Relationship - Trajectory of the Humane

Vera Felicidade, 45, Gestalt Psychotherapist, graduated in Psychology at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), is now publishing her fourth book called Relationship Trajectory of the Humane. 20 years ago she has revolutioned Psychology while negating the unconscious in her firsth book Gestalt Psychotherapy - Conceptualizations (which is now re-published, third edition) and created her own psychotherapic method grounded on the fundamentals of the germany Gestalt and the Husserl's Phenomenology. In her most recent work, she develops the concept of "all relationship generates positionaments, which generate new relationships that, in turn, generate new positionaments, indefinitely", she conceptualizes desire, doupt, choice, anguish, disponibility, illusion and reality, love. In an exclusive interview to the Newspaper A TARDE, she speaks of her theory and makes antithesis to a series of concepts of the actual Psychology:

A TARDE - How did come up the idea to elaborate the Gestalt Psychotherapy?

V.F. - When I was studing Psychology, in 1964, and the Psychoanalysis didn't answer and was not satisfactory to the questioning over the humane, in so far as it looked to me as something totally literary, fundamented on the constructum of the unconscious, which was an hypothesis having nothing to do with science. The question of the unconscious didn't allow any comprovation unless through the unconscious itself. To come to this point my philosophical fundaments had great influence on my thought: the Materialism, Dialetic Materialism, my great preoccupation with Episthemology. I also had already the idea that Psychology had to know the man, and not just help him as that generation of psychologists use to think. Than I started to try to give answers to what is the human being, to the point that in 1970, I could answer this question and so I wrote the book.

A TARDE - How did you structure a psychotherapic method?

V.F. - It was like if the whole of the Gestalt knowledge left clear to me that to understand the humane it have to be in terms of what he was in the world, finally, how he perceives. I tried to transfere all of the Laws of Perception, given in experiments, and make a dynamic with them. There was a series of Psychoanalysis concepts, "parapraxis" (fehlleistung) for exemplo, which was explained by the unconscious, the Law of Proximity can well explain it; association of ideas, that Freud and Jung have taken so much time to conclude, can be explained by Proximity, Good Form, Continuity - Laws of Perception. But my first preoccupation was to create concepts. From this point I wrote the first book, which is the fundament of all of my work, there I defyne what is the human being, I do face the problem of temporality showing that the past do not have influence, because if it has influence it is present, I also show that the future do not exist, if it exists it is an aim and as an aim it is dis-structurator. In this sense my vision is very phenomenological, but it has a divergence from Phenomenology, because I take in consideration the structure. Another question which have to be answered it was the question of the affective wanting, because it use to be considered as something bad, as a desease. I had shown that the affective wanting is intrinsic to the human being, but, when I perceived this, I also perceived levels of structuration of the humane, levels that I call necessities and possibilities. The human being is resultant of possibilities or of the looking of solutions to necessities. My first book was almost an imposition towards be scientifically coherent, to give light to the ideas, create the conditions to discuss them, and in a certain way, it was also a theoric background to my work avoiding to be seen as something faker.

A TARDE - Is the Gestalt Psychotherapy better than the Psychoanalysis?

V.F. - When I created the Gestalt Psychotherapy my preoccupation was not to do what the Psychoanalysis did not do or to be better than the Psychoanalysis. I may have taking this position in so far as I criticize very much the Psychoanalysis, because it is a theory which lacks a lot scientific and methodological fundamentations; and besides, it is a theory created in the context of end of the XIX century. We had at that time an incipient Psychology, totally dominated by the Psychophisics, Psychophisiology, and there was also a science that was characterized by mesurements, the human being was considered something complex, qualitative, something which could not be mesured. Any theory which didn't try to grasp the human complexity through complexity, a myth, could not act. But in 1970, after the hyppy movement, after a series of crisis inside Philosophy, after the superpopulation etc, the veils of something which was always obvious started to fall down, I mean, the man is in the world and it has thousands variables, there is no sense in sclerosing it, no sense to determine mesurement points. I think my theory is valid in as much as it tries to show the globalization in the way to aprehend the humane. Gestalt is a global vision, it is a vision of camp, it is not that thing of cathegories, types, classes. If I did not have created the Gestalt Psychotherapy, probably another person would have done something equivalente, because it was not possible anymore to work with that rigid concept, the stereotypied concept of unconscious.

