Gestalt Therapy Around the World

Eleanor O'Leary

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780470699379, 9780470699362
• eBook ISBN: 9781118323502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

The first internationally focused book on gestalt therapy to provide a comprehensive overview of current practice around the world.

• Features coverage of the history, training, theoretical contributions, and research initiatives relating to gestalt therapy in seventeen countries
• Points to future directions and challenges
• Includes extensive information on worldwide gestalt associations, institutes, and professional societies that promote the development of the approach

Part One

Gestalt Therapy

Its Beginning, Theory, and Techniques

1

Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy

The Beginnings

Eleanor O’Leary

Fritz Perls, the originator of gestalt therapy, was born in Berlin in 1893. He lived in Germany, Holland, South Africa, the USA, and Canada. Psychoanalysis was his main therapeutic interest during his period in Europe. However, this was to change as his gradual disenchantment with the approach emerged. In New York in 1951 and 1952, together with Paul Goodman, Ralph Hefferline, and his wife Laura, he finally synthesized his earlier influences into a new paradigm, namely gestalt ­therapy. He eventually left the USA to found a gestalt community in Canada. He died shortly afterwards while presenting a workshop in Chicago in 1970.

Europe: Germany 1893–1933; Family Influences

Little is known of the family facts relating to Fritz Perls, a German Jew by birth. When he was three years of age, his family decided to move to a more fashionable neighborhood in Berlin. He referred to himself as “an obscure lower middle class Jewish boy” (Shepard, 1976, p. 1).

His mother (Amelia Rund) grew up in an Orthodox Jewish environment, while his father (Nathan Perls) was Grand Master in the Freemason Lodge. His father was quite reclusive in his habits. He had a room to which his meals were brought, and when he went out he did so alone. As a child, Fritz witnessed his father ­physically abusing his mother. Despite his parents’ strong religious beliefs, Perls (1972) declared, “I could not go along with this hypocrisy” (p. 59). Referring to his lack of belief in a higher power, Shepard (1976) stated, “He declared himself an atheist and remained one until the end” (p. 21). In his book In and Out of the Garbage Pail, Perls (1969a) proclaimed, “All religions were man-made crudities, all ­philosophies were man-made fitting games. I had to take responsibility for myself” (p. 60).

Perls was the youngest of three children, two girls and one boy. His feelings for his two sisters could not have been more different, in that he loved Grete while he described Else, who later died in a concentration camp, as a clinger. Yet this ­observation of Else may not have been justified. Grete stated in Gaines (1979), “our sister, Else, would hang onto mother. She could not go by herself. No one knew until much later that she had congenital neo-blindness” (p. 2).

Although he hated his father’s behavior, Perls considered his childhood to be a happy one. Grete and he were close companions as they played in the streets of Berlin. Swimming in the summer and ice-skating in the winter kept their young hearts joyful. The beginning of his interest in acting was encouraged in ­adolescence when an older neighbor, Theo Freiberg, invited him to participate in plays in their respective homes. They became a “company” (Shepard, 1976) that offered plays to neighboring communities with Theo as Director. This love of theater was ­further enriched when his mother took him to opera performances, while his mother’s brother, Julius, brought warmth into his life.

A contradictory aspect in Perls’ young life was the behavior of his uncle, Herman Staub, his mother’s other brother, who Perls claimed was Germany’s greatest legal theoretician. This uncle, the pride of the family, sexually abused Perls’ friend, 13-year-old Lucy. Perls’ (1972) words “All that facade of respectability” (p. 202) point to his disillusionment. Yet, despite his disapproval, he ­subsequently rationalized his own promiscuity by claiming that his uncle’s behavior gave him a license for his own. Perls (1972) also recalled in his autobiography that a sentence from a lecture given by psychoanalyst Paul Federn made an impression on him, the sentence being “You cannot fuck enough” (p. 56). Yet it is worth recalling that personal responsibility for one’s actions is one of the key concepts of gestalt therapy.

For someone who became famous in his adult life, his early reputation as a young scholar was poor, having failed seventh grade three times. This failure was in no small part due to his revolt against his anti-Semitic teachers. However, at age fourteen, circumstances altered his outlook when a teacher encouraged him to become involved in drama. Having already pursued drama as a child, there was a fortunate element of synchronicity in such encouragement. His participation in drama taught him the importance of the relationship between words and action.

