The ground rules of Gestalt groups: stay in the present; address people instead of talking about them; say “I”, not “it”; follow awareness down to the body; say what lies behind a question.
Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality
Adjacent
The founding text of Gestalt therapy, which Circling’s own histories name among the practice’s roots. Its starting point is contact: what we experience arises where a person meets their surroundings.
The book is really two books bound together, as the introduction to the 1994 edition explains. One is a sequence of practical awareness experiments by Perls and Ralph Hefferline, a psychologist at Columbia. The other is a dense theory of the self, which Paul Goodman wrote from Perls’s ideas and which the introduction warns is hard reading. The first edition put the experiments first; the 1994 edition restores the order the authors intended, with the theory first.
The theory begins with contact: on its account, experience is made where a person meets what is around them, and contact comes before anything else. Circling works at that meeting point, between people, while it is happening.
Questions to bring into a circle
- What is happening at the edge between me and this person, right now?
Read alongside
- 1970The Rules and Games of Gestalt Therapy
- 1970The Paradoxical Theory of Change
A four-page essay built on a paradox: people change when they fully accept what they are, not when they strive to be different. The therapist should therefore stop trying to change the client.
- 1978Focusing
For contact with your own experience: the “felt sense”, an unclear bodily sense of a whole situation from which more precise meaning can emerge.
Further reading
Cite
Perls, F. S., Hefferline, R. F., & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Gestalt Journal Press, 1994, which restores the authors’ order: theory first.