The Lost Self Changes - Gestalt and Christian Concepts of Rebirths

The Lost Self Changes: Gestalt and Christian Concepts of Rebirth
Author(s): Barrie Ryan

Source: Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Oct., 1976), pp. 247-270
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27505363
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Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1976
The Lost Self Changes: Gestalt and

Christian Concepts of Rebirth
BARRIE RYAN
It is not for me to speak in general terms of the inner reality of him who refuses to believe
in a transcendent being with whom he can communicate. I have only this to report: that I
have met many men in the course of my life who have told me how, acting from the con
science of men who had become guilty, they experienced themselves as seized by a higher
power. These men grew into an existential state to which the name of rebirth is due.1
I went through a "mental breakdown," a personal collapse, a great period of

complete upheaval. I was an agnostic before it; I am a newly spiritual Christian
since it. I experienced conversion; I experienced rebirth. It has happened to many
under many different circumstances, and many, I imagine, under my circum
stances. I won't say it is not worth remarking because it has happened to many. A
miracle is always worth remarking, no matter how many times it happens. I
speak of it because of what I could not understand during the change.
I took two parallel actions during this time of breakdown: I prayed to God to
help me and started going to church; and I went into Gestalt therapy. Neither
was familiar to me. I did them both because I was desperate. I had a little more
faith in the first than in the second, but I was determined to commit myself to
anything that would help me be responsible for myself, so I threw myself into
therapy, too.
During therapy I often became confused as to what I was experiencing.
Sometimes I felt that my growth in therapy (which I could feel was occurring)
was responsible for my increasing spiritual sensitivity; sometimes I felt that my
growth in therapy was because of my faith; sometimes I felt that the two growths
were mutually opposed. I wanted to see how these truths were related, as I felt
that in some significant way they were.
Yet I could not bring my spiritual concerns directly into my work in therapy. I
did not know how to make them valid there. This bothered me deeply. I am sure
that some of my resistance to specific work was a result of feeling that Gestalt was
taking me in a wrong direction.
For instance, the expression of anger was one area of difficulty; the effort to end
relationships was another. These areas were difficult because of my personal fear
Barrie Ryan, M.A., has taught English at the University of Arizona and children of varying ages in
several experimental schools in Tucson. She is currently teaching extension courses for the University
and a class in Ivan Illich for the Free University also in Tucson.
247
248 Journal of Religion and Health
of taking risks, as Gestalt made clear to me; but they were problematic because
they were also critical areas in the testing of my newly awakening spiritual
values. I did not know how to make any distinctions at this time; neither did I
have sufficient faith. So I often simply hung back in dumb resistance.
Yet in the end I knew I could no longer stand living as I had. Therefore, I would
commit myself to the risk of my personal feelings in therapy regardless of the
simultaneous despair I experienced in predicting that this would also probably
mean the death of certain spiritual values within me. Thus I continued to
progress, with the two most important experiences in my increasing hope of
recovery remaining individually significant but somehow unrelated and maybe
even (but how could they be?) mutually hostile at certain points.
After I concluded therapy, my most important personal decision was still to be
made. I was able to make it only with the help of intense prayer, which finally, by
the grace of God, led me out to the other side of darkness.
Following this I read whatever I could find to help me understand the relation
between the two most powerful helps to my recovery. This paper is the result of
that search.
I began by examining the concept of rebirth, from both a Christian and a
Gestalt standpoint. That led me to see the essential similarities and a significant
difference between their views. But that in turn raised questions that I also had
to pursue. They brought me, in the end, to a consideration of how Gestalt therapy
could be a hindrance as well as a help to someone struggling to be spiritually
reborn.
Finally, I must note that although my own spiritual journey took on Christian
form, so that I was initially looking for the Christian understanding of rebirth in
this search, many of the most rewarding insights regarding spiritual rebirth I
found were not limited specifically to a Christian point of view. Therefore, I have
used the term Christian-Spiritual through much of the paper to leave the
meaning of rebirth in the spirit as open as possible.
Psychotherapists who see the relevance of spiritual disciplines to their field of endeavor
(like Fromm, Benoit or Nicoll) or religious thinkers interested in psychotherapy (like
Watts) are a minority, and their number diminishes when we look for those who have defi
nite notions as to how the ideas and procedures of these different domains are related and
not just divided interest.2
The essence of the Christian message is the need for man to change himself, to
be reborn. It calls for us to become "new persons" in Christ. Exactly what this
means may differ from interpreter to interpreter. I shall attempt to avoid
doctrinal issues and concentrate on the experience of change itself. In his book,
The New Man, Maurice Nicoll discussed what this change process involves.3
He who would love God is told he must die to the outer man, the man of
appearances, and be reborn to the innermost man in himself ("The kingdom of
God is within you"). He must die to his ego, his pride, and all the love of status in
the world that issues from it. He must be born to a whole new sense of what
goodness is, and he must be able to act from it. To become this new person, he
The Lost Self Changes: Gestalt and Christian Concepts of Rebirth 249
must break his feeling of complacency or self-satisfaction and come to feel that he
is almost nothing.4
Since it is by no means easy to die to one's self in the worldly sense, resistance
to this process will be strong and will come from the very forces within a man that
are threatened:
The conception of the Gospels is that man is continually being dragged down by evil forces
which are in him, not outside him, and to which he consents. By man's consent to these
forces in himself, progress in human life is prevented. The evil powers are ... [in ] his self
love, his egoism, his ignorance, his stupidity, his malice, his vanity, and also his thinking
only from his senses and taking the seen world, the outer appearances of life as the only
reality. These defects are collectively called the devil, which is the name for the terrible
power of misunderstanding everything that undeveloped man possesses.5
Since he is going to resist, and since the change required is so radical, if it is to

take place a man must be led into bewilderment, into a wilderness. Everything in
him must be subjected to temptation so that all that is useless for his new growth
will be burned away and all that is essential evolution will be left. He must
gradually be transformed from the lower aspects of appearances to the higher or
inner kingdom of the truth of love by this process. The process is difficult and
often painful.
One of Nicoll's most strongly held points is that although goodness is first in
importance and the real end of all knowledge, a man can come to act from it only
by first undergoing a change in his understanding of truth. In short, he sees that
truth must grow in him before his feeling of what is good can change:
Now whatever a man loves he regards as good, and what he regards as good he wills and
acts from. If he only loves himself then he is a man to whom Good means only his own good,
and anything that does not apply to his own good he will regard as bad. The development of
the will is through the development of the love, and the development of the love is at the
expense of the self love.6
Until a man's understanding of what good is changes, he cannot really be a new

