The spontaneous gesture and the therapist: the language of authenticity

Abstract

One of the innovations that Winnicott introduces into clinical methodology is his special appreciation and use of children's “spontaneous gestures” in the therapeutic context. The consideration of gestures, traditionally disregarded from the perspective of rationality and, therefore, so belatedly taken into account by thought, certainly marks a turning point in the definition of the human being. The efforts of Winnicott, on the one hand, and phenomenology, on the other, have contributed fundamentally to a better understanding of the long journey of life in its existential realization. This paper seeks to characterize this effort and argue that the authenticity of the gesture in the spontaneity of children's squiggles is necessarily correlated with the same spontaneity of the therapist, as a welcoming and non-interpretive openness, and that both in their correlation configure what could be the human “being-there” in the most properly Heideggerian sense.