Thread: Gestalt Psychology - Applications for Lucid Dreamers

Strangely I came upon Sisyphus as a name just a few days ago when trying to find new tracks for a playlist and I don't think I'd heard the name before. And I see now that to some irony, I started off the playlist based on a track called Stillbirth which is partly about starting again and in another sense being born once again, which incidentally I feel is thematically relevant here.

Your description of how your perception shifted towards your otherwise normal environments makes me think of what I learned and experienced through mindfulness, which is about appreciating and at the same time not making judgments on one's situation and surroundings. It sounds to me like there's a difference because mindfulness in that sense is about quietude of conscious mind, which I don't think is what your described experience was about. Both seem to be about subjective perception though. Perhaps this relates to the Buddhist practises that have a similar potential? I admit that mindfulness is not a practise I've kept at the fore of my mind, but it's been there nonetheless.

It's interesting about Perls' book putting forward the notion that they were not intent on convincing readers intellectually or through reasoning in itself; in a way this is very close to something I have appreciated about reading Jung's works and more specifically reading one of the translated versions of the Red Book, because like you say the big-picture view is relevant but not necessarily entirely clear. Yet, to me there's at some point a fairly clear message that as a reader I should make my own judgment and not necessarily be so concerned with trying to make intellectual sense of what I am are reading. Much of Jung's experiences in said book had been otherwise private for quite some time and I think this may be of relevance because it meant that the pretext of "needing to prove" was not truly required when writing, since they were to some degree "just" his experiences.

I will admit that I think it is very difficult for just anyone to read something of this nature, possibly Gestalt Therapy too then, because most of us have that need of "logical" proof from an author except for the instances where we can actually relate to the described methods or experiences; in my case I have felt it easy to read the Red Book because although it is a product of its time and of its author's mindset, for me it provides a very relatable reading on some accounts, while also giving me some context of what some notions might have been like a hundred years ago.

Right now there's not much else I can comment because I think I need to process this a bit and I've come and gone away from the keyboard a few times since I started writing this. So far however, I like your extensive explanation here and feel like it's something to read with interest in exploring what's behind what's being said.

---

(This bit is a bit haphazard and disoriented because I am a bit short on time as I finish this, so I may need to revise/clarify something I said)

Just to briefly touch on the subject of normal versus healthy, in semi-recent conversations with someone elsewhere the topic of normality has come up a few times, no doubt in good part because of the community that I and they are in, we necessarily have to accept that we are not mainstream in relative terms as far as sub-cultures go.

So I think when you pointed out that "normal" sometimes incorporates "unhealthy" into its coping/survival mechanisms, I felt this to be a bit incomplete in some way, and if you were to give further explanation or example on it I might understand in what sense you meant this. I think because we tend to define normality as that which is apparently average. In a sense the entirety of people's individual experiences cannot be reasonably summarised based on their whole, because that whole does show patterns about the people, but it does not explain the patterns in itself, though it points there.

In my particular case, many people in the same community are individuals that I would 90% of the time label as "emotionally damaged", myself included. This is the apparent normal for myself and others in the community, whether they realise it or not and it's true that these individuals' lives likely include many degrees of unhealthy coping... However, through my experience and reading of works and thoughts such as those of Jung, I have been made to consider over the years that human experience requires the unhealthy aspect to be healthy; in Jungian terms, without the Shadow aspects of ourselves we might not be whole and these are aspects that we could totally consider to be unhealthy in some cases, psychologically anyway, if nothing else. I feel I'm straying a bit here so to be more specific I mean to say that I feel people do require to some degree to have this sort of unhealthy and self-expressing freedom, because if they don't have that freedom, behaviours, attitudes and coping mechanisms may become ever more extreme, much in the same way that anything that gets illegalised, banned or forbidden will be sought out just as much, if not more, than if the banned thing were to be normally available in some way, even if in a limited manner that is still restricted. I think there is obviously a need for balance, because one way or another, extreme behaviour and damaged or ill-intending psyche will always exist and cannot be eradicated so to speak, regardless of whichever way the pendulum swings, since such behaviour is to some extent resultant of individuals reaching breaking points in their lives because to some degree, that's just what happens in life.

Sorry for the delay - I will definitely get to posting more, and answering, in the next couple days once I have time to do it properly!

Originally Posted by DarkestDarkness

Your description of how your perception shifted towards your otherwise normal environments makes me think of what I learned and experienced through mindfulness, which is about appreciating and at the same time not making judgments on one's situation and surroundings. It sounds to me like there's a difference because mindfulness in that sense is about quietude of conscious mind, which I don't think is what your described experience was about. Both seem to be about subjective perception though. Perhaps this relates to the Buddhist practises that have a similar potential? I admit that mindfulness is not a practise I've kept at the fore of my mind, but it's been there nonetheless.

