In his book Schöpferische Indifferenz, philosopher Salomo Friedlaender (1918/2013) opens with [1] & [2]:
Creative Indifference, individual: please don’t immediately misunderstand that first word! It does not mean an individual human being, […], nothing individual at all, but the whole, but not objectively, but subjectively, a creative pathos, the will, the decision, freedom, exemption of the ‘inside’ from utter isolation, of all dividuality —when only this freedom enables everything isolated to be governed, a creatively living identity. […] (O)ne can only give this to oneself—but otherwise one is only an illusory self.
Salomo Friedlaender, 1918/2013, p. 89 (Translated from German)
In the years post WWII, a German-born jewish psychotherapist & psychiatrist, Friedrich (Frederick) Salomon Perls, with his wife Laure, put together (perhaps gestalt-ed) the foundation of a therapeutic modality now known as Gestalt therapy. They were literally refugees in South Africa at that time. Perls drafted out gestalt therapy philosophy in his first book entitled, Ego, Hunger and Aggression (Perls, 1942/47). In this book, philosopher Salomo Friedländer‘s concept of Creative Indifference”.
Creative Indifference, in Gestalt therapy circles, is also given the terms the Fertile Void and the Zero Point. This is an essential aspect of Gestalt therapy. It is also an abstract concept that deserves attention. Therapists who take the time and space to chew on this concept actually grow as therapists. This is how relevant creative indifference is to our vocation. The very fact that Perls started his first book by explaining Friedländer’s work in its first chapter indicates its relevance.
It is my pleasure, with this blog post, to give highest esteem and admiration for Dr. Amendt-Lyon for this keynote lecture at the Gestalt Conference 2019 in Budapest. I was there, alongside about 800 participants, listening to this lecture. Little did we know at that time that this gathering of international gestalt therapists would precede the unfortunate COVID-19 pandemic that would upend the world we thought then we knew.
Below is a bunch of notes and the transcript of her lecture. I figure that this is necessary, lest the video goes astray.
Transcript (Key notes)
When Fritz Perls wrote Ego, Hunger and Aggression, he stated, “for a long period of my own life, I belong to those who, though interested, could not derive any benefit from the study of academic philosophy and psychology until I came across the writings of Sigmund Freud, who was then still completely outside academic science, and S. Friedländer’s philosophy of creative indifference.”
Perls had several reasons for finding the psychoanalytic system incomplete and faulty. First, for treating psychological facts as if they existed separately from the organism. Second, for using linear association psychology as the foundation for their forward dimensional system, and third, for neglecting an important phenomenon, differentiation.
To correct this third fault, Perls intended to apply differential thinking which is based on Friedländer’s theory of creative indifference.
[…]
Experimenting — A familiar approach to creative indifference and differential thinking
Experimenting allows us as therapists to be learners, to take risks, to bearing, but also humble and clumsy make mistakes and admit them, and especially to be able to attune ourselves to our patients while still remaining in touch with our own perceptions.
From this perspective, an experimental attitude is not only an antidote to narcissism but it also prevents us from producing premature answers to complex questions. It stops us from knowing it all. To me, this is the basis for working creatively. We take into account the patient’s experience as well as the therapist’s, and then we explore the situation they create together.
(A)n experimental attitude is not only an antidote to narcissism but it also prevents us from producing premature answers to complex questions. It stops us from knowing it all.
This makes the field more complex the patient and therapists are interacting each with their own polarities interests motivations experiences and needs.The patients polarities don’t exist in a vacuum. They aren’t the object of an examination, but rather emerge within the context of the therapeutic relationship within a joint situation. This experimental approach turns the therapeutic situation into the kind of fertile void from which the surprising and enriching interplay of polarities can emerge. Novel ways of meaning-making stimulating awareness and connecting to one another are supported. This is the light-footed calibration and balance of all aspects of ourselves in relation to one another being of the field; not digging in our heels in stubborn persistence in isolation and prefabricated assertions.
Embarassment is the boundary state par excellance
Part of the journey toward mutual meaning-making is experimenting with embarrassment. Embarrassment which Laura Pearl’s called the boundary state par excellence in which we have one foot in the familiar and one foot in the unknown; a fine example of balancing and calibrating polar opposites. It’s a little bit the way I feel now not really being able to see you, being mildly blinded but still talking and hoping that you’re staying with me.