person. The ultimate result of rebirth should be a change in motive, a change in
behavior, a new person. But the process involves dying to an old truth and
discovering the new before his actions and behavior will change.
To summarize Nicoll's main points, then, rebirth involves: the death of
appearances; the loss of complacency and coming to feel that one is nothing;
being dragged down by evil forces in oneself; becoming bewildered and tempted
so that one can be transformed from lower to higher; willingness to suffer in this
process; growth of truth in a man before his feeling of what is good can change.
To be led into a wilderness or a state of bewilderment involves mental distress
and confusion. Although Nicoll sees this as an essential part of suffering toward
being spiritually transformed, it is probably more common in our time to see
confusion as a separate state and to treat it separately. To flesh out our
understanding of the possibility of spiritual transformation coming out of such a
state, we can look at a study done by Pitirim Sorokin presented in The Ways and
Power of Love.7 Sorokin investigated more than 3,000 great, known altruists in
the course of history to see how they had evolved. He did not limit his study to
Christians, but included people of any belief or religion who had become known
for their loving powers, however manifested. He found that these people fell into
three categories, which he designated as: the Early Fortunate Altruists, the
Intermediary, and the Late-Converted or Late-Catastrophic Altruists. The
categories rest on a continuum of increasing difficulty and pain involved in the
rebirth.8 Since my concern in this paper is with understanding the relation
between psychological and spiritual senses of rebirth, I will concentrate on the
Late-Catastrophic Altruists, who were originally the most worldly, having
experienced the most mental difficulty, having gone through dramatic crises in
which their whole lives were turned upside down before they became capable of
radiating love.
The people in the Late-Catastrophic group were often basically hedonists or
primarily logical-minded. If they had a spiritual bent at all, they did not fully
realize it; it was at loggerheads with other parts of themselves. They became
great, unselfish, and dedicated souls ultimately, i.e., they accomplished a
complete change in their behavior.
At the beginning of the period of change, they were experiencing "an
increasingly painful discord in their lives," a sense of dissatisfaction and
unhappiness. Sorokin refers to them as "sick souls." Thus, Sorokin hypothesized,
they were in a sense ready to look for some "way out" of their lives at that time.
At this point they had what Sorokin terms a precipitant, some experience that
exploded what remained of their former way of looking at things, something that
had a shock effect, something that broke down appearances completely.
Pr?cipitants were different: the death of a loved one, extreme sickness or
nearness to death oneself, betrayal, or sometimes great, unexpected kindness or
forgiveness, are some examples. But the effect of the precipitant was the same for
all. Sorokin explains that its value was "to expose and make explicit the hidden
contradictions in them whether in their mind and conduct, social group or
institution."10
What had originally been stressful but perhaps vaguely felt, then by means of
the precipitant became open stress, consciously and fully revealed. Sorokin feels
that at this point they could have taken innumerable means to deal with their
pain and bewilderment. They could have lapsed, he thinks, into official mental
disorder, moral or mental regression to the level of a brute, semianimal
submission, cynical sensualism or suicide.11 These are the chief escapes that
Sorokin feels most people seek at such times of extreme stress. Since the
temptation to go these routes is great, he feels that this is why so few are able to
complete conversion from these circumstances. But the Late-Catastrophic
altruists instead passed through a "dark night of the soul with its loneliness,
drift, and absence of any divine or other inspiring force." 12
The crucial factor in their conversion experience begins here. At or during this
time they come to identify with the Supraconscious. Sorokin uses Supracon
scious instead of God because he is dealing with people from so many different
beliefs and religions and he feels that this term allows for more flexibility. What
he means by this word is the ultimate power as felt to be above or beyond or
outside us but also in some paradoxical sense the most real part of us. They had,
he says, "a progressively growing awareness . . . that their true self is neither
their body, nor their unconscious, sub-conscious, or pre-conscious-energy . . . but
rather the supraconscious, whatever name and properties they give to it. . . "13
He makes it clear that identification cannot be merely ideological. It must be a
real matter of life and death, real emotional commitment. It is the identification
of themselves with this power that carries them through the time of confusion
and pain. Then, "... after a short or long, sharp or mild, buf always painful
stage of depression, disillusionment, hesitation, inner struggle and dark hours
. . . "14 they reintegrated themselves, their egos, values, and group affiliations
around their newly emerged sense of a transcendent reality with which they
identified. Some were able to accomplish this r?int?gration in the world, but
many had to leave the "world" for a time for solitude or semisolitude of retreats,
monasteries, etc., to effect the complete change. Sorokin sees the immediate time
after the precipitant and during the identification with the Supraconscious as a
"sensitive" time in which these people "need a careful helping hand in guiding
them toward the creative [altruistic] first deeds and self-identification" with the
Supraconscious because it is a time when they could go either backward or
forward. "If the first self identification is made with creative love or some other
great value, and if the intentional or unintentional first deeds are altruistic or
creative, the consequences of such ideas and deeds help to break the unstable
equilibrium in favor of a creative life course. If both factors are negative, they
tend to send the respective person along one of the noncreative highways."15
Some of the people Sorokin discusses in this category of Late-Catastrophic
altruists are: St. Francis, Buddha, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Paul, St. Augustine,
Sri Ramakrishna.
Sorokin speculates that the Late-Catastrophic altruists are a minority of the
great altruists probably because it is so difficult, so painful and wasteful to go
through such upheavals to change that most people cannot do it. The other
altruists have more advantages of love in their lives to help effect the growth of
rebirth. Still, it must be clear that the Late-Catastrophics do represent the
extreme of Nicoll's points of the process. They went through a very difficult time
of mental distress. Through their willingness to endure the pain and confusion,
through their identification of themselves with the power of love that is outside
and beyond, they were slowly transformed from the lower appearances of things
to the higher principle of love and were ultimately enabled to live and act from it
completely. They were, in the spiritual sense, truly reborn.
Here I would like to stress Sorokin's understanding of mental difficulty. He
discovered that the Late-Catastrophics were experiencing mental disturbance
and dissatisfaction originally, which is why he felt they were ready to seek
another solution. However, he saw outright "official mental breakdown" as one of
the possible escapes from dealing with that stress or the stress intensified and
clarified by the precipitant.
Anton Boisen, who himself could be classified as a Late-Catastrophic altruist,

also came to a conclusion about a connection between conversion experience and
mental difficulty, but his understanding was different.
Boisen was hospitalized as the result of a sudden mental collapse during a time
when he was studying for the ministry. It occurred to him during his hospitaliza
tion that there was a definite similarity between mental illness and conversion
experience. After he was released, he devoted the rest of his life to working with
hospitalized patients in order to understand what that relation was and to work
toward the recovery of patients. In his book The Exploration of the Inner World:
A Study of Mental Disorder and Religious Experience he presents the results of
his efforts with 173 mental patients.16
Boisen observed hospitalized patients' mental disturbances as being character
ized by three different kinds of basic responses: acute onset, where the person
experiences a sudden crisis of disorientation accompanied by panic and
self-blame; drifting or indifference, where the person is extremely passive and
lacks concern for anything; delusional misinterpretation, where the person
attributes blame to various forces or people outside himself, is extremely
defensive and paranoid.17 But Boisen felt that only the first kind of breakdown
was similar to what was experienced during religious conversion. The other two
responses, drifting and delusional misinterpretation, he saw quite definitely as
escapes from facing difficulty (in the same way as Sorokin saw the whole category
of "official mental illness" as an escape). But Boisen concluded that hospitalized
persons suffering breakdowns of the acute type were attempting necessary
conversions,18
Instead of looking only at the behavior of these patients as had previously been
done, or assuming that the problem was organic, Boisen became interested
particularly in their thinking. He found a "religious content" in their thinking:
they had a sense of the mysterious, a sense of peril about themselves and the
world, and an increased and intense sense of responsibility. He felt that it was
this "religious content" in their thinking that was trying to help them face their
difficulties, that the acute panic reaction was "Nature's way" of trying to heal
their disharmony and inner conflicts by throwing them openly into duress. He
explains this in the same way Sorokin explains the effect of the precipitant for the
Late-Catastrophics: it exposes the conflict clearly to the person, it helps him see
what he needs to face.10
In examining these patients' backgrounds, Boisen also found a common
denominator: unassimilated experience or experiences of high emotional inten
sity, usually of a sexual nature.20 Boisen explains that the patients, feeling they
could not relate these experiences to people they loved and needed to be loved by,
for fear of rejection had kept themselves bound to an instinctual or lower level in
themselves. At the same time, they also kept the loyalty toward the values of the
person or persons they loved. Thus, they developed a serious conflict within
themselves. Again, for Boisen, the acute panic is a way of trying to force the
person to get rid of these sets and attitudes that are blocking his development, to
help him resolve his conflict once and for all on a more comprehensive and total
level?or, to put it another way, to help him reach an ultimate loyalty in

