Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951)
Frederick S Perls, Ralph Hefferline & Paul Goodman
Review (c) Copyright Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Psychology Classics
Reproduced by kind permission of the author.
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“…much of the constant effort you supposed to hold yourself together is actually unnecessary. You do not fall apart, go to pieces, or ‘act crazy’, if you let up on your deliberate holding back, forcing attention, constant ‘thinking’ and active interference with the trends of your behavior. Instead, your experience, begins to cohere and to organize into more meaningful wholes.”
“Some of us have no heart or no intuition, some have no legs to stand on, no genitals, no confidence, no eyes or ears.”
In a nutshell
Be alive every minute in the physical world you are in. Listen to your body; don’t live in abstractions.
In a similar vein
RD Laing The Divided Self
Karen Horney Our Inner Conflicts
Carl Rogers On Becoming A Person
Milton Erickson My Voice Will Go With You
The Esalen Institute on the Californian coast at Big Sur was an epicenter of the 1960s social revolution. Literally ‘on the edge’, perched on steep hills high above the Pacific Ocean, it attracted people who wanted to push the boundaries of the self and break free of society’s constraints.
Fritz Perls, psychologist, arrived at Esalen in 1964. Having grown up in avant-garde Berlin and fled from Hitler’s Germany for the United States, Esalen must have seemed like a spiritual home, and spent a lot of time there before his death in 1970.
Charismatic and sometimes cantankerous, Perls was one of the early West Coast personal development gurus. His philosophy was that the modern man or woman thinks too much, when they should be experiencing, feeling, doing; and his slogan ‘lose your mind and come to your senses’ chimed perfectly with the counter-culture.
Gestalt Therapy, written with the brilliant radical Paul Goodman and a college professor and patient of Perls, Ralph Hefferline, became the manifesto of a new type of psychotherapy. Though he had trained in Freudian psychoanalysis, Perls had long dispensed with the couch, instead finding that confrontational group sessions were often the best way of piercing a person’s psychological ‘body armor’ and letting their true, vibrant selves out.
For a book about excited feeling, Gestalt Therapy can be a tedious read requiring a fair amount of concentration. Its purpose, however, was to lay out the theoretical basis for Gestalt therapy ideas. Its theme of shaking off the straitjackets of normal societal roles to live in the ‘here and now’ made it a very confronting work. It is easy to forget how new it would have seemed in 1950s America.
Gestalt = wholeness
Have you ever seen those pictures where, looked at one way you see a beautiful woman, but then from the same lines an old hag appears? (See the cover of this book for an example). If so, you will have had a gestalt or ‘aha!’ experience. There is no exact English translation, but the German word gestalt roughly means ’shape’ or ‘form’, or the wholeness of a thing. The Gestalt school of psychology (associated with figures such as Wertheimer, Koehler, Lewin, Goldstein, Whyte and Korzybski) showed that in experiments to do with visual perception, the brain always tries to ‘complete the picture’ when incomplete images are put before it. We are programmed to find a ‘figure’ against a ‘ground’ or background, that is, to give attention to one thing at the expense of another and find meaning amid a chaos of color and shape.
Perls took ideas from Gestalt psychology and fashioned from it his own form of therapy. He wanted to apply the idea of wholeness to personal well-being, and borrowed the notion that a person is always being shaped by a certain dominant need – the ‘figure’ – and when this need is satisfied the need drops back into the background (’the ground’), making way for another one. In this way all organisms regulate themselves, getting what they need for their survival.
The issue with human beings, however, is that our complexity can muddy the waters of the simple need-satisfaction equation. We can repress some needs and over-emphasize others; our idea of survival can get warped, believing we must maintain ourselves in a certain way, even if to an outsider what we are doing is stupid. The person takes this need for granted, as it becomes connected totally with his sense of self. But it is a self that it is no longer fluid or elastic, a neurotic self. It has stopped being aware.
In traditional Freudian analysis, the ‘doctor’ tries to ‘understand’ such a person by trying to delve into their mind; by treating them as an object. The Gestalt therapist, in contrast, appreciates the person as part of their environment. The mind, the body, the environment, are all part of the one consideration. Instead of psychology’s tendency to break things down into pieces, Gestalt therapy apprehends the whole. In Perls’ words: “[The] Gestalt outlook is the original, undistorted, natural approach to life; that is, to man’s thinking, acting, feeling. The average person, having been raised in an atmosphere full of splits, has lost his Wholeness, his Integrity.”
