The Roots

The beginnings of the Gestalt Psychotherapy (Gestalt Therapy) placed themselves between the 40s and the 50s, when a group of researches – among whom two psychoanalysts F. Perls and his wife Laura, the writer Paul Goodman, the philosopher I. From, the pedagogue E. Shapiro, the physician P. Weiss – comparing themselves with the failures of the traditional psychotherapeutic approaches facing the “new” pathologies (particularly, narcissism and borderlines), re-read in a clinical key the knowledge about human condition (psychoanalysis and psychotherapies, Gestalt psychology, phenomenology and existentialism, field theory, holism, etc.) spread a psychotherapeutic model that, because of the multiplicity of influences where it was from, opened and keep on open theoretical and methodological perspectives about clinics and anthropology.

Nella prospettiva di Perls e Goodman, la terapia è uno spazio estetico, in cui viene dato corpo alla parola vuota del nevrotico, oppure si dà parola, contenimento espressivo al corpo ferito dello psicotico.

A. Sichera

Gestalt therapy is a model of cure and growth that integrates in a functional way three background principles about the human condition, the subjectivity (theory of self), the relational nature (theory of contact) and time (lived time in the relationship). The Gestalt Therapy making as its own the neglecting the pre-constituted diagnostic schemas, refers itself to the health as a creative adjustment by Organism to the Environment. It is not adjustment to the social standards or to the newer and newer and never completed research of conjugating – in ever and ever integral and full way – Organism and Environment, I and Thou, the unicity and the belongingness, the separating and meeting of each other.

The psychotherapist’s job is not to “find” what is wrong with the patient, then to be able to “say” him, or to learn things to teach him, but to teach to the patient how to learn himself.

F. Perls

The relational intentionality, crucial figure of Gestalt clinics – let the, non-eliminable even if unconscious, research of the other emerge from the intimate of every psychological sorrow (or pathology). The analysis and the experience of the relational stories that the person builds in one’s own life or in a therapeutic setting allow to learn (within and through the relationship) the ways how the pathways going from us to the other and from the other to us break off, on the verbal and physical level. The holistic attention to the relational intentionality, to the intercorporeity, to time and way of contact and the withdraw from contact make Gestalt Therapy a body therapeutic model, experiential and relational suitable to a single, to a family, to a group, to an organization.