A TARDE - From the first book to this fourth one, that you publish now, what had change in your concepts about the human being?

V.F. - Now, everything has changed in terms of development of concepts. For exemplo, when I say that all relationship generates positionaments which generate new relationships that in turn generate new positionaments, indefinitly, and then I define doubt, anguish, choice, love, disponibility; that would be the diverse manifestations of situations where this appears, I mean, the development that all relationship generates positionaments... in a way I'm showing that the human being exists in a time and in a space. I'm showing that the temporality is the relationship and that the space is the positionament. But in 1972 I did'nt have a clear idea that all positionament... I use to explain this, maybe, in terms of Dialetic. I use to say that things were continue; but I already use to speak of a spiral; and in this new concept I'm explainig the spiral. And so it is the development of a conceptualization which was there but in another sense. In the fourth book, already knowing what is the human being, I started to show what he does. I started to show that he relates himself or that he positon himself, that he is in one time, in one space. Still in the first book I have shown that to perceive is to know by the senses, I was trying to do an antithesis to the concept of consciousness and this generates the antithesis to the concept of unconscious. When I say in the fourth book, that perception is relationship, I'm just encircling something that from a certain academic vision, I had positioned.

A TARDE - When does occur positionaments like anguish?

V.F. - Anguish is a symptom of non-aceptance, anguish is compromise. It is a moment of stoppage of the humane who stops in an expectation, in one a priori. The human being loses all his dynamics, his reversibility. He has tremors, cold sweat, he doesn't swallow, he doesn't sleep, he becomes sexually impotent, he is afread, positioned, enprisioned on the dislocations resultants of the non-aceptance not faced. These positionaments generates new relationships, the fear to die, the fear to have a stroke, the drama to have an erection, the problem to have to swallow in front of the food, so this positionaments generate relationships full of difficulties. It is more-or-less like this: if you keeps yourself lying down in any situation, stopped, the fact of being stopped itself, creates a series of relationships, changes, creates wrinkles over the bed, wounds over the body, torpidity on the muscles etc.

A TARDE - And how does Gestalt Psychotherapy work to structure the human being?

V.F. - Doing antihesis in the sense of neutralize those dislocations of positionaments. For exemplo, anguish is a positionament that was generated by a compromise, so this compromise will create a series of dislocations, fear, pain over the breast, difficult to swallow and so on, somatizations. Therefore, Gestalt Psychotherapy starts to make possible to the individuo to perceive that what he feels is created by he himself, and not a result of another thing, like a witchcraft, bad lack, organic desease, or even the unconscious. On Psychoanalysis, people thinks that, unconsciouslly, they are wishing to destroy themselves. The attitude of Gestalt Psychoanalysis is to cut off the alibi, to avoid that the patient utilize the problem as a justification to his own difficulty, creating a way for the person face the thing which he/she is problematizing. The Gestalt Psychotherapy doesn't promise salvation in the sense that the individuo will never have any problem. And exactly at this point we come to the most important concept of this psychotherapy related to neurosis.

A TARDE - What is neurosis?

V.F. - It's the non-aceptance of non-aceptance, which creates self-referentiament, responsible for a distorted perception, which leads the individuo to live referentiated or in one time which is not the present. What the therapy claims is to give conditions to the person to accept his ou herself, even if this acceptance is acceptance of non-acceptance. In this sense, the Gestalt Psychotherapy has no values, has no fixed-ideas, it doesn't have even the objective to adapt. If the person accepts his/herself as he/she is, the better. If he/she is just very well in the system, in terms of adaptation, but doesn't accept his/herself, he/she has to change, and the therapy possibilitates this.

