Two Therapeutic Treatments of Clinical Depression

Gestalt therapy is not new. However, its current popularity has grown rapidly since it was given new impetus and direction by Dr. Frederick Perls. Gestalt is a German word for which there is no exact English equivalent; it means, roughly, the forming of an organized, meaningful whole (James & Jongeward, 1973, p. 7).

Perls perceived many personalities as lacking wholeness, as being fragmented. He believed people are often aware of only parts of themselves rather than of their whole self. For example, a women may not know or want to admit that sometimes she acts like her mother; a man may not know or want to admit that sometimes he wants to cry.

The aim of gestalt therapy is to help an individual become whole--to help the person become aware of, admit to, reclaim, and integrate his fragmented parts. Integration helps a person make the transition from dependency to self-sufficiency; from authoritarian outer support to authentic inner support. Those who depend on outer support--such as a spouse, academic degrees, job titles, therapist, bank accounts, and so forth--to hold themsel

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at she would never accept his invitation, so he does not ask her. By helping the patient to face these fears and negative thoughts, which are often not founded on fact, the therapist encourages the patient to take some risks and to do things that might make him or her feel better. Many believe a great deal can be accomplished by combining cognitive and behavior therapy. The dilemma of psychology is that it is basically divided into two classes: the one interested in behavior and the other interested in awareness, or lack of awareness. The latter is the phenomenological approach which emphasizes that the messages that are self-evident--existential in the pure sense--that individuals receive through the organs of their senses. They know through seeing, hearing, feeling; and from these come the primary information people receive about themselves and their relation to life. The behaviorist, on the other hand, is not interested in the phenomenon of awareness and the subjective approach. The behaviorist, however, does have the advantage over other methods in that he deals with the here and now. According to Perls, if one puts together both the phenomenological approach and the behaviorist approach, the result would be contempora
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Approximate Word count = 2721
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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