Psicoterapia Gestaltista - Conceituações
(Gestalt Psychotherapy - Conceptualizations)

Vera Felicidade de Almeida Campos - Edição da Autora - Rio de Janeiro -1973

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Extract

Chapter III - Basic Dimensions of Structuralization - Dis-structuralization

Affective wanting

The affective wanting, in gestalt conceptualization, is intrinsic to human being, contrary to what happens in other psychological approachs, psychoanalysis for exemple , where affective wanting is understood as resultant of a deficient process of affective relation mainly fundamented in the paternal and / or maternal figure.

When we say that affective wanting is intrinsic to human being, we are saying that it is so configurative of the human, as the eyes are, arms, legs are, etc. Delineated the theme, we will focus its significance. As affective wanting we understand the necessity or possibility of relationship with the other; in this new understanding, new approach of affective wanting, becomes evident why it is usually taken as extrinsic, synonym of emotional problems, by the other psychological theories. This is due to the lack of unitarian and global view, that means, due to the elementaristic schematization of the behavioural and existential human phenomenon; they have apprehended the affective wanting as resultant of just the necessity of relationship with the other, which is configurative of inauthentic structures, coming from this position a whole distorted approach of the theme, as it is taken unilaterally.

The affective wanting configures the other in the sense of possibility or necessity of relationship. When intrinsic, assumed, the affective wanting makes the other possible; in an other way, an other is a barrier, the other one starts to be an aim, an obstacle. If the affective wanting is every day less assumed, it becomes everyday more extrinsic and around me it begins to constitute a huge emptiness - the so called autism. The autism cuts the possibility of relationship, it is a negation of my affective wanting immanency, which brings about the possibility to emerge the division between I and the other, level of realization and level of aspiration, quantity and quality, etc. Staying like this, it becomes impossible to me to be unitarian, accept myself as possibility of relation. Not accepting myself as possibility of relation, I am not able of auto-determination in relation to others. I am not disposable, not authentic. I use the other one as a tool according to my necessities. All this occurs because I do not have the context, the space of the affective wanting assumed, the space which is the place of the other one, in this way I stay with the existential emptiness; in other words, solitude in front of me, as such, extrinsic, due to my auto-referentiated pontualization, there was no experience of coexistence. The solitude due to auto-referential and not due to assumption of the affective wanting, was transformed in object of complaint, extrinsic data, consumable therefore, as phantasm who takes the place and substitute the other one. [36].

Returning to what was already conceptualized, we now will verify the affective wanting functioning, the attitude of affective wanting - this figure, totalized as necessity or as possibility of relation.

The level of structuration of the relational necessities (and this does not include just affective wanting) is the level of survival, and the level of structuration of the possibilities is the existential level. At this moment of our explicative developments, the conceptual tessitures get thicken and to avoid them to become tangled, we now clarify what was just synthetically totalized.

The man is-in-the-world and from this position emerges all his relations, which are always in front of him, but which can be experienced as before, after and now, for, to and how, authentically, inauthentically, with participation, contemplation or alienation, the relations may be assumed or negated, distorted, finally, the experiences may be total or partialized, distorted in social levels (here we include culture, economy, family, religion, etc) and biological levels. Why do we consider the social experience in a partial way? (We understand by social the whole universe of society, with its ideological, political, religious, familial, professional, scientific institutions, of culture and civilization). Why the biological would lead to partialization? The answer to these questions brings to the initial concepts of what is the human being. We go through a fast review. The human being is temporality as psychological experience; his relation with his constituent context, the world, the other one, is done through perception, consciousness, intentionality, that is why his psychological experience is his only condition of relation-knowledge. Besides of that - be temporality, relational process - the human being is an organism, biologically configurated with this possibility. The social experience, extrinsic to him, occurs as adherent condition, as part of a whole which is his process of be-in-the-world, but it happens that in this experience it may emerges a distortion part-whole, bringing about unilateralization - the machine-man, the institution-man, the duty-man, the thing-man, or in the words of few ones who think this defines the man: the homo socious, homo economicus, homo intelectus, etc. [37].

