Power, privilege, and generational difference in the gestalt therapy community: A conversation with Dr. Kamila Biały

Feb 8, 2021

Dr. Kamila Biały is a gestalt therapist and sociologist from Poland. She’s on the leadership team of New Gestalt Voices and is one of the two founders and facilitators of the excellent Humans of Gestalt project. I see Kamila as part of a new generation of gestalt therapists who are calling on the gestalt therapy community to better acknowledge the political and social contexts in which we practice, to make justice and equality more figural in our work. I talked to Kamila in preparation for a podcast we’ll be recording in February 2021. The transcript of our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Dr. Kamila BiałyRhys: I’m soon going to be doing an episode with you on New Gestalt Voices Radio and the topic is intergenerational dynamics. I’m hoping you can tell me about why you’re interested in this topic.

Kamila: Yeah, I’m thinking about what triggered me into thinking about this topic. I guess it was through taking part in different gestalt community meetings. And what I’ve been observing is that generally it was the senior therapists talking and it was difficult for the young people to bring in their ideas, or even just to be there, present. This is just an impression I’ve had. For example, at one of these recent meetings, the new Board was to be formed and the senior therapists are simply getting too old, or they’ve already been on the Board and are basically fed up with it, and there was this pressure on young people to be part of it. And some of these young people, it was their first time in this meeting. And it was like, “Oh, maybe you’ll come and join, it’s lots of fun”. And I could see that there’s no actual connection. There’s this need to “pass the torch,” so to speak, but it’s so clumsy.

Rhys: There’s a disconnect between the values of the older and younger generations?

Having common ground is perceived as confluence, and some people feel the need to differentiate, to individualise. But from my perspective, we’re fed up with differentiation, with individualism. We want to feel some community!
To belong!

Kamila: Yes, exactly. For example, in a recent meeting an idea was brought in to make an organisational statement about the ecological crises. “What’s our general opinion about that as an organisation?” And then the voices started to appear, critical voices: “I don’t know if this is a political organisation,” and so on. You know, people started to differentiate. And if we’re speaking about values, I feel kind of like a generational representative. And I felt, “People! We need to somehow unite on this issue!” And the senior therapists were saying, “I don’t like to be pushed into it, this confluence, where we need to have one opinion”. So, after reflecting on this I was starting to think that having common ground is perceived as confluence, and some people feel the need to differentiate, to individualise. But from my perspective, we’re fed up with differentiation, with individualism. We want to feel some community! To belong! Of course, differentiation is an important process, but I felt angry and lost because I was so surprised that people were so resistant to simply say, “This is an urgent issue”.

Rhys: It sounds like one of the generational differences you’re identifying is the extent to which therapy is politicised, is a political process versus a personal process. And another one is the extent to which people are willing to tolerate individualism. I think that early gestalt therapy was highly individualistic, and there’s obviously been a big turn away from that with the relational movement. But I still think that individualism is very difficult to uproot.

Kamila: Yes, isn’t it.

Rhys: You know what also comes up for me are things that I read about and I see—I’m not on social media anymore, so I feel like I see this stuff less—but there’s a lot of talk around “cancel culture” and people being “de-platformed,” and there has emerged in some progressive quarters of our generation over the last 10 years a mentality of, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”. It seems black and white. And I wonder if some of the older gestalt therapists are reacting to this that they see in the younger generation.

Kamila: Hmm, interesting. I’m not much on social media either. I’m aware of this mostly with my sociology colleagues, who are mainly leftists. So it’s difficult for me to be part of their groupings because they’re so radical. This is funny because I’m aware of those dynamics when it comes to my sociology circles—it’s hard for me to identify with them—whereas with gestalt therapists of this younger generation, I feel part of it, even though we are so focused on ecology, racism, LGBT issues. It’s as if it looks different from the inside.

Rhys: I’m thinking about you wanting to make a statement about the ecology. I feel that gestalt therapy has traditionally had a big emphasis on uncertainty and “not knowing”. But I want to say, “Well, what about conviction, aren’t there times when we need to have conviction about things, to hold particular values?” For example, we might want to hold firm values around the biosphere, or having an anti-racist approach, or whatever. There might be reasons to move away from uncertainty around such issues. We might want to land on values and hold onto them. So, I’m wondering how we bring these values into our work while also cultivating uncertainty, which is obviously valuable. How do we strike a balance? I don’t want to be doing politics, or doing sociology, in therapy. But I also recognise that we in some ways we can’t avoid doing politics.

