Essays · Theory & Practice

Codependency in the Organism–Environment Field

Consider a familiar scene. Someone returns home exhausted, notices that their partner is upset, and immediately begins to assess what might restore calm. The evening's plans change. A conversation is postponed; a telephone call to a friend is not made; the wish to rest becomes secondary. When asked what happened, the person can describe the partner's tone of voice, the messages implied by a glance, and the likely consequences of doing nothing. The question of what they themselves needed is unexpectedly difficult to answer.

This scene can be interpreted in several ways. A familiar account of codependency might emphasize excessive responsibility, poor boundaries, or the search for approval. A more affirmative account might recognize the care of someone trying to protect an important relationship during a crisis. Both readings can illuminate aspects of the experience. Neither, on its own, tells us how the situation organized what could be noticed, felt, expressed, and done. This is the point at which Gestalt field theory becomes particularly useful. It allows us to move the question away from a presumed defect inside one individual without presuming that all attachment, helping, or sacrifice must therefore be healthy. Instead, we can ask how a field comes to be organized so that another person's distress repeatedly takes the foreground, while possible differences in need, desire, or action become harder to support.

The central argument of this essay is that some experiences described as codependency can be interpreted as recurrent restrictions of possibilities for contact in the organism–environment field. Those restrictions need not arise at the same point in experience. Sometimes a person's own need has difficulty becoming a figure. Sometimes it is perfectly clear, but expressing or acting upon it carries consequences. Sometimes a difference is expressed and temporarily welcomed, yet the relational organization soon returns to its previous pattern. These are not stages of a universal cycle, and they are not diagnostic subtypes. They are different questions about the conditions under which contact is possible.

This perspective also demands a caution. The word codependency is not a recognized independent psychiatric diagnosis. It names an unsettled domain of relational descriptions rather than an established disease entity. Molina, Taiwo, and Grey's (2026) integrative review of thirty studies identified six broad conceptual perspectives and argued for more relationally and socioculturally informed understandings. A Gestalt account ought to contribute to that clarification, not merely add another label to the same confusion.

The argument is intentionally narrower than the everyday use of the term. Not all intense attachment, one-sided care, or difficulty leaving a relationship warrants the label codependency. The working object of inquiry is a recurrent, distressing, and relatively inflexible organization in which attending to another person systematically narrows some relevant possibilities of contact. Even then, codependency is a provisional description, not a causal explanation. The work of explaining begins only when one identifies how the restriction operates and what supports or maintains it.

Between the language of deficiency and the defense of caregiving

The controversy becomes clearer when Schiebel and Lancer (2026) offer an accessible contemporary formulation that connects blurred or rigid boundaries, unstable self-definition, and self-neglect to earlier relational adversity. They also acknowledge social expectations concerning gender, self-sacrifice, and dependency. This is more sophisticated than a purely individual-deficit account. Yet their recurring developmental explanation leaves a further question open: when the person responds today, which elements derive from earlier relational learning and which are being actively supported, demanded, or punished in the current situation?

Robert Weiss and Kim Buck (2022) challenge precisely the tendency to treat the relatives and partners of people with addiction as damaged because they care. In their model of prodependence, the starting point is attachment, crisis, and the inherent value of sustained human connection. Rather than interpreting exhaustive efforts to help as evidence of psychological deficiency, they propose recognizing how ordinary people respond to extraordinary relational distress. This is an important corrective to approaches that confuse loyalty with pathology or hold caregivers responsible for another person's addiction.

Yet the strength of the prodependence argument also reveals its limit. If care is always approached primarily as the expression of love, how do we describe a caring response that has become costly, compulsory, or unable to change? How do we distinguish an action freely undertaken from one maintained through fear, guilt, isolation, or the absence of alternatives? The fact that a response is understandable and not morally blameworthy does not establish that it remains flexible, effective, or sustaining. Weiss and Buck acknowledge that helping can become ineffective and that healthier boundaries may be needed. Their decisive contribution is a non-shaming therapeutic stance, not the assertion that every action is beneficial. Equally, the small pre/post clinician survey reported by Weiss (2019), following an educational presentation, concerns the acceptability of a conceptual frame among professionals; it does not demonstrate comparative treatment efficacy or the absence of harm in every form of caregiving.

