Gestalt therapy is a humanistic, existential and phenomenological approach—humanistic in the sense that the therapist supports the client’s innate potential for change and development; existential in that it views the individual as ultimately responsible for her life and her choices; phenomenological in its insistence that the most important dimension of both human life and the therapeutic process is that of direct experience. It is also inherently relational and dialogical, placing therapeutic value on the living relationship that emerges in ongoing interaction between client and therapist. The Gestalt therapist is directly involved in the client’s unfolding process and makes definitive use of her own natural responses, integrating personal experience with diagnosis and treatment. In contact with the client, she endeavors to model behavior that is spontaneous, well-integrated and real. In this way, she facilitates depth in the client’s sensory and emotional perception, and supports the cultivation of an awareness that is experiential rather than merely explanatory or descriptive. The therapist presumes this quality of awareness to be the individual’s only means of achieving clarity with respect to her most basic needs; accordingly, she supports the client’s awareness of physical sensations as they arise in interaction with the environment, so that over time these become more familiar and tolerable, and the associated emotions more accessible to exploration.

In this process the Gestalt therapist is predisposed to follow rather than to lead, deriving from “the co-created field” interventions that are mutually responsive rather than unilaterally directive. Because the client is presumed to possess agency in her own life, her natural capacity to engage with the environment is honored, while her conditioned passivity, expressed in various forms of unconscious manipulation, may be steadily frustrated. Acknowledgment of the human capacity for creative adjustment (including especially the one we have already made) is the paradoxical element of Gestalt therapy that makes authentic change possible. The therapist’s role is to accompany the client through a global process of expanding awareness and “response-ability” in which distressing symptoms, rather than being “fixed” or “eliminated,” are spontaneously recontextualized in the act of exploration. When we have so fully experienced a problem that we are able to risk owning our part in it, we regain access to our capacity to choose. This is why the “Gestalt experiment” must be so spontaneous and open-ended that it can lead just about anywhere, and why the ability to improvise is an essential ingredient of the therapist’s skill-set. The integrative orientation of the Gestalt approach tends to resist the limiting isolation of polarities (such as “good” and “bad”) which are often more effectively understood as inseparable components of a larger and more comprehensive whole. When the client develops facility with this perspective, life becomes a less constricted, strategic and avoidant affair. Challenges and problems begin to look more like adventures in growth and inclusion, and the function of therapy comes to be understood as that of a catalyst for an ongoing process of development and integration.