There’s power here, whether you want it or not.

Kamila: Yes, this is reminding me something that happened recently. A senior gestalt figure joined us, and from the first moments of meeting him, I like him as a person, but I don’t like his ideas. So, I was really angry with him, and in one of the meetings, I was trying to show him “Hey, you’re a known person in the gestalt community. You’re an authority, you write books. This has some importance.” And he said, “No, it’s important only what’s here, between you and me, how you feel”. It was interesting for me to have this kind of conflict with him and trying to show him “There’s power here, whether you want it or not”. And, ironically, some weeks later, in the same context, I had to own my power as a recognisable person in the gestalt community with regard to my peers who know me from Humans and NGV projects.

Rhys: I see this is an example of where the “I-Thou approach,” if I can call it that, leaves a bit of a vacuum because there’s not much room in that approach for considering power and privilege. And if we’re talking about a younger generation of gestalt therapists, that’s something we’re interested in, power and privilege. And maybe that’s a key difference between the older generation and younger generation. Definitely the older generation were trying to undermine certain kinds of power relationships. For example, we can go back to that idea of “cultivated uncertainty,” which I see as an attempt to undermine traditional power relationships, especially as they were in psychoanalysis, where the analyst had the power of interpretation and the analysand was like a powerless recipient of that. But what strikes me about that is that a position of uncertainty might be very good at undermining power differentials in an individual setting, but it says nothing about broader structures of power. It’s looking at the movement of power between you and I in this individual setting, but it doesn’t talk about how I might be enacting all different kinds of power because of my social position or the privileges I’ve enjoyed.

Kamila: Yes, the “I-Thou” approach might in specific situations in a therapeutic setting be considered as oppressive, especially when a client’s experience is infiltrated by power relations and this is figural for them, this is their phenomenology; an asymmetry, not a dialogue of equal partners. Regarding our generation’s need for conviction, I fully agree: we have not been raised in a stable, prosperous society; our life is necessarily individualised. We get involved in ephemeral projects partly because it’s creative, but partly because there’s no other option. These are not the times of life-long employment. We were brought up in a world starting to get disillusioned by democracy and other “grand narratives”. That said, we need to hold particular values, we need to support our togetherness. And this is a challenge since we are, as I said, so necessarily differentiated—think, for example, of identity politics and social movements some of us are part of.

Dr. Kamila Biały is a gestalt therapist and sociologist from Poland. She’s on the leadership team of New Gestalt Voices and is one of the two founders and facilitators of the excellent Humans of Gestalt project. I see Kamila as part of a new generation of gestalt therapists who are calling on the gestalt therapy community to better acknowledge the political and social contexts in which we practice, to make justice and equality more figural in our work. I talked to Kamila in preparation for a podcast we’ll be recording in February 2021. The transcript of our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Dr. Kamila BiałyRhys: I’m soon going to be doing an episode with you on New Gestalt Voices Radio and the topic is intergenerational dynamics. I’m hoping you can tell me about why you’re interested in this topic.

Kamila: Yeah, I’m thinking about what triggered me into thinking about this topic. I guess it was through taking part in different gestalt community meetings. And what I’ve been observing is that generally it was the senior therapists talking and it was difficult for the young people to bring in their ideas, or even just to be there, present. This is just an impression I’ve had. For example, at one of these recent meetings, the new Board was to be formed and the senior therapists are simply getting too old, or they’ve already been on the Board and are basically fed up with it, and there was this pressure on young people to be part of it. And some of these young people, it was their first time in this meeting. And it was like, “Oh, maybe you’ll come and join, it’s lots of fun”. And I could see that there’s no actual connection. There’s this need to “pass the torch,” so to speak, but it’s so clumsy.

Rhys: There’s a disconnect between the values of the older and younger generations?

Having common ground is perceived as confluence, and some people feel the need to differentiate, to individualise. But from my perspective, we’re fed up with differentiation, with individualism. We want to feel some community! To belong!

Kamila: Yes, exactly. For example, in a recent meeting an idea was brought in to make an organisational statement about the ecological crises. “What’s our general opinion about that as an organisation?” And then the voices started to appear, critical voices: “I don’t know if this is a political organisation,” and so on. You know, people started to differentiate. And if we’re speaking about values, I feel kind of like a generational representative. And I felt, “People! We need to somehow unite on this issue!” And the senior therapists were saying, “I don’t like to be pushed into it, this confluence, where we need to have one opinion”. So, after reflecting on this I was starting to think that having common ground is perceived as confluence, and some people feel the need to differentiate, to individualise. But from my perspective, we’re fed up with differentiation, with individualism. We want to feel some community! To belong! Of course, differentiation is an important process, but I felt angry and lost because I was so surprised that people were so resistant to simply say, “This is an urgent issue”.

