Gestalt-therapy

The Gestalt-therapy , also called Gestalt , is a Psychothérapie which analyzes the experiment " here and maintenant" and personal liabilities. It was created in particular by Fritz Perls, a psychiatrist and German psychoanalyst, emigrated in South Africa then to the E. - U., his wife Laura Perls and Paul Goodman. The work founder is entitled Gestalt Thérapie ; Co-writing with Paul Goodman and Ralph Hefferline, it is appeared in 1951.

Gestalt comes from the German verb gestalten, which means “to format, to give a structure”.

Description

Gestalt is interested particularly in the contact and the comparison by the expression of the emotions.

Many therapeutic approaches try to explain the Psychisme in terms:

of subsets (for example: that, it Me and Super-ego in Psychoanalysis),
of grids of observation as the three states of Ego in compromise Analysis (Relative, Adult, Child),
of body blockings (bioénergie), Rolfing, etc

All descriptions which are, in fact, “statics”.

The Gestalt-therapy is from a dynamic point of view. It is interested in the “process”, the permanent adjustment between an individual and his environment. This adjustment is by definition in perpetual change.

Gestaltiste thus speaks about:

cycle of contact,
of creative adjustment,
of form which emerges from the bottom,

who are as many terms which evoke the movement. The Gestalt-therapy stresses each situation here-and-now awakening of the process in progress in.

Gestalt is thus at the same time a theory, with tools of rigorous analysis, and especially a psychotherapy, i.e. a step allowing, within a given framework, to explore existential difficulties.

It integrates, in a specific way, a coherent whole of varied, verbal and nonverbal techniques, using the word, the emotion, the dream, the imaginary one, the creativity, the movement and the body.

Objectives

She seeks to integrate five principal dimensions: physics, emotional, cognitive, social and spiritual (cf the Pentagram of Ginger).

Its originality is not in its techniques but rather in its objective:

to increase the capacity of adaptation to different beings or environments,
to restore freedom of choice.

It places the patient as actor of the change, and the relation like engine of this change.

Gestalt rehabilitates the felt emotional one, still too often censured by the Occidental culture, by supporting some the expression. This one can be torrential at the beginnings of a therapy and thus requires to be channeled by an experienced professional, cases of decompensation having been announced at this stage.

Characteristic: a focusing on the process

Certain forms of therapy are centered on why and seek the origin of the traumatism. In fact “therapies of the upstream” by determining the cause (even by extracting it) are given for objective to eliminate the future consequences. Last consequences being by nature noneliminable, but only relativisables.

Other currents are “therapies of the downstream”: by leaving side the origins of our blockings, these therapies seek to release the behavior, “to emerge the river” and “to clean the banks”, to enable him to run more freely. The behavioral therapies (PNL in particular) use this strategy.

While continuing, Gestalt is a “therapy of the current” of the “movement”: what is important it is the process, rather than it why. This focusing on the process (word which means progress, walk ahead, in Latin), is found in the vocabulary gestaltist:

the border-contact,
Gestalt unfinished,
ruptures of the contact.

For the Gestalt-therapy the difficulty is looked within the framework of the here and now . what is step of therapy of the emotion.

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