Frank-M.

Staemmler

The Willingness to Be Uncertain —

Preliminary Thoughts About Interpretation

and Understanding in Gestalt Therapy

Modern hermeneutics emerged to an important degree from the phenomeno-
logical tradition; for instance, there is a train of thought that runs from Husserl to
Heidegger to Gadamer. In this chapter I will follow this train. As Heidegger said,
“from the very beginning our essence is to understand and to create comprehensi-
bility.” That means that we are all interpreting and creating meaning all the time —
a fact that, in my view, has not been discussed thoroughly enough in the literature
of gestalt therapy. On the contrary, many gestalt therapists still seem to be influ-
enced by Perls’s verdict, “Never, never interpret!” which from a phenomenological
and hermeneutical point of view is just silly and impossible to comply with. The
question has to be: How can we as gestalt therapists interpret in ways that are
compatible with our basic tenets? I will offer some preliminary statements and a
clinical vignette, which may serve as a point of departure for further considera-
tions.

Healing through dialogue is an eminently hermeneutical phe-

nomenon indeed. (Gadamer, 1974, p. 1072)

Although most philosophers and psychotherapists would agree “. . . that the

central concept of a human psychology is meaning and the processes and transac-
tions involved in the construction of meanings” (Bruner, 1990, p. 33 — original
italics), there has not been very much written about the question, how meaning is
constructed in gestalt therapy, that is, what place understanding and interpreta-
tion should have and how they can be handled within the theoretical framework
of the gestalt approach (see Staemmler, 1999). This is somewhat surprising since
already in the second sentence of the theoretical part of Gestalt Therapy the
authors refer to that dimension: “. . . psychologically what is real are the ‘whole’
configurations . . ., some meaning being achieved” (Perls et al., 1951, p. 227 — my
italics).
In this chapter I will try to offer some preliminary considerations, which I
hope will be useful for future attempts to work out a theoretical framework that
deals with this important issue.

A Short Story of a Long Misunderstanding

I would like to start with the summary of a short story that I recommend to
anybody to read in full length because of its mental clarity and its literary quality.
It was written by Nobel prize-winning Gabriel Garcia Márquez; the title of the
story is “I Only Came to Use the Phone” (Márquez, 1994).
The author describes what happens to a young woman, whose car breaks down
on a country road in the pouring rain and who tries to get a lift to the next tele-
phone. After a long time the driver of a van picks her up; in the van there is a
group of sleeping passengers covered with blankets. As she is cold and wet, the
woman sitting next to the driver gives a blanket to her also.
After a while the van stops. Together with the other passengers she gets out and
enters a building. She meets a woman in uniform and tells her she wants to make a
phone call. She is ordered to join the other women in the communal dormitory.
Suddenly awake to the fact that she is in a psychiatric hospital, she tries to escape
— to no avail. Her explanations, protests, and attempts to leave the building are
unsuccessful; they are answered with force and sedation. The next day, she is
introduced to the medical director of the hospital. He deals with her in a very
friendly and patient manner. She tries to convince him that she has only come to
make a phone call and repeatedly demands to be permitted to call her husband and
inform him of her whereabouts. The doctor speaks to her in a fatherly voice saying
“Everything in due course” — and finishes the conversation.
A few weeks later, she manages to send a message to her husband. The price is
high; she has to give in to the sexual advances of a night nurse. The visit of her
husband to the hospital from which she expects her liberation begins with a
conversation between him and the medical director. The latter explains to the
former the mental disease of his wife. He talks of states of excitation, vehement
outbursts of aggression and fixed ideas (especially the one to make phone calls);
further treatments as well as the sympathetic cooperation of the husband for the
sake of a positive course of the disease are strictly indicated.
After having been informed in this way, the husband sees his wife. He soothes
her, encourages her, tells her that she will soon feel better, and promises to come to
visit with her on a regular basis. At first she is perplexed; then she starts to rave
and to scream like a maniac. On her husband's next visit, she refuses to see him.
The doctor says to him calmly: “That is a typical reaction. It will pass.”

This arresting story illustrates several ideas on which I would like to elaborate
in this chapter. I guess that for the most of you it is obvious that the hospital staff
as well as, at a later point in time, the husband are all adhering to an interpreta-
tion of the woman’s situation that to them is as unquestionable as it is false to the
woman herself — and to us, the readers. From our vantage point it is easy to see
that the staff mistreats the woman by diagnosing her as manic and psychotic,
thereby, drives her crazy. Additionally, from our vantage point is it easy to be
outraged at the apparent injustice that is done to the main character of the story.

The Question of Interpretations

However, let me say: It is easy, but it is a little too easy, for I think that this
reading of the story only refers to one of many possible interpretations, which to
me is not even the most interesting. I need to admit quickly, though, that it
conveys an important message — a message that is in accordance with our
phenomenological and dialogical heritage in gestalt therapy: “Do not hold on to
your prejudices about people, but listen carefully and seriously to what they
have to tell you!”
As a consequence of this attitude some gestalt therapists including Fritz and
Laura Perls held that we ought to abstain from interpretations. For Laura Perls
interpretation was “an intellectual shortcut. It promotes introjection rather than
assimilation and integration, and this is a waste of time” (1992, p. 202). Fritz Perls
simply demanded: “. . . never, never interpret” (Perls, 1969a, p. 121 — original
italics). Given his biography we can assume that the paradigm he had in mind
when he imposed this ban was the classical psychoanalytic interpretation, that is
an interpretation, which is derived from a certain kind of psychological theory
and metatheory. As an example for this sort of interpretation I give you one by
Arlow, a psychoanalyst, who once wrote: “Certain patients have a difficulty in
facing or dealing with reality, which is based on an unconscious equating of the
female genital with reality” (Arlow, 1969, p. 962).
Those of you who are familiar with the person of Fritz Perls will know that his
objection against such interpretations was not necessarily directed against their
sexual content; usually he was quite interested in sexual issues (see Perls, 1969b).
What he did not like was the certainty provided by a general theoretical bias that
understands all kinds of phenomena within the fixed framework of a certain
prefabricated pattern of meanings and that makes it difficult for clients to find
and/or invent their own understandings.
However, Perls’s critique of psychoanalytic interpretations to a large extent
blinded him to see clearly how he used to interpret himself: We all know, for
instance, his dogma that any element in a dream was a representation of some
disowned aspect of the dreamer’s personality. If you read the transcripts of his
workshops you frequently come across bold interpretations such as these: “If you
avoid looking at another person, it means that you’re not open. . . . By the way,
this low voice is always a symptom of hidden cruelty” (Perls, 1973, p. 135).

