INTRODUCTION

This contribution is based on the paper presented at the Turin Gestalt School conference (May 16-18, 2025) entitled *Effortless Self-Regulation*.

The article offers a reflection on the Gestalt concept of organismic self-regulation, placing it in dialogue with three fundamental dimensions of human experience: aggression, sexuality, and power. Drawing on clinical observations of phenomena such as emotional dependence, abusive relationships, Stockholm syndrome, and hubris, it explores how power dynamics permeate intimate relationships, groups, and social systems, influencing processes of contact and growth.

The hypothesis guiding this work is that organismic self-regulation is influenced not only by individual needs, but also by the ways in which aggression, sexuality, and power are organized within the relational field within a—patriarchal—culture that influences it. When these dynamics harden into forms of domination, self-regulation takes on neurotic forms; when they find more reciprocal and creative expressions, they can support processes of individual and collective development.

ORGANISMIC SELF-REGULATION: A FIELD PERSPECTIVE

In Gestalt therapy, organismic self-regulation is the ability of the organism-environment system to spontaneously organize experience according to emerging needs (Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, 1951, which I will now call PHG). Through the process of figure formation, contact, and its completion, the organism tends to maintain vital continuity and dynamic equilibrium.

Self-regulation is neither a deliberate strategy nor a learned skill. It is a bodily, pre-reflexive, and situated process that constantly changes in its relationship with the environment. For this reason, it does not belong exclusively to the individual, but to the relational field in which experience takes shape.

From this perspective, health is not defined in terms of correct behaviors or appropriate emotions, but rather in terms of process. What is clinically relevant is not so much what a person desires or does, but rather how those involved organize experience: how they recognize a need, how they come into contact with it, what they do with it, and how they integrate it.

Even seemingly self-destructive behaviors can be understood as attempts at regulation. They often represent creative attempts at self-regulation through which the organism seeks to maintain the continuity of experience, giving a possible form to needs not yet fully recognized or modulating levels of arousal perceived as unsustainable.

Understanding their regulatory function, however, does not mean considering them an expression of health. When a mode of regulation becomes rigid, repetitive, constrictive, or detrimental to a person’s vitality, it signals an impoverishment of the contact process, supported by the entire relational field.

This leads to a specific clinical position: self-regulation is neither taught nor corrected from the outside. Rather, therapeutic work consists in creating the conditions for it to rediscover spontaneity, flexibility, and creativity (Perls, 1949).

From this perspective, I would like to explore the role that aggression, sexuality, and power play in organizing human experience.

AGGRESSION AND SEXUALITY AS FUNCTIONS OF CONTACT

Referring to Perls’s studies, aggression and sexuality can be considered two fundamental expressions of the vital energy that organizes the relationship between organism and environment (1949).

While criticizing the primacy of libido in Freudian theory, Perls recognizes sexuality and aggression as two complementary and necessary forces for life.

We briefly describe their function as they underlie self-regulation processes, leaving further exploration to other sources (see Pizzimenti, 2015; Pizzimenti, Bellini, 2022; Bellini, 2025).Descriviamo brevemente la loro funzione in quanto sono alla base dei processi di autoregolazione, rimandando l’approfondimento ad altre fonti (si veda Pizzimenti, 2015; Pizzimenti, Bellini, 2022; Bellini, 2025).

While aggression allows the organism to distinguish itself from the environment, sexuality enables the opposite movement of connection. One separates and defines; the other unites and integrates. Relational life is organized in the ongoing dialogue between these two polarities.

Aggression is not the same as violence. It represents the ability to discriminate, choose, transform, and assert one’s boundaries. Every time we satisfy a need, make a decision, say “no,” or differentiate ourselves from another, we are exercising a form of aggression.

Sexuality, for its part, is not limited to genitality. It constitutes a force of connection, creativity, and openness to contact. Through desire, pleasure, and bodily involvement, sexuality helps open boundaries and foster the experience of of encounter and interconnection.

From the perspective of genital sexuality, orgasm can be understood as a relational and psychological experience in which the boundaries of the self recede into the background of the experience and people experience a sense of profound connection, feeling part of something larger. In this moment, the differences that made the encounter possible do not disappear, but temporarily cease to occupy the center of awareness. The boundaries continue to exist, without being experienced as separation.

If we consider the male experience, we see that orgasm and ejaculation are not overlapping phenomena. The genital discharge associated with ejaculation does not necessarily coincide with an experience of encounter and exchange at the contact boundary, as people may continue to perceive themselves as separate in their respective individualities.

