ABSTRACT
Like many of the theories discussed in this text, Gestalt therapy grew from a reaction to classical psychoanalysis that permeated the psychological community of the early twentieth century. A psychoanalyst, cast as an anonymous blank screen, focused on interpreting a client’s unconscious drives. Consciousness was a small and insigni- cant portion of a client’s psyche, whereas the unconscious was presumably the vast entity largely responsible for a client’s psychological functioning. Adherents to psychoanalytic theory believed that because a client could only rarely access one’s own unconscious a client needed an analyst to unlock the mysteries of the unconscious and, through interpretation and analysis of transference, free a client from intrapsychic turmoil.
