Erving Polster is a psychologist born on April 13, 1922, in Czechoslovakia who is a pioneer in Gestalt Therapy. He received his Ph.D. from Western Reserve University in 1950. He founded the Gestalt Training Center in San Diego and has written seven books on Gestalt psychology. His first wife was psychologist Miriam Polster, and they married in 1949 and moved to La Jolla in 1973. Miram died in 2001, and he married his second wife Rose Lee in 2006. Polster retired from private practice in 1998, but continued writing and consulting work in psychology. [1] [2] [3]
Carl Ransom Rogers was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of humanistic psychology and was known especially for his person-centered psychotherapy. Rogers is widely considered one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1956.
Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology and a theory of perception that emphasises the processing of entire patterns and configurations, and not merely individual components. It emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.
Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and philosopher. Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, editor of the two leading analytic journals of the era, managing director of Freud's publishing house, and a creative theorist and therapist. In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.
Friedrich Salomon Perls, better known as Fritz Perls, was a German-born psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. Perls coined the term "Gestalt therapy" to identify the form of psychotherapy that he developed with his wife, Laura Perls, in the 1940s and 1950s. Perls became associated with the Esalen Institute in 1964 and lived there until 1969.
Max Wertheimer was a psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. He is known for his book, Productive Thinking, and for conceiving the phi phenomenon as part of his work in Gestalt psychology.
Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy(GTP) is a method of psychotherapy based strictly on Gestalt psychology. Its origins go back to the 1920s when Gestalt psychology founder Max Wertheimer, Kurt Lewin and their colleagues and students started to apply the holistic and systems theoretical Gestalt psychology concepts in the field of psychopathology and clinical psychology. Through holism, "a person's thinking, feeling, actions, perceptions, attitudes and logical operations" are seen as one unity. Many developments in psychotherapy in the following decades drew from these early beginnings, like e.g. group psychoanalysis (S. Foulkes), Gestalt therapy (Laura Perls, Fritz Perls, Goodman, and others), or Katathym-imaginative Psychotherapy (Hanscarl Leuner).
Hans-Jürgen P. Walter is a German psychologist and psychotherapist known as one of the main founders of Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy. Walter studied psychology with the German Gestalt psychologists Edwin Rausch and Friedrich Hoeth, eminent representatives of the second and third generation of Gestalt theory in Germany. Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy GTP spread as a psychotherapeutic method in the German-speaking countries, being officially accredited as an independent scientific psychotherapy method in Austria.
Gestalt therapy is a form of psychotherapy that emphasizes personal responsibility and focuses on the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist–client relationship, the environmental and social contexts of a person's life, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of their overall situation. It was developed by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls and Paul Goodman in the 1940s and 1950s, and was first described in the 1951 book Gestalt Therapy.
Clinical psychology is an integration of human science, behavioral science, theory, and clinical knowledge for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically-based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and personal development. Central to its practice are psychological assessment, clinical formulation, and psychotherapy, although clinical psychologists also engage in research, teaching, consultation, forensic testimony, and program development and administration. In many countries, clinical psychology is a regulated mental health profession.
In psychology, introjection is the unconscious adoption of the thoughts or personality traits of others. It occurs as a normal part of development, such as a child taking on parental values and attitudes. It can also be a defense mechanism in situations that arouse anxiety. It has been associated with both normal and pathological development.
Laura Perls was a noted German-born psychologist and psychotherapist who helped establish the Gestalt school of psychotherapy. She was the wife of Friedrich (Fritz) Perls, also a renowned psychotherapist and psychiatrist.
James Solomon Simkin (1919–1984) was an early seminal figure in the history of Gestalt Therapy.
Randy Misael Sebastian Dellosa, known as Doc Randy is a Filipino psychologist and who has training in psychiatry.
Abraham S. Luchins was an American Gestalt Psychologist and a pioneer of group psychotherapy. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and died in New York.
Mary Henle was an American psychologist who's known most notably for her contributions to Gestalt Psychology and for her involvement in the American Psychological Association. Henle also taught at the New School of Social Research in New York; she was involved in the writing of eight book publications and also helped develop the first psychology laboratory manual in 1948 based on the famous works of Kurt Lewin.
Gerhard Stemberger is a sociologist and Gestalt psychologist in Vienna, Austria, and one of the main representatives of Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy.
Giuseppe Galli was an Italian physician and psychologist. He was Full Professor of General Psychology at the University of Macerata from 1982 to 2009.
Joseph Chaim Zinker is a therapist who has contributed to the growth and development of Gestalt theory and also Gestalt methodology. He co-founded the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.
Miriam Polster was a clinical psychologist who was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, United States of America. Polster had an interest in music, which happened to be her undergraduate major and a subject she integrated into her work. Once reaching graduate school, she became an advocate for Gestalt therapy; a therapy aimed towards self-awareness. Polster was the co-founder of The Gestalt Training Centre. Polster was the co-author of two novels, and the sole author of Eve’s Daughters. Miriam Polster died due to cancer, in 2001.