The “Bracketing” of the “Natural Attitude”

One could call all of these interpretations prejudices. The hospital staff in the
Márquez story, the classical analysts, and Perls as well as other gestalt therapists
who adopt his interpretive patterns — they all proceed on the basis of prejudices.
But: That is not as problematic as it may seem at first sight. The real problem is
that they are not aware of the prejudiced character of their understandings of the
situations they are in. This lack of awareness is what makes them too certain and
thus unable to see things differently and to negotiate the possibility of different
meanings at all. They are being neither phenomenological nor hermeneutical.
They are obsessed by what Husserl (1922) called the “natural attitude” and
guided by their respective beliefs and ideologies.
Husserl was not content to accept as true what appears to be first given. He
wanted to overcome any preconceptualized way of looking at phenomena. His
stated objective was to “eliminate traditional modes of thinking completely, to
recognize and tear down the bounds of the mind . . .” and to establish “. . . an
entirely new attitude which is opposed to the natural ways of experience and
thinking” (Husserl, 1922, p. 3) through his method of the “phenomenological
reduction.” His primary method was to “bracket . . . this entire natural world
that is ‘there for us’” (ibid., p. 56), a method he called “epoché.” By means of the
free variation of the objects of investigation and a second reduction, called the
“eidetic reduction,” he aimed to discover their “invariants” and, ultimately, their
essence, which was to be free of any contingent (accidental) properties.
There has been considerable criticism of these ideas and, additionally even
stronger criticism, of Husserl’s notion of a “transcendental ego” which resulted
from his third “reduction,” the “transcendental” one. Philosophers (for instance
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but, to a certain degree, even Husserl himself in his
last years), historians, cultural sociologists, ethnologists, and others emphasized
that it will never be possible to clean your mind of all pre-understandings and
“. . . that certain aspects of an individual's horizon of understanding ineluctably
are inaccessible to self-reflection” (Rennie, 2000, p. 486).
I think the critics are right: “One can never know for sure that the phenome-
nological reduction has been successful” (Schmitz, 1980, p. 21). We as therapists
(as well as most other human beings) are looking at our clients from a perspec-
tive that to a large extent is coined by the “natural attitude” and shaped by our
historical and cultural biases. Even though we all try as much as possible to
practice some kind of “bracketing,” to become aware of such biases, and to be
open to our clients, we have to confess that in our everyday work we remain
quite far away from a radical “antiseptic” phenomenological stance most of the
times. Our attempts at bracketing will always remain attempts, which may be
successful to a certain degree — but: “The empirical individual in his ‘social
reality’ cannot but bring back all these noxious interests, prejudices, traditions,
cultural constraints and social pressures, which in Husserl’s view stood in the
way to truth and understanding” (Bauman, 1978, p. 129).

Interpreting and Understanding Is Being Human

In my view this is no disaster, but a positive aspect of our being just as human
as our clients. As far as I am concerned, as a therapist I do not find it desirable to
be “not a human ego,” which is the ultimate consequence of the transcendental
epoché as Husserl (1962, p. 275) himself admitted. And, what I say about myself
also applies to my clients: One of my teachers at the university of Würzburg,
phenomenologist Heinrich Rombach (1980, p. 81), pointed out that practicing a
radical “eidetic reduction” means to sacrifice the individual person (i.e. the
“empirical subject”). This may be appropriate for philosophical purposes but it is
definitely not what I am aiming for in my relationships with my clients.
Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s most famous student and also one of his prom-
inent critics, clearly demonstrated that even “any mere pre-predicative seeing of
the ready-to-hand is, in itself, something which already understands and
interprets” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 189). For him understanding and interpreting
was not primarily a human activity, which you might as well not exercise; more
than that it was a central trait of being human. He said: “From the very beginning
our essence is to understand and to create comprehensibility” (Heidegger, 1983,
p. 444). And Heidegger’s most famous student, hermeneutic philosopher Hans-
Georg Gadamer, assisted: “Understanding is . . . the original form of the realization of
Dasein which is being-in-the-world” (Gadamer, 1989a, p. 259 — original italics).
In recent years modern developmental researchers have presented convincing
evidence supporting the philosophers’ assertions: Already
by the end of the first year it is not events themselves, but what infants make
out of them that determines emotional reactions and individual reactivity. More-
over, dramatic individual differences in the meaning of events and of emotional
arousal itself have become established. (Sroufe, 1996, p. 131)

Even in perception we do interpret, since we always see something as some-

thing. I see this thing here as a table, the other thing over there as a chair etc. (see
Staemmler, 2002a, p. 26). Hence Heidegger (1962, p. 189) spoke of the hermeneu-
tic “as-structure” of perception and understanding. And the gestalt psychologists
would not become tired of demonstrating, how human beings (as well as many
animals, even bees and birds — see Hertz 1928a; 1928b; 1929; 1930; 1931; Köhler
1933, pp. 100ff.) organize our perception in meaningful wholes.
So the first basic statement I would like to make can be formulated following
Watzlawick’s (1967) famous sentence, “You cannot not communicate.” Accord-
ingly my statement is:
(1) You cannot not interpret.
The minute you perceive or understand something, you perceive or under-
stand it as something; that is, you relate it to a category, you distinguish it from
something else, you form a gestalt, you attach meaning to it etc. So in my view
we can define interpretation simply as a necessary “. . . activity the aim of which
consists in arriving at understanding” (Bleicher, 1980, p. 29).
Phenomenologists do not hesitate to admit that already a phenomenological
description “. . . presupposes a framework of class names, and all it can do is to
determine the location of the phenomenon with regard to an already developed
system of classes” (Spiegelberg, 1960, p. 673). In addition, a “. . . phenomenologi-
cal description . . . can never be more than selective: it is impossible to exhaust all
the properties, especially the relational properties, of any object or
phenomenon” (ibid.). As a result, we cannot even assume, “. . . that different
observers, who perform the phenomenological reduction with great conscien-
tiousness and clarity, would necessarily arrive at identical results” (Schmitz,
1980, p. 22).
If we apply these insights to psychotherapy it becomes clear that
. . . to assert that a therapist . . . can claim to engage in any form of dialogue
with a client which is free of interpretative variables would not only be a false
claim, but also an absurd one. In an important sense, from a mental standpoint we
can do nothing but interpret. (Spinelli, 1996, p. 197 — original italics)

