Presenter: Jean-Marie Robine
Description:
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 primarily concerned 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., metamorphosis, transformation.
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 form, an aesthetic act.
Biography:
Jean-Marie Robine has been a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist since 1967 and a Gestalt therapist since 1976. After more than 15 years as a psychologist, then a director, in a public health service for children, adolescents, and their families, he created in 1980 the Institut Français de Gestalt-thérapie (IFGT), the first Gestalt institute in France. To date, it has trained hundreds or maybe thousands of Gestalt therapists not only in France but also in Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, the USA, and Latin America.
He was a co-creator of the Societé Française de Gestalt, then of Collège Européen de Gestalt-thérapie, national societies for Gestalt therapy, and the European Association for Gestalt Therapy. He was also the president of EAGT in the early 1990s.
In addition, Jean-Marie created the two French journals for Gestalt therapy and was their editor-in-chief for several years. Then he opened a nonprofit organization for publishing a series of Gestalt therapy books, l’Exprimerie, as a division of IFGT. More than 50 Gestalt therapy books, originals and translations, have been published, mostly in French but also some in English. He has authored or edited nine Gestalt therapy books, which have been translated into several languages. He is the co-editor and publisher of the last manuscript from Fritz Perls – with wonderful comments from several famous colleagues – already available in many languages, and also the editor of Self: A Polyphony of Contemporary Gestalt Therapists, published in many languages.
Now retired from heading IFGT, he remains the organizer and coordinator of its international programs, teaching mostly abroad some supervision groups, postgraduate programs, and training for supervisors and trainers, but also enjoys his (partial) retirement in the countryside near Bordeaux to grow his vegetables and fruit trees.
Websites:
www.gestalt-ifgt.com
www.exprimerie.fr
