Here is a brief and free account of the sequence of steps for making sense of a client case, proposed at one of the seminars by Jan Roubal, a Czech gestalt therapist, trainer and psychiatrist.

The first step:

to ask yourself a question about the work with the client: what is going on?

How could this case be described if you stepped a long way back and looked at it from there?

The emphasis may differ here: for one person it is on the client, for another on the therapist, for another on their interaction, on the material the client brings.

The second step —

relying on what has been formulated, we answer the question: and in view of this, what should I do in sessions with this client, and what, on the contrary, is better not done or absolutely must not be done?

Recommendations take shape: what the interventions in the work with this client are aimed at.

Then we return to the first point and ask ourselves:

and on what grounds did I decide so?

What led me to the thought that this or that is happening?

In this way we move from the whole image and, perhaps, already from interpretation back to phenomena: what did I see, hear, feel and so on, that eventually led me to such conclusions?

And the last step

returns us to the beginning of the inquiry: how else can this be looked at?

And what else might this be, besides what I have already seen?..

These steps are a good tool for «putting it together».

To describe a case, all of this of course needs to be filled out with details, with specifics and with a grounding in the theory of the gestalt approach.

But for processing the collected material and preparing the description it helps a great deal, it gives a foundation.

In particular, it contains one essential emphasis: phenomenology.

It is important to separate the phenomena of perception from interpretation, from the conclusions drawn on their basis. And to explore perception — both your own and the client’s.

Author of the text

Olena Vorozheikina