This may seem to be an unpleasant restriction for those who still hold the firm
belief that they might be able to see things “as they really are” and have not yet
understood that most likely things-as-they-really-are do not exist for us. But
those who are willing to face some uncertainty will probably welcome the liberty
that springs from the fact that we are not like automatons or like Skinner’s rats.
We become what we are and we are what we become, we do not have a
meaning which could be determined once and for all, but a continuously changing
meaning, and therefore our future is relatively uncertain, our behavior . . . relative-
 ly unpredictable — we are free. (Lyotard, 1993, p. 135 — original italics)

We do not simply respond to stimuli. On the contrary, we are human beings

who can take an intermediate step and choose which meanings to attribute to
those stimuli and, therefore, have some freedom of decision about how we are
willing to react.

A Clinical Vignette
The following clinical vignette illustrates the ubiquity of interpretations in a
therapeutic dialogue. I have inserted respective comments in the initial part as
well as in the end of the vignette (in brackets, italicized). The reader is invited to
also pay attention to the numerous interpretations that are made by both client
and therapist in the intermediate parts of the vignette to which I have not added
any comments.
The client is thirty-six years old and works as a masseur and physiotherapist
in a cancer rehabilitation clinic where she works with patients who have under-
gone severe surgery.
This is the nineteenth session. The numbers indicate the time: “(00:50)”
means that it is fifty seconds after the beginning of the session; this information is
meant to enable you, the reader, to get an impression of the pace at which the
session proceeds.
Therapist: Last time we finished our session when we had just discovered that a certain
kind of closeness is lacking between the two of us. (The therapist speaks about his understand-
ing of the previous session’s ending.)
Client: That’s right. I also realized at home that I am either too compliant, for instance
with my son [who is twelve years old], or too stern, for instance with my patients in the
hospital . . . It seems like two poles: I am either too soft and too sloppy or I almost freak
out when things don’t go well. And somehow it is just like that with closeness and
distance too. (The client interprets some of her behaviors as representing two poles.)
Th. (00:50): Yes, we have also found out between us that although you enter into
contact with me some closeness is missing. — How do you experience that? Do you have
a wish for that? (The therapist says some more about his take on the last session and then asks
the client for her interpretation of it.)
Cl.: I am not sure if that has something to do with my wishes, certainly not only . . . It
also has to do with getting involved with somebody else. I experience that with my
patients too. Always a certain distance remains even with those I get on with well and
with whom I feel a certain connection from the very beginning. (The client tries to find
contexts that can help her to make sense of her experience.)
Th. (02:15): Yes, that matches my impression: I find that we are getting on well with
each other, I like you, and I also have a sense that you like me too. You talk to me in a
trusting manner and speak openly about the things that occupy or even oppress you.
And yet I feel as if a rest of nearness or some sort of a warm reverberation does not come
about — or maybe some cordiality. (The therapist conveys his understanding of an aspect of
their relationship.)
Cl.: That’s true. To a certain degree it feels well rounded, but then there is a limit.
Th. (03:00): Maybe you can describe this limit in more detail?
Cl.: Yes, but it’s strange . . . There is something . . . (Pause) Even with my son I draw
this limit, although I frequently wish it were different. Sometimes I make it, but I easily
fuse and am affected too much when he finds himself in situations that aren’t pleasant for
him. I don’t want that . . . But I am not sure if that’s a different problem again. If I think of
you and me . . . There is something . . . (The client is still looking for relevant contexts in order
to make sense of herself.)
Th. (04:30): I don’t know if that would already be too close for you, but I would find
it easier to look at what it is like between you and me. That’s probably the most tangible,
and we both have impressions, which we can share. (The therapist suggests one context,
which he thinks might be most useful for the creation of meaning.)
Cl.: OK, fine.
Th. (05:00): Well, try and focus your attention on your awareness of the closeness
between us: How do you experience that with me now?
Cl.: I don’t feel completely good about it, not really flowing . . . A few minutes ago I
was a little surprised when you said that I appeared trustful to you. I do not really feel
that myself fully. I’m not really aware of that. (The client refers to the therapist’s previous
interpretation of their relationship and points out that she has a different take on it.)
Th. (06:00): You don’t clearly feel trustful, although you behave that way . . . (The
therapist expresses his interpretation of her interpretation.)
Cl.: Yes, right . . . But something is missing, something that would make me feel
completely good so I could let go . . . Sometimes I have felt that more clearly, for instance
when I have cried here. Then I have felt you more and differently, your attention, your
favor . . .
Th. (07:00): Are you saying that when you are more involved emotionally you also
have a clearer sense of me?
Cl.: Yes, then it is OK, then there is something well-rounded that does me good, that
makes me feel wrapped up.
Th. (07:15): I am just thinking if we could try an experiment, which would require of
you to entrust yourself a little more . . .
Cl.: Oh!
Th. (07:30): . . . and that would make it easier for us to find out, what’s possible for
you and what isn’t. — What is your reaction to this idea?
Cl.: Well, it is like I don’t really dare to . . . Although I would like to try it out . . .
Th. (08:00): OK, let me make a suggestion. You do not have to accept it; we can also
consider if there is another possibility that’s better for you. — The idea I have is this: I
