When the Esalen Institute was founded in 1962, with an explicit agenda of offering a forum to “everything that is excluded from the Academy,” certainly the youthful founders did not have in mind to invent (or reinvent) ”experiential education” — much less to revolutionize the fields of adult education, lifelong learning, and a number of related areas in education, in the broadest and deepest sense of the word.
What is the self? “Not-a-thing-but-a-process,” we are accustomed to answer, if sometimes a bit formulaically, under our Gestalt model. “Only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by,” say Goodman and Perls. Not the meanings themselves, in other words, but the “finding and making” of them (and possibly not all meanings, but only those “we grow by”). Not the story, that is, but the need and capacity to tell a story, to make some meaningful whole out of the “booming, buzzing confusion” that is the world.
The current vogue for Shakespeare and things Shakespearean in the popular media is a curious aspect of the contemporary cultural scene. Of course we know that the Bard has long (though not always) been the most often-performed dramatist on stage, at least in the English-speaking world. But live theater — and particularly “highbrow” theater — reaches only a relatively small audience; big-budget motion pictures and television are a different matter. When the movie boomlet reaches Titus Andronicus, long and reasonably regarded as the most unstageable of all the Shakespeare canon, clearly we’re in the presence of something different, something that speaks to the current cultural moment in a particular way. But what is it? What does Shakespeare reflect in us, and what do we see in Shakespeare, that resonates with our felt concerns and realities in today’s world?
Creativity may be usefully defined as the capacity to generate novel solutions to problems, which includes of course the ability to see the world in problem-solving terms in the first place. Clearly, this creative capacity is the defining characteristic of our species, an extremely young branch of the primate order, which has managed to arise and then spread over the entire planet in the course of only 3000 or so generations, a mere blink of evolutionary time. This capacity, in turn, rests in some way on our biological history: specifically, the remarkably rapid expansion of brain tissue in our ancestral line, in which the neocortex together with its infoldings has multi- plied some fourfold in surface area in the brief evolutionary window of only a couple of million years
The Gestalt model is an approach to understanding the organization of experience — how it is that we get from the chaotic, overwhelming world of stimulus and event to the kind of organized, usable, and relatively stable sequences and pictures that serve us in our essential survival and growth task of predicting and dealing with contingency, both present and future. The ability to do this flexibly and creatively, across a variable range of conditions, is our fundamental species survival characteristic, the capacity that first set our particular evolutionary line apart from the other great apes, and then led to our spreading over and dominating the globe (a domination which may yet come to an end, if we do not solve the kinds of social and intergroup problems that will be discussed in this essay).
The dawn of the twentieth century, as has often been observed, brought the high-water mark of something we may call, particularly in its Anglo/American inflection, the “High Victorian Synthesis.” This was that optimistic and fiercely self-confident worldview that held that Western European civilization was the vanguard of a new departure in human history, a permanent if sometimes bumpy upward arc of progress marked by the enormous advances of the past few centuries in science and technology, which were themselves now nearly complete. Along with this came the growth and spread of individual rights and expression.
Mapping human capacities, noticing patterns and generating assumptions about how we and other people are motivated and work, has to be nearly as old as those capacities themselves. This activity of course can be implicit or explicit; oftentimes we know a person’s motivations and assumptive set (or our own) inferentially, by observing how he or she or we ourselves behave.
Los hallazgos recientes en las investigaciones neurobiológicas, avalan y apoyan algunos de los puntos que la teoría de campo de Gestalt maneja sobre el desarrollo infantil. Este artículo examina las aportaciones que hace la literatura de la investigación neurobiológica sobre la importancia de la interrelación en la estructuración de los circuitos neuronales durante el primero y segundo año de vida y el significado que esta información tiene para la perspectiva construccionista intersubjetiva de la Gestalt.
