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metanymous в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)
Although Gestalt was quite good at revealing the dynamics of internal conflicts, and eliciting alienated behaviors, it was not nearly as effective in resolving them. The client kept switching back and forh between the two parts of the dialogue until integration occurred. Sometimes this took a long time, and it often involved a lot of broken furniture as they acted out their anger and fantasies of revenge on the empty chair.
This was primarily because Gestalt didn’t include the presupposition of positive intent behind every behavior. Assuming positive intent makes it much easier for us to accept an alienated part, and be willing to identify with it and learn from it. Gestalt took a small step in this direction by assuming that every alienated part had a valuable power. No matter how troublesome or destructive a behavior was, it was a resource that could be integrated and used in more positive ways if it was acknowledged as part of the self. The only real choice was between the present state in which the alienated part would express its power in whatever way it wanted, or identifying with it, taking it into the self, and gaining some degree of choice about how the power was expressed.
However, acknowledging the power in a troublesome aspect of behavior is not nearly as convincing and liberating as realizing that an alienated part is already performing a positive function that can be acknowledged and celebrated, building a positive alliance with the part. For instance, a parent’s withering criticism might have the positive intent of motivating a child to succeed, as well as the positive intent of expressing the parent’s feeling of helpless frustration.
Since the child also wants to succeed, the parent and child are now in agreement about the intent, so they can now explore together how to alter the problematic behavior to make it even more effective in achieving the positive intent. Once this alliance is established, it is relatively easy to work together with the part, instead of battling with it.
There are actually three fundamentally different kinds of positve intent, and they can be illustrated in a familiar scenario in which a parent or other important person criticizes a child, and the child understands this behavior as meaning something about the child. Often a criticism is a clumsy overgeneralization like, “You’re stupid,” or it’s loaded with unuseful presuppositions like, “Why won’t you ever grow up?”
- The parent’s positive intent could be entirely for the parent—to express frustration, to be “right,” to get the child to behave in a way that makes the parent feel better or look better to others—or some other benefit to the parent. When this is the only positive intent, it changes the emotional significance of the criticism. It becomes obvious that the criticism results from the parent’s limitations, and really has little or nothing to do with the child, so the child no longer needs to be troubled by it.