could sit down on the floor cross-legged, then you could lie down in front of me on your
back and place your head on my lap. Then I would place my hands underneath your
head and move it gently to and fro. So you could get a sense of the degree to which you
can give your head into my hands.
Cl.: (pauses, laughs, then:) Oh! . . . Trust! — I started feeling dizzy for a moment
when you said that . . . But I’m going to do it anyway!
Th. (09:30): I find it important that you do not take the bull by the horns if that means
for you to pass over something that’s difficult for you rather than to attend to it and do it
carefully so that you become exactly aware of what is going on in you. — This is not a
feat to be performed, it is rather a discovery to be made.
Cl.: Yes. (pauses, remains motionless)
Th. (10:15): I know you’re courageous. You don’t have to prove that to me.
Cl.: (remains silent for a while, then slowly begins to cry softly)
 Th. (11:30): What are you experiencing?
Cl.: I am touched by what you said, that you mentioned that intermediate step. I tend
to forget that. It was important for me that you mentioned it . . . I felt being seen by you. I
was ready to jump over it and to do quickly what you had suggested.
Th. (12:30): I guess you would have come to me outwardly, but not inwardly;
inwardly you would have stayed in your chair.
Cl.: (laughs) Right! — And for a moment I thought: ‘I don’t want to.’
Th. (13:00): You don’t want to come closer? — Can you hear your voice as you say, “I
don’t want to.”?
Cl.: (begins to sob) I do not want to be forced! — I do not want to be forced to be
close.
Th. (13:45): Of course . . .
Cl.: (blows her nose, then cries again)
Th. (14:20): This seems to move you a lot . . .
Cl.: But I’m not sure what it is . . . I don’t know . . .
Th. (15:15): To me you look as if you are at a very delicate point right now. (Pause) I
get the impression I need to be very careful with you now.
Cl.: (Pause) I don’t know what’s going on . . . My head is pulsating.
Th. (16:15): You look very vulnerable to me, very sensitive.
Cl.: (Pause) I feel blank. I have no idea, no thought . . .
Th. (18:00): It seems almost as if you were not there — no idea, no thought . . .
nothing . . .
Cl.: (Pause)
Th. (18:45): Maybe a little lost too. As if you were in nowhere land now . . .
Cl.: Hm . . . (pauses, blows her nose) Yes, I have the feeling . . . I feel empty. As if I
was going out of my head here . . . (points to a place at the back of her head)
Th. (20:00): Can you try to follow that? Where are you going?
Cl.: Away, backward, but there is still a connection, I only go that far (points to a
place about two yards behind herself).
Th. (20:30): And in front there remains your empty body?
Cl.: Yes, I can see it.
Th. (20:45): And everything that I would get to feel, if I came closer to you, was this
empty body. You wouldn’t be there in your body. — I can understand that pretty well, if I
recall that you said you did not want to be forced to be close. That seems like an efficient
way to elude that force. If you cannot evade it outwardly, you can still evade it inwardly.
Cl.: Yes! (pauses, then begins to cry again)
Th. (22:30): Give way to that feeling.
Cl.: I’m thinking of the experiment you suggested . . . I imagined you sitting there
with my head in your hands . . .
Th. (23:20): And then you start to cry?
Cl.: Hm.
Th. (23:30): Stay with that image for a while. You see me sitting there with your head
in my hands.
Cl.: I really would like to be there . . .
Th. (24:00): Do you long for it?
Cl.: Yes, but only briefly. And then I am going away again.
Th. (24:20): With the longing you were in your body briefly, and then you emptied
yourself again?
Cl.: Yes, exactly. It’s not possible with an empty body.
Th. (24:30): And you don’t get anything out of it.
Cl.: Strange . . . (pauses), to be this way, so empty . . . (pauses). Now it occurs to me
that in everyday life I’m also frequently leaving myself, daydreaming, not really being
there . . .
Th. (25:30): Yet there was also the longing . . .
Cl.: But only very briefly! (laughs loudly) In the end I don’t dare . . .
Th. (26:20): Yes, if you do not pass over it you feel how shy you are and how hard it is
to come close. Of course you would be able to pass over it and do it with your body
emptied . . .
Cl.: . . . just functioning. — Now I realize what it is that I experience with my
patients. I have to function no matter how they smell, how they look with their scars, I
have to touch them, I have to do my work . . .
Th. (27:20): Isn’t that like being forced to be close in your work?
Cl.: Yes, it is. (begins to cry again) That’s exactly what it is. (sobs vehemently) Oh,
gee! Every time it is like being raped . . . I have to do it, and I know I can do it . . .
Th. (28:30): . . . if you empty yourself. If you don’t, it’s like being raped, if you stay in
your body and feel it . . .
Cl.: Yeah, I couldn’t bear it, if I would stay there . . . Many of my patients are mutilat-
ed. They have been raped by the operations and radiations. I couldn’t bear it, if I would
be there . . . I can only do it, if I don’t feel it.
Th. (30:00): If you would let their bodies come close, these raped bodies, it would feel
like you being raped yourself. (Pause). Then you would fuse and also feel what it means to
be in a physical state like that?
Cl.: Yes. Sometimes I do it (sighs deeply) . . . A few weeks ago, for instance, I worked
with a patient who had had an operation in her womb area. There was a huge edema at
her pubic bone. It looks terrible and feels terrible. Then I thought to myself: Of course I, I
can do it, I can cope with it, I can help her, I can do it all. — But it also made me angry: I
have to do it. I cannot say, “I can’t get it done.” Then I thought, I wouldn’t want to know
what had been destroyed in her body, burnt by the radiation . . . She can forget her sex
life, it is lost forever . . . (cries). There is also a part in me that likes to help and give some
relief, but I hate to have to do it on orders. Then I function: I can do it . . . (At this time the
client’s avoidance of closeness as observed by the therapist in the beginning of the session is
understood in a new way, i.e. her attempt to resist to being forced to be close, her attempt to escape
from her tendencies to become confluent with the suffering of her patients etc.)

The session continues for about fifteen more minutes.

