Does Dionysian Gestalt have an abuse problem?

On Claudio Naranjo's Seekers After Truth course

El Maestro, Nino Divino, Claudio Naranjo

In 2016, Sofia was a 33-year-old Gestalt student, enrolled in a four-year course at a Gestalt school in Barcelona. The course was OK, although there were things that struck her as strange, especially in the sexuality part of the course.

One day, there was a gross exercise where everyone sat in a circle and they poured oil in the centre. Everyone stripped off naked and rolled around in the oil, including the lead therapists.

That year, she signed up for Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth (SAT) course, a five-stage training that just about every Gestalt teacher and student has done in Spain and Latin America. Each stage costs around Eu1000 (paid in cash), and involves a ten-day residential retreat, usually in some grand building in the countryside. Sofia had done SAT I, where they learned about the Enneagram and beat up a pillow representing their egos; SAT II, where they went through a rebirthing process; and now she was ready for SAT III, taught by the legendary maestro, Claudio Naranjo himself.

Naranjo, a Chilean psychiatrist who founded SAT in the early 1970s, is held in such reverence in the Spanish-speaking world of Gestalt, that the 100 students on the course stood up and bowed when he entered the hall, as if he were the Dalai Lama. They also each had the opportunity for a five-minute private audience with El Maestro. There was a long queue of students, mainly women, outside his room.

Sofia waited her turn excitedly, then went inside and sat next to the old man on a sofa. He asked her some questions about her Enneagram personality type, and then suddenly asked her if she had a boyfriend. She was surprised. ‘No’, she replied. ‘Someone as good-looking as you should’, he said.

Then he spoke some more about spirituality, blablabla, and suddenly his arm lunged at my breasts. I shrank my entire body away from his hand. At that moment one of his young female attendees entered the room and I ran out. I told the queue waiting outside ‘Don’t go in there, he tried to touch my tits!’

She stayed in the retreat. ‘I should have left right there, but I’d paid and I was confused and astonished.’ She adds:

I told one of the therapists running the course what had happened. She said that Naranjo had once tried to touch her tits as well, and added: ‘You need to learn how to carry your beauty because this sort of thing happens with men’. Then she recommended I walk around the hall showing off my beauty to the group without fear.

The next day, Naranjo was giving a talk to the group, when suddenly he walked up to Sofia and put his finger into her belly button, in full view of the group. ‘He said it would give him luck.’ Later that day, in the dining room, when she walked past him he tried to grab her and kiss her on the mouth.

Sofia had many friends in the world of Gestalt and, after the retreat, she told several senior figures what had happened, and asked them what they thought about Naranjo’s behaviour. 

The founder of one Gestalt school said ‘this is probably not the first time this has happened to you. There are some people who attract this sort of thing’. As if I was the cause of it! I never went back to his school. I talked to the head of another school. He said: ‘It’s not a big deal. Jorge Llano [the founder of a Gestalt school in Colombia and previously a senior teacher on SAT] also touches womens’ tits. It’s complicated, managing male sexuality.’ Another therapist said to me: ‘who made you the morality police?’ 

The day after the retreat, she was invited to a birthday party by one of the SAT trainers. She arrived, and there was Claudio Naranjo. ‘You don’t say hello to me?’ he said when she arrived.

It was awkward, everyone at the party looking at me. I said to my friend, ‘either we leave, or I’m going to talk to him about what happened.’ At one point, Naranjo got up to go to the toilet. As he walked out, I tapped him on the shoulder, and asked if I could speak to him. We went into a bedroom, and he said ‘is this because I tried to touch you?’ I said yes, and that I was very surprised by what happened, because I’d held him in high veneration. He said ‘if you want me to apologise, you won’t get it. And, it may sound arrogant, but if you ever wanted to be a part of my close team, it’s not going to happen.’ It was as if that’s the price you have to pay to work closely with him as a woman. Then he left the party. And I understood, this wasn’t a one-off, or a symptom of his old age. This was premeditated, conscious, habitual and supported by his environment.

Sofia adds:

What really surprised me was the reaction of the Gestalt world. Like it was no big deal. I think it’s because Gestalt and SAT is an economic empire, and a lot of people’s livelihoods are tied to it. But I would never sell my dignity for money. I told a therapist about the incident - he works on SAT as well - and he said ‘this is why I would never let a family member do the SAT course’. But you’d let a patient do it? What happened to protecting patient safety! That’s when I decided to have nothing more to do with Gestalt. 

Dionysian Gestalt

Last Friday we wrote about multiple allegations of abuse at Transformacion Humana, a Gestalt school in Colombia founded by Jorge Llano, who was also a senior teacher on Naranjo’s SAT courses. When Jorge Llano resigned in 2023, he said: 

I have been a channel of forces and a carrier of lineages…I took it from my teachers in blind and faithful love and passed it on to others…I have been contaminated by those processes and the baggage of that Dionysian Gestalt that we loved, but now we see that it also caused harm. 

This sounds self-excusing, but some of the students and staff who denounced him say the same thing - this isn’t just about Jorge Llano, it’s about an entire lineage. 

How a Gestalt school became an abusive high-control group

We’re going to examine this lineage of psychedelic psychotherapy - Gestalt, and specifically, a strand of it sometimes known as ‘Dionysiac Gestalt’, associated with Fritz Perls, then his disciple Claudio Naranjo, which then spread to multiple Gestalt schools throughout the world, especially Spain and South America. This tradition also influences psychedelic therapy in the US through MAPS (Rick Doblin cites him as a ‘profound inspiration’ and asked him to give a talk to therapists on the first MDMA trial in 2000) and AWE, the psychedelic therapy school run by Jorge Llano’s son, Igor, and promoted by MAPS. 

AWE: is the intense psychedelic therapy training course safe?

We will raise serious ethical questions about Seekers After Truth and the wider tradition of Dionysian Gestalt: its lack of evidence, its lack of informed consent for some of its erotic exercises, its unsafe use of high doses of psychedelics, its lack of safe boundaries, its secretiveness and resistance to criticism, and its veneration of male guru-figures (especially El Nino Divino, Claudio Naranjo) and tolerance of their misbehaviour. All of this makes abuse more likely to occur and go unchecked. As we’ll see, there have been allegations of abuse and unethical behaviour against several Gestalt teachers connected to the Seekers After Truth programme. Two leading Gestalt therapists who taught on the course were imprisoned for unethical and illegal treatment of their patients (Guillermo Borja in the 1990s, and Antonio Asin in 2019). 

Naranjo himself died in 2019. The Fundacion Claudio Naranjo told us they take these issues seriously and are undergoing an internal process to create a new code of ethics. But a year after declaring this, they still haven’t produced this code or made any obvious changes. Sofia says: ‘I think they are more interested in managing their public image.’ We also emailed 35 Gestalt schools connected to Naranjo to ask them if Gestalt had an abuse problem and what they would do to protect their students. None replied. The Association of Gestalt Viva schools said they are creating a new protocol of ethics, but didn’t produce this protocol.

We should say right at the beginning that there are of course many Gestalt therapists who take professional ethics and boundaries very seriously, and who are no doubt furious with the behaviour of their colleagues. And most therapists agree that there are some interesting ideas and techniques in Gestalt therapy. Nonetheless, something needs to change. At the end of the article we will offer some suggestions.