Fritz Read online

  His survival was more a matter of luck than wise choice. Being a medical student, he was made a medic and was shortly transferred to the Thirty-sixth Pioneer Battalion, a unit trained for gas attacks. He was appalled by the lead truncheons carried by some of the soldiers—volunteer “specialists” whose job it was to enter opposing trenches and club gassed Englishmen to death.

  Fritz received an exceptionally strong dose of anti-Semitism during the war. Not considering himself Jewish by virtue of religious belief, yet considered that by the officers he served under, he often wondered who his enemies were—the English Tommies he was fighting against or his countrymen who gave him more hazardous assignments in the hope, perhaps, of having one less Hebe around. He was to describe those years as the hardest period of his life. He witnessed death and destruction on a colossal scale and found himself, at times, anguished by having so many injured to attend to that he did not know where to turn or whom to choose to help.

  Fritz spent nine months in the trenches before his first furlough. At the front, he was wounded, suffered lung damage from being gassed, and on a third occasion was hospitalized due to the high fever of influenza brought on by the cold and the filth of living in the trenches.

  He narrowly escaped death one day in Flanders when his orders were changed from staying with the medical officer in the third trench to joining an attack group in the more dangerous front line. At three in the morning, the gas attack was made. For two hours, his company endured a barrage of British fire. It was then that he received his wound, when an exploding shell fragment caught him in the middle of his forehead. On returning to the lines, he discovered that the third trench took a direct hit, killing the doctor in charge and both medics.

  Perhaps his grimmest experience occurred when the wind shifted during one gas attack. Many of the gas masks his compatriots used failed. Equipped with only four small oxygen tanks and with soldiers clinging to him and pleading for air, he had to rip the tanks away again and again from one man in order to offer air to another. He wrote, in In and Out the Garbage Pail, of a powerful temptation to tear off his own mask and surrender to the inevitable agony.

  Once, on furlough to Berlin, he bought a ticket at The Royal Opera House to see Figaro. The contrast between the sufferings in the trenches and the beauty and elegance on stage affected him so greatly that he ran from the theater before the performance ended and broke into heart-wrenching tears.

  Numbness was one result of his life as a soldier. He underwent periods of great detachment, depersonalization, and for years lost the capacity for inner imagery and fantasy. He went about his tasks as if in a trance, without apparent concern for his own survival. In 1917, he calmly walked into a railroad station to attend to casualties after the station and two nearby ammunition trains had been hit. On another occasion, under Allied bombing, he helped unload cases of ammunition, winning a medal while simultaneously manifesting his loss of emotional responsiveness.

  By 1917, Fritz was promoted from private to officer and served as a medical sublieutenant. The horrors were in large part over for him. As an officer, he fared much better than the enlisted men, with frequent furloughs, decent food, and more adequate quarters. Upon the German defeat in 1918, his battalion was ordered to return to its home base immediately. Forced to march twenty hours a day with little to eat, the hardships returned. It was then that he began his lifelong habit of smoking.

  The war had cost him the closest male friend he would ever have when Ferdinand Knopf was killed. His own suffering and the suffering he witnessed destroyed whatever personal stability he had achieved prior to his military service. The barbarity, contemptuous authoritarianism, racial indecencies, and pain he experienced would have a most profound effect on shaping his future existence—accounting, in large part, for his tremendous humanitarianism coupled with a deep cynicism about human nature. With no friends or ties to keep him in one place too long, he would develop, from this point on, into a wanderer and would spend the next thirty years of his life searching for direction, authenticity, and inner peace.

  Returning to his studies, he chose, in 1919, to go to Freiburg for a semester. He qualified as an M.D. in Berlin on April 3, 1920.

