This document discusses an interdisciplinary approach to violence against persons with disabilities using gestalt psychotherapy. It provides an overview of gestalt psychotherapy concepts like the gestalt, figure and background, field theory, and the contact cycle. The contact cycle model from gestalt psychotherapy is proposed as a way to map and explain experiences of violence and pathological behaviors. The document suggests applying gestalt psychotherapy concepts and models like the contact cycle to understand violence against persons with disabilities and how they may experience violence differently as victims.

1. Interdisciplinary approach to violence
against
persons with disability:
philosophical analysis of the gestalt
psychotherapy
Josip Ćirić,
Information Sciences Dept.
Zadar University

2. for every finite set of
points exists an
unfinite set of curves
that contains them
any set of data may
be explained by
infinite number of
theories

3. Starting points
● Philosophy as conceptual engineering
● Psychologism – reduction of social to
psychological phaenomena
● Analogue to polar coordinate system
● Two-way transfer psychotherapy-philosophy
● Mapping violence against persons with
disabilities using gestalt-psychotherapy

4. Two-way
transfer

8. Gestalt psychotherapy
● Gestalt is an organized field of data.
● Foreground is determined by dominant need with
which the organism is dealing.
● Organism is the totality of the person.
● Contact cycle – explanatory model of normal and
pathological experience and behavior.
● Authenticity and I-Thou relationship

9. Transfers into GPT
● Kurt Goldstein – gestalt psychology (!)
● figure / background
● Kurt Lewin's field theory
● Wilhelm Reich
● Psychoanalysis
● Freud, Adler, Jung (duality)
● Jan Smuth
● holistic understanding of organism; eating
● Jacob Moreno's psychodrama
● Zen budhism
● Martin Buber – I/Thou relationship

10. Gestalt contact cycle

11. Mapping violence
● Contact cycle – pathology and behavior
● Rage – masking emotion
● Experiencing violence – duality – either victim or
aggressor
● The roots of violence: subject or constelation?
● Persons with disabilities – a different kind of
victims?