something more inclusive than the original loyalty, i.e., to integrate in Supracon
scious identification. The terrifying fact is, however, that this sudden thrust into
increased awareness, this crisis, either makes or breaks. That is to say, the person
undergoing this response is much more likely either to recover or to collapse
completely and end up in the back wards of the hospital forever.21
Boisen examines in depth the experiences of several Christians who have been
considered to have had successful conversion after difficult personal trials. It is
interesting that only one of the people he examines, Paul, overlaps with any of
the people Sorokin picks out to focus on in detail. However, some others that he
discusses, like George Fox and John Bunyan, also fit into the Late-Catastrophic
category. In addition, he discusses two of the biblical prophets, Ezekiel and
Jeremiah. Looking at all of these people in their times of disturbance, he finds
that the same kind of "religious content" appeared in their thinking at these
times as appeared in the thinking of the hospitalized acute-onset people: a sense
of the mysterious, a sense of world or personal catastrophe, and an increased and
intense sense of responsibility. The religious conversion people felt their
experiences to be coming to them from God, and later people called their states of
mind "visionary"; but whatever they were called, these people spent a certain
significant amount of time being disoriented or "strange," hearing voices,
receiving visions and/or acting contrary to their usual behaviors, particularly
spending a lot of time in solitude.22 These disturbed periods were so tremendous
to them that they "destroyed the structure upon which their previous judgments
had been based and compelled a revaluation of values."23 Boisen sees these as
times of problem-solving experiences involving questions of personal destiny and
ultimate loyalties, as was the case with the acute-onset patients. Questions such
as "Who am I?" "Why am I in this world?" "How can I bring about a realization
of the possibilities that ought to be?" become urgent matters of life and death at
these times.24
What the acute type had in common with those undergoing the change of character called
conversion was that both arose out of inner conflict and disharmony accompanied by a
keen awareness of ultimate loyalties and unattained possibilities. They are both attempts
at reorganizing the basis for their life.25
The difference for people like Fox and Bunyan is that they eventually came out
of their periods of disturbance with greater inner unity and self-discipline,
enabled to act toward others on a universal basis of love or at least "with socially
valuable insights and a new purpose in life."26 Through the problem-solving
nature of these experiences they were able to become what was best and highest
in themselves.
But the hospitalized patients did not succeed in that kind of rebirth. Of the 173
patients Boisen worked with in this study, only 15 recovered enough to leave the
hospital, and none attained the kind of rebirth in their lives that he felt they were
striving for. Before I consider Boisen's understanding of why that was so, I would
like to review briefly what evidence Sorokin and Boisen have given that supports
and illuminates Nicoll's points about Christian-Spiritual rebirth.
Both the Late-Catastrophics and the acute-onset patients lost their compla
cency and were brought to feel they were nothing by some kind of extreme
situation (a precipitant).
Both groups were being dragged down by destructive forces in themselves.
Sorokin does not go into this in detail, but from the examples he cites in his book,
it is clear that the Late-Catastrophics' early dissatisfaction came from not being
happy with certain aspects of themselves, such as sexual jealousy, drink,
possessiveness or greed of one form or another?in short, dissatisfaction came
from their vanity, their egos, instincts they couldn't control, etc.
For the acute hospitalized patients, Boisen sees the evil as their isolation and
consequent bondage to instincts caused originally by their not being able to relate
incidents of high emotional intensity to the persons whose love and esteem was
necessary to them. It might appear that the evil here is the social evil (not caused
by the individual himself) of failure of charity and understanding?failure to
generate an atmosphere of trust and openness. In a real sense this is true. But
the key factor is that even though the acute patients experienced others as
judging them, and therefore they judged themselves, unacceptable by the
standards of those they loved, when they were actually undergoing their crises
they experienced the sense of their own responsibility toward their own conflicts.
At that time, they felt the problem was their own and they must take
responsibility for it. The locus in the crisis was in them.
Both groups were willing to undergo the suffering necessary to endure the
wilderness of temptation and travail as they were swept along in a new sense of
truth. They did not try to evade or escape what was happening to them.
But the Late-Catastrophics found a strong identification with the Supracon
scious and managed finally to reintegrate their lives totally in harmony with this
and thus be reborn in love. Boisen's patients never achieved such a complete
change. At this point, let us consider Boisen's explanation for this failure.
Boisen says that one of the reasons for the extremely low recovery figure is that
the particular group of patients he was able to work with had been chosen
originally in order to study possible physiological factors in mental illness. The
choices were made on the basis of health factors. It just happened that over
one-third of these patients had been in the hospital over six years. Boisen says if
he had worked with all recently admitted patients, the recovery figures would
have been higher.27 But of the 15 who did recover enough to leave the hospital
and make a satisfactory adjustment in the world, all but one was an acute-onset
type. Only willingness to face oneself opens the door for real possibilities of
change Boisen pointed out, and the drifters and those with delusions are unable
or unwilling to make that kind of effort. Acute onset either makes or breaks;
many of those with acute onset were broken by this extreme effort. It seems
disheartening, to say the least, that only 15 out of 173 could recover. But Boisen is
saddened even more by the fact that none of them was able to be reborn in the
fullest sense, as Sorokin's Late-Catastrophic altruists had been, as Boisen
himself obviously had been, and as Boisen felt the acute-onset patients' own
experiences were trying to lead them to be. This is Boisen's tentative reasoning:
With such courage and faith and loyalty, why these prophets of our hospital wards did not
attain to something of greater value is a question which suggests a further consideration of
no little importance. Their fatal mistake, as I see it, has lain in the failure to recognize and
heed that old injunction of true religious insight which requires that we walk humbly with
God. This my hospital prophets had failed to do. They had brought the divine down to their
own level. They had indeed found inner unification and they succeeded in maintaining it
against great odds but only at a very great cost. The universe had become no bigger than
themselves. They had not learned with Paul to think of the divine as something that lived
within them as a future possibility to be achieved at the cost of sacrifice and struggle. It was
for them something already attained. In dealing with such persons I never try to shake their
faith in themselves or in the value of their experience. I try rather to help them to take the
next step of freeing the divine from their idea of themselves so as to make possible a larger
universe.28
What Boisen is referring to could be spoken of in Sorokin's terms as failure to find

full and committed identification with the Supraconscious.
Boisen's thesis was presented in 1936. It may be difficult to realize how radical
a thesis it must have been then. But if in our time there is more acceptance of the
possibility of a connection between mental breakdown and spiritual seeking (as
recognized in the work of people like R. D. Laing), it must be made clear that
Boisen paved the way in a time when mental illness had a real stigma and people
in such a state were usually isolated and feared.
For the time being, however, I am going to leave the whole discussion of mental
difficulty as seen in the context of a Christian-Spiritual sense of rebirth and move
to a discussion of the Gestalt equivalent of rebirth.
Whose God are you looking for? asked the priest.

