Person Centered Therapy Vs Gestalt Therapy

Psychotherapy is a psychological intervention designed to help people resolve emotional, behavioral and interpersonal problems and improve the quality of their lives. There are many different approaches to psychotherapy. Freud’s psychoanalysis was one of the first forms of psychotherapy.

Cognitive therapy attempts to replace irrational thoughts and maladaptive behaviors with more rational thoughts and adaptive behaviors. For example, this therapy style may require a shy client to ask out an attractive person to help falsify their belief that “If they ask out someone they like, it will be terrible.” Cognitive therapy differs from the other therapies because it is the most measureable.

Humanistic therapy emphasizes the development of human potential and the belief that human nature is basically positive. This type of therapy will focus on insight and self-actualization. The two most common therapies are person-centered therapy and Gestalt therapy; group therapy is also common but focuses less on a single person. Person-centered therapy focuses on the client’s goals and ways of solving problems, whereas, the Gestalt therapy aims to integrate different aspects of personality into a unified sense of self. Humanistic therapy approaches are often difficult to
Behavioral therapists assume that changes in behavior result from the basic principles of learning especially, classical conditioning, operant conditional and observational learning. Desensitization and exposure therapies are often used in behavioral therapy practices. Desensitization is when clients are told to relax as they are gradually exposed to what they fear, whereas, exposure directly confronts the fear with a goal of reducing it. One fault of behaviorals therapy is that it tends to focus on only the observable problems rather than the root