Fritz Perls: La Terapia Gestalt

by Martin Shepard, Luis Justo (Translator)

Posiblemente la guía más clara, concisa y experiencial de Terapia Gestalt; seguramente la mejor y más completa biografía sobre la apasionada vida de su fundador.

Genres: Biography

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having only read Perls' autobiography, this more objective look based primarily on interviews was useful in demystifying the (in)famous psychotherapist so identified with Esalen and the Human Potentil Movement of the sixties and early seventies.

Although Shepard and many others cited by him were impressed with Perls' talents as a therapist, the picture which emerges of Fritz Perls is not a very attractive one to me. He was, apparently, capable of great perception and certainly shook a lot of people up, but as a father, a husband, a community member and a friend he was deficient. He certainly wasn't a "good" doctor in any Hippocratic sense. Although its refreshing nowadays to read about a psychiatrist who unashamedly slept with patients, male and female, singly and in groups, his compulsion to do so was quite possibly pathological and the circumstances of some of these relationships were hardly therapeutic.

The essence of Gestalt Therapy was a kind of be-here-now preferential option for primary process. While offering useful insights to the mechanisms of projection and some sometimes helpful affirmation to normally suppressed/repressed elements of the personality, there really isn't much to Perls' psychology except his method, itself very much an expression of his extraordinary personality.

[Jealousy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually learned about Fritz more than the books I've read at school, and the technique makes more sense now.