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Terra e Ouro são Iguais - Percepção em Psicoterapia Gestaltista
(Earth and Gold are Equal - Perception in Gestalt Psychotherapy)

 


Vera Felicidade de Almeida Campos - Jorge Zahar Editor - Rio de Janeiro - 1993

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Extract

Chapter II - Polarity Results from Unity

Polarity results from unity, the double is an expression of the unique; division expresses unity [1]. Two, results from one, since quantity, two things, become two one. This explains the creation of the dichotomies: to take the resultants as unities which oppose themselves. Subject and object are poles of the same axle.

 

 

The psychological / philosophical thinking focussed the poles, the 'positionaments', breaking or despising the axle, the configurative relation of subject and object.

 

 

Philosophy, in its search to explain knowledge, imagined a subject who knew and objects which were known. This disposed and accepted, raised the great debate over who initiates the process. It would be the subject, who by the idea would create the world or the world that would be captured by the subject? The various idealistic and materialistic philosophies, then emerged.


Positionant residues of this, are the concepts of idea, soul, spirit, consciousness, mind, sensation, matter, as explanations which unleash cognitive processes.

Through out history, these positionaments were perpetuated in various areas of knowledge. To psychology were left the concepts of consciousness (cogito ergo sum - cartesian cogito) and the concept of mind as receptacle of sensations.

It was not important anymore, to know if the subject creates the object and then would know it, or if the object imposes itself to knowledge, to the subject. It was necessary to know how the mind functions and how sensations are organized. Finally, how consciousness raises.

Among these debates, new deviation - Freud appears, the reverse Avatar, bringing light to the subterraneous world. He used to say: the consciousness is not so important, what is important is the unconscious. We have to understand it, study it. To psychology were left the philosophical patterns, the platonic ideas, the logical categories of Aristotle, the monads of Leibniz, the intellect as the Locke's tabula rasa.

At the beginning of the century, the behaviourists thought that all this was too subjective, not scientific. That the object of study should be passible of objectivation, that is, of mesurement. The psychoanalists continue the 'via regia' of the unconscious.

The gestalt psychologists, benefited by their knowledge of physics, knew they had to study the process of perception. This moment was an important change in the way of approaching human behaviour, in spite of the continuation of the idea of subject and object: subject as who I am and object as who I am not. By extension, subjective, what is inside myself; and objective, what is outside myself.

Consequently, the knowledge of the subject was the knowledge of the psyche, the psychic. The meaning given tosubject and object, by philosophy and corroborated by psychology, is totaly anomalous if we consider the meaning they have in language, in the syntax. Let see a quick exemple: psychologically speaking, a table, a chair, a notebook would never be a subject; because they do not think, do not feel, do not speak, they have no inner life. They are not living beings. Nevertheless, we may say that in the statement "the notebook is on the table", the subject is the notebook, and that in the statement "the table supports the notebook", the subject is the table. It is interesting to emphasize the phenomenological aspect of the linguistic expression as description of phenomenon, expressing positions. It is important as well, not forget that Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, through out his life had fought against these positionaments, in spite of the fact that he use to perceive them in another way, expressed in his explanations of Noema and Noesis [2].

It is very hard to the dualistic, based in categories, typological psychologist, to understand the human behaviour without evoke the ideas of interior and exterior. Even today, Jung is still taken as a great thinker: he use to classify the humane in introvert and extrovert types. He thought, just like Freud, that perception would be a projection of the inner contents of the subject. The perception itself, in these conceptualizations, is an object. Being not able of totalization, the thinkers of the science of the XIX century and half of the XX century, had created many obstacles, ways and labyrinths, finally, they had not perceived that to be a subject or to be an object is one of the human possibilities, determinated by the relational context.

Psychologically, the unity - human essence - configurates the poles of subject and object, that is, to be a subject or an object is a result of being a human being.

What does create the subject? What does create the object? Finally, what does allow polarization? The relationship with the other, with the world and with one's ownself. It is the attrition, dynamic polarization, which polarizes the subject, which configurates the object.

