1) In the article "Gestalt Therapy, Human Potentialities," Frederick S. Perls explains the Gestalt integration technique. Describe this technique.
The Gestalt integration technique is a therapeutic effort that focuses on dream work. The purpose of the technique is to get the client in touch with his own genuine interests, desires, and needs instead of his continuing to live a life in which he tries to have the interests, desires, and needs he thinks he should have.
The integration technique itself is based on the assumption that the patient's dream is an existential message informing him both about his life circumstances and how to change these circumstances into events and situations that are more satisfying and functional. The technique involves having the client assign meaning to every detail of the dream.
Client-assignment of meaning is important because a key aspect of the technique is that it is the patient and not the therapist that really knows what the dream means. However, the therapist does assume that dream elements are projections on the part of the client.
These projections are such that every aspect of the dream (people, places, objects, etc.) are a part of the client's self; specifically they are parts that have been alienated from his/her self-image. The Gestalt integration technique aims, therefore, at having all alienated parts of self encounter one another in the conscious mind of the client so that he may then integrate these aspects into a whole and coherent self that really knows the desires and needs within, and comes to know them in a way that he need not find conflict between them.
The technique, in total, goes for an encounter between what Perls describes as Topdog and Underdog. Topdog is an inner voice that is punitive, authoritarian; he issues commands to the self from a perspective of hatred and tyrannical control. Underdog is the infantile aspect of self, the self that wants...