ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the theoretic base of gestalt therapy. It describes gestalt therapy as a theoretical integration, showing the various elements that contributed to that initial integration. The basic structure of contemporary gestalt therapy relies on the concepts emerging from the process of contacting: subjective experience, relating to another, contextual influence, and experiential learning–phenomenological method, dialogical relationship, field theory, and experiment respectively. The experience of being alive in the world, of being a person in relationship with other persons, comes from the integration of these four areas of concern, and the gestalt therapist or coach must appreciate that all of them are constantly in play for every individual, but certainly for everyone involved with another. The chapter describes contacting, awareness, the experience of self, the concept of self in gestalt therapy, and the contact boundary. It depicts activity at the contact boundary as providing the experiences of connection and separation, meetings with others which are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Contemporary gestalt therapy is a development, a maturing of the original theoretical integration accomplished by the founders of gestalt therapy in the middle of the last century.
