Members of the Manchester Gestalt Centre have contributed significantly to the field of Gestalt psychotherapy – through books, chapters and essays exploring theory, practice, embodiment, relationality, ageing, and the wider field.
Below is a selection of published work available through booksellers, Amazon or directly via the Centre.
Gestalt Psychotherapy and Ageing chapter in ‘Psychopathology of the Situation in Gestalt Therapy
Chapter written by Alessandra Merizzi within the book, Ed. Margherita Lobb & Pietro Cavaleri – Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy
Gestalt: A New Idiosyncratic Introduction
By John Bernard Harris
John wrote this booklet for anyone whose interested in Gestalt, and wants to find out more about it. It offers a very readable introduction to the basic ideas of Gestalt therapy, and is our best seller!
Gestalt: Working with Groups
(2nd revised edition 1992)
By Peter Philippson and John Bernard Harris
This booklet expounds a Gestalt approach to working with groups, teams and organisations. The second edition contains three new chapters. Invaluable for anyone who works in and with groups, in any setting. With illustrations by John.
Working with Anger in Therapy – A Gestalt approach
(Second Edition: September 2001)
By John Bernard Harris, with additional material by Peter Philippson.
This booklet is about anger: what it is, how we can learn to see it positively, how we can work with other people’s anger in a therapeutic way. Written primarily for those in the helping professions, but useful for anyone who simply wants to understand more about the nature of anger. The second edition contains some new material, including a new chapter on Anger Management at Work. With illustrations by John.
The Aesthetic of Otherness – meeting at the boundary in a desensitized world.
Proceedings of the AAGT Conference in Taormina, Sicily.
Edited by Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb and others. With chapters by Alessandra and Peter based on our conference presentations.
To read online free, or to buy (€25 + shipping), click below
The Nature of Pain (1986)
Edited by Peter Philippson
The transcript of a multi-disciplinary discussion involving both ‘orthodox’ and ‘complementary’ practitioners, on the nature of pain.
To order: Please send a cheque or postal order made payable to “Manchester Gestalt Centre” including postage and packing @ 60p for first copy, 20p for each further copy. (N.B. For orders of 10 or more copies, subtract 80p from the price of each booklet. Such orders will be posted to you free of charge.)
The ‘Active Principle’ in Gestalt Therapy and Other Essays
By Peter Philippson
The extended essay on the Active Principle in Gestalt Therapy is a description of an approach that honours the radical understanding of self inherent in Gestalt Therapy. The accompanying essays expand the themes of the Active Principle essay into specific areas of philosophy and practice, including Field Theory, the nature of truth, sexuality and time.
Self – A Polyphony of Contemporary Gestalt Therapists
ed. Jean-Marie Robine
Gestalt Therapy: Roots and Branches
By Peter Philippson
The price of the print version of this book has been reduced to £15 inc. postage if ordered from Manchester Gestalt Centre.
Self in Relation
By Peter Philippson
Peter is presenting here his own map of Gestalt therapy, from its first principles in philosophy to its expression in specific methods of psychotherapy.
The Emergent Self
By Peter Philippson
This book tracks a particular understanding of self, philosophically, from research evidence and in its implications for psychotherapy. At each step, the author includes first the theory he is working from, then the clinical implications of the theory, followed by some links to the philosophical outlook inherent in the theory, and finally a more extended case example.
Paper 1 - Revisiting the Field
By Peter Philippson
In this paper, I examine the meaning of ‘field’ in Gestalt Therapy, and what a field orientation means for the theory and practice of therapy. I also look at what philosophical principles can add to or take away from the clarity of the approach.
Paper 2 - Dreamwork
By Peter Philippson
I love working with dreams. I have found that they have the capacity to move therapy work on to a new level, both in individual and group therapy. They speak from a place that is outside the familiar, and often to what is not being attended to, or avoided in life and therapy.
Paper 3 - People and Avatars
By Peter Philippson
We are in a world that is increasingly complex. Most of us inhabit two worlds that seem very different, the immediate experiential world and a virtual cyber-world of e-mail, text, social media. Gestalt Therapy emphasises ‘contact’ and ‘awareness’, and the question arises how much we can talk about these in relation to connections in cyberspace. What are the ethics of cyberspace?
