When was the term formulated?
The concept was introduced by the Austrian philosopher and psychologist Christian von Ehrenfels (1890) in his article “On the Quality of Form. The topic of the Gestalt as an integral image was further developed by the Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Keller, who studied the peculiarities of human perception.
In 1951 Fritz Perls’s Gestalt Therapy, written in collaboration with Paul Goodman and Ralph Hefferlin, was published. This year is considered the birth year of the Gestalt approach, and Fritz Perls himself is its founder.
In fact, the scientist and his associates borrowed the term from Gestalt psychology, which angered representatives of the latter. Nevertheless, the concept caught on, gained popularity and became the official name of a separate branch of psychology – Gestalt therapy.
When was the science discovered?
In 1942 Fritz Perls, who was originally a psychoanalyst, published his first book “Ego, Hunger and Aggression” and already in it he began to describe what, nine years later, evolved into full-fledged Gestalt therapy: the importance of body manifestations, work with the present moment – the “here and now”, the value-based approach, the development of client responsibility, the value of feeling, direct contact, and so forth.
In 1951 the work “Gestalt Therapy” was published, already more fully describing the new approach to psychotherapy. And in 1952 Perls and his associates founded the Gestalt Therapy Institute.
Since then the approach has been successfully developing and constantly gaining popularity.
What do neurophysiologists think of the method?
The main objectives of Gestalt therapy are the development of the client’s awareness and stimulation of his creative adaptation to the environment, the acquisition of new experiences. Increased awareness and new experiences inevitably activate the brain, increasing the number of neural connections. Therefore, Gestalt therapy is an important adjunct and aid in the tasks facing neurophysiologists.