Contact and confluence
Smell, touch, taste, hearing and seeing are our ‘contact boundary’ with the world. When a person has begun to think of him or herself as an isolated object, they have ceased to be a sensing, contacting, excited being. Perls recognized how modern life, sitting in air-conditioned offices, anesthetizes us. We purposefully reduce our level of awareness to create a more ordered existence with no surprises. But what do people say on their deathbed? Not ‘I wish I had sought more security or earned more money’, but ‘I wish I had taken chances, done more things’ – that is, had more contact with life.
The person in genuine contact with their environment is in a state of excitement. They are feeling, one way or another, all the time. The neurotic, in contrast, instead of risking real contact with the world, withdraws into the inner world he or she knows, and does not grow. The healthy person engages with life: “eating and food-getting, loving and making love, aggressing, conflicting, communicating, perceiving, learning” etc.
The opposite of contact is ‘confluence’, acting out of what you have been taught to do, out of habit, or seeing things as you ’should’ be seeing them. Perls gives the example of someone standing in a gallery looking at a work of modern art. The person feels they are directly perceiving the work, when in fact “…he is actually in contact with the art critic of his favorite journal.” People grow into the world with heavy expectations to change their basic nature into something they are not; This gap between our biological nature and society leads to holes in the person: “Some of us have no heart or no intuition, some have no legs to stand on, no genitals, no confidence, no eyes or ears.” In Gestalt therapy, people claimed the missing parts, and in the process got back lost aggression or sensitivity. Perls noted that “We have a peculiar polarity in this world: listening versus fighting. People who listen don’t fight, and people who fight don’t listen.”
Reading the book, you cannot but wonder: am I in contact, or in confluence? You may suddenly realize that something has gone missing.
Awareness of body and emotion
Perls saw a clear difference between introspection and awareness. Awareness was the “spontaneous sensing of what arises in you – of what you are doing, feeling, planning”. Introspection, on the other hand, was considering the same activities in an “evaluating, correcting, controlling, interfering way”.
The distinction is important, because traditionally psychology involves the assumption that we can analyze ourselves as if we were somehow separate to our brain and body. But such analysis only makes us neurotic; what brings us back to sanity and puts us in happy balance with the world is a reconnection with our senses.
We like to think that we can section off parts of ourselves from emotion, and be purely rational. In Western culture, we have been taught to experience emotions as something that happens periodically, but Perls believed that emotion was continuous. At any one time, if you really notice, you will be experiencing a feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness. Emotions derive from physical interaction with the environment. They are immediate and real and precede thought. If you do not know you are experiencing emotion in every moment, it is probable that you are not experiencing life in every moment. We should not be engaged in trying to control the emotions, since this is the way we are designed to function as physical beings responding the environment. To be always aware of your emotions is the wise way to be, as it provides present-time information about reality. To exist via abstractions literally separates us from what is real.
Gestalt Therapy contains many experiments Perls used to get people to increase awareness, such as telling people to ‘Feel your body!’ By lying still and feeling every part of your body, you would find some areas felt ‘dead’; in other parts you might experience pain or imbalance. Just the simple act of giving attention to certain areas of muscle or joints might lead you to conclusions as to why your neck is stiff or why there is pain in your stomach. Perls noted: “The neurotic personality creates its symptoms by unaware manipulation of muscles.” Often, the experiments would result in a person having the realization that they are either ‘a nagger or a person nagged at’.
In another experiment, Perls asked people to tell themselves what they are seeing and doing in each moment, that is ‘I am now sitting in this chair, this afternoon, looking at the table in front of me. This moment there is the sound of a car in the street and I now feel the sun on my face through the window. Etc. etc.” He would then ask the person what difficulties they are experiencing while they do it. They invariably answer ‘What difficulties?’ The discovery is that as long as you are fully in the present, noticing and feeling the environment around you, you are trouble free. Abstract worries and anxieties reenter only when you ‘leave’ your environment. Some people found the experience to cause impatience, boredom or anxiety, which according to Perls indicated how much their normal consciousness lacked ‘actuality’.
