Finding the Fertile Void

The concept of the fertile void is an idea developed within the framework of Gestalt therapy that I have a real fondness for, one which also helps to provide some sense as to why Perls saw Gestalt therapy as a kind of existential therapy.  In fact, Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman’s original tome on Gestalt Therapy, published in 1951, reads like something of an early entry into the tradition of American existential therapy as formulated by Rollo May.  Most of the information floating around online about the distinction between these two modalities is dubious at best, portraying a significant lack of understanding about the existential tradition and reducing it to a formulaic process that concerns itself only with the “broad philosophical concerns” of “life, death, and existence”, without any understanding about how those concepts are only realizable in the context of the “here-and-now” that is so important to the basic principles of Gestalt.  In fact, when you look at quotes like “[t]he present is a passage out of the past toward the future, and these are the stages of an act of self as it contacts the actuality” and their insistence that the self is a “temporal process”, parts of the PHG text couldn’t sound any more like Heidegger without quoting him directly.

To understand the fertile void, it may be helpful to talk a little bit about what Gestalt therapy is and how it understands things like the self and suffering.  Gestalt therapy’s basic understanding of the human organism is of one that exists within a complex interaction of an organism/environment field.  Nothing that is attributable to the organism can be understood without understanding it in its environmental context.  The complex of interactions between the organism and environment, and the ways in which the organism both consciously and unconsciously adjusts to changes in its own structure and the environment, done primarily at the point of contact between these two entities, is that which we call the self.  In this way, the self is not a fixed thing, but something that emerges in the contact between organism and environment.  Furthermore, the self that emerges in those spaces is not rigidly differentiated, and exactly how much belongs to the organism and how much of that self is environment is blurry and indistinct. 

The Gestalt mode of therapy highly values the adaptive capacities of this self.  The self in this sense is our ability to be with the creative excitement of here-and-now possibilities of responding to an ever-shifting organism/environment field.  Given Perls foundations in psychoanalysis, he isn’t necessarily uninterested in things like id and ego, and the various neurosis and defenses of human existence.  Many of the early Gestalt therapists were actually trained as psychoanalysts (some still are) and have some real appreciation for the psychoanalytic approach.  However, whereas the psychoanalytic approach traditionally concerns itself with insight and the exploration of unconscious phenomena, Gestalt emphasizes a much more active-organismic approach to therapy.  Gestalt also seems more explicitly dialectic/dialogic, whereas psychoanalysis is more implicitly so (or at least it was in its origins—it could well be debated that more contemporary relational and intersubjective schools are extremely interested in the dialectical elements of the human condition and therapeutic process, perhaps taking some cues from gestalt in this vain).

What then is this fertile void that comes up for PHG in their discussion of the self?  The only way to answer this question is, of course, to get swept up in the paradoxical nature of the saying itself.  For the Gestaltists, the fertile void is a place one finds themself that is marked by a simultaneous fullness and emptiness; a somethingness or nothingness; a place of pure possibility where we can’t be anything but what we actually already are.  If Gestalt, Existential, and Psychoanalytic approaches overlap anywhere, it is in their love and extrapolation of these kinds of paradoxes.  The fertile void is something we feel our way into, which allows someone to be in their lostness and confusion, and to see it struck through with the potential of what that confusion could mean (I’m also reminded here of Maria Balaska’s recent book on anxiety and wonder).  This feeling can, I think, be specially cultivated in the work of therapy.

I would perhaps be best to quote the original text here, as I find the kind of language these three used in describing some of these features to be especially powerful.  This is from pages 138 and 139 of the text and is offered in response to the question “how do [they/we] finally lessen the pain?”:

“By finally ‘standing out of the way,’ to quote the great formula of Tao. They disengage themselves from their preconceptions at how it “ought” to turn out. And into the “fertile void” thus formed, the solution comes flooding. That is, they engage themselves, put forward their interests and skills and let them clash, in order to sharpen the conflict, and in order to be destroyed and changed into the coming idea; and finally they do not cling to the interests as “theirs.” In the excitement of the creative process they come to a creative impartiality among the warring parts; and then, with great recklessness and gleeful savagery, each contestant is likely to exercise all his aggression both for and against his own part. But the self is no longer being destroyed, for it is first finding out what it is.”

There is something quite dramatic in the way all of this is worded, but then again, much of our internal processes as they play out are often felt to be quite dramatic.  Things feel as though they are life and death.  Wars do rage on in our internal conflicts.  Though, it may not always come to express itself as such.  In fact, one could argue the more we are able to feel into that experience, the less it will recklessly find its way out of us.

Perls suggests that the opposite of this place is the space of resignation, a word that has perhaps come to take on some added associations within the present news cycle.  In his descriptions of resignation is where Perls is most likely to use some of the psychoanalytic jargon.  Which I think is right for how he conceived of his theory.  It’s almost like in a way, for Perls, psychoanalytic theory is a theory of pathology, whereas Gestalt theory is a theory of growth.  Perhaps that is the dialectical plane on which these two paradigms communicate.  Nestled within the containing function of existential, continental, or Buddhist notions of beingness (depending on one’s predilections).  For Perls, resignation is about identification and internalization of someone else’s needs, wants, and desires.  It is the abandonment of the self, and the self’s creative capacities, that leads to the most suffering.  I think we need to be careful about how we understand the self in this context (the broader present day understanding of the self and self-interestedness are muddied and contaminated enough as it is), but important to remind ourselves again that this is not the self as ego or material entity, but self meaning something like the vitality of the human spirit.

I think what is important to remember about the fertile void, is it seems to me more a kind of mood or way of being.  It’s a befindlichkeit.  One that, if you can help someone to feel into it—most often accomplished by feeling into it oneself and then bringing it into the living space of the therapeutic encounter to be shared—opens up the possibility for a considerable amount of courage in the face of uncertainty.  That if we can help people to remember what it is that the emptiness really contains, there is no end to the ways in which they might choose to fill it up.