1.1 Personal Motivation

I found my way to psychotherapy through music. Making music with other people means resonating with them, harmonising with one another and creating something that is more than the sum of its parts.

Making music together takes place in the here and now and requires a sense of togetherness that goes far beyond the cognitive. It is therefore no coincidence that I have chosen Integrative Gestalt Therapy as my therapeutic home, as it regards precisely these qualities as its foundation. Zinker (2005) describes Gestalt Therapy at its core as a creative process in which therapists must inevitably also be artists. It is not just about techniques, but about working physically with the living, in the here and now.

As therapists, we continually attune ourselves anew to our clients. Creative adaptation, a central principle of Gestalt therapy, describes precisely this human ability to attune ourselves anew, time and again, to the unpredictable – or, as Hartmut Rosa would put it, the ‘unavailable’. This mutual attunement requires a physicality and an intimacy that is only possible between living organisms.

Precisely because this attunement is tied to living bodies, it concerns me that machines have begun to simulate it. With the advent of artificial intelligence in our everyday lives, we as a society are facing a massive upheaval. As a media composer and long-standing managing director of a company in the creative sector, I am by no means hostile to technology; on the contrary, I have always used computer technology as a central tool in my production processes. I also experienced the disruptive potential of the internet first-hand in the 1990s. However, I believe that the introduction of AI will transform our society more profoundly than anything we have seen before. This time, what defines us as living, physical beings is at stake.

This development also poses a question for me personally: why did I become a Gestalt therapist at this particular time? This thesis is also an attempt at an answer. It seeks to strike a balance between my affinity for technology and the realisation that the essence of human encounter cannot be calculated. In this sense, the thesis is intended as a plea for humanism: not against the machine, but for humanity. At the same time, it aims to strengthen self-confidence – both my own and that of my profession – so that we do not downplay the core competencies of Gestalt therapy in the midst of this upheaval, but rather represent them with self-assurance.