Gestalt Therapy

Living Creatively Today

Gonzague Masquelier

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317706960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

How can we reconcile our desire for freedom with the limits or routines that orgainize our existence?How do we affirm our personality while adjusting to the world? How can we be nourished by exchanges with others without losing our autonomy? Gestalt Therapy responds to these essential questions of our daily lives.An important branch of humanistic psychology, Gestalt Therapy emphasizes the importance of communication and contact, the ways that we maintain relationships with ourselves, others and our environment. It helps individuals to develop potential by going beyond rigid patterns and to finally become creators of their own existence, each of us creating our own life rather than merely submitting to it.GonzagueMasquelier presents the history of fifty years of the Gestalt movement as well as its development in today's world.He begins with the story of its founders: Laura and Fritz Perls, and their associate, Paul Goodman.He explains how this unique therapeutic path developed little by little, through the meeting of European existentialism with American pragmatism. Then, he clearly explains the principal concepts which form the basis of this approach, illustrated by numerous clinical examples taken from his own professional experience. Finally, the author reviews the current areas of practice of the Gestalt approach: not only individual or group psychotherapy, but also within organizations, executive board rooms and the training professions.He offers an excellent synthesis of differing aspects of this important perspective within the field of psychology today.

PART

ONE

THE HISTORY OF GESTALT THERAPY

CHAPTER 1

Fritz and Laura Perls

F riedrich Perls, later known as Fritz, was born into a wealthy family in Berlin on July 8, 1893. He spent his childhood in the Jewish ghetto of the Berlin suburbs and was given a very typical education: he describes himself as a rebellious child from the start.⁴ He soon realized the difficulty of being accepted into any form of society: his education was too liberal for the orthodox Jewish ghetto and yet as a Jew he was rejected by bourgeois German society. In 1898, his family moved to a fashionable area in the center of Berlin, but difficulties with their neighbors continued.

His father, Nathan, was in the wine trade and traveled a lot for his work; Fritz described him as a great seducer, who loved society and tried to become assimilated into German culture. He belonged to a Jewish cultural organization and was also a freemason.

His mother, Amelia, came from an orthodox Jewish family; she never finished her formal education, but loved theatre and the opera.

His parents quarreled a lot. Fritz witnessed violent arguments between them during which Nathan beat Amelia, who took her revenge by violently pulling his long beard. Fritz came to hate his father, and developed a spirit of rebellion which was never to leave him. However, he was very close to Grete, one of his two sisters.

When he was about ten years old, Fritz ran away from home for a few days, was expelled from school and committed some petty crimes. Then he discovered the theatre, was hired to be an extra and worked with the producer Max Reinhardt. This teacher insisted on the importance of emotion, on the right tone of voice and the right gesture in order to “ring true.” He directed actors in a totally new way to be more themselves. Fritz was stunningly successful in the role of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust.⁵

This passion for the theatre allowed Fritz to regain, if not the esteem of his father, at least the understanding support of his mother. After an education which he described as mediocre, he began to study medicine, then psychiatry, while remaining passionate about theatre and sharing his mother’s love of opera.

This passion for theatre production and the authentic expression of emotions would later influence his profession as a psychotherapist.

Fritz as a soldier

The First World War interrupted his studies: in 1915 Fritz volunteered for the Red Cross and found himself in Belgium as a nurse in a unit specializing in gas attacks. He was often used as a translator because he spoke French well.

Fritz was horrified by the appalling madness of the conflict. He did not think of himself as a Jew since he was not religious. But he was sent on dangerous missions by his superior officer who explained with contempt that perhaps there would be one less Jew after the war. He sometimes wondered who his real enemies were: the British on the other side or the Germans in his own trenches. He was wounded by a shell and then suffered from lung lesions after a gas attack. He became an officer in 1917.

He survived these trials but was profoundly shaken by his war experiences. Three defining characteristics of temperament seemed to arise from this timel: a profound humanism (for example, he protested when forbidden to nurse wounded British soldiers); a surprising ability to make quick intuitive judgments about people; and frequent feelings of disillusionment about human beings (whom he discovered to be capable of the worst atrocities).

His therapeutic journey

After the war, Fritz took up his studies again, became a neuropsychiatrist, and was a part of the artistic and rebellious circles in Berlin. He wasn’t interested in psychiatry, which was seen at the time as a new but very controversial approach.

In 1926, he started therapy with Karen Horney, a dissident pupil of Freud’s.⁶

This psychoanalyst emphasized the importance of the socio-cultural environment in any treatment. While putting aside the detailed exploration of the past, she emphasized present difficulties, that she saw as responsible for behavioral difficulties. She later emigrated to the United States where her ideas were taken up by the dele-first American feminist movement. She suggested that certain neuroses associated with women are brought on by the place given to women in society. Horney always stayed in contact with Perls, supported him in his research and helped him to settle in New York.