Rhys: It sounds like one of the generational differences you’re identifying is the extent to which therapy is politicised, is a political process versus a personal process. And another one is the extent to which people are willing to tolerate individualism. I think that early gestalt therapy was highly individualistic, and there’s obviously been a big turn away from that with the relational movement. But I still think that individualism is very difficult to uproot.

Kamila: Yes, isn’t it.

Rhys: You know what also comes up for me are things that I read about and I see—I’m not on social media anymore, so I feel like I see this stuff less—but there’s a lot of talk around “cancel culture” and people being “de-platformed,” and there has emerged in some progressive quarters of our generation over the last 10 years a mentality of, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”. It seems black and white. And I wonder if some of the older gestalt therapists are reacting to this that they see in the younger generation.

Kamila: Hmm, interesting. I’m not much on social media either. I’m aware of this mostly with my sociology colleagues, who are mainly leftists. So it’s difficult for me to be part of their groupings because they’re so radical. This is funny because I’m aware of those dynamics when it comes to my sociology circles—it’s hard for me to identify with them—whereas with gestalt therapists of this younger generation, I feel part of it, even though we are so focused on ecology, racism, LGBT issues. It’s as if it looks different from the inside.

Rhys: I’m thinking about you wanting to make a statement about the ecology. I feel that gestalt therapy has traditionally had a big emphasis on uncertainty and “not knowing”. But I want to say, “Well, what about conviction, aren’t there times when we need to have conviction about things, to hold particular values?” For example, we might want to hold firm values around the biosphere, or having an anti-racist approach, or whatever. There might be reasons to move away from uncertainty around such issues. We might want to land on values and hold onto them. So, I’m wondering how we bring these values into our work while also cultivating uncertainty, which is obviously valuable. How do we strike a balance? I don’t want to be doing politics, or doing sociology, in therapy. But I also recognise that we in some ways we can’t avoid doing politics.

There’s power here, whether you want it or not.

Kamila: Yes, this is reminding me something that happened recently. A senior gestalt figure joined us, and from the first moments of meeting him, I like him as a person, but I don’t like his ideas. So, I was really angry with him, and in one of the meetings, I was trying to show him “Hey, you’re a known person in the gestalt community. You’re an authority, you write books. This has some importance.” And he said, “No, it’s important only what’s here, between you and me, how you feel”. It was interesting for me to have this kind of conflict with him and trying to show him “There’s power here, whether you want it or not”. And, ironically, some weeks later, in the same context, I had to own my power as a recognisable person in the gestalt community with regard to my peers who know me from Humans and NGV projects.

Rhys: I see this is an example of where the “I-Thou approach,” if I can call it that, leaves a bit of a vacuum because there’s not much room in that approach for considering power and privilege. And if we’re talking about a younger generation of gestalt therapists, that’s something we’re interested in, power and privilege. And maybe that’s a key difference between the older generation and younger generation. Definitely the older generation were trying to undermine certain kinds of power relationships. For example, we can go back to that idea of “cultivated uncertainty,” which I see as an attempt to undermine traditional power relationships, especially as they were in psychoanalysis, where the analyst had the power of interpretation and the analysand was like a powerless recipient of that. But what strikes me about that is that a position of uncertainty might be very good at undermining power differentials in an individual setting, but it says nothing about broader structures of power. It’s looking at the movement of power between you and I in this individual setting, but it doesn’t talk about how I might be enacting all different kinds of power because of my social position or the privileges I’ve enjoyed.

Kamila: Yes, the “I-Thou” approach might in specific situations in a therapeutic setting be considered as oppressive, especially when a client’s experience is infiltrated by power relations and this is figural for them, this is their phenomenology; an asymmetry, not a dialogue of equal partners. Regarding our generation’s need for conviction, I fully agree: we have not been raised in a stable, prosperous society; our life is necessarily individualised. We get involved in ephemeral projects partly because it’s creative, but partly because there’s no other option. These are not the times of life-long employment. We were brought up in a world starting to get disillusioned by democracy and other “grand narratives”. That said, we need to hold particular values, we need to support our togetherness. And this is a challenge since we are, as I said, so necessarily differentiated—think, for example, of identity politics and social movements some of us are part of.