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THE GESTALT APPROACH to Experience, Art, and Art Therapy*
The word gestalt is German and has no exact equivalent in English. Form, figure, pattern, structure, and configuration are possible translations, but none is quite right, so we have adopted gestalt into English and bandy it about quite a bit in various contexts.
I bandy the word about in the context of the art experience. There is gestalt psychology and gestalt therapy, and there is the gestaltist's way of perceiving himself and others-a way of being, acting, and integrating experience. The premises of gestalt philosophy most relevant to the art experience seem so natural and so consistent with my attitudes that I find it hard to distinguish between what are gestalt tenets and what are my own personal apprehensions of how we human beings become and are.
Healthy children are naturally gestaltists-they live in the present, give full attention to what they are doing, do what they want to do, trust their own experiential data, and, until they are trained out of it, they know what they know with direct simplicity and accuracy.
Most of us are not allowed to grow up naturally, to learn through experience, to add to our knowledge without losing our naive wisdom: our parents, teachers, and culture coerce us into conforming to the accepted standards of how we should feel, think, and do. With varying degrees of stubbornness we resist and then gradually put away our own individual sensibilities and accept our educators' ideas about what a person ought to be. During this process we are forced to deny much of what we know to be true about our own nature. We want approval and acceptance. Most of us, by the time we are considered adult and mature, have forgotten how to be ourselves. We remember just enough of what being ourselves feels like to be afraid of it. Our fear keeps us in a state of tension or deadness so we spend most of our lifetime performing instead of living and use most of our energy denying our fear of knowing ourselves and each other deeply and wholly.
Gestaltists offer ways to get through this wall of fear-we seek ways to recognize what we have hidden away-and to integrate our...