Goldstein upheld a field theoretical approach to the treatment of brain injury, advocating the creative adjustments he saw whole people making in the face of traumatic neurological injury. His work, as most Gestalt therapists realize, significantly influenced the inspirational foundation for what became Gestalt therapy, as developed by Frederick Perls and others. Thus, there is precedent as well as historical lineage in checking back with neuroscience in order to understand how people experience. When that is done utilizing contemporary research, one discovers that Goldstein has been updated. Now, for instance, we do have physical evidence of neurological systems correlating to experience.
People can trace routes in the brain by which phenomenological processes unfold.
One person who has done this to a great extent is Joseph LeDoux, professor at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. LeDoux's research into the brain systems correlating to fear gave new insight into the ways in which anxieties come about and are perpetuated. His point of view on the ways in which field effects influence phenomenological process showed how influences in the field become one's experience. Since then, others have built on his initial discoveries. The Emotional Brain is an easily read overview of Joseph LeDoux's research, and this book is important to Gestalt therapists because the insights of such neuroscience take us out of the realm of speculative philosophizing and ground us more firmly in substantive research.