Understanding Begins With Pre-Understanding

Since we all are human beings who attribute meanings, we need to be aware
of the fact that in the very beginning of any encounter we are no better than the
hospital staff in the Márquez story: Our cultural coinage, our personal history,
our material conditions, our educational and professional backgrounds, our
respective gender, our situational expectations etc., many of which we are not
even conscious of and to a certain extent may never become conscious of — in
short: our respective phenomenal fields determine the ways we first look at and
understand things and events in our therapy sessions.
Heidegger said: “An interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehend-
ing of something presented to us. . . . one finds that what ‘stands there’ in the first
instance is nothing other than the obvious undiscussed assumption of the person
who does the interpreting” (1962, p. 191f.). Gadamer put it briefly: “The so-called
‘given’ cannot be detached from the interpretation” (1984, p. 33). If we as gestalt
therapists, who have been taught to work with the “obvious,” accept this insight
of hermeneutic phenomenology, then we have to become very careful not to
confuse what is obvious to us — remember Husserl’s “natural attitude”! — with
what is ‘real’ in any objective sense of the word. Making this mistake is tanta-
mount to leaving phenomenological ground behind and subscribing to naïve
realism.
For Gadamer, “it is interpretation that performs the never fully complete
mediation between man and world, and to this extent the fact that we under-
stand something as something is the sole actual immediacy and
givenness” (1989b, p. 30). Although Perls was not very consistent in his thinking
about this issue, he was apparently aware at times of the interpretive character of
the given. Among the first sentences of his chapter on the “Philosophy of the
Obvious” one can find the following: “We take the obvious for granted. But
when we examine the obvious a bit closer, then we see that behind what we call
obvious, is a lot of prejudice, distorted faith, beliefs and so on” (Perls, 1973,
p. 177).
Let me sum up what I have just said in the form of a second statement:
(2) Our understanding of any situation necessarily begins with a prejudice or, to put it a
little milder, with a pre-understanding,
as Gadamer (1989a) would never become tired to repeat: In the beginning of
understanding is a kind of narrow-mindedness, a narrow “horizon.” It is most
important to be aware of this fact, because if we are not, we are in danger to feel
too certain, to be content with that pre-understanding, and not to inquire any
further.
A person who believes he is free of prejudices, relying on the objectivity of his
procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical circumstances,
experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a
tergo. (Gadamer, 1989a, p. 360)

Gadamer who, by the way, died recently at the age of 102 years (see Staemm-
ler, 2002b) shows that since the age of enlightenment prejudices have acquired a
very bad reputation, which became a new kind of prejudice — the prejudice
against prejudices. But in his view prejudices are necessary, for if we did not have
them we did not have a point of departure for our attempts at understanding.
Some prejudices may even be confirmed by subsequent scrutiny! “Having a
particular point of view on the world is a condition of seeing it at all, so perspec-
tive in general is not a limit on knowledge but what makes it possible” (Cavell,
1999, p. 1231).
“Only through having a horizon at all, we can encounter something that
widens our horizon” (Gadamer, in: Dutt, 1993, p. 18). Hence Gadamer gave a
second name to the prejudice, which does not have so much of a negative ring in
our ears: He also called it a “draft,” a first sketch that has to be handled with
reservation and uncertainty and that is meant to be differentiated and, always
only approximately, completed.

The Anticipation of Completion

Paradoxically, in order to widen our horizon, to revise the first draft and to
gain a more developed understanding we even need to rely on a certain
prejudice: We have to presuppose — and this is my third statement: — that in
any situation or in any person we are trying to understand
(3) there is the potential to become more and differently meaningful and there is a chance
to make more complete sense
than we had conceived of in the first place. Ultimately we even have to presup-
pose that she, he, or it will make complete sense, if we are to be motivated to
search for new and more convincing meanings. In this context Gadamer speaks
of what has been translated as the “fore-conception of completeness” (1989a,
p. 293f.); I would rather translate it as the “anticipation of completion.” We may
never reach this completion — and in certain cases it may even turn out that the
completion we have anticipated is complete nonsense —, but we need to assume
that it can be reached in principle.
The “anticipation of completion,” however, is in no way tantamount to the
idea that there is one, “right” or “last” or “perfect” or “final” interpretation.
Gadamer underlined “. . . the fact that the meaning of a person’s life is always
uncertain and inconclusive at any time because the future is open ended and
lacking closure” (Guignon, 1998, p. 572). Any interpretation is firmly tied to the
perspective or the horizon of the understanding person, which includes her or
his “time perspective” (Frank, 1939; Lewin, 1951). In field theoretical terminology
this term indicates the given point in time and history from which one’s under-
standing originates. So the completion Gadamer advises us to presuppose is
definitely not a perfection of our own interpretation! On the contrary, it is the
possible completion we ought to attribute to the meaningfulness of the other
person’ utterance, the assumption that the behavior of the woman who says she
only came to make a phone call may make complete sense to her.
However, I admit that Gadamer’s “anticipation of completion” may be a
misleading term, if one forgets that it is to be seen as a heuristic principle and not
as a proposition describing facts. Davidson (1984) has proposed a similar
assumption; he calls it the “principle of charity,” which may be less in danger of
misinterpretation. The “principle of charity” demands from the interpreter to
prefer, if in doubt, interpretations that make it possible to understand the
communications in question as consistent and true — at least for the time being,
that is as long as there is no convincing contradictory evidence.
As the Márquez story clearly shows, this principle must also be applied to our
professional diagnoses, no matter if they stem from psychoanalytical or ICD or
DSM or other sources, of course including any gestalt therapy approach to
diagnosis. They may serve as useful points of departure in our pursuit of
understanding our clients. But we need to be aware of the evidence proving that
clinicians (as well as other humans) tend to hold on to their previously formed
diagnostic judgments by only acknowledging or overrating confirming data — a
fact known in social psychology as “spontaneous trait inference” or the “prior
belief effect”, which leads to ‘self-fulfilling diagnoses.’ Moreover and on a more
basic level, we have to recognize that “diagnoses . . ., if the hermeneutic approach
is employed, cannot be viewed as disease entities and natural science ‘facts,’ but
rather as temporary formations that change with changing times, historical eras,
cultures, and prevailing prejudices and practices” (Chessick, 1990, p. 271).
The same applies in general to our experience both as private persons and
professionals. Experience is apt to supply us with the comfortable certainty that
goes along with the fact that you have seen similar things and events before; they
do not come as a surprise anymore, and you can fall back on familiar ways of
coping. As supportive as this may feel on the one hand, it can also turn into the
laziness and denseness on the other hand that lead to being impervious to
anything new (see Miller, 1990). Being experienced in a positive sense of the term
must include the expectation that there is always the chance for some novelty.
Therefore a person who has really learned from experience will be especially
capable of making new experiences and to learn from them again.
Thus experience is experience of human finitude. The truly experienced person
is one who has taken this to heart, who knows that he is master neither of time nor
the future. The experienced man knows that all foresight is limited and all plans
uncertain. (Gadamer, 1989a, p. 357)

