Empty Chair Technique
The Empty Chair Technique
By 1993, Fritz Perls had been dead for nearly a quarter century. His theories and therapy lived on. In The Gestalt Journal's Fall '93 issue celebrating the centennial of Perls' birth, Norman Friedman[1], director of the Gestalt Therapy Center in Queens, reviews the genesis of the topdog-underdog dichotomy, explains the rationale for the use of the "hot seat" in topdog-underdog role playing, and provides examples of therapist/patient interplay a la Perls.
Friedman[1] describes how the topdog-underdog split within a single personality stems from childhood. Specifically, this neurotic personality comes into being at an early age, when the child's parents require that the child "conform to their own unmet needs rather than meeting those of the child." They want a quiet child, an obedient child, a child who makes the family look good -- while the child wants and needs other things from them, such as "an appropriate amount of acknowledgment, validation, comfort, and support." Parents and child compete to get their needs met, and the dependent child loses out, forming defenses -- ignoring his own needs, being agreeable, submissive, etc. -- in order to survive. "Out of this compromise," writes Friedman[1], "a polarity is formed, an intrapsychic reflection of the actual situation: the voice of the parents becomes internalized as the Topdog, while that of the child's self becomes that of the Underdog." Later in life, the conflict between the two causes anxiety and other problems. I suppose it would be heresy to state that there is no topdog-underdog in our brains. If my mother died in a car accident when I was five it is not a matter of top dog or underdog, it is a matter of great pain and how that has affected my life.
According to Friedman[1], the "hot seat" technique used in Gestalt "symbolizes the commitment a person makes to deal with anxiety when coming up to work with the therapist." Like Perls' version, in "chairwork," the patient sits in the hot seat with an "empty chair" placed a few feet away. What ensues is a "dialogue," aimed at bringing "both sides of the conflict" into "awareness." The patient conjures up, or acts out, both roles; the empty chair is where the topdog "projection" -- perhaps mother or father -- goes.
The first stage of chairwork is for "the polarity to come into awareness and the patient to take responsibility for both sides," for the patient to "take back" and "own" the projection. The therapist's role in all of this is not to explain, interpret, or soothe, but to "serve as an objective enabler," to "provide a model of openness and authenticity" in order to "bring the conflict out as much as possible so that it may be brought to a head."
An Example of an Empty Chair Dialogue
Sample Dialogue: Empty Chair Technique
