Psychotherapy is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change behavior, increase happiness, and overcome problems. Psychotherapy aims to improve an individual's well-being and mental health, to resolve or mitigate troublesome behaviors, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills. Numerous types of psychotherapy have been designed either for individual adults, families, or children and adolescents. Certain types of psychotherapy are considered evidence-based for treating some diagnosed mental disorders; other types have been criticized as pseudoscience.
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.
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).
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.
Richard Price was co-founder of the Esalen Institute in 1962 and a veteran of the Beat Generation. He ran Esalen in Big Sur for many years, sometimes virtually single-handed. He developed a practice of hiking the Santa Lucia Mountains and developed a new form of personal integration and growth that he called Gestalt Practice, partly based upon Gestalt therapy and Buddhist practice.
Salvador Minuchin was a family therapist born and raised in San Salvador, Entre Ríos, Argentina. He developed structural family therapy, which addresses problems within a family by charting the relationships between family members, or between subsets of family. These charts represent power dynamics as well as the boundaries between different subsystems. The therapist tries to disrupt dysfunctional relationships within the family, and cause them to settle back into a healthier pattern.
Ruth Charlotte Cohn was a psychotherapist, educator, and poet. She is best known as the creator of a method for learning in groups called theme-centered interaction (TCI). She was the founder of the Workshop Institute for Living Learning (WILL), which is known today as the Ruth Cohn Institute for TCI.
James Solomon Simkin (1919–1984) was an early seminal figure in the history of Gestalt Therapy.
Feminist therapy is a set of related therapies arising from what proponents see as a disparity between the origin of most psychological theories and the majority of people seeking counseling being female. It focuses on societal, cultural, and political causes and solutions to issues faced in the counseling process. It openly encourages the client to participate in the world in a more social and political way.
Randy Misael Sebastian Dellosa, known as Doc Randy is a Filipino psychologist and who has training in psychiatry.
Jesper Juul was a Danish family therapist and author of several books on parenting to a general audience. In his book Your Competent Child he argues that today's families are at an exciting crossroads because the destructive values — obedience, physical and emotional violence, and conformity — that governed traditional hierarchical families are being transformed. The book has been translated into 13 languages and has popularized current ideas of non-authoritarian parenting.
Leslie Samuel Greenberg is a Canadian psychologist born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is one of the originators and primary developers of Emotion-Focused Therapy for individuals and couples. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at York University in Toronto, and also director of the Emotion-Focused Therapy Clinic in Toronto. His research has addressed questions regarding empathy, psychotherapy process, the therapeutic alliance, and emotion in human functioning.
Carl Alanson Whitaker (1912–1995) was an American physician and psychotherapy pioneer family therapist.
Ross V. Speck, MD (1927-2015), was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and family therapist. He had a strong interest in sociology and anthropology and did research in family therapy of schizophrenia, drugs, depression, and adolescents. He was one of the "first generation" of family therapists and a founder of the Family Institute of Philadelphia. In addition, he was the originator of NetWork Therapy.
Gestalt Practice is a contemporary form of personal exploration and integration developed by Dick Price at the Esalen Institute. The objective of the practice is to become more fully aware of the process of living within a unified field of body, mind, relationship, earth and spirit.
Paul Rebillot was a member of the human potential movement. He is the author of The Call to Adventure: Bringing the Hero’s Journey to Daily Life.
Family therapy is a branch of psychotherapy focused on families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of interaction between family members.
Violet Solomon Oaklander was a child and adolescent therapist known for her method of integrating Gestalt Therapy theory and practice with play therapy.
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.
