A Look at the world of Fritz Perls - creator of Gestalt Therapy

Fritz Perls was both a showman and a man with a sense of humour, who loved to provoke and to frustrate people, perhaps with the intent of startling them into awareness. At first sight it may look as though in this assertion he is recommending a drop from human to animal consciousness, that we let go of our rationality and follow the senses wherever they lead us. Going a little deeper it seems he is telling us that in developing the mind we have lost touch with our immediate reality, and so with our understanding of who we are. In this essay we shall be looking into exactly what he did mean, whether his dictum serves any useful purpose and how it may be applied and expanded upon thirty years later. In particular, what does he mean by “mind” and “senses”?

In contemporary western culture we have had a long training from early childhood and often right through university in developing the mind. We learn to be rational, to think things out ahead of time, and according to Perls we lose contact with the here and now. In his unpublished work Psychiatry in a New Key he explains that “mind” has at least two meanings: attention as in “I put my mind to it” and fantasy as in “I saw it in my mind’s eye”. (Perls, 1950’s). He says that there is no problem with the faculty of attention, indeed it is inextricably linked with awareness, a quality which he and most other psychotherapists regard as essential to human development. It is the aspect he describes as fantasy or picturing reality to ourselves which overoccupies us to such an extent that it overshadows everything else. He expands on this later in his life by saying that that “if you look a bit closer, what you call ‘mind’ is fantasy. It’s the rehearsal stage. Freud once said: ‘Thinking is rehearsing’.” (Perls 1969, p.47). We stay inside our minds, working out what to do and considering all the disastrous or wonderful results, which may occur, afraid to simply jump into our lives and see what happens. This experiment of seeing what happens is a fundamental to the gestalt approach.

He differentiates between thinking and understanding: “As long as you have your senses, as long as you can see and hear and realize what’s going on, then you understand.” (Perls 1969, p. 25). To understand, to feel what is happening here and now, we have to let go of that aspect of mind which is always busy going somewhere else and fails to notice what is directly in front of it. Perls is not the only one to point this out. Pablo Picasso (as cited in Polster and Polster, 1973, pp. 15-16) says, “Everybody wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of birds? Why does one love a night, a flower, everything that surrounds man, without trying to understand it all? … Those who try to explain a picture are most of the time on the wrong track.” Here the artist, Picasso, is using the word understand in another way, meaning exactly that aspect of mind which Perls is asking us to let go of. As soon as we try to understand a painting, a flower or a beautiful sunset we lose the ability to feel its reality, to truly understand what it is.

To clarify what he means by senses Perls (1969) gives an example from the Japanese film The Seven Samurai in which one of the warriors is so alert that when anyone comes near to him he is already sensing their presence. If he were lost in his mind or anywhere other than in the present moment he would be a dead man. He sees what is there and not what he might imagine to be there. In these two examples we see how the experience of the artist and the warrior bears out what Perls is saying. Both of them have to be in the moment in order to express the beauty of that moment or in order to survive, and to do this they have to be in their senses.

Not everyone would agree. Joel Latner (1992) says of the dictum we are considering that “this ran directly counter to Gestalt therapy’s holistic commitment to embracing everything the individual could contribute to the emerging figure: the intellectual and spiritual as well as the physical and the emotional.” However, when reading the works of Fritz Perls with attention it is hard to see that he could be suggesting a rejection of the intellectual or the spiritual when he says “lose your mind.” He might have been understood more clearly if he had spoken of letting go of the mind.

In a state of let go it becomes possible to be aware of one’s immediate sensual experience. Still, when one looks attentively, the mind is present and active. The reader may like to experiment with this. Try to drop the mind altogether and you will see that this is not a possibility. Some mental activity continues. Try a little harder and the mind will react, fighting for its position. Try not to think of monkeys for one minute, and suddenly monkeys will appear from every direction, clamouring for attention! If this seems unlikely, try it and see. However, it is possible to shift the focus of attention from the mind to the senses, allowing the mind to form the background while the senses become the foreground figure. The intellectual and the spiritual remain available whenever one wants to go to them.

Polster and Polster (1973) on the other hand are interested in moving forward with Perls’ ideas rather than refuting them. They talk of a union between awareness and expression. This union cannot become manifest when people who are lonely “eat, those who are angry make love, and those who are sexually aroused make speeches. In such perversions of the relationship between feeling and doing lies the crux of self-alienation.” (p.214). They trace a progression from Wilhelm Reich, who led Perls to see that the mind creates an armouring in the body structure which has to be loosened to release natural behaviour, to their own work and beyond. They have moved from a concept, which distinguishes the mind from the senses to one of union.

The problem has not been with the mind as such, but rather one of too much emphasis. When the mind is always in the foreground the remainder of the being will atrophy, yet a man who stayed always in the realm of the senses would lose touch with the subtleties of the mind and the powers of reason. What he needs is the ability to shift at will from the one to the other. The whole man or woman is the one who has his or her whole being available. In the very nature of things one aspect will always remain in the background whilst another figures in the foreground

In my own experience I have found that there remains one more dimension to consider, the possibility of letting go both mind and senses and resting in emptiness. This too has often been misunderstood as a denial of mind and body, rather than being seen as a question of focus. When the mind, the emotions or the body need attention it can be given freely; when they have nothing to do it remains to move into emptiness rather than remaining unnecessarily busy. The rest offered by this experience of meditation is more complete than the rest offered by the deepest of sleep, and one returns ready for action, if that is what is needed.

