Fritz Read online

  In his work, Fritz tried to teach people what is, for he knew that without full awareness of ourselves, we cannot lead fulfilled lives. No person can attend to his wounds unless he is aware of his hurt. No man can discharge his tensions if he is oblivious of his anger. No woman can satisfy the needs of the flesh if she is unaware of her sexual appetites.

  Fritz’s Gestalt Therapy focused upon the never-ending moment-to-moment interaction between man and his environment. Whereas Freud, with his concept of libidinous energy, postulated that sex was the main motivating factor behind most of life’s activities, Fritz simply assumed that the organism is always striving for homeostasis—seeking to take in things from the world that it needs in order to be in balance and seeking to discharge things when it is overloaded.

  To appreciate the challenge such self-evident concepts posed to his psychoanalytic colleagues, one need only cite the remark of Maria Bonaparte, one of Freud’s disciples, upon reading the manuscript of Fritz’s first book, Ego, Hunger and Aggression, in 1940.

  “If you don’t believe in the libido theory anymore,” she said, “you’d better hand in your resignation.”

  Gestalt thinking led Fritz to realize that there was more to existence than Freud’s twin motivating forces of Eros (sex) and Thanatos (destructiveness, the anti-life force). As he wrote in Ego, Hunger and Aggression:

  “Attempts have been made to enumerate and classify instincts. Any classification which does not consider the organismic balance, however, must needs be arbitrary, a product of the specific interest of the classifying scientist.

  “To be entirely exact, one has to recognize hundreds of instincts and to realize that instincts are not absolute, but relative, depending on the requirements of the respective organism.”

  Fritz referred to “incomplete Gestalts” instead of “instincts,” need systems that required satisfaction. He also recognized that completing a Gestalt was no end in itself, but merely allowed the next Gestalt to emerge. Thus, a thirsty man desires a drink before he wants a woman. And after his woman, he feels driven to make an important telephone call that he has thought about all day.

  For people to be in balance, to discharge tensions, to meet their needs requires, firstly, that they recognize their bodily yearnings. Too many of us, in the course of growing up, have lost touch with our own myriad impulses. We are taught, through our parents or our subculture, that certain urges make us unlovable. Yet, the impulses don’t go away. Instead, we develop tics to hide our aggression, ulcers to mask our competitiveness, indifference to disguise our longing for love, propriety to avoid our sexual lusts, or phobias to deny our desire for independence. Rather than recognize our needs and tensions as our own—the better to fulfill or discharge them—we have learned how not to accept them. What we do, instead, is project our needs onto others, attributing to them what we ourselves lack.

  Thus, timid people who always fear verbal or physical attack have usually disowned part of their aggressiveness. The other person becomes the angry one and not me. The “he-man” who accuses gentler people of being “sissies” invariably denies his own softness and tenderness. The “professional” old maid, who spies on young girls and their beaus and condemns their “immorality,” disowns and projects onto others her own sexuality. As does the bully who beats up young men with long hair for being “faggots” after projecting his own untolerated homosexuality onto them.

  Gestalt Therapy offered people a chance to recognize and accept their projections as their own feelings, so as to be able to fulfill themselves, discharge their tensions, and thus be ready for subsequent challenges and responses. Adopting some simple techniques from psychodrama, Fritz had his patients playact at being those people or things that they complained about. In the process, they often came to appreciate that “I am you,” expand their acceptance of self/other, and lead a richer and less troubled existence.

  Like other existentialists, Fritz tried his best to minimize concepts and maximize phenomenology. He knew that concepts were nothing more than interpretations of events. Phenomenology, on the other hand, restricted itself to a description of things you could touch, feel, taste, see, or hear. “Lose your mind and come to your senses” was a phrase that he liked to use.

  In his work, Fritz paid attention to the obvious, as a good phenomenologist might. He read the language of the body with an uncanny accuracy. He attended to the sound of your voice as much as to your words. If you said “I love you” in the same tone that you order cheesecake in a restaurant, he might confront you with that, have you playact your voice—describe yourself as your voice—so that you might recognize how bereft of feelings you were.

  His therapy aimed at synthesis, not analysis. It was immediate and dealt with what was occurring in the Here and Now—not with events that had occurred in a distant childhood. It offered passion, drama, and confrontation in place of psychoanalytic detachment. It was a psychology of experiences, not words.

  “If you write a book about Fritz,” said Wilson Van Dusen, a West Coast phenomenologist who brought Fritz to California in 1959, “you must emphasize what things were like when he turned up on the scene. We were all imbued with psychoanalysis, we must get an extensive history of the person. We were all basically retrospective, strongly retrospective in both our analysis and therapies. We couldn’t conceive of understanding a patient without an extensive history. And for a man just to walk into a room and describe people’s behavior so accurately added a whole new dimension. This is where I considered Fritz very great. His incomparable capacity to observe. He could see all that he needed to see in the present. He often said, ‘I’m only trying to see the obvious. You’re sitting in this way and the implications of this are . . .’ It was dealing right here on the surface, the skin, the obvious. Yet, all you needed to know was there. The patient’s history would only elaborate—repeat again—what you are seeing now.