Asking Authentic Questions

The basis of such an attitude is open-mindedness or, to say it in the words of
Socrates, the knowing that one does not know. The Socratic insight makes it
possible to ask questions that aim at a fuller understanding of the person and the
situation with which one is confronted. Of course I am thinking of authentic
questions, not of pseudo-questions that already predestine their answers. “To ask
a question means to bring into the open. The openness of what is in question
consists in the fact that the answer is not settled” (Gadamer, 1989a, p. 363).
The main character in the Márquez story does not have a chance, because
nobody, including her husband, is asking authentic questions. Nobody even
ascribes to her the competence to give meaningful answers. But in any honest
attempt at understanding we have to “. . . address others with a presumption
that they are capable of responding meaningfully, responsibly, and, above all,
unexpectedly” (Morson, 1986, p. IX — original italics).
This takes me to my fourth statement:
(4) Understanding is based on authentic questions,
that is questions — implicit or explicit — that do not lay down their correspond-
ing answers in advance. This means that one needs to be prepared to listen and
to expose oneself to the uncertainty that goes along with the unpredictable
impact of the other’s utterance. In the same vein Martin Buber says, “genuine
dialogue cannot be arranged in beforehand” (1965, p. 87).
 Interpretation and the Therapeutic Relationship
No later than at this point of this chapter it will have become apparent that
hermeneutic philosophy overlaps with dialogism in some respects. There is a
basic analogy: “’Any true understanding is dialogic in nature. Understanding is
to utterance as one line of dialogue is to the next’ (Voloshinov, 1929/1986,
p. 102)” (Shotter, 2000, p. 113).
Since among gestalt therapists Buber’s dialogical anthropology is known
much better than other dialogic approaches, I will briefly point out the parallel
between hermeneutics and dialogism by referring to Buber’s well known
characterization of the “basic words,” “I-Thou” and “I-It” (see Buber, 1958;
Staemmler, 1993).
There are different kinds of understanding of a person, which can be assigned
to either one of these basic words. A typical example of what one might call “I-It
understanding” is the undertaking to find out what is characteristic of a certain
person in order to predict and/or control her behavior. In this case understand-
ing is part of a manipulative strategy. “It is the method of the social sciences,
following the methodological ideas of the eighteenth century and their program-
matic formulation by Hume, ideas that are a clichéd version of scientific
method” (Gadamer, 1989a, p. 359).
Another widespread example for this I-It-understanding can be found in the
claim to understand the other better than she or he understands herself or
himself. In the Márquez story, the medical director and the husband, after having
been briefed by the director, display this kind of understanding very saliently. I
think it is not by accident that the author fits out exactly these characters with an
attitude of arrogant possessiveness disguised as benevolence. In my reading of
his story he tries to uncover a trait that can frequently be found in the helping
professions. It springs from the dialectics of the relationship between the caring
and the cared-for, which is akin to the dialectics of the relationship between the
master and the slave. “The claim to understand the other person in advance
functions to keep the other person’s claim at a distance” (Gadamer, 1989a,
p. 360).
In a recent publication Leanne O’Shea relates a personal experience which
impressively illustrates a client’s fear of being interpreted in an I-It-manner:
Very early in beginning with a new therapist, I had a dream that was dis-
turbingly erotic. It was not so much the sexual content that unsettled me, but that
in my dream my longing and desire were directed towards my therapist explicitly
and unambiguously. I felt stripped bare by the dream, and even though I under-
stood it represented the work I needed to do, I recall arriving at therapy that day
feeling vulnerable and ashamed. All I could manage to do was allude to the
dream, and even though I felt myself to be in a safe place, I was unable to disclose
its specific content. The reasons for this are or course quite complex, but in
retrospect I have a sense that one of things that inhibited me was the fear that my
dream would be interpreted in a particular way, specifically that it would be
understood as the expression of my unconscious sexual desire for my therapist.
Whether or not this was true is, I think, irrelevant. It was more that somehow I felt
that my capacity to make meaning of my experience would be lost in the interpre-
 tation that I knew would be made. (O’Shea, 200, p. 106f.)

By contrast, the kind of understanding that is compatible with Buber’s I-Thou

is based on the willingness to let the other person speak to me and to accept that
she or he has something valid to tell me. It is based on a willingness to be
uncertain, on an openness, which not only implies the possibility that I might
learn something from the other, but also that I let something pass even against
my own point of view. The kinship of this hermeneutic position with Buber’s
“between” is obvious, and sometimes Gadamer chooses words he may have
adapted from Buber, with whose writings he was familiar, for instance when he
states: “The dialogue has a transforming power. When a dialogue succeeds,
something remains for us and in us, which has changed us” (Gadamer, 1993,
p. 211).
Moreover, this kind of understanding is something, which connects humans
to each other. In order to make this clear Gadamer plays with German words: To
listen to somebody (in German: jemandem zuhören) is linked with the experience
of belonging to somebody (in German: zu jemandem gehören):
In human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the
Thou truly as a Thou — i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say
something to us. Here is where openness belongs. (…) Without such openness to
one another there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always also
means being able to listen to one another. (Gadamer, 1989a, p. 361)

Let me give you still another quote, which will both remind you of Buber’s
terms and which will help me to prepare my next statement. Gadamer says: “The
true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between” (1989a, p. 295 — italics added). In
other words, it takes a joint endeavor of the one who is trying to understand and
the one who is to be understood, if understanding is to be achieved. The “be-
tween” in which that understanding takes place is a whole, which — in this
instance as well as in others — is more and different from the sum of its parts. It is
not just what the one person contributes plus what the other person contributes;
it consists of what results from the mutual exchange within this encounter, and
this result would never have been possible for each of the participants alone nor
by means of what they brought into that encounter in the first place. It has an
emergent quality.
It would never have been possible, because each participant enters the
dialogue as the person, who she or he is, that is to say: from the perspective of
her or his phenomenal field including her or his personal background, which is
both unique and limited. If we use the terms I have introduced before, we can
equally say: Each participant enters the dialogue with her or his own set of pre-
understandings or with her or his respective narrow horizon. At the beginning of
the dialogue, for each participant anything she or he thinks, says, feels, and does
has its meaning in relation to her or his respective horizon.

