Seeing Clients with an Artist's Eye: Perceptual Simulation Exercises

Abstract

This article offers some novel ideas to the age-old debate within the helping professions about how to gain balance between an analytical, cognitive style of processing data and the more experiential and humanistic process of direct perception. Ideas drawn from the perceptual skills training are combined with therapeutic techniques from Gestalt therapy. This marriage of ideas can be helpful in training counselors to understand and experience how techniques used by artists to see objects realistically can be applied to a counseling relationship.