Gestalt therapy, with its emphasis on immediate awareness and participation, offers a method to develop the necessary support for a continuous personal creative adjustment, which is the way to deal with the experience of dying and therefore of living. Laura Perls

It was developed in the early 50's, by Fritz and Laura Perls, and by Paul Goodman. They were the first emigrated Psychoanalysts from Germany who met Goodman, who was a New York intellectual. Since the day they created it, the gestalt therapy has continuously evolved to what is now known as Contemporary Gestalt Therapy.

We can say, from afar, that its origin emerges in a social context that made therapeutic approaches to be seen generally as an adaptation of the patient to the established norms.

Gestalt therapy emerges from the beginning as an original therapeutic approach due to its marked orientation to the creativity and individual identity of each person, affirming that, by accepting the problem in the therapy, the individual is able to solve his own difficulties. This focus on creativity remains valid in the current practice, in which the therapist maintains an assessment of the patient's first-person experience rather than the third-person view of the therapist.

What does Gestalt mean?

Taken from the psychology of Gestalt, which is the foundation for the Gestalt Therapy, this word does not have a literal translation but in German it means "form". The Gestalt Therapy is interested in the forms, in the "how" of the experience, of their formation processes, the way they are experienced and also the way we reflect on them every moment, or what we could call the process of formation of gestalts.

Another way to talk about this foundational concept is the sequence of contact, seen as a continuous process of immediate awareness and reflective consciousness. Therefore, contact is the process of forming fluid, changing experiences that consider their environment and relationships. There are times in which the possibilities diminish, causing a reduced perception of immediate possibilities and generating repetitive "patterns" of thinking or acting, related to problems not yet solved. Sometimes the person can feel sad, depressed, angry, or trapped in those unsatisfactory patterns, but without having a clear awareness of them. For example, a person, who had to confront his primary environments with distrust, can carry with her interactive patterns that affect her adult relationships.

Gestalt therapy provides the possibility of taking embodied consciousness of these areas which have not yet been considered, and therefore of generating the birth of new possibilities where before there were only impossibilities and dead ends. Chronic and hopeless suffering disappears to bring fullness and certainty to life.

This Gestalt process holds in its outlook the exploration and integration of the different spheres of the particular human experience, meaning, the body as the place of all human life including the social, family, friends, and work environment. Likewise, although focused on the present, the past experiences are welcomed considering them as support for the present moment. These stories appear not only in reflective memory but in an embodied form. That is why the contemporary gestalt enriches its repertoire of intervention including the living corporeality in each session.

Contemporary Gestalt Therapy

As a live therapeutic approach, Gestalt Therapy is nourished by its environment interacting with other related disciplines. Therefore, we can today speak of a contemporary Gestalt Therapy that has as back up several disciplines that have grown with it and with other older proposals but not less current. Contemporary Gestalt Therapy is now more than ever, phenomenological, hermeneutic, existential and relational, meaning, we understand the human being as given and always built in relation, located in a corporeality, above all by privileging the patient's experience, describing more than explaining, recognizing a living being in a world, not an isolated being. Therefore, gestalt therapy considers ​​the therapeutic relationship as fundamental, therapy as a space of co-creation, interaction, and dialogue.