[발췌] The Monk Manager and the Road to Abbey Management: Essays in Organisation ...

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12. 'Gestalt' therapy

[This section draws on the work of Gaston De Cock of the University of Leuven. Gestalt therapy as a training method, has heen based on the work of Fritz Perls.]

It is important to note that Gestalt therapy has little or nothing in common with Gestalt psychology. In connexion with the latter one could consult some of the work of amongst others Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Koehler and Max Wertheimer. According to the principle of Gestalt therapy, humans experience reality through certain forms of existence or specific ways of contact with the worl. Note that this does not mean that the reality of human life is something out there alien to the person and unconnected to this thinking and consciousness. George Berkeley even argued that there was no reality at all apart from the perception of things in the mind of people.

The following existential forms are usually identified:

a. Aboutism ─ In the contact with the world determined by aboutism people do not get really personally involved nor committed to reality. Their thinking, actions, behaviour, always seem to be about something else no directly related to themselves. It is quite unfortunate that most of the sciences operate in a reality of this 'aboutist' level only. Thiking of the psychologist, sociologist, economist, etc., who discusses issues of human reality as if he or she were to belong to a different realm or as if he or she were to be a 'humanite' of a completely different species compared to those involved with the concepts of his or her theories. One could consult in this connexion e.g., ( ... ... ) Aboutism, as existential form therefore, is essentially based on non-involvement or at least on the pretence of non-involvement.

b.Shouldism ─ The experience of reality guided by shouldism is concerned with what should be or what ought to be. Cases of this type of existential activity can be found pretty openly in religion, moral philosophy, ethics, deontology and in fact in most normative science. Many a positive science however─think of a specific kind of positive economics, psychology, management[─]openly pretend to dwell in 'aboutism' and 'isism'. Yet quite often a wide array of hidden shouldist assumption and purposes is barely hidden beneath the surface statements. Think of the way Frank Green and Peter Nore[1977] have discussed and analysed 'The myth of objectivity in positive economics'. Compare with the criticism of Edmund Ions[1977] of the fashionable use of [pseudo-] mathematical techniques in various social sciences. According to the Ions a good deal of the time the author in question becomes so engrossed and overtaken by his mathematical methodology that he largely ignores the argument he was actually supposed to be dealing with. Not unfrequently when one confronts mathematicians ^pure sang^ with the so-called mathematical analysis used in say economics and the like, their reaction is often one of bewilderment and surprise. ( ... ... ) In two articles under the titile: 'When numbers get serious' and 'The problem with statistics' ^The Economist^ [cf. 23 November 1996] is very critical of the current application of a particular branch of mathematics. Under the caption: 'Damned lies. Economic statistics are in a bad way the paper stresses that in relation to economic activity: "finding the right numbers is much harder than you might think ... [because] many ... [economic] activities cannot be seen and cannot be numbered". Spending much more public money on gathering the 'right' figures and numbers may help but: "they would still be far from perfect". The harsh conclusion is: "the fact that economics are becoming increasingly unmeasurable, at least in precise ways" and we ought better learn to live with that. ^The Economist^ recommends: "Greater modesty ... in the application of statistical exactitude ... [in the sense that] ... policymakers should not set targets that are over-precise", or in other words, that are more precise: "than the underlying data can support". One must at long last accept that: "most statistics are approximations". John Maynard Keynes knew this already many years ago when he quipped that: "It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong". This idea must have been at the back of the mind of people like Graham Galer of Royal Dutch Shell and Denis Loveridge [1992] of the Open University Business School when they developed the notion of ^scenarios^ rather than just forecasting. In scenario-writing one does not attempt to forecast precisely what exactly is going to happen when, where and how. Scenarios try to produce nothing more but neither less than say, two or three, perhaps four at the most, of reasonably wide 'bands' of meaningful potential future activity and development. The scenarios are supposed to be quite different yet paradoxically intimately related in meaning. ^The Economist^ does not leave it at that and in the same issue [Volume 341, Number 7993] with some tongue-in-cheek reference to Milan Kundera it continues it assault on 'economic statistics' under the caption: "The unmeasurable lightness of being". The article starts with the old joke that: "There are three kinds of economists: those who can count and those who can't
.  But in a more serious tone the paper denounces economists for: "churning statistics through computer models ... [whereas] ... few worry about the reliability of those numbers". The late Jean Gimpel must be smiling now in the Walhalla of academics when ^The Economist^ stresses that: "Important questions, such as why all the billions of dollars invested in computers have failed to boost productivity growth, rest upon the accuracy of official statistics", even wondering whether the numbers collected are relevant at all. Three main reasons are given for the enormous challenges to the significance of current figures. One, the growing importance of internal decision-making in multinational corporations. Two, ordinary and conventional collection of figures has tremendous difficulty with the: "production and manipulation of ideas" which reflects an apparently incessantly increasing share of economic output. That is why the number-crunchers often steer away from: "fast-growing sectors such as software, telecommunications, entertainment, health care and financial services" not to mention education. Three: "new goods, shorter product cycles and rapid quality improvements" make it much more delicate to measure the variation in output and prices over various periods of time. ( ... ... ) To conclude: "standard economic statistics fail to capture many of the benefits of information technology, which increasingly take the form [back to Jean Gimpel] not of cost saving or greater volume, but of improved quality, time saving, convenience and increased consumer choice".

c. Isism ─ Isism refers to the search for the why in events and things. This existential activity is reflecte in the examination of the meaning and being of things in the cognitive experience leading to ontology: what does it mean to be what one is, what there is, what things and events are.

d. Gestalt therapy [not to be confused with Gestalt psychology] ─ Rather than to talk about something else [cf. aboutims], or to argue how things should be [shouldism], or to explore why things are what they are [isism], in Gestalt therapy one tries to understand what is via the how, not via the why. Authenticity of behaviour is encouraged. In other words, you are urged not merely to say what you are feeling, but to be what you are and where you are.

The questions asked are:
- what are you doing
- what are you feeling
- how are you doing whatever you are engaged in doing
Via these questions people are assumed to learn to confront the Here & NOw.

The slogans of Gestalt therapy are:
- do not think, use your senses
- abandon doing as if, stop pretending
- loose your mind and come to your senses.

( ... ... )