Because politics is the future!
José “Pepe” MuJica

The hypothesis that I try to formulate with curiosity and passion is based on the relationship between organismic self-regulation and power.

Weaving a clear and detailed discussion of the connection between self-regulation and power in Gestalt therapy and counseling is no simple matter. This article, therefore, does not claim to establish any truths in order to understand the epistemological complexity of the discussion. Rather, the intention is to highlight connections, doubts, and reflections regarding the concepts of self-regulation and power (the latter, moreover, the subject of numerous studies across multiple disciplines).

Organismic self-regulation is a cornerstone of Gestalt therapy; it refers to the organism’s ability to respond to its own needs spontaneously, creatively, and adaptively through the process of contact with the environment.

1. Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, took the concept of the organism from K. Goldstein, a psychologist and neurologist (1878–1965), who developed a holistic theory of the human being. Studying the brain injuries of wounded soldiers during the First World War, Goldstein became aware of the difficulties that biology and medicine had in explaining the consequences of such injuries and the surprising adaptations of patients. He devoted himself primarily to the study of the control that the central nervous system exerts on responses to serious physical and mental illnesses, highlighting the power of organisms to sometimes adapt to terrible injuries by redistributing their reduced energy, thus recovering more wholeness than circumstances would theoretically have allowed. In The Organism, Goldstein shows that the human being does not function in parts, but as a living whole that organizes itself creatively to continue existing and fulfilling itself. The organism, according to the author, is a global, structured unit, capable of self-organization, which always reacts as a whole to environmental situations. Every function, symptom, or behavior makes sense only in relation to the entire organism. And while the subtitle of The Organism might suggest a more scientific treatise—a holistic approach to biology derived from human pathology—it is actually a text of significant humanistic significance. L. Corsi, who edited the Italian edition, emphasizes: “Man, Goldstein believed, is necessarily imperfect, and the experience of limitations is an intrinsic prerogative of human nature, because only under this condition can he consider himself truly free and ensure an opportunity to exercise courage. (…) the profound conviction that life’s difficulties are the inevitable price to pay for affirming one’s existence in an often hostile world, as individuals endowed with free will and will.” And R. W. Nathan writes again: “The organism is an entire world or, one might say, a true Weltanschauung, which allows us to open doors in many fields of knowledge: from neurology to philosophy, from psychology to sociology, to anthropology, etc. (…) a work as ignored as it is fundamental for understanding human nature”.

The holistic vision expressed in The Organism has profoundly influenced several twentieth-century authors such as Merleau-Ponty, Binswanger, Gestalt psychology and Maslow’s humanistic psychology.

Now, the reference to Goldstein’s research, taken up by Perls in Gestalt Therapy, allows us to place a first piece in the puzzle of the hypothesis proposed here, namely that organismic self-regulation is power, as an innate biological function characterizing the organism.

Perls further develops the question of the organism as a whole, emphasizing the ecological aspect (Gestalt Therapy Word for Word, p. 14), that is, the impossibility of separating the organism from its environment—for example, how human beings cannot survive without oxygen, and by extension, wherever we go, Perls argues, we carry a kind of world with us. Of course, as always, authors must be contextualized to the time in which they lived to understand the full scope of their discourse. In this sense, while Goldstein, through his research, offers biology and medicine a different vision for understanding the organism and therefore the human being, Perls instead focuses on the organism as a whole (there is no separation between mind and body) in relation to the environment. Thus, the human being is seen as a system capable of regulating itself if left free from external and internal interference (such as conditioning, judgments, or repression). Self-regulation is not imposed from the outside (with rules or models), but emerges from direct experience and contact with the present moment. According to Perls: “…one can let the organism take charge of the situation without interfering, without interrupting; the organism’s wisdom can be trusted. Countering this attitude is the entire pathology of self-manipulation, environmental control, and so on, which interferes with the subtle mechanisms of the organism’s self-regulation. Our manipulation of ourselves is generally ennobled by the term conscience/morality.” Perls’s statements raise a problematic question: if organismic self-regulation is a spontaneous process, what weight does culture have? Can we affirm that organismic self-regulation is a natural process? Would we risk returning to a merely scientific and objectifying interpretation of the human being? Or could we perhaps recover the concept of the contact cycle, contact boundary, and aggression to understand the issue more deeply.

Let’s start from the assumption that human beings come into the world already imbued with culture, symbols, and meanings, and that the natural dimension is somewhat risky. Every child is educated through processes of care or lack thereof. Education is the lived experience of man as culture, as A. Erbetta writes. This means that education is everything we receive and that influences us, whether intentional (e.g., school) or accidental (e.g., the place where I was born and raised in the early years of life, the people my parents associate with, the foods we buy, etc.).

So, while education shapes me, it also constrains me. Let’s look at some examples: consider how language, emotional, and sensory development, for example, if stimulated in the early years, fosters a child’s development. Or how knowing how to read and write opens up more opportunities for me. Today, it might be that knowing how to speak multiple languages ​​supports me as a global citizen. Or, again, meeting a teacher passionate about their subject allows me to learn differently and might inspire me to research.

