Elsa Gindler: Lost Gestalt Ancestor
British Gestalt Journal 2001, Volume 10, No. 2

Elsa Gindler lived in Berlin from 1885 -1961. During that time she developed and taught a method of working with people which she called exactly that: "Arbeit am Menschen"....In Gindler's groundbreaking work, students were guided to be curious about their own functioning, and to experiment, both in class and throughout their daily lives, with new ways of moving, breathing, speaking and perceiving...Gindler was the first to use the word "experiment" in relation to people's working with their own awareness of body sensation in interaction with their environment....Central to our Gestalt heritage is the fact that Laura Perls was a student of Gindler in Berlin in the early 1930s.... The full text of this article appears in British Gestalt Journal 2001, Volume 10, No. 2


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