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Book Reviews |
Key Words: Books Reviewed
Gordon Wheeler is introducing what he believes to be a new paradigm for the field of psychotherapy based on the original constructs of Gestalt psychology. He uses the conceptual framework of constructivism as a vehicle for his approach to looking at individualism and the self. This book is an ambitious undertaking as he goes about deconstructing the idea of the individualistic self, pointing to the limitations of a long-held view and suggesting that much of the difficulty that psychotherapy has had in explaining human distress is related to the view of self. The author of this book believes that the individual self as historically viewed precedes and transcends relationship and social conditions and that interpersonal experience is somehow secondary and even opposed to the needs of the inner self.
The book is written to lead the reader through a set of experiential chapters presenting the notion of relational self in a set of frameworks that develop the concepts of the social field, contact, shame, support, and intimacy and through these the broader human experiences related to narrative, culture, health, ecology, and spirit.
In the first imagery exercise, the author leads the reader through experiences of thinking, feeling, and imaging to inform a stepwise, detailed behavioral-descriptive feedback of the self. The sequence of this imagery (and the author suggests writing this down) would go "I see/ imagine, then I feel/do, and then you see/imagine/feel and offer a response." An example would be "I see shoulders hunched over, mouth sagging, and then I feel sad and lonely, and then I could do something to help you, but you couldn't take care of me." This would be a recursive exercise in which there might be a number of descriptions resulting. In the second exercise, the reader explores the experience of creating outer and inner social supports in relation to the experiences of the first step and encounters shame as a result of the individualistic model many operate from.
In the third step, the reader explores the shame and asks what one would need from another person to enable one to talk about it. This step would begin explorations concerning intimacy. These exercises, the author suggests, would enable one to understand the nature of the individual as the figure and the imagined world as the ground in a Gestalt framework. This much-simplified example may give at least an incomplete picture of the exercise.
This is not an easy book to read, as it expects the reader to have a working knowledge of Kuhn's concept of paradigm, basic Gestalt psychology, and the development of Gestalt psychotherapy as it has grown in sophistication. However, this is a book well worth reading because it introduces in a broad panoramic way the limitations that are inherent in how the psychotherapy field has viewed the self in relation to society. Wheeler takes one rapidly through a wide range of concepts that invite and challenge the reader to examine long-held beliefs about the self in relation to the world. As the author suggests, this means a significant shift in the way we think about ourselves and our patients. Much of what has been appearing under the rubric of constructivism, deconstructivism, and constructionism introduces a vehicle for understanding our traditional views of self and suggests that a concept of relational self is well worth considering.
The written word has limitations, and nowhere have I found that more true than with this book; there is so much I would have liked to discuss with the author. This is perhaps one of the problems that arise when experiential learning is involved. There is much to agree with and disagree with—necessarily so with the developing of a new paradigm about the self. I would also have liked a traditional subject index for the book because there are so many ideas that call for further thought and comparison.
Although the thinking of this book may seem radical, the Zeitgeist of the field of psychotherapy has shown that many elements being offered here have actually been around for some time. Some senior Gestalt therapists will find much that is already congruent with their thinking. Group psychotherapists have long been talking about and considering a view of the self that is relational, although perhaps not as clearly as this author does. Transactional analysis and redecision therapy have acknowledged the role of the self, although again not as clearly and strongly as this book. Current analytic thinkers will find much that is provocative and much that is affirming. Self psychologists should find in this book a well-developed set of arguments for a point of view that will challenge, as well as support, current thinking.
FOOTNOTES
Dr. Gladfelter is a faculty member of the Fielding Institute, Santa Barbara, CA.
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