Gestalt group therapists navigating a fracturing field: A disciplined movement-by-movement moment-to-moment aesthetic practice
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis aims to show how Gestalt psychotherapists avail of their embodied forms of knowing in their group practice. The literature pertaining to how Gestalt group therapy practitioners attend to their embodied experiences as sensed, felt and lived is marginalised in a modality that has a conflicted relationship to outcome and process research. In this qualitative research, I critically co-inquired with experienced Gestalt practitioners working with groups. All were members of a training institute on the island of Ireland. The research occurred at a time of the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Europe. An action-research approach, namely collaborative inquiry, framed this qualitative research into Gestalt therapists’ and supervisors’ group practice. An embodied hermeneutic phenomenology was adapted and underpinned by a Gestalt epistemology of embodiment, dialogue, phenomenology and field theory. The collaborative inquiry and methodology held a clear intent of researching with others, not on others. The qualitative inquiry revealed that traces of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the embodied group practitioner lingered throughout the research. The pandemic evoked an existential crisis that was called forth through the group therapists’ lived body over time. This illuminated the necessity to consider an ethics of care for embodied group practitioners when experiencing existential challenges in such a fracturing world. Utilising the form of a group (e.g. peer or supervision) as a support for embodied group practitioners to transmute a plurality of complex and sedimented experiences in a fracturing and suffering pandemic field was considered. Another significance of this inquiry is that it reveals Gestalt group practitioners’ ways of orienting in their work by engaging in a disciplined movement-by-movement moment-to-moment aesthetic practice as they attend to their sensing, feeling, moving bodies in the here-and-now with group members. There were no simple or cleve…
abstract: This thesis aims to show how Gestalt psychotherapists avail of their embodied forms of knowing in their group practice. The literature pertaining to how Gestalt group therapy practitioners attend to their embodied experiences as sensed, felt and lived is marginalised in a modality that has a conflicted relationship to outcome and process research. In this qualitative research, I critically co-inquired with experienced Gestalt practitioners working with groups. All were members of a training institute on the island of Ireland. The research occurred at a time of the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Europe. An action-research approach, namely collaborative inquiry, framed this qualitative research into Gestalt therapists’ and supervisors’ group practice. An embodied hermeneutic phenomenology was adapted and underpinned by a Gestalt epistemology of embodiment, dialogue, phenomenology and field theory. The collaborative inquiry and methodology held a clear intent of researching with others, not on others. The qualitative inquiry revealed that traces of the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the embodied group practitioner lingered throughout the research. The pandemic evoked an existential crisis that was called forth through the group therapists’ lived body over time. This illuminated the necessity to consider an ethics of care for embodied group practitioners when experiencing existential challenges in such a fracturing world. Utilising the form of a group (e.g. peer or supervision) as a support for embodied group practitioners to transmute a plurality of complex and sedimented experiences in a fracturing and suffering pandemic field was considered. Another significance of this inquiry is that it reveals Gestalt group practitioners’ ways of orienting in their work by engaging in a disciplined movement-by-movement moment-to-moment aesthetic practice as they attend to their sensing, feeling, moving bodies in the here-and-now with group members. There were no simple or cleve…
author: Desmond, Billy
language: eng
keywords: Gestalt therapy, groups, phenomenology, aesthetics, embodied, field theory
date published: 2025-9-29
date modified: 2026-07-24T03:26:59Z
provider: University of Northampton
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Northampton