Gestalt therapy Warsaw

GestaltGestalt (German for character, person, form) therapy comes from the humanistic-existential tradition, its founders being a German couple of psychologists - Fritz Pearls and Laura Pearls - and Paul Goodman, an American poet, novelist and psychotherapist. All three together, in the 1940s, gave birth to and the name of what we today call Gestalt psychotherapy. They developed their idea among the immigrant American society to which they themselves belonged. Since the 1970s, there has been a rise in the popularity of this therapeutic trend, and it has now been incorporated into the ranks of mainstream psychotherapies.

Gestalt psychotherapy assumes that a person is a dynamic subject who is constantly changing and constantly has the opportunity to grow. The therapeutic process itself is strongly based on insight, so the client, entering with the therapist into a so-called "existential dialogue," tries to better understand himself, so to speak, "looking" deeper and deeper into his psychological interior. On the other hand, Gestalt is also experiential in nature - it places a strong emphasis on the here and now, understanding one's own emotions as one experiences them, understanding the signals the body gives us.

A therapist working in this trend should not directly tell us what we should do, since therapy by definition should not be directive. Instead, the client's subjectivity and responsibility for the course of therapy, as well as for improving functioning outside the framework of the office, are emphasized. Central to this therapy is the meeting on an equal footing between client and therapist and the assumption that it is the client who knows better, i.e. his subjective view of the world is key. Thus, this therapy combines some aspects of psychoanalytic, existential, experimental, but also Zen Buddhist approaches.

The aim of therapy is to create, through the joint work of the therapist and the client, a space to fully experience oneself, tolerate strengths and weaknesses, ambivalent feelings - simply to accept oneself as one really is, therapy should also give resources to make the right decisions in life, closer to our authentic desires, also fostering the establishment of so-called real relationships with another person, based on authenticity and sincerity.