Who is Fritz Perls?

Berlin: theatre, war, and medicine

Perls was a poor student and a difficult boy, by his own cheerful account. What saved him was the theatre. As a young man in Berlin he worked at the edges of Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater, and what he learned there — that how a thing is said carries more than what is said, that gesture and breath and timing are the real information — never left him. Anyone who has watched him work can see the director in him, and the showman.

Then came the war. He served as a medic in a pioneer battalion in the gas warfare on the Western Front, and it marked him permanently. He came out of it with no remaining faith in the civilisation that had produced it, which is worth remembering when he later sounds glib about respectable opinion.

He qualified in medicine in Berlin in 1921 and moved into neuropsychiatry. He also moved into the psychoanalytic world of Weimar Berlin, which was then the most interesting room in psychology.

Frankfurt: Goldstein, Gestalt psychology, and Laura

In 1926 Perls went to Frankfurt as an assistant to Kurt Goldstein, who was working with soldiers whose brains had been damaged in the war. Goldstein insisted that such a patient could not be understood as a set of broken components, but only as a whole organism doing its best to cope. This is the idea that turns into Gestalt therapy, and it arrived here rather than later.

Frankfurt was also thick with the academic Gestalt psychologists — Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka — whose work on perception supplied the vocabulary. We perceive whole shapes, not accumulations of parts. Something stands out as figure while the rest recedes into ground. The therapy borrows that structure and applies it to feeling, need, and attention.

And in Frankfurt he met Lore Posner, a psychology graduate student twelve years his junior, who was reading phenomenology and existential philosophy that he had not read. They married in 1930. Her contribution to what followed was continuous and, for decades, largely unacknowledged — including by him.

His own analyses shaped him as much as his reading. Karen Horney sent him to Frankfurt; Clara Happel took him on there; and in 1931 he went to Wilhelm Reich, who mattered most. Reich attended to the body, to posture and breath and muscular holding, and treated resistance as something happening in the room rather than a story about the past. Both are in Gestalt therapy.

Exile: Amsterdam, then Johannesburg

In April 1933 Perls crossed into the Netherlands with very little money, having been active enough in the Antifascist League to be worth arresting. The Amsterdam year was miserable and poor. In 1934, with a recommendation from Ernest Jones, the Perlses sailed for South Africa.

Johannesburg was good to them. They founded the South African Institute for Psychoanalysis, built a large practice, and lived well; he learned to fly. Fritz served as an army psychiatrist with South African forces during the war.

It was also where he stopped being a psychoanalyst in anything but training. Ego, Hunger and Aggression came out in Durban in 1942, and it is where the argument opens: that the analytic picture of digestion and aggression was wrong, that a person assimilates experience the way a body assimilates food — chewing it, taking what nourishes, spitting out the rest — and that what we swallow whole poisons us. He was calling the method 'concentration therapy' at that point. The name Gestalt came later.

The break with the analytic establishment had a personal edge. In 1936 he had flown to the congress at Marienbad to give a paper on oral resistances, expecting to be recognised; the paper landed badly, and Freud met him at the door for a few cold minutes and did not engage. He was still telling that story bitterly thirty years later, and some of his lifelong contempt for orthodoxy starts in that corridor.

New York: the book, and the people who wrote it with him

Perls arrived in New York in 1946, in his fifties, starting again. What happened next was a genuine collaboration, and the later mythology has flattened it.

Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality appeared in 1951 under three names. Ralph Hefferline, a psychologist at Columbia, developed and tested the experiments in the first volume with his students. Paul Goodman — anarchist, novelist, social critic, and a far better writer than Perls — took Perls's rough manuscript and wrote the theoretical second volume, supplying much of the language the approach still uses. It is the densest and most serious statement of the theory, and the part most people skip.

The New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy followed in 1952, run out of the Perlses' apartment on Central Park West, with Laura, Goodman, Isadore From, and Paul Weisz. A Cleveland institute followed in 1954. Laura and From taught there for decades, and the relational, dialogic tradition that most Gestalt therapists now practise within came down that line rather than through Fritz.

Fritz himself was restless, unfaithful, and increasingly bored. By 1960 he had left New York, and the marriage was effectively over, though they never divorced.

Esalen: the guru years

After some years of travelling — Miami, Los Angeles, Ohio, a spell in Japan at a Zen monastery, heart trouble, and experiments with LSD — Perls arrived at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur and took up residence in 1964. He was seventy, with a white beard and a jumpsuit, and he became the most recognisable figure of the American human potential movement.

The format was the workshop: one participant at a time in the 'hot seat' in front of a group, dream work, the empty chair, and Perls himself — fast, funny, theatrical, and often brutal. Much of it was filmed and much of it was transcribed, which is why our picture of him is so heavily weighted to these five years. Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (1969) is a transcript of that room.

So is the Gestalt Prayer, the four lines that escaped into the culture and got printed on a million posters. Laura Perls and Paul Goodman both disliked it, and they had a point: read on its own it sounds like a licence for indifference, which is not what the theory says.

In 1969 he left for Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island to build a residential Gestalt community — a 'kibbutz', he called it — where people would live and train together rather than pass through for a weekend. He died in Chicago in March 1970, of heart failure after surgery, a few months later.

The difficult part

Perls was not a good man, and there is no use pretending otherwise. He was vain, needy of an audience, and dismissive of people who bored him. He was serially unfaithful and slept with women he was teaching, at an institution and in a decade with no rules about it. He treated Laura badly and did not correct the public impression that Gestalt therapy was his invention alone. He could be cruel to participants in front of a room, and some of the recorded moments people find electrifying are hard to watch for exactly that reason.

He also had a real contempt for explanation — he had names for interpretation and theorising that cannot be printed here — and that anti-intellectual streak did the approach lasting damage. It let a generation take the techniques without the theory, which is how Gestalt therapy acquired its reputation as a bag of tricks with a chair in it.

None of this is a reason to ignore him. It is a reason not to model yourself on him.

What came after

The core of what he saw has held up: attention to the present moment, awareness as the engine of change rather than a preliminary to it, and the person understood as a whole in contact with a situation rather than a case history to be decoded.

The manner has not held up, and it was never the whole picture even at the time. Laura Perls and Isadore From in New York, Erving and Miriam Polster in Cleveland, and later Gary Yontef and Robert Resnick built the approach into something dialogic and considerably kinder — two people working together, with the relationship between them treated as part of the method rather than a distraction from it. Beisser's short paper on the paradoxical theory of change, written the year Perls died, states the underlying principle better than Perls ever did.

That is the tradition I work in. If you have watched the old films and found the manner off-putting, that is a reasonable response, and it is not what a session here looks like. Nobody gets pushed into a chair and told to perform for an audience.