  “This was illuminating. At the time, I was well into existential analysis. I was drifting in the general direction of the Here and Now. We had gobs of existential psychological theory from Binswanger, Minkowski, Heidegger. But here was a man who could put into practice a rather tortured theory. So, naturally, I studied and learned as much as I could from him.”

  Fritz was strongly committed to the idea that all external controls, “even internalized external control—’you should’—interfere with the healthy working of the organism.” Freud called this internalized external control the Superego. Fritz referred to it more colloquially as the “Topdog.”

  “Many people,” he wrote, “dedicate their lives to actualize a concept of what they should be like rather than to actualize themselves. This difference between self-actualizing and self-image actualizing is very important. Many people only live for their image.”

  One thing that can certainly be said about Fritz was that he did not live up to any conventional or predictable image. Whereas psychiatrists are expected to be kind and helpful listeners, Fritz was often curt and rude. Although notorious for being a tightwad, he could also turn unexpectedly generous. He felt that social conventions were “phony” and refused to abide by the rules of “niceties.” Thus, while he could be charming when meeting someone who captured his attention, he could also turn you off with an icy “I never asked to be introduced to you” remark. He refused to be predictable, refused to be pigeonholed, refused to be “in character,” preferring to let the situation govern his response:

  “Once you have a character, you have developed a rigid system. Your behavior becomes petrified, predictable, and you lose your ability to cope freely with the world with all your resources. You are predetermined just to cope with events one way, namely, as your character prescribes it to be. So, it seems a paradox when I say that the richest person, the most creative person, is a person who has no character.”

  Fritz’s commitment to integrity, self-discovery, authenticity, and liberation through “doing your own thing”�
�doing what you want to do and stop topdogging yourself—was matched by his commitment to living in the present. Just as “shouldisms” were damned by him, so were “aboutisms.” He would not suffer listening to gossip nor would he gossip about others. When he was with you, he was with you. People who knew him in New York knew little of his life in Europe or South Africa. Those who met him in Florida or California knew nothing of his days in New York.

  For example, while Fritz lived with Wilson and Marjorie Van Dusen when he came to California in 1959, they had children of their own running about the house. Yet, they never knew that Fritz had children. And many people, particularly women, were so taken with his “I-Thou” encounter, that they fancied themselves as having a “special relationship with Fritz,” not realizing that what was special was not their relationship but, rather, Fritz’s way of relating to them in that eternal, timeless, present of his.

  This fierce determination on his part to BE his message—to live what he preached (or preach what he lived)—required both courage and conviction. In saying what he felt and refusing to abide by convention, he aroused the enmity of many former friends and fellow professionals. Thus, his attempt to be true to himself and allow himself to act spontaneously required, along the way, a discipline far harsher than any momentary observer would guess.

  Judith Malina, who, with her husband, Julian Beck, are the cofounders of The Living Theater, offers this view: “He was a revolutionary in that he enacted in his own life’s behavior what his furthest thinking and the furthest spirit of the times led him to. He enacted it fully and he gave himself over to it. He was as close to his own image of a total person as he could see it. He took all the risks—unafraid and unashamed and unabashed—and went very far, all the way, in terms of what he would see as ideal for himself. And that’s the most revolutionary thing one can do.”

  Through his way of life, his work with others, and his writings, Fritz continually encouraged the emotions to find satisfaction. He directed awareness to needs that haven’t been met. Until he came along, the standard therapeutic position was one that favored analysis of attitudes as opposed to acting upon them. Many patients were cautioned, in the course of their analyses, not to make any major decisions affecting their lives until their treatment was over. Divorces, marriages, moves to other cities, changes of jobs, were either to be postponed indefinitely or acted upon only after lengthy discussions with the therapist. Pejorative diagnostic labels such as “acting-out” were applied to those patients who dared act upon their feelings without prior approval from their analysts.

  The average analyst, acting somewhat like a Superparent, assumed an attitude of “Wait a minute. Before you go around satisfying these impulses, let’s get a sense of what they mean and how acting upon them is going to affect things in your life right now and in the future. Your actions might be dangerous.” Restated, the line is, “Stay in the path you’re used to so far and don’t yearn for completion of something that’s open and waiting and unknown, because it might somehow harm you.” Fritz, of course, denied that any psychotherapist had the gift of prophecy. Crystal-ball gazing might work for fortunetellers, but not for psychiatrists.

  The standard precautionary approach did, though, justify the typical therapist’s distrust of his own impulsiveness. The unfortunate fallout of such an attitude was that many patients never learned to have faith in their own intuition, their own uniqueness, and their own spontaneity. Most therapy was thus geared to promote temperance, caution, and an adjustment to the conventional way.

  Fritz, with his simple insistence upon acting in accord with one’s feelings, threw down the gauntlet to his more conventional colleagues. For taking his stand, saying his piece, and daring to live his own unique life, Fritz was treated with contempt by the traditionalists. Fond of teaching, he was never invited to teach his psychology at any of our prestigious institutions. Neither Columbia nor Yale extended him a faculty appointment. Nor would any of our leading psychiatric hospitals dare to let him work and instruct within their confines. The orthodox analysts and their neo-Freudian friends who ran such places considered Fritz to be a bête noire. He was alternately ignored, criticized as being “simplistic,” or damned for his personal excesses—for his brazen sexuality, his slovenly ways, his arrogance and egomania.

