About the author Sheldon Litt, an American psychologist, received his Ph.D. at the New School for Social Research in New York, and has had clinical training with Fritz Perls and others at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. He has held many academic honours, including a National Science Fellowship and a National Teaching Fellowship. He was Asst. Professor in the USA before being invited to teach at the universities of Uppsala and Stockholm, Sweden. For the past 25 years he has trained professionals in modern methods of psychotherapy, teaching at many universities and clinics in northern Europe.
Today there are probably more than four hundred different schools of psychotherapy.
Perls was originally trained as a Freudian analyst in Germany but became disillusioned with the abstractions and rigidities of psychoanalytic practice. In a gestalt session, the focus is always on the immediate present, the existential Here and Now . Last winter I was in Spain. Thus, the individual is split and a great deal of energy is wasted by being somewhere else, past or future, rather than being focused on what is happening right now. So if our energy is split up in this way, there's not much left to work on present concerns and problems.