Gestalt Therapy By Fritz Perls, Laura Perls And Paul Goodman

Gestalt Therapy is a humanistic therapy created in the 1940s and 50s by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls, and Paul Goodman. Gestalt Therapy focuses more on the present rather than the past or future and concentrates on picking up self-awareness and practices in the present as opposed to before (Counseling Directory, 2015.). Therefore the counsellor does not illustrate experiences for the client. Rather, the counsellor and the client cooperate to offer the client some assistance with understanding him/herself. It was established by Fritz Perls, his wife Laura Perls and Paul Goodman. Fritz Perls and Laura Perls were both a married pair of German Jews. Both of them were qualified in psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology. They had moved to Amsterdam,
The main objective of Gestalt Therapy is to make the client become more fully and creatively alive and also to be free from unresolved issues and to have a clear mind. To use layman’s terms, the therapy’s purpose is to let the client achieve self-awareness. Gestalt psychology originated from Max Wertheimer who advanced the gestalt view using the motto “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. He said that it was wrong to study psychology in segments like the structuralists did (Gerald Corey,
Over time, Fritz began having differing opinions with his wife and Goodman about how Gestalt therapy should be further expanded and after being diagnosed with a heart illness in 1957, Fritz moved south to Miami and did not live with his wife for any long period of time anymore (Clarkson and Mackewn, 1993). In 1969 he published Gestalt Therapy Verbatim which gives a clear understanding of the methodology and philosophy of gestalt