Aesthetic Relational Knowledge of the Field: A Revised Concept of Awareness in Gestalt Therapy and Contemporary Psychiatry

This article supports the need for psychotherapy and psychiatry to overcome the fragmentation of scientific knowledge. The author focuses briefly on the evolving relationship between psychotherapy and society, providing a brief overview of today's clinical needs. She then proposes a new development in the clinical concept of awareness from the optics of the field: aesthetic relational knowledge as a clinical tool that emerges from the phenomenological, aesthetic, relational, and process-oriented approach that is the Gestalt method. Therapeutic competence, in other words, is empathic and resonates with the client in a cocreated field. A clinical example will demonstrate how the concept of aesthetic relational knowledge can be used in a Gestalt therapy setting.