If we can stay with our embarrassment, our clumsiness, our awkwardness, then we can make contact with what is different for the other, and as we allow ourselves to stay with this experience the boundary of what is accessible expands. We don’t acknowledge our embarrassment, but rather remain within our familiar structures, then we may have the feeling of security but the the price is costly. We won’t contact the novel, we won’t learn anything new, we won’t grow. If patients are struggling with leaving their comfort zones and reluctant to familiarize themselves with the unknown, I’ll often encourage them to embody their dilemma by standing up and playing around with the boundaries of the carpet in my office. Virtually with one room one foot on the carpet and,On the wooden floor, representing the familiar and the unknown. Standing up moving around physically embodying different stances often affords them better awareness of their inflexible polarities and entices them to try out new more satisfying calibrations.
[…]
What are exactly creative indifference and differential thinking, polarities, Zero point or pre-difference, degrees of differentiation.
In a chapter written by the German Gestalt therapist, Ludwig Frambach called the world of nothingness Salomon Friedlander’s creative indifference that I translated for the book […], Frambach put forth that Friedländer’s basic concepts. Creative indifference and polar differentiation mark the beginnings of Perls reflections on therapy theory. […]
Background of Friedländer’s life.
He was born in 1871 in Golans, which is now Poland. He was a German-Jewish philosopher and satirist. […]
With a good measure of black humor. Friedländer wrote, very absurd and popular. Avanga poetry and prose under the name Mynona, which is the German term for anonymous (anonym), written backwards. It seems that Mynona was Friedländer’s alter ego. His dissertation focused on Schopenhauer and Kant. In 1906, he moved to Berlin where he was very comfortable in expressionist bohemian circles among artists and intellectuals.
In 1933, he fled from the rising Nazi movement to Paris where he was very ill for many years and this ironically prevented him from being deported. He died in Paris in abject poverty in 1946.
As far as I can could determine except for two of his novels, none of his writing has been translated into English. So anything you read in English of his philosophy is been is in German or another language.
In Ego, Hunger and Aggression, Perls mentions that there’s no such thing as objective science, that all observations, including those made by scientists, are impacted by particular interests preconceptions and an attitude, largely unconscious, which proceeds selectively. He emphasizes that human beings are indifferent to and uninterested in what they subjectively experienced to be not differentiated.
“Indifferent” refers to being disinterested without prejudice or preference, impartial, unbiased.
“Indifferent” here refers to being disinterested without prejudice or preference, impartial, unbiased.
I’m using the term indifferent to mean not differentiated, capable of development in more than one direction. Being disinterested underlines the absence of prejudice or selfish interests, whereas being uninterested refers to aloofness. So disinterested and uninterested are not very good synonyms because uninterested rather means “I don’t care. I have no interest at all.”
The Zero point, null or naught, is both a beginning and a center like with positive and negative numbers. Perls finds that it’s natural for human beings to think in opposites.He says differentiation into opposites is an essential quality of our mentality and of life itself. Our systems revolve around the Zero point of normality or health. For example, differentiating into two opposites, such as plus and minus, or pleasure and pain.
The way we think in opposites is important and depends on the context. Opposites Perls says a more closely related to one another than each is related to other concepts, such as black and white within the context of color.
Differential thinking, which is a term that Perls coined is the insight into the working of such systems. We would have no concept for day if we didn’t have night as well.
Perls said instead of awareness sterile indifference would prevail. So in Friedländer’s theory it’s important to distinguish between a fertile void and an infertile one.
Creative indifference and being interested
Creative indifference must be distinguished from uninterested detachment from the “I don’t care” attitude. If we’re to perceive an appreciate a phenomenon, it must be different from something else. And as we try to disentangle thoughts into correlative pairs, the unity of polar differentiation, the middle point, or indifference, remains elusive.
We can’t grasp it.
Our focus lies, rather, on the poles than on the indifference.
In this indifference lies the real secret — the creative will, the polarizing one itself, which objectively is absolutely nothing. However, without indifference, there would be no world.