Ah, mindfulness. I don’t like to use the word myself since it’s rather imprecise, and I have the impression it’s been diffused to the point where it just sounds like it doesn’t mean anything much. I could call what I tried back then a mindfulness technique – but I am quite sure that corporations would not offer their employees programs on something if they were expecting results akin to what I experienced, and it would be kind of creepy if they did.

I’m not entirely sure I know what you mean by “subjective perception” – I would say that all perception is subjective – but I guess I might describe it as something like centered perception, or perception grounded in the present moment, or possibly embodied perception, in contrast with perception in which thought has taken precedence over the senses. Maybe that’s close to what you mean?

Originally Posted by DarkestDarkness

It's interesting about Perls' book putting forward the notion that they were not intent on convincing readers intellectually or through reasoning in itself; in a way this is very close to something I have appreciated about reading Jung's works and more specifically reading one of the translated versions of the Red Book, because like you say the big-picture view is relevant but not necessarily entirely clear. Yet, to me there's at some point a fairly clear message that as a reader I should make my own judgment and not necessarily be so concerned with trying to make intellectual sense of what I am are reading. Much of Jung's experiences in said book had been otherwise private for quite some time and I think this may be of relevance because it meant that the pretext of "needing to prove" was not truly required when writing, since they were to some degree "just" his experiences.

Oh, you’ve read the Red Book! It had only just been published when I was really focused on getting to know Jung’s works, and I couldn’t afford it then, but it sounds fascinating. There’s a chapter in Jung’s (semi-)autobiography – it’s called something like “Confrontation with the Unconscious”, I think – which I understand deals with the period in his life the Red Book dates from, but as a more general overview.

In the case of this book, it isn’t that Perls doesn’t want to convince readers that his theory is correct, but that he wants to convince them on an experiential basis rather than an abstract, intellectual one that would be meaningless if it wasn’t grounded in experience. Not to mention useless, since most people wouldn’t be motivated to act on the basis of something that wasn’t meaningful to them on an experiential level. At best, the intellectual understanding can serve as an inspiration and a guide towards getting the right sorts of experiences, but only if you actually try to put it into action – and the book does offer a very thorough grounding. It’s just not where the main emphasis lies.

Since you’ve got me thinking about Jung now, I guess I can borrow an example out of his life to illustrate what I mean. Jung was a Christian because God was just part of how he experienced the world – experience colored by the culture he grew up in, but experience nonetheless. Jung’s father was a pastor, but his understanding of his religion never got beyond the intellectual level – it never became truly real for him, which according to Carl Jung was a major source of dissatisfaction in his life.

Or – to use another example, since only using a religious one might give the wrong impression – my grandfather has been a psychology professor and a school counselor, but he always seemed to keep his “psychologist self” completely compartmentalized from his family life (which I’ve been given to understand was outright dysfunctional in some ways) and has always been rather clueless as to how to actually communicate with people effectively. I don’t know whether he’s felt like there’s something important missing from his life since he would never mention it if there was, but he’s my only living grandparent at this point, and even though we theoretically have an interest in common, it still feels like we never have anything to talk about when we see each other, which is kind of sad.

(On that note: I don’t know whether mentally psychoanalyzing one’s relatives actually does them any good, but it is a good way of staying sane in a dysfunctional family. )

I’m going to try to get back to the normal vs. healthy point later and address the rest of your post, but since it is sort of relevant here, I will say that I think one way in which what is normal in Western culture is unhealthy is the heavy emphasis placed on intellectual understanding – on being knowledgeable, on being right, on knowing the facts – when it’s at best the prelude to a deeper, experiential sort. And the dark side of this is that people who (reasonably) find the resulting shallowness and hypocrisy objectionable, or (reasonably) don’t see the point in acquiring knowledge that stays purely abstract, start thinking that ignorance must be a good thing, and the facts don’t matter at all (which is not reasonable). Sociology has its own separate toolkit from individual psychology, but I find there are a lot of social problems that come into focus when you consider that there are people in a culture that embody its shadow in various ways.

OK, so I’m finally ready to continue. This may or may not be a logical place to start – but I did want to focus on explaining some of the basic concepts before trying to make something out of them, and so I’m going to begin by considering the Gestalt view of the structure of the psyche.

I’ve always found theories mapping the psyche into distinct parts, like Freud’s id, ego, and superego, to be a bit slippery. If you look for these distinctions in your own mind, it’s usually possible to find at least some evidence for pretty much any theory, but I’ve never found any of them to really “click”. Just dividing the mind into conscious, preconscious, and unconscious regions is unobjectionable, and may be useful for some purposes, but it doesn’t actually lead to a better understanding of how it works, except by emphasizing that we aren’t aware of everything that’s there at any given time, and that there’s probably a lot there that has doesn’t regularly (or ever) enter awareness.