When boundaries recede into the background and the experience of connection prevails, Gestalt therapy speaks of the experience of the Self: a moment in which organism and environment fully meet in the process of contact and the experience of belonging temporarily prevails over the experience of separation.

THE COUPLE AS A LABORATORY OF SELF-REGULATION

Loving relationships are one of the privileged places to observe the self-regulation of the field.

In the initial stages of a relationship, the characteristics of sexuality often prevail: attraction, closeness, pleasure, curiosity, and creativity. Later, differences between partners emerge, and with them the need to redefine the boundaries of the relationship.

This is where aggression appears in its many forms: conflict, disagreement, frustration, anger, distancing, and negotiation. These moments do not necessarily represent a failure of the relationship; they can be valuable opportunities for growth, allowing people to recognize each other in their otherness.

The maturation of a relationship requires the ability to navigate both moments of connection and differentiation. In some cases, this process leads to a renewed mutual choice; in others, to separation. Both possibilities can represent coherent outcomes of the field’s self-regulation.

WHEN THE PROCESS STIFFENS

Self-regulation is never completely interrupted. Even when contact encounters obstacles, the organism continues to seek forms of adaptation. What can be lost is the spontaneity of the process.

When excitement is unsupported, it can transform into anxiety. In such conditions, the person tends to resort to rigid and repetitive contact patterns that reduce tension in the short term but limit the possibility of new experiences.

From this perspective, so-called neurotic self-regulation can be understood as a form of self-regulation that has lost flexibility while continuing to pursue adaptive goals.

The contact interruptions described by Gestalt—introjection, projection, retroflection, confluence, deflection, and egotism—can be understood as ways in which the organism attempts to maintain balance when full contact is perceived as too risky.

In this regard, Salonia distinguishes between fitness and fullness. Fitness concerns the organism’s adequacy to its environment, how closely the choice corresponds to what one truly feels one wants to do; fullness, on the other hand, refers to the lived quality of the experience. It is possible to be in the right relationship or the most suitable professional role without experiencing a true sense of fullness (Salonia, 2008).

This distinction raises a central question for this work: what prevents couples not only from experiencing certain experiences, but from experiencing them fully?

POWER AND SELF-REGULATION

To address this question, it is necessary to introduce the topic of power.

By power, we do not mean exclusively domination or coercion. Power can be defined as the ability to influence the relational field and to be influenced by it. In this sense, it is not an ancillary phenomenon to human relationships, but rather a constitutive dimension of them (Bellini, Magarelli, 2025).

Sartre’s reflections are particularly useful in this regard. Through the experience of another person’s gaze, human beings discover that they are not only the subject of their own experience, but also the object of others’ perception. This discovery inevitably introduces a tension between different freedoms.

Every relationship therefore implies mutual influence. Each individual seeks to assert their own point of view, their own needs, and their own freedom, while the other person does the same. From this tension, power emerges as an inevitable dimension of human encounters.

From a Gestalt perspective, many forms of neurotic self-regulation can be understood as the result of power conflicts that have not found a satisfactory resolution. Consider the child who forgoes expressing anger to preserve the bond with their caregivers: renouncing their spontaneous movement ensures the survival of the relationship, but produces a loss of freedom and creativity.

NEUROTIC SELF-REGULATION, POWER, AND ASYMMETRIC RELATIONSHIPS

If power is an inevitable dimension of every relationship, then we must question the relationship between power and self-regulation.

From the Gestalt perspective, as we have said, neurotic self-regulation is not considered a mistake or a pathology in the strict sense, but a creative solution developed by the organism to address a situation perceived as problematic.

From this perspective, relational configurations characterized by strong power asymmetries can be understood as attempted solutions that, over time, tend to harden and reproduce themselves.

Phenomena such as emotional dependence, abusive relationships, Stockholm syndrome, or hubris can be interpreted as particularly stable forms of experience organization, in which the need for belonging, recognition, security, or self-realization is intertwined with dynamics of domination and submission.

Understanding the regulatory function of these configurations does not mean legitimizing them or minimizing their suffering. Rather, it means questioning why they persist and continue to exert such a strong attraction on the people involved.

Emotional dependence offers a particularly telling example. Remaining within gender stereotypes for the sake of simplicity, a woman who struggles to recognize her own worth might be attracted to men perceived as strong, confident, or authoritative. Conversely, a man who struggles to feel lovable might seek relationships in which he receives constant confirmation of his own importance.