  During the postwar period, Fritz coped, as best he could, with the disastrous economic situation that existed in Germany. Food was scarce and there was a galloping inflation. He lived with his mother and Else (Grete having married and left home), renting two rooms from Amelia to help her maintain financial solvency. By this time, Fritz and his father had ceased to have any effective contact. Nathan isolated himself more and more from the rest of the family as they moved from apartment to apartment, living, finally, in a room shut off from the rest of the house. The two men rarely found themselves together, and from the mid-1920s on, Fritz had ceased speaking to him. When Nathan died, some years later, Fritz neglected to attend the funeral.

  Establishing a practice as a neuropsychiatrist, Fritz concentrated on prescribing medical cures for a variety of psychological and neurological complaints. Along with some M.D. friends, he became a member of Berlin’s bohemian class, hanging out, at first, in the Café of the West and later the Romanische Café. This began his clear identification with the counterculture, an identification that continued throughout his life.

  Along with many young people on both continents who had fought in the Great War, Fritz began to realize how they had been duped—that the war had served no end other than profiting a number of industrialists. Revolting against the hypocrisy and narrow nationalism of the day, he associated himself with the Bauhaus Group—with dissident artists, poets, architects, writers, and political radicals, people who were challenging the established order of things on all fronts in the hope of establishing a less authoritarian and more creative society. Whereas other psychiatrists might get so deeply involved in their own work that they become insular and academic, Fritz was seriously interested in the activities of the larger world.

  Mary Wigman was revolutionizing dance in Germany in the same way that Isadora Duncan was in the United States. Each woman was seeking to replace the highly stylized form of dance that existed with a more personal form, a form that flowed from the artist’s spirit. They sought spontaneity in movement that was natural and individualistic, that was flowing and continuously creative rather than routine and ritualized. One of her students, Palucca, was associated with the Bauhaus. Through her, Fritz came to know and respect Wigman’s teachings as a natural extension of his earlier apprenticeship with Max Reinhardt.

  Among the crowd of artists, rebels, and writers was the philosopher Sigmund Friedlander, who was to have a profound effect on Fritz’s future development. Fritz found that Friedlander’s message offered a possible “antidote to my existential confusion and bewilderment.”

  By the time they met, Fritz had despaired of finding answers through the teachings of the traditional philosophers—whether the moralistic preachings invoked by his father or the works of Plato—who set up ideal schemes for existence, which they themselves could not adhere to. He was tired, as well, of the Germanic tradition of explaining things by offering hundreds of different Rules, Categories, or Truths that purported to answer the riddle of life but only left the student more confused than ever.

  Friedlander, in his work Creative Indifference, introduced Fritz to simplicity—to the German equivalent of Taoism: that opposites define each other and that there is a resting point, in the center, embracing both polarities. Friedlander felt that it was only through staying in this indifferent center point and accepting the bivalent attitudes that man could become well balanced. Many of Fritz’s later Gestalt formulations stemmed from this early encounter—such as the notions that the organism strives to maintain the zero point for optimal functioning; that when one element is lacking or overdefined (whether it is love or hate, thirst or overhydration) an attempt is made to achieve closure (zero—neither surplus nor shortage) by incorporating what is lacked or
discharging what exists in excess; and that this, not elaborate instinct theories, can best be used to explain most human behavior.

  In 1922, he began making weekly overnight trips to Bremerhaven, acting as a consultant to an ex-patient of his—a butcher—and his friends. It was a marvelous opportunity for him. Not only was he supplied with food for himself and his family during those terribly lean postwar years, but he was paid his fees in the dollars that came in with the great transatlantic ships, a bonanza during the raging inflation then rocking the Fatherland. He accumulated $500, enough at that time to have purchased several apartment houses in Berlin. Instead, the wanderer used this money to come to New York.

  Fritz was encouraged to come to America by a distant relative who persuaded him that economic conditions in the United States offered him a far better opportunity. He left his family and arrived in New York in October 1923. He worked in the Department of Neurology in the Hospital for Joint Diseases, where he continued his work in neuropsychiatry as he simultaneously studied to prepare for certification as a physician in this country.

