https://doi.org/10.1177/1053825920904387
Journal of Experiential Education
2020, Vol. 43(2) 156­–170
© The Authors 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1053825920904387
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Article
Theory and Praxis in
Experiential Education:
Some Insights From
Gestalt Therapy
Chantal Bourgault du Coudray1
Abstract
Background: Higher education policy increasingly conceptualizes industrylinked,
service, and place-based forms of education in terms of experiential
education. Although potentially promising, this turn toward experience
risks instrumentalizing and marketizing experience, which is exacerbated by
individualized theories of experiential learning. Purpose: Some scholars have
therefore called for more sociological accounts of experiential learning, inviting
deeper consideration of how individual experience is connected to social, cultural,
or environmental factors. Methodology/Approach: This article responds
to that call by explicating the praxis of Gestalt therapy, often associated with
the individualistic human potential movement, but which nevertheless offers a
framework for reconceptualizing theory and pedagogy of experiential education
in more sociological terms. A brief history of Gestalt therapy foregrounding
its sociological and experiential basis is followed by explanation of the three
pillars of Gestalt therapy (commitment to dialogue, phenomenology, and field
theory). Findings/Conclusions: This framework is shown to support a more
sociologically oriented theory and praxis of experiential education that also
integrates divergent understandings of experience. Implications: Given the
turn toward experience in higher education and contemporary flourishing of
cooperative social processes in general, defining experiential education more
explicitly in terms of Gestalt praxis promises a timely enhancement of both, in
the service of socially responsible objectives.
1
The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
Corresponding Author:
Chantal Bourgault du Coudray, Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Education, School of Humanities
(Gender Studies), The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Western Australia
6009, Australia.
Email: Chantal.Bourgault@uwa.edu.au
904387JEEXXX10.1177/1053825920904387Journal of Experiential EducationBourgault du Coudray
research-article2020
Bourgault du Coudray	 157
Keywords
experiential education, Gestalt therapy, dialogue, phenomenology, field theory
Although experiential education has historically been associated with various forms of
outdoor and expeditionary education, higher education policy increasingly draws
upon concepts associated with this field to rationalize industry-linked, project, service,
cooperative, and place-based education, as well as endeavors to enhance overall “student
experience” (McRae & Johnston, 2016). Although this turn toward experience is
potentially promising, it entails a risk that experience will become an instrumental and
marketized means to achieve ends of economic efficiency, resulting in what Roberts
(2008) terms neo-experiential education. This risk is exacerbated by the prevalence of
theories of experiential learning which are largely individualist and psychologized,
despite a practical emphasis among experiential educators on embodied processes and
social contexts (Bell, 1993; Quay, 2003; Seaman et al., 2017; Seaman & Rheingold,
2013). Explanations of learning as a cognitive and disembodied process that is “essentially
Cartesian” (Seaman & Rheingold, 2013, p. 158) thus abstract and separate learning
from the corporeal context in which it occurs. Furthermore, the purpose of the
learning is too often yoked to individualist ideologies that foreground self-actualization
and empowerment (Bell, 1993; Seaman et al., 2017), at the risk of overlooking
questions of social justice (Roberts, 2008; Warren, 2002). Seaman et al. have therefore
called for more sociological accounts of experiential learning, inviting deeper consideration
of the ways in which psychological or personal experience is connected to
social, cultural, or environmental factors.
In an attempt to historicize this need, Seaman argues that experiential education
theorists draw too uncritically from the human potential movement’s focus on selfactualization,
particularly Abraham Maslow’s understanding of experiential education
as a change process grounded in making a person “aware of what is going on inside
himself” (Maslow, as cited in Seaman, 2016, p. 3). Given the explicit or implicit debt
of much experiential learning theory to the human potential movement, particularly
through the work of David Kolb (Seaman, 2016; Seaman et al., 2017), this hypothesis
is not unreasonable. An alternative explanation for the problem, however, might interpret
the field’s bias toward cognitive and psychologized concepts as a reflection of the
continued ubiquity of Cartesian thinking in many research cultures, including (or perhaps
especially) within the fields of education and psychology. As Bell (1993) argues,
theory often functions as an extension of Cartesian philosophy, in which “[a]bstract
thinking is privileged over embodied knowing” (p. 20) and in this scenario, the psychologized
individualism of much experiential learning theory is perhaps not only a
manifestation of ideology associated with the human potential movement; it is an
expression of far-reaching and entrenched preferences embedded in Western traditions
of thinking and research.