In these cases, the relationship is structured not only around unmet infantile needs, but also around as yet unexplored developmental possibilities, the now for next (Spagnuolo Lobb, 2011). What attracts is not only what is missing, but also what could be learned.

The other person’s love can thus become the place where one learns to recognize one’s own value; the partner’s esteem can become the place where one learns to feel accepted within one’s limitations and vulnerability.

From this perspective, neurotic repetition can be understood as the organism’s persistent attempt to complete open relational configurations and to realize developmental possibilities that have not yet found a satisfactory form.

However, when the power disparity becomes chronic, the growth process stalls, and the relationship tends to transform into a rigid structure, in which one pole develops at the expense of the other.

The hypothesis I develop in this paper is that one of the factors preventing couples (or groups) from developing a sense of greater fulfillment and satisfaction is the blockage of power dynamics that fail to evolve and transform to adapt to the growth potential of the human beings involved.

FROM CLINIC TO SOCIETY

The dynamics observable in individual relationships do not emerge in a vacuum. They take shape within cultural, social, and historical contexts that favor some expressions and discourage others.

For this reason, a reflection on self-regulation cannot be limited to the individual dimension but must necessarily interrogate the social field in which individuals live.

In the hypothesis I am arguing, the forms of self-regulation observable in intimate relationships are influenced by power dynamics, and in particular by the ways in which power is organized at the collective level.

In this sense, patriarchy can be understood not simply as a system of relationships between men and women, but as a specific mode of organizing power.

What characterizes the patriarchal paradigm is not only the privilege historically attributed to men, but a more general valorization of hierarchy, competition, dominance, and individual affirmation.

What characterizes the patriarchal paradigm is not only the privilege historically attributed to men, but a more general valorization of hierarchy, competition, dominance, and individual affirmation.

The problem, therefore, is not only gender differences, but the very way power is conceived and distributed.

When relationships are organized according to a hierarchical logic, one pole inevitably tends to assume greater importance than the other. In these situations, organismic self-regulation encounters greater difficulties, as the full development of one person risks occurring at the expense of the other.

This is not to say that every patriarchal society inevitably produces neurotic self-regulation, but rather that social systems based on strong power asymmetries tend to favor more rigid and less reciprocal relational configurations.

The power struggle we observe in couples, groups, and organizations can be interpreted as the microscopic expression of broader cultural processes.

When a couple remains trapped for years in a mutual attempt to dominate, they are not simply experiencing a private problem. They are also reproducing relational patterns deeply rooted in their culture.

STRENGTH, LOVE, AND OBJECTIVENESS

Simone Weil’s reflections offer a particularly valuable perspective for understanding these dynamics.

In her famous essay on the Iliad, Weil describes strength as that which transforms the human being into a thing. Force acts not only through physical destruction, but also through more subtle processes of objectification (1941).

Those who exercise force and those who suffer it are both trapped in the same logic.

The victim progressively loses the ability to express their subjectivity. But those who dominate also risk losing touch with the vulnerability, reciprocity, and complexity of human experience.

From this perspective, winners and losers share a common loss: the reduction of the richness of experience to relationships of control and submission.

This observation allows us to reinterpret many contemporary forms of relational suffering in a new way.

From this perspective, emotional dependence, Stockholm syndrome, and hubris syndrome can be understood not as separate psychological phenomena, but as different outcomes of the rigidification of organismic self-regulation around asymmetrical configurations of power.

In emotional dependence, the power to define one’s own value and relational security is progressively delegated to the other person, with a reduction in autonomy and self-support aimed at preserving the bond.

In Stockholm syndrome, under conditions of strong asymmetry and possible coercion, the subordinate person may organize their experience through identification with the person in power, as a last-ditch effort to reduce anxiety and maintain a form of relational security. This risks a progressive reduction in critical clarity and the ability to distinguish between self-protection and adaptation to domination.

In Hubris syndrome, typical of certain leadership positions or positions of strong organizational responsibility, the process focuses instead on the dominant pole: the individual tends to identify their point of view with reality itself, reducing the ability to listen to feedback, the tolerance for dissent, and the verification function offered by the relational field.

In all cases, power loses its circulating and relational nature and crystallizes into forms of delegation, identification, or overlap between self and reality, with a progressive reduction in reciprocity, flexibility, and the possibility of shared growth.