Bacon and Conway (2023) pursue another route, linking codependency and enmeshment through schema-related patterns of self-sacrifice, subjugation, and underdeveloped autonomy. Their model helps articulate the subjective consequences of other-directedness, but its explanatory center remains the early development and subsequent activation of individual schemas. A field account needs to ask, in addition, what current situations permit, discourage, reward, or punish. Schema theory may explain the recurrence of anticipated disapproval; a field description must establish whether the disapproval is only anticipated, currently enacted, or embedded in material conditions. These explanations need not compete if their respective explanatory levels remain explicit.

The opposition between deficiency and affirmation therefore rests on a questionable assumption: that the meaning of caregiving can be settled by deciding what kind of person the caregiver is. One account may describe the person as insufficiently differentiated. Another may describe the same person as admirably attached. Field theory suggests that both positions can prematurely locate meaning in the individual rather than examine the unfolding situation.

A field perspective does not ask whether care is excessive by reference to a predetermined quantity. It asks what the care does in this particular field, which figures it supports, which differences it permits, and which possibilities become less available. The answer cannot be obtained from the outward behavior alone. Spending an evening with a partner may express affection, practical solidarity, a response to a credible threat, or a habitual adjustment in which a person's emerging needs disappear from attention. The action looks similar. Its organization and meaning are not.

This is also where a field interpretation must accept a limit. If the same description fits every act of care, it has ceased to discriminate. The field must be specified through observable and reportable features of situations: what was experienced before the response, what alternatives were available, what consequences were anticipated or had occurred, how others actually responded, and what happened in later encounters. Otherwise, the field becomes a more elegant name for an unspecified cause.

The field is not simply the setting around the individual

In Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman (1951) begin from the organism–environment field. Contact is not something an already complete individual adds to life from outside; it is the process through which an organism lives, discriminates, orients, reaches, and assimilates in a changing environment. The self is therefore not adequately pictured as a sealed possession whose boundaries must always be defended. It is understood in relation to the activity of contact.

A field-theoretical interpretation of codependency must preserve the implications of this proposition. PHG's self is not a hidden possession waiting to be separated from other people; it is an activity of contacting in a given situation. This does not dissolve persons into an undifferentiated collective or deny asymmetry in responsibility. It means that capacities for differentiating, reaching, declining, and assimilating depend upon a field in which those activities have meaning and support. Saying that a person has been influenced by a difficult partner is not yet field theory. Nor is drawing a circle around two people and calling their interaction a field. The question concerns the concrete, mutually implicated conditions through which a particular experience emerges. What is foregrounded is a property of the situated process, not simply a private preference followed by an external reaction.

Kurt Lewin's work provides a broader historical background for this orientation, while Malcolm Parlett (1991) articulated five principles of field theory for Gestalt practice: organization, contemporaneity, singularity, changing process, and possible relevance. These principles discourage explanations that detach behavior from the conditions of its occurrence. A change in available resources, a shift in another person's response, or the presence of a reliable witness can change what a person is able to experience, not merely what they later decide to do about an experience already formed. Wollants (2012) gives this orientation a particularly useful clinical emphasis by speaking of therapy as therapy of the situation. The object of inquiry is not an isolated structure hidden beneath the relationship. It is the lived situation in which patterns of contacting acquire coherence and are repeated. The relevant unit of understanding includes people, embodiment, their history as presently meaningful, social expectations, material resources, and the opportunities or dangers of acting differently.

Gary Yontef (2002) makes an implication of this position explicit: interdependence belongs to the very structure of a field account, whereas an ideal of heroic self-sufficiency sits uneasily with Gestalt theory. His discussion also warns that therapeutic attitudes can generate shame when legitimate needs for support are treated as weaknesses. There is, however, an essential ethical qualification. Co-constitution of experience does not mean equal moral responsibility for harm. Where one person threatens, exploits, or coerces another, the relational situation must be described without obscuring who exercises power or who bears the danger. This does not deny personal history. A person may have learned that voicing disagreement threatens belonging. Such learning matters. But the current persistence of silence cannot be deduced from childhood alone. Perhaps the present partner responds respectfully, and the old anticipation can now be tested. Perhaps disagreement still provokes intimidation. Perhaps the relationship is caring but family obligations make alternatives difficult. Field inquiry must remain able to distinguish these possibilities.