Paper 4 - We can be Together, but You and Me can Meet
By Peter Philippson
What does it mean for us to meet? Is it a matter of us being here together in the same place, or seeing each other, or you hearing me? How much is it just a meeting of my interpretation of you, while you are meeting with your interpretation of me? Are we just in a hall of mirrors, reflection meeting reflection? And in that case, is it meaningful to talk about meeting, or contact, or love at all? Are the narcissists right, and are we all like Narcissus, falling in love with our own reflection?
Paper 5 - A Couple in the World: a field-oriented view of Couples Work
By Peter Philippson
In this paper, I want to develop a Gestalt field-oriented understanding of therapeutic work with couples. The approach can be extended to work with families, but that is beyond the scope of the present paper. The basic field awareness is that just as the activity of each person in a couple can only be seen in the context of the couple as a whole (rather than belonging merely to that individual), no couple exists in a vacuum, and many issues that couples come to therapy to resolve are related to the wider field in and from which the individuals and relationship are emerging. This perspective also allows us to gain a less culture-specific view of relationships.
Paper 6 - The Joy of Horror Films
By Peter Philippson
I like good horror films. They tell us what we truly fear, and how we truly respond to fear. And I am curious why so many people also like horror films, and related questions about why children regularly see monsters in the dark, why people go bungee jumping and white water rafting, even why people feel better singing or hearing the Blues. What does this tell us about ourselves as a species? And what does it mean that there are also people who would strongly avoid all of these (avoidance also being an energised relation to the object of avoidance)?
Paper 7 - The Tyranny of ‘Feelings'
By Peter Philippson
What is the meaning of emotion in therapy? When is it important to focus on ‘feelings’ and when is it counterproductive? This in many ways seems like a ridiculous question, since ‘feelings’ are often taken as the central point of who we are and what we show in therapy. In this article, I want to question the assumption that emotion is necessarily central to therapy, and look at the meaningful place for emotion in both therapist and client.
Paper 8 - Time, Life and Death
By Peter Philippson
In this paper, I dig deeper into a Gestalt Therapy understanding of time which gets away from the idea of a line from the past into the future. I then look at what this view implies about our understanding of death in relation to life.
Paper 9 - Sexuality: Drive and Relationship
By Peter Philippson
It has become a truism in psychotherapy writings to say that therapy is about the ‘lived-body’ (Körper) rather than the physical body (Leib), and the ‘phenomenal world’ rather than the physical world, and has thus reproduced the Cartesian mind-body split that Perls and Goodman were so keen to move away from. The human animal, with its appetites, skin and genitalia, is gone! So we are left with a cerebral version of sexuality which has lost its rawness and danger. The primary sexual organ is then the brain and our narrative capacity. I think it is useful for Gestaltists to go back and revisit the important place that Freud allocated to sex.
Paper 10 - A Relational Approach to the Empty Chair
By Peter Philippson
In this paper, I want to describe why and how I continue to use the empty chair at times, how I understand it in relational terms, and, more generally, how experiments can be integrated with relational dialogue.
Paper 11 - Autonomy and Affiliation in a Cultural Context
By Peter Philippson
This is the plenary lecture I gave at the IGWien Gestalt conference in Vienna in October 2018, on the theme ‘Inside and Outside’. Vienna was the city of my mother’s birth before she and my father had to leave their native Austria and Germany and make a new life as asylum seekers in Britain. I speak to the theme of inside and outside, and cultural difference, from my experiences as a child and adult in a refugee family.
Paper 12 - A Gestalt Theory of Group Psychotherapy
By Peter Philippson
This paper presents a theory of groups and group psychotherapy, based on the Gestalt Therapy theory of Self, and informed by present-day thinking about human intersubjectivity, especially the work of Daniel Stern. In both these approaches, self is seen as arising from what Stern calls the ‘intersubjective matrix’ rather than belonging to the individual. Thus a ‘group matrix’ with different norms and rules than a person’s everyday life will inevitably call out different self-possibilities, and this, rather than an individual exploration, becomes the basis for therapeutic effectiveness.