Perls appears to disagree. He says (1969) that one is always aware of something, that one cannot be aware of nothing. To me this implies that he has remained one step short of completion, but this is a moot point as it is so dependent on one’s personal experience. One wise man, Osho Rajneesh, has said, “You cannot even imagine how much silence can descend upon you when the head is not there. Your physical head will be there, but the involvement, the obsession, is not there.” (Rajneesh, 1979, p. 101). This experience of silence or no-thingness is the step, which is usually missed in psychotherapy, and this is the ultimate background against which every other figure may be seen. Perls might have found this concept easier to relate with when expressed in another way by the Zen master Hakuin, cited by Alan Watts (1961, p.173): “This very earth is the Lotus Land of purity, and this very body the Body of Buddha.” When we come totally into our senses we find that we have been in paradise all along.

Enough of philosophy, is all this of any practical use to the therapist or counsellor? In one of his last works Fritz Perls gave the example of the client who often experienced headaches. He asked his ‘patient’ to stay with the pain rather than attempting to avoid or dispose of it, to be in his senses experiencing what was happening rather than using the mind to go elsewhere and avoid the experience. As the client stayed with the pain he realised that his headaches were functioning as an interruption of his need to cry, and began to weep. “He has transformed a psychosomatic symptom into an expression of the total self, because in his short outburst of despair he was wholly and totally involved.” (Perls 1976, p.69) As long as the client stayed with his mental experience he held off the tears by armouring himself as Reich explained, and experienced instead the tensions of a headache. When he let go of the mind and came into his senses he experienced the need to cry. Again and again in reading Fritz Perls one comes across these very simple examples of the way he worked, and one sees that despite his reputation for confrontation he also had a great capacity to empathise with and to support his clients. In order to bring this client to the point of realising his need to cry he had first to guide him to feel the pain of the headache. In the beginning the patient would have preferred to avoid doing this by dismissing the experiment as nonsense.

Fritz Perls was not a man to waste time or words. If he had been he would most probably have died in Nazi Germany. He demands a lot from his audience. When he says “stop thinking” (Perls 1969, p.69) he does not mean stop thinking for ever and ever amen. In fact he himself constructs his arguments with a great deal of careful thinking. What he means is - right now stop thinking and feel what is happening in the body and in the emotions, in the realm of the senses. Many in the field of psychotherapy have said that it is helpful to both client and counsellor to stay in the here and now. Sigmund Freud has defined “evenly hovering attention” as the optimal state of mind for the psychoanalyst (as cited by Rubin, 1996, p.24), but he does not spell out how to achieve this state. One of Perls’ major contributions has been his ability to elucidate the way in which both client and therapist may come to an awareness of the present moment by feeling what is happening now. He often said that “now” is his favourite word.

REFERENCES

Latner, J. (1992). The Theory of Gestalt Therapy. In Nevis, Edwin C., (Ed.), Gestalt Therapy Perspectives and Applications. Cleveland: Gestalt Institute of Cleveland (GIC) Press. Perls, F. (1950’s). Psychiatry in a new key. Retrieved April 7, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.gestalt.org/newkey.htm Perls, F. (1969). Gestalt therapy verbatim. Lafayette, California: Real People Press. Perls, F. (1976). The gestalt approach and eye witness to therapy. New York: Bantam Books. Polster E. & Polster, M. (1973). Gestalt therapy integrated: Contours of theory and practice. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Rajneesh, O. (1979). My way: the way of the white clouds. New York: Grove Press. Rubin, J. (1996). Psychotherapy and buddhism: Toward an integration. New York: Plenum Press. Watts, A. (1961). Psychotherapy east and west. New York: Pantheon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Corey G., (2001). Theory and practice of counseling and psychotherapy. (6th ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks-Cole/Wadsworth. Kelly, G. F., (1996). Using meditative techniques in Psychotherapy. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 36(3), 49-67. Retrieved March 1, 2001 from Academic Search Elite EBSCOhost (AN: 9607101352). Latner, J. (1992). The Theory of Gestalt Therapy. In Nevis, Edwin C., (Ed.), Gestalt Therapy Perspectives and Applications. Cleveland: Gestalt Institute of Cleveland (GIC) Press. Perls, F. (1950’s). Psychiatry in a new key. Retrieved April 7, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.gestalt.org/newkey.htm Perls, F. (1969). Gestalt therapy verbatim. Lafayette, California: Real People Press. Perls, F. (1972). In and out the garbage pail. New York: Bantam Books. Perls, F. (1976). The gestalt approach and eye witness to therapy. New York: Bantam Books. Polster E. & Polster, M. (1973). Gestalt therapy integrated: Contours of theory and practice. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Rajneesh, O. (1979). My way: the way of the white clouds. New York: Grove Press. Rosenfeld, E. (1977). A conversation with Laura Perls. Retrieved April 7, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.gestalt.org/perlsint.htm Rubin, J. (1996). Psychotherapy and buddhism: Toward an integration. New York: Plenum Press. Watts, A. (1961). Psychotherapy east and west. New York: Pantheon. Welwood, J. (1985). Awakening the heart: East/west approaches to psychotherapy and the healing relationship. Boston: Shambhala Publications. Wysong, J. (1978). A conversation with Erving and Miriam Polster. Retrieved April 7, 2001 from the World Wide Web: http://www.gestalt.org/postview.htm