Gaie Houston: Bracketing
Perls described Awareness as a present phenomenon, as now, a developing glow from within.
We previously likened genuine awareness to the glow produced within a burning coal by its own combustion, and introspection to turning the beam of a flashlight on an object and peering at its surface by means of the reflected rays. P. 158 PHG.
This statement needs to go before any talk about bracketing. This word has crept into psychotherapeutic jargon, and needs to be hounded off the premises of any gestalt practitioner. It is a violation of the concept of genuine awareness. A client is sitting in front of her therapist lamenting that Labour has won the election. The therapist is a Labour voter. Arguably this is a moment for the therapist to bracket her political affiliations. To do so involves a manipulation of organismic gestalt formation. It involves a deliberate switch, or at least an attempt to interrupt, the emergence of that glow from within.
Working only partly in awareness, the extraordinary power of our mind works ceaselessly at sifting all the data behind every perception and every action anyone ever takes. What is apparently this instant is fashioned not just by the immediate scene, but by personal history, by the state of the digestion, the weather, this morning’s row with the neighbour, attitude to the person addressed, by all that is known to the organism. The field is awesomely vast. To put aside or squash what the mind presents as the next awareness is to be, in Sartre’s terms, to be in bad faith. Phoney. A lot of us are, a lot of the time, and none the better for that.
If the fictional therapist in the last paragraph was worth her training, she would not play at bracketing. She would trust that her interest in her patient would influence her perception more than the fact that she had spent the evenings of a week door-stepping for a Labour candidate. Surmises and curiosity would rush in about what in the client’s life had led her to support Reform or the Lib Dems or whoever else. The therapist is there to do therapy, not either to parade or coyly hide her own life.
It would be easy for me to go on writing about this example of bracketing. My need is to move on to the huge bracketing operation most of us manage over climate change. Please. Picking up litter in the park and carrying a fancy bottle to hold the coffees that would have been served in single-use plastic is laudable. It does not balance going to Japan for your once-in-a-lifetime holiday there; it does not justify a couple of round trips by air within Europe every year.
We live with the absurdity that economic prosperity for many nations depends on air travel, many of them places that suffer already and will suffer catastrophically more from the global warming that planes create. It is not very difficult to see why people respond to the constant advertisements for bargain travel to everywhere. If they do go so far as to find out how much it would cost to go to the same places by surface travel, they get a pretty nasty and convincing shock. There is no incentive for most governments to tax air travel in a way that reduces it. So on we fly, whoosh, to self-immolation.
Taking a seven-day cruise is three times more carbon-polluting than flying to a place and staying there, claims one website. A more dramatic way of admitting how air travel contributes four percent to global warming is that ninety kilograms of CO2 is emitted for every passenger every hour. That’s a fact that gets bracketed.
OK. So let’s stick to the car. Oh dear. Cars cause a whacking ten percent increase to global warming. This is where we have got to. A lot of genies have been let out of bottles and it would be massively inconvenient to try and stuff them back, while we can still have our wishes granted and be the luckiest generations of humans ever to have despoiled this beautiful planet.
Letting all these data seep into our gestalt formations would sometimes make for extraordinarily radical choices and behaviour. Bracketing is a slipshod concept. But no wonder it is such a popular device.
Gaie Houston
Long time Gestalt practitioner and writer. Brought group dynamics into Gestalt awareness.
