ABSTRACT
This chapter is focused on clinical practice and describes the development of Gestalt therapy values from the time when humanistic approaches were founded to the relational turn that has affected all methods since the Eighties. Connections between these values and the development of societal needs and clinical sufferings are shown. The need for a new set of values is addressed, from support for individual potential to building a sense of “being-with” the other. The author demonstrates the contemporary need to address the ground experience of patients in order to be effective with new forms of psychopathological sufferings. She also proposes looking to the paradigm of reciprocity, applied through an aesthetic approach and inspired by Gestalt hermeneutics (phenomenological and field oriented), and presents Aesthetic Relational Knowledge as a means of working through the suffering of the client in a contextualised way, considering the resonance of the therapist as part of the experiential field of the client. This new humanistic value can be realised by focusing on the “dance” of reciprocity between the therapist and the client (a model under research that considers mutual perceptions and reactions to the perceptions of the other, supported by the vitality that each one places in being-with the other). Three main needed changes on clinical practice are described: to work on the ground, to use the Aesthetic Relational Knowledge and to refer to the paradigm of Reciprocity. Clinical examples are provided. A consequence of this new value is a turn in the ethical position of the psychotherapist: from a narcissistic effort to be a “good therapist” to an aesthetic attitude that doesn’t deny limits and puts the presence of the other in the foreground. An important consequence for therapists is to take care of themselves so that they are able to deal with the trauma of the pandemic, which is also strengthened through constant dialogue with the professional community.
