go to 2nd part
The above question permits answers ranging from "absolutely nothing"
to "they're basically the same thing". I have phrased it in that way because
I suspect it is possible for the answers those present will give to cover the entire
spectrum between these two poles. For me, the question means that I have taken on
the task of demonstrating how Gestalt therapy and Gestalt theory are related to
each other and that they have decisive parts in common.
Preparing for this presentation, I increasingly got the impression that by taking
on this task I had manoeuvred myself into a position of paralysing slackness. How
much more attractive would it have been to define a "good" thing versus
a "bad" thing using bold polemics? Why did I have to take on a task which
demanded the psychic maturity of me to be convincing "without anger and jealousy",
using no more than factual arguments? - After I had spent plenty of time feeling
sorry for myself, I had an idea:
"I know you'd rather have your peace quietly drinking your pints of beer than
explain yet again why you get along like you do", I told the Gestalt theoretician
and the Gestalt therapist who had made themselves at home on my "psycho-physical
level" (psychophysisches Niveau = PPN) or - more simply put - were vegetating
in my garden of life. "But what", I continued, "if you pretended,
for a good cause, that you had to worry about the other diluting your beer with
water or spiking it with spirits, or imagine an intelligent young woman entering
the scene and each of you wanting to take her home afterwards?"
The latter image struck home with both of them, and the Gestalt therapist - we'll
call him Fritz - instantly began to gibe, "Age goes before beauty - you go
first." Theo, the Gestalt theoretician, rebuffed on the spot, "Sex is
your area of expertise, of course. Regarding age, at least I've stayed young, especially
in my way of thinking, which I sometimes doubt you have. I totally go along with
Mary HENLE (1978) and Maria RICKERS-OVSIANKINA and Rudolf
ARNHEIM on this. RICKERS-OVSIANKINA wrote to me (letter of the 8th of December 1978)
that she was worried about the too far-reaching and somewhat naive statements made
by people like Fritz PERLS. And ARNHEIM is even more unequivocal (letter of the
10th of May 1979): He writes that in the United States the prospects for clinical
psychology are bleak, 'mostly due to the influence of the unspeakable Fritz PERLS
whose abuse of the term Gestalt has lead to dreadful confusion and degeneration'.
So I suggest you keep your first name secret if you want to be taken seriously by
a Gestalt theoretician. Your great Fritz PERLS was really a philanderer first and
foremost, wasn't he?"
Fritz: "And why are you putting on airs like this? In your case it was nothing
but the wish to put me in the shade with a woman which has turned you on so much
that you're being unfair and are trying to get at me with quotes and untruthfully
moralising insinuations. But that's not the way it works. I won't even get involved
in a discussion about Fritz PERLS as a person. Look at your own horn! I'll start
from an entirely different angle: Maybe you really haven't quite realised yet that
Gestalt therapy has got Gestalt theory down from its academic ivory-tower where
it might otherwise have continued to prove the ideas so revolutionary for human
sciences on simple geometrical shapes until Doomsday. And I do mean 'revolutionary
ideas'; but you had adjusted so well to this entire scientific ado which is so intent
on pseudo-exactitude (including its elitist arrogance) and poses on the pedestal
of alleged objectivity, that there was hardly anything left of the humanist notions
of the holistic approach."
"All right, I'll get down to the facts now," said Theo. "But first
I'd like to point out that your matter-of-factness wasn't exactly truthful. Academic
Gestalt theory has never been as daft as you made it out to be, but I'll come back
to that. The fact is that Gestalt therapy has developed into an irrational movement
of salvation. In view of this I'd rather stay up in my ivory-tower of precise abstraction.
I don't want anything to do with this humanist nonsense where holistic means that
everything is somehow related to everything else!"
Listening to Theo and Fritz going on about their views I'm beginning to get impatient;
they obviously need a mediator if there is to be a chance of initiating a factual
dispute. The role-play seems to have become quite serious. "You two, I'd like
to ask you a few questions now and make sure you stick to the subject. Firstly:
Why is Gestalt therapy actually called Gestalt therapy?"