Challenging the psychologism of experiential education theory may not, therefore,
be simply a matter of reducing the influence of the human potential movement
158	 Journal of Experiential Education 43(2)
within this field. Indeed, it is worth noting that humanistic psychology (including
the tributary of the human potential movement) was just one expression of a sustained
counter-cultural lineage in Western thought that can be traced from 18thcentury
Romanticism through 19- and 20-century existentialist philosophy, to
20th-century feminism, environmentalism, and poststructuralism (to name just a
few widely recognized iterations), which has challenged Cartesianism. This counter-cultural
tradition has always offered a correction of dualistic thought which
emphasizes holism and relationality in contrast to the disconnecting tendencies of
partition and atomization. Although it has undoubtedly retained an individualistic
slant through its foregrounding of (often critical) questions about human subjectivity,
its insistence on the alienating effects of Cartesianism as well as its holistic
attention to relational connections has also offered a more sociological perspective
that views individual experience as interactionally shaped by societies, cultures,
and environments. Viewed in this way, contradictions within the human potential
movement and experiential learning theory might be appraised compassionately, as
expressing the difficulty of manifesting a critical or counter-cultural practice from
within the very context that is being questioned. Furthermore, the struggle within
these fields to reconcile Cartesian theoretical frameworks with a counter-cultural
philosophy that emphasizes community, embodiment, and connection demonstrates
what the feminist philosopher Haraway (1987) describes as an affective, contingent,
engaged, situated—and messy—approach to the task of theorizing.
Haraway’s is an approach that will be familiar to many experiential educators, who
are accustomed to theorizing in similar ways. Yet, by abstracting this process, she
arguably compromises the very situatedness that she names, a difficulty that Seaman
and Rheingold (2013) explore when they observe that cognitive processes “will always
be constituted by social relations and cultural artefacts” (p. 159). Their solution to this
difficulty is to document and analyze examples of reflection in practice, to track how
cognitive processes are interlaced with embodied and social experience, and they conclude
that more research of this type is likely to support a theory of “how abstraction
is socially accomplished and mediated” (p. 170). It would certainly be useful to
develop new formulations of how experiential learning occurs, but as Quay (2003) has
suggested it may also be useful to reflect on existing theories “that could be described
as close cousins of experiential education” (pp. 110–111). This article therefore revisits
a site of philosophy, theory and practice (or praxis) that is often associated with the
human potential movement and humanistic psychology more generally, but which
may yet offer a valuable framework for understanding the ways in which cognitive and
embodied processes intersect. That site is Gestalt therapy.
The Sociological Origins of Gestalt Therapy
Seaman et al. (2017) highlight the indebtedness of the human potential movement to
Basic Skills Training Groups (later, simply T-groups) research, which was pioneered
by social psychologist Kurt Lewin in the late 1940s. Their argument recounts the erosion
of Lewin’s earlier sociological approach in favor of a more psychologized
Bourgault du Coudray	 159
approach that flourished in the 1950s, an evolution documented by Lewin’s collaborator
Ken Benne in his 1964 history of T-group research. Overall, Seaman et al. argue
that Lewin’s work “helped facilitate the rise of self-awareness programs in the 1960s,
providing the template for encounter groups, Gestalt sessions, marathon groups, and
wilderness-based personal growth programs” (p. NP7). This narrative’s specific association
of Gestalt therapy with other manifestations of the human potential movement
is logical in the sense that Frederick “Fritz” Perls, a key founder of Gestalt therapy,
became a celebrity at Esalen (the stronghold of the human potential movement at Big
Sur, California) in the 1960s, running workshops that showcased psychotherapeutic
techniques he had developed in New York in the 1950s.