Friedländer says, “yet in this indifference lies the real secret — the creative will, the polarizing one itself, which objectively is absolutely nothing. However, without indifference, there would be no world.”
Indifference, or the naught zero of the difference, is the center of creativity. The original source, the subjective heart of the world, according to Friedländer. External and objective is what can be differentiated into polarities, but the internal part is the indifferent, weighty world of nothingness.
Originally in German, das Weltenschwangerenichts, which means literally, the nothingness that gives birth to worlds.
…The nothingness that gives birth to worlds.
This picture is a Zen calligraphy of the word “mu” which incidentally refers to the same concept of nothingness.
Friedländer emphasizes the lively creative center by referring to it with a multitude of terms ,ego or ego heliocentre, self, being, subject, individual identity, person, mind, soul, absoluteness, the symbol for infinity insistence will or freedom. […] Perls used in writing Ego, Hunger and Aggression, center, zero point, equilibrium, naught, void, pre-difference, holes, balance and so forth.
Friedländer won’t be restricted to one term for what is indescribable and perhaps this joy in circumscribing a definition influence Perls’ diverse descriptions of the concept of self. Because in Perls, Hefferline and Goodman (1951), he refers to it as the artist of life, the function of contacting, the actual transient present, the system of present contacts, and the agent of growth, the complex system of contacts necessary for adjustment in the field.
Creative indifference tends toward creative development.
Friedländer are found indifferentiation to be liberating, for it allowed a person to become centered, able to integrate a variety of experiences and contents, to tolerate ambiguity and ambivalence, and to find what he called, their heart. By embracing a diversity of possible phenomena, we can actively engage in creative production because creative indifference tends toward creative development.
In more simple terms, arising from an indifferent middle point, we can embrace and balance both polar opposites and calibrate our actions, depending on what the situation calls for, demand characteristics of the situation; Gestalt psychologists would say.
Polarities are mutually related, not contradictions
Polarities shouldn’t be treated as mutually exclusive contradictions, but rather as polarly differentiated units of opposites. They are mutually related and can be flexibly centered according to their zero point. Between the polarities there’s a tension, a kind of magnetism an appropriate Gestalt therapy example of this is what we call, present-centeredness.
According to Perls, the present is the ever-moving zero point of the opposite’s past and future. It’s not static, or absolute, but a constant plane with relativity, a balancing, a back-and-forth of meaning-making.
The Field, the Context
Opposites emerge from the pre-different. Differentiation begins at the zero point, and in choosing a zero point, the field is a pivotal factor.
Creative indifference is full of interest, extending towards both sides of the differentiation. It’s by no means identical with the absolute zero point but will always have an aspect of balance. Thus by having the field, the context, we can determine the opposites, and by having the opposites, we can determine the specific field.
[CASE STUDY at timestamp 19:56]
Ludwig Frambach also finds evidence for Friedländer’s differential thinking in such gestalt concepts as as self and middle mode. In Perls, Hefferline and Goodman you’ll read self is spontaneous middle and mode as the ground of action and passion and engaged with its situation as you, I and it. The spontaneous is both active and passive both willing and done to, or better, it is middle in mode, a creative impartiality, a disinterest, not in the sense of being not excited or not creative, for spontaneity is eminently these but as the unity prior and posterior to activity and passivity containing both.
In the English language there hardly exists any middle mode, it doesn’t imply any action on the self such as retroflection. The middle mode means rather than whether the self does or is done to. It refers to the process itself as a totality. It feels it as its own and is engaged in it. So perhaps it is the English expression, “to address oneself to”.
The fertile void, the impasse
The fertile void, which Perls seems to often use almost interchangeably with creative indifference, also appears in his five-layer model of neurosis. Following the phoney and phobic layer there’s an impasse, a kind of blockade in which former foreground-background differentiation dissolves into chaotic disarray. The fourth layer, resembling a vacuum, is referred to as the death layer, also the fertile void or implosion.
Here the indifference of nothingness, the creative ground can be experienced affording a person the opportunity to readjust a one-sided identification to discover unknown aspects of himself or herself, to experiment with calibrations of extremes, and basically recovery mode. Then the self can be spontaneous in its agency integrating previously rejected or undiscovered aspects of the personality, balancing them appropriately with what a person already accepts and identifies with. This is the emergence of the explosion layer.
