Gestalt group therapists navigating a fracturing field: A disciplined movement-by-movement moment-to-moment aesthetic practice

This thesis aims to show how Gestalt psychotherapists avail of their embodied forms of knowing in their group practice. The literature pertaining to how Gestalt group therapy practitioners attend to their embodied experiences as sensed, felt and lived is marginalised in a modality that has a conflicted relationship to outcome and process research. In this qualitative research, I critically co-inquired with experienced Gestalt practitioners working with groups. All were members of a training institute on the island of Ireland. The research occurred at a time of the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Europe. An action-research approach, namely collaborative inquiry, framed this qualitative research into Gestalt therapists’ and supervisors’ group practice. An embodied hermeneutic phenomenology was adapted and underpinned by a Gestalt epistemology of embodiment, dialogue, phenomenology and field theory. The collaborative inquiry and methodology held a clear intent of researching with others, not on others. The qualitative inquiry revealed that traces of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the embodied group practitioner lingered throughout the research. The pandemic evoked an existential crisis that was called forth through the group therapists’ lived body over time. This illuminated the necessity to consider an ethics of care for embodied group practitioners when experiencing existential challenges in such a fracturing world. Utilising the form of a group (e.g. peer or supervision) as a support for embodied group practitioners to transmute a plurality of complex and sedimented experiences in a fracturing and suffering pandemic field was considered. Another significance of this inquiry is that it reveals Gestalt group practitioners’ ways of orienting in their work by engaging in a disciplined movement-by-movement moment-to-moment aesthetic practice as they attend to their sensing, feeling, moving bodies in the here-and-now with group members. There were no simple or clever embodied skills, techniques, or interventions to assuage the complexity of working therapeutically with groups. Group practitioners’ ability to orientate towards the group-as-a-whole atmosphere was integral to the starting situation in a fracturing context. They moved recursively between thinking and sensing, feeling, moving, as bodily ways of knowing. A pilgrimage of the animating group practitioner’s body occurred in a liminal space, where pauses were kinaesthetically lived. The group practitioners’ aesthetic experiences and breath were used as a ‘conduit’ to discern the group atmosphere and intentionality of contact of group members. Gestalt group practitioners honed a quality of sensitive and discerning attention involving the soma and aesthetics of contacting, a somaesthetic orientation to practice. In this collaborative inquiry, subtle oppressive practices and relational ruptures in the academic supervisory group were examined. It is a call to academic supervisory teams to attend to the decolonising of knowledge creating, which may disrupt more established forms of qualitative inquiry so new horizons of embodied understanding can be revealed. The demands on the principal practitioner-researcher are significant in relation to one’s own psychological well-being and care as the methodology requires a form of ongoing disciplined inquiry into the lived body and living body encounter with others. A limitation to this inquiry is that it is idiographic and therefore the revelations are not generalisable. It is proposed that future research may benefit by collaborating with disciplines across arts-based research, decolonising methodologies and phenomenology of movement scholarly practices.