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From
Individual to Relationship
The Therapist's
Use of Self
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FROM THE
INDIVIDUAL TO RELATIONSHIP -
A Gestalt Perspective on the Client-Therapist relationship.
Parlett reminds us that "…the original
Gestalt agenda was to locate human distress not in the confines
of a person’s individual psychopathology, but instead in
the interactions between people and their situations". (In
Clarkson & McKewn, 1993 p.193).
Some of the concepts put forward in this
book i.e. introjection (the process of taking from the environment),
retroflection (the process of doing to ourselves what we would
like to do to the environment), and projection (the process of
attributing to the environment qualities that belong to ourselves),
are mostly to do with how the person relates to the environment.
However Perls used them in therapy to underline the responsibility
of the individual in reaction to his environment. Two other concepts
i.e. contact and confluence relate directly to the mutual relationship
between people.
Confluence relates to the idea that two
people merge together, become blurred on the boundaries, not knowing
where one starts and where the other finishes. Contact on the
other hand refers to the process of discovering self in relationship
to the other person. With contact there is a sense of openness
to exploring difference, to novelty and to feeling a boundary
and separateness from the other person yet at the same time feeling
the possibility of touching and being touched by the other. These
concepts of contact, confluence and boundary permeate the work
of Perls Hefferline and Goodman.
Continued
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