When I offer training workshops to people who haven’t seen me work before, one of the main things that they find surprising is how rarely I ask clients questions. In this paper, I discuss the issues that underlie my preference to avoid asking questions. I am aware that to even ask the question can seem strange. People have commented that I don’t see interested in my clients! And in fact, it turns out that the answer to that critique is a major part of the discussion.

In this paper, I examine the meaning of ‘field’ in Gestalt Therapy, and what a field orientation means for the theory and practice of therapy. I also look at what philosophical principles can add to or take away from the clarity of the approach.

My proposal is that the importance of obsessions and compulsions are that they provide an achievable quasi-response to the situation of anxiety and terror when acted out ‘as in a dream’. So frightening and alienating times inevitably bring out a combination of rageful aggression and loss of sensory and human contact with the world if we cannot find a meaningful way to address the danger in a contactful way. In time-honoured fashion, we find human sacrifices that we fantasise will bring bet...

It seems important to me to address the place of confluence in the outlook of Gestalt Therapy. Does it have a meaning and functionality in our being in the world, or is it always a problem to be confronted? The latter was true at one stage in earlier Gestalt culture, where confluence was seen as always bad and to be avoided (although this is clearly not what our founding theory said).I will put the case that confluence is a very significant part of the Gestalt understanding of self...

My thesis in this paper is that the people of the psychotherapy world, including Gestalt therapists, bear part of the responsibility for a world where truth has become fragmented, split off from the physical world of sensory and motor experience, and there is no obvious way for people to share through difference or to question assertions made that are ‘flatly contradicted’ by physical evidence. We have done this by a misreading of Husserl’s phenomenology, supported by a culture of confluen...

What does it mean for us to meet? Is it a matter of us being here together in the same place, or seeing each other, or you hearing me? How much is it just a meeting of my interpretation of you, while you are meeting with your interpretation of me? Are we just in a hall of mirrors, reflection meeting reflection? And in that case, is it meaningful to talk about meeting, or contact, or love at all? Are the narcissists right, and are we all like Narcissus, falling in love with our own reflecti...

This is a chapter I was asked to write for a book to be published in Ukraine on the ‘active principle’ in a number of different psychotherapies. The book is now not going to be published, so I am publishing it myself. I would like to thank Larysa Didkovska and the Ukrainian Psychotherapy University for the inspiration to write this.I really like the question: what is the ‘active principle’ in Gestalt Therapy: what is the engine of change that I offer clients who come to me...

This book tracks a particular understanding of self, philosophically, from research evidence and in its implications for psychotherapy. At each step, the author includes first the theory he is working from, then the clinical implications of the theory, followed by some links to the philosophical outlook inherent in the theory, and finally a more extended case example.It takes the view that the continuing self is partly an illusion, partly a construct, and that we in fact have to work to st...

This book is a collection of articles written in the period 1985–2011. The articles form a background for perspectives that concern the foundations of Gestalt therapy: foundations in philosophy and foundations in psychoanalysis and connections with other therapeutic theories.

We are in a world that is increasingly complex. Most of us inhabit two worlds that seem very different, the immediate experiential world and a virtual cyber-world of e-mail, text, social media. Gestalt Therapy emphasises ‘contact’ and ‘awareness’, and the question arises how much we can talk about these in relation to connections in cyberspace. What are the ethics of cyberspace?One of the aspects of cyberspace is that we can create ‘avatars’ of ourselves that are our extensions into...

I like good horror films. They tell us what we truly fear, and how we truly respond to fear. And I am curious why so many people also like horror films, and related questions about why children regularly see monsters in the dark, why people go bungee jumping and white water rafting, even why people feel better singing or hearing the Blues. What does this tell us about ourselves as a species? And what does it mean that there are also people who would strongly avoid all of these (avoidance a...

What is the meaning of emotion in therapy? When is it important to focus on ‘feelings’ and when is it counterproductive? This in many ways seems like a ridiculous question, since ‘feelings’ are often taken as the central point of who we are and what we show in therapy. In this article, I want to question the assumption that emotion is necessarily central to therapy, and look at the meaningful place for emotion in both therapist and client.