Gestalt Journal

EDITOR
AND
PUBLISHER Joe Wysong
BOARD
OF Judith Brown, Santa Barbara, CA
EDITORS Lynne Jacobs, Los Angeles, CA
Philip Lichtenberg, Rosemont, PA
Michael Vincent Miller, Newton, MA
Erving Polster, La Jolla, CA
Molly Rawle, Highland, NY
Gary Yontef, Santa Monica, CA
Joseph Zinker, Cleveland, OH
Isadore From, 1919-1994

Laura (Lore) Perls, 1905-1990
Miriam Polster, 1923 - 2001
The Gestalt Journal is published semiannually by The Center For

Gestalt Development, Inc., a not-for-profit, tax-exempt organization.
Yearly subscriptions are $38.00 for individuals and $50.00 for
institutions. Subscribers outside the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico must
add $10.00 for airmail delivery. Surface delivery is not available.
Payment must be in U.S. funds drawn on U.S. or Canadian banks or
by International Money Order. Order from and make remittances
payable to: The Gestalt Journal, P. O. Box 990, Highland, NY 12528-
0990. Telephone (845) 691-7192. Fax (775) 254-1855.
Email address: tgjournal@gestalt.org
Web page location: http://www. gestalt.org
Copyright 2001 by The Center for Gestalt Development, Inc.

THE
GESTALT
JOURNAL
Volume XXIV, Number 2, Fall, 2001
FROM THE EDITOR 5
THE SPEAKING BODY (Or, Why Did Wilhelm Reich

Go Crazy?) 11
Michael Vincent Miller
THE SONG OF THE SELF: Language and Gestalt

Therapy — Words of Fire, Words of Stone 31
Daniel Bloom
GESTALT THERAPY IDENTITY: The Search for

an Identity Continuum 45
Theo Skolnik
THE PARADOXICAL THEORY OF CHANGE 87

Arnold Beisser
TO THE MEMORY OF MIRIAM POLSTER 93

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS 99

FROM THE EDITOR
This is the last issue of The Gestalt Journal under my

editorship and the final one published under the auspices of
The Center for Gestalt Development, Inc. After twenty-four
years, it is time for new horizons for the Gestalt community
and for The Center for Gestalt Development as well. Begin-
ning with the spring, 2002 issue, The Gestalt Journal will become
The International Gestalt Journal and will be published by the
International Gestalt Therapy Association (IGTA).
The International Gestalt Journal will be under the
editorship of Frank-M. Staemmler from Wurzburg, Germany.
The consulting editor will be Michael Vincent Miller of Boston
and New York. Working with Staemmler and Miller will be the
IGJ editorial board: Enila Chagas (Brasilia, Brazil), Lynne
Jacobs (Los Angeles, USA), Jung-Kyu Kim (Seoul, Korea),
Peter Philippson (Manchester, England), Walter Ferreira da
The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 2
5
FROM THE EDITOR
Rosa Ribeiro (Brasilia, Brazil), Jean-Marie Robine (Bordeaux,
France), Sylvie Schoch de Neuforn (Paris, France), and Gary
Yontef (Los Angeles, USA).
The Journal’s publisher, the International Gestalt
Therapy Association, is what the name suggests – an organiza-
tion that will bring together the various regional groups in the
Gestalt therapy community into a meaningful, international
entity. Many regional groups have opened themselves to
international membership and international participation in
their conferences, but none have succeeded in creating an
internationally political organization with elected officials from
throughout the world. All remain politically dominated by the
regions they represent.
The International Gestalt Therapy Association has
successfully established a political structure that invites equal
participation by members from throughout the world. IGTA’s
Board of Directors is limited to one member from any one
country thus eliminating the possibility of domination by one
or two geographical regions. The current IGTA Board of
Directors consists of: Walter Arnold (Finland), Lilian Frazäo
(Brazil), Ole Ry Nielsen (Denmark), Eleanor O'Leary (Ire-
land), Miriam Sas De Guiter (Argentina), Giuliana Ratti
(Italy), Shraga Serok (Israel), Daan van Baalen (Norway), and
Gary Yontef (USA).
In addition to the publication of the International
Gestalt Journal, IGTA will also a sponsor an international
conference that will meet every other year in venues through-
out the world. IGTA’s inaugural conference will meet in
Montreal from August 7-11, 2002. Information about the
conference can be found on the IGTA web site at www.ges-
talt.org/igta.htm.
Although the advances in technology are many, most
are still in their adolescent stage and IGTA is the first interna-
tional Gestalt organization to hold board meetings, confer-
ence planning committee discussions, and other key dialogues
by e-mail thus bridging the communication gaps usually
created by cross-time-zone communication.
6
FROM THE EDITOR
If you would like membership information, you can
find it on the web at www.gestalt.org/igta.htm or by writing
IGTA at P. O. Box 1045, Highland NY 12528-1045 USA.
* * * * * *
The Center for Gestalt Development will now be

emphasizing its publication arm and devoting far more time
to the production of books relating to the theory and practice
of Gestalt therapy. We will continue to bring back out-of-print
classics while giving birth to more new books that reflect
current trends and thinking in Gestalt therapy.
Several projects are in the developmental stages that
take advantage of the technological advances in information
dissemination. By the time you read this, a complete collec-
tion of back issues of The Gestalt Journal will be available on a
single CD with text string searching capabilities making it
possible for writers, researchers, and students to locate
materials of relevance to their areas of interest with striking
immediacy. We are using the latest in digital technology to
produce our books and will shortly be making them available
on searchable CDs to accompany and compliment the printed
versions.
The Gestalt Therapy Page, founded in 1992 by The Gestalt
Journal Press, was the first “web site” dedicated exclusively to
the theory and practice of Gestalt therapy. Originally estab-
lished under the auspices of a university server, it moved to its
own “home” at www.gestalt.org in 1995 and has been the
number one (both in quality and in popularity) ranked Gestalt
page ever since. We will continue to expand our web offerings
including a new edition of our directory of Gestalt practitio-
ners that will allow individuals and training centers to update
their listing information on an ongoing basis.
We are beginning to explore the use of DVD as a
distribution media for our collection of Gestalt films including
demonstration workshops and lectures by Frederick Perls,
Laura Perls, James Simkin, John Swanson and other teachers
and practitioners. The ability of DVD technology to make
permanent that which has always been fragile (both videotapes
7
FROM THE EDITOR
and films fade rapidly whether viewed or not and can become
useless after a decade unless continually recopied).
Those are our plans for the near future. What innova-
tions we’ll be exploring in five years or so are difficult to
imagine.
* * * * *
This is the final issue of The Gestalt Journal. It seems, as

