Gestalt Therapy Essay

As stated in Encyclopedia Britannica, “Gestalt therapy is a humanistic method of psychotherapy that takes a holistic approach to human experience by stressing individual responsibility and awareness of present psychological and physical needs (Gestalt Therapy). Gestalt therapy was first introduced by Frederick, Fritz, and Laura Perls in 1940. Gestalt therapy teaches people to become aware of situations in them and to respond to those situations fully and reasonably (Gestalt Therapy). Frederick, Fritz, and Laura Perls were the founders of gestalt therapy. They first introduced gestalt therapy in 1940. Fritz was strongly influenced by many psychoanalysts. He did not agree with much of Freud’s work which is what led him

Gestalt therapy began as a research endeavor and as a movement against the established assumptions of psychology at the beginning of the twentieth century (Schulz, 2013). Laura Wagner-Moore stated, “Gestalt therapy assumes that an organism ultimately knows what is best for its self-regulation and actualization” (Wagner-Moore, 2004). In Gestalt therapy the client learns to fully use their internal and external senses to become self-responsive and self-supportive. Gestalt therapy focuses more on what is happening now rather than what could be, should be, might be, or what was (Yontef, 1993). The gestalt therapist engages the patient in dialogue rather than trying to manipulate the patient toward some therapeutic goal and embodies authenticity and responsibility in that dialogue (Yontef, 1993). Gestalt therapy helps the client to recognize that they are responsible for their own actions instead of blaming some external force or person. Many of the awareness techniques used in gestalt therapy came from came from various aspects of Eastern thinking such as Taoism and Zen-Buddhism (Wulf, 1996). A popular exercise used in gestalt therapy is the empty chair. The empty chair is a therapeutic technique in which the client is seated facing an empty chair and is instructed to picture themselves, parts of themselves, or someone else in that chair and speak as though that person were sitting in that chair in front of them. The empty chair technique has been found to be superior to empathetic responding for increasing shifts in awareness (Wagner-Moore, 2004). Gestalt therapy differs from other types of therapy due to the fact that when using other types of therapy