The Integration of Horizons

Now let us assume that a dialogue would have taken place between the
medical director and the woman who came to make a call — a dialogue, in which
the doctor would have permitted himself to be uncertain and would have tried to
understand the woman in a genuine way as described above: He would have
started to ask authentic questions about her background, he would have listened,
and he would have acknowledged her as a person who was able to tell him
something meaningful that he had not known before.
In this case something important would have happened to him: His horizon
would have become wider! He would have integrated at least parts of what the
woman told him, and his background would not have been the same as before. It
would have changed in the sense that his ‘mental picture’ of the woman would
have become more detailed, more differentiated, and more complete. He might
even have started to doubt the appropriateness of some of his own pre-under-
standings. The woman’s horizon would have affected and extended his horizon,
in other words: His horizon would have grown by the integration of the
woman’s horizon.
The integration of horizons is something different from putting oneself in the
other’s shoes as the idiom would have it. Doing so would mean to give up one’s
own horizon and to see the other as she or he saw herself or himself before and
without any hermeneutic dialogue taking place. This would be a mere duplication
of the other’s perspective without any profit. There would even be a loss, since it
would mean to deprive the other of the person who was going to understand her
or him. “If the interpreter tries to see ‘the other’s point of view,’ then he would be
freezing both his object and himself into static patterns . . . The task consists,
however, not in placing oneself in the latter, but in widening one’s own horizon
so that it can integrate the other; this is what occurs whenever understanding
takes place” (Atari, 1991, p. 36).
According to Gadamer true understanding takes place through a “fusion of
horizons” (1989a, p. 306). One might also say that understanding is a joint
coordinating of meanings within relationships as a result of a dialogue that takes
place within the frame of a certain cultural discourse (see Gergen, 2000). I suspect
that the word “fusion” is likely to trigger some aversion in gestalt therapists,
who may associate it with “confluence.” Although this would be an example for
a misunderstanding on the basis of not genuinely asking Gadamer what he
means by this word, I would rather sidestep this possible misunderstanding.
Therefore, I put my fifth statement this way:
(5) Understanding goes along with an integration of the other’s background and, hence, a
corresponding widening of one’s own horizon.
Sartre has said this much more saliently: “To understand means to change, to
go beyond oneself” (1964, p. 18). I think it is legitimate to reverse this sentence
and say that you did not understand, if you did not learn something new, if you
did not change in some way. In other words: The answer to the question if you
did change or not can help you to answer the question if you did understand or
not.

Meaning is Continuously Changing

Here a potentially infinite progression has its beginning: If you change as you
understand, you understand differently than before and you are not the one you
have been before. So you have gained a new background, a new horizon, a new
perspective from which to look at the person whom you are trying to
understand. Sooner or later you will come up with a different interpretation. And
the same applies to the other: The process that resulted from her or his wish to be
understood has consequences for her or him too. It has brought the other in
touch with your questions, your perspective, and your horizon, and in order to
respond to these questions she or he had to understand you to a certain degree.
The other had to widen her or his horizon too. So she or he has also changed in
the course of this process. Nobody and nothing remained the same, neither you
nor the other nor the subject matter that was to be understood. So “. . . the
meanings that we give to the events, experiences, people, and things in our
lives . . . [are] communally constructed and inherently susceptible to transforma-
tion” (Anderson, 2000, p. 202).
In Gadamer’s words — and this is my sixth statement —,
(6) understanding a person is “. . . not merely a reproductive but always a productive
activity as well” (1989a, p. 296 — italics added).
Although we can assume that in many cases there has been a more or less hidden
meaning in the beginning of the hermeneutic process, this process never only
consists of the mere “dis-covery” or finding of this pre-existing meaning. Mean-
ing is not just there waiting to be uncovered or made conscious. Understanding
is always also an innovative process in the course of which new meaning is
created. We have to conclude that the process of
. . . understanding contributes to what is to be understood, or, phrased differently,
that the fact that there occurs understanding is of importance for what is under-
stood. . . . understanding is in essence cooperative and . . . this has important
consequences for the content of what is understood. (de Gelder, 1981, p. 44 —
original italics)

When different persons meet, when new horizons come into play, when other
times impose their perspectives, new meanings and ways of understanding will
emerge. Perls’s dictum “there is no end to integration” (1969b, unpaginated), has
often been paraphrased by Petzold as “there is no end to creation.” This sentence
can well be applied to understanding. If understanding is part of being human, it
is part of our liveliness; and what is the essence of liveliness, if not continuous
(pro-)creation and creativity?
From this point of view, interpretation and understanding are in accordance
with our process-oriented thinking in gestalt therapy; they have to be seen as
examples of the famous sentence of Heraclitus, “one cannot step twice into the
same river” (1979, p. 53). There is no such thing as ‘the’ interpretation, which is
true once and forever. This means that the process of understanding will never be
finished. Women and men are historical beings who change continuously as time
goes on; and so do their environments. Therefore “to be historically means that
knowledge of oneself [as well as of others — F.-M. St.] can never be
complete” (Gadamer, 1989a, p. 302 — original italics). No method, as sophisticated
as it may be, will ever assure us of the ultimate correctness of any understanding.
As Gadamer points out in Truth and Method, there is no secure way from method
to truth.
The whole of the hermeneutic enterprise and the conversation that it invites
and provokes continues to emphasize the tentativeness of the process of relations
and intersubjectivity; continues to remind us that . . . the meanings that appear
true at once can transform themselves into something also seemingly true; that the
truth lives in the relation of subjects during a particular time and according to a
particular context. (Barclay, 1993, p. 99)