After graduating from secondary school, Fritz began medical studies in Berlin. Due to an elongated heart, a stoop, and asthma, he was deemed to be medically unfit to serve in the German Army. However, after battles such as Verdun in 1916, where the Germans suffered 460 000 casualties, fitness standards were lowered, permitting Fritz to enlist. He served as a medical officer and experienced the ­horrors of trench warfare on the Western Front, including gassing. He suffered a minor head injury and also had to make hard decisions on the treatment of injured soldiers. He was promoted to sub-lieutenant in 1917. At the end of the war, he resumed his medical studies at the Frederick Wilhelm University in Berlin and qualified as a doctor in 1921. This was followed by training in psychoanalysis at the Psychoanalytic Institutes in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Vienna. By the mid 1920s he had stopped communicating with his father.

One of the most significant events in Perls’ life was his meeting in 1926 with Lore (Anglicized Laura) Posner, who later became his wife. He was successful in obtaining an assistantship with the gestalt physiological psychologist, Kurt Goldstein, at the Institute for Brain Damaged Soldiers where Laura was working. She had studied with the gestalt psychologists Kohler and Koffka at the University of Frankfurt, and with existential theologians Paul Tillich and Martin Buber.

Perls’ (1972) description of his marriage in 1930 is surprising given his ­emphasis on self-responsibility. He commented, “At that time Lore pressed for marriage. I knew I was not the marrying type. I was not madly in love with her, but we had many interests in common and often had a good time” (p. 49). Furthermore, Laura (Gaines, 1979), referring to the description by Perls, stated, “It simply was not true. I never expected that he would marry me, or that he would marry at all. And I did not care. For more than three years before we were married I was his lover, and still I certainly did not press” (p. 8). A statement by Laura (Gaines, 1979) is particularly poignant: “I was so much in love with him, I gave everything to him, and he took it and kept on taking” (p. 20). For Perls, self-responsibility did not include fulfilling his own personal obligations.

Laura and Fritz had two children: a girl, Renate (born 1931), and a boy, Stephen (born 1935). Two years after Renate’s birth, Fritz began speaking English (he was already fluent in French), although he was embarrassed by his German accent when speaking it. Fritz showered Renate with affection for the first four years of her life. He delighted in introducing her to everybody. His change in behavior, Perls (1969a) claimed, was due to being blamed for everything that went wrong – a reason that did not justify his withdrawal from a young child. His view of Renate is apparent in a statement he made in 1972, when Renate wrote to him with a picture of his grand-daughter, Leslie: “For once a letter without asking me for something, but I am sure the letter is an overture for a request that likely will come via Lore” (Perls, 1972, pp. 275–276). His son, Stephen, confirmed that Fritz did not appreciate what he called “leeching” – “Fritz was critical … of my sister; he often felt that (she) was leeching on him” (Gaines, 1979, p. 93). His fondness for his grand-daughter, Leslie, can be seen in his description of her as a “cute and bright copperhead” with “something real about her” (Perls, 1972, p. 172). His treatment of Renate was not unlike that he displayed towards his sister, Else. Renate (Gaines, 1979) stated, “Fritz left me out of his whole life” (p. 17) – a sad conclusion for the daughter of someone who was to help so many in his lifetime.

