One of the forms of the psychotherapy is called gestalt therapy. This is an existential therapy, which also bases itself on the importance that the current experience of a patient has in his life. Besides using the personal responsibility as a start point for the patient’s treatment, it also focuses on the relationship established between the therapist and the patient, the social details of the patient’s life, as well as the environmental ones.
The gestalt therapy is built upon four pillars, considered to be indispensible for its functioning. The method based on dialogue, the phenomenological one, the field-theoretical approaches and the experimental freedom are the ones that gestalt therapy was built on. Works like Perls’s “Ego, Hunger and Aggression” in 1947 describe gestalt therapy in accordance with the four principles mentioned above. However, the early practice of gestalt therapy was also based on experiments or “safe emergencies” how they were called back then and involved much of the personal experience of the patient and this fact was backed up by almost half of the books of Perls, Goodman and Hefferline. Later on, some other people influenced the evolution of gestalt therapy, such as Miriam Polster and Erving, who brought to attention the liaison between the self of the patient and the others, which was the foreplay of dialogical therapeutic technique.
Over decades, the various aspects and methods of the gestalt therapy were perpetually studied and developed by people in this field. Starting with the ‘90s, the literature focus on this kind of therapy practically exploded and several professional journals about gestalt therapy appeared, so its development was an ongoing and intense one. Today, this therapy is applied and given a lot of attention in the coaching and organizational work. Some practitioners managed to combine gestalt therapy methods with meditation practices into a human development program known as Gestalt Practice.
The phenomenological method of the gestalt therapy means exploration, whose goal is to gain awareness. It comprises three different approaches, of which the first is the epoché which targets the elimination of the patient’s assumptions and expectations, by ignoring the initial prejudices and biases. The next rule is that of description, which replaces the explanations with descriptions. The third one is that of horizontalization, which assigns the same value to every item of description.
The dialogical relationship is achieved and preserved the best by the therapist when he or she enters “the game” of dialogue and, rather than attempting to control the discussions, he or she participates in the same manner.
The fields to which the field-theoretical strategies of the gestalt theory are referring, have two sets of different dimensions. One is the phenomenological set of dimensions, which is comprised of all the details of the physical environment in which one lives, as opposed to the ontological one.
Gestalt therapy is without any doubt an experiential approach, because it is more oriented towards actions, rather than talks as a means of therapy. By experimenting, a therapist can be directly aware of the patient’s reactions and experience to something new, rather than just discussion about this new something.