the author Margherita Spagnuolo-Lobb treats the self as an experiential event and tangibly demonstrates how phenomenology is brought into the clinical field by Gestalt therapy with the collocation of the self in a ‘middle position’ between organism and environment, which is to say in a uniquely relational position. In this sense, she shows why the theory of self in Gestalt therapy, although epistemologically based on the paradox of theorizing the untheorizible, does not go with the unbridgeable gap between individual needs and the rules of living in society. Understanding the field in a way which surpasses the system theory, Spagnuolo-Lobb treats the self as the experience of contact, i.e. as a function of the field organism-environment which takes place in the phenomenal actuality, dealing in more detail with the three basic functions of the self understood as the person’s ability to relate to the world, and treats the development of the self as development of the experience of contact-withdrawal from contact. Finally, she turns to the pathology of the self, understood as an interruption of the ability to make contact and in the end raises questions on the aim of psychotherapy, by defining the later as a move from egotism to relational creativity.