It is through perception that the subject and the object are structured. By affirming this we are saying that the human being is nor subject nor object, he is human being, who according to his own perception configurates himself in subject or object, occuring the same in relation to the perception of the other - the other perceiving myself, configurates me as subject or object. There is no world of the subject (classically configurated as subjective by philosophy and psychology) and the one of the object, mundaneness. There is a human being who perceives, and this is the relational dynamic of being in the world. The conceptualizations and nominations of subject and object create stagnations, divisions, in the way of perceiving man. This causalistic linearity is responsible for arbitrary divisions, it is as if we would imagine a fish swimming outside water, a pruned man, imprisoned into explicative forms.

In psychotherapy, it is fundamental to abolish the arbitrary and didactic categories of subjective and objective, since they camouflage the human essence. The maximum we admit is the subject as synonym of unleasher of action and movement, and object as the target of this action, of this movement. But while admiting this, we are contaminated by the philosophical and psychological a priori, we are thinking in the human being as agent. A table never is a subject, it is always an object, been then explicit the typical contradiction of the philosophical and psychological thought.

To clarify, we proceed to the etymology of the word subject and the word object.

Subject, from the latin subjectu, 'to put under'. And object, from the latin objectu, 'to put, to unleash forward, to expose'. We can perceive the conotations suffered by the word until the meaning of intern, the subjective, what is guarded, hidden, put under the appearence; the object remains as the visible, the passible of being known. The subject as subjectivity is not passible of being known. It was the drama of the psychological introspection, it is the drama of psychoanalysis with the unconscious, it is the behaviourist despair that tried to cut any subjective category, thinking it would exist only what would show itself what was objectifyed. It is what allows the psychotherapy to say that the individuo is auto-referentiated (closed in one's ownself) taking one's ownself as pattern and mesurement of everything, or to say that he is in the world with the other.

In a more embracing perspective of visualization of the human being, it is necessary to abolish these obstacles, these positionaments of subject and object, and think of individuo, human being, unity. We see that these polarities of subject and object are configurations / positionaments of the humane and it would be an unilateralization to perceive the humane through these positionant contexts.

Now, we may try to explain the human being, explaning how he perceives and what he structures in this perception, and doing so, to understand what is subject and what is object. The first step is to bracket the "realm of the subject, the realm of the object", since this demarcation besides of create abysses to the being in the world, it is an eternal impasse in the affective, social and therapeutic relationships. The mediation to the duality subject and object, can only be done through perception, through the totalization of its process. We may try.

I perceive what is in front of me - it is as if I would say: I, subject, subject capturing, describing, observing what is unleashed, exposed, the object. In this sense, the first thing I perceive is what is around me: it is my body, it is the other. Perceptivelly I detach, I separate and / or integrate, I add. The development of the human being is a demonstrative process of structuration of positionaments, it is the classical formation of Ego, it is the classical apprenticeship process. Subject and object are structured, just like the model of the magnetized bar that, by attrition, creates positive and negative poles, indefinitely, even if been cut. The great problem is that all philosophy, all psychology, finally, the whole of the scientific thought began to understand and study the humane starting from these positioned configurations of subject and object, which hides the human essence, filling the psychological approuch with these divisions till the classical body and mind. Such a pregnant dualism that Rudolf Arnheim (follower of Gestalt) says: "If we identify the human being with the mind, the body is not just the primordial tool of man, but also his nearest neighbour in the world which is around him. The divisory line may be traced in both directions" [3].

Well, if what is inside is outside (isomorphic principle, Koehler), body and mind do not exist as distinct realities. Mind is body, it is cerebrum, neurons, nerves, synapse, engrams etc. The man is an organism in the world, a possibility of relationship. By starting this process of relationship, of perception, he structures internal levels of subject - hidden, not exposed, not explicitated - and external levels of object - explicitated or exposed. In other words, he perceives himself encircled by situations, things and people who are close to him, with him or separated from him, with him or against him: he perceives similarity or dissimilarity. Meanings, valencies, values which structure, configure the levels of subject and object, emerge.