What is hidden can’t be transformed
The goal of Gestalt is to stop living life as if you were on automatic. Many people find that they live in actuality only a small amount of the time; when they consciously do it more, it can be a breakthrough. It is full awareness and attention that will resolve an issue, Perls taught, not rationalizing about it.
Most of us find that the parts of ourselves that we try to throttle into non-existence always come back. Yet purposeful reduction of awareness, or repression, means the issue can never be changed or resolved. If something terrible happened in the past, Perls taught that you had to bring it fully into the present, even act it out again, in order to ‘own’ it. Trying to ignore it had only given it more energy. When something is given full attention and awareness, only then will be the possibility that it can be altered or transformed.
Earnestness vs. responsibility
Perls believed that the healthy adult should not throw out completely the ways of the child. Spontaneity, imagination, curiosity, wonder were things we should keep – as all great artists and scientists do - and not be deadened by ‘responsibility’ and always making sense.
A child is superior to an adult in their earnestness, even when involved in play. He or she may leave an activity at a whim, but when they are doing it nothing else matters. Gifted people retain this very direct awareness, but the average adult is usually not interested enough in what they are doing. They do things because they ‘have to’. Few risks are taken, one minds one’s own business.
Perls points out that what we think of as being ‘responsible’ is a lot of the time simply closing ourselves off to living life intensely. As he puts it: “…habitual deliberateness, factuality, non-commitment, and excessive responsibility, traits of most adults, are neurotic; whereas spontaneity, imagination, earnestness and playfulness, and direct expression of feeling, traits of children, are healthy.”
Final comments
Perls’s philosophy of doing what you feel instead of doing what you ‘ought’ to do ensured his place in the hearts and minds of alternative types. His famous ‘Gestalt Prayer’ summed up of the spirit of the 60s:
I do my thing, and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you and I am I,
And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.
Sometimes the last line was left off the posters, as it didn’t seem to gel with the flower-power ethos. But then, Perls often made fun of the seekers of ‘joy’, ‘ecstasy’ and ‘highs’ and made a point of noting the hard work involved in his therapy. It was often unpleasant and raw and could reduce people to tears. No-one wanted to have their privacy invaded and be told about the holes in their personality. Yet Perls would point out that we can only move on after we admit we are stuck.
Like Milton Erickson, Perls was a master at reading body language. In group sessions, he would often be less interested in what a person said than the tone of their voice and how they were sitting. People were not allowed to discuss anyone not in the room, reinforcing the ‘here and now’ intensity of gestalt therapy. He considered himself a good ’shit detector’ in people, a skill vital in life that was a long way from the hazy ‘love and peace’ mantra of the times.
Perls also liked to talk about aggression. He believed that holding in anger denied that we were essentially animals. We stifle tiredness or boredom, but we should be like the cat, doing a great yawn and stretch to put ourselves back into action again. What the body wants, we should give it, in order to stay in equilibrium. Is there a part of yourself that you have cut off because it was anti-social or not worthy of a nice person? To come alive again, reclaim it.
Frederick Perls
Born in 1893 in Berlin, Perls gained his medical degree in 1926. On graduating he worked at the Institute for Brain Damaged Soldiers in Frankfurt, where he was influenced by Gestalt psychologists such as Kurt Goldstein, existential philosophy, and the neo-Freudians Karen Horney and William Reich.
In the early 1930s, with Germany becoming unsafe for Jews, Perls and his wife Laura moved to the Netherlands and then South Africa. There they established their own psychoanalytic practices and the South African Institute for Psychoanalysis. But they became critical of Freudian concepts, and slowly developed the gestalt method of practice, articulated in Ego, Hunger and Aggression: A Revision of Freud’s Theory and Method (1947). In 1946 they moved to New York, setting up an Institute of Gestalt Therapy in 1952. After separating, Fritz moved to California and Laura stayed in New York with the children. He came to Esalen in 1964.
The year before he died, Perls published Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (1969), which chronicles sessions held at Esalen, and his autobiography, In and Out of the Garbage Pail.
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