RULE
A rule is a virtual boundary, that is, a boundary that we do not perceive with our senses, but which is the result of an agreement and whose purpose is to not require me to make a choice every time I find myself experiencing a situation identical or very similar to the one regulated. If the rule is imposed by the environment, it requires an agreement between me and the environment. The environment can then try to force me to respect the rule, the boundary, the limit that the rule establishes, by threatening me with sanctions and obtaining a forced agreement from me, but I must still agree for a rule to fulfill its function as a limit.
Let’s take an example. At driving school they taught us to consider the solid line between two lanes as an impassable wall. It is evident that there is no wall, but when I got my license, I accepted this agreement. However, we all know that if I am on a straight country road with good visibility, I will easily break the agreement and violate the rule to overtake a tractor that forces me to proceed at thirty miles per hour. We are equally aware that if a hidden police patrol stops me and gives me a ticket, I will protest, but in the end I will accept the penalty knowing that I have broken a rule with which I had declared myself in agreement and from which I cannot escape.
Self-regulating means that I give myself these rules, I create a boundary for myself. In the previous example, I self-regulate by deciding to break an agreement made with the environment; my rule becomes that the line is just a line and not a wall, and I take responsibility for it.
The example of the solid line concerns explicit rules with explicit agreements. To these, however, we must add all the implicit rules and implicit agreements that all societies and human groups construct, which are much more numerous and conditioning than explicit ones because they tend to transform into introjections[1]. Gestalt therapy hypothesizes that if a human being could grow freely, without absorbing introjections, they would self-regulate spontaneously. Behavioral rules would therefore arise from direct experience and personal choices, together with external rules that, once truly “chewed” and assimilated, become one’s own and are no longer experienced as impositions from outside.
In the driving example, if the rule is assimilated, and therefore has become my rule for not putting myself and others at risk, I will choose to break it only after carefully evaluating visibility, lane width, traffic, etc. If instead it is an unassimilated rule, which I observe only for fear of getting a fine, seeing that there are no police officers, I might even make a risky and dangerous overtaking maneuver.
Gestalt Therapy speaks of Organismic self-regulation, that is, all those rules that an organism gives itself, even possibly going into conflict with external rules, to function effectively in the environment in which it is immersed.
In the founding text of Gestalt therapy (hereafter identified as PHG)[2] they distinguish between healthy self-regulation and neurotic self-regulation. Getting up in the morning after I have spontaneously awakened and no longer feel sleepy is healthy self-regulation. Always getting up with an alarm clock to go to work, even if I don’t want to, and that work repels me, but I do it because “one must work” is neurotic self-regulation[3].
However, I believe that this differentiation is not sufficient and it is useful to make a further one between immediate self-regulation and conscious self-regulation[4].
Eating when I am hungry or sleeping when I am sleepy or crying when I am moved are examples of immediate self-regulation, that is, not mediated by conscious thought. In practice, immediate self-regulation is concretized in actions that do not arise following reflections.
Eating because it’s lunchtime or waking up with an alarm clock or holding back tears are examples of conscious self-regulation.
Let’s take a more complex example. I like my job and I want to get up to go to work; I don’t experience it as an obligation: I want to do it. The evening before I go out with friends: I want to do it, I have fun and go to bed late. The next morning the alarm goes off. I am still sleepy. Immediate self-regulation keeps me glued to the bed; there is no conscious thought, only drowsiness that does not fade: I am not present to myself, no crack in the self[5]. However, I begin to think that the work I have to do is important to me and I want to do it today: I begin to be present to myself, to reflect on what I want. A tension is being created between the immediate self-regulation that keeps me in bed and the conscious self-regulation that makes me get up to go to work. If conscious self-regulation prevails, I will make an effort to detach myself from the bed.
We can define effort as the measure of the tension created between conscious self-regulation and immediate self-regulation, the more the tension grows, the more the effort needed to develop an action increases.
Developing effortless self-regulation means reducing to a minimum the tension between conscious and immediate self-regulation so that the inevitable choice emerges spontaneously from the situation and is not a dominant act toward the environment and my emotions.
Gestalt therapy, in its founding book[2], speaks of organismic self-regulation in the terms in which we speak of immediate self-regulation. It does not make a distinction with a form of conscious self-regulation. In that book the main focus is the contact process, so much so that from it we can derive a true manual of psychopathology of the contact process.
The role of awareness is less emphasized in that volume, and not by chance appears that famous phrase that has made Gestaltists discuss so much; speaking of therapy in PHG it states: We can also realize why usually “awareness” is not of great help.
In PHG they refer only to awareness, a word that has no equivalent in Latin languages and which Jean Marie Robine has translated as “conscience immédiate“, that is, a form of consciousness essentially entrusted to sensory processes and not mediated by the reflective processes of the ego.
