Gestalt Concept of Phenomenology: Gestalt therapy values phenomenology, emphasizing the importance of understanding the client’s subjective experience and lived world, “just as it is,” without imposing pre-conceived interpretations.
Neuroscience of Phenomenology
The hippocampus’s role in constructing episodic memories and contextual representations is central to phenomenology.
Our phenomenological experience is fundamentally shaped by how our brains construct reality. The hippocampus plays a vital role in creating our subjective experience of “what is happening now” by constantly integrating sensory input with past experiences (the ground in Gestalt terms) and contextual information. Each individual’s hippocampus, shaped by their unique history, contributes to their unique phenomenological world.
Phenomenology in Gestalt therapy emphasizes the present moment, but our present experience is always colored by our past. The hippocampus, as the seat of episodic memory, highlights how deeply intertwined memory and perception are. Our past experiences (hippocampal memories) constantly shape how we perceive and interpret the present.
Gestalt therapy’s phenomenological approach can be seen as aligning with the neuroscience of the hippocampus. By focusing on the client’s “lived experience,” the therapist is essentially exploring the client’s unique hippocampal construction of their reality. The therapist aims to understand the client’s subjective world, acknowledging that it is shaped by their individual history and contextual understanding, which are deeply rooted in hippocampal function.
In therapy, techniques that encourage clients to describe their experience in detail, without interpretation, can be seen as accessing and exploring this hippocampal level of subjective reality construction. For example, ‘Now I am Aware’ of the tension in my shoulders, the emerging pain in my chest, and a sense of butterflies in my stomach. The therapist may ask the client to ‘be with’ this experience as much as they can where they are now, applying the paradoxical theory of change, and what emerges will be organic change from ‘what is’.