I replied:
A starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.
?Anne Sexton*
Fritz Perls's famous statement in regard to Gestalt therapy is: "To suffer one's
death and be reborn is not easy."29 But what does the death involve; and what
the new birth?
What needs to die, according to Perls, is all that is keeping us from becoming
our authentic selves, i.e., our social roles, our conception of ourselves in terms of a
controlling image, our manipulation of the world (and others) in terms of that
controlling image, our fear of letting go of our control and just being, our fear of
being rejected if we feel what we truly feel. All this must die if we are to allow
what we truly are to emerge, if we are to be born again to our real potential. Perls
says, "every individual, every plant, every animal has only one inborn goal?to
* "Is It True?" In Sexton, A., The Awful Rowing toward God. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975.
Used with permission of Houghton Mifflin.
actualize itself as it is."30 And further, "the fact that we live only on such a small
percentage of our potential is due to the fact that we're not willing ... to accept
myself, yourself, as the organism which you are by birth, constitution and so
on."31
How is this rebirth to be accomplished? It would be hard to say that first one's
feeling of complacency must be broken, since it would be unlikely that any
person coming for therapy would really be complacent. But a person must come
to feel he is nothing before change can occur?and this would be difficult for the
person coming for therapy, since undoubtedly he would feel a need to shore up his
self-image, which seems to be failing him somehow. So he must be pushed toward
confronting his anxiety everywhere he experiences it; he must be pushed toward
the impasse in which he feels he cannot support himself.
To understand what this means exactly, it is necessary to explain Perls's
understanding of the movement of confrontation within the structure of neurotic
personality. Perls sees five layers of experience: 1) the clich? layer, where we
exchange polite but fundamentally meaningless data, 2) the social roles layer,
where we try to be an image of ourselves?usually more of whatever we "think"
we are e.g., more good, more tough, etc., 3) the antiexistence layer. When the
social-roles layer is inoperative for whatever reason, what we feel is no existence,
an impasse point, a point that we feel we cannot go beyond. This impasse point is
where we begin to experience avoidance. We don't want to go into it, we don't
want to become aware of it, because we are afraid of our death?the death of our
constructed identity. But if we are pushed into the impasse, then we do initially
experience death. Perls calls this 4) the implosion layer. It is a fertile void,
though, if we will stick with it, because ultimately out of our "death" comes 5)
the explosive level, where our real and strong feelings of our authentic selves
literally explode back to life (feelings of grief, orgasm, anger, or joy).32
If in therapy every time we sense avoidance we are made to seek awareness of it
and in it, we will go through this process. And as we do, we will gain back what of
ourselves we have disowned because it did not fit our social-role identity. As we
gain back "ourselves" we will lose the need for a controlling image of ourselves,
we will become alive and self-regulated and enabled at last to live out of our
authentic selves.
It seems important to discuss the method by which the aforementioned
awareness is achieved, since it is the method itself that distinguishes Gestalt
from other therapies.
The process in Gestalt therapy is phenomenological. One does not proceed by
explanation of past experiences; one proceeds by an awareness continuum in the
present. There are various procedures that can be used by the therapist to help
the patient (client?) maintain an awareness continuum, but I do not think it
necessary to go into them in this paper. Roughly the idea is for the patient to keep
reporting out loud what he is aware of now, both inside and outside his body. As
he approaches an area of avoidance, his awareness becomes more difficult and
the therapist can help him choose to focus on his blanking awareness and go into
the impasse.33
Taking his basic ideas of perception from Gestalt psychologists, Perls contends
that our awareness is composed of figure and background in a shifting
configuration. The needs that have not been met, the awareness that is
unfinished because it has not been acted on, will emerge from background into
figure in the order of greatest urgency. In a healthily functioning individual,
needs can arise naturally into foreground (figure), be recognized, and then be met
by the individual (acted upon) in any number of ways. In the malfunctioning
individual, needs thought to be dangerous have often been blocked from
awareness?therefore, they remain unfinished. But it is necessary for the
organism to keep blocking them instead of recognizing them. (Perls says needs
themselves can never be blocked?only awareness of them). If a person does this
long enough, he no longer has any idea how he is doing it. If he can again
concentrate on awareness, these blocked needs can emerge into the foreground
where they now have a chance to be acted upon so that they can be finished or
completed. It is when we can really allow the need we have blocked for so long to
come fully into awareness that we experience our death (whatever that need is,
obviously it was not something we could allow ourselves for fear of some kind; to
allow it now is to die) and when our true response to that need emerges for the
first time, it is an explosion of feeling.
When this process is repeated often enough, we feel we can allow our needs to
come up spontaneously. We no longer need to block our awareness of certain
needs because we feel we can handle them (i.e., we feel we can express our
feelings in response without dying). We then become what Perls calls "self
regulating," we simply learn to attend to our awareness instead of trying to
control it.
But why do we construct controlling images of ourselves in the first place, ideas
that only must be broken down if we are to be reborn to our authentic selves?
Perls feels that maturation is "learning to support ourselves," a progressive
growing away from the need for environmental support.34 He does not mean by
this that we don't always have or need a relationship with our environment,
simply that we need to grow so that we don't think we have to depend on certain
specific outside supports in order to be what we are. If in growing up the child
does not learn by sufficient frustration to find his own resources in himself, if he is
given too much support, instead of learning to find and develop his own
potential, he begins to develop ways to manipulate himself and others so as to
remain safe. His fear of not being safe, his desire to maintain the status quo is
really based on his ignorance of his own ability to find ways of meeting his needs.
Out of this fear, which comes from ignorance, he develops a controlling image
of himself and a sense that if it is to be maintained, he must in general be
controlled by something outside himself. Therefore, he spends his time neither in
true contact with himself nor with his environment, but mostly in an intermedi
ate zone (which Perls calls maya) where he predicts the future and protects
himself from the true data, which would lead him to real contact and thus real,
responsible action for his feelings and needs. In short, he lets his mind take over
the business of living. His mind is the place where he can analyze, sort out, find
the proper generalized concepts to keep his awareness and his behavior going
along the track of greatest safety, he thinks.
There is a big area of fantasy activity that takes up so much of our excitement, of our
energy, of our life force, that there is very little energy left to be in touch with reality, and
very often if we work and we empty out this middle zone of fantasy, this maya, then there
is the experience of satori, of waking up. Suddenly the world is there.**
It would appear, then, that according to Gestalt, the evil that drags us down is
basically our own fear and cowardice, refusal to let go of our controlling ideas of
life and ourselves and take risks in living, unwillingness to take responsibility for
what we truly feel and are. Our ego, our vanity, Perls sees as constructs produced
by this basic fear.
An apparent difference between Gestalt and the Christian view on this matter
of the source of trouble is that Gestalt sees the beginning of the answer to
inauthenticity in "coming to your senses," in allowing your senses to make you
aware of what is really happening to you. Senses are the data of awareness, and:
Awareness per se?by and of itself can be curative because with full awareness you become
aware of this organismic self-regulation?you can let the organism take over without
interfering . . . and the contrast to this is the whole pathology of self-manipulation,
environmental control, etc.36
On the surface, the Christian view is much more suspicious of sensory data as
illusory, but I think for the same reason that Perls is wary of the workings of the
mind: fear of letting one aspect of experience control us instead of achieving
honest total awareness. The Christian and the Gestalt views see the dangers of
illusion in different places, but they share an understanding of the harm that can
come from using something to avoid the whole truth.
The ethic of taking final responsibility for yourself is summed up in Perls's
now famous words:
Take responsibility for yourself and shed it for anybody else. The world is not there for
your expectation, nor do you have to live for the expectation of the world. We touch each
other by honestly being what we are, not by intentionally making contact.37
Although everything past the first sentence of the above quotation would be
compatible with the Christian view, the first sentence does indicate a real point
of difference. While the Christian view also would maintain that the secret of
truth begins in being responsible for yourself, it would not end there by any
means. What about loving your neighbor? The question is: "Is taking responsibil
ity for someone else really loving him?" Both Christianity and Gestalt would say
no, that the desired end is to help people to be responsible for themselves, that
sometimes loving involves taking a stand against what another is doing. But
Gestalt would say if loving "happens" while you are being responsible for
yourself, good and wonderful, but you cannot make it happen. Christianity, on
the other hand, would say that we must enable ourselves to have a loving attitude
toward others regardless of how they personally affect us. We must have a value
for their personhood that is not dependent on what we do or do not get from them.
The ultimate result of Gestalt therapy may be that a person will be capable of
just such an attitude toward others (once having dealt with his own conflicts,
fears, needs, and distortions) but there is no implicit ethic indicating that this is
where we should arrive.
Like Sorokin and Boisen, Perls, too, feels that the greatest single obstacle to
being reborn is unwillingness to suffer the pain of confusion and difficulty
involved in the change process. Perls has based most of his theory on this
observation. His most basic contention is that without experiencing frustration,
we do not grow. People must be pushed toward what they avoid, since it is
precisely by this means that they will develop the awareness that will allow them
to experience their own support and become their authentic, mature selves.
One of Nicoll's points about rebirth in the Christian sense was the experience
of "the drawing of the lower by a series of transformations to the higher." This
was valid for the Late-Catastrophics who, once they had come to real identifica
tion with the Supraconscious, still had to be transformed (in a long or short
period) by a series of experiences in which they eventually totally lost their
previous egocentric way of looking at the world and became capable of a unity of
being in which they could generate love and kindness in all their actions toward
others. The "lower" was their initial state of dissatisfaction in which their egos,
values, and group affiliations were not unified, they manifested erratic behavior,
and often felt they were the victims of their instinctual drives or their ego
satisfactions.
Boisen felt certain that what his acute-onset patients were experiencing was an
urgent need to reach a more comprehensive or higher level of integration?not to
be victimized by their instinctual drives any longer, to rise to a sense of their
unattained possibilities: in short, to be transformed to the "something higher in
themselves." They could not attain this level completely, but Boisen's hypothesis
about what they were in fact attempting definitely assumes the idea of a
transformation from lower to higher.
It is on this point that the Gestalt understanding of what it is to be reborn
really differs from the Christian-Spiritual understanding. In the Gestalt under
standing, a person must undergo a series of transformations to be sure, but they
are along a continuum of incompleteness-completeness. One becomes more
integrated, more completely his authentic self by re-experiencing disowned
parts of himself, but there is no question of the values "lower" or "higher" being
placed on any of them or on anything. All is equal. The self is just more or less
integrated. Much of therapy actually may have to do with re-experiencing what
one may have originally labelled as "lower" and, therefore, rejected as unaccept
able to awareness. Perls would recoil at a "lower-higher" concept of value, which
he would see as an underlying cause of so much inauthentic behavior and
blanking of awareness.
Claudio Naranjo, another Gestalt therapist, has put it this way: "Psychother
apy stresses the balance of right and left; mysticism the harmony of above and
below."38 The significant difference between the Christian-Spiritual understand

