Gestalt Therapy
Psychological Counseling and Creative Therapy
On Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt Therapy represents an internationally recognised approach within Humanistic Psychotherapy.
Gestalt Therapy explores the diversity of human beings and their uniqueness within the context of their relationships and social environment. Gestalt Therapy supports personal change and development.
New Perspectives
Sometimes in life, our ability to deal with certain situations can be impaired, causing us to stagnate in certain patterns or programs of behaviour. In Gestalt Therapy, we reflect or mirror the client’s current life situation in order to understand the whole spectrum of related life experiences that the client has had, paying attention to the social dimension of these experiences. This process aims to understand what has come to a standstill in the client’s life, and to bring it into motion once again.
Psychological Counseling
Therapeutic support is thus oriented to enhance the client’s ability to react adequately and in a creative way towards life situations and the various challenges that the client will meet. Encounter and contact play a particular role in this context: within the mutual process of exchange between therapist and client, a change can be identified which enables creative adaptation on the part of the client. Therapeutic support is oriented towards the individual situation and needs of the client.
Creative Therapy
Gestalt Therapy belongs to the range of creative therapy: Gestalt Therapy is a creative approach that can make use of various media according to the particular therapeutic process that is being undertaken; these various media can facilitate engagement and understanding in different ways. I work with elements of conversational therapy, body therapy, art therapy, music therapy or writing and poetic therapy, among others.
The content of the sessions is bound to professional discretion. I offer therapy and counseling in German and English, and bilingually (German-English) in the context of couple, family or relationship counseling and therapy.
Further Reading, Links
Joseph Zinker: Creative Process in Gestalt Therapy, New York 1982.
Gary Yontef: Awareness, Dialogue, Process. Essays on Gestalt Therapy, New York 1993.
Gordon Wheeler/Stephanie Backman (ed.): On Intimate Ground. A Gestalt Approach to Working with Couples, San Francisco 1994.
Gestaltansatz des Hamburger Instituts für Gestaltorientierte Weiterbildung (HIGW): http://www.higw.de/higw/gestaltansatz/
Gestalt Therapy definition of the European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT): http://www.eagt.org/description_of_GT.htm
„The aim of Gestalt therapy is the awareness continuum, the freely ongoing Gestalt formation where what is of greatest concern and interest to the organism, the relationship, the group or society becomes Gestalt, comes into the foreground where it can be fully experienced and coped with (acknowledged, worked through, sorted out, changed, disposed of, etc.) so that then it can melt into the background (be forgotten or assimilated and integrated) and leave the foreground free for the next relevant Gestalt.“
Laura Perls
„The principles of gestalt therapy in particular apply to actual people meeting actual problems in actual environment. The gestalt therapist is a human being in awareness and interaction. For him there is no pure patient-ness. There is only the person in relationship to his social scene, seeking to grow by integrating all aspects of himself.“
Erving and Miriam Polster