If we compare descriptions of disturbances in human behaviour in traditional psychopathology and in gestalt therapy, we see that both the subject matter and the language of these descriptions differ.

A psychopathological description is more or less static; most often it is a description of the components of a symptom.

A psychotherapeutic description is dynamic and directly bound up with the therapist–client interaction.

Psychotherapeutic descriptions, however, are not all alike either.

In symptom-oriented approaches (cognitive psychotherapy, for example) the therapist relies on more or less static ideas about the client’s character and about norm and pathology, and «acts upon» the personality, seeking to bring about predetermined changes.

Within such a worldview the patient can be regarded as an object.

In person-oriented approaches (chiefly existential, and in part contemporary psychoanalytic ones), which rest on the principles of living-through, dialogue and immediacy, the client and their «traits» are considered not in themselves but always in the context of their interaction with the world — a world of which the therapist is also a part.

This is especially true of gestalt therapy, with its reliance on the theory of contact.

The context of a gestalt-therapeutic description of any given symptom is the context not so much of a pathology of the psyche as of a pathology of contact.

Any symptom is something that was once a creative adjustment and later turned into a conservative adjustment.

In analysing a symptom, then, we have to consider it in the context of contact, and that means considering specific needs, specific characteristics of the environment, and the specific meanings of the symptomatic behaviour.

And all of this in two dimensions.

In the first, we work out which needs and experiences have «frozen» in this symptom.

In the second, we can understand which present possibilities, which new experience, the presence of this symptom saves the person from and holds them back from.

Returning to the specific way pathology is understood in gestalt therapy, it can be put simply as follows.

A mode of self-regulation cannot be «cured» in the narrow sense of the word; one can only help the client find another mode of self-regulation that allows their needs and interests to be met more fully.