Clinical Gestalt Therapy

The purpose of this book is to support and strengthen the trend of integrating the Gestalt approach into psychotherapeutic work with people with mental disorders. The book provides examples of the ideas of author's colleagues and his own attempts to translate the terms of psychopathology into the language in order to enrich both approaches with the novelty that is so necessary for the growth and with strengthening of the professional interest of Gestalt therapists in clinical psychotherapy. The relevance of understanding psychopathological disorders from the perspective of the Gestalt approach, as well as the need to develop adaptive strategies for psychotherapy of people suffering from these disorders, is undoubted. It opens the door to a new space of awareness, experimentation, research, and co-creation that we can explore together with our colleagues and our clients - fellow travelers who are looking for new boundaries of existence and new ways to live in this difficult and ever-changing world.

The idea to write the book was fueled by the deep interest I had in the mental world of those who literally feel what is happening in the environment in a different way or those who do not deny reality but do not want to know anything about it and run away from it into neurotic perception or into the "bodily madness" of conversion disorder. I would like to note that working with people with mental disorders in the Gestalt Therapy paradigm not only helped me to step away from the one-sided norm-centered expert position of a clinical psychologist, but also to complete it with a commitment to existential dialogue, as well as the ability to experimentally seek new ways of creative adjustment for each individual client and for myself in this process. In addition, it highlighted my own "dark" spots, and helped me to feel that in humanistic psychotherapy, a specialist firstly is a personality, and only then he or she is a professional.

-- Yevgeny Ryaboy