Gestalt Therapy Approach to Depressive Experiences

Abstract

Mourning and depressive experience are distinguished to highlight the core of the suffering of people in depression. In the mourning experience a specific person or situation becomes unreachable and therein lies the loss suffered. The experience of melancholic depression differs: what is lost is that which anchors the subject to the fabric which connects him/her to the world. A radically relational approach to depression where the client and therapist are seen as depressing here and now in the therapy’s situation is introduced.