Paper 13 - Why I Don’t Ask Questions in Therapy
By Peter Philippson
When I offer training workshops to people who haven’t seen me work before, one of the main things that they find surprising is how rarely I ask clients questions. In this paper, I discuss the issues that underlie my preference to avoid asking questions. I am aware that to even ask the question can seem strange. People have commented that I don’t seem interested in my clients! And in fact, it turns out that the answer to that critique is a major part of the discussion.
Paper 14 - Post Truth: The World Therapy Made!
By Peter Philippson
My thesis in this paper is that the people of the psychotherapy world, including Gestalt therapists, bear part of the responsibility for a world where truth has become fragmented, split off from the physical world of sensory and motor experience, and there is no obvious way for people to share through difference or to question assertions made that are ‘flatly contradicted’ by physical evidence. We have done this by a misreading of Husserl’s phenomenology, supported by a culture of confluence and thus an unwillingness to stand out with authority, or to say ‘no’ to someone else’s way of experiencing things.
Paper 15 - One-Power and Two-Power Therapy
By Peter Philippson, with thanks to Bob Resnick
In a one-power family, only one person can have power at any one time: either there is one person who always holds the power, or the power moves between the family members in different situations, but still is never shared. In a two-power family, everybody can be powerful, and there is more liveliness, creativity and energy, and also more overt conflict.
Having been sensitised to this idea, it became clear that a very high proportion of the difficulties brought by my clients came out of an early family pattern of one-power relationships, which they then took into their later relationships with partners, children, friends and work relationships.
And yet, most approaches to counselling and psychotherapy are based on one-power relationships between therapist and client! This paper discusses what it means to engage in two-power psychotherapy.
Paper 16 - Confluence and Self
By Peter Philippson
It seems important to me to address the place of confluence in the outlook of Gestalt Therapy. Does it have a meaning and functionality in our being in the world, or is it always a problem to be confronted? The latter was true at one stage in earlier Gestalt culture, where confluence was seen as always bad and to be avoided (although this is clearly not what our founding theory said).
I will put the case that confluence is a very significant part of the Gestalt understanding of selfhood, and that there are both times when it is required and times when it becomes problematic.
Paper 17 - The ‘Active Principle’ in Gestalt Therapy
By Peter Philippson
I really like the question: what is the ‘active principle’ in Gestalt Therapy: what is the engine of change that I offer clients who come to me because their lives have got stuck in a path that is frustrating and painful?
The answer that I give to this question comes from my ‘foundational’ perspective based on the original writings of the founders of the therapy. That approach seems to me to answer the question of ‘active principle’ in a radical way that has supported my work with a wide variety of clients, and has generated a lot of excitement when I teach it in Ukraine and elsewhere. For me, the field-relational perspective is the active principle in therapy.
What does this perspective offer as an active principle, and how does it differ from other therapies?
Paper 18 - Antivax, OCD and Other Projections
By Peter Philippson
My proposal is that the importance of obsessions and compulsions are that they provide an achievable quasi-response to the situation of anxiety and terror when acted out ‘as in a dream’. So frightening and alienating times inevitably bring out a combination of rageful aggression and loss of sensory and human contact with the world if we cannot find a meaningful way to address the danger in a contactful way. In time-honoured fashion, we find human sacrifices that we fantasise will bring better fortune. These can be refugees, people different from ourselves racially, sexually, politically, or religiously. The sacrifice does not work, any more than it did for the Aztecs or the Nazis, but we continue because we have no Plan B. Conspiracy theories abound, because then there is a shadowy ‘they’ who can be stopped, and then it will be all right.
Paper 19 - Group and Self
By Peter Philippson
In this paper, I have tried to do two things: to show how it is possible to talk about self-of-group in Gestalt terms, and to give a practical illustration of the idea of a person as an organ of choice and will of the field (in this case the field of a group). This way of looking at groups can be extended to groups of many sizes and configurations, including national politics and large organisations.
I have tried to avoid losing either a field-centred orientation or a sense of the significance of the field-emergent individual. We are never in a social vacuum, nor are we ever wholly socially determined. Human beings are both highly socially adapted, and able at any moment to turn round and take a different path: this is where social change comes from.