Francesetti and Roubal (2020) further develop the field perspective by distinguishing phenomenal, phenomenological, and psychopathological fields and examining the therapist's participation in what becomes possible during an encounter. Their position helps prevent a merely systemic inventory of two separate actors. The therapist is not standing outside the field, observing a client's stable pattern as though it were an object. The therapist's presence, pace, expectations, and capacity to receive difference belong to the clinical situation too. But field description and moral attribution must not be conflated: two people can participate in a situation without being equally responsible for intimidation, exploitation, or harm. It follows that codependency, if the term is retained, cannot be adequately defined simply as an inability to set boundaries. A more precise formulation would concern a recurrent organization of experience in which some relational demands become consistently prominent and other potential figures, responses, or reorganizations have difficulty finding sufficient support.

Codependency can imply that a caregiver's love is itself diseased, and the term has often been used without distinguishing overload, coercion, trauma responses, and constrained choices. Eliminating it would avoid some of that burden. Yet it continues to name suffering that people recognize in themselves, and recent research describes patterns that merit study without granting the term diagnostic status (Molina et al., 2026). The defensible use of the word here is therefore cautious: it identifies a question about recurrent relational restriction, not a kind of person.

Three safeguards follow. First, the restriction must be situated and consequential, not inferred from the quantity of care given. Second, its mechanism must remain open because a diffuse emerging need, a clearly recognized but unsafe action, and an unsustained relational change are not the same event. Third, the explanation must survive negative cases. A caregiver who freely and knowingly suspends leisure during a short crisis, with adequate support and the ability to resume other activities, may be deeply interdependent without showing the pattern in question. A person who monitors an abusive partner because retaliation is credible requires a description of coercion before any hypothesis about confluence. These are not exceptions to be forced back into the model; they test whether the model is being used responsibly.

Figure and ground: what becomes available to experience?

The classical Gestalt distinction between figure and ground shifts our attention from the amount of care provided to the organization of experience. A figure is not just what one consciously chooses to think about. It takes shape against a background of bodily sensation, previous experience, expectation, environmental stimulation, and available action. In a close relationship, another person's suffering may rightly become the figure. The ethical issue is not that one's own interests cease to occupy the center at every moment.

The more interesting question is whether the situation permits movement. Can tiredness emerge as a figure once immediate danger has passed? Can irritation be noticed without automatically becoming a sign of disloyalty? Can the desire for companionship coexist with the need for solitude? Can the wish to help be examined alongside the limits of what help can accomplish? A flexible figure–ground organization allows the foreground to change with circumstances. A restricted one continually reproduces the same hierarchy of salience even as circumstances change. Strictly speaking, the issue is not whether the person's needs occupy the foreground more often than the other's. Gestalt theory offers no ideal ratio of self-attention to care. The issue is whether a relevant difference can emerge, receive support, and enter contact when the situation calls for it. This is a stronger account than saying simply that one partner's needs are more important to the person than their own. Sometimes the need to rest is clearly known and deliberately postponed for good reasons. In other cases, the experience of tiredness never becomes sufficiently articulated to function as a possible orientation. The distinction matters. In the first situation, the person may be struggling with an action or a choice. In the second, the problem arises earlier, in how a possible figure differentiates from its ground. A recurrent anticipation of the other's mood can become a powerful organizer of perceptual and bodily attention. A change in voice is noticed almost immediately; one's own tension is registered only after the encounter has ended. This does not demonstrate a deficit of perception or a pathological dependence on another person's emotional state. It may be an intelligent response to unpredictability. The field question is why certain cues have acquired this particular urgency and what conditions would allow other aspects of experience to become salient.

This reading also changes the meaning of awareness. Awareness is not a command to turn inward and identify personal needs as though they existed fully formed in private. It is the ongoing possibility of contacting what is emerging in the situation. A wish to rest is no less relational than a wish to stay with a distressed partner. Both depend on a world in which rest, companionship, responsibility, and support have meaning. Differentiation concerns whether these possibilities can be discriminated, not whether one escapes dependence on others.

Confluence before a new excitement

Confluence is especially pertinent because it addresses the difficulty of differentiation. Yet the term is frequently used too broadly. It can become a shorthand for intimacy, agreement, close attachment, self-sacrifice, or emotional dependence. Such uses obscure its place in the Gestalt account of contact. Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman (1951, Vol. II, Chapter XV) explicitly locate confluence among the interruptions that can occur before the new primary excitation. They also distinguish the necessary, largely unnoticed confluence of assimilated habits and secure backgrounds from neurotic confluence that is maintained through repression and resists new contact. In their account, a normal background is not defective because it is unexamined. The question is whether a new difference can become contactable when circumstances call for it. Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman (1951) further warns that these descriptions are not a typology of neurotic persons. This precision matters. A contemporary account of codependency cannot simply equate habitual accommodation with the specific PHG concept, and the word codependency is not a category devised by PHG.