His son, Stephen (Gaines, 1979), emerges as an even-handed and reasonable individual. His recollections give a first-hand picture of his relationship with Fritz. He stated, “My father was never angry; he was simply so busy with his own things. It was more just kind of a non-involvement that became part of my ­lifestyle” (p. 26). Speaking of his father’s generosity, he stated, “Most of the time, Fritz was generous, but not really. It was a contest that we had throughout life. He was very generous with money if he were asked for it, but he would never offer it first” (pp. 109–110). Perls (1972) appeared to have no difficulty with regard to generosity, stating that Stephen was “rather phobic and stubborn in asking and accepting any support” (p. 264). Stephen (Gaines, 1979) offered an explanation for his approach to Fritz with respect to money. He stated, “Takers annoyed him. So, by asking him for something I would wind up being a taker and he would have no respect for me” (p. 110). An interesting comment by Stephen is as telling of Laura as it is of Fritz, “Basically, I hated my father and his pompous ­righteousness, but he could also be loving and warm. How much my attitude was influenced by my mother’s hatred of him, how much she poisoned us children with it, I could not say” (p. 173). Yet there were good times in Stephen’s life as a young boy. Speaking of his youth in South Africa where he was born, he stated, “We took trips to the veldt area to look at the animals, or down to the ocean. But mostly I remember talking about my father, and him not being there. We had nice grass and grounds where we lived so I would bring my friends over occasionally” (p. 26). These excerpts covering some of Stephen’s thoughts portray Fritz as a non-involved parent who was generous with money when asked and whose son hated his pompousness but also saw his mother’s hatred of his father. For his part, Stephen concluded, “He is still father to me, though certainly not my image of what a father should be” (p. 275).

Having considered Fritz’s personal life, the next section will consider five main influences in the development of gestalt therapy, namely Freud, Reich, Friedlander, the gestalt school of psychology, and existentialism.

European Influences: Psychiatry, Psychology, and Psychotherapy

A large number of influences played important roles in the development of gestalt therapy. This orientation towards development was reinforced recently by Yontef (2005), who stated his preference for assimilating new possibilities into gestalt therapy, “I have not seen any framework which works better as an integrating framework for me as a psychotherapist than gestalt therapy” (p. 98). A valuable overview of the subject is Crocker’s (2005) statement that “Gestalt therapy is an example of the Aristotelian paradigm, a way of understanding that focuses upon concrete and specific individuals, situations, and events, seen in their environmental context, and attempts to understand the nature of change and how things – particularly living things – come to be as they are and to behave as they do. This is a marked contrast to the … Platonic paradigm, which focuses on unchanging ­universal essences that are imperfectly exemplified in the changing world” (p. 66).

Freud

Perls met Freud for the first time in 1936 during a brief visit to Vienna from South Africa, to which he had immigrated in 1934. He described his relationship with Freud as polemic and stated in his autobiography “Freud, his theories, his ­influence are much too important for me. My admiration, bewilderment and vindictiveness are very strong. I am deeply awed by his suffering and courage. I am deeply awed by how much, practically all alone he achieved with inadequate ­mental tools of ­association-psychology and mechanistically-oriented philosophy” (Perls, 1969a, p. 45).

One important assumption of psychoanalysis was that contact with a therapist could result in consciousness of feelings, experience and behavior for patients and assist them to deal with new behavior and overcome neurosis. This assumption was adopted by gestalt therapy, but with an emphasis on awareness rather than on consciousness.

Perls’ concern with the present was bolstered by Freud’s observation of transference (Naranjo, 1972). Naranjo stated “although at first the analysis of the present was a tool or a means for the interpretation of the past, many today regard the analysis of childhood events as a means toward the understanding of present dynamics” (p. 60). However, Perls viewed the present as the essential ­component and termed Freud’s concept of the unconscious as that of which we are unaware.

It was the difference in their view of time that differentiated Freud and Perls. For Freud, the first five years of life was paramount to subsequent personality development, while for Perls the present lived reality of individuals was the matter to which persons needed to pay attention. Yontef (1993), in contrasting the ­differences between gestalt therapy and psychoanalysis, referred to reality contact over transference, active presence over a blank screen, dialogue and phenomenological focusing over free association and interpretation, field theory and process over Newtonian dichotomies.

Reich

Perls trained as a psychoanalyst with Wilhelm Reich in 1931 and 1932 and was supervised by Otto Fenichel and Karen Horney. Both Horney and Reich ­considered that a minimum of the traditional clinical routines was desirable for an effective therapeutic relationship. Perls’ (1972) description of Horney was as “one of the few people I really trusted,” notwithstanding her words to Perls as related by him: “The only analyst that I think could get through to you would be Wilhelm Reich” (p. 49). Perls po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part one: Gestalt Therapy
• Part Two: Gestalt Therapy Around the World
• Part Three: Reviewing the Past and Moving Onwards
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Worldwide Gestalt Associations, Institutes, and Professional Societies
• Index