Readings

Pointing out, verbatim

I am currently working with two texts: Gestalt Therapy Verbatim and Ultimate Computing by Stuart R. Hameroff.

The first is not so much a theory of psychotherapy as a documentary record: a sequence of laboratory facts, spoken situations, questions, interruptions, and moments of contact. The second offers a striking account of how contact-withdrawal, or the cycle of experience, might be understood as an actual process taking place at the nanoscale in the animal brain, rather than merely as a diagram for teaching Gestalt theory.

The choice is not arbitrary. I take Perls's Gestalt perspective to be an early stage of a psychology rooted in physics. His observations were still mediated by the philosophical language available at the time, but his work repeatedly presses against that language. He borrows and contests terms associated with Buber, Husserl, Heidegger, and others while searching for a vocabulary closer to lived process.

This struggle belongs to a larger historical moment: the attempt to think organism, field, experience, and science together. Perls's interest in the how of experience, rather than in a theory of the psyche, makes sense in that context. It is also where these two readings begin to meet.

Read together, they suggest a path between Gestalt panpsychism and a physical biology of consciousness: one text starts from contact as lived fact; the other asks how living matter might compute, organize, and perhaps become aware.