  He was not to find the fulfillment he sought. Hampered by language difficulties, put off by what he felt to be infantile and adolescent conduct in those he met and worked with, and missing the play of ideas and creative ferment of his Bauhaus associates in the lofts and cafés of Berlin, he suffered only increased isolation, alienation, and loneliness. An illness to Else provided him an excuse to return to Germany in April 1924.

  Nineteen twenty-five was a significant year for Fritz. Thirty-two years old at the time, still living in his mother’s home, unsure of himself physically, sexually, socially, professionally, he became involved with a woman who not only stimulated him tremendously but also challenged all his sexual assumptions. The richness, grief, pain, confusion, and pleasure of this relationship provided the vehicle that eventually transported Fritz from his medically oriented practice into that of psychotherapy.

  Consider, if you will, Fritz’s mental state at the time. He wanted to make some mark in the world, but had no unique point to make. He suffered from a pervasive feeling of not being worth anything (Nathan’s “You’re a piece of shit” feedback). Stooped, round-shouldered, short, and balding, he considered himself quite ugly. Emotionally benumbed by his war experiences, he went through his days like a robot, as if in a cloud, lacking inner imagery or emotional sparkle. His numbness and lack of faith in his worth extended to his sexual capacities. He doubted his potency, his ability as a lover, the size and adequacy of his penis. His sexual views and attitudes were ultraconventional and wrought with guilt. He even believed that he had damaged his memory through excessive masturbation when younger.

  Enter Lucy, a distant relative whose mother was a good friend of Amelia Perls. Fritz was asked to visit Lucy in the hospital where she awaited an operation for the removal of a kidney. Upon entering her room, he was overwhelmed by her blond-haired beauty. She represented the type of woman he worshiped from afar. His previous sexual experiences were apparently perfunctory, noninvolving, infrequent, and with undesirable partners. He had never known a woman of such radiant appeal. Imagine his shock when after ten minutes of polite conversation the Princess turned to the awkward Frog and said, “You are beautiful. Come kiss me.” That this should happen to him! And from a married woman! . . . With children! This was truly inconceivable.

  The passion of those kisses in her hospital room, which she gave to render herself oblivious to her impending surgery, marked the beginning of an erotically rich and stormy relationship. Lucy became Fritz’s guide on the road to sexual affirmation or, as it then seemed to Fritz, to wickedly satisfying perversity. Possessive, passionate, reckless, experimental, Lucy would be considered “far, far out” even in today’s psychedelic generation.

  After her recovery, Fritz saw Lucy frequently. One day she dropped by his office with a friend. Standing in the physiotherapy room, Fritz, through a crack in his sliding door, spied Lucy and her girlfriend making love in the consulting room. When the friend began to lick Lucy’s genitals, “I explode, jump into the room, push the girl aside and have a short and strong orgasm with Lucy.”

  Later the girls arranged a foursome, which afforded Fritz his first homosexual encounter with the girlfriend’s husband. Although no physical gratification followed from his experience with this man, the combined aspects of breaking through another taboo and watching the women make love filled Fritz with excitement.

  Fritz was particularly astonished and dumbfounded to hear from Lucy that his uncle, the eminent, moralistic, famed attorney, Herman Staub—the man he later believed might be his actual father—had had sexual relations with her when she was thirteen.

  These experiences, coming after years of emotional deadness were at times overwhelming. Love, lust, guilt, surprise, shame, jealously, and desire would clash, reverberate, encourage and destroy one another within his sunken chest. In an attempt to come to terms with these forces, Fritz entered psychoanalytic treatment in 1926. His fascination with the process soon led to his training to be a psychoanalyst himself.

  Psychoanalysis, an upstart, controversial, radical approach at the time, was entirely consistent with Fritz’s search for new ways. But it was the anguish and excitement of his love affair with Lucy that led him to Karen Horney, his first analyst. This, in turn, slowly transformed his medically oriented practice and led, eventually, to his own contribution: Gestalt Therapy.

