Unfinished gestalt. Theory of incomplete actions in gestalt psychology

In the early twentieth century, a direction in psychology was founded in Germany, which was called "Gestalt psychology". The Gestaltists built their scientific theory on the fact that the perception of the world around us is based on the sensory and imaginative perception of objects and phenomena as integral structures that are indivisible to individual components. For example, if a person sees a familiar object with missing parts, then his consciousness seeks to supplement this object and "finish" these most missing parts.

In the same way, people seek to complete, supplement, bring to the logical whole incomplete actions, untested feelings, unspoken emotions and thoughts. The principle of completion formed the basis of psychotherapeutic techniques of Gestalt therapy, founded by F.Perls. He believed that the individual always seeks to complete the unfinished gestalt, to finish the unfinished and to achieve a sense of wholeness and harmony. When these or other life events and situations, as well as feelings and experiences associated with them, come to a logical conclusion, a person comes to a state of calm and confidence, felt not only on the emotional, but also on the bodily level.

What does it mean to complete a gestalt? This means satisfying the need, the main and most significant at this moment in life, realized and felt at the physical, emotional and mental levels. In Gestalt psychology, the emergence and satisfaction of need is a cycle of education and the completion of gestalt. Figuratively speaking, each person's need is a bright figure, standing out against the general background of life experience. When the need is satisfied, the figure goes away, dissolves in the surrounding background, but another figure appears, and the higher and more significant the need, the contours of the figure are clearer and brighter. An incomplete gestalt is an interrupted cycle, a situation that needs or is emotionally unjustified until the logical conclusion. What happens and why? The reasons for this can be very different. This may be external social factors or intrapersonal prohibitions and restrictions imposed by upbringing. Well, so, - someone will tell. Unfinished actions do not mean the end of life, does it continue? Yes, life goes on, but how, and what? Each unmet need, and especially deeply significant, leads to stress. Stress, caused by the incompleteness of one need, gives rise to incompleteness of another. So, gradually life turns into a series of failures, unexpressed feelings, emotions, which entails boredom and inaction.

The emotionally unfinished gestalt is a feeling of frustration, grief and anger, sadness and indignation that arose in the past in relations with parents, beloveds, children, spouses and who were not expressed and expressed. Unfinished gestalt can also be from unrequited love, actions not taken in the past, from arose and unconscious sense of guilt , etc.

Psychotherapists assert that an incomplete gestalt makes a person constantly return to him, to those unspoken feelings, interrupted feelings or actions, trying somehow to relive them again, in a different form. Very often parents, forcing children to do some actions and deeds, try to complete their own unfinished gestalt in the past. But even more often a person tries to avoid the completion of something unfinished, thereby increasing his dependence on the past. It includes mechanisms for avoiding and suppressing the arising unconscious needs and desires, once unrealized, and this, in turn, leads to neuroses and psychosomatic diseases.

Gestalt therapists with the help of various therapeutic techniques and techniques help a person to reveal and realize from vague feelings and intuitive dissatisfaction once incomplete actions and emotions in order to relive them again, already at a different level, and thereby harmonize their lives.