However, correlating Gestalt therapy with the human potential movement misses
the ways in which it was—like Lewin’s work—an important precursor of it. The
work undertaken by the pioneers of Gestalt therapy in New York in the late 1940s—
which Perls then exported to other parts of the United States (notably California)
from the 1950s—paralleled the work undertaken by Lewin’s team, with both strands
eventually converging at Esalen in the 1960s (Fisher, 2017; Stoehr, 1994). Despite
their separate articulation, the approaches developed by Lewin and Perls were similarly
indebted to Gestalt psychology as it was developed in Germany in the early
20th century. The German word “Gestalt” was coined in 1890 by the Viennese philosopher
Graf Christian von Ehrenfels, to define “a psychical whole formed by the
structuring of the perceptual field” (Wulf, 1996) and this suggested an alternative to
the scientific methodology of dissecting wholes into ever smaller and more discrete
parts, forming the basis for Gestalt psychology, which emphasizes holistic rather
than atomistic aspects of perceptual organization (Wertheimer, 2000). Before migrating
to the United States, both Lewin and Fritz Perls’s wife Laura were trained in
Gestalt psychology, and Fritz Perls had worked as a clinic assistant with Kurt
Goldstein, a Gestalt neurologist, in the 1920s.
This shared intellectual heritage can be observed most clearly in field theory, which
both Lewin and the Perls elaborated following its initial conceptualization by the
Gestalt psychologists. In the disciplinary contexts of psychology and sociology, field
theory is generally connected with Lewin but was independently explored in Gestalt
Therapy (Perls et al., 1951)—the seminal articulation of Gestalt therapy—which
understood both “organism” and “environment” as part of an “interacting field” (p. 4).
In both cases, field theory extended the Gestalt psychologists’ interest in relationships
between parts of the whole (Robine, 2015; Wertheimer, 2000), and thus signaled a
more relational and sociological approach to psychology. Although like Lewin, Fritz
Perls then became increasingly oriented toward individualized concerns, to equate
Gestalt therapy primarily with his approach is inaccurate because, as Serlin and Shane
(1999) observe,
much of what was considered Gestalt therapy—that is, the “Fritz” style of working with
the “empty chair” and the like—is but one particular form . . . [T]he other two codevelopers
of Gestalt therapy, Laura Perls and Paul Goodman, made equally substantial although . .
. different contributions to its formulation, application, and dissemination. (p. 374)
160	 Journal of Experiential Education 43(2)
Significantly, both Laura Perls and Goodman “were personally and professionally
more devoted to connection and community involvement” (p. 375), thus exhibiting
more interest in addressing social problems than Fritz Perls.
Goodman was an eclectic intellectual whose career defied easy pigeonholing—he
worked variously across academic, publishing, therapeutic, and activist contexts, and
his best-selling book Growing Up Absurd became a defining text of New Left politics
in the 1960s. His scholarly expertise was also highly interdisciplinary, interweaving
perspectives from philosophy, psychology, theology, sociology, political theory, educational
theory, and aesthetics. Goodman was thus instrumental in articulating the
range of conceptual influences that coalesced in Gestalt praxis. As his biographer
observes, Goodman “did not view psychotherapy as a discipline closed off from the
rest of life, just one more professionalized service industry in the planned society”
(Stoehr, 1994, p. 16). Rather, his interest in the possibilities of Gestalt therapy trended
always toward the more holistically conceived task of transforming not just individuals
but also society and culture. His approach thus articulated mistrust of state, bureaucratic,
or other top-down processes, as well as faith in the organismic capacity of
human beings to self-organize for their survival, and in this, Goodman betrayed his
anarchist political leanings (Stoehr, 1994).
