About the book

The handbook Šolar na poti do sebe by the doctor and psychotherapist from Nova Gorica Viljem Ščuka is a result of the author's many years' work in helping adolescents solve their problems when they are dealing with themselves, their needs, wishes and wants on the one hand and limitations and conditions on the other. The book is based on the author's theoretical and practical knowledge of the Gestalt theory and professional meetings with adolescents and their parents in Slovenia and abroad. As he enumerates the basic Gestalt principles, he presents the relationships between pupils, parents, peers and teachers as a wholesome occurrence in which mutual influencing and experiencing are of great importance. With the help of the Gestalt approach we can better understand what is happening with adolescents and how they experience things in their intensive and turbulent period of growing up which is so very crucial in personality development. From the introduction: In their maturing years, pupils are truly interested in their own lives and persistently look for a way to themselves while we keep telling them to look for the way to knowledge ... We do not realize that knowledge alone is not enough for a person to be successful in life and at work. In this period, personal attitude becomes important as well. They will have to market their personality in the future too, not just their profession. Parents, teachers and others should encourage pupils to develop their own personality and life style that will go well with their personal characteristics as well as with demands of the social surroundings. From a review: Viljem Ščuka, a doctor, specialist in school medicine and psychotherapist has been building his wholesome view of the personal and social development of adolescents in the school environment and outside it in his 35-year-long active work with young patients in the regions of Vipava, Goriško and the Slovenian part of Trieste. When he first came across the Gestalt approach as a psychotherapist, he began professionally focusing on this method. He's offering a large part of his wholesome view of the child in search of a way to knowledge and their own self in this valuable book. It is valuable because it takes us through the minds of the earliest (ancient) thinkers and later holistic philosophers to Gestalt, and warns and reminds us that the wholesomeness of a person in the biological, intellectual and spiritual sense is marked and formed already in the childhood years and realized in adolescence. Gorazd V. Mrevlje