Also for PHG, Consciousness and Deliberateness, which we can translate as reflective consciousness and conscious action, intervene when there is a delay in the passage from awareness to action on the environment. Only in the writing 15 years later, “Psychopathology of Awareness,” Perls deepens the role of awareness. The considerations I make in this article arise from the integration of these two volumes and from clinical observations developed over these years.
The reason why PHG speaks almost exclusively of immediate consciousness[3] is to be found in the political and cultural context to which the entire group of intellectuals who founded Gestalt Therapy in New York in those years belonged. They considered it fundamental to free the individual from the regimentation of patriarchal cultures and from religious indoctrination by giving the “lived body” a power that had always been denied to it in Eurocentric societies. This centrality of the body, senses, and emotions found immediate connections with Heidegger’s phenomenology that had so influenced German culture before World War II, a reality in which the Perls couple had grown up and been formed. This mix led to a profound critique of psychoanalysis and to the development of a clinical vision centered on the experience of what happens between the organism and its environment. Psychology is no longer seen as the science that studies what happens “inside” the human being, but rather as the study of creative adjustments,[6] that is, the incessant alternation of novelty and routine that originates the process of assimilation and growth.
The psyche is no longer seen as something to be sought inside the human being, where it cannot be found, but as something that becomes visible, that takes an observable form for the other precisely when it circulates through the continuous connections that exist between all organisms and their environment and which cannot be interrupted under penalty of death. These connections occur through boundaries that are boundaries of individuation, that is, they separate everything that exists, but which cannot exist unless connected to other existents: connected, but also separated and individuated. For Gestalt therapy, boundaries always perform a double function, of uniting and separating. This for me is the definition of a boundary of individuation. Let’s take the example of skin. If I bring my hand close to a flame, the burning I feel on my skin signals the boundary of where I end, who feels the burning, and where the flame object begins that transmits the intense heat that burns me. Here the skin performs the double function of individuating me, and therefore separating me from the external world, and of connecting me to the external object that transmits one of its properties to me: developing heat. This experience of being an individual separated from and continuously connected to the external world is interrupted only by death.
For PHG, psychology should study what happens between the human being and their environment because it is only in that “between” that the psyche acts when the taken-for-grantedness of individuation boundaries is put in crisis by a novelty. The psyche acts when routine is interrupted because a novelty emerges and the being adapts to this environment modified by novelty while, simultaneously, modifying the environment to make the novelty assimilable. It acts when what in Gestalt is called the contact process develops: the emergence, from the existing connection, of a boundary that is no longer of individuation, but rather of contact. Let us remember the first definition given of contact in PHG: “The awareness of assimilable novelty and the operations necessary to reject a novelty not assimilable within a context. No repetitive or overwhelming experience can be the object of contact.” The first time I bring my hand close to a flame, a contact process begins. The intensification of heat I feel on my skin is a novelty. If I bring my hand too close, the novelty will become no longer assimilable and I will reject the contact by withdrawing my hand. The connection with the external world is never lost. Even if I am not aware of it, my skin continues to perceive the temperature of the air surrounding me. At the same time, I have grown, I have learned from the “flame” novelty and will no longer need a contact boundary the next time I approach a flame. Unless a new experience develops in another context. If for example, on a cold day, I bring my hands close to a flame and perceive that, maintaining a certain distance, the sensation of heat is pleasant, here from the individuation boundary emerges a contact boundary and I become aware of this assimilable novelty.
When this contact boundary comes into action we begin to experience the self, which means having less need to be an individual until arriving, in the moment of full contact, at no longer needing boundaries between me and the world, between I and the other. The conjunction disappears; I/other, organism/environment become unity with within it a contact boundary and no longer an individuation boundary. It is not the experience of losing boundaries, which is the psychotic experience, but of no longer needing them. If boundaries are no longer necessary, it means that differences are no longer dangerous, but nourishing and assimilable. I continue to exist, but I no longer need to feel separated from the other to feel safe. Full satisfaction is the experience of full contact.
If the connection between me and the other becomes dangerous, I experience anguish; if the contact between me and the other becomes dangerous, I experience anxiety. Connection is passive and conservative and concerns survival, while contact is active and evolutionary and concerns growth. Connection is given, while we develop contact every time we encounter a novelty. As I have already written, the connection between organism and environment, between human being and world is interrupted only by death[7]. Unlike connection, the contact process can be interrupted if anxiety develops and becomes intolerable. Anxiety is the consequence of an attempt to control a danger that I project into the future, for which therefore I can do nothing in the present moment, and which I fear I will not know how to face.
We can imagine that in PHG reflective consciousness was neglected because it was already very supported and “exploited” by educational, religious, political, governmental systems that tended, and tend, to nourish it with introjections because, as Nicol Bosco reminded us in his intervention citing Foucault: If power is internalized, the person controls themselves and there is no need to control them from outside.
