Eric Berne and Fritz Perls, 25 years later.

Abstract

This article presents a synthesis of Eric Berne and Fritz Perls’s life, the creators of Transactional Analysis and Gestalt Therapy, and their most important contributions to Psychology and Psychotherapy. Some of these Transactional Analysis’s contributions are the possibility to offer a systematic model of theory of personality, with simple and practical concepts - like the ego states or the life’s script - and the wish of intrapsychic and interpersonal integration in a therapeutic theory and methodology. Some Fritz Perls’s important contributions are his holistic, constructivist and systemic conception of reality, his vision of human being as a psychophysic organism interdependent environment, the creation of a processual therapy that works with the patient’s mode to contact with the environment (in the therapeutic session) in order to obtain the satisfaction of his necessities, and a psychotherapeutic methodology that encourages the patient to take on the responsibility of his own life.