[…]
Is working with creative indifference a methodological question an approach that gestalt therapists adopt today?
It’s often the case that people who seek psychotherapeutic help find themselves off balance, out of touch with their emotions, caught in a rut of routine that’s limiting and frustrating… and a person who’s suffering from an urgent problem will most likely not be ready and willing to immediately begin the search for aspects of their perception that have been avoided, overlooked, devaluated or which are potentially shameful. They may say, “This is who I am. This is how I am. I’ll never be able to change.”
Therefore a trusting mutually appreciative therapeutic basis is important before we embark on the adventure of exploring unknown territory. As usual, we’re accompanying our patients, not forcing our insights and interpretations down their throats. We all know that the need to change and grow is often as strong as the need to hold onto our familiar ways of dealing with life.
A part of our task is to stimulate our patients’ curiosity and help them complete the picture between the familiar pole and the unknown one taking the many small steps in between. And this is involves what I often call, “rewinding their film”.
Not being aware of things that might shed light on our situation is one way of avoiding a decision that could bring about change. So our job is to keep the dominant pole in awareness while helping the patient to realize that there’s a polar opposite out there that’s being neglected, and the that these polar opposites are parts of a whole aspect of the same reality. We can help them to realize that restricting themselves to one pole not only keeps them in an unsatisfying situation but also robs them of the opportunity to test more enjoyable and satisfying ways of being. A part of our task is to stimulate our patients’ curiosity and help them complete the picture between the familiar pole and the unknown one taking the many small steps in between. And this involves what I often call, “rewinding their film”.
Not knowing for sure, is helpful
To this effect, an indifferent attitude and approach of not knowing for sure is helpful. Not knowing for sure implies that there are countless ways of dealing with a problem, not just one. This takes into account the uniqueness of each patient and each therapist and unique this of the way they work together.
Moreover, the rest of the field — the current context — must be considered, such as life circumstances, and the social, financial, and political situation.
Friedländer’s equilibration of polar opposites certainly influenced Perls’ work with polarities, as well as the gestalt therapy concept that human beings create their own reality. Equilibriating or centering implies appropriate adjustment to a situation. Balancing the predominant with the neglected aspects, transforming a feudal struggle into productive cooperation. Turning a standoff into enjoyable interplay and enriching recombination.
[…] Instead of rigid and isolated dualities, we have flexible and related polar opposites.
The fertile void is insistent, and it only becomes existent through the will of a person.
If the center, self, zero point or fertile void is indifferent or undifferentiated and everything possibly human is a priori contained in this, then the fertile void can be considered to be an inexhaustible source of energy and possibilities. Friedlander calls this fertile void insistent, and it only becomes existent through the will of a person.
The distance from the zero point of one’s decision corresponds to a distance from the same zero point in the direction of what this person is avoiding or not embodying. From this perspective, if one’s very essence is considered to be invulnerable, all movements away from the center seem to be relative differentiations.
Then all the decisions one makes, all the undesirable developments, all the injuries and traumata can be worked through in light of an opposite force that can be accessed. To me, this is a very life-affirming position and it’s vital for our work as gestalt therapists and appeals to me on the one hand — but on the other hand, I must admit, that I sometimes feel restricted by Friedländer’s elusive concepts.
In my perspective, a contemporary gestalt therapeutic concept of the fertile void is not just about concentrating on a patient’s polarities and calibrating them because this reflects the one person psychology of the past.
Contemporary perspective is multidimensional and highly relational. I tend to envision a three-dimensional conglomerate of related parts that can be jointly reconfigured many times over. Rather a sculpture and installation or a group of items placed together, meaningfully then a drawing because the parts need to be movable. So let’s not just limit ourselves to focusing on the calibration of polarities, but also on the additional dimensions of what we as therapists bring into the equation. The relational present of the patient as well, the dimension of time and many other influences on the present situation.
Contemporary perspectives of Gestalt therapists
I’d like to mention the work of several gestalt therapists on who’s concepts are drawn and reflecting on the fertile void Joseph Zinker (1977) on polarities and experiments, Franz Staemmler on cultivated uncertainty, Laura Perls on meaning-making and embarrassment, Richard Wallin on Gestalt theoretical principles and Jean-Marie Robine, on intentionality and the situation.