Consider a person who notices an unsettled feeling when their partner proposes another demanding weekend. They agree immediately and only later experience vague heaviness or exhaustion. If asked why they did not refuse, they cannot answer because refusing was not yet an experienced option. It would be inaccurate to say that a fully conscious need was necessarily suppressed. The need may have been present as bodily excitement without yet becoming a figure that could be owned, named, and tested against the situation.

Here the interpretive hypothesis of prefigurative restriction becomes meaningful. The other's preference has already organized the scene, while the emerging difference remains insufficiently articulated. Such a configuration may be explored through the classical account of neurotic confluence before new excitement. It cannot, however, be inferred automatically from obedience, caring behavior, or verbal agreement. Other explanations are possible, including fatigue, uncertainty, a culturally valued duty, strategic accommodation, or concern about actual retaliation.

Gestalt writing has previously investigated the overlap between confluence and codependency. Medina Pacheco, Reyes García, and Villar Zepeda (2009), in a small qualitative study of four women, examined confluence in couple relationships and compared it with codependency. Limiti's Gestalt discussion of affective dependence (2020) already drew on creative adjustment and figure–ground dynamics; his later analysis of belonging (2026) likewise underscores that relational dependence has not been neglected by Gestalt authors. Affective dependence and codependency overlap, but they are not interchangeable constructs. The novelty claimed here is correspondingly limited: neither confluence, field theory, nor the clinical importance of belonging is new. The contribution sought is a distinction among the location of the restriction before figure formation, after recognition, and across subsequent relational encounters. What remains worth developing is a more discriminating account of where restriction occurs and what observations would distinguish the different forms.

Neither confluence nor the contact boundary should be turned into a moral scale running from bad dependence to good independence. Laura Perls's work on support and contact, and the relational reconsiderations developed by Wheeler (1991), point toward a different conception. Differentiation needs support. Where the field cannot sustain a difference, exhortations to become separate may be experienced as a demand to abandon belonging. Where belonging is stable enough, a new difference need not destroy the relationship; it can enrich it.

Three distinguishable restrictions of contact

A field interpretation gains clarity when it refrains from explaining every similar-looking behavior through the same mechanism. I propose three distinguishable, potentially overlapping configurations. They should be understood as analytic distinctions within situations, not as personality types, phases of a compulsory cycle, or validated clinical categories.

In a prefigurative restriction, the difficulty concerns the emergence of a differentiated figure. The person can identify the other's mood, anticipated needs, and possible dissatisfaction more readily than the bodily and emotional direction of their own experience. A possible wish appears only after prolonged attention, or remains vague. Neurotic confluence before new primary excitement offers one possible Gestalt interpretation. Clinically, this formulation asks what allows a sensation to become meaningful. What happens in the moments immediately preceding agreement? Which bodily shifts occur when a different response is imagined? Does the person experience the possibility of wanting something else, or does the situation seem to offer only a single obvious course? Importantly, the presence of a clear figure concerning the other's needs does not mean that all figure formation has failed. The restriction is selective.

In a restriction of expression or action, the difference is already experienced. The person knows that they want to rest, disagree, ask for help, or leave. Yet the practical or relational consequences of acting are substantial. Their silence may be associated with introjected obligations, retroflection, or fear of rejection, but it may also reflect financial dependence, the absence of respite care, threats, the responsibilities of raising a child, or a history of credible retaliation. This configuration cannot be explained simply by insufficient awareness. The person may have accurate awareness and few safe alternatives. To interpret the difficulty as confluence merely because the person remains in the relationship would obscure decisive characteristics of the field. Such a mistake can become ethically serious in situations of coercive control or abuse. The immediate question is not why the person fails to express a boundary, but what would happen if they did and what resources could make a safer alternative possible.