they say, only yesterday that we began the process that brought
us here. Although of some interest, I've decided to leave the
telling of our history to another time and to simply express my
appreciation to those who've given us their support over the
years.I want to express my deepest thanks to those who serve
on our Editorial Board. They gave freely of their time and
energies and deserve most of the credit for that is of value that
has appeared in these pages. Articles were considered,
reviewed, and re-reviewed. Most that we published were
substantially revised as a result of comments and suggestions
that have come from Board members.
Working with them all has been one of the greatest
rewards of editing the Journal. Often at opposite ends of a
theoretical pole, disagreements have been in the classic
framework of the "disputation" — an argument of idea and
principle and not one of personality. Occasionally these dis-
putations have appeared in these pages and the "airing" of
these differing points has contributed to the literature of
Gestalt therapy. Regrettably for our readership, some have
appeared only in communications that have found me at the
central focus — an experience I've enjoyed immensely.
Thanks are also due those early souls who subscribed
to the Journal based only on a mimeographed letter we
circulated before the first issue appeared — about 300 in all.
If not for their willingness to contribute $16 (our original
subscription cost) and hope for the best, we would not have
survived our first year. Most, I'm pleased to say, are still among
our readerships (which passed the milestone one thousand
mark in our third year of publication).
8
FROM THE EDITOR
I hope you find the issue rewarding and that you'll join
with us in a symbolic "blowing out of the candles. " A printed
celebration is a private affair between writer and reader. So,
I join you in celebrating our “farewell” and hope that you will
continue to support the exploration of Gestalt therapy theory
and practice by becoming a subscriber to the next generation
in this publishing cycle, The International Gestalt Journal. I
believe that its editor, Frank-M. Staemmler, will quickly
establish it as the premier international publication of Gestalt
therapy.
— Joe Wysong
Founder and Editor
9
THE SPEAKING BODY
(Or Why did Wilhelm Reich Go Crazy?)
This essay is adapted from a talk given in Montreal

at the Gestalt Journal’s conference to honor Erving
and Miriam Polster, August, 2000. MVM.
Part 1: Historical and Philosophical Background
What can we say at this point in our history about the

