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Perls' approach to therapy has been strongly criticised by Jeffrey Masson.[11] Masson allows Perls' words to speak for themselves, quoting from his autobiography, In and Out the Garbage Pail, to show that Perls was sexist and abusive. For example:

"I got her down again and said, gasping: 'I've beaten up more than one bitch in my life.' Then she got up, threw her arms around me: 'Fritz, I love you.' Apparently she finally got what, all her life, she was asking for, and there are thousands of women like her in the States. Provoking and tantalizing, bitching, irritating their husbands and never getting their spanking. You don't have to be a Parisian prostitute to need that so as to respect your man."

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On one hand it is difficult to assess Gestalt Therapy apart from Perls as the driving force behind it, while it seems unfair to draw conclusions about the therapy based on the personal eccentricities of its founder. That he had a potent influence on those whom trained with him is fairly clear. The criticism most commonly leveled at Gestalt Therapy is its confrontational approach. Perls' style of therapy centered on provoking and confronting, and his trainees also used provoking and confronting -- often to an undesirable degree. Abe Levitsky, a San Francisco Gestaltist and former student of Fritz's, well summarized the problem: "Scorn was a weapon [Fritz] used, and unfortunately I feel that scorn has been incorporated by many Gestalt therapists and been perpetuated. But that has nothing to do with Gestalt Therapy. It simply had to do with Fritz's irascibility, where his style is imitated instead of his message."[3] I listened to several of Perl’s audiotapes, and I must say, none of them made any sense. They were the incoherent ramblings of a man too “loose.” He made the confusion between acting out like an ape or any other thing he could imagine, and freedom.

To what degree Perls' irascible, scornful style was passed on to second-generation therapists (Perls died in 1970) is difficult to know. We can, however, evaluate the degree to which his core ideas and techniques have been preserved and elaborated by perusing The Gestalt Journal in the 1980s and by examining the journal's Fall 1993 special issue commemorating the centennial of Fritz Perls' birth.

Perls' message was, in many ways, short and to the point. "Do your own thing," "Be here now," and "Lose your mind and come to your senses," are standard Gestalt commandments. Indeed, Fritz even wrote what he called the Gestalt Prayer, which he frequently used to begin his group therapy sessions: And by the way, after a patient finished with her time in the hot seat, he or she kissed Perls on the forehead; a mark of respect, it was believed.

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If the sociocultural setting of the World War II era helps to explain Perls' passion for certain concepts, his personal life setting helps explain his anathema for others -- in particular, the "concepts" of past history, personal vulnerability, and neediness. Perls not only intellectually disavowed the validity of past causes, he would tolerate no mention of this subject from anyone. In his more rational moments on the subject, he contended that a person's past history could only elaborate upon what you could observe here and now in the present. In his less rational moments he would simply react to mention of past causes with anything from irritation to rage.

In fact, the issues of past causes and personal vulnerability represented Perls' unadmitted "Achilles heel." It is relevant at this point to mention some aspects of Perls' own primary relationships. By his own admission, his home life was unhappy. His parents hated each other.[31] His father regularly assaulted his mother. The father apparently had hatred to spare for young Frederick, whom he called "a piece of shit."[32] As a teenager, Fritz found more hatred at school, where the teachers were "unloving" and "cruel."[33] In this environment the youngster apparently developed what Jeffrey Masson describes as "an almost unfathomable lack of warm feeling for...his own family." Masson quotes Perls' single mention in his autobiography of his elder sister. "She was a clinger...She also had severe eye trouble... When I heard of her death in a concentration camp I did not mourn much."[34]

Perls -- who had hardened himself against his own childhood suffering -- was notorious for his intolerance of sensitive or needy men. Many an unsuspecting man got "zapped" in Perls' groups for the mere indiscretion of beginning a sentence with "I want" or "I need." His biographer, psychiatrist Martin Shepard, writes:

Fritz's harshness was invariably in direct proportion to his own neediness, and he was particularly needy at this time [the early 1960s, during his first stint at Esalen]. His attitude and bearing discouraged those who would place him in the role of a nurturing parent or a reassurer. He treated such requests...scornfully or with a logical argument; "What do you need me for?" he might ask. "What do you need your parents for? You've got eyes and ears and energy. What do you want to do?[35]

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I took a seminar with Perls (and with Rogers, as well), and I was struck by the theories that psychologists construct that seem to evolve straight out of their personalities. As students, we mimicked Perls running the group, chain smoking, and saying, "Be an ashtray." "Be a couch." It was all whim and caprice. But it had to do with liberating feelings to some extent, which was something new in his epoch. Of course, after a group session where a woman was in the hot-seat, as I mentioned, there was the obligatory kiss on Perls' forehead or cheek. The master received his homage. It was more a show than therapy; an interesting show, because he was a showman, but serious scientific therapy was out of the question.

In its own way, Gestalt Therapy as practiced by Fritz Perls and those who carried on his work employs a form of hypnosis on its patients. The therapist is the central figure, the command center. The patient takes his cues about reality from this external figure rather than from the truths of his own experience contained in his own mind. He submits in the same childlike fashion of the hypnotic subject to the suggestions and authority of the therapist so that the subsequent experience is largely determined and defined for him. His reality is circumscribed by the larger presence of the therapist (in a sense by the larger, more powerful need of the therapist). If Perls' verbatim accounts are anything to go by, the Gestalt therapist tells you what to feel and what to do; when to do it and how to do it -- right down to selecting the words and images in which the patient is to express himself. How is this different from the hypnotist who tells you that you are sleepy when you are not, or the cult leader who manipulates his followers' need to be taken care of to suit his own need for control and power? In the case of Perls' therapy, the control and power are deceptively hidden behind a professed disinterest in either.

Hypnosis functions through its ability to make use of the split in consciousness which is the essence of neurosis. Gestalt Therapy does the same thing though not in precisely the same way. Perls acknowledges conflicts, polarities, divisions within the self, yet he conducts his therapy through games which he instigates and which not only illustrate the split but enhance it as well. It is part of the hypnotic process to convince the subject that something is happening which is not happening.

The goal of therapy in Gestalt is to develop people's awareness about what's really happening to them, what they really want, what they're really striving for, wherever the organism is looking, wherever its attention is drawn. The goal of therapy is to make this possible by somehow by...giving them back possession of themselves, possession over their own motives, finding out what is unconscious to them, what they're doing unbeknownst to themselves...take people who are conditioned and automatic and put them in some kind of aegis over themselves.[63]

In Gestalt Therapy, the patient is kept unconscious by being made aware; a disconnection that is sustained by his being given the illusion that he has become more conscious; that he is "in touch with thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they occur from moment to moment"; that he has lost his mind and come to his senses; that his "present, here-and-now experience constitutes the only reality." Just as in hypnosis, consciousness is restricted to provide a distraction against Pain and a barrier against the presence of the past. Consciousness is narrowed down to the present offshoots of repressed Pain in the form of projections in the here-and-now. The chief difference between hypnosis and Gestalt therapy is that hypnosis excludes awareness to avoid the unification of consciousness, whereas Gestalt excludes the unconscious to achieve the same end.

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Perls called for total experience. Yet paradoxically, he did so while fencing off the past as forbidden territory, denouncing repression as invalid and memory as distorted. He wished to reject mental ruminations and awaken the person to life through feeling, yet he concentrated on awareness and understanding. He insisted on people living as they truly were, yet he constructed a therapy whose main features involved enacted feelings and role playing --roles which he scripted. He disavowed the unconscious while proclaiming that dreams, which arise in an unconscious state, are compilations of all that we are. Transference was denied, yet by his therapeutic staging and self-presentation as seer, Perls inevitably made himself into a symbolic figure and therefore, a focus of transferred feelings. To dismiss the phenomenon of transference was to suppress aspects of the total therapeutic experience, as was his sweeping claim that trauma was a fallacy.