A third configuration concerns the durability of change. A personal need may become clear and be expressed. A partner may respond constructively once. The couple may even reach an agreement. Yet their shared organization later returns to its previous form. Old obligations are reasserted, one partner's distress again takes precedence, or the family and institutional environment offers no support for the new arrangement. This restriction of relational reorganization is different from the absence of awareness and from the immediate inability to act. It concerns the way subsequent encounters support or undo a new possibility. Roubal and Francesetti (2022), in reconsidering the paradoxical theory of change from a field perspective, provide a useful theoretical basis for asking how change is supported beyond an individual's intention. An isolated act of differentiation is not the same as an enduring transformation of the situation.

These restrictions can overlap, and a person's experience may move among them. They should not be mapped one-to-one onto the PHG sequence of contact, treated as diagnoses, or used as a theory that explains itself. The third distinction in particular concerns the conditions that sustain change over time rather than an additional contact-cycle mechanism.

These distinctions matter because they lead to different clinical questions. If a need has not emerged, what might support its formation? If the need is clear but unsafe to act upon, what protection and resources are missing? If action occurs but the situation rapidly reverts, what relational conditions need to change for the new possibility to endure? The three questions cannot responsibly be replaced by the single instruction to establish better boundaries.

Two situations that look alike but are not

The following vignettes are entirely fictional and serve to clarify a theoretical distinction.

The first situation. Mira is attentive to her partner's changing moods. When he is uneasy, she reorganizes her evenings without being asked. She does not describe herself as frightened of him, and their relationship includes affection and reciprocity. During a conversation she explains, in detail, why he needed her company the previous night. When asked what she had wanted, she pauses. Only after describing a tightness in her chest, some irritation, and a strong desire to lie down does she begin to recognize that she had wanted a quiet evening. Her immediate agreement was not necessarily a decision to ignore a clearly known need. The possibility of needing something different had barely emerged. Here it may be useful to explore figure formation and the support needed for a nascent difference to take shape. It would be premature to declare Mira codependent or to deduce an early trauma from the single episode. Suppose that, after several conversations, she begins to request an evening of rest. Her partner initially agrees but soon returns to assuming her constant availability, while she has little support to sustain the change. The problem has shifted. A difference can now be felt and expressed, yet its continuing relational support is fragile. This further hypothetical development illustrates the third restriction without turning it into a fixed stage or a judgment against either person's care.

The second situation. Ana also cancels plans when her partner becomes upset. Unlike Mira, she knows exactly what she wants and can describe her exhaustion without hesitation. Her partner has repeatedly threatened to withhold money, disrupt her work, and intimidate her when she refuses demands. Ana has limited savings and no reliable place to stay. Her attention to changes in his mood may be an appropriately vigilant response to danger. The problem is not that she has failed to discover her wishes. A formulation centered on confluence could obscure the coercive structure of the situation and transfer responsibility onto her. Here the relevant interventions may involve safety planning and access to practical support. A Gestalt field perspective does not replace specialized responses to violence; it requires that they be taken seriously.

The two people may exhibit nearly identical observable behavior. They both change their plans to accommodate a partner. Yet the relevant organization of experience differs substantially. The distinction illustrates why the therapist needs to understand the actual field rather than diagnose from the outward shape of a response.

Care, belonging, and the social distribution of possibilities

The language of codependency is particularly vulnerable to cultural assumptions about self-sufficiency. A view that treats asking for support as weakness will easily interpret dependence as evidence of failure. Weiss and Buck (2022) are right to challenge this prejudice. Human life is structured through dependence on others, and significant care often involves real sacrifice. A relationship does not become unhealthy merely because its responsibilities are uneven at a particular moment. Nevertheless, rejecting the pathology of dependence is not the same as celebrating all asymmetry. Social arrangements may systematically assign the labor of managing others' feelings, crises, and practical needs to particular people. Gendered expectations, low income, disability-related support needs, limited public services, and informal family obligations can shape who is expected to care and which alternatives are realistically available. Schiebel and Lancer (2026) recognize that cultural demands influence codependent patterns. A field approach asks more specifically how such demands are active here: who provides unpaid care, who has money or transport, who can rely on extended family, whose employment is disrupted, and whose refusal brings consequences. These are not simply beliefs about appropriate caring. They affect whether rest, negotiation, redistribution, and withdrawal are feasible ways of contacting.