ing of rebirth and the Gestalt sense then lies here, in the idea of the ultimate
transformation to be expected. According to the Christian-Spiritual understand
ing, ultimately a person should be lifted into something larger and higher than
himself, thus changing the basis for his understanding and action. Those who
hold the Gestalt view believe in the healing of the person within himself, in
restoring his authenticity. This difference is really what is responsible for the
difference in the ethic of each. Obviously if the ultimate goal is to be healed
within yourself, then being responsible for yourself only follows. However, if the
goal is transformation to a higher level of yourself, then being responsible
somehow for others and/or other forms of life is going to become the ethic.
The question now arises "of whether these two experiences?that of healing
and that of mystical union (transformation)?are different in the sense of
belonging to separate domains of experience or are just different stages in a
single-change process."39
Naranjo has given this matter a great deal of attention and has done some work
on it with patients. Although he says the answer is not completely certain yet, his
own view is that healing probably must precede mystical awareness and that
they are probably different stages in a single-change process:
Just as in Dante's journey, only after reaching the fullness of the ordinary human
condition can he (man) soar above the earth, so most spiritual traditions recognize the
need for a via purgativa before the via unitiva, the need for a man to realize his true nature
as a human being before he can aspire to realize his divine nature, for him to establish
order and harmony in his life before his soul can become receptive to the supernatural.40
An experiment by Stanislaus Grof in Czechoslovakia provides some evidence

along these lines. Grof administered LSD-25 to three groups of people in therapy
sessions over a long period (60 to 90 weekly sessions). There was a psychotic
group, a neurotic group, and a so-called normal group. He was trying to see what
responses he would get in the different groups when therapy was carried "beyond
the moment when the change-process satisfied the ordinary standards of mental
health."41 Two conclusions bear on the question about the order of healing and
transformation. One is that the normal group responded much faster to
treatment than did either of the others (and the neurotics did faster than the
psychotics); the other is that the nature of their experiences became increasingly
mystical so that Grof, who was a Freudian analyst, had to change his language to
adapt to the changes, and in their final stage of treatment "his patients entered a
domain of experience which only the language and symbolism of mystical
traditions could express."42
But here is the rub: even if healing and transformation are in fact different
stages in a single-change process, Naranjo has also keenly observed in his patients
under drug experiments that these two stages are not clear cut in practical reality.
For "ecstatic and visionary experiences can take place before the human personal
ity is ready to live up to or even to understand their content."43
For this paper, the question is: If healing and transformation are indeed
different stages (in that order), but practically speaking they are not clear cut in
actual experience, how do we allow for the truth of the two in conjunction with
one another in actual therapy situations (remembering that Gestalt therapy is
concerned only with the integration of the person within himself)? Does the
therapist simply discourage anything seeming mystical as irrelevant, or can he
somehow allow for its validity (recognizing its possibly even greater significance
in the future) without losing his sense for his own primary purpose?
Naranjo did much experimenting with synthetic drugs on some of his patients
for some time. It was voluntary on the part of the patients. He observed the
properties of each drug as well as the responses of patients to it. Certain drugs
induced visionary experiences. Naranjo concluded that mystical insights
received by persons under these conditions have both positive and negative
potential. The positive value he described thus:
An artificially induced peak may act as a momentary release from the prison of ordinary
personality and its built in conflicts . . . such an experience will contribute to his
permanent liberations by reinforcing his incentive, shattering his idealizations of prison
life, giving him valuable orientation and information from outside sources as to what to do
to gain his freedom.44
According to Naranjo, if the therapist chooses, he may go along with this