role of the human body in Gestalt therapy? How one treats the
body in psychotherapy raises all the traditional philosophical
questions about the nature of bodily existence. What is a
human body anyway? Is it, as in some idealistic philosophies,
merely congealed mind? Is it a complex organization of matter
shaped by evolutionary adaptation, as in biological theory? Is
the body the shabby outer garment of the soul, as some
religions would have it? Is it a shell of nerve endings around
a vacancy, as the work of certain behaviorists implies? Is it an
elaborate plumbing system for transporting desire, which is
pretty much how early psychoanalysis thought about it?
11
THE SPEAKING BODY (OR WHY DID WILHELM REICH GO CRAZY?)
There are schools of psychotherapy aligned with just
about every one of these views. At the extremes, some thera-
pies have treated people as though they are at bottom nothing
but bodies; others as though they are finally nothing but mind.
Strangely enough, this sort of polarization is turning up more
these days than it did in the past. But the tendency toward a
split has always been around. Freud had hoped, when he first
began working at unlocking the secrets of human behavior, to
dissolve all mental life into the body, that is, into biology and
neurology. He gave up on this first “scientific” project rather
quickly, however. His subsequent invention of the “talking
cure” concerned itself mainly with exposing and then inter-
preting the hidden twists and turns of the mind. A multi-layer-
ed view of mental life has been the dominant legacy of
psychoanalysis ever since. I remember a science fiction story I
read when I was around twelve, in which the inhabitants of a
future society had developed to the point that they were
spheres filled with brain or mind. Legs, arms, torsos had
evolved out of existence because they had become unneces-
sary appendages. I wonder now if they had all been through
too much traditional psychoanalysis. Maybe not only id, but
everything else as well, had been turned into ego.
With the discovery of powerful pharmacological
medications, much of modern psychiatry seems to have found
its way back to Freud’s abandoned project. It reduces not only
psychosis but also depression and anxiety to abnormalities in
the central nervous system. In the current situation, psychoan-
alysts and psychopharmacologists have each tended to choose
one side of the Cartesian mind-body dualism. Thus drawing
the line and arraying themselves on either side of it, they now
fight over market share.
The actual history is not quite so simple as the above
discussion suggests. The tendency in psychodynamic therapies,
in general, has not been to eliminate the body, but to treat it
as a collection of symptoms deposited by the unconscious. The
psychoanalytic body tends to be a site of inhibition and
suffering when it’s not flowing with desire. Freud remarked
that a neurotic feels his body, a healthy person his feelings.
Wilhelm Reich took up this idea and expanded it. He passed
it through the ego psychology of Anna Freud in order to
12
MILLER
elaborate it into a view of the body as a patchwork of resistanc-
es and mechanisms of defense. If the body had become a
rather abstract mosaic made up of excitable neighborhoods —
oral, anal, phallic — in Freud, Reich made it physically
concrete again. Reich’s revision directly influenced the
beginnings of Gestalt therapy. He had been one of Frederick
Perls’s therapists, and Paul Goodman was much enamored of
his work. In practice, the Reichian influence led to a new
emphasis: When the patient produced stories and dreams,
complaints and associations, the Gestalt therapist not only
listened and reacted, but also paid the closest attention to the
patient’s bodily presence.
This method became a valuable and familiar part of
Gestalt therapy. It involved shifting the foreground frequently
from the patient’s discourse to a clenched fist, a fixed smile or
grimace, a lack of breathing, and other indications of the fixed
gestalts we call retroflections. Some Gestalt therapists became
so captivated with this change of figure that they subordinated
the “talking cure” and focused on something that became
widely known as “body work.” When Gestalt therapy positioned
itself among the so-called humanistic therapies during the
1960s and 70s, its receptiveness to Reich also opened it to
influences from bioenergetics, Rolfing, the Alexander meth-
od, Feldenkreis, as well as approaches to the body derived
from eastern spiritual practices, such as yoga and Sufi, along
with many other methods that were in the air.
So where does this history leave the already poor
battered human body in Gestalt therapy? From its beginnings,
Gestalt therapy has always repudiated the Cartesian mind-body
dualism in favor of a holistic approach. In theory, at least,
Gestalt therapists ought to be able to move smoothly without
disjunction from mind to body and back again. Nevertheless
in actual practice the question of how to introduce the body
into therapy has spawned a good deal of confusion, becoming
a pole around which controversy has swirled and “truths” have
become fixated. The Reichian emphasis, along with other
residues of ego psychology in Gestalt therapy, has made it
difficult to maintain a consistent psychosomatic unity. As a
result, new splits have penetrated Gestalt therapy itself.
13
For all the holistic thinking that Frederick Perls
introduced into Gestalt therapy from his work with Goldstein
and his reading of Smuts, his own re-working of Reich did not
altogether fit well with holism. Perhaps unwittingly, Perls’s
approach helped foster a new mind-body split. This tendency
became clear in the 1960s Verbatim period. Sounding like the
Beatles or Timothy Leary, Perls came up with one of his
numerous slogans: “Lose your mind and come to your senses!”
(as though the senses were not already saturated with mind).
Still, one can interpret this notion in Perls’s late work as a way
to change figure/ground in the hope of restoring more
balanced functioning among the people he was teaching. His
trainees were primarily over-socialized middle-class profession-
als (called psychiatrists, psychologists, and the like) who
tended to be alienated from their bodies and their feelings.
They were likely to respond to their abstract concepts and
stereotypes with more enthusiasm than to their clients or their
lovers. A dose of 1960s Reichianism might have seemed like
the ideal prescription for them.
The trouble was that Perls, for all the startling bril-
liance of his demonstrations, settled too readily for transcripts
of the demonstrations peppered with diagnostic or prescrip-
tive slogans in place of comprehensive theory in those warm
touchy-feely bell-bottomed California days. Many of his
followers treated his catchy aphorisms and dramatic tech-
niques as though they, in fact, comprised the theory of Gestalt
therapy. One result was an anti-intellectualism that re-in-
troduced the Cartesian split by coming in through the back
door, or perhaps I should say, through the rear end. Words
were denigrated as though they were dead abstractions that
served to evade authentic feelings. The body was more
palpably present and therefore more likely to reveal the truth,
although as Reich had made clear, the body could lie, too.
Indeed, much of so-called body work could be described as
techniques to transform a body in hiding or playing possum —
evident, for example, in the mask-like poker face that betrays
no shred of emotion, the polite shrug and upright posture of
the good student (or good patient), the slump-shouldered
shuffle of the passive-aggressive character--into a more
authentic instrument for expression of feelings.
14
MILLER
One can view a body as recalcitrant material, like a
statue, or as a vibrating instrument for emotional expression,
like a guitar. On the one hand, the body performs as an
obstinate limit, restricting a self that strains against it to reach
the world. On the other, the body is a malleable instrument
for transmission and reception that partially takes its form
from changing circumstances. It is like the difference between
the Newtonian particle and the quantum wave in physics.
From a Reichian perspective, the fixed particle is the neurotic
body; the wave-like experience the healthy body. This has
been a rich vision for psychotherapy in many respects. But
does it go far enough? There are many other ways of thinking
about the body that psychological theory needs to take into
account. We can consider the body as an object, as an organ-
ism, as a metaphor, as a construction, as a fiction or narrative,
as a locus in the field of experience. Which of these various
points of view are therapeutically useful? All of them? What
does it mean to do “body work,” if there are so many different
keyholes through which to peer at the human body, which
only yields up portions of its mysteries to the assorted peepers?
Such questions remind us that there is another
conception of the body that entered Gestalt therapy during its
early formulation. This alternative view derives from existential
phenomenology, and it gives rises to a quite different idea of
the body’s place in therapy. From combining such thinkers as
Husserl, Tillich, and Buber with the principles of Gestalt
formation, Gestalt therapy developed a method of concentrat-
ing on how experience, including experience of one’s bodily
existence, is continually shaped and re-shaped through one’s
present meetings with nature and a world of others. As
Merleau-Ponty summarized the phenomenological outlook
with its emphasis on the creative contribution the perceiver
makes to all lived experience, “perception is already expres-
sion” (Merleau-Ponty,1970, p.6) The phenomenological body,
sometimes called the “lived body,” is more like a process or
flux than a thing, a fluctuating subjective landscape, like a
painting that the artist keeps revising from one moment to the
next.
To focus on a subject engaged in creating experience
sits uneasily with the Reichian approach, with its focus on
15
animal energies and muscular tensions. It sits uneasily, but
that does not mean that these are mutually exclusive outlooks.
The contraction and loosening of muscles, as well as the
spread or containment of sensations, are among the raw
materials that go into the conversion of the human body from
animal organism into the lived (and partially constructed),
experiential body. One encounters this phenomenological
view immediately in the opening pages of Perls, Hefferline,
and Goodman, where Goodman describes seeing, not in terms
of retinas and optic nerves, but as the “oval of vision” close up
against one’s eyes. The point is that these two divergent
formulations of the therapeutic body, both of which wend
their way through Gestalt therapy theory, have never been
sufficiently reconciled with one another.
The question of reconciling them bears importantly on
how one might answer another important question: Is there
really a difference, from the standpoint of Gestalt therapy,
between the “talking cure” and “body work”? In my opinion,
