Gestalt therapy: A contemporary view.

Abstract

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. -Albert Einstein, 1930There is nothing new in Gestalt Therapy. What is new is the organi zation of existing elements-the 'Gestalt. ' -F. S. Perls, personal communication, 1966 Gestalt therapy is not only an integration of many areas of knowledge both from within and outside of psychotherapy, but it also represents a new paradigm in psychotherapy theory itselfdynamic, not static; processes, not procedures; homeorhetic, not homeostatic. Chuang et al. ( 2019) described homeorhesis as follows:Homeorhesis is a term coined by C. H. Waddington to describe a property of a dynamic system to return to a particular trajectory after an external perturbation or despite the continuous presence of random noise. It is thus Editor's Note: Robert W. Resnick, author of this chapter, passed away after the chapter was approved for inclusion in the APA Handbook of Psychotherapy. The editors would like to recognize Dr. Resnick for his contribution to this handbook and acknowledge his many other significant contributions to the field.1 While finishing my clinical psychology doctoral dissertation, I was on a half-time appointment in the psychology department and a half-time appointment in the counseling center at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Each morning, I would get my coffee from a vending machine down the hall (with paper cups) and carefully walk to my office, trying to avoid spilling the hot coffee. Inevitably, try as I may, I usually spilled a bit of coffee. One morning, the director of the counseling center joined me on that walk from the coffee machine. Talking to him, I held the cup by the rim with two fingers-strong enough not to drop it and lightly enough not to crush it-so I could look at him as we walked and talked. To my amazement, I arrived at my office with a full cup of coffee. Rather than try to control the movement of the coffee, I had inadvertently "allowed" the natural movement and balancing to happen. Balance requires movement.