Gestalt Therapy

   "Gestalt," meaning in this context wholeness of form, became a kind of therapy associated with the human potential movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Although the concept of wholeness of form—and the persistence of the whole despite changes in it—goes back to the Ancients, the term "Gestalt" was revived in 1890 by the German philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932). In the years between the World Wars, a school of German psychologists adopted the concept as a way of thinking about visual and auditory perception, and it retained considerable currency even after the Second World War when in 1952, in the journal Studium Generale, Klaus Conrad (1905–1961), professor of psychiatry at Homburg University in the German province of Saarbrücken, suggested the psychologists’ recent work on "Gestalten" might offer psychiatry a useful third way of proceeding, beside Jaspers’s "infrapsychic" biological approach and the "ultrapsychic" invocation of archetypes: "I propose that the analysis of psychopathological events from the viewpoint of Gestalt-theory be called "Gestalt analysis [Gestaltanalyse]" (p. 49).

   Yet, the concept of "Gestalt therapy" came to the United States via psychoanalyst Fritz Perls (1893–1970), who had studied medicine in Berlin, undergone there several training analyses, and then in 1926 gravitated to Frankfurt am Main to continue his analysis and to work as an assistant in neurologist Kurt Goldstein’s (1878–1965) Institute for Neurology. It was Goldstein who introduced Perls to Gestalt psychology. In 1933, Perls migrated from Germany to South Africa and there in 1941–1942 wrote a manuscript, published only in 1945 in London as Ego, Hunger and Aggression, that outlined the principles of Gestalt therapy, directed toward the reestablishing of wholeness in the battered psyche. In 1946, Perls migrated to the United States, landing after many peregrinations in 1966 as resident psychiatrist at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He also founded institutes for Gestalt therapy in New York and in British Columbia. His book Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951) made him a forerunner of the human potential movement, whereby he accentuated "unlimited spontaneity." (See Psychotherapy: Carl Rogers.) The basic premise of Gestalt therapy is that the neurotic’s conceptual field is cluttered with Gestalten, or intuitive forms, and that he is unable to make sharp differentiations about what he or she really wants. The therapy restores him to a position where need satisfaction is possible.