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Gestalt Psychology & Therapy

association in learning with the concept of insight, supposing a person learns a task as a meaningful whole rather than in piecemeal fashion. Gestalt as developed by Wertheimer, Koffka and Kohler tends to restrict its attention to the phenomena of conscious awareness, and does not deal with the personality as a whole.

Perls, born in Berlin in 1893, moved to the United States after World War II, and published Gestalt Therapy, which launched the new school of therapy, and Perls then focused on setting up Gestalt training institutes around the world (Famous, 2004). Wertheimer believed that the elementarists had found only the secondary products of analysis: that understanding whole properties must precede consideration of the significance of the parts (Watson, 1977, 473). A gestalt is primary to the parts, and is not merely the sum.

A major focus of gestalt therapy is to focus on the on-going experiment of the here-and-now, stressing the structure of the moment (Litt, 2004). The here-and-now is the concrete reality, the patients "awareness posture, breathing, tone of voice, gestures, facial expressions, etc." While many other therapies concentrate on verbal material, in Gestalt, the face-to-face encounter with the client fosters the working whole person, how he forms his figures and grounds, and helping him become more aware of it. Gestalt looks at "what is" and not at some theoretical explanation of it. Perls' crucial therapeutic tool was the ability of the person to contact his ongoing presentness. Attention turns from one aspect of consciousness to the next, depending on feelings and moods. It is possible to explore the continuum of awareness by noting what is focused on and what is omitted.

A primary task of the Gestalt therapist is to help the person stay in the present, to see what interferes, where the blind spots are, where there is fog, distortion, unfinished situations, confusion, avoidance, etc. (Lit...

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Gestalt Psychology & Therapy. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:35, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1704495.html