Diagnostics in Gestalt therapy or About ways to protect psychotherapists from unwanted clients Should everyone who applies for psychological help be taken as clients? Even if you have identified your strengths and limitations in areas of work, is this enough to make a decision? What do you need to know about the client in order to preserve your psychotherapeutic identity, and, sometimes, just yourself? The material presented in the article is a lecture recorded and edited by me from a wonderful psychiatrist, member of the MGI coaching staff, MGI trainer; supervisor; Gestalt therapist Alexey Viktorovich Smirnov. It contains the answers to these questions. Thanks to him! And although he gave this lecture to us when we were still students of the second stage of MGI, I, having started my own practice and armed with the knowledge personally verified by Alexey, still allowed deviations from them... And in vain... But, apparently, I it was necessary to personally verify that they work. In general, from the point of view of the classical Gestalt approach, a Gestalt therapist should not engage in diagnostics. Gestalt arose in the wake of the “antipsychiatric movement,” although its founders had a basic psychiatric and psychoanalytic school. Then what are we talking about? What kind of diagnostics? We will talk about the primary diagnostics acceptable in Gestalt, which is carried out at the moment of meeting a potential (still just such at this stage) client. Answering the question “Who am I diagnosing and why?”, the Gestalt therapist does not solve the problem of studying the client’s personality, the main goal is to determine whether he takes this person as a client or not. What tools are used? It is more appropriate to ask the question “Where is the diagnosis carried out?” Many are convinced that this is the head. But here she is not your friend or comrade. The main tool is - excuse me, the "fifth point"! She is the one who solves this problem like no one better! What does she need to identify? She must recognize the differences between the therapist and the other (potential client). And if they are strongly expressed, then this other person will be perceived as “crazy”, “out of his mind”, “strange”, etc. In fact, no matter how frivolous the above may sound, this skill is very important, since it protects the therapist from unwanted connections with suspicious clients. From a scientific point of view, primary diagnosis is the construction by a Gestalt therapist of a highly structured differentiated gestalt in the situation of the field “organism - client’s environment”, in which he decides the question - “Should I contact the client’s field or not? “So, here are 6 axes (parameters) for assessing the field “organism - client’s environment” from Alexey Smirnov: 1. Somatic health of the client. Various disorders of internal organs and systems can give rise to neurosis-like, psychopath-like states. Here doctors will help faster by prescribing appropriate treatment, and the conditions will go away on their own.2. The client’s normal social situation: he has housing, money, work, no problems with government agencies... You obviously cannot solve these problems for the client. “Therapy is contraindicated for clients without money!” - joke from Alexey) But what if someone, for example, parents, pay for their child’s therapy? We need to find an answer to the question: What do they want? It is important to take into account the interests of the child. Act according to the principle “Do no harm.”3. The presence of close relationships with the client and their character. Clients who do not have friends or relatives will “hang out” on the therapist. He will become the only close person. This is very difficult, especially in a situation of grief, loss... The nature of the relationship is also important, because the kind of relationship the client has with loved ones, the same he will build with the therapist. It is important to understand where the area of ​​problems is: - in the area of ​​the client’s own phenomenology - or in the area of ​​the client’s relationship (So as not to break up a couple, for example. Because one will change and the other will not.).4. The presence or absence of mental illness in the client.5. Availability)