ABSTRACT
Gestalt therapists need to tolerate the uncertainty of intersubjective relating and all that comes with it from existential angst to the joy and wonder of not knowing what will unfold next. As gestalt therapists, ‘they must be subjective, since subjectivity is in the situation, but this is not to say that the people should be arbitrary’. The remarkable advances made in neuroscience help inform the reader in their approach and their work with particular presentations but the author also wary. The people believe that patterns of relating will form between themselves and their clients, that there is a methodology to working phenomenologically and a need to take a situational view of the person and the therapeutic relationship. Staemmler discusses cultivated uncertainty describing such an attitude to be one of optimism as it implicitly shows that change is possible.