A TARDE - Are the phobia, depression, psycosis and anguish symptoms of non-acceptance?

V.F. - Your question is interesting in the way that it allows to show what is Gestalt Psychotherapy. It is not a class theory, it is a theory of camp. So it doesn't has cathegories of neurosis, types of symptoms, I mean, sexual impotence, figidity, lack of erection, not be able toswallow, become dizzy, be afread to go out to the streets, have an unlcer, all of these are positionaments resultant of a break of relationship, a break of the gestalt I-in-the-world. The Gestalt, like the Buddhism, Taoism, Biology, Physics and Chemistry, thinks the world as a totality, there are no sectors, no parts. What Biology does: it takes a cell of epithelium of the arm and from it, it describes the whole of the comossomic structure. What Gestalt Psychotherapy claims to is that from a simple sample of the behaviour, all that is the individuo can be reproduced. There is nothing like: at home the individuo is like this, at work he is like that. Psychoanalysis, as therapy of support, admits that the individuo is fine but has a disturbance. In Gestalt Psychotherapy there is nothing like this, there is unity. Any problem is always an indication, a symptom of neurosis. In a way it is an obvious vision. Just like the "egg of Colombo". If an orange is spoiled, it doesn't help to cut off that part; when one makes the juice the taste of the spoiled part will be there, because whenever a part is affected the whole is compromised, as the whole is not the sum of the parts.

A TARDE - Does this explain the fact that you accept cases which are considered irrecoverable, like the psychosis?

V.F. - Yes. Since we are able to change the perception the individuo has of hisself, he changes his relationship with everything. Now, in case of psychosis the work is the same as neurosis as far as conceptualization is concerned, but there are variables which make it difficult, because when the individuo is psychotic, he has no economic autonomy, he has no autonomy to go and come, and so the treatment and the result of it becomes difficult, but the difficulty is not because he is psychotic, but because as far as he is psychotic this creates a series of positionaments which impermeabilizes him to the dialogue.

A TARDE - Is the typology, the classification of neurosis in cathegories, a distortion of the actual Psychology?

V.F. - The old visions use to think that the human being was a complex, they use to establish types of complexity and so started to create types. From this come phobias, panics, rules, and even the classification of behaviour according to age: adolescents behave like this, addults like that; behaviour according to profession: psychologists are always crazy people, jornalists are like this and that etc; they do this as a way, summing up that result, to come to an understanding, I mean, it is the inductive and deductive method, which still predominates in the Social Science and Psychology. They can't aprehend the globality and so they classify. From this come phobias and characteristics. Besides of phobias, they speak also of karma, destiny, paranormal things and like this they try to explain. It's everyday more and more acentuated the idea that the human being is complex, enigmatic, because everyday gets more difficult to them to globalize, everyday they fall even more in the typifications, because we are living in the times of high technology, times of operationalization of everything. The human essence is never configurated, never considered, what is there is the functioning of the humane.

A TARDE - And how is Gestalt Psychotherapy situated in this context?

V.F. - The Gestalt Psychotherapy does not think the human as something linear. When one thinks the humane, one has to think, more-or-less, in something so dynamic as that model of theatom. There are thousands of variables, thousands of intersections, thousands of movements. There is no difference between the man of the XX century and the man of the X century, or even the man before Christ. The man is always the same as essence. Speaking of this I just remember Husserl, creator of Phenomenology, when he said that science is description and this affirmation of him cause a great terror at that time, because the science of those times was seen as comprehension and explication, I mean, it was deductive and inductive. Someone came to him and asked who was born first, the egg or the chiken? He answared: bring me the egg and the chiken and I will answer. This is the phenomenological description. When I say that there is no man of yesterday, in a sense I'm just following Husserl. I mean that we must think the man now, to think the man here. There is no hypothetic man, chimerical man, there is always a man of flesh and bones in one time.

A TARDE - Why is the deductive and inductive method predominant in Psychology?

