Culture, Self, and Field: A Gestalt Guide to the Age of Complexity

Abstract

Abstract As humans we are born prematurely, with both brain and social patterning extensively organized by post-uterine experience. Thus culture is evolutionarily inherent to our human nature. Our received models for understanding and working with cultural experience and issues, however, are heavily marked by reductionistic “nature vs. nurture” thinking, as well as by cultural imperialism, racism, sexism, objectivism, and dualism. In Part I of this essay, a review of prevalent and past approaches to cross-cultural intervention and understanding shows both the limitations of our inherited models, and the gradual emergence of elements of a more unitary, constructivist, and experience-near approach. In Part II, the elements of a Gestalt field approach to the study of cultures and cross-cultural interventions is developed, with implications for applications of the model to multicultural work. In this model, emphasis is placed on the integral relation of contact and culture, the multicultural dimensions of all contact experiences, multiplicity and context dependency of cultural boundaries and belonging, dialogue as the most fundamental intervention strategy, experiment and support, and the value of multicultural awareness as a condition of growth.

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