Lucid Gravity

James R Willis, Purdue University

Abstract

In this dissertation I re-contextualize Gestalt Therapy Theory in the historically novel context of Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics. I concur with Deely (2001) that Peirce's achievement requires a new history of philosophy. According to Deely, Peirce's semiotics "achieves the highest grade of way by which things become susceptible to analysis and understanding." "Since Peirce," Deely asserts, "no field of study will long avoid the developmental pressures of the sign." Writing from the point of view of a Gestalt Therapy Theory practitioner and visual artist, I respond to the "developmental pressures," Deely suggests by extending the breadth and depth of Gestalt Therapy Theory to include the postmodern point of view of Peirce's semiotics. I co-opt Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (1958), who admits to being influenced by Gestalt psychology, to facilitate critical reconsideration of the modern mode of "representation." I refer to Deely and Merrell in regard to supplanting "representation" with "signification." I ground Gestalt Therapy Theory in the primary source book Gestalt Therapy, Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman (1951). Semiotics reveals the three structural components of Gestalt Therapy Theory -- "mind," "body," and "organism/environment field" -- to be none other than semiosis, the actions of signs. The structural component "spirit" is problematic. Because I concur with Deely that semiotics requires metaphysics to quicken its development, I include Corrington's Ecstatic Naturalism (1994) which provides a semiotic metaphysics capable of explaining the problematic term "spirit" in Gestalt Therapy Theory from the point of view of semiotics. The title of this dissertation, "Lucid Gravity," is an artistic phrase used to provoke attention to Peirce's achievement. Precisely specified, "Lucid Gravity" reduces to "transparent and grave significance." Semiotics makes the situation of consciousness in relation to knowledge and nature transparent to itself. I argue that Peirce's semiotics subsumes Gestalt Therapy Theory and opens it out on a new intellectual horizon.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Webb, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Linguistics|Philosophy|Experimental psychology

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