What I learned from Gestalt Therapy -- and from Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy'

One of the things I learned from Gestalt Therapy was this: Go with the freshest and strongest 'gestalt' (stimulus) because where it takes you will be alive and spontaneous; not stale and dead. For better or for worse, this is how I am mainly writing Hegel's Hotel -- each new essay bearing the fruit of my latest, freshest, strongest gestalt.

It is not the most organized and/or 'Apollonian' of approaches -- it is more like a dialectic dance between Apollo and Dionysus with the slower, more methodical essays showing the domination of Apollo and the faster, more frenzied essays showing the domination of Dionysus. I view these as my two main 'writing archetypes'.

Dionysus carries the greater speed, sponaneity, creativity, and passion; Apollo shows the slower, more methodical organization. Without the internal, creative -- partly chaotic -- passionate frenzy of my Dionysian archetype, Hegel's Hotel will never be finished before I die. What's more -- people would not want to read it any more than they would want to read tax instructions or court papers. Cheers to Dionysus -- and to Nietzsche who introduced me to Dionysus! And let us not forget Apollo functioning in the background -- sometimes in the foreground -- as organizational and ethical advisor, topdog, drill sergeant, and conscience.

Without the Apollonian archetype within our personalities, there would be no organization and ethical responsibility in our lives, no law and order, no drive to work our way through the mundane repetitions that are necessary in life to get better and better at what we most want to do and be. All would be chaotic, disorganized, and hedonistically narcissistic. There would be no law and order, ethics and/or morals.

Dionysus looks after these latter things -- God of wine and dancing, celebration, narcissism and hedonism, biological impulses. Working together, Dionysus and Apollo help to create in man a 'balanced whole'. Working apart and dissociated from each other, man collapses in self-destruction, either stale and existentially dead (Apollo by himself) or obsessed with narcissistic and hedonistic addictions (Dionysus).

Apollo and Dionysus need each other just as we need their mutual archetypal influence on the growth and evolution of our personality in order that our personality stay balanced, harmonious, and whole. Either side dominating the other will lead to pathology and/or self-destruction (too conservative -- Apollo; or too liberal -- Dionysus).

-- dgb, April 25th, 2008.