Gestalt Therapy as Clinical Husserlian Phenomenology - by Peter Philippson

About the workshop

The basic problem discussed by phenomenology is an old and simple one. What is the relationship between what we perceive through our senses (phenomena) and what is actually there causing our perceptions (noumena)? How do we know that we are seeing something approaching a true reflection of the world, or is our perception so distorted that the world is essentially unknowable?

The latter was certainly the view of Plato in The Republic, with his image of people in a cave, watching the shadows cast on the cave wall by the world but not seeing the world, only the flickering shadows. As therapists, we know something about distortions: people who hear voices or see images that nobody else can see, but which appear very real and disturbing to them; people who see themselves as horribly obese when they are starving to death.

But there is a deeper problem. Gestal…