awareness and temporarily bypass the blocks in order to develop the sane and
strong aspects of the individual. If he does this, he must realize that he is not
essentially changing the situation "on earth," i.e., he is not yet dealing with the
patient's ability to deal differently with his life, but he is strengthening the larger
perspective.45
The negative aspect of the mystical experience received under therapeutic
conditions is that the person can imagine he has greater powers than he in fact
has yet.
Most religions give a warning about this?they stress the need for "personal development"
without which the way of mysticism becomes that of "magic": a quest of the supernatural
in the service of the ego rather than one for a supernatural order to which the ego may
become subservient, the living understanding of a greater whole in which the individual
may find his true purpose.46
So the therapist may choose to bypass the mystical experience in order to push
the patient into facing his blocks and "plunging into distressful feelings." If he
does so, he will be dealing with "earthly difficulties, with only slight chances of
being able to rise above them, but with more chances of effecting change."47
It seems to me that the important thing here is Naranjo's understanding of
both the value and the danger in visionary experiences coming out of their
probable significant order (after the patient has been healed). Further, I think
that this understanding enables the therapist to see what going with them or
resisting them can achieve in actual therapy situations.
The fact that Naranjo was working with drug-induced states does not seem to
me to invalidate his understanding of the meaning of these states, however they
may occur. He himself is aware that a question can be raised about the difference
between drug-induced and non-drug-induced visionary experiences. They are
both valid as far as he is concerned, though he indicates that if these states have
to be induced, the person is simply less ready to receive them and they will
probably not have as profound or far-reaching effects as those that are received
uninduced.
Now I would like to reconsider Boisen in the light of Naranjo's understanding.
Coming from a much earlier time and dealing with hospitalized patients, Boisen
shares with Naranjo a sense of the significance of what he calls "religious
content" in mental breakdown states?at least those characterized by acute
insight. (We should not become distracted by the difference in terminology. Boi
sen says "religious content" and Naranjo says "mystical insights," but their
description of these states is extremely close, whatever they term it. The states
they both speak of are characterized by cosmic awareness, sense of the
mysterious, sense of oneness, sense of responsibility?though not necessarily all
at once). What disappointed Boisen was the apparent failure of the 15 patients
who recovered to keep a larger perspective and to be healed by it. His explanation
for this failure was that the patients lacked sufficient humility in their
conception of the Divine. Having some conception of the Divine helped them to
recover, but not having a sufficient regard in their conception of the Divine kept
them from being transformed, he thought.
Naranjo corroborates Boisen by revealing that this is indeed the danger in
visionary states in the patient whose self (the Gestalt completeness-incomplete
ness sense of self) has not been healed first. It suggests that Boisen's patients may
simply not have received sufficient therapy to enable them to entertain a larger
conception of the Divine.
Even though I am specifically concerned here with the danger of not allowing
for an understanding of the meaning and value of mystic (Christian, Spiritual)
experiences in therapy, I find it also extremely instructive to ponder the
implications of the opposite condition, not allowing for sufficient healing of the
self in order to receive mystical awareness without mishandling it. The danger
goes both ways.
Following Naranjo, we can wonder also how the Late-Catastrophics were able
to avoid the danger of bringing the Divine down to their own level and go on to be
truly reborn. The Late-Catastrophics did not have the benefit of anything
structural to help integrate themselves. They were never so disturbed as to be
hospitalized, of course, but they could be said to be sufficiently disturbed so that
seeking therapy could have been an option at such a time of breakdown of their
lives. What allowed them to bypass therapy and yet not bring the Divine down to
their own level in the process of change?
First, for many of them, because of the time and place in which they lived,
therapy was not available. Then we must remember that, as Sorokin points out,
these people were a minority of the great altruists. What they underwent was so
difficult that few could achieve it. So we are dealing with a small group of
exceptional people. Nevertheless, the question remains.
The key factor for their rebirth, according to Sorokin, was their identification
with the Supraconscious. It is one thing to have "religious content" or "mystical
insights"; it is another to identify one's true self with what is given in such an
experience. The first is simply an experience or set of experiences. The other
seems to be a commitment to the reality revealed. Sorokin does not suggest that
the change was easy, but rather that the identification was the crucial factor in
the change becoming possible and complete. All we can conclude is that there
seems to have been a commitment or surrendering to the Divine power so
complete that these people were carried past the danger of bringing it down to
their own level. Sorokin points out that they went through a sensitive period
when they could have been thrown either way, and that many of them were able
to complete their integration of themselves only on the basis of their ultimate
faith in the Supraconscious after long periods of solitude or semisolitude in which
they were removed from the temptations of the world for a time.
Even if the Late-Catastrophics had had the option of therapy, Sorokin feels
that psychoanalysis would definitely not have been a constructive option. He
believes that "the supreme value must be positive and contain sublime love.
Ideologies and therapies which try to identify man mainly with id, body, sex, etc.,
are therefore dangerous and harmful and rarely, if ever, are altruistic or creative
results produced."48 People who so identify end up trying to use the world "as a
mere means for their ego," he says.49
Sorokin's criticism leads to the concern of this paper: We have seen the value of
the identification with the Supraconscious for the Late-Catastrophics. We have
seen the need for successful identification of these people with certain types of
hospitalized patients under Boisen's care. We can draw the conclusion from both
men's work that when conditions of stress within people interfere with their
feeling integrated, a precipitant of some kind can bring that divisiveness into the
open and make the need for transformation urgent. The need for transformation
may be experienced in different ways, but one manifestation for some people is
the receiving of mystical experiences or experiences of religious content. The
problem appears to be their integration within themselves, yet the content of
these insights appears to be attempting to draw them into a transformation
beyond themselves or above themselves into a new relation with life, into rebirth
of the spiritual type. What transformation they are actually able to make, if they
are fortunate enough to make any, will depend on the strength of their ability to
face the confusion and difficulty and also on the kind of guidance available for
the transformation.
We also know that psychotherapists in general and Gestalt therapists in
particular take it to be within their province to effect the healing of the individual
within himself, and that religionists in general consider it within their province to
bring this transformation into a new relation with life. But even though Naranjo
may be right that healing must come before enlightenment, we know that
unfortunately the two kinds of experience in some people under great stress are
interwoven. So the question comes down to this: If a person experiencing the
urgent need for unity and integration in this interconnected way takes the option
of going into therapy, which is not only available today but acceptable in a
worldly sense, will he be obstructed from also gaining enlightenment (or
transformation to a higher level)? Will he adjust his idea of transformation to
only integration of himself? This is not to question the absolute need for healing
the self from its divisiveness, but to ask whether it must be done at the cost of
another kind of growth. We already know Sorokin's position. He feels that
therapy will reduce. But he was speaking of psychiatry.
Obviously not everyone who goes into therapy will experience mystical states. I
am concerned with those who do. I am concerned with those who are receiving or
undergoing experiences that are aimed at bringing them to a transformation of
themselves to another level of being, to rebirth in the spiritual sense. So I pose the
question: Does Gestalt therapy's orientation toward integration within the
individual in any way theoretically hinder or obstruct the possibility for any
given individual to experience the validity of transcendence as a desirable end
beyond therapy itself? Not if the therapist is Naranjo. But how typical is
Naranjo? We need to look at Gestalt again.
On the surface of much discussion of Gestalt there is often actual hostility
toward religion or toward some conception of God. It would be constructive, I
think, to take a closer look at a representative passage or two to see what they
actually involve. Here are two from Irving and Miriam Polster 's book Gestalt
Therapy Integrated: Contours of Theory and Practice:
Each person is the center of gravity in his universe. The fact that, yes, Virginia, there is a
real world out there, does not diminish one's powers to sense, interpret, and manipulate
that world so that its ultimate nature is determined by one's own experience. Science not
withstanding, the universe then becomes his own creation just as we have heretofore fanta
sied that it was God's creation. This fantasy was mustered out of our own humility, giving
away our power, or, more cynically, copping out on our own responsibility for the troubles
we have created. Perhaps we don't want to believe that we ourselves could cause such self
pain and explain it by the intervention of mysterious god-forces.50
They also write
... trading faith in God for faith in ourselves seems like a fair trade. No guarantees but then
where has God been lately either?51
There are two points in these passages that represent attitudes often found in
Gestalt discussion, attitudes that could be a hindrance or obstruction to the
person struggling toward transcendence.
The first is the idea that God or religion is a cop-out for failing to be responsible
for ourselves. Since the emphasis in Gestalt is on taking responsibility for oneself,
anywhere else we are inclined to look for strength is suspect. However, this idea of
religion as the means of avoiding responsibility for self is not at all consistent
with the findings of Sorokin, Boisen, or Naranjo. It was precisely the mystical
experiences received in distress by Boisen's acute patients and Naranjo's
drugged clients (we cannot compare Sorokin's Late-Catastrophics here precisely,