Zinker sketched his notions of a healthy and a pathological self-concept in terms of polar opposites and aware versus unaware experiences. This is a sketch of his of healthy self-concept where. The aware part is white and shows the polarities that are accessible to an individual and the shaded area is his blind spot. So the shaded area is rather small.
The pathological self-concept is here. It shows a rather large shaded area of blind spots and things that aren’t accessible. It shows inflexibility and unawareness.
Despite the fact that many of us today deal with categories of healthy and pathological as being on a much more fluid spectrum and rather founded on relationally-based aesthetic criteria than individual pathology Zinker’s sketches enable us to understand that embracing contradictions ambivalence and ambiguity and ability to experience relationships between these internal aspects, help to keep us balanced.
Here he shows that if we stretch the polarities in one direction it automatically stretches also in the other direction.
When Frank Staemmler refers to cultivated uncertainty as an attitude for Gestalt therapists, that reflects the dialogical approach, it implies that we must be aware of our uncertainty regarding our own attribution of meanings to patients. Looking closely, we also find it in what Laura Perls called the three E’s of therapy: existential, experiential and experimental. According to Laura Perl’s we’re constantly creating out of nothingness psychotherapeutically, artistically, or scientifically with insights and realizations, with the re-configuration of chaos and ugliness into something new and meaningful.
Following the thoughts of Laura Perls and Paul Goodman about aesthetic qualities being inherent to human experience, Michael Vincent Miller (2003), in a beautiful article called Notes on Art and Symptoms, reminds us that Gestalt therapy theory reflects concepts where familiar with in the field of art. Good contact can be seen as an aesthetic activity and these activities demonstrate good form and others beautiful, in the sense of being meaningfully organized and integrated.
It’s precisely the integration of seemingly incompatible and disparate experiences, the ability to deal with the challenges of ambiguity and complexity, the skill of being able to embrace differing perspectives and contradictory alternatives with ease and comfort, that’s our goal and therapy, for they afford us meaning in a sense of being one with ourselves in relation to others. Such ongoing gestalt formation belongs to the essential goals of therapy.
Both art and psychotherapy thus reflect the human tendency to form and transform familiar elements and thus bring about new information to transform one’s own experience in a world in a way that allows for integration by creating something unique and meaningful. The form is given to human experience. It’s precisely the integration of seemingly incompatible and disparate experiences, the ability to deal with the challenges of ambiguity and complexity, and the skill of being able to embrace differing perspectives and contradictory alternatives with ease and comfort, that’s our goal and therapy, for they afford us meaning in a sense of being one with ourselves in relation to others. Such ongoing gestalt formation belongs to the essential goals of therapy.
To Laura Perls, we human beings are always involved in the polarities of being unique and being mortal. The first gives us the impression of incredible significance. The second the feeling of fear and frustration and the human condition is a continuous balancing of the tension between these poles.
Richard Wallen convincingly tied gestalt psychological principles in particular gestalt destructuring and formation to the effect of practice of herself therapy. He suggested ways of interest intervening, that would destabilise a blocked unsatisfying life situation and support the patient in reconfiguring the field into a meaningful whole. He gave great attention here to bodily awareness and careful experimentation with the perception of and movement. Although he doesn’t speak in terms of fertile voids or polarities, he does focus on deconstructing an imbalanced field and reassembling it beginning fresh to allow a meaningful stop to emerge and this brings me to Jean-Marie Robine’s profound work on taking shape.
An article published in 2003 or being focused is his attention on the therapeutic situation and the importance of the unoriginal pre-differentiated phase the vague, confused, diffuse or chaotic phase of four contacts before a figure clearly emerges. He states what we call the “social situation” is a structure of possibilities that I create with the other, and which in turn creates us respectively. Clearly, the therapeutic situation defines my presence and my intention as a psychotherapist just as it defines the presence and expression of my client.
The concept of the self in gestalt therapy tends to focus on someone’s I am, a narrative identity. Which is one of the possible declensions of the personality mode of the self. A result of an experience in a certain situation.