Laura Perls was a highly trained pianist and dancer, and the only girl at the gymnasium
school she attended in Germany, where she took a humanities course in classical
and modern literature, Greek, Latin, and French. At the University of Frankfurt, she
began studying law because she wanted to make a social contribution working with
juvenile offenders, but gravitated into Gestalt psychology, completing her doctoral
dissertation in this field. At graduate school, she also studied psychoanalysis and existentialist
philosophy, and was a student of Martin Buber for 2 years (Serlin & Shane,
1999). Her thorough grounding in Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, and existential
philosophy thus contained most of the substantial ingredients of Gestalt therapy as it
subsequently evolved. In her subsequent life and career, she was less engaged with
public political movements than Goodman, but her political sensibility was nevertheless
similarly grounded in her attention to community. As Serlin and Shane observe,
[c]ontact, support, stability, commitment, and rootedness were key words in the
vocabulary of Laura Perls, and these principles are evident throughout her life, work, and
death. Throughout her life she always valued friendship, established networks, and
engaged in community involvement . . . Laura tended to focus on connection, cooperation,
caring and relationship. (p. 383)
In other words, Laura Perls’s approach was that of the affective, contingent, engaged,
and localized theorist. She did not write as much as Goodman or Perls—and/or her
authorship was not acknowledged—and because she expended less energy on
abstracting, her contribution to the development of Gestalt therapy was less visible.
Nevertheless—and like so many other women in other fields—her relational and
pedagogical labor vastly exceeded that of her male colleagues, since she worked for
almost 40 years at the New York Institute for Gestalt Psychotherapy, training
Bourgault du Coudray	 161
generations of therapists. As a result of this work and in the longer term, she was
arguably more influential in shaping the commitments of Gestalt therapy than her
more flamboyant husband.
As this brief account of the origins of Gestalt therapy suggests, it is more grounded
in sociological questions about the connection between individual and social experience
than is often understood. Indeed, the ongoing usage within Gestalt therapeutic
communities around the world of a unique training format which requires trainees to
commit to individual therapy as well as ongoing participation in group therapy is an
important way in which the practice continues to recognize and explore these connections.
This approach has also supported a strong tradition of applying Gestalt therapeutic
principles in organizational and community contexts, often as an expression of
social responsibility; for example, through The Relational Center in Los Angeles
which aims to support “neighbourhoods, communities and organisations, especially
those interested in increasing citizen participation, stakeholder investment, and greater
involvement in decision-making” and to cultivate “the conditions for sustainable,
healthy, democratic community” (O’Shea, 2011). Thus, while it is true that Gestalt
therapy took an individualist turn via Esalen and some widely publicized maxims of
Fritz Perls’s such as “I do my thing and you do your thing,” its overall characterization
as individualistic misrepresents its past contribution to apprehending the social and
also underestimates its value for supporting socially oriented work in the present.
Furthermore, since Gestalt therapy combines a sociological inclination with a unique
approach to understanding experience, its relevance to the conceptualization of experiential
education in more sociological and socially responsible terms is worth elaborating.
The next part of this article therefore explores specific commitments of Gestalt
therapy that support this agenda.
Experience
Roberts (2008) observes that within the field of experiential education, the concept of
experience is often understood in common sense terms by “descriptors such as ‘handson
learning,’ ‘learning by doing,’ ‘active learning,’ and learning ‘outside the fourwalled
classroom’” (pp. 20–21). These phrases suggest an embodied dimension that is
reflected in the visibility of nature-based or expeditionary forms of education in the
scholarly literature, but the concepts of experience that are typically used to theorize
such activities are abstracted through “cyclic models that separate experience and
reflection” (Seaman & Rheingold, 2013, p. 158). As Roberts (2008) observes, there
are also three competing abstractions of experience at work in the field of experiential
education: “experience as interaction, embodied experience, and experience as praxis”
(p. 19). According to Roberts, the first is grounded in the pragmatist educational philosophy
of John Dewey and foregrounds learning as a “shared, interactive experience”
rather than an individual undertaking (p. 23). The second is grounded in existentialist
phenomenology and understands experience as subjectively “‘lived’ through our individual
bodies” (p. 25). The third is grounded in critical theory and sees experience as
grounded in “dynamics of power and social change” (p. 27).
162	 Journal of Experiential Education 43(2)
Roberts’s taxonomy provides a useful account of the different ways in which
experience can be theorized, but it also reproduces the atomizing logic of
Cartesianism and does not explore how these different schemas may overlap. This
is where the praxis of Gestalt therapy is particularly salient, because through its
combination of philosophy, theory, and practice, it suggests how all three understandings
of experience canvassed by Roberts may interact in support of experiential
education. The three pillars of commitment in Gestalt therapy are dialogue,
phenomenology, and field theory (Resnick, 2015), which can be roughly mapped
against Roberts’s view that experience can be understood as interaction (dialogue),
embodied experience (phenomenology), and praxis (field theory). Although the
Gestalt approach is ultimately holistic, the sections which follow explore each of
these commitments in turn, with a view to identifying their value in supporting the
theorization and practice of experiential education.
The Commitment to Dialogue
The commitment to dialogue in Gestalt therapy builds on the philosopher and theologian
Buber’s (1923/1937) focus on relationality, which he articulated in his 1923 book
I and Thou through the claim that “[i]n the beginning is relation” (p. 18). For Buber
(unlike Maslow), relationality was thus the basis of experience: “The man who experiences
has no part in the world. For it is ‘in him’ and not between him and the world
that the experience arises” (p. 5). In elaborating his ideas, Buber (1923/1937,
1929/2002) focused on what he termed the “I-Thou” relationship and its emergence
through dialogue. In Buber’s (1929/2002) formulation, I-Thou dialogue is not simply
“speaking together”; as he argued, “[t]he life of dialogue is not limited to men’s traffic
with one another; it is . . . a relation of men to one another that is only represented in
their traffic” (p. 9, emphasis added). He thus understood dialogue as an orientation
toward “meeting” or an experience of mutuality between unique beings. Early Gestalt
therapists dedicated themselves to practicing Buber’s approach to dialogue, including
and often especially in group contexts and with time, the relational orientation implicit
in the commitment to dialogue has been increasingly foregrounded (Clarkson, 2014;
Yontef, 2002), and has informed a relational turn across the entire field of psychotherapy,
including psychodynamic variants derived from the work of Freud and Jung
(Aron, 1996; Mitchell, 1988).
Supporting the capacity for meeting through dialogue are two other concepts proposed
by Buber and elaborated by Gestalt therapists: confirmation—or recognition of
the other’s uniqueness—and inclusion—or the empathic capacity to imaginatively
enter into the life of the other (Clarkson, 2014). The notions of confirmation and inclusion
underscore that dialogue validates “the uniqueness of the individual within the
context of the relational” (Hycner, 1995, p. 6), entailing experience of simultaneous
separateness and connection. In this sense, it is a form of emergence, arising from a
dialectical polarity; as Kempler (1974) observes, “[n]either separateness nor union is
the goal . . . but rather the exhortation of the . . . undulation between them” (p. 65).
Bourgault du Coudray	 163
In the terminology of Gestalt therapy, a commitment to dialogue also supports the
emergence of contact or the “experience of appreciating the ‘otherness,’ the uniqueness,
and the wholeness of another, while at the same time this is reciprocated by the
other” (Hycner, 1995, p. 8). Contact is thus experiential and is often described by clients
as a transformative feeling of being seen and/or heard, and with therapeutic repetition
of the experience, their own capacity for presence and contact—or their dialogic
orientation—is experientially supported and enriched.Yet, as V. Burley (n.d.) observes,
dialogue practiced along such lines is not an everyday or natural form of communication,
but rather “grows out of an attitude that must be learned and practiced” (p. 67). It
demands the seamless integration of theory and practice, which she compares with the
art of making music:
In order to make beautiful music most people must struggle with the theory and the scales
and the repetitious exercises . . . Learning the theory is the substructure of doing excellent
therapy and an important part of the training required, but in order to work well, theoretical
abstractions are woven in seamlessly into the experience; they do not dominate or obscure
the therapist’s eye. (pp. 69–70)
As Burley suggests, the practice of dialogue as it has been developed by Gestalt therapists
is a form of interaction that is certainly theorized but is ideally learned experientially,
through encounters with “stewards” (Hycner, 1995, p. 11) of dialogue who have
themselves learned its art through experiential repetition; in this sense, it can be situated
within what Vygotsky (1978) described as “the zone of proximal development”
which refers to activities that benefit from some kind of pedagogical support.