because Sorokin was looking at behavior rather than experience?experience is
implied more than discussed in detail) that allowed and encouraged them to face
themselves. ("Religious concern and religious consciousness tend to appear
whenever men are facing the issue of life and are seeking to become better."52) It
seems that the view of religion as a cop-out is a shallow understanding. It might
characterize some religion, but it is directly contrary to the evidence I have
presented in this paper about people in distress who are concerned with
changing. This opinion about religion could be an obstruction to the person
attempting transformation. It possibly could, if it were expressed explicitly
enough, cause a person to shut off a source of help.
The second attitude represented in the passages from the Polsters is illustrated
particularly in the first three sentences of the passage quoted above. To
determine the ultimate nature of the world by one's own experience is, I am
afraid, a pretty clear-cut example of Sorokin's worst fear of using the world "as a
mere means for their own ego."
It must be obvious that such a sense for what reality ultimately is is essentially
hostile to any religious view of the ultimate nature of reality and could certainly
be an obstruction to a person attempting transformation in enlightenment.
It might seem as if the whole Gestalt concept of the desirability of self-regula
tion would run counter to the effort toward transcendence, but I don't think so.
The effort to get back to self-regulation is the effort to get away from
manipulation of self and others. No love of the Supraconscious based on control
or avoidance of what one is will lead to real transcendence anyway. Actually this
dying to the self-image on which our control is set up is one of the factors in
Gestalt that probably encourages the very possibility of living in a new relation.
As we have already seen, it is one of the points that Gestalt therapy and the
Christian-Spiritual concept of rebirth have in common. However, there is a short
dialogue between Perls and a student on this subject that illustrates another
danger:
Question: When the organism can take care of itself once the integration is complete and
self-regulation is available for the total organism, then control no longer becomes a factor?
Perls: That's right and then the essence of control is that you begin to control the means
whereby to get satisfaction.53
Satisfaction is a disturbing word, from a mystical-spiritual standpoint. It

suggests a naturalistic conception of man. It suggests that Perls may "identify
man mainly with . . . body ..." or bodily needs. This could definitely be an
obstruction to the man trying to achieve transformation in transcendence.
However, the word may be a practical necessity. It seems that one could only say
this was a bias in Perls. It is never clear cut that that is his orientation. It appears
in various examples, but not as an explicit statement. Perls was interested in
doing away with concepts and concentrating on awareness, and, therefore, his
final statement about needs is quite open-ended:
Human beings have thousands of... needs on the purely physiological level. And on the
social levels there are other thousands of needs. The more intensely they are felt to be es
sential to continued life, the more closely we identify ourselves with them, the more in
tensely we will direct our activities toward satisfying them.
Formulating this principle in terms of Gestalt Psychology, we can say that the dominant
need of the organism at any time becomes the foreground figure, the other needs recede at
least temporarily into the background. The foreground is that need which presses most
sharply for satisfaction, whether that need is, as in our example, the need to preserve life it
self, or whether it is related to less physically vital areas?whether it is physiological or psy
chological.54
These statements should steer us back to the point that the essential process of
Gestalt is neutral; establishing and maintaining an awareness continuum and
whatever comes up as foreground for any given individual in that process will be
the matter that he and his therapist address themselves to. Gestalt is not a
normative therapy. It is a therapy determined by the individual's own awareness.
Therefore, regardless of the particular bias of the therapist, it is not, as a
therapeutic method, structured by a definition of man's essence. It is an
existential therapy.
I think, however, it would be a fair generalization to say that most
psychologists writing about Gestalt see the goal of wholeness or authenticity not
just as their specific area of concern but as man's ultimate goal, as Perls himself
feels. Naranjo seems one of the very few exceptions in his ability to see different
senses of rebirth in connection. But it is interesting that he claims that
"psychology has moved more and more in the direction of seeing an aim beyond
that of healing."55
Even though the process of gestalt is open-ended and therefore should not be a
hindrance to the person seeking transformation in transcendence, the possible
obstructions and difficulties lie in the potential biases of some therapists. To
summarize, these biases can be: 1) the conception of authenticity as the only true
goal of man; 2) seeing the desire for transcendence as a cop-out to avoid
responsibility; 3) reducing the world to one's ego; 4) identifying needs only with
body.
However, in my opinion there are also some important ways in which Gestalt
therapy can be a definite encouragement to the person whose ultimate goal may
be spiritual enlightenment. Naranjo has already spoken of the largest sense in
which therapy can be necessary. He has suggested that without being healed one
is likely to misuse whatever deeper spiritual insights one receives, or at best be
unable to realize them fully within oneself. But I would like to end this paper
with a consideration of some specific ways in which aspects of Gestalt can either
encourage or reinforce a spiritual direction in a person.
1) The act of going into therapy. The basic fact of going into therapy can open
one up to a re-examination of oneself in relation to life itself, to growth of any
kind. Naranjo says there is "an intense urge for self transformation in the thera
The Lost Self Changes: Gestalt and Christian Concepts of Rebirth 2?l
peutic process which alone permits a person to open up to both 'the bes
'worst' in himself."56 And Boisen has shown us that trouble and extreme per
distress can be the very times in one's life when a religious orientation appea
help us face ourselves. Not everyone will be so opened, undoubtedly, but
tential is there in the very act of commitment to change, in going to therapy
2) The experience of nothingness. I have already pointed out that this i
experience in both the Christian and Gestalt concepts of rebirth. To die t
"self-image" in Gestalt can certainly open you to death of your self-love
Christian sense. It is the same necessary step whether it leads only to authen
or also to "transformation from lower to higher." It is a profound experience
3) Being able to take risks. This is how Polster speaks of the experien
learning to take risks:
Disaster does not come so easily, though, for those people who are willing to move th
the transition from what looks like the catastrophic dissolution of the familiar into
choate. One's future welfare often travels in disguise and its blessings are frequently
nized only after extensive turmoil.... What is hard to appreciate, when terror s
catastrophic gap, is that this blankness can be a fertile void. The fertile void is the e
tial metaphor for giving up the familiar supports of the present and trusting the m
tum of life to produce new opportunities and vistas.57
Lines like "one's future welfare often travels in disguise and its blessin
frequently recognized after extensive turmoil" and "trusting the momen
life to produce new opportunities and vistas" are clear expressions
necessity for faith. The experience of learning to trust and have faith is esse
to spiritual growth, too, and the connection between learning to risk ones
faith in the inherent goodness of that effort is parallel in Christian rebirth
The point in both is not to act for a reward (or for support), but out of the tr
the feelings, whatever the consequences.
4) Ascent by descent. A person may discover through the awareness c
uum process that he has avoided becoming aware of certain feelings (no
these feelings haven't had a part in his life, but that he has blocked aware
them). He discovers that he has blocked them because he feels he can't co
them. (Take anger, for instance. He may feel that he cannot express ange
for fear of going into uncontrollable rage.) However, if he will truly allow h
to become aware of the previously blocked feeling and enter into it, descend
it, become it, he can paradoxically find that he has a choice about it, i.e., tha
longer controls him, that he can choose and thus rise above it.58
Just as knowledge of the external world gives him power, self-knowledge, in the for
direct experience of his processes, gives him control. And so he identifies with his b
enters into his processes, and at the same time, rises above himself, feels free from hi
esses, detached as the master is from the horse. What seems to be a way of descent i
body and his senses ends up by being a way of ascent to the spiritual domain of cons
ness and freedom.59
And the final conclusion, the most effective way of rising above the senses and emot
inseparable from the descent into direct contact with the immediacy of feeling.60
It seems to me that being willing to give oneself over to a negative feeling might
be one of the most difficult risks for someone groping toward transformation in
transcendence. As Naranjo explains elsewhere, there are two basic approaches in
the domain of difficult feelings:
moving against the tendencies of the moment?where the aim is to uproot negative feelings
by denying them in order to get to the most real and basic feelings of sacredness and love
moving with the tendencies of the moment in all their imperfections in order to have a ca
tharsis to get rid of psychological debris (the ascent by descent way).61
Naranjo says they are both aims to achieve the same ends, just different means.
But for many people of spiritual inclination, the cathartic method might not
seem "right." For one reason, there might be fear of taking a personal risk. Love
of love and regard for the sacredness of life could be other real considerations.
Therapists with the biases I spoke of previously are probably not going to be
sensitive to the fear of contributing to the negative or evil in the world; they
would not understand such a fear for what it is. But if a prospective patient or a
patient undergoing therapy could understand how ascent by descent works,
maybe this cathartic way would not seem such a threat to one who needs to
transcend.
5) Gratitude for life itself. This means joyousness or blessedness or grace
experienced when one is capable of self-support.
Perls' contention that maturation is in the development of self-support instead of external

