Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer
FrancoAngeli Journals

Presentations, edited by Giuseppe Sampognaro and Alessandra Vela

No. 1 (2025)

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

  • Jean-Marie Robine
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3280/qg2025-1oa20562
Submitted
luglio 3, 2025
Published
2025-07-23

Abstract

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.

References

  1. Baumgarten A.G. (1988). Esthétique. Parigi, FR: L’Herne (ed. or.: Aesthetica. Braunschweig, DE: Wengler & Spohr, 1750; trad. it.: Estetica. Palermo: Aesthetica Edizioni, 2020).
  2. Capek J. (2010). Action et situation: Le sens du possible entre phénoménologie et herméneutique. Hidelsheim, DE: Georg Olms Verlag.
  3. Chrétien J.-L. (1992). L’appel et la réponse, Parigi, FR: Les Éditions de Minuit.
  4. Dewey J. (2010). L’art comme expérience. Parigi, FR: Éditions Gallimard (ed. or.: Art as Experience. New York, NY: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934; trad. it.: Arte come esperienza. Palermo: Aesthetica Edizioni).
  5. Dewey J. (2012). Expérience et nature. Parigi, FR: Éditions Gallimard (ed. or.: Experience and Nature. La Salle, IL: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1925; trad. it.: Esperienza e natura. Milano: Ugo Mursia, 2020).
  6. Frank R. (2022). The Bodily Roots of Experience in Psychotherapy. New York, NY: Routledge.
  7. Freud S. (1962). L’avenir d’une illusion. Presses Universitaires de France (PUF) (ed. or.: Die Zukunft einer illusion. Vienna, AT: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1927; trad. it.: L’avvenire di un’illusione. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1975).
  8. Freud S. (1969). L’Interprétation des rêves. Parigi, FR: Presses Universitaires de France (PUF). (ed. or.: Die Traumdeutung. Leipzig, DE Und Vienna, AT: Frank Deuticke, 1900; trad. it.: L’interpretazione dei sogni. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1985).
  9. Gibson J.J. (2014). La théorie des affordances. Parigi, FR: Éditions Dehors (ed. or.:. The theory of affordances. In: Shaw R., Bransford J., ed., di, Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. New Jersey, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Ass. Pub. Hillsdale, 2014).
  10. Maldiney H. (2022). Espace, rythme, forme. Parigi, FR: Éditions du Cerf.
  11. Miller M.V. (1980). Notes on Art and Symptoms. The Gestalt Journal, III, 1: 86-98.
  12. Perls F.S., Clements C.C. (1968). Acting Out Versus Acting Through. Voices, The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, 4, 68: 66-73.
  13. Perls F.S., Hefferline R.F., Goodman P. (1951; 1994). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York, NY: The Gestalt Journal Press (trad. it.: Teoria e pratica della terapia della Gestalt. Vitalità e accrescimento nella personalità umana. Roma: Astrolabio. 1971; 1997).
  14. Perls L. (2017). Vivre à la frontiere. Bordeaux, FR: L’Exprimerie (ed or.: Living at the Boundary. New York, NY: Gestalt Therapy Press, 1992).
  15. Petit M. (1981). “La fonction thérapeutique de l’enactment en gestalt-thérapie, Tesi di dottora-to presso l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales”, Parigi (non pubblicata).
  16. Pignon-Ernest E. (2009). Faire œuvre des situations. Avignon, FR: Collections Entre-Vues-Éditions Universitaires d’Avignon.
  17. Robine J.-M. (2002). L’intentionnalité en chair et en os. Cahiers de Gestalt-thérapie, 12. Ri-pubblicato in Robine J.-M. (2004). S’apparaître à l’occasion d’un autre. Bordeaux, FR: L’Exprimerie.
  18. Saint Girons B. (2008). L’acte esthétique. Cinq réels, cinq risques de se perdre. Parigi, FR: Klincksieck (trad. it.: L’atto estetico: cinque realtà, cinque rischi di perdersi. Modena: Mucchi, 2009).
  19. Schaeffer J.-M. (2015). L’expérience esthétique. Parigi, FR: Éditions Gallimard.
  20. Sontag S. (2008). Garder le sens mais altérer la forme. Parigi, FR: Éd. Bourgois.
  21. Straus E.W. (1989). Du sens des sens. Contribution à l’étude des fondements de la psychologie. Grenoble, FR: Éditions Jérome Million (ed. or.: Von Sinn der Sinne. Berlino, DE: Springer, 1935).
  22. Straus E.W., Griffith R.M., eds. (1970). Aisthesis and Aesthetics. The Fourth Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
  23. Woolf V. (1989). Le Vagues. Parigi, FR: Le Livre de Poche (ed. or.: The Waves. Londra, UK: Hogarth Press, 1931; trad. it.: Le onde. Torino: Einaudi, 1960).

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...