Institut de Développement du Thérapeute

The Secret Longing

2021-03-01T12:17:01Z

A Relational Compass in a Field Perspective

Béja, V. & Belasco, F. (2020).

The Secret Longing : A Relational Compass in a Field Perspective. Gestalt Review , Vol 26, N°1, 2022, 34-49 - The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA https://doi.org/10.5325/gestaltreview.26.1.0034

From the perspective of relational and field Gestalt therapy, the authors shed light on the phenomenology of clinical intervention by showing that the therapist's main activity consists in adjusting his or her own resonance to the movement towards contact - to the impulse - which informs the therapeutic encounter itself. The therapist “positions” himself in order to “hear” better.
And it is this change in the therapist that leads towards change in the patient.

A clinical example illustrates the different moments in this process. By designating the intentionality at work in the encounter as a “Secret Longing”, the authors introduce a new concept, offering practitioners a sensitive compass that allows them to orientate themselves and to persevere in their effort to adjust to the patient and maintain their aim to reach him or her.

=> English article available on request

Introduction (Excerpt)

-Concerned about the effectiveness of the therapies we conduct, we wanted to examine how our desire for change and our attitude of listening could be articulated both theoretically and practically.
Because yes, gestalt psychotherapy does have a goal: to work in such a way that the patient's view of the world is changed, and so that their relationship with the environment evolves to make their experience less painful.
And yet, inspired as it is by the phenomenological attitude of observing, listening and welcoming, the practice of Gestalt therapy does not aim for change directly. It teaches us to get through times of meaninglessness, or uncertain or uncomfortable situations.
The acceptance of what is happening, the waiting patiently for a figure to emerge, the concern not to impose premature differentiation - these are the hallmarks of a posture that respects the experience of the other. But such a disposition towards listening, welcoming and waiting can also paralyse the therapist if he becomes merged with it, and may end up engaging the relational dynamics of the therapeutic dyad in an endless loop.
It is towards the formulation and the exploration of this place, where change and an attitude of phenomenological listening must be combined, that we wish to contribute through this article. Can this articulation be coherent with Gestalt therapy? We think so, and put forward the concept of a Secret Longing that we use as a compass that can orientate us in the zones of uncertainty and wandering that we inevitably have to go through in any therapy.

TO GET THE PAPER
https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/gestalt-review/article/26/1/34/304865/The-Secret-Longing-A-Relational-Compass-in-a-Field?searchresult=1

Ways and means of the phenomenological attitude in a field perspective

2021-03-01T10:30:25Z

Vincent BEJA

Tél: +336 83 45 75 84

This article has been first published in the British Gestalt Journal Vol 29, n°2, 33-39 -

In this paper the author tries to give a sense of how and why the phenomenological attitude, when applied in a field perspective, is useful and operates in and on the therapeutic dyad, thus having an impact on the client's lived world.

My recognition goes to Florence Belasco for her support, and with whom I have maintained a long and mutual companionship on these themes of clinical research and relational psychotherapy for almost ten years.

He starts by explaining the meaning of the phenomenological attitude in a therapeutical setting which he summarises as a deep listening and a genuine curiosity of the given of the situation. He then describes the therapist's experience in the first person when engaged in a phenomenological attitude and its polarity of listening and reflecting. This attitude helps the therapist to meet their client differently, thus changing the whole field and possibly having a significant impact on the client.

For this to happen, the author offers a pragmatic compass – the Secret Longing – which he has developed with Florence Belasco at their Institute and which speaks directly to the heart of the therapist. He details how it can be applied on a clinical level, supporting the therapist in working on their primary task towards the client when adopting a field perspective. For the therapist, when caught at some stage in a relational impasse with the client, this task consists in listening more and being able to perceive and welcome the Secret Longing which is operating in the relationship.

This is precisely what helps to change the ‘intersubjective matrix' from which the selves and worldviews of both client and therapist are constantly emerging.

Vincent Béja,
Past chair of the EAGT Research Committee, convening international conferences on Gestalt therapy research in Paris (2017) and Hamburg (2021), co-founder of the French Research Committee, former member of the AAGT Research Task Force.
Co-editor with Florence Belasco of the book La recherche en Gestalt-thérapie (2018), member of the editorial board of the Gestalt Therapy Book Series, and member of the reading committee of the Revue Gestalt for ten years.
He has written more than fourty articles on Gestalt therapy in various French and English- speaking journals and translated many others.
Co-founder of the IDeT (Institute for the Development of the Therapist) in Paris, France. He is currently a member of the SPR (Society for Psychotherapy Research) and the NYIGT (New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy).

This article was published in British Gestalt Journal 29.2.33-39 To read the full issue, please visit the British Gestalt Journal website.

=> full article on request to the author

Interview with Julianne Appel-Opper

2020-02-07T19:04:35Z

In preparation for Julianne Appel-Opper's coming to Paris for the Master Class and the extensive training to the Psychotherapy of the Relational Living Body she is offering at IDeT, Vincent Béja conducted an interview with her in February 2019.
We ask our readers that any reproduction, in whole or in part, of this text on their part, make explicit mention of the following reference :

Appel-Opper, J., Béja, V. (2019), Interview with Julianne Appel-Opper
https://www.idet.paris/interview-with-julianne-appel-opper

Interview

Vincent Beja: Dear Julianne, I have seen you working in Berlin almost 9 years ago. I still remember how I was touched and impressed by your little piece of work, there. In my view you are the very one I know working truly relational through/with the bodies (the client's and yours). That makes me curious about you, Julianne. Who are you and where do you come from?

Julianne Appel-Opper: Hi Vincent, thank you for remembering my work. Thanks that this touched you. I am a 59 year old woman living in Berlin, enjoying the city and my local neighbourhood. I grew up in a small village in Germany, studied Psychology, trained as psychotherapist, lived and worked in other countries for quite some time, 12 years. Integration has been my theme throughout my life. I love moving, walking and dancing.
During my first work in psychosomatic clinics, I got fascinated about how bodies speak and communicate beside words spoken. I saw patients whose only way to communicate feelings, conflicts, trauma was via their bodies, e.g. tensions in the back, neck, shoulders. Experiencing stress at work or in the family, the muscles who had been beaten up as a child would tense up as if expecting the same beating as this child. Transgenerational stories lived in some of my patient's bodies and traumatizing experiences were held in the body to which words cannot find an access.
Years later I worked in the U.K. in a language which was not my first language. At first, I could not understand every word a client said but I could hear what was communicated to me at a bodily level. The Do's and Don'ts, the nonverbal behaviour can be quite different. It is like two realities in the room with two bodies dancing with different rhythms and melodies. Every movement is really also cultural.

Vincent: And how did you decide to become a therapist and how have you been trained? Why Gestalttherapy?

Julianne: I studied Psychology at the University of Gießen, back then, in the 80s, a city with more psychoanalysts per inhabitant than New York. My fascination for psychoanalytic theories has been with me since then. Through meeting the wife of my husband's colleague, Ina Rösing, a trained gestalttherapist and a Professor of Cultural Studies, I came into contact with Gestalttherapy.
I recall that I was curious and so attended conferences held by Gestalt training institutes. At the end, I believe that I chose my training institute from the way the people danced at the conference parties: lively, expressive and relating. The German Fritz Perls Institute which at that time offered a training in Integrative Gestalt Psychotherapy gave me a solid theoretical foundation spanning from philosophy, developmental psychology, gestalttherapy, psychoanalysis, psychodrama, depth psychology. I felt enriched with the elementary orientations of gestalttherapy as existential, experiential, body-oriented, creative and dialogical and also by the lived therapeutic styles especially from Ute Wirbel and Dr. Hildegund Heinl.

Vincent: What drove you to work so intimately through the bodies, via the sub verbal ongoing communication?

Julianne: (Living) Bodies communicate so much of what has happened to them as rhythms and melodies of their movements, breathings, eyes and voices. The embodied stories are broadcasted and need a bodily-with to sense that there is another body and to carry on speaking. Bodies are scared and nervous about being exposed. Pointing to/focusing on a movement can so easily stop the movement and with this the communicating of a story. This motivated me to look for new ways of working with body-to-body-communication. I believe that it is in this area in which the client's fixed gestalten can be physically moved on.
Over the years, I have developed embodied interventions and experiments. First, I announce with words the intervention so that both bodies hear what might happen next. This also enables me to monitor how the client's body reacts to my intention. Instead of drawing attention to the client's body, I show my own bodily impulses and resonances within the embodied in between enabling the client's body to choose how much to take in from a secure distance. Working in small steps allows the two bodies to staying within the window of tolerance. In this process, a relational self-agency can develop further.
For example, if my client speaks about her mother and her relationship with her and her arms are hanging down as if both would not be alive. Let us assume that the arms play a musical variation of the relational theme that she felt alone in the company of the mother. Then, an embodied intervention would be that I announce wanting to move my arms, for example touching both elbows. Often then, the client wants to do the movement and thus defreezing the held arms and with this, to dilute the feelings held in the body. The process can be described as we are impressing each other in a new dialogical rhythms of arms.

