Predatory Violence: A Gestalt Therapy Approach. Part One

This article is the first of two aimed at exploring the issue of predatory violence from the view of Gestalt therapy (GT). It attempts both to retrace the phenomenology of this experience and to consider the epistemological framework of GT, describing and deconstructing the main concepts, tools, and theoretical framework we have in GT. The aim is mainly to convey the idea that we are facing a complex phenomenon. That means that we need a complex—not simplified—modality to understand and face it. In this first part we will consider how, following the developments of field theory, we say that the person and personal experience emerge from a context, from a background in continuous movement and change. So much so that, if life itself is made up of movement and change, of encounters and separation, of experience and assimilation, predatory violence results as a kind of nonexperience/nonlife, freezing the possibilities of the field.