Buchholz2020

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Buchholz2020
BibType ARTICLE
Key Buchholz2020
Author(s) Michael B. Buchholz
Title Seeing the Situational Gestalt - Movement in Therapeutic Spaces
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Psychotherapy
Publisher
Year 2020
Language English
City
Month
Journal Gestalt Theory
Volume 42
Number 2
Pages 101–132
URL Link
DOI 10.2478/gth-2020-0011
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract


Notes

This paper starts with a short review of recent developments in psychotherapy process research and analyzes that a medical, or better, technical approach in process research – using words such as ‘intervention’, ‘effect’ and ‘outcome’ – is gradually acknowledged as only one side of psychotherapy; the other, more human or ‘humanistic’ side, is ‘conversation’, described by prominent authors as ‘low technology’. Conversation analysis cannot study psychotherapy as a whole. Sessions are subdivided into ‘situations’. What are situations? I make a proposal to answer this question by three components: open up, select and control options. Then, 11 transcribed extracts from psychoanalytical therapy sessions are used to describe three types of situations and the special kind of requirements they demand from a therapist. Obviously, such situations appear during a session, they can be handled if therapists are sensitized for certain difficulties to arise. Shift-of-situation and double meaning are new observations in this approach to define the situational gestalt and train ‘seeing’ it.