Vincent: Having read some of your papers, I have the impression that the verbal expression of the meaning of the situation can happen at the beginning of your intervention or in the middle or at the end. But sometimes that may stay implicit. Could you say something about the verbalising of the story held in the body of the client?

Julianne: Yes, this is right, sometimes clients were able to speak the unspoken at the beginning when I expressed my intention and at other times, the words could come up after the intervention right away or later.
The embodied stories held in the body need to be acknowledged with words too, again and again. I see this as a process similar to the Gestalt Cycle, which therapist and client go through. From the mute embodied gestalten/stories - for example from the frozen movements of the arms of a 7-year old – both client and therapist explore the rhythms and melodies of what happened to the 7-year old and how both bodies can find ways to interbodily acknowledge this. At a bodily level, my arms tell his arms: “We see you”. Then, the next step is to reply as arms to these arms, thus moving the frozen arms. This also needs words, telling the two adults and the four arms (both therapist and client) what might happen next. And yes, telling the intention with words can already help to speak the unspoken.
The embodied stories contain another body and the bodily inbetween with this other, the movements done and held, the reactions and resonances. These embodied gestalten colour in what we expect from another body, how we can make use of the other body, how we contact. I see a living body as an orchestra with all these different tones, rhythms and melodies- from different times and with a range of gender. With violent stories, I can hear the Doer, the aggressor and the Done-to, the victim child.
In this way, both therapist and client move from first noticing, acknowledging, welcoming, replying to these embodied mute/voiceless unspoken stories being held in the body and waiting to be spoken about. This process is Fritz Perls' integration. I see integration as an ongoing, life-long process, becoming fully who we are.
The way we speak, what words we use and how we speak is crucial. With the example of the 7-year old, I can sense the pride of doing everything on his own. Words can open up an embodied story and words can also close a story. In this cycle of working with embodied stories, there is another important part in which both client and therapist say: ”Thank you arms for what you have done to protect me as a child and to keep me safe”. Creative adjustments need to be acknowledged so that the arms hear a “well done” instead of a “why couldn't I do something”. Beside any meaning of a situation, I strongly argue that the arms need to hear that this also made sense.

When I have worked with somebody at conference workshops, I found this quite tricky as the integration could not happen fully in this setting. Then, I had to trust that the colleague will take what happened in the workshop into her/his therapy sessions, and thus doing the next steps needed. This gives me the idea to describe the steps of integration further. Thanks for giving me this idea.

Vincent: Working like you do seems so touching and powerful. Is it difficult for a student to grasp the way you build your intervening?

Julianne: Over the years, I have learnt a lot how to teach my interventions. I have understood that it is less difficult to grasp these processes when students can become aware about when and how the implicit body-to-body-communication starts. This helps to see how this slowly step-by-step turns into embodied interventions.
Nowadays, before working with somebody, I point out the following: “Please hear that the work already starts as soon as I finish my question: “Who wants to sit with me for some minutes?”. Then and there, I hear the first rhythms and melodies of how everybody reacts to my question. These moments are very similar to the first seconds of a therapy session. The first looks, moves breathing in the presence of the other is so rich. The living body broadcasts all the stories held in the body. From the feedback given, I hear that people can follow my interventions and experiments. This is wonderful as then people see the processes unfolding and two living bodies communicating with each other and thus moving each other.

Vincent: And then could you give us a glimpse of how you teach it?

Julianne: My workshops offer a safe and respectful space for exercises, experiential process, live supervision, small group work together with theory input and discussions. I like us to have fun. When we play it is so much easier to learn.
With the focus on the rhythms and melodies of a movement, we will explore the movement of sitting down. Questions as: “When does the movement start? Where in your body does it start? How does the movement end? What kind of journey is this? What might the chair say about you and how you are sitting down? With other exercises we will explore breathing rhythms, looks and voice. I look forward to hearing your laughter and giggling, exploring these processes.

Vincent: What would you add for our french colleagues who don't know you yet?

