His little zinger about Gestalt being removed from the title of the reprint of the book by Jossey Bass for good reasons is absurd. The book is still listed on all fronts as a Gestalt presentation. Wysong is also completely erroneous in his pronouncement that the body therapists who influenced Gestalt therapy did so without use of touch. In addition, Lore Perls used touch in her work without hesitation, particularly when she was working with the client s embodied supports for contact in breathing, posture, and so on. As to how much Body Process is rooted in Gestalt therapy theory, Philip Brownell gives some very succinct representations of this in his comments.
Readers can of course decide for themselves.
Body Process was never intended to be a complete explication of Gestalt therapy theory and practice. It was intended to explicate an aspect of the Gestalt therapy approach and theory, the phenomenology of embodied experience and a way of working therapeutically which takes body experience and body process as an orienting point. This possibility was implicit but never fully developed in the original writings and practice of Gestalt therapy. I do not agree with this view, nor with the view that Gestalt therapy has any such fundamentalist doctrine. Gestalt therapy is by it s nature a herald of the value of experimentalism in attitude, in practice and in writing.