  Horney, the therapist he chose, had already established a reputation as one of the early, innovative psychoanalytic pioneers. She, too, would later break from orthodox analytic doctrine and found her own, more liberally oriented school. Worried about his memory, preoccupied with matters sexual, confused as to his goals, employing a cynicism and an arrogance to hide his feelings of inner worthlessness, Fritz believed that analytic insight, dealing as it did with just such matters, might lead him from the valley of confusion to the mountain of enlightenment. In the same measure, it would fill the spiritual void that existed in his life by supplying answers to questions that science, nature, Marxism, and philosophy had not.

  Based in large part on the turmoil Fritz was undergoing with Lucy, Horney’s advice was to separate himself from her and leave Berlin once more. Frankfurt seemed like the place to go, as Fritz, at that time, was intrigued by the work of Kurt Goldstein, who was seeing brain injuries through the lenses of Gestalt psychology—seeing how people perceived things differently. He was also attracted by the Existentialists—Buber, Tillich, and others—who met and wrote and taught there. Frankfurt was, as well, a beautiful and cultivated city. And he might stay, at first, with his mother’s brother, Julius Rund, a warm and unassuming man. Horney recommended that Fritz continue his analysis with Clara Happel, a student of hers in Frankfurt.

  He arrived there in October after painfully wrenching himself free of Lucy and secured an assistantship to Goldstein at his Institute for Brain-Damaged Soldiers. At one of Goldstein’s seminars, he met Lore Posner, twenty-one years old and a graduate student of Gestalt psychology.

  Gestalt psychology had little in common with what Fritz was later to call Gestalt Therapy. The Gestalt psychology that Lore studied and Fritz was marginally exposed to was of academic interest only. It described perception: how individuals saw things. It dealt with foreground/background and helped students to appreciate the concept of relativity. Depending on one’s interest while viewing a fish tank, one can notice either the fish or the water. These Gestaltists had no idea of using their research in any psychotherapeutic way. Their interest was an experimental one, not one of helping people overcome emotional difficulties. Had Fritz not borrowed the term in 1951 for his therapeutic system, Gestalt would have faded to the dusty back bookshelves of graduate school libraries, a mere footnote in the history of academic psychology.

  Lore (who later anglicized her name to Laura) was much younger than Fritz. Attractive, wide-eyed, and eager to nurture this “lively, spontaneous, wi
tty . . . cynical and kind of desperate man,” her quiet attentions helped fill the emptiness that Lucy’s absence had caused. Fritz had a commonality of interests with her. They shared a love of the arts. Laura was an accomplished pianist, wrote poetry, and enjoyed classical music, theater, and opera. Indeed, her knowledge in these areas far surpassed Fritz’s.

  The oldest of three children, Laura was born into a family where appearances mattered. Her father, of whom she was fond, was a successful jewelry manufacturer who obviously returned his daughter’s affection. He provided her with the sort of education that was usually only given to male children. Considered to be the brightest of the Posner children, Laura displayed an independent intelligence that gained the respect of family and teachers alike.

  “I received much recognition from early childhood on,” she told me. “I was a musician when I was five, wrote poetry when I was six and seven, and I went to a classical gymnasium, which girls at that time didn’t do. I was the only girl in my class at first.”

  Laura’s mother was brought up to be a lady. Her passion was gardening, her concern was for the household, and she deferred to her husband continually. Laura felt her mother was too passive and lacked a point of view, qualities that caused Laura to lose respect for her.

  When Laura met Fritz, she was immediately attracted to him. The fact that her father and her brother Robert felt antagonistic toward him did not faze her one iota. As the family’s leading intellectual, she could readily counter their arguments. The entire family opposed her romance with this Bohemian black sheep. “They imagined I should marry a businessman who made a lot of money.”

  Robert asked their father to investigate Fritz, to show him up, to find something out so that he could get rid of him. But their father said, “No. I don’t like him. But if I do anything against him, I lose my daughter. And I don’t want to do that.”