Julianne: Please attend my workshop. I look forward to seeing you!
Many greetings from Berlin, Julianne

Interview with Lynne Jacobs

2020-02-03T13:17:05Z

As part of Lynne Jacobs' visit to IDeT, scheduled for April 2021, Vincent Béja conducted this interview.
You can read it and download it here.
We ask our readers that any reproduction, in whole or in part, of this text on their part, make explicit mention of the following reference:
Jacobs, L., Béja, V. (2019), Interview with Lynne Jacobs. https://www.idet.paris/interview-avec-lynne-jacobs

Nous demandons à nos lecteurs que toute reproduction complète ou partielle de ce texte de leur part, fasse mention explicite de la référence suivante :

Interview with Lynne Jacobs

Jacobs, L., Béja, V. (2019), Interview de Lynne Jacobs. https://www.idet.paris/interview-avec-lynne-jacobs

Interview

Vincent: Hello Lynne. You're well known in the international gestalt community, but probably less well known by our French colleagues. I think you've only been to France once, at the invitation of Jean Marie Robine, almost twenty years ago. Can you introduce yourself in a few words by telling us where you come from and what are your main interests?

Lynne: I grew up in racially segregated suburbs near our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. I was born in 1950, while segregation was still legal in many parts of the U.S. I came of age during our civil rights era, and that has affected me profoundly. I write and teach on the meaning of “whiteness” in the U.S.
What else can I tell you about me that matters? Well, I have lived in the Los Angeles, California area since I came here to go to graduate school in clinical psychology in 1972. It was hard to leave my family—I have 4 siblings and love to spend time with them—but I fell in love with LA immediately upon arrival. I still love living here, where, since I live very close to the ocean, I run and walk along cliffs overlooking the beach several times a week.
I met my husband in 1982. He was a Japanese history professor for many years. Now he is a psychoanalyst. Aside from my love of my work—therapy, teaching, supervision, some writing—I played softball (like baseball) for 25 years after I moved to LA. I had to stop when my hands became arthritic. I also enjoy bike-riding. In fact, once my husband and I rode our bikes across the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and we are very proud of that!
Living in the U.S. I feel sad, angry and frightened and demoralized quite often. People are tense, dispirited, angry. Our president and his corrupt staff are nearly breaking our democracy, and I don't have to tell you how disruptive and dangerous he is to all countries, and to the environmental health of our planet.

Vincent: How did you come to psychotherapy and, especially, of course, to Gestalt therapy?

Lynne: Are there any among us who do not have trauma in our lives? It is almost a cliché. But I am not sure trauma is my main reason for becoming a therapist. Certainly my experience with suffering has been a resource. When I was in grade school, and even in early college, I thought I would be a history teacher. I enjoy studying history. But I wanted to be the kind of teacher that students would want to talk to on a personal level. I had been very nourished by conversations with teachers who cared about me. I didn't really even know that such a thing as psychotherapy existed, I just knew that I thrived on intimate conversation. There is an aesthetic equality to intimate conversation that always attracts me.
In college, I fell in love with a psychologist I met. He introduced me to the world of therapy, and recommended that I volunteer at a local clinic. I co-led a therapy group with a local psychiatrist. IT was only then that I realized that the world of psychotherapy would be my home. I was like a fish finding water! In my last year of college, this same man introduced me to Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. I knew immediately that when I could afford to pay for therapy, I would choose a gestalt therapist. Both of my parents were emotionally distant, and growing up in the family left me hungry for a therapeutic experience in which the therapist was willing to be a person, someone with whom I could have the intimate conversations that breathed life into my somewhat deadened soul. So my attraction to gestalt therapy is defiantly it's emotional, here-now process, coupled with an appreciation of dialogical presence.
I offer here a few paragraphs from a short discussion I gave at the AAGT/EAGT:

"I know that for many people their first acquaintance with Gestalt therapy was a form of grand activity and show. But my first acquaintance was with subtle musical, dance-like interplay between therapist and patient. The experience of “truth-telling” is a sensory experience that one feels in the muscles of one's face, in one's breathing, in the expansion in one's diaphragm, in one's growing freedom movement in the moment. therapeutic communication, even when profound suffering enshrouds us, has a beauty that transcends the pain without obliterating the pain. So, what first drew me to Gestalt Therapy was the beauty of meaningful dialogue—which always means an Other, of course, as all contacting does—, the being-with, and it remains one of my strongest supports for putting my heart at risk.
The second, which is an aspect of the dialogic attitude, is the Gestalt therapy emphasis on presence. Joseph Zinker wrote a lovely essay in the first year of the publication of the Gestalt review entitled, “Presence As Evocative Power in Therapy.” His description made clear how the ethic and aesthetic of presence were intertwined. As with what I was saying about the surrender to dialogue, Zinker says of presence that it “stimulates unknown parts of oneself, parts not yet fully sensed, described or named as awarenesses. Another's presence makes me feel my own being-here, my own validity. Presence is generally empowering.” He describes qualities of presence in sensate terms: deep full and even breathing, a sense of being grounded, diffuse attentiveness, readiness to respond, something like Friedlander's zero point. Sitting with someone's presence, as Zinker writes: “I feel free to express myself, to be myself, to reveal any tender, vulnerable parts, to trust that I will be received without judgment or evaluation."
Being in the presence of presence is, dare I say, miraculous.
My professional interests have been shaped a long (and blessedly successful) struggle to overcome a pervasive sense of isolation and emotional disconnection in my life. My struggle to come out of isolation and to allow intimacy, to touch and be touched, dominated my early years as a patient. In fact, my initial (and current) attraction to the world of gestalt therapy is that the experience of the therapist's presence offered some hope for salvation from own emotional impoverishment and isolation. “

