Gestalt Therapy and Social Change
Paul Goodman’s radical promise for Gestalt beyond the therapy room
Amidst extreme political polarisation, institutional distrust, and social fragmentation, could Gestalt therapy offer collective healing beyond the consulting room? In fact it was born with social transformation woven into its very fabric, through the influence of its main theorist, Paul Goodman, whose radical vision believed therapy and social change to be fundamentally inseparable. Goodman, the primary author of the theoretical sections of Gestalt’s key text Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, was never just interested in psychotherapy as conventionally playing out in the therapy room. A social critic, anarchist philosopher, and public intellectual whose book Growing Up Absurd influenced an entire generation of activists in the 1960s, Goodman brought to Gestalt a deep analysis of how society shapes and misshapes human development. His central thesis was simple: it is not individuals who are sick, but society. Drawing from the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin, Goodman believed that human beings are not inherently flawed but rather damaged by their institutions.
This perspective fundamentally reframes what therapy is for. Rather than adjusting individuals to fit a dysfunctional social order, Goodman saw therapeutic work as helping people change their environment. Liberation from authoritarian institutions, schools that crush creativity, workplaces that demand conformity, systems that crush human potential was not incidental to healing but central to it. He passionately believed that liberation is itself a political task, and central to that liberation is the transformation of social institutions.
What might this mean in practice today? Gestalt's core principles translate well to the challenges of social engagement. The emphasis on awareness, that is cultivating clear perception of what actually exists in the present moment rather than what we assume or wish to be true offers a foundation for cutting through ideological distortion and propaganda. In a media landscape saturated with misinformation and tribal identity, the Gestalt invitation to stay with direct experience before interpretation becomes genuinely countercultural.
The concept of contact, the authentic meeting at the boundary between self and other, between self and environment provides a template for dialogue across difference. Where contempt and projection characterise so much contemporary discourse, Gestalt's attention to what emerges at the contact boundary points toward encounters that neither merge into false agreement nor retreat into defensive isolation. This capacity for genuine contact, neither confluent nor disconnected, is precisely what fractured communities need.
Responsibility, rephrased in Gestalt terms as response-ability (our very capacity to respond), invites active engagement with our circumstances rather than passive victimhood or helpless cynicism. Goodman captured this position in his instruction to would-be revolutionaries - suppose your side had won and you had the society you wanted, how would you live personally in that society and start living that way now. This is not withdrawal but embodied prefiguration, demonstrating through present action the quality of relating that social change ultimately seeks.
Laura Perls articulated the inherently political dimension of this work with clarity - when we support people to become more authentic in societies that are authoritarian, this is always political work. Supporting the development of genuine selfhood, the capacity to know what one wants and to make meaningful contact with others, inevitably challenges social arrangements that depend upon compliance and diminished personhood.
The early Gestalt community understood this integration of therapeutic and political concerns. The New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy became what Joseph Melnick called a hotbed of social advocacy. Practitioners like Elliot Shapiro applied Gestalt principles in trade union activism and educational reform; Patrick Kelly directed Identity House, working to change the conditions in which LGBT people lived through community building and peer counselling. These were not separate activities from their therapeutic work but expressions of the same fundamental orientation.
As Gestalt became professionalised and mainstream, this activist dimension diminished. Training programmes focused on individual treatment, formalised requirements narrowed practice, and the field became more insular. This drive for Gestalt to become an accepted psychotherapetic modality may have cost it some of its original critical edge.
Today, Goodman's analysis feels more urgent than ever. Structural inequity, the gap between democratic rhetoric and reality, the power of institutions to constrain human growth, the widespread experience of alienation and injustice, these conditions call for responses that integrate personal awareness with social engagement. A Gestalt therapy, awakened from its political amnesia and reconnected with Goodman’s founding vision, has so much more potential to contribute to the work of mending the world.
more on Paul Goodman
Watch Paul Goodman (changed my life), Jonathan Lee (2011)