These observations about dialogic practice have important implications for experiential
education, because although dialogue is often understood as a method that can
be applied in educational contexts or alternatively as a goal that students can be socialized
to engage in, Burley’s observations highlight that dialogue is itself an experience
that facilitates learning about oneself and others, and which is learned through embodied
practice. This is suggestive of how frameworks that separate theory and practice
(or cognitive and embodied processes) might be challenged. Given that many experiential
educators already use dialogue extensively, a Gestalt perspective may offer a
useful theorization of what is already happening; when dialogue occurs in experiential
education contexts, it is not a separate exercise in abstract reflection but can be understood
holistically, as an integral component of the ongoing and social experience.
Furthermore, when it is considered that, as Buber (1929/2002) claimed, an I-Thou
encounter is possible with “an animal, a plant or a stone” (p. 12), staples of experiential
education such as hiking or canoeing may also be understood as offering opportunities
for dialogue with the natural world, thus blurring perceived boundaries between
experiencing and reflecting.
Overall, the relationality of the Buberian approach provides a counterpoint to
understandings of dialogue in pragmatist conceptualizations of deliberative democracy
or civic education that inform theories of experiential education (Roberts, 2008),
which tend to work from the assumption that dialogue involves the interaction
164	 Journal of Experiential Education 43(2)
of separate, stable selves. In contrast, a Buberian approach, which sees interactive
processes as constitutive of selves and realities, is arguably more sociologically
attuned to the ways in which subjectivities are socially and environmentally shaped.
This focus on the co-construction of self and reality also reveals the indebtedness of
dialogic thinking to phenomenological philosophy, which Roberts posits as the basis
for his second conceptualization of experience, as embodied.
Phenomenology
In the writing of Buber, the relational dimension of dialogue is explored phenomenologically,
through tracking the immediate experience of encounter. Phenomenology
was developed by the philosopher Edmund Husserl, notably elaborated by Martin
Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre (among others), and proceeds
from attention to immediate or prereflective experience (Moran, 2002; Stewart,
1978). As suggested above, it has been particularly influential for relational thinking
because as Yontef (2002) explains, “[i]n phenomenological thought, reality and perception
are interactional co-constructions” (p. 16). This approach challenges the subject/object
dichotomies of Cartesian thought, as exemplified by Heidegger’s
hyphenated concept of “being-in-the-world” (Gergen, 2009, p. xxii).
As a method, phenomenology involves three main principles: bracketing, description,
and horizontalization. Bracketing involves putting aside existing knowledge,
theoretical frameworks, ideologies, or preconceptions. This is undertaken to enable
faithful description (rather than interpretation) of phenomena as they arise.
Horizontalization involves equal consideration of all phenomena, without imposition
of a hierarchy (T. Burley & Bloom, 2008; Crocker, 2005). The utility of this methodology
for tracking psychological experience has led to its embrace within the field of
humanistic psychology (Waterman, 2013), and Gestalt therapy played a central role in
pioneering this approach (T. Burley & Bloom, 2008; Crocker, 2005).
Because of the premium that phenomenology places on lived, subjective sensation
and perception, Roberts identifies it with what he terms embodied approaches to experience,
a view that is supported through Gestalt therapists’ careful attention to bodily
responses. Hallmarks of Gestalt therapeutic work include descriptive attention to the
“here and now” of somatic experience, through attention to the client’s bodily sensations,
physical presentation, and facial movements. However, there is also a psychological
inflection to phenomenological work, expressed through attention to meaning
making processes. During this exploratory process, the subjective perceptions of both
the client and therapist are foregrounded, and the therapist is guided by curiosity about
the client while bracketing interpretative possibilities and horizontalizing the information
that is emerging. As the therapy progresses, any meaning making that unfolds is
checked and rechecked against the client’s present experience as well as that of the
therapist, so that theorizing or interpretation remains continually grounded in phenomenological
attention to experience. In group contexts, a continuously phenomenological
approach is particularly important for keeping track of the various intrapersonal,
interpersonal, and group processes that are simultaneously unfolding (Kepner, 1980).
