The paper discusses the history of group psychotherapy, highlighting its transformations until the emergence of the gestaltic groups. The history of group psychotherapy reveals its socio-pedagogical evolution. The first proposals, emi- nently didactic, exhortative and repressive, were followed by the inclusion of psychoanalysis, allowing the expansion from the focus on the individual to an interpersonal perspective, which had emphasized the group as a "family". The text high- lights the advent of the proposals of Moreno, Adler, Burrow, Bierer, Lewin and Rogers, who have created a vast field of action between the humanistic psychotherapies, characterized as "pedagogies of life", focused on the available resources in groups. It is in this last context that we can include the gestalt therapy, although some limits on their group initiatives, at least in the practice of its founder, Frederick Perls, and some of his followers. Beyond his psychoanalytic training, Perls had incor- porated, from his own experience, a number of influences, ranging from expressionist theatre to zen buddhism, character analysis, psychodrama, until phenomenology and existentialism. Perls, who considered himself a mediocre psychoanalyst, have created a living approach, which integrates the list of the more recognized psychological references, particularly with regard to group practices.