The Dangers and Limits of Understanding Another Person

In the section on “Interpretation and the Therapeutic Relationship” I have
already pointed at some dangers: Understanding can be abused for manipulative
purposes; and it can be misused in the service of an arrogant attitude, which
claims to know the other better, (in depth psychology:) “deeper,” or fuller than
she or he does herself or himself. These two dangers, if taken together and to
their extremes, may lead to an “understanding” that tries to exert a kind of
totalitarian control over the other person as it takes possession of her or him and
assimilates her or his otherness to a degree, which is equivalent to negating or
destroying it. What happens to the woman in Márquez’ story is a startling
example. Theodor Reik, who is famous for his book Hearing With the Third Ear
(1976) called this
. . . psychological cannibalism: The other is incorporated into the I and
becomes, at least temporarily, a part of the I. By this process of psychological
understanding the human lust for power asserts itself not only in its finest and
most sublimated, but also unconsciously in its roughest ways. (Reik, 1935,
pp. 189f.)

By contrast, interpreting and understanding another person in the way, which

I have called an “I-Thou-understanding,” cannot be possessive or ignorant of the
other’s otherness. This kind of understanding is aware of its own limits. More-
over, it does not only accept these limits, but it wants them and defends them if
they are threatened. I-Thou-understanding recognizes and acknowledges the
paradoxical conditions on which it is based: The anticipation of completeion (or
the principle of charity — see respective section above) on the one hand and the
engaged acceptance of its limits on the other hand.
What I have just described as “engaged acceptance” may also be called
“voluntary self-restriction”: I-Thou-understanding prefers to let go of grasping
the presumed completion of the other’s meaning, if the integrity of her or his
otherness is about to be jeopardized. It thoroughly knows that, although there
are many similarities between human beings, the other will always remain a
mystery, which has to be respected and left untouched for the sake of humanity
(see Arnold, 1999, p. 43). Just like gestalt therapy, hermeneutic philosophy
cherishes differences.
One of the greatest moralists of our times, Emmanuel Lévinas (1987; 1989;
1992), has eloquently emphasized that any ignorance or disrespect of the other’s
otherness must be seen as an inhumane act of violence or brutality. His German
translator summed up his position when he wrote that the “. . . seizing — not the
ethically responding — understanding of the other is violence towards him, since
it just annihilates the otherness of the other and subjugates it . . .” (Wenzler, in:
Lévinas, 1989, p. 71).
In a certain sense Gadamer anticipated the position of Lévinas when he wrote
that “. . . we understand in a different way, if we understand at all” (1989a, p. 297 —
original italics). However, Gadamer did so from a primarily logical point of view,
not so much from an ethical one as Lévinas. Gadamer’s reasoning went this way:
Now certainly I would not want to say that the solidarities that bind human
beings together and make them partners in a dialogue always are sufficient to
enable them to achieve understanding and total mutual agreement. Just between
two people this would require a never-ending dialogue. And the same would
apply with regard to the inner dialogue the soul has with itself. Of course we
encounter limits again and again; we speak past each other and are even at cross-
purposes with ourselves. But in my opinion we could not do this at all if we had
not traveled a long way together, perhaps without even acknowledging it to
ourselves. (Gadamer, 1989b, p. 57)

Conclusion: The Potential Shortcomings of This Chapter

As I wrote in the beginning, my aim for this article was to offer some prelimi-
nary thoughts, which may serve as a point of departure for further considera-
tions. Hermeneutic philosophy and its possible applications in psychotherapy
are just too vast an area to be dealt with in such a relatively brief chapter.
So I expect that to everybody who has studied philosophy this chapter is
obviously deficient since it only refers to a very small part of the hermeneutic
tradition. This tradition can be traced back to the Ancient World, to the Middle
th
Ages, and, in its modern form, to the 19 century. Well-informed readers will
certainly miss the mention of names such as Schleiermacher (1996), Dilthey
(1958), and Nietzsche (1964), as well as the names of important hermeneutic
th
writers of the 20 century such as Betti (1967), Ricoeur (1974), Habermas (1982),
Feyerabend (1995), Rorty (1979), Davidson (1984), Derrida (1976), and many
others.
My preference of Gadamer springs from personal sources: He was one of the
“grand old men” whom I met in my life and who deeply impressed me by the
way they were as persons let alone by what they had to say. Even to him this
chapter does not do justice. Too many important aspects of his philosophy have
not been mentioned, — horribile dictu: — not even the famous “hermeneutic
circle,” which he had adapted from his teacher, Martin Heidegger.
Another serious shortcoming of this chapter has to do with the fact that many
facets of the criticism of Gadamer’s philosophy have been neglected. Except for
Hirsch (and to him only in footnotes 7 and 10) I did not refer to any of
Gadamer’s critics, not even to his both famous and infamous discussion with
Derrida at the Goethe-Institute in Paris, France, in April, 1981 (see Becker, 1981;
Forget, 1984; Michelfelder & Palmer, 1989), which caused quite a stir. In addition,
I have left out completely any discussion of the differences between understand-
ing texts on the one hand (which is to what hermeneutic philosophy mostly
refers) and understanding persons on the other hand. I have tried to avoid this
discussion in that I have only tapped hermeneutic sources for ideas that I think
can be transferred without theoretical problems to the understanding of persons.
Much remains to be done, if we want to draw on the hermeneutic literature
and make use of it for our theory and practice of gestalt therapy. However, I am
sure that this philosophy can be very inspiring for us. I hope that this chapter has
been able to offer the foretaste of a meal that promises to be delicious.
For me one of the most striking analogies between hermeneutic philosophy
and gestalt therapy theory can be found in the attitude that both of them favor: a
well-cultivated uncertainty (see Staemmler, 1997; 2000). In this vein I would like
to finish with a quote from Wittgenstein, who in his beautiful little book On
Certainty warns us not to be impressed very much by the attitude of assurance.
He wrote: “Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things
are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified” (1972, p. 6e
— original italics).

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