It is interesting to notice that from the first months to 2, 3 years old, a child perceives his father, his mother, the table, the TV and the chair as animated beings. Everything has life. It is well known that the child becomes very satisfied when his mother beats the table in which he, the child, dashed. The natural, immanent process, is the object be a continuation of the subject; the objects are animated, personified. It is the classical anthropomorphic thought or the animist thought attributed to the savages. While growing we apprehend the values, functions and meanings of the things, we then, perceive through categories; it is as if the world was a road full of sinalizations.

Through perception we apprehend what is before us, grouping by Similarity, Proximity, Continuity, Good Gestalt, Better Direction, Closure. In any perceptive process there is always pregnancy. We observe this in the perception of the body - even distorting, thinking we have a body and that the body has a foot: we perceive the foot as being our body or belonging to it (law of continuity). The perception of "belong to" is also pregnant in the social sphere: we know who are our family members, our community members, which one is our nation etc; the breaks of continuity begins when the unity is broken, and this happens through values. The meaning attributed to the experiences creates parts, portions, structures adaptations and maladaptations, one does not slide anymore, the movements do not continue anymore, the individuo fights for positions. The levels of survival and contemplation are, then, structured.

By collapsing, get jammed, unsuccessfull on the struggle for survival, one of the tentatives to continue surviving, is to look for help in psychotherapy. It is one of the remedies suggested by the social system [4]. The survivor, threatened person, unsuccessful, reaching the divers psychotherapies, is treated as a human being who is in difficulties, needing help, support. He expects to be re-oriented, absolved, to be conscious, directed in his maps, finally, repolarized in his desires to get a new view of himself. At this point, it is definitelly installed, the positionament of the being, since he is treated as object - the exposed, the symptom - which must be under therapy. He is one more being, adjusted, capable and satisfied with himself, in the best of the hypothesis. To be able to, to be adjusted, satisfied pressupose demarcations, a fence in the ontological emptiness. The necessity of realization, by itself, exilates the possibility of existence, transforming the individuo in a successfull survivor.

To Gestalt Psychotherapy, the problem, the neurosis, the process, finally, the difficult to exist, come from unilaterality fulfilled by necessities. The gestalt psychotherapist, after the totalization of the non acceptance and the questioning of the unilateralizing problems, look for answers to the perception of "to exist", without positionaments, values, aims, trying that the individuo becomes a disposable being, independent of functions and results.

How to be disposable independent of functions and results? This is the great puzzle of psychotherapy and of the being-in-the-world with the other.

Using a Mahabharat's metaphor [5], it is as if the fundamental in psychotherapy and in life would be to be able to see a portion of gold and a portion of earth as equal: two portions [6]. Dedicate oneself to the essence and not to the values. The essence in the case of the portions, is what occupies the space, the values are configurative in the search of how much custs the occupant. The perception of essences substituted by the one of attributive values, led man to distorted and arbitrary perceptions, making him to hang himself on symbols, in the importance and meaning of the perceived. It raises struggle for survival, competition, the search to satisfy the desires, the alienation, the lost of dedication, the lost of the simplicity of the existence, finally, the existencial, contemplative level is substituted by the level of survival.

When we speak in the simplicity of "to exist", we are speaking of recuperation of humanity: the fact that the man perceives that he is a body, an organism, a thought, a perception, a being in the world independently of what this may means, independently of what he has and do. It is the fascination with the existence instead of realization of the existence. It is vital to wonder with the fact that one exists, thinks, perceives, sleeps, loves. It is fundamental to contemplate all this process of to exist instead of stopping oneself in the hunting-collect, fight-escapement of the survival. In our society and in our culture, there is no way to change the state of alienation and survival, but every human being who feels depressed, questions himself, suffers, negates himself, feels anguish, has the condition to change when perceives that through out his life he ran after goals, trying to achieve positions, trying to affirm himself socially. It is integrative to perceive the possibilities of being a subject, of being an object, without finish oneself on them, understanding his behaviour always as resultant: an explicitness of the human essence.

The positionament of survival as I subject is the omnipotence. I am able to resolve anything, I question myself, I accept that I do not accept myself. I understand the processes, I face the circunstances. I am a therapist: I separete the wheat from the tares. I am the spiritual guru, I am with God, with the Masters, with the Orishas, I understand the human beings, I know life is ephemeral.

