Therapy as an Aesthetic Issue: Creativity, Dreams, and Art in Gestalt Therapy

Abstract

The idea of creativity is central to Gestalt Therapy. Significantly, however, from a linguistic standpoint, it is not usually found in the form of a noun - “creativity”, as such - but rather as an essential attribute of the experience of contact, which Perls and Goodman had already thought of immediately as “creative adjustment”. In a word, Gestalt Therapy does not offer an abstract definition of creativity, of its ousia’, but understands it as a quality of the experience of the field, a property that cannot be isolated from the life context in which it is performed and made relevant. If the noun tends to block and harden, the attribute expands the elements of the discourse to that which, in each case, it is linked, connoting and orienting them in a new direction of meaning, which simultaneously accompanies and modifies them. Creativity is not defined in Gestalt Therapy; but it is implicitly stated that all that “happens” in the field, in relation to the contact, is in itself “creative”, because without the creative contribution of the subjects involved there is no contact, no experience, no relationship.