Who is Robert Resnick?

The taxi

Resnick grew up in Far Rockaway and put himself through City College at night, driving a New York cab in the daytime. He talked about the taxi for the next sixty years, and not out of sentiment: a stranger gets in, you have a few minutes of unavoidable and completely unprotected contact, and then they are gone. He called it his grounding in contacting, and a precursor to everything Gestalt.

The formal training followed — a master's at Columbia, a doctorate in clinical psychology at Florida — and then, in 1965, on a fellowship at UCLA, he watched Jim Simkin work. That was the end of his plan to go back to New York.

Two teachers, and why it mattered

Resnick is unusual in having trained closely with both Fritz Perls and Jim Simkin, and in being certified by both, by examination, in 1969. He was the youngest of that first generation.

What he took from each is the interesting part. From Perls came the demonstrative teaching: short, live pieces of work with a real person in front of a group, so that theory is shown rather than described. From Simkin came a rigorous phenomenological method — staying with what is actually observable, and not importing an interpretation. His own way of working was the two together, and it is a good deal more disciplined than the films of Perls suggest.

He was blunt about method. He rejected an eclectic Gestalt therapy — a bit of this and a bit of that, held together by the therapist's taste — and insisted that the approach is a coherent theory from which the practice follows. That position is why the empty chair irritated him: a technique detached from the theory that gave rise to it is just furniture.

Taking it to Europe

In 1969 Perls chose Resnick to introduce Gestalt therapy to Europe, and he ran his first workshop in Rotterdam that autumn. A few years later he and Jan Rainwater organised the first Summer Residential training, with therapists from the United States and Yugoslavia; it has run every year since and is probably the oldest annual psychotherapy training programme in the world.

The scale of what followed is easy to understate. Participants came from twenty-five countries, went home, and started training programmes of their own, often inviting the faculty on afterwards. Gary Yontef, Lynne Jacobs, and Hunter Beaumont taught on it; the guest faculty over the years included Erving Polster, Edwin and Sonia Nevis, Malcolm Parlett, Jean-Marie Robine, and Dan Bloom. A very large share of the Gestalt therapists practising in Europe today can trace their training to that programme in a step or two.

He kept up sixteen to eighteen weeks of teaching in Europe a year, for fifty years.

Homeorhesis: the correction he wanted to be remembered for

Gestalt theory had long leaned on homeostasis — the idea that an organism regulates itself back to a point of balance. Resnick thought that was mechanical and, worse, wrong about people. He proposed homeorhesis instead: not a return to a fixed point, but the holding of a trajectory. A river keeps its course while every drop in it moves.

The clinical consequence is not academic. If health is a fixed set-point, therapy aims to restore what was. If health is a trajectory, then the question is not how to get you back to normal but whether you are moving, and how you regain the path after being knocked off it. Nothing is meant to hold still, and a person who has stopped moving is the problem to be worked with rather than the goal.

Of the three things he said he wanted to be remembered for, this was one.

Couples: from fusion to connection

The second was the couples work he developed with Rita Resnick, his wife and co-founder of GATLA. Their argument is that the model most couples inherit is a fusion model: two people merge into a single unit, difference is a threat, and individuality is something to apologise for. In Gestalt terms that is confluence — a boundary dissolved rather than crossed — and it is precisely why so many such relationships quietly stop working.

They proposed a connection model in its place. Connection requires two people to connect: two distinct individuals, in a rhythm of coming together and separating, rather than one merged organism trying to hold still. Resnick framed the whole thing as the basic human dilemma — how to be connected to another person and still keep a self.

His description of intimacy is the part most people remember: intimacy is when you are not watching yourself and not watching the other. Not split, in other words, and not managing the encounter from somewhere outside it.

“Chicken soup is poison”

His first published article, in Perls's own festschrift around 1967, carried that title, and the phrase followed him for the rest of his career.

The target is the well-meant intervention that soothes rather than helps: the sympathy that steps in to take the discomfort away, closes down what was about to be felt, and leaves the person exactly where they were, but comforted. It feels like kindness on both sides of the room. Resnick's point was that it protects the therapist more than the client, and that being met honestly is worth more than being made to feel better.

He also wrote on shame — “The Recursive Loop of Shame” in Gestalt Review in 1997 — which is the same concern from the other direction.

Why he made the films

Resnick spent decades filming his own clinical work, alone and with Rita, and he was explicit about why: he wanted to replace the picture of Gestalt therapy the public had inherited from Perls's Gloria session in 1965. That film is still, sixty years later, how most students first see the approach, and it shows a seventy-year-old showman working in a manner nobody trains in now.

He never wrote the book on couples he always meant to write. He wrote it many times in his head, by his own account, and left the films instead.

That is the argument for watching him next to Perls rather than in place of him. The theory is recognisably the same; almost everything about the conduct of it is different.