The communitarian leaders, the saviours of the nation, the renowned theoreticians, all of them know the solution and how to realize it, nevertheless they maintain the compromise "if the wheat is little, my bread comes first", "that is life", "we must maintain positions to get changes".

On the side of the money makers, the social producers, they start from the principle that getting one million dolar, they resolve anything: "we must get it". The drug addicts, the outsiders, by their side, refuse to maintain the established order: "I have nothing to do with this, I want just to do what I want, I don't care for anything".

The timid, shy or weak, who wishes success solving the problems which impede the harmonious relationship, they too, just desire, they too, just belive. All of them positioned in goals and a priori.

What would be the I object? It is the exposed, it is the dislocation of the auto-referentiament in barter, in crisis, in anguish, in fear, in madness, in obesity, in the SPA, in the plastic surgeries, in the drugs, in faith, in the participation. It is the moment of truce, the pause in the continue survival. How to transcend such positionaments? Dedicating oneself to life, contemplating the existence and integrating subject and object, allowing new polarizations. Finally, the disposability structured through dedication and discipline is the exit, since these are the temporal limits of the humane - it is the experience in the present.

It is not a case of a cruzade for discipline and dedication, which would become one more rule, onemore value. It is a case of questioning, it is the act for the sake of the act, which is essencial and immanent to the being in the world. The human survival configurates itself when one asks 'what for?', 'how much?', when one thinks of results. The discipline and dedication allow to see the portion of earth and the portion of gold as equal to each other, slowly one perceives variations of collors, weight / texture, notice that in one of them it grows flowers, in the other it does not, that with one of them one may make pans more easier and quicker, in spite of that they may have shorter duration; that with the other one, the pans are more difficult to make but are more durable. It is the discover. It is the change, it is life.

Continuing our metaphor, portion of earth and portion of gold, we verify that psychology, philosophy did not approach the subject and object in a global, total, continue way, creating with such division, the world of the subject and the world of the object. They use to defend that the subject is the one able to know, able to perceive and he was complex; while the objects were passible of being konwn. They condemnate humanity to discover itself through "know its ownself", the eternal interrogations, accumulation of objects and values - it is the ambition. Only the gestalt psychologists, with the study of perception as synonym of behaviour, did not fall into this valorative traps [7]. The gestalt psychotherapy, with the concepts of neurosis as perceptive distortion - auto-referentiament - possibilitated the perception of the human essence independently of its values and meanings. But, in spite of this theoretic contexts, only through perception of things as they are, independent of values and meanings, it is possible to exist with disposability, without attachment to situations of survival. Only when we live in the present and contemplate our past without attachment to it and without run away from it, is that we can walk, slide in the world: whatever comes is a meeting, not a search. "Without hope, without fear", as Caravaggio - italian painter (1573-1610) - use to say. The day, the night, today, tomorow, everything a continuity. Pleasure / unpleasure, satisfaction / unsatisfaction, work / no-work, to have money / not have it, finally, we break the imprisonant limits and perceive the infinit horizons of the "to exist", of being a man. It is when we perceive that there is no need to so much effort, that this unilateralizes the living, that the only way to transcend the dichotomizant limits - positionants, interrupters, separators - is to dedicate oneself to exist. It is fundamental the continuity of the movement of being in the world got through the dedication. We are not in the fase of the positionant hunting-collect anymore.

Being disposable, realizing our human essence, we break the positionaments of subject and of the object and we slide. It is as if, integrating the object, the subject would polarizes itself, becoming

 

 

a generator of energy, dynamic, the center of the circle that by rotation of its base generates the cylinder, or the point that, dinamizing itself, configurates itself, by its trajectory, into a spiral:

 

 

As far as the search of results, attitude of maintenance, evaluation of things and values, are there, we are stagnated.

Gestalt Psychotherapy as Polarizing Attrite

- In gestalt psychotherapy, the first change, in the so called realm of the subject and of the object, is the beginning of the unification of dichotomies, it is to make the other to perceive that he is the neurosis; the neurosis is not an object which upsets him. It is him. It is to say: I do not have a neurosis, I am my neurosis, or still, the problems, the difficulties are no obstacles in my way, they are expression of my non acceptance. In other psychotherapic views, this process is equivalent to conscientization. In reality, what occurs is the change of perception.

