Gestalt Therapy as an Aesthetic Act. From Sensing to Forming of Forms

Today, reference to philosophical aesthetics seems to be taking on an increasingly important role in the theoretical apparatus of gestalt-therapy, including as a contribution to the development of a specific psychopathology or theorization of the therapeutic encounter. Baumgarten’s original aesthetics were primarily concerned with what I would prefer to call aesthesis, since it is essentially a matter of feeling, of sensitive knowledge. When we speak of anesthesia, kinesthesia, paresthesia, etc., the various prefixes nuance the forms of aesthesis, of feeling. Baumgarten thus invited us to embark on a veritable epistemology of sensibility: I can access the other only through my senses, i.e., my perceptions and sensations in their presence, perceptions and sensations that are then transformed into feelings, thoughts, representations, imaginations, inferences, projections, knowledge... The evolution of the concept has clearly shown that the aesthetic act does not stop at feeling, or even feeling what I feel, because this feeling (aesthesis) is transformed into an act. The aesthetic act extends into a change of form, i.e., meta-morphosis, trans-formation. If, among Gestalt Therapists, aesthetic reference is sometimes dominated by – or even limited to – what I’ve called aesthesis (aesthesis stage?), there’s a risk of forgetting that even this phase of the process, this implicit, mainly sensory-motor knowledge, doesn’t make us mere receivers. We are actors, that is, producers of acts, the first of which is to “feel what I feel”. In the therapeutic situation, every therapist has often been confronted with the fact that some patients “feel” but don’t know how to carry out the work that enables this feeling to be transformed. The process of feeling is immobilized and fixed in various pathological forms; the metamorphosis of feeling into action itself requires an act, an intervention. The psychotherapist’s task, his act, enables the patient to appropriate his feeling, to feel that he feels, and to experience the metamorphosis of this feeling, the forming of forms, an aesthetic act.

Keywords: ; Aesthetics; feeling; sensation; formation of forms

Jean-Marie Robine, La terapia della Gestalt come atto estetico. Dalla sensazione alla formazione delle forme in "QUADERNI DI GESTALT" 1/2025, pp 71-83, DOI: 10.3280/qg2025-1oa20562