Contrary to gestalt’s temporalized and delocalized way of approaching the concept of self narrative identity tends to be static and perceived as a structure or character. It gives us the impression of fixity, suggesting that the self is something permanent or stable. So this need for stability and continuity forecloses access to the novelty of situations and opens us to the repetition of experiences, including the most painful ones. So if a patient has some presuppositions about themselves or us as a therapist, then it prevents this person from sensing the situation, and what’s really going on. They aren’t of the situation. So, this might suit their comfort zone and need for security and certainty, but instead of staying in contact with their immediate sensations and perceptions, however vague, confusing or contradictory, we often tend toward what Robine calls premature differentiation, which is based on a similar premature individuation.
So Robine compels us to linger in this phase of four contacts or skillfully return to it with our patients. So we can enable them to access novel aspects of our meeting and to avoid these over-hasty assertions or premature intentionality, because intentionality proceeds, what forms a person’s conscious intent.
We can seek it in the therapeutic situation by expressing how we, as another in the presence of our patient, are mostly impacted by this encounter how we resonate and experience it. We begin with experience with what is sensed and perceived in the moment as opposed to our assumptions of the other.
What I sense and intuit when together with someone helps me to understand what’s in the field. The way I’m affected by a patient gives me information about their intentionality, and how I act on this, can support its differentiation and open the person to new possibilities. Here, now, next tells us that in the present moment, there’s an orientation, an imminent direction, an implied future.
Robine talks about the metaphoric construction site, which is reopened with each encounter giving us novelty surprises and touching the unknown. And it appears to me that it’s just this metaphoric construction site –I love that expression — Is the rich source of all possibilities and creative indifference.
This view has implications for the effective practice of gestalt therapy. Robine reminds us to attend more carefully to the phase of the process of construction and deconstruction of gestalts. The emergence of figures against the background. As he said at the fertile exit from the void, that according to Perls, defines the zero point, the before and after of every gestalt.
So instead of taking our patients presenting problem, or the figure they decided to work on it face value, it’s our task to introduce a measure of uncertainty or doubt, maybe irritate them. Interventions are called for that enhance the vagueness. They can help to work back to the id of the situation, to an undifferentiated state from which together we can allow gestalt construction and deconstruction to an unfold.
As Robine says, this complexifies intentionality by amplifying confusion. This is one of the gold nuggets in this article, it’s wonderful. So we joined the revisit the elements that contributed to the emerging figure. We disentangle the material, we try to reconnect it, we restructure it, through the presence of another in a way that takes our own situation or present and our presence into account. We afford the patient different information adding complexity and the reorganization. The process of reconstruction allows for novelty and the reorganization of a dysfunctional situation. So this redistributes the excitation. It reorients the direction of meaning. We extend an invitation to play. We play with the situation until work becomes played.
Enabling possibilities
Therefore our interventions are aimed at enabling possibilities. We collectively disconnect deconstruct de-autonomized we reshuffle and then we reconstruct. We stand by our patients during upheaval and temporary chaos. We contain confusion and seeming incompatibilities. We assist with the new configuration of figures and backgrounds we maintain mobility and flexibility. Our task is not a matter of substituting dysfunctional connections with new more appropriate ones. But it’s much more matter of introducing mobility in such a way that nation’s experience can modify if you can modulate its available and accessible materials into creative configurations themselves, unceasingly renewed. As an old saying goes, “if you give someone a fish then he has food for one day, but if you teach him how to fish then they’ll have food for a lifetime”.
Our patients’ difficulties in living their symptoms and suffering can be seen as the production of figures from the available materials in their backgrounds, it’s a process of gestaltung, of taking shape giving form to something. So we’re engaged in the structuring of the situation. Often we’ll have to interrupt a patient’s prepared narrative or insist on rewinding the film so that we can benefit from the possibilities of an undifferentiated starting point and continuously engaged in the aesthetic creation of meaningful forms.
It’s this undifferentiated location, this vague phase of fore contact, that I relate to creative indifference, it’s the deep well of all possibilities the metaphoric construction site. So my perspective can be summed up as a decidedly relational multidimensional approach our tasks are to intervene in such a way that the rigid patterns of our patients can be softened, their age-old assumptions are reassessed as to their appropriateness to the current situation over hasty narratives are slowed down and explored step by step. A prefabricated solution to a problem is put on hold and the focus is placed on collaborative meaning-making based on aesthetic experiences.