Fritz: "PERLS called it that deliberately. According to him his theoretical
knowledge and practical experiences which gained crucial importance for the articulation
of his criticism of psychoanalysis and for the description of his own therapeutic
method are owing to his encounter with Gestalt theory. He wrote, 'I am indebted
to Professor K. GOLDSTEIN for first introducing me to Gestalt psychology. Unfortunately,
in 1926 when I was working at the neurological institute in Frankfurt I was still
too preoccupied with the orthodox psychoanalytical method, and was therefore only
able to absorb a fraction of what I was offered' (PERLS, 1942, cited from German
edition, 1978, 9; Vorwort aus dem Jahr 1942). But even if he hadn't been
to lectures of Gestalt theoreticians as a medical student in Berlin, he certainly
attended a few in Frankfurt, held by Adhémar GELB (who supervised the dissertation
of his wife Lore) and probably also by WERTHEIMER, to whom he dedicated his first
book (Ego, Hunger and Aggression, first published in South Africa in 1942,
in England in 1947) when he began to realise the importance of his experiences with
Gestalt theoreticians. Whenever he starts talking about the basics of his own psychotherapeutic
approach, he refers to views and terms pertaining to Gestalt theory!"
Theo interrupts, "I'm having to restrain myself. You want to prove that after
psychoanalysis Gestalt theory became and remained his psychological habitat. That
may be, but I've also heard that GOLDSTEIN was a wee bit embarrassed when he later
discovered PERLS among his listeners in the United States. ARNHEIM talks about the
'entirely unauthorised usurpation of this name (i.e. that of the term Gestalt)
through Fritz PERLS' (personal message of the 11th of December 1979). - A touch
of Gestalt theoretical 'stable odour' mixed with psychoanalysis - PERLS (1969, 4)
even admits to not having read most of FREUD's books and even fewer Gestalt theoretical
papers. Basically you've got a mixture of two different fragrances which at best
serve to produce a perfume. Psychoanalysts should be grateful that he has chosen
Gestalt theory for his disavowal."
Fritz: "Let me start with the 'stable odour'. I don't think so little of it.
Whoever has got his nose filled with the right intimate scent can never be totally
wrong in his judgement of where his home is. [fn.
1] And that's what it was like for Fritz PERLS as well. He realized the
significance the Gestalt theoretical approach gains for people, for the individual
as well as for the community, provided it is systematically translated into practical
therapeutic action. Who among the Gestalt theoreticians, apart from Kurt LEWIN after
his emigration, has engaged with the confusing diversity of immediate human relationships?"
Theo: "Surely, there have been other approaches: the old paper by SCHULTE (1924)
titled 'An Attempt at a Theory of the Paranoid Idea of Reference and Delusion Formation';
LUCHINS (e.g. 1949, 1964) and FROMM-OPPENHEIMER (e.g., 1968) studied clinical psychology
in the United States, almost simultaneously with PERLS; ARNHEIM engaged in critical
analysis of the arts and the film medium (cf., e.g., 1978); and there are a number
of philosophical, almost psychotherapeutic and political publications by Max WERTHEIMER
in the United States (1934, 1935, 1937, 1940)..."
Fritz: "... which no German Gestalt theoretician has found relevant enough
to be translated, not even Wolfgang METZGER who has after all translated Productive
Thinking (WERTHEIMER, 1964) and whose profound agreement with his teacher
WERTHEIMER is supported by his important book Creative Freedom (Schöpferische
Freiheit, 1962). You could actually talk to METZGER about Gestalt therapy
without him immediately turning up his nose. But apart from that, most German
Gestalt theoreticians disowned their own fathers after the war unless papers
fitted tolerably into the paradigm of experimental statistophilia, to coin a
new term. And even in the United States neither WERTHEIMER nor LUCHINS achieved
any acclaim or influence with the above mentioned treatises. [fn. 2]
Of course I'll readily concede that PERLS wasn t the incarnation of Gestalt theory
pure and simple (who is?), but he has impressed so many people in his concrete work
with them that they have spread - and who could be surprised at it? - even his theoretical
inconsistencies and have on top of that, according to the principles of the development
of rumours, distorted whatever was indeed acceptable. These people shouldn't have
been deserted. Mary HENLE's public discussion of PERLS in 1978,
demonstrating remarkable passion and the obviously irrevocable intention of tearing
him to pieces, came at least 20 years too late. Was LEWIN's fate any different in
respect of the delay of discussion? No! And this has resulted in the fact that many
representatives of group dynamics refer to him even though they have at best read
his last programmatical papers, but have no idea about his Gestalt theoretical background
(Jörg FENGLER, personal message to Jürgen STEINKOPFF of the 2nd of December
1977), which in turn has inflationary tendencies when it comes to theory and practice
in this field. The group dynamics research of LEWIN hardly existed for academic
Gestalt theoreticians. And this split too had already started in the United States."