there is ultimately no difference in principle, even though the
particular style and preferences of a given therapist may look
very different in practice. The body, as a foundation in the
construction of human experience, is never reducible only to
the animal organism. It is eloquent with expressive languages
and signifiers — gestures that reach or demonstrate, telling
postures, idiosyncratic movements and positions that reveal
meanings and values. And language, considered not just as
formal structure (grammar, syntax, semantics) but as the
expressive and receptive activities of speaking and listening
(phonology and intentionality), belongs to the body as much
as to the mind. French psychoanalysis, especially in the form
it took under the baton of Jacques Lacan, considers the
distinction between langue, which is the abstract structure of
language, and parole, which is the actual spoken word (a
distinction Lacan borrowed from the linguist Ferdinand
Saussure) to be of central theoretical importance. There is no
language without a body. The issue is whether the language is
dead and desensitized just as the body can be dead and
desensitized.
In the Cartesian view the mind is a mysterious spiritual
substance, an invisible vapor that reasons, feels, and wills. It
16
MILLER
has the body at its disposal, so that it can drive it the way a
pilot flies a plane. If I decide to pick up a glass on the table, I
begin transmitting thought-like impulses, as if I had pressed
the correct combination of buttons on a mental keyboard.
These willful mental activities are received by my hand and
arm which then get busy making the correct maneuvers to
achieve the goal. Can you imagine Michael Jordan heading for
the basket and sinking a shot in a series of steps like this? If
this is how humans function, then the body exists pretty much
in the same sense that a table or an automobile can be said to
exist. The body is an elaborate external machine, and my
consciousness sits at the controls. The Cartesian picture of
human nature has often been aptly described as “the ghost in
the machine.”
The Cartesian division, which locates bodily existence
in one realm of being and mental reality in another, led to all
sorts of philosophical conundrums and contradictions.
Philosophers tried every contortion, but there was no satisfac-
tory way to bridge the two realms by logically connecting them
to each other. Husserl came at it from a completely different
angle: His phenomenology made the logical bridge unneces-
sary through eliminating the gap that required bridging in the
first place. By bracketing off everything except the experienc-
ing subject, he was able to join thinking and sensing together
as aspects of one another in the same realm — namely, the
realm of “experience.” It follows that all of our sensations of
our world are already permeated with mind, and vice versa.
Separating mind and body then is a post-experiential act of
abstraction.
From the phenomenological standpoint, it cannot be
that my mind forms the idea of picking up the glass, and then
sends a message to my arm and hand to carry out the order. A
phenomenological account would proceed more like this: I
become curious (Is this an antique glass?) or feel a need (I’m
thirsty!) or encounter a problem (Does this glass go in the
cabinet on the left or the right?). My reaching for the glass is
from the start informed by and infused with my desire-filled
attention. Such attention is not just sitting up here in my head
and being directed from there. The attending is an essential
part of the movement of reaching itself. Everything I do that
17
involves the glass contains thoughts, sensations, feelings,
interpretations and value judgments, as well as actions, in a
simultaneous, closely knit web. I don’t go through a linear
sequence of steps to get from the idea to the activity. I simply
pick up the glass in a single, unified sweep.
But even to point at unification or integration isn’t
quite accurate, because to say something is unified or inte-
grated presupposes that there are separate parts that you are
bringing together into an integration or a unity. This is not
what is going on, except in the models we construct after the
fact. To be sure, the models are useful for explaining things in
retrospect, but they are only metaphorical ways of thinking
about these matters late in the game. They are reflective
afterthoughts. Phenomenology tries to get at something it calls
pre-reflective experience.
I pick up the glass, and my mind is involved, my senses
are involved, my will is involved, my interest is involved —
activity and experience are taking shape at the same time. So
what is a talking cure or what is body work in relation to this
portrait of human conduct? When you use the phenomeno-
logical method, speaking is not just mind, and picking up a
glass is not just body. They are both expressive, need-governed
actions one can perform in responding to one’s continually
changing meetings with one’s world. In other words, they are
both what Gestalt therapy calls contact.
How do we know we have a body? If this seems obvious,
it’s not. Do we know it from more from the inside through
sensations or the outside from our senses? I can’t say whether
animals “know” they have bodies — perhaps they just are
bodies. We are different, because as humans, we rely so much
on self-reflective knowledge. We require an epistemology in
order to develop and get on. The other animals don’t, so far
as we know. What we can see of our bodies is distorted and
limited. For instance, we can never directly see the back of our
heads or our nostrils or teeth or our eyes themselves. Our
visual knowledge of these parts of the body comes only
through reflected images, such as through mirrors and
photographs, reports from others, and inferences from touch.
Such knowledge belongs to the register that Lacan calls “the
imaginary,” which is basic to his theory of how human identity
18
MILLER
develops. The ways in which we come to “see” ourselves, for
instance with distorted body images, help make clear the
extent to which knowledge of our bodies employs construc-
tions that are not given by the animal organism. My sense of
my body is “fleshed out” by impressions others have of me, so
that my knowledge of my body always depends on the way it is
embedded in the world and includes the world’s responses to
it (as though it were not only my body). In a somewhat ana-
logous way, Winnicott said that the baby’s first self is in the
mother’s eyes. But the world’s involvement in our body
knowledge extends beyond how others regard us; it is true also
of our contact with inanimate objects. When I pick up the
glass, I am touching it, but, in a sense, it touches me back as
well, such that I feel this as a pressure that flows back through
me and becomes part of the whole experience. One’s body, as
one comes to know it, is never an encapsulated entity but is
always located in the field that it plays a crucial part in
unfolding between oneself and one’s world.
Emmanuel Levinas, the splendid French philosopher
who died recently, takes the between-ness even further into
the world than Winnicott or Lacan. He says that philosophy
needs to begin, not with interrogating the composition of the
world or the self, but with the face of the other. This seems
plausible developmentally. When a baby opens it eyes and
becomes conscious, one of its first experiences is the mother’s
face. This point of departure, it seems to me, leads Levinas to
a richer understanding of the relationship between oneself
and others than Martin Buber’s analysis of it. Buber calls his
beautiful conception of the I-Thou a “word,” but Levinas
begins with the wrinkled skin of the face of the other whose
eyes are looking at you even as you look at them. You cannot
look at the other’s living face, he says, without it calling forth
from you an awareness of ethical responsibility for the other.
Only in what is evoked by such awareness does one discovers
oneself, according to Levinas. And only in these moments of
realization do both language and philosophy arise and take
form. Therefore, Levinas claims, ethics precedes modes of
philosophical thinking, such as metaphysics. For him, contact,
human experience, and human relatedness all begin with
expressive bodily presence, not of ourselves but of the other,
19
and not in something so verbal as the I-Thou. The word is not
first. The face and gaze of the other comes earlier. Such
knowledge, for Levinas, is neither specifically scientific know-
ledge nor the kind of knowledge associated with the arts,
though it may partake of both. It is, above all and first of all,
ethical knowledge. Among the things Levinas has taught me
is that the interminable debate about whether psychotherapy
is a science or an art pales before the fact that it is an ethical
position one takes in the presence of another human being.
So by now we can speak of the mind as existing
throughout all experience with some depth of understanding
about what this might imply for knowledge of the body. It’s
not just a question of whether the brain is the seat of the mind
nor a question of the unity of mind and body. Maybe it would
be most accurate to say that mind is to be found at work
especially at the point where I touch and feel touched. When
I speak to you, if I’m speaking without too much self-con-
sciousness, you could say my mind is at my lips. (This would be
the phenomenological description.) I am not thinking
deliberately, which would be like talking to myself, but I am
talking to you, just as I am looking at you and you at me. Yet
certainly there is thought in my speaking to you. Again, this is
exactly what Gestalt therapy means by contact. When the
contact is talk, one’s mind is not a separate executive dictating
words to the mouth. If, on the other hand, we observe
someone who is talking to us appearing to continually consult
their brain as they speak (frowning, pausing, looking up), we
might regard this as mildly obsessional retroflected activity,
probably the consequence of having taken in too earnestly the
command, “Think before you speak.”
I once visited a master class given by an extraordinary
piano teacher named Adele Marcus, who had been an
associate of such pianists as Arthur Schnabel and Vladimir
Horowitz. She had also been the mentor to some of the best
concert artists currently performing. At the beginning of the
class, she made a few brief but extremely telling comments.
She said that when you play the piano, you will experience the
feeling that you want to express in your abdomen. The only
other thing that you should be aware of is the sensation of
your fingertips touching the keys. Anything that enters your
20
MILLER
awareness in between these two points, she continued, is a
resistance. Obviously this includes the head. You could say that
when a pianist has something to express, the mind and the
heart join together, and in the actual expression the mind is
not lurking in the head; it resides at the fingertips.
Part 2. Clinical Issues
To what extent are Reich’s concepts still useful in

Gestalt therapy? The answer is that within limits they continue
to inspire important work in Gestalt theory and practice.
Reich’s early thought contained valuable new insights into
how the developing child’s responses to anxiety and trauma
can harden over time into character. His most significant
discovery was that these lasting formations, which he called
“character armor,” appear not only in the patient’s reports but
in the speaking voice, not only in dreams, memories, and
associations, but in physical inhibitions, tensed or flaccid
muscles, anaesthetized portions of skin, incoherent actions, or
inappropriate gestures of expression. Gestalt therapy calls
these retroflections. Isadore From made their value for clinical
practice particularly clear. He consistently taught that psycho-
therapy usually needs to start out with attention to the
retroflections, precisely because they show up in the body
(which includes the voice), so that we can see and hear them.
Gestalt therapy also developed (partly from Reich’s influence,
partly on its own) techniques or experiments for undoing
retroflections. But since retroflections bind the anxiety of
blocked feelings which a person cannot yet, as a rule, support
sufficiently to experience other than as anxiety, one needs to
go about undoing retroflections with great delicacy and
sensitivity to what the undoing may produce.
Which brings me to the limitations in the Reichian
approach. I want to suggest to you that these are related to
another issue, which is, “Why did Wilhelm Reich’s theories go
crazy?” It is likely that Reich himself went crazy while he was
evolving his late cosmic theories. However it is also true that
he was horribly and scandalously persecuted by the U.S.
government, although that ugly episode in the long history of
American witch hunts is not what I intend to discuss in detail
21
here. Instead, I’m going to speculate about why Wilhelm
Reich’s theories eventually skidded out of control and finally
off the track of usefulness. I hope that this will shed some light
on why the Reichian perspective is finally inadequate and
needs to be integrated with a phenomenological view of the
body.
In teaching how to diagnose and work with the body,
Reich’s early work enabled Gestalt therapy to understand
concretely how people’s physical tensions and numbed-out
body parts cripple their capacities for meeting needs, doing
satisfying work, and forming successful relationships. His
emphasis on paying attention to the body also brought an
observable immediacy to psychotherapy, and thus taught
Gestalt therapists a good deal about making use of the present
situation in the therapy session. But what comes next? For
Reich, the next step was strenuous intervention to release the
pent-up energy that now remained frozen in characterological
body configurations.
His approach led directly to bioenergetics and influ-
enced the other kinds of body work which many Gestalt
therapists have added to their repertoires. Almost all body
work centers around undoing of retroflections in order to
release blocked energy and feeling. There is no question that
working on retroflections in therapy can free storms of activity
and emotion. But toward what end? What is to be made from
the storms? In the case of Reich himself, the release and the
goal eventually merged, because his aim was to restore
something he called orgastic potency. Reich felt that the chief
neurosis in the modern soul sprang from a physical depriva-
tion, a congealing of life force such that people could no
longer surrender fully to any experience, especially to the
experience of orgasm.
Even if you read Reich’s exaltation of surrender to
orgasm as his stand-in for all spontaneous, full living — and I
do think this is what Reich had in mind — his vision still leaves
unanswered what is supposed to happen after the therapeutic
liberation of energy. Something essential is left incomplete,
which makes the experience at once not enough and too
much to handle. It’s a little like those people who after making
love immediately leap out of bed, get dressed, and call a cab.
22
MILLER
Given the tenor of Reich’s later work, I think that his theories,
and maybe Reich himself, became overwhelmed with the flood
of liberated impulses, desires, passions, and instincts. Humans,
unlike other animals, cannot rely on instincts alone in riding
the waves of energized sensations and impulses. That is never
the whole story for the human. Paul Ricoeur puts it this way:
Because we have no genetic system of informa-

tion for human behavior, we need a cultural
system. No culture exists without such a system.
The hypothesis, therefore, is that where human
beings exist, a nonsymbolic mode of existence,
and even less, a nonsymbolic kind of action,
can no longer obtain. Action is immediately
ruled by cultural patterns which provide tem-
plates or blueprints for the organization of
social and psychological processes, perhaps just
as genetic codes — I am not certain — provide
such templates for the organization of organic
processes. In the same way that our experience
of the natural world requires a mapping, a
mapping is also necessary for our experience of
social reality. (Ricoeur, 1986, pp. 11-12)
What drove Reich’s psychology, and perhaps Reich,

into craziness is that he did not differentiate between the
animal organism, which has certain built-in maps, and the
human subject, which always needs to construct maps of the
body beyond what is given by the organism.
Reich had no theory of the body as lived experience,
the body as continually re-imagined or symbolically recon-
structed through the human capacity to give form to experi-
ence. Perhaps the other animals can depend on the hard-wir-
ed programming built into their instincts to limit, contain, and
guide their energies toward completing their purposes. But
the human cannot depend on animal instincts. We need to
make and give form to experience. This is the basis of social
order, culture, and art. Reich, however, envisioned the pure
release of biological and instinctual energy, and then there
was no place to go from there except directly to the universe.
23
Which is exactly where Reich went next. His early work
on character armor was followed by writings in which he
concluded that therapy reawakened the same energy in the
individual that moves the stars and the planets. In honor of
the organism, or perhaps the orgasm, he named this cosmic
fluid or ether “orgone.” He came to believe that it controlled
not only all living activity but also the weather and the tides.
Driven by this mystical vision and a sense of urgency about the
doom mankind was fashioning for itself through repression of
instinctual life, Reich turned increasingly messianic and
megalomaniacal. Some would say he became psychotic. He
preached that the salvation of mankind depended on tuning
in to the cosmic currents of orgone. And he invented a new
body therapy to outdo all body therapies. He oversaw the
building of special orgone boxes, somewhat resembling
outhouses, designed to collect cosmic ray-like currents of
orgone. By sitting in them people could absorb these currents
in order to restore their sex lives, increase their elan vital,
prevent cancer, and so on. A puritanical and perhaps equally
megalomaniacal United States government got after him and
indicted him for transporting orgone boxes across state lines.
Reich died in jail.
Whether our life force comes from the cosmos or
human nature, our situation demands that we make some-
thing with meaningful structure and form from it. The mere
release of urges, appetites, interests, and longings can become
a boundless ocean that drowns one’s sense of oneself. What is
required is an aesthetic principle in psychotherapy that
enables patients to become creative agents capable of traveling
on their own beyond the Reichian manipulating and opening
of sensation and feeling toward their own discoveries of how
to shape their lives. Our theories and practices of psychother-
apy must correspond to this need. I think that the pheno-
menological foundation in Gestalt therapy, especially as it
underwrites the conceptions of the contact boundary and
gestalt formation, provides such a theory and implies such a
practice. The Reichian influence still has its place in this
scheme of things; what phenomenology adds is an embracing
concern with the form-making creation of experience. As in
art, form matters in therapy as much as content, and good
24
MILLER
form provides fluent possibilities yet limits and restrains at the
same time.
When a work of art moves us profoundly, it is not just
because of orgasmic excitement, even in cases where that is
what the work is about. There is always a restraining element
that creates a boundary (which is an important part of what we
mean by form in art). It is exactly the same thing with love.
Love is not only surrender to orgasmic fusion, although,
heaven knows, one wants to count this among the moments of
love. But when you make the flood of sexual excitement into
the goal, you get the crazed romantic myth of love as fusion,
which has very little to do with relating to another person.
There is no relationship in this kind of fusion. Love requires
restraint in order to make a limiting resistance, such that one
still finds one’s edge. Without awareness of an edge, we can’t
meet. We simply end up awash in a big puddle or soup of
energy.
Of course, in a society where there is so much chronic
tension and emotional isolation, it is not surprising that a
renegade like Reich landed on the side of letting go and
giving in. You can’t love if you can’t let go and feel your
feelings. But that’s only one side of the story of love. The other
is that love calls for cautious respect for the one’s own
separateness and that of the other. That is what I mean by
restraint. Reich had a wonderful understanding of the animal
body and the damage that repression could do to it. But he
had no theory of eros as form-giving imagination. There is
plenty of sex and energy in Reich but very little love.
Wittgenstein says that the body is the best picture of the
soul. That is not a definition of a body that is only an animal
body. When you are doing body work, you’re massaging the
psyche and the soul as well as the body, and you had better be
careful about the massage. Another important drawback
handed down from Reich’s legacy is that the liberation of
energy tends to remain under the control of the therapist who
makes strong, hands-on interventions, even though it is the
patient who experiences it as liberating. The consequence is
the exchange of an old dependence, the dependence of the
child on parents, for a new dependency on the therapist.
Granted that the tensions and other bodily mechanisms of
25
defense that Reich pointed to were formed in the field of that
old dependency. So it may seem like a good bargain to trade
it in for a new dependency on the therapist as liberator, the
therapist as cheerleader of emotional release. So long as even
the most benevolent dependency remains, however, psycho-
therapy is essentially a sado-masochistic structure, no matter
how mild in appearance. It’s as if the patient says, “Do it to
me!” and the therapist obliges. It may be nice to have a
cheerleader on your side for a while, but then it is crucial that
the cheerleader step out of the way so that the patient can take
possession his or her own experience, including the aesthetic
form he or she gives to both body and soul. Getting out of the
way is not enough respected in much of body work that derives
from Reich. It then brings about invasive colonization of the
patient.
Obviously invasive practice is not only an issue for body
work. The sado-masochistic colonization occurs as much in
talk therapies, even if the massage is more subtle and internal.
This is the case in those kinds of psychoanalytic therapy where
the analyst makes it clear to the patient that the only growth
comes through accepting the therapist’s interpretations. From
the therapist’s position of authority it is not difficult to force
ideas on a person through talk, just as it is possible to force the
arousal of feelings in a person through manipulating the body.
You simply use different orifices. But the outcome — an
infantilized patient, whether happy about it or not — amounts
to the same thing. Equally invasive, if not worse, is too much
therapeutic empathy. An overdose of empathy too closely
resembles fusion for my taste. I am not against empathy if it
operates from a respectful distance, like Buddhist compassion,
such that it leaves the patient’s otherness intact even as it pays
careful attention to it.
By way of concluding, let me illustrate how integrating
the Reichian view and the phenomenological view of the body
might be put to use diagnostically. Consider, for example, how
psychosomatic unity, which is part animal, part imaginative
construction, might become distorted in the perversions and
the personality disorders. I submit that both kinds of disorders
are made through using the capacity to create form for an
attack on a central facet of the human condition—that bodily
26
MILLER
existence in relation to the world is risky and uncertain. For
both perversions and personality disorders, the uncertainty is
too much to bear. My point is that both do it through an
imaginary constriction of physical existence — to put it this
way borrows from both Reich and phenomenology — with the
aim of establishing an illusion of certitude and control against
the uncertainty of life and love. There is nothing perverse
about the so-called perversions except insofar as a person gets
stuck in being able to express his or her sexuality in only one
way. Why should anything in the spectrum of sexual possibili-
ties be denigrated unless it is harmful to oneself or others? But
when the result is an unnecessarily severe restriction of being
limited to traveling for pleasure down only one road, you
could call it perverse if you want to.
In the case of the perversions, feeling desire for or
making love to the entire being, including the whole body, of
another person seems to hot to handle. Unable to support so
much excitement (one’s own or the other’s) because it shakes
the foundation of the lover’s sense of control, he or she limits
the movement or the expressiveness of the other’s body or
reduces it to a part. For instance, if looking intimately into the
face of a beloved is too anxious-making, maybe the lover can
look intimately at a foot. If one cannot make love to the body
of the other, maybe one can still manage to get gratification by
making love to a part. The foot contains something of the
person — as Rilke says in a poem, even the feet can weep —
but it’s personal on a small enough scale so that one can still
feel in control. If it turns out that a foot is still too much, since
it is composed of the other’s living flesh, then one can fasten
on a symbolic representation, such as underpants or some
other article of clothing, and allow desire to flow out to this
thing that is close to the person but inanimate. The perver-
sions attempt to reduce the being of the other to a silhouette
or a fragment or a substitute. But these reductions are
nevertheless achieved through acts of creativity, although what
is made is less, whereas we usually think of creativity as making
something that is more. The narrowing is in the name of
security and certitude.
The personality disorders, to a large extent, work in the
opposite way (I don’t pretend to account here for all the
27
personality disorders, anymore than the preceding accounts
for every perversion). Whereas the imagination lessens the
being of the other in perversions, in the personality disorders
one turns this capacity to reduce experience toward oneself.
The goal is similar — to diminish the anxiety of uncertainty by
making one’s response to life more manageable and predict-
able. The personality disorders attempt to maintain control
and certitude in all contacting the world, in intimacy and
social relations, by constricting the sense of self. Then the
spreading physical sensation of excitement aroused in moving
toward the world is channeled into a narrow pipe or a rigid
structure. (There is another kind of personality disorder that
has too little structure, but I am not going to deal with it
here.) With such limited equipment, a person can neither
tolerate his or her own excitement nor take in much of
anything from another. It would be too overwhelming. In
many types of personality disorder there is little evidence of
anxiety because that is what has been eliminated by filtering
out unpredictability. But if you dig deeper you will likely find
anguish, that thin burning thread of sensation, when too
much is compressed into too little.
The perversions and the personality disorders demon-
strate in dramatic ways the need we all have to invent a stay
against the flood tide of life’s uncertainties. Robert Frost
alluded to this when he defined poetry as “a momentary stay
against confusion.” Since we are constituted by both our
animal nature and our symbol-making, form-giving imagina-
tions, we try to invent ways of living with uncertainty. Why?
Partly because we live in time, conscious of the continual
change that carries us toward death. Perhaps it is our peculiar
existence as the creature who is aware of dying that makes our
living only as an animal organisms not only inadequate but
intolerable. Writing poems, philosophizing, doing scientific
research are among the ways in which we reach beyond the
organism and perhaps accept our dying. This must be what
Socrates meant in Plato’s Apology when he rebuffed his friends
who wanted to rescue him from execution by telling them that
the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.
We may or may not long for immortality, but we don’t
want to live surrounded by infinity, like little boats buffeted by
28
MILLER
an endless sea. I remember seeing on an antique shop wall an
eighteenth-century Armenian cherub carved of bronze. Its
chin was tucked into wings folded across its chest, its eyes were
closed, and it looked a little sad. Even angels, the sculpture
suggested, grow weary of infinity. Given such consciousness we
need to make sense of life, and we get some help from our
ability to create those patterned finite structures that we call
gestalt formations.
References
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1970. Themes from the Lectures at the