EROS AND DOMINATION

It may be useful to add a further consideration to these configurations: domination is not only a structure that produces suffering or limits freedom, but can also exert a strong psychological and erotic attraction. Power does not operate exclusively through coercion; it can organize the desire, arousal, and sense of identity of those involved.

In some relational configurations, superiority, authority, and the ability to lead or prevail can take on an erotically organizing function. At the same time, the ability to trust, allow oneself to be led, or temporarily relinquish responsibilities can offer experiences of security, orientation, or emotional intensification. In these cases, hierarchy is experienced not only as an external imposition, but also as a regulatory modality capable of reducing uncertainty, structuring the relational field, and sustaining a sense of belonging.

From a Gestalt perspective, this does not imply considering every asymmetry pathological, nor denying the possibility that certain differences in role, competence, or initiative can be experienced consensually, creatively, and mutually nourishingly. The clinically relevant question concerns the degree of mobility of the process: whether positions of power remain flexible and transformable, or whether they tend to harden into stable identities that limit the freedom, reciprocity, and developmental possibilities of those involved.

It affects the existence of power or difference, but with the loss of their relational dynamics. When domination becomes the only possible way to organize encounters, the relational field becomes progressively impoverished and self-regulation loses creativity.

TOWARDS ANOTHER IDEA OF POWER

If the problem is not power itself, but its crystallization into forms of domination, then the question becomes imagining different ways of exercising it.

In this sense, the concept of power needs to be rethought.

For a long time, power has been associated primarily with the ability to impose, control, prevail, and win. This conception is based on the idea that power is a limited resource, which can be possessed by some only at the expense of others.

However, different forms of power exist.

A teacher can exercise power by facilitating learning rather than by imposing obedience.

A therapist can exercise power by creating the conditions for the patient’s autonomy rather than by promoting dependence.

A leader can exercise power by coordinating resources and skills without centralizing control.

In all these cases, power does not disappear. It changes form.Una persona leader può esercitare potere coordinando risorse e competenze senza accentrare il controllo.

To describe this transformation, we have used the term “matriarchal” elsewhere (Montella, 2025). By this, we do not mean a reversal of gender roles or the replacement of male domination by female domination.

We use this term symbolically to indicate a way of organizing coexistence based on participation, cooperation, mutual recognition, and the valorization of differences.

Such a perspective does not eliminate conflict, aggression, or differences. On the contrary, it recognizes their value within the relational process.

The goal is not to build tension-free relationships, but to create contexts in which differences can meet without turning into relationships of domination.

CONCLUSIONS

Organic self-regulation cannot be understood exclusively as an individual phenomenon. It emerges within relational fields traversed by needs, desires, conflicts, differences, and power relations.

Aggression, sexuality, and power are not obstacles to self-regulation, but fundamental dimensions of its functioning.

Aggression enables differentiation and the affirmation of boundaries. Sexuality fosters connection, creativity, and encounter. Power inevitably emerges from the mutual influence that characterizes every human relationship.

Difficulties arise when these dimensions lose flexibility and crystallize into forms of domination, control, and submission.

From a Gestalt perspective, individual symptoms and relational suffering can be understood as the organism’s attempts to find new possibilities for balance and development. Even the most rigid configurations retain, within them, an intentionality for growth.

The task of psychotherapy, then, is not to correct these processes from the outside, but to create the conditions for them to evolve toward broader, more creative, and more integrated forms of contact.

Similarly, the task of communities and institutions could be to foster ways of organizing power that support mutual growth rather than domination.

The hypothesis developed in this paper is that many relational difficulties stem not simply from unmet individual needs, but from the inability of relational systems to transform their power configurations over time. Couples, groups, and organizations suffer not so much because of differences in strength, competence, desire, or influence, but because these differences tend to harden into stable roles of domination and dependence. When power loses its mobility and becomes identity, self-regulation is impoverished and mutual growth is halted.

If organismic self-regulation represents trust in the field’s ability to generate ever-new forms of balance, then the contemporary challenge is not to eliminate power, aggression, or conflict, but to create relational conditions in which these dimensions can remain dynamic, reciprocal, and transformative. From this perspective, the maturity of a relationship, a group, or a society is not measured by the absence of tensions, but rather by the ability to navigate them without transforming them into relationships of domination, maintaining the possibility of encounter, differentiation, and shared growth.

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FILMOGRAPHY

• Resnick, R. W., & Resnick, R. F. (2016). Coming Home [Video]. Gestalt Associates Training Los Angeles.
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