ABSTRACT
In the first edition of Gestalt Therapy: 100 Key Points and Techniques (Mann, 2010) I described a more traditional view of empathy as a one-sided activity in which the therapist engages with the client and feels their reactions to a situation as if they were their own. The mini-chapter in the first edition was subtitled, ‘a cautionary note about empathy’, echoing Fritz Perls’ (1973: 105) view that, ‘If a therapist withholds himself in empathy, he deprives the field of its main instrument’, and that a gestalt therapist must have ‘a relational awareness of the whole situation’ (ibid.). Perls saw no place for empathy in gestalt therapy stating that ‘there can be no true contact in empathy, at its worst it becomes confluence’ (ibid.: 106), that says as much about his aversion to confluence as it does his aversion to empathy and both were sounding dangerous. Consequently, Martin Buber’s (1958) description of inclusion as a process with a starting point of distance that moves from two independent selves to relationship rested far more easily with Fritz and was integrated into gestalt therapy as inclusion was presented as being orientated around contact with a shuttling between the therapists experience and their experience of the other. Buber considered this to be a simultaneous process, though I cannot equate this with gestalt’s theory of figure and ground. Buber saw empathy as an important feeling but that by its nature this feeling ignored one existential pole of the dialogue. He saw inclusion as an existential movement towards attempting to experience both sides of the dialogue, for him inclusion involved the embodiment of the others experience whilst not losing a sense of ones own embodied experience.