support refers not only to a freedom from interpersonal dependencies, but to a psycho
logical process not unlike Buddhistic "extinction of desires"... the experience of desire
lessness does not imply the cessation of life functions, but, rather, a joy in the given with no
craving for what is not. The essence of such experience lies not in a cessation of impulses
but in a different stance of the individual's consciousness toward such impulses.62
6) The sense of wonder in attending to experience itself. This is closely related

to No. 5. Perhaps it is the opposite side of the same coin. In an article in Gestalt
Therapy Now, Naranjo points out a similarity between Gestalt awareness
continuum and certain ascetic practices:
The practice of attention to the stream of life relates to asceticism in that it not only entails
a voluntary suspension of ego-gratification, but also presents the person with the difficulty
of functioning in a way that runs counter to habit. Since the only action allowed the exer
cise is that of communicating the contents of awareness, this precludes the operation of
"character" in Perls's sense of the word and even doing as such. The practice of the Now is
one of ego-loss, as emphasized by Buddha_63
That present-centeredness is essentially connected with transcendence would

also be attested by:
The whole practice of meditation is essentially based upon the situation of this present
moment, here and now, and means working with this situation, this present state of mind.
Any meditation practice concerned with transcending ego is focused in the present
moment.64
The experience of attending to Now, since we try not to "lay anything on it" but
simply attend to it, can lead us not only to discovering what we feel, but also to a
simple but powerful sense of wonder about experience per se. It can lead to a
sense of the sacredness of what is.
... we may end by reasserting that the end state sought by the various traditions, schools,
or systems under discussion is one that is characterized by the experience of openness to
the reality of every moment, freedom from mechanical ties to the past, and surrender to the
laws of man's being, one of living in the body and yet in control of the body, in the world
and yet in control of circumstances by means of the power of both awareness and independ
ence. It is also an experience of self-acceptance, where "self ' does not stand for a precon
ceived notion or image but is the experiential self-reality moment after moment. Above all,
it is an experience of experience. For this is what consciousness means, what openness
means, what surrendering leads into, what remains after the veils of conditioned percep
tion are raised, and what the aim of acceptance is.65
References
1. Buber, Martin, "Guilt and Guilt Feelings," Psychiatry, 1957, 20 (2), 129.
2. Naranjo, C, The Healing Journey: New Approaches to Consciousness. New York, Pantheon,
1973, pp. 17-18.
3. Nicoll, M? The New Man: An Interpretation of Some Parables and Miracles of Christ. London,
Stuart and Watkins, 1967.
4. Ibid., p. 3.
5. Ibid., p. 5.
6. Ibid., p. 25.
7. Sorokin, P., The Ways and Power of Love. Chicago, Henry Regnery Co., 1967.
8. Ibid., p. 147.
9. Ibid., pp. 206-207.
10. Ibid., p. 213.
11. Ibid., pp. 211-213.
12. Ibid., p. 208.
13. Ibid., p. 146.
14. Ibid., p. 265.
15. Ibid., p. 231.
16. Boisen, A., The Exploration of the Inner World: A Study of Mental Disorder and Religious
Experience. Philadelphia, Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1936.
17. Ibid., pp. 28-30.
18. Ibid., p. 53.
19. Ibid., pp. 30-34,
20. Ibid., p. 149.
21. Ibid., p. 160.
22. Ibid., pp. 58-82.
23. Ibid., p. 81.
24. Ibid., p. 80.
25. Ibid., p. 147.
26. Ibid., p. 69.
27. Ibid., p. 18.
28. Ibid., p. 200.
29. Perls, F., Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Moab, Utah, Real People's Press, 1969, v,
30. Ibid., p. 11.
31. Ibid., p. 11.
32. Ibid., pp. 55-57.

33. Ibid., pp. 51-52.
34. Ibid., p. 28.
35. Ibid., p. 50.
36. Ibid., p. 17.
37. Ibid., p. 65.
38. Naranjo, The One Quest. New York, Ballantine, 1972, p. 20.
39. Ibid., p. 134.
40. -, The Healing Journey, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
41. -, The One Quest, op. cit., p. 137.
42. Ibid., p. 138.
43. -, The Healing Journey, op. cit., p. 19.
44. Ibid., p. 20.
45. -, The One Quest, op. cit., p. 23.
46. -, 77ie Healing Journey, op. cit., p. 18.
47. Ibid., p. 23.
48. Sorokin, op. cit., p. 177.
49. Ibid., p. 177.
50. Polster, I. and M., Gestalt Therapy Integrated: Contours of Theory and Practice. New York,
Vintage Books, 1974, p. 38.
51. Ibid., p. 101.
52. Boisen, op. cit., p. 82.
53. Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, op. cit., p. 23.
54. -, The Gestalt Approach and Eyewitness to Therapy. Ben Lomond, California, Science and
Behavior Books, 1973, p. 7.
55. Naranjo, The One Quest, op. cit., p. 33.
56. Ibid., p. 202.
57. Polster, op. cit., pp. 120-121.
58. Naranjo, The One Quest, op. cit., pp. 177-181.
59. Ibid., p. 178.
60. Ibid., p. 181.
61. Ibid., p. 73.
62. Ibid., pp. 194-195.
63. -, "Present-Centeredness: Technique, Prescription, and Ideal." In Fagan, J., and Shep
herd, I. L., eds., Gestalt Therapy Now. Palo Alto, California, Science and Behavior Books, 1970,
p. 61.
64. Trungpa, C, Cutting through Spiritual Materialism. Berkeley, California, Shambala Publica
tions, 1973, p. 155.
65. Naranjo, The One Quest, op. cit., p. 225.
Useful Material Not Quoted
Berdayev, N., The Destiny of Man. New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1960.
Brown, G., "The Farther Reaches of Gestalt Therapy: A Conversation with George Brown,'* Synthesis,
1974, 1 (1), 25-41.
Perls, F., et al., Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York, Dell
Publishing Co., 1951.
Salzman, L., "Types of Religious Conversion," Pastoral Psychology, 1966 (Sept.), 8-20.
Walker, J. L., Body and Soul: Gestalt Therapy and Religious Experience. Nashville, Tennessee,
Abingdon Press, 1971

The Lost Self Changes - Gestalt and Christian Concepts of Rebirths

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The Lost Self Changes: Gestalt and Christian Concepts of Rebirth

Author(s): Barrie Ryan

The Lost Self Changes: Gestalt and

I went through a "mental breakdown," a personal collapse, a great period of

Since he is going to resist, and since the change required is so radical, if it is to

Until a man's understanding of what good is changes, he cannot really be a new

Anton Boisen, who himself could be classified as a Late-Catastrophic altruist,

level?or, to put it another way, to help him reach an ultimate loyalty in

What Boisen is referring to could be spoken of in Sorokin's terms as failure to find

Whose God are you looking for? asked the priest.

below."38 The significant difference between the Christian-Spiritual understand

An experiment by Stanislaus Grof in Czechoslovakia provides some evidence

According to Naranjo, if the therapist chooses, he may go along with this

They also write

drugged clients (we cannot compare Sorokin's Late-Catastrophics here precisely,

Satisfaction is a disturbing word, from a mystical-spiritual standpoint. It

final statement about needs is quite open-ended:

Perls' contention that maturation is in the development of self-support instead of external

6) The sense of wonder in attending to experience itself. This is closely related

That present-centeredness is essentially connected with transcendence would

32. Ibid., pp. 55-57.

Useful Material Not Quoted

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