In 1991 I began studying to become a psychoanalyst after meeting Robert Stolorow, whose Intersubjective Systems Theory has an epistemology that is very congenial with gestalt therapy. And he teaches finely attuned listening, which has enhanced my therapeutic work. I loved my study, I enjoy my psychoanalytic community, although gestalt therapy is still my home. I will be glad to speak more about how I “marry” my two worlds if you people are interested when I come to Paris.

Vincent: In 1995 you published a book with Rich Hycner: “The Healing Relationship in Gestalt Therapy: A dialogic, Self-Psychology Approach”. This book clearly and explicitly placed Gestalt Therapy in a relational perspective. Can you tell us how this book was born and how it was received, both within the gestalt community and outside?

Lynne: When I began therapy (as a patient), I chose Gary Yontef because he had written an article of two in which he emphasized contacting between the therapist and the patient, and one of his first articles, he spoke of I-Thou. I knew I wanted to be in therapy with someone who valued paying attention to the relationship in therapy. I very much wanted a therapist who cared about how I experienced our therapeutic dialogue. In our work together, we paid close attention to how I experienced being with him, and actually our work together influenced both of us to want to explore the function of the relationship in therapy.
I was working towards my doctorate at the time, so I chose to write a theoretical paper on the centrality and the function of the relationship in gestalt therapy, and I also attempted to integrate Buber's ideas on dialogue. The paper was ultimately published in The Gestalt Journal. By this time, Rich Hycner and I had become acquainted through our shared interests in Buber and gestalt therapy.
For me, the relationship has always been central in ANY therapy that is meaningful. So, after my first article was published, I continued to explore and elaborate on that central theme, and that is how I became interested in contemporary psychoanalysis, which places central emphasis on the relationship. Eventually, Rich asked me to send him the articles I had written, and he offered to write companion chapters and create a book with his ideas and mine (it never would have occurred to me to write a book, so I am grateful to Rich!).
The book was very well received in England and Australia and in parts of the US. Also, when I have travelled elsewhere, I hear from students that some of them have read it. I do not believe it is known outside the gestalt community at all. I think it has been somewhat controversial in some places in the USA, since I did not use a lot of the terminology from PHG. But whether or not it is widely read, it was important for naming and focussing our attention on the centrality of the relationship, and that idea is now widely accepted.

Vincent: There is now a growing interest in research in our community. It pushes us to open ourselves to the whole field of psychotherapy. The therapist's ability to be fully engaged with his client and to respond sensitively to him becomes one of the main topics for research and training. How do you see the future of Gestalt therapy? Will it become a branch of contemporary psychoanalysis? What is your wish for our therapeutic modality and our Gestalt community?

Lynne: I think this is a difficult question to address! I am have never been very good at imagining my own future, much less the future for anything else. I have always been skeptical of psychotherapy research. I live in dread of having the aesthetics of therapy—which is akin to aesthetics of life!—being robbed of its vital indeterminacy by being subjected to research. However, the new paradigms that Brownell and other gestalt therapists are pioneering are more tolerable to me, sometimes even exciting.
As regards the future of gestalt therapy, sometimes I think our future does not matter as long as our fundamental “bones” live on, incorporated well into another theory. However, as I continue to be exposed to other ways of therapy, I have become convinced that I prefer we go the other way around. Our theory is so comprehensive, and it's implications for practice so open, that I would rather that other be drawn into GT.
What do I predict? I am not optimistic about a robust future in USA, because we have few gestalt therapists who are willing to teach at universities here. I am more optimistic about other countries in which the paths to becoming a therapist (and then a gestalt therapist), are different.

Vincent: Thank you very much Lynne... and see you soon at IDeT!