This unequal distribution of care is not merely a theoretical concern. Official evidence from Argentina illustrates how gendered responsibilities shape the material possibilities of everyday life. According to the National Time Use Survey (ENUT 2021), 91.7% of women participated in unpaid work, compared with 75.1% of men. Among those performing these activities, women devoted an average of 6 hours and 31 minutes per day, compared with 3 hours and 40 minutes for men. The disparity was particularly pronounced in care work specifically: 31.4% of women and 20.3% of men participated in these activities, with female participants spending an average of 6 hours and 7 minutes daily, compared with 3 hours and 30 minutes for male participants. These estimates include time spent on simultaneous activities (INDEC, 2022, pp. 19, 43). A subsequent official economic assessment, published in 2023 and based on ENUT 2021 rather than a new time-use survey, estimated that unpaid domestic and care work accounted for approximately 146.1 million hours per day in Argentina in 2022, with women contributing 70.2% of the estimated total time (DNEIyG, 2023). These findings do not establish that gender inequality causes codependency. Rather, they demonstrate why a Gestalt field perspective must consider the unequal distribution of time, responsibilities, and resources when examining opportunities for differentiation and contact. What may appear clinically as difficulty prioritizing one's own needs can also reflect material and relational conditions that constrain the possibilities of rest, negotiation, and change.

Consider the person caring for a relative with significant support needs. Exhaustion and restricted social life may arise not because the caregiver cannot differentiate from the other, but because respite services and shared responsibilities are absent. Attributing this situation to insufficient boundaries would be an explanatory failure. It would mistake the effects of an unequal distribution of resources for a personal deficit. The converse error is possible too. A person may have substantial resources and nevertheless feel compelled to monitor another's mood continuously, even in a relatively safe relationship. There may be important experiential and relational questions to explore. A serious field approach makes room for both patterns, without confusing them.

Limiti's (2026) discussion of affective dependence and crises of belonging is a useful reminder that the alternatives to a constricted relationship are not exhausted by leaving it. New figures may become possible when the wider background of belonging becomes richer: friendships, community, meaningful activities, and reliable support can reduce the demand that one bond carry every possibility of recognition. The clinical aim need not be a purified independence. It may be a field in which different forms of belonging coexist and no single relationship must organize the whole of experience.

What would a field-oriented inquiry change?

Rather than beginning with the assumption that the client has poor boundaries, the therapist can investigate a concrete episode. What occurred immediately before agreement or withdrawal? What did the client notice in the other's expression? What sensations were present? Was a different possibility conceivable at that moment? What consequences had similar actions brought in the past? Which obligations or resources made one response more feasible than another? This approach is phenomenological without becoming blind to material circumstances. It attends carefully to what was experienced while also asking about threat, money, time, care responsibilities, access to support, and relational responses. None of these is a secondary social context added after the psychological work is complete. They are part of what makes a situation what it is.

The therapist's presence also matters. Field inquiry does not exempt the therapist from examining their own participation or justify an interpretation being imposed because it sounds relational. A client who habitually anticipates others may seek to discover what the therapist wants them to say. A well-intentioned invitation to become more independent can reproduce the same structure: the client becomes compliant with the therapist's preferred outcome. A field-sensitive stance instead makes room for hesitation, disagreement, and even the wish to remain in a demanding relationship without treating that wish as evidence of resistance.

A possible experiment might involve noticing what happens when the client imagines offering a different answer. But the meaning of the experiment depends on the situation. For Mira, attention to bodily sensations may help a previously diffuse need become available. For Ana, the same exercise would be inadequate if it ignored danger. A therapeutic exploration of contact must remain answerable to the consequences of contact beyond the consulting room.

Similarly, an account of change cannot end when the client recognizes or expresses a need once. What happens in the following days? Does the other person respond differently? Can responsibility be redistributed? Are alternative resources accessible? Can the new figure find a background that supports its continuation? The clinical focus moves from the isolated moment of self-assertion toward the ongoing reorganization of the field. A field formulation may therefore change within therapy. What first appeared to be difficulty sensing a need may become a problem of safely expressing it. What seemed like failure to set a boundary may prove to be an unmet requirement for respite, housing, or practical assistance. A useful formulation has to remain revisable.

What would make this interpretation more than a metaphor?

