Fritz Perls
Fritz Perls was a psychiatrist who founded a new direction in the psychological treatment of mental disorders - GESTALT THERAPY . In the period when psychoanalysis was the dominant direction in explaining psychopathology and psychotherapy, Perls, otherwise psychoanalytically educated, began to advocate different views from her. Perls symbolically marked the difference between his and psychoanalytic teachings. He considered 1940 to be the point in time when he stopped being a psychoanalyst.
Gestalt therapy emerged as a result of Perls's ideas about the main mechanisms within the personality and, in an informal way, a critique of psychoanalysis of that period. His work "Ego, Hunger and Aggression" (1942) has the subtitle "A Revision of Freud's Theory". In the book, Perls emphasizes the importance of the hunger drive as the primary driver (in relation to the sexual drive according to Freud's interpretation).
The most famous concepts related to gestalt therapy are: CONTACT with others and the environment and the current experience of a person - happening HERE and NOW .
The contact between the self and the surrounding takes place through the stages of the contact cycle: pre-contact, establishment of contact, full contact and post-contact.
Difficulties in establishing contact are called RESISTANCE (defense mechanisms): introjection, projection, retroflexion, deflection and confluence. A neurotic symptom will arise when some of the resistance becomes the primary way of contact.
Mental problems can also be seen as a disturbance in the contact between the self and the environment through an unfinished experience from the past . If there is a sufficiently intense emotional reaction to events from the past, the goal of psychotherapy would be to complete this way of reacting in such a way that the person is in contact with events from the PRESENT . The role of the psychotherapist in such a process is not to interpret the content he hears, but to direct the client to dare to experience the emotional content.
One of the most famous psychotherapeutic techniques, the so-called the TWO CHAIRS technique is related to the practice of Gestalt therapy. The idea of this technique is to elucidate the conflict between conflicting parties within the personality in a safe therapeutic setting. While sitting on one chair, the client will invest all his energy to be a part of the personality and vice versa. In this way, the parts of the personality that cause a person psychological discomfort due to the conflict, become verbally clearer in terms of content, as well as at the level of emotional expression. The psychotherapist's task is to observe the dynamics between these two parts, communicate and determine adequate therapeutic interventions for both parts, with the aim of overcoming the conflict.