The biological is the ground of structuralization, remembering the circle that through the translation movement of its base configures the cylinder [38]. The space of the human processual dynamics is the context (see isomorphism). When we are based just in the level of the biological, we do not relate ourselves, we are just situated, and as such, partialized.

Having seen the levels of partialization, we start now to relate them with the subjects of authenticity and inauthenticity, which we had already considered.

For the purpose of didactic configurations, which are just descriptive (the reason of plastic analogies), we understand as objectifying experience the spatialized experiencies, adherents, no transcendents, no humanes, in spite of be of the men, and, we call, all this, dislocation, configurations, which happen in the survival level, where the man is reduced to a simple response before the demands of the world, and this response is nothing else then adaptation, search of adaptation or disadaptation, always response to the social, to civilization - good-manners, be member of a club, have a profession: formal manner of earning one's life as well as of justifying it, have children, proprieties, personal documents, be a delinquent (marginalization too is standardized), revolutionary, religious, etc - being, in this way, a survival, contingent, totalized by extrinsic limits, codes, labels, roles, techniques, science, finally, be caught in what he conventionally names his human condiction, human nature, which being so, is a ground of alienation, as it is divergent from him, it is external, puts him in the position of copier, executor, maintainer, etc, [39].

The social man responds, struggles, transforms, adapts and situates himself, improuves, has and does, survives, dominates nature, creates [40]. Everything, raising from the social experience, this is already an exit, a drain, as well as creation, improuvement and transformation of his space through biological motivations, reduced and explained basically through sex, hungry, thirst and sleep [41].

All these things exist. They are not good or bad, right or wrong, they are part of the whole. They are the level of survival, but do not define the man, they are his starting point, they are there to be assumed and transcended, as well as to be obstacles, limits. If there is transcendence - that is possible through the relational dynamics - occurs a transformation of quantity into quality, and the existential level raises, transcendent as it is relational and not positioned, making possible the existence of the man equal to himself, without external patterns (God, society, culture, etc) which are adherencies; he is his own measurement, the only one possible for his singulatity, his human quality. [pgs. 42 to 47]

FOOTNOTES:

36. The experience of solitude generates anguish, tension, anxiety as well as constitute justification before the impotency of being alone.

37. The non apprehension of the relational totality being-in-the-world, by the marxists, was responsible for the hyerarchization of the human necessities; from here they proceed to another distortion - the explanation of relation, man and society, human behaviour, through economic orders and its implications; it is distortion as it is equivalent to the view of the whole starting from an element of explanation - absolutism negator of the dialectic which is incoherent with the marxist fundamentation. This incoherency, not assumed, raised dualistic analysis, creators of myths(technology, for example). The various religious conceptions too distorted, having similar attitude as the marxists have. The equality here stablished, between marxist and religious conceptions, may look strange, absurd, erroneous, nevertheless, having no a priori, it becomes clear, in the level of dualism, elementarism, values to achieve, hyerarchizations, absolutism, as well as nirvanas to conquer, dogmas and ideals to maintain, preserve and divulgate; the only difference is in the objects of the polemic (God - private propriety). The concepts of homo socius, homo intelectus, homo economicus, are Spranger's classification, elementaristic classification, negator of the totalized essence of the human.

38. The concept of world with its conotations of reality, society, phisical-relational universe is here used in the sense of phenomenic reality, according to the point of view of phenomenology, where the phenomenon is the evidence perceived as reality, without dualism. From this comes the study of evidence, essence, appearance, manifestation and reality as the study of what is given to my knowledge, the study of my perceptions.

39. Similar themes as the ones here approuched can be found in the book of Rollo May, 'El Dilema Existencial del Hombre Moderno' - Buenos Aires, Paidos, 1968.

40. In this connection, think of the problem of technology, know-how, alienation in the thesis of the marxists and the followers of Marcuse.

41. Here it is easy to understand the distortion that permited Behaviourism, specially Skinner and his thesis of operative conditioning, as well as the marxist protext, the magical religious promises, as an attempt to give new light to the restrict limit.