Foundations

Gestalt Psychology impinges on psychoanalysis, expressionism (Friedlander), general semantics (Korzybski), transcendentalism (Emerson), psychodrama (Moreno), as well as Judaism, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism.

Claudio Naranjo said in his "GESTALT THERAPY TECHNIQUES",

"Gestalt Therapy's building impresses us more than the old bricks that were utilized."

Is the Gestalt therapy Naranjo talks about the same as Gestalt Psychology created by Wertheimer, Kohler, and Koffka?

No! Carrying out a Gestalt basic, the whole is different from the sum of its parts. Gestalt Therapy does not arise, then, as a logical sequence following the Gestalt psychologists' studies.

In 1927 Bliuma Zeigarnik came to the conclusion that an incomplete task demands twice as much energy and memorization as a concluded one...

In those years another German Gestalt psychologist, Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965), denied there was a dichotomy between the biological and psychical things and between the normal and the pathological ones...

This was known as "Global Theory".

Finally, also in that time (in 1922), Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), creator of group dynamics, formulated a solid and coherent theory about the relation between the individual and the environment...

This was called General Theory of the Psychic Field.