  But Fritz persisted in spite of the critics. Like Johnny Appleseed, he sowed the seeds of Gestalt Therapy across the United States and Canada. From New York to Detroit, Cleveland to Toronto, Miami to Columbus, Atlanta to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Big Sur, and Vancouver, he saw, he taught, and he eventually conquered.

  America in the forties and fifties was the land of logical positivism. We had licked the Great Depression, won the Second World War, and presumed that all human problems could be overcome by intelligent planning, good will, and technological progress. Psychoanalysis, whose influence in Europe was aborted by Hitler’s legions, came into its own upon our shores. Its nineteenth-century mechanistic scientific precepts (postulating root instincts which then have a cause-and-effect result on all future development) permeated our universities and became the major influence upon clinical psychology.

  In such a cultural sea, Fritz and Gestalt made odd-looking fish.

  But by the mid 1960s, things had obviously changed. Vietnam and environmental pollution, violence and social unrest, revealed as a lie the proposition that principles, intelligence, and science might be mankind’s salvation. An evening spent among New York’s East Side intellectuals—all discussing their analyses, their Oedipal troubles, and their transferences—made it clear that Freud was not the final solution to the neurotic problem. There were countless numbers of people, by now, who had passed through the psychoanalytic mill, “understood” all the causes of their neuroses, and yet were just as neurotic as ever.

  A great number of people had come of age exposed to existential concepts. They had grown up reading Sartre and Camus instead of Plato and the Classicists, Kerouac instead of Hawthorne, practicing mantras and meditation instead of matins. The simple Here and Now Gestalt approach no longer seemed simple-minded to a generation familiar with Zen and Tao and other ancient Eastern wisdoms. If the forties and fifties were concerned with being “cool,” the sixties advocated “letting it all hang out.” Fritz led a very open life and let his feelings “hang out” before others better than any other psychiatrist in history. And the paradox of the restless/calmly flowing, searching/knowledgeable person that Fritz Perls was made it easy for people to identify with him.

  This, then, was Fritz Perls’s legacy: more than any other man in his time, he helped change the direction of psychotherapy. He led many of us away from a preoccupation with the past to a concentration on the present, away from blaming parents to accepting responsibility for oneself, away from the narrow confines of the libido theory into the broad awareness of myriad numbers of needs, away from an analysis of one’s condition and toward a satisfaction of one’s desires. And he did this while struggling to break away from his own conditioning and into ever-greater authenticity.

  2. Berlin: The Early Years

  Fritz was born in a Jewish ghetto on the outskirts of Berlin on July 8, 1893, the third child of Amelia Rund and Nathan Perls. It was a uniquely interesting and challenging world that the infant discovered himself in.

  It was a time of the Kaiser, of a Germany built upon respect for culture, education, authority, and discipline. It was a land of burghers and aristocrats with traditions of courtly manners, state service, public austerity, and personal dignity. The industrial revolution had not yet despoiled the landscape nor cluttered and gutted the cities. Craftsmanship was still admired in this insular, traditional society.

  The roots of Fritz’s “searchingness” and open-mindedness arose in the very circumstances of his birth, for he and his family exemplified the “modern” German Jew. Such people wished to consider themselves German, but still observed limited religious customs. Unfortunately,
neither German nor Jewish society would accept them.

  In their attempts to break out of the narrow confines of the Jewish ghetto, they antagonized their more orthodox brethren who chose to remain. Often, these “modern” Jews felt uncomfortable with, ashamed of, and alienated from their own Jewishness, from the clannish rituals that tended to exclude the non-Hebraic world. Still, their attempts to enter the larger community of the German Aryan were equally ungratifying, as the same Jewish birthright made them unwelcome. Accepting of and acceptable to neither camp, these Jews were essentially rootless persons who would search for and remain open to new ideas, new people, and, hopefully, a more accepting and acceptable subculture in which to live.

  Fritz, for example, has written about his father’s involvement with the Freemasons, setting up lodges across Germany as any secular Christian might. What he never mentioned was that his father was also active in a Jewish cultural organization, the B’nai Brith, and performed functions for their lodges across the Fatherland as well.

  It is possible that Nathan Perls, Fritz’s father, was never as proud of his work among the Jews as he was of his functions in the nonsectarian world. Or, he may have kept it relatively secret from the rest of the family because of his sexual liaisons with the B’nai Brith ladies. If so, Fritz may simply not have known or if he did know was not impressed with this aspect of Nathan’s activities, as opposed to being embarrassed by his father’s “Jewishness.”

  But Fritz also was unclear about the label “Jew.” Although he could joke, in later years, of being a Zen Judaist, he was also capable of denying his birthright, as he did, initially, with his first American publisher, Arthur Ceppos. Ceppos, who became close to Fritz in later years, recalls how astonished he was when he casually inquired whether Fritz was Jewish only to have Fritz deny it.