An article by John Bernard Harris on the Manchester Gestalt Centre website.

"The current explosion of interest in training and accreditation in Gestalt and other psychotherapies has, so far, taken a largely practical emphasis. People are setting up training institutes and running courses, and many are without teaching or training experience. Where this is the case, they may not have thought in any depth about the training values and methods they use, thereby ensuring that both the content and style of their teaching are appropriate to and consistent with the subject they are teaching.

In this piece I want to try to fill some of this methodological vacuum by presenting some of the ideas and views I am developing on learning and its facilitation. I believe that Gestalt therapy theory, and its parent disciplines of phenomenology, existentialism and field theory, can offer us a coherent approach to this complex subject, and it is in that hopeful spirit that I offer this article.

I want to cover two topics. First, I outline some basic ideas about learning which ground my practice; and second, I want to talk about the facilitation of learning in a training setting."

The rest of the article is available at: