Historical development

Fritz Perls was a German Jewish psychoanalyst who fled with his wife Lore to South Africa to escape Nazi oppression. After the war the couple emigrated to New York City, which had become by the late 1940s and early 1950s, a center of intellectual, artistic, and political experimentation.

Early influences

Frederick Perls was educated as a Medical Doctor in Germany. He was trained in Psychoanalysis and became a psychiatrist. He assisted Kurt Goldstein at Frankfurt University where he met his wife Lore Posner (Laura) who had a doctorate in Gestalt Psychology. They fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in South Africa. During their years in South Africa they also became influenced by Jan Smuts and his "holism". In 1936 Fritz Perls attended a psychoanalyst's conference in Marienbad, Czechoslovakia, where he presented a paper on oral resistances, mainly based on Laura Perls' notes on breastfeeding their children. Perls and the paper were turned down.[citation needed] (Perls did present his paper in 1936 but it met with 'deep disaproval' (In and Out the Garbage Pail, Fritz Perls, 1969)

The seminal book

The seminal work was Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, published in 1951; co-authored by Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, and Ralph Hefferline (a university psychology professor, and sometime patient of Fritz Perls). As it turns out, most of the original Part II of the book was written by Paul Goodman from the notes of Fritz Perls, and contains the meat of the theory. It was supposed to go first. The publishers decided that Part II, written by Hefferline, fit more into the nascent self-help ethos of the day, and made it Part I, making for a less interesting introduction to the theory. Isadore From, a leading early theorist of Gestalt therapy, taught Part II for an entire year to his students, going through it phrase by phrase.

First instances of practice

Fritz and Lore (now Laura) founded the first Gestalt Institute in New York City in 1952. Isadore From became a patient, first of Fritz and then of Laura. Fritz soon anointed Isadore a trainer and also gave him some patients. Isadore lived in New York until his death, at 75 in 1993, and was known worldwide for his philosophical and intellectually rigorous take on Gestalt therapy. A brilliant, witty and sometimes caustic man, From was very much the philosopher of the first-generation Gestalt therapists. Acknowledged as a supremely gifted clinician, he was unfortunately phobic of writing and the few things committed to paper are transcriptions of interviews.[1] Jim Simkin was a psychologist who also became a client of Perls and then a co-trainer with Perls in California. Simkin was responsible for Perls coming to California where he attempted to begin a psychotherapy practice. Ultimately, being a peripatetic trainer and workshop leader was a better fit for Fritz' personality. Simkin and Perls co-led some of the early (for California) training groups at Esalen.

The schism

In the 1960s Perls became infamous for his public workshops at Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Isadore From referred to some of Fritz' several day workshops as "hit-and-run" therapy because of its emphasis on showmanship with little or no follow-through, but Perls never considered these workshops to be true therapy. Rather, he felt he was giving demonstrations of key points for a largely professional audience. Unfortunately, some films and tapes of his work were what most graduate students were exposed to as the "real" Gestalt therapy.

Jim Simkin went from co-leading training groups with Fritz to purchasing a property next to Esalen and starting his own training center, which he ran until his death in 1984. Here he refined his precise laser-like version of Gestalt therapy, training psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors and social workers within a very rigorous residential training model.

When Fritz Perls left New York City for California, there began to be a split between those who saw Gestalt therapy as a therapeutic approach with great potential (this view was best represented by Isadore From, who practiced and taught mainly in New York, and by the members of the Cleveland Institute, co-founded by From) and those who saw Gestalt therapy not just as a therapeutic modality but as a way of life. The East Coast, New York-Cleveland axis was often appalled by the notion of Gestalt therapy leaving the consulting room and becoming a way-of-life (see "Gestalt prayer") in the West Coast of the 1960s. A alternate view of this split sees Perls in his last years continuing to develop his a-theoretical and phenomenological perspective methodological while others, inspired by From, were inclined to a rigorous theoretical activity which verged on replacing experience with ideas.

The split continues between what has been called "East Coast" GT and "West Coast" GT, at least from a US-centric point of view. However, the way-of-life view seems to be fading from US Gestalt as people move on from the 1960s. Esalen is still functioning in Big Sur. The widow of Esalen's co-founder Dick Price, Christine Price, continues to hold Gestalt workshops there, and many Gestalt therapists world-wide continued to be instructed by the life and teachings of Perls..

Post-Perls

In 1969 Fritz Perls left the USA to start a Gestalt community at Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, Canada. He died almost a year later on 14 March 1970 in Chicago. One member of the Gestalt community was Barry Stevens. Her book about that phase of her life, Don' t Push the River, became very popular. She developed her own form of Gestalt therapy body work, which is essentially a concentration on the awareness of body processes.

The Polsters

Erv and Miriam Polster started a training center in La Jolla, which also became very well known, as did their book, Gestalt Therapy Integrated, in the 1970s.[citation needed]

They had an influential role in advancing the concept of contact. A disturbance described by Miriam and Erv Polster was "deflection", referring to a means of avoiding contact by jumping around from one thing to another and never staying in the same place for very long. All the instances of a disturbance have a pathological and a non-pathological aspect. It is appropriate for the infant and mother to become confluent, for example, or two lovers, but inappropriate for client and therapist. When the latter pair becomes confluent, there can be no growth because there is no boundary at which the one can contact the other; the client will not be able to learn anything new because the therapist is simply an extension of the client, so to speak.

Source: Wikipedia