Collège de France 1952-1960, trans. by John O’Neill.
Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Univ. Press
Ricoeur, Paul. 1986. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia
Univ. Press
29
THE SONG OF THE SELF:
Language and Gestalt Therapy
Dan Bloom
Laura Perls once asked her students “What is Gestalt

therapy?” After listening to their varied replies, she said
“Gestalt therapy is an experiential, phenomenological,
holistic, organismic, existential psychotherapy.” Because
Gestalt therapy encompasses so much, attempts to address the
theory satisfactorily encounter enormous obstacles. Many of us
believe that Paul Goodman set forth an excellent model for
Gestalt therapy and have worked within it over the years. And
we believe that this model is best set forth in Gestalt Therapy:
Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. This is a
formidable problem that I must address at the outset.
Meaning is not a fixity. It does not exist encoded in the
words of any single book. It is a function of the dynamic
interaction between the reader and the read, at the con-
tact/boundary itself. Meaning is the ever-shifting, infinitely
various figure that emerges from the destructuring of what is
read, what is heard, or what is observed — what is experi-
31
THE SONG OF THE SELF: Language and Gestalt Therapy
enced. Without this destructuring, “meaning” would remain
an alien introject, dead clumps of authority exerting a leaden
weight on the liveliness of true understanding.
Nevertheless, words mean what they mean as well as
what each of us tries to tell them to mean. Otherwise, under-
standing would be impossible and communication pointless.
Contact, for example, has a specific meaning to Gestalt
therapists and is ill-used when we say “make contact with me.”
And so for other words in the Gestalt therapy lexicon, such as
boundary, resistance, excitement, frustration, — each of us
can compile a hate list of misused words by careless Gestalt
therapists.
How can we reconcile the desirable plasticity of
language, its discovering/inventing function, — often with
elements of personal risk — with our knowledge of and loyalty
to our own established principles of theory, our own under-
standing of meaning? Perhaps this is the underlying question
addressed by this paper.
Gestalt therapy theory is a unitary theory; all of its parts
are so intimately connected that to understand one, one must
understand another and so on in a kind of loop. To begin
anywhere is to begin in the middle and out of context. To
hold any one aspect up for examination, extracted from the
whole, is to add a certain distortion. Perhaps this is true for
many theories. Nevertheless, for expediency and teaching, I
propose the following basic concepts: organism/environment
field, contact-boundary, contact, creative adjustment, and the
self. Language can be understood with reference to these core
concepts.
The organism/environment field is the world where
human beings, human animal organisms, live. It is a unity,
undivided by colloquial notions of mind, body, inner, outer,
biological, emotional etc. Experiencing occurs at the “slash”
in that compound word “organism/environment”; it is the
contact-boundary, the “specific organ of awareness of the
novel” (Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951, p. 259). Aware-
ness occurs here. It is the place of Being, the clearing, the
horizon, of the existential phenomenologists. This “place” is
of the organism and of the environment; it is the meeting. It
is the “where” of contact. Contact is the central notion of
32
BLOOM
Gestalt therapy. In fact, it is fair to state that Gestalt therapy is
the psychotherapeutic modality that attends only to contact
making (and its interruptions) in the therapy session.
Contact is awareness and motor response of the field,
the forming of a figure of interest against a ground in the
organism/environment field (Perls, et al., p. 231). It is the
integrative process by which the organism lives, perceives,
experiences, nourishes itself, thrives — “and in general,” it is,
“every function that must be primarily considered as occurring
at the boundary in an organism/environment field.” (Perls, et
al., p. 373) Its aftermath is growth. All contact is creative
adjustment. It is the finding, making, and creating of solutions
to the ongoing needs of the organism. It is the adjusting to the
parameters of the field, the limitations or opportunities in the
world-as-found.
The self is the functional structure of experiencing. It
is the system of contacts themselves. Unlike the Cartesian self,
the self in Gestalt therapy is constituted by contact(s). Good-
man named only three “special structures “ of the self: Id, Ego
and Personality functions (Perls, et al., p. 378). Yet he sug-
gested there are others. Very briefly, the id is the organismic
background of need, appetites, urges, including those
unfinished from previous interrupted or weak contacts. The
ego is the function which “orients and manipulates” the self,
solves the problems of living. It is the doing and the being of
the organism, the biting, chewing, tasting, swallowing. It is the
learning. It is the speaking. The personality function is the
“verbal replica of the self,” “a rhetorical attitude.” It is who we
say we are. It contains the aftermath of previous contacts as
memory. It is what was learned. It is what was said. It provides
a sense of continuity over time, a stable personal identity.
In the beginning, in Gestalt therapy metapsychology,
there was/is contact. This must be so in any experiential
theory since, by definition, all we are concerned with is
awareness. Language developed as an aftermath of social
contact.
Language, whether spoken or written, whether by word
or sign, whether by sound or gesture, by its very existence,
posits the social field. The act of communication declares that
there is another to communicate to. The making of an
33
utterance implies a separate self from an other (Kristeva, 1981,
p. 41). Otto Rank, in Art and Artist, suggests that speech is a
creative achievement and as such represents man making
himself independent of that which exists (Rank,1932, p. 240).
In Gestalt therapy, speech is grounded on an individual’s
awareness of (o)r faith in the existence of an other person
from whom one is separate. There can be no speaker ex-
tracted from a one-spoken-to. But since the self is a phenome-
non of the organism/environment field, there can be no
self-other split. Words do not bridge an abyss between self and
object, or between subjects, but are themselves evidence of the
social contact-boundary, of the unity of the field. As a con-
tact-boundary activity, speaking is internal and external
simultaneously, that is, at once, a unity of subject and object.*
Language is always about something. It always has
meaning (Goodman, 1971, p. 3 ff.). Words both represent
something else (as signifiers) and have Being-in-themselves.
Words do not merely describe a legal right, the proper
recitation of them creates a right. Consider the words, “I do,”
in a marriage ceremony, for example.
Language is an attempt at describing experience. As
such, it must always fall short. Just as no theory of human
experience can be as rich, or as complete, as the experience
it seeks to describe, no communication can carry the essence
of the experience it attempts to be about. Goedel’s Theorem
has application here. No system can be understood without
reference to a higher system. Husserl’s notion of the un-
thought thought likewise is relevant here as it suggests the
phenomenological epistemologists’ understanding of the
limitations of cognition
In Goodman’s anthropology, the social bond existed
prior to the use of language as a tool. Pre-verbal outcries and
utterances, the grunts, gasps, sighs, whimpers, the primitive
sounds which are still the drum beats of our animal nature,
* See Berman, Art, From the New Criticism to Deconstruction, 1988, Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, p. 73, paraphrasing Heidegger, “If the self is
inextricably interwoven with the environment, language becomes external and
internal simultaneously.”
34
BLOOM
evolved as the need emerged for greater differentiation of the
already existing contact. Words as tools were developed to
communicate greater complexities of meaning along with the
more primary sounds. As human beings proceeded in their
social development, from Eden to Babel, and as posture be-
came more erect with our sensory organs less attuned to the
closer sensations of the earth, language became increasingly
more abstract, more experience-distant, and meanings more
complex and abstract. Words eventually accumulated the
capacity to replace experience altogether, to be “instead of”
rather than “along with” that which they describe. In psycho-
analytic language, this process is part of the mechanism by
which the primary process is tamed by the secondary process,
so that civilizations may thrive and the work of the adult world
can be done.
At this extreme, where language’s contact-making
capacity diminishes, it can become neurotic verbalizing. The
speaker is no longer plastically using words to be in-the-world,
to create and invent meanings and relationships, but as static
instruments of a neurotically split self. Verbalization, then, is
less a tool for discovery of new experience and more a means
to perpetuate the status quo. As with all interruptions of
contact, this protects the sensitive contact-boundary from an
excess of danger or frustration. And this, Goodman argues,
has been an inevitable and even a necessary consequence of
the development of the social fabric. With the increasing
complexity and diversity of society, the need for a common
code of shared meanings was required.
Isn’t this the significance of the Tower of Babel: human
beings were punished for getting too close to God and
sentenced to a chaos of misunderstanding. In the biblical
story, humans tried to reach God by building of a tower to
heaven; this was an effort toward contact. God intervened,
interrupted contact, and propelled humanity toward a babel
of confusion. To prevent the frustration of confusion, human’s
compile dictionaries, instruct one another in the inherited
meanings of their language. Nations organize around lan-