V.F. - It is much more ease to understand something through an analogy, that means, the understanding through essence implicates gobalization. Globalization is difficult because the referenciated positionaments themselves. And so, everytime it comes an analogical reasoning it is more understandable. When Freud, for exemple, use to say that his masters were the greeks and took a tragedy like "Edipo" and from it structured the whole of "Edipo Complex", he was using the content, the literary form, symbolic form, which was giving reference to people to interpret, I mean, make analogy. When one says that it is necessary to aprehend the essence, to configure, to globalize the phenomenon, the whole thing gets dry, loose. For exemple: the gestalt psychologists were very much criticized because they use to explain human behaviour through perception and when speaking of perception they just use to draw small points. The whole of the society formation is pragmatic, and to this the Catholic Church has contributed a lot, in its presbiterian vertent also, even the science of the XX century has developed through the pragmatic approach of August Comte. I mean, anything exists with any motive, any finality. And so, now a days, the recuperation of the human should be done in the sense of dilettantism. I say in this fourth book, that the begining of the transcendence of the massificated man is the aesthetic attitude, that means (not running away from the subject to avoid distortion) we may say that the show of the "escola de samba" or the football play, with its harmonic coordenation of things, it is already a transcendence, because it allows the instauration of an harmony, something which transcends the reality. Coming back to the question, strange it may seems, the contingencies sometimes explain better than the conceptualizations. It is easier to say that the individuo is desadjusted than to say that the individuo is desadjusted because he doesn't accept his limits.

A TARDE - If perception is relationship and neurosis is perceptive distortion, what can happen to a civilization where the individuos relate in a distorted way?

V.F. - If the perceptions are everyday more distorted, the relationships will be everyday more distorted too. But as all relationship generates positionaments generators of new relationships... indefinitelly, the massification itself will give man the conditions to humanize himself. It will function as antithese. In a way, why is there space, now a days, to the Gestalt Psychotherapy, is spite of not be the space given to Psychoanalysis, to Eduardo Mascarenhas for exemple? It is because Psychoanalysis do not answer anymore. Or, in another level, why the marvellous medical science of the sixteens reached the point it is today, in terms of quality, and everyday more we see the increasing of alternative medicine, macrobiotic, homeopatic, herbs treatement, acupunture etc? It comes to a point where the massification is so much that the system reverts itself. This is the hope, the more massificated is the system, there will be always a way to humanize the people. That is why I do work in Gestalt Psychotherapy. It is the saying that everything which goes up will comes down, it's the Gravity Law of Physics, and the relationship leads to positionament....

A TARDE - At this fourth book you say that there is no choice, can you explain this?

V.F. - The choice is always compromise to one contingence. This contingence becomes necessarily an adherence, extrinsic to the chosen situation itself. When the situations are different and you have to choose, you will choose in accordance to another referential which is not one of the chosen thing. This other referential is compromiser, since it is an orientator, a determinator of conduct. And so, when your conduct of choice is in accordance to a determinator, the choice is totally an adherence, I mean, or it is by chance, or it is an obligation. In the first case, it allienates; in the second case, it orientates. Since 1960, choice is an word that is in fashion because Sartre started saying that man is free when he chooses. This because people was so compromised by the gearings of the system, that it not even could choose. The great human moment of the non-thing, of the generation of the sixteens, was when the man coul choose. Camus said that liberty is the possibility to say no. Caetano said that it is the possibility to say yes. And so, the liberty as that desperate act, when the individuo transcends the circunstance and is able to say yes, I want this, no, I don't want this. It is a sort of desperate vision, like Brecht saying: "Sad the country which needs heroes". When I say that choice is negative, I mean, sad the person who has to choose.

A TARDE - It is more-or-less like the situation of the mouve "The choice of Sofia"?