In contrast to mapping the psyche functionally, or based on the relative level of awareness of mental contents, Gestalt psychology considers the psyche to structure itself in various ways in response to stimuli – for example, one’s intentions or external situations. All of these temporary configurations can be understood using the concept of figure and ground: various parts of ourselves are brought into focus as they become relevant, or else they fade into the background, where we are aware of them only in a vague way, if at all.

(tldr; The psyche only has particular structures situationally: they are not a permanent feature.)

The concept of figure and ground is a bit easier to understand when considering sight or hearing: it means that we perceive one or several elements to be central and the rest as peripheral to them. This does not happen in a static way, but in a fluid, shifting one that is dependent on factors such as our own interests, desires, or the presence of something new or unusual in our environment. If you’re very hungry when entering a restaurant, you may not even notice its decor until you’ve eaten something. If you’re listening to a piece of music and an instrument you play enters, that’s likely to be the focus of your attention even if it’s not playing the melody. This is essentially the basis for the concept of state tests as well: things that “don’t belong” naturally stick out to us, and what we’re doing when we perform one is making the connection between “this isn’t something that would normally happen in this kind of a situation” and “I might be dreaming”.

This is the case for thought, one’s “conceptual sense”, as well as sight, hearing, and the other senses. This idea may be a bit difficult to grasp if it’s new to you, but it’s easily testable in one’s own experience of external reality. That reaction of seeing something that does not belong and thus attracts our attention is clearly a conceptual reaction as well as one of sight; there’s just no reason to schematize our reactions and separate out their various elements most of the time. It’s also worth mentioning that Buddhist philosophy has traditionally considered thought as a sense alongside the usual five, and it should also be a familiar idea if you’ve read ETWOLD (see Chapter 5!), although its role in perception is assumed there rather than stated explicitly.

It’s a little more difficult to catch your own mind in the act – to be aware of what exactly is happening as you take on various attitudes, roles, and mental stances and see the various combinations of figure and ground – but it’s a worthwhile exercise. And it is quite possible for noticing something is odd about your own thoughts to lead to a lucid dream, just as noticing environmental oddities can.

(tldr; Perception, which is always colored by thoughts, takes the form of figure and ground, with some parts sticking out to us and others fading into the background.)

I find this is a much more intuitive way of considering the structure of the psyche: as entirely situation-dependent. There are some situations where it may make sense to consider it in terms of conscious vs. unconscious (particularly while dreaming) and others where distinctions such as superego vs. ego or ego vs. shadow might be appropriate. These are temporary configurations or patterns that become habitual, and the degree to which they resonate with us will tend to depend on the sorts of situations or conflicts that are typical for us.

That part about conflicts is actually a major limitation of the better-known ways of dividing of the psyche. Freud formulated his model of the psyche based on the sorts of inner conflicts he saw his patients experiencing. Plato does something very similar in the Republic: he posits different parts of the psyche based on the various ways people can be in conflict with themselves. However, people aren’t always in a state of conflict in which they experience themselves as having various “parts”. And most of us (with the notable exception of Freud) would probably agree that inner conflict is not a natural state to be in. Do those parts still exist when we’re not feeling divided? We would have trouble finding them when introspecting – and I think I can safely say that they’re not discoverable by experience except by actually summoning up a compelling inner conflict or experimentally placing ourselves in the right kind of situation. When they make up the figure, they’re parts; when they’re part of the background, they’re not.

Introspection as a method is subject to similar limitations in that, when you’re examining your own psyche, it is not from a neutral observation post: it’s you who’s considering you, and so you’re actually introducing another type of division. This split is not a permanent feature of the mind either, and the sort of self-awareness that is characterized by taking on the role of a “watcher” is not the only kind that’s possible. (Note: This is something I’ll probably be returning to at some point since it’s highly relevant for various methods of attaining and maintaining lucidity, and mistaking one sort of self-awareness for another may be the source of some difficulties).

In the mind’s optimal state of functioning, these systems of figure and ground – the Gestalts, or wholes, of Gestalt psychology – are free to develop out of the basic unity of mind, body, and environment, with anything capable of becoming figure, and the figure being in focus and clearly distinguishable from the background. However, there are various habits of thought and perception that disturb this relationship and prevent certain things from coming into focus, or prevent any figure from coming fully into focus. This is where the methods of Gestalt psychology come into play: not with the goal of establishing some sort of theoretically harmonious relationship among the various parts of one’s mind, but rather troubleshooting the various problems that prevent this entirely natural thing from happening.

Interestingly, Perls seems to regard this state in which this process is allowed to take place undisturbed as being the same as the end-point of what Jung calls integration. This would also be something worth following up on, since it’s easy to see how this could be the case, but Jung is coming at it from a different enough angle to where it isn’t immediately obvious that there aren’t any important differences.

(tldr; Other approaches to this question are characterized by various limitations as their methods tend to introduce artificial divisions into what is essentially a unity.)