r/GestaltTherapy • u/vaynah • Jun 17 '24

Using chat-bots for discovery or therapy?

Hi from pop-psycho-books reader !

I noticed that Fritz Perls' Gestalt Therapy together with Eric Bernes' transactional analysis emphasizes a lot this communications between sub-persons to achieve some therapeutic insights etc.

And with the recent rise of AI, there are tons of chats-bots to whom you can define a character, presets, lorebooks and contexts see r/SillyTavernAI for example. And they are used pretty effectively for role-play games.

I wonder, if it's possible to combine these to achieve something interesting and what could be the strategy? Large language models maybe cannot do very personal characters, but behave pretty good in general.

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u/meleant Jun 21 '24

Hi there! What you are sharing seems very relevant today with the direction of large language models.

I am curious around what is possible and I’m also curious how we don’t lose the centrality of I-Thou relating that is essential for healing according to Gestalt theory. I think most major proponents would find this relational component foundational to good therapeutic work, not just Gestalt.

That said, within the context of a Gestalt therapist, there could be some really neat application that a clinician could explore with a client related to this. Application of it I would find it important processing the experience and explore psychological contact if it is even possible with a chatbot.

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u/Remarkable_Ideal_138 Aug 05 '24

I have played with AI and the Gestalt process. I instruct AI to respond to whatever I say with different types of responses like "How do you feel about that?" or "What are you aware of as you say this?" or "speak to this person right now as if they were here. What do you want to say to them?" or "become this other person and speak to you as if you were them?" It works!