Theo: "You've mentioned METZGER. He had reviewed the American LEWIN rather
early on (cf. 1963, 1975). And very positively. And don't forget also many of those
here present." -
"Right, let me interrupt you two once more. I'm finding all this reasonably
interesting, but in regard to the topic I gave to you it seems a bit like talking
about the world and his wife.
But your conversation has made me realise one important thing: It seems to me that
Gestalt theoreticians of all orientations are to blame to some extent for the dissociated
development of their own approach. After the dispersion of the former centres of
Gestalt theory by the racist civil service legislation of the Nazis, too many theoreticians
considered their own pile of muck to be the best and preferred to 'leave the field'
when a realisation of the (lip) service to the whole and the differentiation of
Gestalt characteristics would have required laborious and careful analysis of the
achievements of others. So now I'd like to ask you, Fritz: Which Gestalt theoretical
views and concepts does PERLS rely on?"
Fritz: "Well, I can think of so many that I hardly know where to start. No,
I do, I'll start with a quote which has only recently come to my attention in PERLS's
autobiography In and Out the Garbage Pail (1969, unpaginated, pp. 6-9, beginning
with the author's text). In it he comments on 'self-actualization':
'Self-actualization is a modest term. It has been glorified and distorted by hippies, artists, and, I am sorry to say, by many humanistic psychologists. It has been put forth as a program and achievement. This is the result of reification, the need to make a thing out of a process. In this case it even means to deify and glorify a locus, for self indicates merely a 'where' of happening, self to be contrasted (and making sense only through this contrast) with otherness.Am I becoming too philosophical?'"
... A wheat germ has the potential of becoming a plant and the wheat plant is its actualization.
Now: self actualization means the wheat will actualize itself as a wheat plant and never as a rye plant.
... No eagle will want to be an elephant, no elephant to be an eagle. They 'accept' themselves; they accept them-'selves'. No, they don't even accept themselves, for this would mean possible rejection. They take themselves for granted, No, they don't even take themselves for granted, for this would imply a possibility of otherness. They just are. They are what they are what they are.
How absurd it would be if ... the eagle wanted to have the strength and thick skin of the beast.
Leave this to the human - to try to be something he is not - to have ideals that cannot be reached, to be cursed with perfectionism so as to be safe from criticism, and to open the road to unending mental torture.
The gap between one's potential and its actualization on the one side of the ledger, and the distortion of this authenticity on the other, becomes apparent. 'Shouldism' rears its ugly head. We 'should' eliminate, disown, repress, negate many features and sources of genuineness and add, pretend, play at, develop roles unsupported by our élan vital, resulting in phony behavior of different degrees. Instead of the wholeness of a real person, we have the fragmentation, the conflicts, the unfelt despair of the paper people.
Homeostasis, the subtle mechanism of the self-regulating and self-controlling organism, is replaced by an external superimposed control-madness undermining the survival value of the person and the species. Psychosomatic symptoms, despondency, lassitude and compulsive behavior replace the joie de vivre.
The deepest split, long ingrained in our culture and thus taken for granted, is the mind/body dichotomy: the superstition that there is a separation, yet interdependency, of two different kinds of substance, the mental and the physical. ...
... We are organisms, we (...) do not have an organism. We are one wholesome unit, but we are at liberty to abstract many aspects from this totality. Abstract, not subtract, not split off. We can abstract, according to our interest, the behavior of that organism or its social function or its physiology or its anatomy or this or that, but we have to stay alert and not take any abstraction for a 'part' of the total organism. ... We can have a compositum of abstractions, we can approximate the knowing of a person or a thing, but we never can have the total awareness of (to talk in Kantian language) das Ding an sich, the thing itself.
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