The word field risks becoming an attractive but empty explanation. If every difficulty is said to be a product of the field, nothing has been explained unless one can specify the relevant processes and conditions. The value of the proposal therefore depends on whether it helps discriminate situations that other theories treat as equivalent. It also depends on acknowledging when a rival explanation is sufficient. An attachment formulation may describe how a threat of separation organizes vigilance; schema theory may explain why guilt arises before refusal; family-system analysis may track reciprocal expectations. The proposed field questions have a distinctive contribution only when they show how these dispositions and histories are enacted or transformed by the actual, present configuration of support, danger, affordances, and response.

A first empirical question would concern variation within the same person. Does the clarity of personal needs diminish in particular relational encounters and become more available where safety and support change? A second would distinguish awareness from action. Do people sometimes identify their needs clearly while reporting independently verifiable constraints on acting? A third would concern the persistence of change. Does the subsequent response of partners, families, or support systems help predict whether a newly expressed need remains actionable over time?

Qualitative interviews focused on concrete episodes, repeated observations of everyday situations, and psychotherapy process studies could examine these questions. A credible study would compare the same participant across different relational settings, rather than inferring field organization from a questionnaire score alone. It might ask participants to reconstruct the seconds before agreeing, record whether a wish had already been identifiable, document actual consequences of dissent where safe to do so, and trace whether subsequent interactions support an altered response. Observing a repeated pattern only within threatening contexts would support a situational explanation more strongly than a stable individual-deficit explanation. Research involving coercion requires safeguards against exposing participants to retaliation. Comparison with attachment, schema, caregiver-burden, and systemic accounts would be essential. If coders cannot distinguish nascent need, recognized-but-unactionable need, and failed maintenance across episodes, or if these distinctions add nothing beyond available models of attachment, schema activation, caregiving burden, or coercive control, the present formulation loses its proposed explanatory advantage and should be revised or abandoned. The conceptual appeal of the theory is not evidence that it has already been confirmed.

Beyond confluence: contact without the ideal of self-sufficiency

Codependency has often been discussed as though therapy must choose between two moral portraits. In one, the caregiver is insufficiently autonomous and must learn to stop rescuing. In the other, the caregiver is inherently healthy and simply needs support to love more effectively. The contrast has clinical force, but it is too narrow for a Gestalt account.

Gestalt field theory offers a different starting point. It asks how a situation organizes the emergence of needs, the recognition of differences, and the possibilities of contact. Sometimes a new need cannot yet become a figure. Sometimes it is fully present, but the field makes expression dangerous or materially unfeasible. Sometimes a different response occurs but cannot be sustained because the surrounding relationships and supports remain unchanged.

Confluence is part of this account, but it is not its synonym. The neurotic confluence described by Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman before new excitement offers a useful theoretical route into one particular difficulty of differentiation. It does not account for every instance of self-sacrifice, nor can it explain away power, crisis, care, or scarcity. To reduce codependency to confluence would be to reproduce, in Gestalt language, the individualization that field theory was intended to challenge. To attribute every difficulty to a vaguely invoked field would be an equally serious error, substituting a total explanation for a careful description of what is happening.

The question is therefore not how to make people need others less. It is how to understand and support situations in which human beings can depend on one another without losing the possibility of meaningful difference. A field can sustain intimacy and disagreement, care and rest, belonging and change. The distinctive promise of a Gestalt interpretation of codependency lies in examining when that plurality becomes restricted, how the restriction is maintained, and what might allow another form of contact to emerge.

References

About the Authors

Author

Sergio Hernán Blogna Tistuzza

PhD · Postdoctoral Studies, University of Buenos Aires Researcher, Gino Germani Research Institute · Member, Buenos Aires Gestalt Association

Sergio Hernán Blogna Tistuzza holds a PhD and has completed postdoctoral studies at the University of Buenos Aires. He is a researcher at the Gino Germani Research Institute and a member of the Buenos Aires Gestalt Association. His work explores Gestalt theory and its dialogue with the social sciences.

Editor & Publisher

Zoya Nissan

Editor & Publisher, GestaltReview.com

GestaltReview is an independent, open-access educational resource focused on Gestalt therapy, psychology, theory, research, and clinical practice. As Editor & Publisher, Zoya oversees the development and publication of educational articles, essays, historical profiles, and research-informed resources for therapists, students, researchers, and readers interested in Gestalt therapy. Her work includes editorial planning, topic research, article editing, source and reference review, contributor coordination, and maintaining the publication's digital archive. GestaltReview welcomes essays, case studies, reflections, and other contributions from practitioners and researchers interested in advancing thoughtful discussion within the Gestalt community.

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