Friedrich Salomon Perls, a complex, ambiguous and controversial personality, is considered the main founder of Gestalt Therapy.

The thing is, as we say in gestalt:

"The whole is very different from the sum of its parts!"

In 1930 Karen Horney suggested that Perls analyse himself with Wilhelm Reich.

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) - who started as Freud's disciple - published The Function of Orgasm, where he attributes to orgasm a normalising faculty that relaxes and harmonises the energy in four times (tension, charge, discharge and repose). This, he says, marks the general law of life pulsation. After 1930 he broke with Freud and insisted more and more on the value of the present over the past's "archaeology.

Reich did active analysis: he touched his patients, included the corporal thing, worked with tensions and muscular armours. Besides he related the aggressiveness, sexuality and politics in a direct way. He went beyond verbal speech; the how of phenomena mattered more to him than the why. Reich deeply inspired Perls to create Gestalt Therapy.

In 1936 Perls became sceptical, mistrusted the scientific, political philosophical and religious dogmas more, then denounced them...

No more spiritual fathers! I am responsible for my own existence!

He in 1940 finished his first book, Ego Hunger and Aggression. Here he rejects the Preponderance of the Subconscious, questions the priority of infant sexuality and the libido and says there is no use for the transference as the basis of treatment.

Several ideas emerged that would later culminate in Gestalt Therapy.

DIRECT and GENUINE contact of the therapist with the patient.
Importance of the PRESENT.
Attention to incomplete emotions.
HOLISTIC approach of the organism and its medium.
Importance of the BODY and the SENSATIONS.

Holism (based on ideas of Darwin, Bergson and Einstein) sustains that the organism is a mutual help society that, in turn, takes part in the medium, it is a whole that in its present, holds its past and much of its future. The concept comes from Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950), who was Prime Minister of South Africa and founder of the United Nations. Perls admired Smuts.