Accordingly, the original situation and materials from which these figures emerge can be jointly perceived, experienced, and reconnected in a novel way, thanks to the sensory experience, immediate emotional reaction and insights of the therapist within the therapeutic situation.
Typical interventions to this effect are:
“I feel as if you’re giving me the answer to a question I haven’t posed yet.” “Let’s rewind the film to the beginning and proceed slowly.” “Tell me more about what you were experiencing before you came to this conclusion.” “How else could we perceive this situation?” “What might we have overlooked?” “Describe your bodily sensations and impulses.” “Do any images arise?” ” What do you smell or taste?” “Who or what might have played a role when this difficulty first arose?” “What’s the opposite of your fearing powerless and being at your partner’s mercy?” “My breathing becomes shallow as I listen to you.” “I feel angry when I hear what you’re telling me.” “I start to feel hypnotized when I listen to you talking without interruption.” “I feel out of touch with you when you talk about yourself in terms of clinical diagnosis.”
Clearly this implies that we’re not working solely with a patient’s polarities, but also with what emerges is figural from the context of our experiences, with our immediate sensory and emotional reactions, our fantasies, with our reflections on the therapeutic relationship and dynamics.
The therapy room has become a multi-dimensional space for creative play and experiments, for novel compositions mixtures and new combinations. We are part of the equation. A creative elaboration of therapy is for the moment real and the game. One which is limited in time, but which has a lasting effect.
We have extended an invitation to play. As psychotherapists, we can assume that if people have learned one-sided view of themselves and others, they can also learn to balance these misperceptions or premature assertions. At times we’re like good parents. We’re attentive to their needs. We offer them a safe space to explore what might feel threatening and encourage them to restructure and reconnect their interpersonal fields. We encourage them to take stock of their current assumptions and models of the world, to test novel ways of construing and discover what’s appropriate to their life here-and-now with a view to what comes next. Thank you for your attention.
My article on Creative Indifference
Understanding Salomo Friedlaender’s Creative Indifference: A Psychotherapy Case-Study.
Chew-Helbig, N. (2022). Understanding Salomo Friedlaender’s Creative Indifference: A Psychotherapy Case-Study. Geštalt Zbornik. 9, pp. 5-15 https://www.ceeol.com/content-files/document-1127011.pdf
Footnotes:
[1] “Schöpferische Indifferenz, Individuum — bitte nicht sofort ein Mißverständnis bei diesem ersten Wort! Es ist kein einzelner Mensch gemeint, auch nicht die aus solchen Einzelheiten bestehende Menschheit, überhaupt nichts Einzelnes, sondern das Ganze, aber nicht objektiv, sondern subjektiv, ein schöpferisches Pathos, der Wille, der Entschluß, Freiheit, Exemtion des „Innern“ von aller Isolation, aller Dividualität — als diese Freiheit erst befähigt zur Regierung alles Vereinzelten, schöpferisch lebendige Identität. Allerdings, dieses kann man sich nur selber geben — aber man ist sonst nur illusorisch ein Selbst.” (Friedländer, 1918/2013, p. 89)
[2] At this point of writing this article, I am not aware of an English translation of the book, Schöpferische Indifferenz, the quotations I present here are my translated version.
Bibliography
Ament-Lyon, N. (2019). How can a void be fertile? EAGT Gestalt Conference 2019, Budapest, Hungary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXMw7h5WWds
Friedlaender, S. (1918/2013). Schöpferische Indifferenz. Gesammelte Schriften Vol 10. BoD–Books on Demand.
Miller, M. V. (2003). The aesthetics of commitment: What gestalt therapists can learn from Cezanne and Miles Davis. In Creative License (pp. 153-161). Springer, Vienna.
Perls, F. (1942, 1947). Ego, Hunger and Aggression ISBN 0-939266-18-0
Perls, F., Hefferline, G., & Goodman, P. (1951). Gestalt therapy. New York, 64(7), 19-313.
Zinker, J. (1977). Creative process in Gestalt therapy. Brunner/Mazel.