Transformational Chairwork: Five Ways of Using Therapeutic Dialogues
Scott Kellogg, PhD
New York University
Perls strongly believed in the importance of working with dreams. Drawing on psychoanalytic, Jungian, and humanistic concepts, Perls argued that emotional disturbance stemmed from patients’ accepting certain aspects of their experience while projecting and dissociating others. Healing would come through the re-integration of the disowned parts, and the dream became an ideal vehicle for this process (Perls, 1969)
For Perls, every detail in the dream is an aspect of the person. He would ask patients to embody these images by speaking from the perspective of each of them. To further his goal of integration, he would select images that were, in some way, polarities to each other. For example, in one chair they would speak from the vantage point of the sky, while in the other, they would speak from the perspective of the earth. Other polarities could included sea and shore, male and female, and a bare floor and a rug (Baumgardner, 1975; Perls, 1969). In one particularly beautiful example, Perls first had a woman speak from the image of a beached whale – which embodied her feelings of depression and self-loathing. He then asked her to speak from the perspective of the sea. One observer remembered her being transformed as she accessed the power of an image that was filled with life, beauty, and mystery (Miller, 1992). In this way, Perls juxtaposed a life image against a death image and helped this woman experience the fact that both were true for her.
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