Fritz Perls

Friedrich Salomon Perls, better known as Fritz Perls, was a German-born psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, born in Berlin in 1893 and died in 1970. He studied medicine, served in the German army in the First World War and became an assistant to Kurt Goldstein, who worked with brain-injured soldiers. He trained in psychoanalysis, and Wilhelm Reich became his supervising senior analyst in Berlin in 1930. Fleeing the Nazi regime, he went with his wife Laura Perls to the Netherlands and then to South Africa, and later settled in the United States. He coined the term Gestalt therapy for the form of psychotherapy that he developed with Laura in the 1940s and 1950s, which stresses awareness of sensation, perception, emotion and behavior in the present moment, and from 1964 he was associated with the Esalen Institute.