Gestalt and experiential approaches: Perls and beyond
Last reviewed September 2026 by Dr. Andrew Wichterman · Aligned to the current NCE blueprint. Valid for exams through June 30, 2027.
AI-narrated overview made with Google NotebookLM. The written lesson below is by Dr. Andrew Wichterman.
Gestalt therapy is present-centered and technique-rich, which makes it a favorite for exam items that describe a procedure and ask for the approach.
Try to answer each from memory first, even if you have to guess. Guessing before reading makes the answer stick; reveal only after you have tried.
Perls and the Gestalt view
Fritz Perls, with Laura Perls and Paul Goodman, built Gestalt therapy on awareness in the here and now. People are whole organisms in a field; a healthy person forms clear figures against a background, completes them, and moves on. Unfinished business, unexpressed feelings from the past, intrudes on the present until it is completed. The aim is awareness and contact, not insight or interpretation. Perls's layers of neurosis run phony, phobic, impasse, implosive and explosive; working through them leads to authentic contact.
Contact boundary disturbances
Gestalt names five ways people interrupt contact. Introjection: swallowing others' beliefs whole. Projection: attributing one's own disowned qualities to others. Retroflection: doing to oneself what one wants to do to others, or wants from others. Deflection: avoiding contact through vagueness, humor or changing the subject. Confluence: blurring the boundary between self and other, avoiding conflict by agreeing. The exam asks you to name the disturbance from a description.
Techniques
The empty chair: the client speaks to an imagined person or part of self, then may switch chairs and answer, integrating polarities such as top dog and underdog. Exaggeration: amplifying a gesture or phrase to bring its meaning into awareness. Reversal: acting the opposite of one's usual style. Staying with the feeling. Making the rounds in a group. Rehearsal. Dream work: every element of the dream is a projected part of the dreamer, to be spoken as. Language experiments: I rather than it or you, won't rather than can't, and rather than but, and turning questions into statements. Perls called techniques experiments and warned against using them as gimmicks.
Related experiential approaches
Psychodrama, from J. L. Moreno, uses action methods: a protagonist enacts a scene with auxiliary egos and a director before an audience on a stage; techniques include doubling, role reversal, mirroring and soliloquy. Emotion-focused therapy, from Greenberg and Johnson, combines Gestalt and person-centered work with attachment theory to access and transform emotion; it is well supported for couples. Focusing, from Gendlin, attends to the felt sense in the body. Body-oriented and expressive arts approaches share the experiential emphasis on doing rather than talking about.
Limits and fit
Gestalt's confrontational, high-intensity style, especially in Perls's own practice, can be inappropriate for fragile clients and for cultures that value emotional restraint or deference. Contemporary relational Gestalt is gentler and dialogic. On the exam, Gestalt is the answer when the technique is enacted in the present and involves speaking to or as something; it is not the answer for items about cognition, reinforcement or insight into the past.
Without scrolling up, write everything you remember from this lesson. Then check yourself against the key terms. Recalling the whole lesson once, right after reading it, does more than reading it twice.
Ten questions from this domain, with an explanation after each answer.
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