Bourgault du Coudray	 165
As T. Burley and Bloom (2008) observe, Gestalt therapists thus “point a spotlight
to a specific part of experience,” sharpening the client’s (or group’s) conscious
awareness of particular aspects (p. 162). This supports the goals of Gestalt therapy
which are “deceptively simple: first, awareness and second, cognitive, affective and
behavioural adjustment” (p. 172), and this procedural approach is supported by
research in neuroscience which suggests that “learning and change do not happen
without awareness” (T. Burley & Bloom, 2008, p. 178). Yet despite the importance
of awareness for learning and the effectiveness of the phenomenological method for
sharpening awareness and preparing the ground for social action, research on the
everyday educational applications of phenomenology has been scant (Quay, 2016;
Greenberg et al., 2019). This is possibly because, like Buberian dialogue, a phenomenological
approach “can only be learned at a deep level through engaging in the
process” (Greenberg et al., 2019, p. 169), which is difficult to orchestrate in educational
contexts that remain governed by mechanical “banking” metaphors (Freire,
1970/2006).
Roberts gestures toward this difficulty when he claims that a phenomenological
approach “takes us away from the everyday and the typical”—referencing the prevalence
of experiential education activities such as wilderness adventures, in which
students transcend familiar settings (Roberts, 2008, p. 25). Furthermore, he suggests
that some such embodied practices position nature as a medium that facilitates
self-actualizing spiritual transcendence, leading him to characterize
phenomenology overall as “highly individualized and transcendent” (p. 25).
However, the cultivation of awareness through attention to the everyday “here and
now” within Gestalt therapy contradicts Roberts’s claim, suggesting that it is a
mistake to equate phenomenology with transcendentalism. Furthermore, Gestalt
therapy suggests how phenomenology can provide a methodical entry point into the
realm of experience that then supports dialogically supported learning about social
and intersubjective dynamics. These insights may therefore encourage experiential
educators to apply or deploy phenomenological approaches in relation to more
mundane settings and sociological themes. Indeed, given the ubiquity of experience,
Gestalt therapy’s attention to the commonplace suggests how greater commitment
to phenomenology might position experiential education as a coherent
pedagogy for a very wide range of educational objectives.
Field Theory
As briefly discussed above, field theory’s consideration of the organism in its environment
is grounded in a relational and sociological logic: the organism and the environment
cannot be understood apart from their relation or interaction. In Gestalt field
theory, this relationship is theorized in terms of “the contact boundary,” which is where
organism and environment “touch” or “meet” and is where experience occurs (Perls
et al., 1951, p. 229). This concept is thus particularly apt for theorizing experience,
perhaps especially for experiential educators who—like Gestalt therapists—specialize
in working at the contact boundary.
166	 Journal of Experiential Education 43(2)
Yet, returning to the argument of Roberts, how does Gestalt therapy’s use of field
theory support the view of experience as a praxis embedded within networks of power?
Answers to this question lurk in debates about field theory (Crocker et al., 2015;
Parlett, 1991) that can be summarized as follows: Does it understand “environment”
in a constructivist manner, as an individual’s subjective or constructed perception of
reality, or does “environment” have some kind of independent and objective existence?
For some—including Lewin (1951)—the answer is “the former,” which leads
to relatively psychologized explanations of how individuals perceptually organize
their environment, including their relationships with others. In this formulation, it is
difficult to argue for the objective existence of, for example, power structures such as
class and gender or even something called “nature.” If, however, environment is conceptualized
as having an objective existence, then more sociological applications are
conceivable, where one may share a field—such as class or gender identity—with
others (Robine, 2015).
Although these respective positions can seem irreconcilable, Robine (2015) offers
a helpful reframing when he notes that
I may be able to conceive of the other as an organism with an environment, but I
experience him or her only as environment, part of my own environment. The
constructivist approach has to be linked to the objectivist approach in a dialectical to-andfro
tension, rather than merged together in some impossible synthesis. (p. 494)
In other words, he suggests that Gestalt field theory offers an advance on Lewin’s version
through its both/and approach; “[h]ence it is possible to speak of the field of a
particular person or client (organism) and his or her environment” (p. 493, emphasis
added). In further support of this view, Robine notes that within Gestalt theory, use of
the term “organism” rather than “subject,” “person,” or “individual” “does not imply
exclusive reference to the self” (p. 493) but attempts to “break with a purely mentalist
conception of the field” (p. 497). In noting that Gestalt therapy was the first and only
therapy to use an ecological framework, ecopsychologist Roszak (2001) similarly values
Gestalt field theory’s capacity to transcend a purely subjectivist view, perhaps also
indicating its value for environmental educators who are often specifically interested
in facilitating experiences at the contact boundary of organism and the natural environment.