Returning to the theme of effortless self-regulation, we can understand how conscious self-regulation always exists in tension with immediate self-regulation.
Much of our work as Gestaltists consists in giving dignity to this tension.
In Eurocentric culture, immediate self-regulation is generally devalued. Often confused with instincts, or worse, with lack of self-discipline or “moral laxity”. In the English language the word awareness is used as a synonym for attention, an error that Perls insisted upon greatly. We can support it with attention, with presence, yet immediate consciousness simply happens. When we ask a patient to pay attention to her breathing, we are asking for a voluntary act of attention, but the emotion that the person often experiences in doing so is an immediate self-regulation to the new situation that is created between us. There is an increase in tension between reflective self-regulation, which we have brought to the foreground with our request, and immediate self-regulation that has gone into the background but from which it re-emerges powerfully.
Gestalt has highlighted the importance of tensions that are created between necessary polarities. It is precisely the tension between them that determines our movement in the world. We move in space thanks to the balancing of tensions between antagonistic muscles. We relate to others through continuous tensions between desires and fears, emotions and rationality, necessity and creativity, aggressiveness and sexuality, between the probable and the possible. Tension requires the ability to make choices, which rules make unnecessary. Barbara Bellini in her presentation quoted Sartre’s famous phrase: “
This tension that we experience between the forms of organismic self-regulation is the internalization of the tension between the organism and the environment or, if we prefer, between individual and world. The tension between my desires, needs, thoughts and all my other individual characteristics and what the world demands, the rules that the environment establishes to create a society, the “external” rules. We self-regulate in living these tensions. Everyone self-regulates. It is not possible not to self-regulate, the point is that to self-regulate we are called to respond to this tension between the two forms of self-regulation. The more reflective self-regulation is free from introjections, the more it is able to take into account immediate self-regulation, the more effort decreases. The more conscious self-regulation relies on external introjected rules toward which we have not exercised our freedom as responsible beings, the more effort increases. Effort is the consequence of forcing a situation, it has nothing to do with fatigue.
[1] An introjection is a rule that had the function of protecting me from a painful experience and that I make into a hallucinated experience, that is, an experience that I have not had, but that is “as if” I had had it. For example: a child is about to stick his fingers into an electrical outlet, the father exclaims: “don’t do it or you’ll get shocked“. The child withdraws frightened by the fear he heard in his father’s voice, even though he doesn’t know what the “shock” experience is. If this event is repeated several times the child will make the father’s fear his own without however realizing anymore that it is the father’s fear, and not his own, and the implicit rule “you don’t put your fingers in electrical outlets” will become a hallucinated experience, that is, he/she will behave “as if” he/she had had the experience of getting shocked.
[2] Perls, Hefferline, Goodman – Theory and Practice of Gestalt Therapy – Astrolabio – Milan – 1971
[3] Neurotic does not mean wrong, but repetitive and unaware that the suffering I create for myself and others is not inevitable, but the result of automatisms and a limitation of my possibilities.
[4] During the last conference of the Gestalt School of Turin I had differentiated between organismic self-regulation and conscious self-regulation. Subsequently dialoguing with Nicol Bosco and Irene Tria I realized that it was an error because all self-regulations are organismic, hence the concept of immediate self-regulation and reflective self-regulation which I believe is more correct.
[5] J.P. Sartre in “Being and Nothingness” defines presence to self as a lack of full coincidence with oneself: “Presence to self indicates that an impalpable fissure has insinuated itself into being. If it is present to itself it means that it is no longer totally itself“.
[6] PHG – p. 249
[7] At least in the form that we know and manage to perceive with our senses or perhaps it would be more correct to say that what we call death, with its irreversible processes of body transformation, is the most probable consequence of the interruption of the connection between organism and environment
[8] J.P. Sartre – Being and Nothingness – Il Saggiatore – Milan 2002
[9] We have no objections to the fact that it can happen, we just don’t consider it useful to create other tension between polarities as would be that between the ordinary state of being, with little self, and that of enlightenment with full self.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Perls – Hefferline – Goodman – Theory and Practice of Gestalt Therapy – Astrolabio – Milan 1970
- Husserl – The Lifeworld – Mimesis – Milan – 1991
- Husserl – The Crisis of European Sciences – Il Saggiatore Milan – 2013
- Heidegger – Being and Time – Longanesi – Milan – 1969
- P. Sartre – Being and Nothingness – Il Saggiatore – Milan 2002
- M. Robine – The Revealing of the Self in Contact – Franco Angeli – Milan 2005
- Foucault – Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison – Einaudi – 1976
- Pizzimenti – Connect… Only Connect – Figuremergenti – 2020
- Bellini – Sexuality and Power – Figuremergenti – 2023
- Tarditi – Phenomenological Variations on Fear – Figuremergenti – 2023