- Another important moment in psychotherapy is when the individuo perceives that if the problem of the other one affects him, the problem is his problem. This integration with the object, personifies, and consistently integrates the dislocations of survival.

- The desire to change, the desire to feel better, is always put in the context of the criterion of necessity, evaluation of survival. To perceive that one can not change if one does not dedicate to what upsets oneself, is another way to fusion, integrate with the object.

- The complaints, lamentations, sores and frustrations translate always an impotence, the not be able to get, the walk looking back, the experience of memory: it is like to be a parasite of one's ownself, of the good times. It is the regreat, it is the revolt. This omnipotence expresses the non acceptance of the continuity of to be. (Depression can be focussed through this attitude).

- To think, to expect, to ask the therapeutic support is to wish the connivance, the help to the goals, it is to transform the therapy in object, in the last resource. When the individuo perceives that the therapist is an antithesis, a remover of masks, a denouncer, it is unbelievable, but the individuo feels himself understood, mirrored - it happens fusion, integration between subject and object, possibilitators of existential, contemplative dedication, or of positionament dedicated to survive, maintain the results got till now, increasing the basis of guaranty, since the removing of masks and denunciation leads to change, to the break of positionaments or to the desperate tentative to maintain what was already got.

- To perceive that the great "passion", the "love of one's life", is no more than a last resource, what allows dreams, is integrative of the subject and object, since it permits to perceive the imobility, the fear, the lack of disposability to life, to the other.

- To perceive the other, as he himself, as a subject, is integrative - it is as if in the break, in the relationship contextuated in X would raise new poles; another subject, another object. This situation is experienced in the psychoterapic process itself. It is found too, in the affective breaks if it is not found positionaments like victim, parasite, opressor, opressed, which are variations of the dichotomies subject-object.

- The perception that what supports, also oppresses, is liberator, integrative.

In gestalt psychotherapy we look forwards to the individuo to perceive the axle, the lines, the continuity, the reversibility, the pregnancy of the situations in substitution to the points of support, the desired nirvanas, the frightening infernos, finally, the stagnant and imprisonant positionaments of the humane. This change is got quickly, in spite of some times the break of positionaments creates emptiness, the non referential, since the non acceptance renders the man unhuman. When we accept the emptiness, we live in the present. The emptiness is emptiness exactly when we do not live in the present; we live in the a priori or in the goals. The non experience of the present structures the emptiness. Experiencing the emptiness raises another experience which is the one of the present, and this is already something, it exists already a time, a temporal experience, the experience of the present. And with the temporality one begins to be, begins to structure oneself. It is of no importance that one has relationship with A, B or C, but if the relationship happens with his emptiness - and this is the present - there is equilibrium, just as in any structurant relationship.

- The experience of the emptiness, being also experience of the present, structures. "Structure" is here, almost synonym of "individualize". If the being is being in the time, and if temporality is exactly one of the dimensions of the individuo, the experience of the emptiness is structurant. The emptiness when negated is as if it was a space - it is the spatialization of the time. When the individuo is neurotic, he spatializes the time. The experience of this spatialization goes on fragmentizing, compressing, structuring the emptiness, since the fragmentation suposes goals and a priori. To experience the emptiness is to realize an antithesis. The spatialization of things is linked to functions. In terms of functionament, everything is situated, one loses the dynamic: the place of the pleasure is one place; to work, only in this or that table. When things begins to exist, the emptiness begins to be perceived, the emptiness is not anymore. To perceive the emptiness is to existentialy realize oneself, it is humanization as acceptance of dynamics, of movement, since we can then, understand the break of the alienate referentials of our human essence.