In these examples, education supports me in the process of growth and in developing my ability to function in the world, to choose and decide for my life. On the other hand, however, as we said, education constrains me, through widespread or specific morality (religions, ideologies, common sense, etc.). Now, education is closely connected to power and its exercise. M. Foucault argued that modern power is no longer exercised solely through force or external repression, but acts on individuals through their internalization of norms. This means that power becomes more effective when individuals absorb social rules and begin to modify their behaviors autonomously. This process of self-discipline can be an example of adaptation in the service of power: the individual polices himself, judges himself according to externally imposed but now internalized standards—a form of internalized power, where the individual becomes both the subject and the object of control. We can easily observe this aspect within the training groups of our counseling school or in individual counseling sessions, that is, how people are often in conflict between what they desire and what they have learned to be right or wrong, according to social norms or values.

Gestalt Therapy and Counseling support the growth process by restoring a sense of personal power. In this regard, I would like to revisit some concepts developed by J. P. Sartre. Philosophical references, in my opinion, allow us to restore the complexity of the human being and not reduce it to mere psychologisms, which would then inevitably descend into some spiritual vision to find some sort of explanation and dignity.

Philosophy, as Galimberti says, is the exercise of criticizing one’s own thoughts; I like to think of it as a practice of doubt and curiosity. According to Sartre, man is condemned to be free, that is, to be totally responsible for his actions. Just as in Gestalt therapy, we support people in becoming 100% responsible for their own behaviors, even in a relationship, for example, we work on the paradox of supporting the couple in becoming both 100% responsible, not 50/50.

Sartre considered that power is internal to personal freedom; every human being has the power to make sense of the world through their choices. However, this power is also a burden, as it implies not assuming external justifications. This aspect is also evident in therapeutic and counseling work, especially at the beginning of the process when people would prefer the therapist or counselor to tell them what is right to do or not to do, to choose for them, to determine their problem and what possible solutions might be. In considering the other as the expert or professional, there is necessarily a sort of delegation, which, however, can sometimes lead to the patient or client being deprived of responsibility. The patriarchal system, where the choice (understood as the final decision) is delegated to the father or whoever fulfills that role, is emblematic of this. It’s true that power exists as a social relationship, as evidenced by the current events we’re witnessing in many countries around the world. Institutional power (state, bureaucracy, economics, finance, etc.) can alienate people, drastically limiting their freedom or killing them—think of the Palestinian genocide. Sartre, influenced by Marx, believes that power in modern societies leads to individual alienation. Therefore, power exists both as radical individual freedom and as a social structure that can oppress or alienate. Human beings remain responsible and capable of subverting power relations; and while this can be considered the crux of Sartre’s lesson, Perls had a fundamental insight, which, in my view, allows us to understand how the experience of power, responsibility, and self-regulation are closely intertwined. Rereading Perls, I seemed to grasp that the biological and existential aspects of people are integrated and in constant relationship with the world: “No organism is self-sufficient. It requires the world to satisfy its needs. To consider an organism alone is to consider it as an artificially isolated unit, while there is always an interdependence between the organism and its environment. The organism is a part of the world, but it can also experience the world as something separate from itself, as something as real as itself.” (The Self, Hunger, Aggression. Page 44)

In other words, the self is that function of the human organism that expresses the capacity to engage with the environment or withdraw from it. Humans can therefore engage with the environment at the contact boundary but also differentiate themselves from it.

Perls intuited that the dental stage in children—the transition from sucking milk, which supports the ability to introject nutrients for nourishment, to the ability to bite and chew with the development of teeth—supports the ability to deconstruct food and reality, to attack them in order to assimilate or reject them. This transition becomes crucial from both a physiological and psychological perspective. Perls will understand aggression as a biological function that allows a person to grow and evolve.

Aggression is the necessary and constitutive force of human beings, which allows for the necessary tension or conflict with their social context, allowing them to deconstruct reality (e.g., introjects, morality, etc.) to find their own creative adaptation, differentiating themselves while also fully participating in the social context. This aspect also implies a socio-political quality of Gestalt Therapy and Counseling, in my opinion, namely, care and attention to the environment, understood as a place to which we are inevitably connected and interdependent.

I believe that the theoretical difficulty and experiential beauty of Gestalt Therapy lies in this integration that Perls advocates between biological and philosophical/experiential functioning, through the contact cycle and the principle of organismic self-regulation: “Gestalt therapy is a philosophy that seeks to be in harmony, in alignment with everything else, with medicine, with science, with the universe, with everything that is. It finds support in its own formation, since the formation of gestalts, the emergence of needs, is a primary biological phenomenon.” And gestalt, according to our author, is also the lived phenomenon, which cannot be analyzed or fragmented, otherwise it becomes something else (Gestalt Therapy Word for Word, pp. 23-24). Precisely as the procedural becoming of existence, gestalts are formed and destroyed.

Implementing these concepts in Gestalt Therapy and Counseling involves recognizing oneself as part of the situation, supporting the client to differentiate themselves and thus connect with their own aggression, supporting awareness—that is, being present with the senses in the process of contact and, if possible, identifying spontaneously and harmoniously in the here and now—but above all, supporting the individual’s fullness and the anthropological capacity for self-regulation in the relationship (organismic self-regulation). This, in my opinion, is the most important contribution that Gestalt has made to clinical, educational, and counseling settings, and which is still not fully developed and widespread in our work.

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