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We are told on the dust cover of the book that the Gestalt approach is based on growth principles rather than on arbitrary standards. This indeed is the spirit of the book, and it seems to me that it is a spirit very much in sympathy with that of Jungian psychology.
As in Jungian psychology, the source of development, or the point of emphasis, is not the ego, which the authors define as a system of identifications and alienations, but the self, which they regard as the dynamic process of contacting between organism and environment. It is thus a distinctly narrower concept than that of the Jungian self and is to do with the amount of awareness and aliveness at any given moment, and the differentiation between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’. These latter concepts hark back to the old laboratory experiments on perception and learning by the Gestaltists of academic psychology, and pervade somewhat confusingly the tough terminological thicket which confronts the newcomer.
The book is addressed to a reader the authors wish to help and liberate. It is a manual of instruction in self-therapy primarily for the not-too-ill intelligent younger person. Thus (p. 4) we read: ‘To suppose you do have a secret self but that it is sinister and better left alone is an attitude you have not always had and need not retain indefinitely.’ It comes from the reader's having rejected parts of himself that caused too much trouble in certain times of stress. However, present circumstances being different, the cast-out part can now perhaps be salvaged.
The first half of the book instructs the reader in performing a series of experiments on himself and the way he carries out various simple operations. Perhaps one might say they are designed to help the reader become aware of any loss of ego function and find out the manner in which he is preventing himself from functioning. The first experiment is called ‘feeling the actual’ and the first instruction is to ‘try for a few minutes to make up sentences stating