At the very least, when understood along the lines suggested by Robine, field
theory offers a productive way of accommodating tensions between psychological and
sociological modes of explanation.
Furthermore, by locating experience at precisely the point where the interior and
subjective world of the organism collides with the social and material affordances of
its environment, field theory provides support for Roberts’s view of praxis as a political
understanding of experience, as a means of “reproducing inequalities or . . . for
counter-hegemonic emancipation” (Roberts, 2008, p. 27). An example of this can be
seen in the Gestalt perspective that the therapist is a part of the client’s environment
(and vice versa), so that there is no objective or neutral position for the therapist to
inhabit (Clarkson, 2014). The (radical) political implication of this approach is that
Bourgault du Coudray	 167
it decentres the therapist and calls for a more horizontal or collaborative relation of
power between therapist and client than is supported by many other psychological
or psychotherapeutic frameworks. In this sense, field theory parallels and confirms
the praxis suggested by educational frameworks relevant to experiential education
such as situated learning, which similarly decentre teachers, relocating them as participants
in learning communities constituted through shared experience with students
(Quay, 2003).
Conclusion
Responding to critical questions about the individualist humanistic premises that
ground much experiential education theory, this article has attempted to “argu[e] for,
rather than assum[e], the desirability of . . . humanistic assumptions” (Seaman et al.,
2017, p. NP15) by explicating how Gestalt praxis supports a coherent and socially
responsible framework for apprehending human experience. In summary, by dialogically
supporting phenomenological attention to experience at the contact boundary,
Gestalt therapists cultivate awareness, which is the basis for learning. This is how a
commitment to dialogue, phenomenology, and field theory work together in Gestalt
praxis, which can also be viewed as an experientially grounded pedagogy. In this
sense, the framework of Gestalt therapy is germane to the theorization of experiential
education, suggesting how divergent understandings of experience (Roberts, 2008)
within this field might be integrated through the combination of philosophy, theory,
and practice that constitutes Gestalt praxis.
Gestalt therapy suggests how experiential education theory might develop a less
psychologized and more sociological orientation which accounts for the ways in which
individual experience is connected to social, cultural, or environmental factors, supporting
the emergence of responsible social action. As this article demonstrates,
Gestalt theory—in contrast to individualistic manifestations of the human potential
movement that have exerted a greater influence on experiential education—was significantly
grounded in a sociological sensibility and its well-developed praxis is thus
suggestive of how experiential educators might reconcile attention to individual experience
with recognition of the ways in which that experience is socially, culturally, and
environmentally shaped. Overall, it provides a practical roadmap for simultaneously
attending to multiple concerns that animate experiential education: intrapersonal or
internal processes, intersubjective processes, and field-sensitive considerations.
Although further elaborating practical examples of possible integrations between
the fields of Gestalt therapy and experiential education is beyond the scope of this
article, potential articulations could include collaborating to defend humanistic
principles of experiential education from the dehumanizing effects of neoliberal
educational policy; designing research processes and outputs that challenge the
Cartesian separation of theory and practice; enticing therapists out of their offices
and into classrooms or learning environments; incorporating psychotherapeutic
principles into teacher training; or collaborating to support communities in pursuing
social and environmental justice. Certainly, given the turn toward experience in
168	 Journal of Experiential Education 43(2)
higher education and contemporary flourishing of cooperative social processes in
general (Hawken, 2007; O’Hara, 2016), defining experiential education more
explicitly in terms of Gestalt praxis promises a timely enhancement of both, in the
service of socially responsible objectives.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
ORCID iD
Chantal Bourgault du Coudray https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2155-2512
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Author Biography
Chantal Bourgault du Coudray is the chair of gender studies at the University of Western
Australia. She is a qualified Gestalt psychotherapist and the Experiential Education Coordinator
for the Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Education at her university. Other research interests
include feminist care ethics, feminist cultural studies and fairy tales, and she has written and
produced a number of films including a feature-length drama.