ABSTRACT
In the introduction to the theoretical volume of the Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman text (Gestalt Therapy, 1951, hereafter referred to as PHG), Goodman says of the self that it “is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life. It is only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the role of finding and making the meanings we grow by” (p. 235). It is clear from this statement that Goodman considered the self to be central to human life. This essay will elaborate the idea of the self in Gestalt therapy and explore the foundations in human experience out of which the concept of the self arises. In particular, my intentions are: first, to work but a basic theory of the nature of the human self; second, to clarify and resolve an apparent conflict between two views of the self--the self as “the system of contacts in a difficult field” and the self as “the agent of growth”--in the PHG text; and third, to examine the foundation in experience of the almost universal belief in the self’s existence. The third of these is a set of generalizations based on the empirical study by Daniel Stern and his colleagues (1985) of the evidence of the sense of self in human infants.