V.F. - "The choice of Sofia", when she is with the two children and the man says, look, you have two sons, one of them is going to die, you will choose who of them will die. If you don't choose one, the two will die. When she chose one and saved the other one she perceived the total trap, the total impotence. When the daughter goes, she accepts, but she is so massificated, so compromised, that she shouts, but do not run, because if she runs she would be killed, and all of them would die. To do this she would had to have an spontaneous attitude and not be wishing to survive. There are situations in life that it is better not to survive them, in terms of an structurated vision, authentic and individualized vision. In a massificated vision, a vision of survivel, people always want to survive to anything, of any cost. When the individuo is an open being, in the sense of been spontaneous, no choice puts him against the wall. The trajectory, if seen as a continuity, has no bifurcations, no breaks. The break is what propitiates the choice, the anguish. When we speak of massification and this thing of survivel, it becomes clear that, is spite of 30 centuries of philosophical thought and two centuries of science, we continue thinking the human being as an organism. The thought is this, the human being is thought as an organism which has sexual necessities etc. Or as fruit of the divine. It is difficult to think of the humane as temporality and space.

A TARDE - Is is possible transcendence without psychotherapy?

V.F. - Without psychotherapy I think it is impossible the human being to structure himself. Who changes the human being is the other, but the other as acceptance and oppeness (disponibilidade). If the person do not accept himself it is because never met this other. The other who could accept him, and change him, is the psychotherapist, in so far as he establishes the questioning. Or, the love. If someone is loved by the other to the point of being accepted with total oppeness (disponibilidade), he/she changes. Out of this movement of love as giving, integration, total acceptance, and out of therapy, there is no way of structuration. If the individuo is problematic he can't love, but by a "miracle", someone can love him/her, to the point of changing.

A TARDE - Does therapy leads to dependence?

V.F. - The Gestalt Psychotherapy is a questioning, a dinamization, an antithesis, a cut of dislocations, the other side, the opposit of the poste, so it dynamizes. The one who experiences a therapeutic process knows this. The ones who are outside the process, sometimes, the father, the husband, the wife, the lover, sees it as dependence, something bad. Because it is another one, hot him or her, who is interfering in the one he or she would like to interfere. It is a dynamization, and seen by eyes not of the ones who participate of the process, may be conceptualized and considered from the problematic referentials of the person who is looking. One thing is what is experienced, other thing is how another sees this experience. Therapy is not something of good-sense. I'm not saying it is something of crazy people. The good-sense is the common-sense, what is statistically pregnant, what is more valid. This is necesserilly a general which defines, and as such, it is not individualizator. It is not good-sense, and saying this I'm not saying it is contra-sense. It is sense, judgment without valorative attributions. It is not good-sense, nor common-sense, nor contra-sense, in the true sense of those words.

A TARDE - 20 years ago you have created a psychotherapic method. During all this time you have been working as psychotherapist, but you are not well known to the great public. This doesn't bother you?

V.F. - All of my work is a work of antithesis, given the present order of Psychoanalysis, the actual stage of the psychological thought, the Social Sciencies, about what is the humane. The Psychology, the Sociology, the Psychoanalysis, the Linguistic, finally, all Social Sciencies think that the human being is a resultant of "x" variables, like culture, economy, family etc. I do not say that he is resultant, I say he is a being-in-the-world and that he relates himself with all those claims. In this way my work is antithesis and antithesis is never recognized. It is only recongnised as synthesis. From this point, I don't bother, I even understand, because it would be completelly against my thought to say that things are as they are, to know that this that I think is not thought in general, and wish to be recognized. Now, if I'm creating one thing, of course I would love this be recognized in one transverse vision. Because longitudinally, I know that, if I do antithesis, my work will be recognized slowlly. In the day-to-day of psychotherapy I feel my work been totally recognized, it is efficacious, exactly because of that it is there for the last 20 years. When I say thatt here is no unconscious, that human being is not a result of instinct, of economic order, not determined by culture, has nothing to do with karma etc, I'm putting an antithesis to a whole serie of explanations. What is important is the step-by-step, brick-by-brick, to contribute to change the dominant thought, to structurate another.

A TARDE - And so Vera, your work is what you say about the doubt: "All affirmation negated, that possibilitates a question?"

V.F. - Yes! You just got the gestalt.