In 1927, Perls left Berlin for Frankfurt, where he took care of wounded soldiers suffering from brain damage, under the direction of Kurt Goldstein. At this time, Goldstein was conducting research in Gestalt psychology which involved studies of how we perceive forms and how our brains produce images. There was no psychotherapeutic project in Gestalt psychology, and Perls later borrowed the word Gestalt for his therapeutic approach.

He socialized with philosophers like Buber⁷ and Tillich⁸ and resumed his own psychoanalysis with Clara Happel. He was interested in Bauhaus,⁹ an artistic teaching organization and contemporary art movement which proposed a new teaching method: that personal experimentation by the student is more powerful than the knowledge presented externally by a professor.

His psychoanalytical journey led him to question all the imperatives which had marked his life: you must be respectable, you must earn money, you must please. Little by little he was letting these suffocating constraints go, yet he felt lost and anguished in abandoning them.

Here we find two themes which will be important to him in the elaboration of Gestalt Therapy: the search for authenticity and the value of experimentation (by the client with the reassuring accompaniment of the therapist).

It was in 1928 in Frankfurt that he met his future partner…

The beautiful student

Lore Posner was much younger than Fritz. She was the eldest in a family of three children. She was given both the expected classical training for a young bourgeois girl of her time (needlework, piano and poetry) and a more modern education. Her father, a wealthy jeweller (change order) valued her curiosity and original intelligence and pushed her to pursue her course of studies. She therefore gave up the idea of a career as a piano soloist to study law and then psychology.

When she met Fritz, Lore found a resolution of the two polarities which were important to her: on the one hand, a need for security which was possibly fulfilled by the twelve-year age gap between them, and by Fritz’s social status as a doctor and decorated war veteran; and the other pole, her need for adventure, nourished by the bohemian aspirations of this man she wanted to marry. She shared his taste for research (since she was a graduate student of Gestalt psychology) and his passion for art (she was already an excellent pianist and a great fan of opera).

Lore’s father and brother opposed the match, and they conducted an investigation of Fritz’ past and concluded that it would be a disastrous marriage. But there was nothing they could do about it. Against the wishes of her family Lore moved in with Fritz on her twentieth birthday (in 1925). Resigned, Lore’s father wrote: “If I were to do anything at all against him, I would lose my daughter. And that is something that I really don’t want to happen.”¹⁰

She anglicized her name to Laura and like Fritz, began psychoanalysis with Clara Happel which originally was motivated by her desire to understand her partner and his friends’ jargon: “All I wanted was to be a member of the club!”¹¹

Vienna, then Berlin

In 1927, Perls thought about becoming a psychoanalyst himself and left for a further year’s training in Vienna with Helen Deutsch. He was disappointed by her professional coldness.

He returned to Berlin and started as a psychoanalyst in 1928.¹² Meanwhile he continued his own therapy with Eugen Harnick, which involved five sessions a week. After four years of living together, Laura asked him to marry her. Fritz wanted to work on this decision in therapy, but his analyst told him “You are not allowed to make any important decisions while you are in therapy. If you get married, I shall stop being your therapist.” In his own words Perls then exchanged “psychoanalysis for marriage”¹³ and married Laura in August, 1929. Their daughter Renate was born two years later. Fritz continued therapy with Wilhelm Reich, who helped him discover the potential in bodily and emotional approaches. He felt stimulated and validated by these approaches and would always say that of his four successive psychoanalysts, Reich was the most important.

The rise of Nazism interrupted this period. Reich was attacked for his Marxist positions and fled to Norway. Apart from his Jewish background, Fritz was politically left-wing, a member of the antifascist League and he gave lessons at the Worker’s University: all reasons for him to be a target of the Nazis. He left hurriedly for Holland in April 1933, with a hundred marks hidden in a cigarette lighter.¹⁴ Laura took refuge with their two year-old baby at her parents’ home in the south of Germany. In May 1933, the Nazis burned the works of Freud, Einstein, Thomas Mann and Zweig in front of the university of Berlin.

Laura joined Fritz six months later. They were not allowed to work in Holland, and so began a time of economic hardship for them. In 1934 they decided to leave for South Africa; they were attracted by the research of Prime Minister Smuts (a cofounder of the League of Nations—1919),¹⁵ and by his global view of man and society, what he called the holistic approach.

Johannesburg

Fritz spent the three weeks of the boat trip to Johannesburg learning English intensively. The couple was attracted by the wealth and quality of life which they found in South Africa. In 1935, Fritz and Laura founded The South African Institute of Psychoanalysis and success came v...