At the beginning of the twentieth century, a direction in psychology was founded in Germany, which was called "gestalt psychology." The Gestaltists built their scientific theory on the fact that the perception of the world around people is based on the sensual and figurative perception of objects and phenomena as integral structures, indivisible into separate components. For example, if a person sees some familiar object with missing parts, then his consciousness seeks to complement this object and “finish” these very missing parts.
In the same way, people strive to complete, supplement, bring to a logical whole incomplete actions, untested feelings, unexpressed emotions and thoughts. The principle of completion formed the basis of the psychotherapeutic techniques of gestalt therapy founded by F. Perls. He believed that the personality always seeks to complete the incomplete gestalt, complete the unfinished and achieve a sense of integrity and harmony. When those or other life events and situations, as well as feelings and experiences associated with them, come to a logical conclusion, a person has a state of calm and confidence, felt not only on an emotional, but also on a physical level.
What does it mean to complete gestalt? This means satisfying the need, the main and most significant at the given moment of life, realized and felt on the physical, emotional and mental levels. In gestalt psychology, the emergence and satisfaction of a need is the cycle of education and completion of gestalt. Figuratively speaking, every human need is a bright figure that stands out against the general background of life experience. When the need is satisfied, the figure leaves, dissolves into the surrounding background, but a different figure appears, and the higher and more significant the need, the contours of the figure are sharper and brighter. Incomplete gestalt is an interrupted cycle, a situation that is needy or emotionally not brought to its logical conclusion. What is happening and why? The reasons for this can be very different. These may be external social factors or intrapersonal prohibitions and restrictions imposed by education. Well, well then, someone will say. Incomplete actions do not mean the end of life, does it continue? Yes, life goes on, but how and what? Every unmet need, and especially deeply significant, leads to stress. Stress caused by incompleteness of one need creates incompleteness of another. So, gradually life turns into a series of failures, unexpressed feelings, emotions, which entails boredom and inaction.
Emotionally incomplete gestalt are feelings of disappointment, grief and anger, sadness and indignation that once occurred in the past in relationships with parents, lovers, children, spouses, and which were not expressed and expressed. Unfinished gestalt can also be from unrequited love, actions not taken in the past, from arisen and unconscious feelings of guilt , etc.
Psychotherapists claim that incomplete gestalt causes the person to constantly return to him, to those unspoken feelings, interrupted experiences or actions, trying to somehow relive them again, in a different form. Very often, parents, forcing children to perform some actions and actions, try to complete their own unfinished gestalt in the past. But even more often, a person tries to avoid the completion of the once unfinished, thereby increasing his dependence on the past. It includes the mechanisms of avoiding and suppressing within oneself the arising unconscious needs and desires that were once unfulfilled, and this, in turn, leads to neurosis and psychosomatic diseases.
Gestalt therapists with the help of various therapeutic techniques and techniques help a person identify and realize from vague sensations and intuitive dissatisfaction the once-incomplete actions and emotions in order to relive them again, at a different level, and thereby harmonize their lives.