Beauty and Uncertainty as Transformative Factors: A Free Energy Principle Account of Aesthetic Diagnosis and Intervention in Gestalt Psychotherapy

Abstract

Drawing from field theory, Gestalt therapy conceives psychological suffering and psychotherapy as two intentional field phenomena, where unprocessed and chaotic experiences seek the opportunity to emerge and be assimilated through the contact between the patient and the therapist (i.e., the intentionality of contacting). This therapeutic approach is based on the therapist’s aesthetic experience of his/her embodied presence in the flow of the healing process because (1) the perception of beauty can provide the therapist with feedback on the assimilation of unprocessed experiences; (2) the therapist’s attentional focus on intrinsic aesthetic diagnostic criteria can facilitate the modification of rigid psychopathological fields by supporting the openness to novel experiences. The aim of the present manuscript is to review recent evidence from psychophysiology, neuroaesthetic research, and neurocomputational models of cognition, such as the free energy principle (FEP), which support the notion of the therapeutic potential of aesthetic sensibility in Gestalt psychotherapy. Drawing from neuroimaging data, psychophysiology and recent neurocognitive accounts of aesthetic perception, we propose a novel interpretation of the sense of beauty as a self-generated reward motivating us to assimilate an ever-greater spectrum of sensory and affective states in our predictive representation of ourselves and the world and supporting the intentionality of contact. Expecting beauty, in the psychotherapeutic encounter, can help therapists tolerate uncertainty avoiding impulsive behaviours and to stay tuned to the process of change.

The aesthetic valve: how aesthetic appreciation may switch emotional states from anxiety to curiosity

“…In line with the learning theories of aesthetics, we previously suggested that aesthetic appreciation (and, as we discuss below, the expectancy of the reward associated with it, i.e. aesthetic attitude ) can switch our emotional state from anxiety to curiosity (see the section Beauty Makes Us Curious and Less Anxious in [58]) and can function as a ‘valve’ [12] that redirects attentional resources from self-related exploitation (i.e. goal directed behaviour based on previously acquired action policies) to contemplative learning-oriented exploration [59].…”

“…Protracted maladaptive exteroception may cause adjustments in metacognitive (second order) beliefs resulting in pathological anxiety, in which neutral sensory and social stimuli are evaluated as threating and uncertainty is avoided. In short, anxious agents have learned that surprise cannot be reduced by learning and therefore try to avoid it [44,124]. We have already demonstrated that music listening can reduce performances in heart beat detection [59], which on the contrary is increased during anxious states [126][127][128].…”

“…In healthy agents who maintain a good balance between surprise avoidance and novelty seeking [10,42], expected uncertainty can elicit positive emotions such as the excitement associated with the opportunity to learn and reduce uncertainty [43]. In anxious states, on the other hand, uncertainty is more negatively valenced [21] and the agent is not able to tolerate emotionally arousing uncertainty, because the agent does not have a good expectation that expected uncertainty can be reduced by learning [44].…”

“…Conversely, curiosity can be conceived as the positive epistemic emotion generated by the perceiver's metacognitive [45] belief that uncertainty conveys the possibility to learn something new from the entropic ambiguous world [44,46,47]. In a sense, curiosity is linked to the expected reward for acquiring new knowledge through exploratory behaviour [23,24,48,49] determined by positive expectations regarding learning progress [50], information gain [51], or slope in the reduction in prediction error [47].…”

Primary States of Consciousness: A Review of Historical and Contemporary Developments

“…Additionally, certain life events or situations may also trigger them, such as the loss of a loved one or a major life transition (Sarasso et al 2022; Gaggioli and Others 2016; W. R.…”