On The Personality Theory Of Perls

As a representative of humanism, Perls' theory was the rage in 1960s and 1970s while Perls himself was even be called "guru". The gestalt therapy created by him, together with Rogers' and Rollo May's psychotherapies are ranked to be the three most important psychotherapies of humanism. On the basis of generalizing the personality theory of Perls, the thesis gives discussion and evaluation on its contributions and limitations. Furthermore, connecting with our national reality, the thesis points out some elicitations it offers.Generally speaking, the personality theory of Perls is on the standpoint of phenomenology. It concerns human life, his contact with the environment and his existence and experience. Perls was mainly affected by existentialism, phenomenology, gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, holism and eastern theories. The basic premises of his theory include: the organism is a whole; individual interacts and connect with its environment; individual seeks for a kind of homeostasis; the principle of gestalt psychology. Surrounding with above premises, several key terms appear, such as unfinished situation, self-regulation, contact, boundary, awareness et al. Moreover, Perls put forward his opinion on individual development and growth. In his view, the process of individual development is to remove external interruption, growing from original external-supported and external-regulated to self-supported and self-regulated. Besides, he pointed out that introjection, projection, confluence and retroflection were four basic neurotic mechanisms. He also suggested the five layers of neurosis that could block individual growth, which were phony layer, phobic layer, impasse layer, implosive layer and explosive layer. From his point of view, to be mentally healthy, a person must pass the above five layers, as peeling the onion, and at last to be a whole organism with the high capability of awareness, self-regulation and self-responsibility, living on the here and now.The contributions of Perls' personality theory include: it promoted the development of modern personality theory; it accelerated the development of existential psychology in America; it originated the gestalt therapy. Meanwhile, some limitations exist hi his theory, such as: obscure body-mind standpoint; intenseindividualism and moral relativism; fierce deintellectualization tendency; a theoretic system with much holes; lacking in positive research. Besides, Perls' theory gives useful elicitations to some social and educational issues in our country: Perls advocated to know our advantages and disadvantages and to express our desire, which can help Chinese people to release their psychological pressure; he advocated to understand and develop true self which can give us some enlightenment to realize individual value; his view that individual develops latent abilities and creativity during the interaction with his environment gives us some elicitations in how to cultivate students' creativity; our family education can learn much from his ideas about self-responsibility, self-support and frustration.