To perceive the emptiness establishes a limit, it is as if we are born again, it is the beginning of sliding or of anguish, of non acceptance. It comes to the scene, the criterions, the positionaments: one opens his hands to the results and evaluations, or never the portion of earth would be seen as equal to the portion of gold. It raises divisions in relation to the therapy. The levels of subject and object are recreated as definers of the being. They are existential impasses and therapeutic impasses. It is the process of being in the world. It is the adaptation to the non transformation which is going to generate new dramas, worse than the anterior ones, since now the individuo is adapted to not transform himself, to maintain. It is as if subject and object had the appearence of integration. When one begins to move in this realm, the castles fall down, lots of slaves and vassals are necessary, it is the oficial parasitism. It is the dependence, the generator matrix of the survivors. The super-mother, the super-father, the good chief, the great friend, the solicitor and comprehensive therapist etc., are structured, constituted in unhuman positionaments. [pgs. 23 to 39]



FOOTNOTES:


[1] - It is out of the fact that the division expresses the unity that the realization of gestalt psychotherapy is possible. When a human being is divided, fragmented, there is always the possibility of unification, as in his division subsists the unity human essence.

[2] - Noesis is the act by which one thinks. Noema is what is thought. Husserl had his thought oriented to the problem of the correlation of the subject and the object in the act of knowledge, passing, in this way, from a certain eidetic realism to a transcedental idealism. More radical than the cartesian doubt, the phenomenological reduction consists in put in brackets, the natural, ingenous attitude of the consciousness, which spontaneouly affirms the existence of the world, and in isolate the contingent and natural data (the external world and the empiric I) from the pure I, the subject of transcendental Ego. The pure consciousness, model of all original and necessary evidence, discovers itself as "intentionality", font of all meaning, since it is constituent of the object. His eidetic analisis allows to specify modalities of consciousness: perceptive consciousness, imaginative consciousness etc. Insisting over the original and fundamental experience the subject has of the other and making the intersubjectivity the fundament itself of the objectivity of the world, Husserl avoided the solipsism to were he had the risk to bring the transcendental idealism. (Translated from the Petit Robert 2, Dictionnaire universel des noms propres, Paris, 1990).

[3] - Arnheim, R., Intuition and Intelect in Art, pg.133.

[4] - The "transcendental" searchs of explication to the dramas of the survive too, are suggested ways - it is the "take care of your energy", "understand your karmic choice", "put away your obsessors, that upsets you", "clean your ways" etc...

[5] - Mahabharat - it is a great indian epic poem, with about 120 thousands verses, divided into 19 books. It is a collective work, antique, from the vedic age, 1000 A.C. and continued upto VI century of our era. It describes, in a heroic and liric way, the adventures of five brothers, facing the enmity of the king of a rival clan, and the war between indo-european clans, in the Indo-Ganges basin, describes the fights among themselves and against the dravidic tribes which at this time, were in the territory. The Mahabharat is also a specie of encyclopedia of sacred and profane knowledges of the indo-europeans, hindus of this time. The great philosophical poem Bagavad-Gita is a part of the sixth book; probably it was added after the other episodes. The nineteenth book is also a later addition, it tells the myths related to the God Krishna. The Mahabharat was very much divulgated and known, having being translated and interpreted in all countries which suffered indian influency. It was an unfailling font of inspiration to literature and fine arts. (Translated from the Petit Robert 2, Dictionnaire universel des noms propres, Paris, 1990).


[6] - "Renunciation is the desinterested work. The true renunciation is the renunciation to desires and nothing more than that. Action is the only way to reach the yoga of renunciation, once one gets it, serenity comes to the mind. The pleasures which come from attachment are only, fonts of posterior pain, they have beginning and end. The things which have biginning and end, are never font of eternal joy, the wise man shall avoid them. When a man comes to the state where cold and heat, pleasure and pain, the honour of dishonour, look equal to him, this man is always serene. A portion of earth, a stone, a portion of gold are equal to him. He sees no difference between friends and enemy, between dispassionate person and passionate person, not even between bad people and good people. This man is great". (Mahabharat, vol.2, cap. 3, pg.668)

[7] - When the gestalt psychologists established the concept of Geographical Environment - the environment as science describe it - and Behavioral Environment - the environment as the individual perceives it -, when they said that the neurological configurations (Gestalten) are equal to the psychological ones, or yet, "what is inside is outside" - Isomorphic Principle - and when, through the Principle of Contemporaneity, Kurt Lewin said that the present changes the past, that what happens changes what has happened, they got global and unitarian view of the human psychological processes without causalist, determinist, reducionist a priori; they reached the human essence, without valorative attributions.


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