guage units and defend their “national security”; personal
identities are maintained through loyalty to a “Mother
Tongue.” From the harmony of the builders of Babel, man-
35
kind has become the balkanized chaos of world conflicts. And
to equilibrate the tensions in a field where individual expres-
sions endanger social harmony, we speak words which quietly
attempt to replace those socially impossible actions. “Talking
about” replaces “doing” as an acceptable sublimation.
In Goodman’s model, this is the evolution of language
as a developmental theory as it corresponds with the increas-
ing differentiation and complexities of the organ-
ism/environment field. And this is as true for individual
human development as it has been for the development of the
human race. An infant is born into a world of language;
awareness emerges in a field of pre-existing language use. As
the infant’s own field becomes more complex, her pre-verbal
utterances are shaped by successive contacts. Outcries are
replaced with learned words. These become the tools of
interpersonal functioning. They are inherited as artifacts of
previous contacts; our native tongue is the souvenir of all who
spoke it before us. It contains relics of our social past. The
child learns this heritage through experiment, play, and
introjection.
This process can be restated with a different emphasis.
The infant is born into a field which includes the parent.
Interactions at this primitive contact-boundary are dominated
by gestures and all the pre-verbal utterances and sounds of
cooing and gurgling we recognize as baby-talk. The parent
understands this wordless language, participates in it, encour-
ages its successive development into formal language. And as
the contemporary analysts and self-psychologists claim, this
parent serves a vital further function in mirroring to the infant
through this empathic understanding of the child’s language
and establishing his rudimentary sense of self. As the child
develops, and as his field becomes increasingly complex, from
dependence on a single nurturing parent, to the larger social
family unit, and then outward to the community, so does his
language capacity and requirement develop — from child--
speech that is understood only by the immediate family, to
facility in the common code understood by the community.
This sequence or development away from the idiosyn-
cratic and intimate language of the infant/nurturer field to
the more generally comprehensible and public language of
36
BLOOM
society, stated extremely, is the sequence from the playful
creativity of a child’s inventions with sounds to the dry flat
prose of a technical manual, for example, where ambiguity is
unacceptable. (add the intimate private language of lovers: a
well-integrated person would be able to use language at all
these levels as the circumstances required)
In Gestalt therapy, words have two aspects relevant to
this discussion. They may be instruments or tools in the
contact process. Secondly, they may assist in the interruptions
in the creativity of that process. The latter is words of stone,
the former, words of fire.
“When speaking intervenes in the world and shapes ex-
perience,” Goodman writes in Speaking and Language “it often
is, or is taken as, a direct action in the environment . . .”
(Goodman, 1971, p. 19). We can see from this phrase, that this
is the manner by which words make and invent experience.
These are the aspects of language as contact function. Contact
is a process which has been schematized and simplified as
containing certain stages, each possessing distinct experienc-
able properties: fore-contact, contacting, final contact, and
post contact.
Let us look at language from the point of view of each
of these sequences of grounds and figures.
In fore-contact, the figure is the Id of the situation, the
given, whether it be a present appetite or urge, environmental
stimulus, or the unfinished tensions from previously incom-
plete contacts. I suggest that this must include the pre-verbal
sounds, outcries, sub-vocal speech (Perls, et al., 1951, p. 322)
that dwell in the physiology of the word: its breath (or breath-
lessness), its sounds, its tones and overtones.
In contacting, the self becomes more active as the
possibilities of the field become figural. The self orients and
manipulates, distinguishes, chooses, rejects, moves towards
what is desired. This is the ego functioning. Here, words are
tools for organizing the field, words for asking, defining,
cajoling, pleading, convincing, stating, making, declaring, and
of course, creating. And to the extent that the self is fully
engaged in contacting, words are fully alive. The figure they
help form is bright, clear, graceful, flexible. “I am saying my
say, speaking to you.”
37
And now, deliberateness can relax to the spontaneous
sequence of final contact — the experience of integration and
unity of perception, motion, feeling. And here, words are most
alive, plastic, shining, clear, and richly connotative. Meaning,
on various levels, passes from the speaker to the hearer. There
is communication. What is said is heard. The understanding
of the listener reaches out to the words of the speaker. The
Thou has heard the I.
In post-contact, there is a flowing together of organ-
ism/environment. There is the peace of fulfillment, of
satisfaction. There is silence. There is a meeting. An I-Thou
unity.
And so in the ideal circumstances of contactful speech,
words of fire. I will argue that it is an important attribute of
Gestalt therapy that we attempt to establish these ideal
circumstances in the session.
Obviously, speaking may also be part of the sequence
of figure/grounds that includes losses of ego functioning
resulting in weaker figures, less fluid sequences of fig-
ure/ground — the speech of the neurotic verbalizer, words of
stone. In such instances, words in some manner function to
protect the surface membrane of the contact-boundary from
an excess of either danger or frustration. However, the
original danger and frustration no longer exist, but the
verbalizer is not aware of this.
These interruptions of contact are confluence,
interjection, projection, retroflection, and egotism. All of
these phenomena also have normal, non-neurotic manifesta-
tions. I am concerned here with aspects which lead to inter-
ruptions in the creativity of the organism: principally, the
unaware interruptions. When there are interruptions, there is
rarely if ever a single loss of ego function operating; typically,
all are at work, interweaving and supporting one another, one
emerging as figure to another as background. What is com-
mon to all is that in various degrees, the person spoken to is
rarely apprehended as a Thou, but as an It, in Buber’s sense.
To the extent that contact is incomplete, what is unfinished
remains unfinished as background tension for subsequent
figures.
38
BLOOM
Language which suggests confluence is dull lifeless
verbiage, seemingly cutoff from the grounds of the speaker, on
the one hand, or the wildly unpredictable fury of hysterical
discharge on the other. Neurotic confluence is an unhappy
state where the ground is demanded as against any possibility
of differentiation, yet there is no concrete experience of
functional ground. In speech, where confluence is figural, the
speaker may often pepper his language with “we’s,” casting a
broad cloak over differences in his world so as to establish a
sense of oneness. The tone of speech may appear to be warm,
yet often, this warmth flakes off to suggest the cold ice of
bottomless despair, protected by the pseudo-warmth of the
language.
The language of introjection is all too familiar to us.
The words spoken do not seem belong to the speaker. What
is said is spoken from the alien identifications that have not
been integrated into the self. They may be the words of
impersonal authorities — as a student crammed for an exam
regurgitates the authorities gulped down. Or it may the words
of parents or other powerful and threatening tyrants, incom-
pletely pacified by incorporation in the process of introjection.
One of the red-flags of introjection is the passive appeal to
authority or habitual “I should” references. The rhetorical
tone of possible introjection might include a sense that the
speaker is trying to be convincing, thereby hinting at the
background conflict the introjection is attempting to ignore.
Projection also has observable traces in language. In
this interruption of contact, the self disowns a part of itself and
experiences it as part of the environment. And so, in speech,
we may hear the distancing phrases of “There is,” “It seems”
“You know” etc. The speaker may notice “a heaviness in the
room,” or perceive hostility on friendly faces. The listener to
speech where projection may be figural may have the sense
that the speaker is not talking to him at all. (Since the speaker
is more than likely to be speaking or responding to his own
projections and does not even notice that he barely notices the
listener at all.)
When retroflection is the figural loss of ego function-
ing, the speech typically carries evidences of the physical
39
tension of the person. He may hesitate, or actually seem to
struggle to get to a point. Words chosen may be rarefied
abstractions. Sentences may be circuitous mazes where speaker
and hearer may seem to get lost. The speaker may punctuate
his speech with self-critical asides, “I don’t know,” “This may
seem stupid,” and of course, he may conspicuously apologize
for things of which the hearer has not the slightest idea. His
words may sound pinched, tension laden, or perhaps so soft
and withheld that one can barely sense the talker is talking.
And in egotism, the speaker will be so absorbed in the
loveliness of his own speech, the taste of his own words, that in
itself is the excuse for his speaking. Communication is the
annoying justification for his peacock display of what he thinks
is his own intelligence, etc.
What I have just described are only a few possibilities
of the way in which language may reflect losses of ego func-
tions. Of course, there are certainly many ways contact may be
interrupted without the use of any words. But this is not my
focus here.
In our model, where we distinguish contact from its
interruptions, it is tempting to think in terms of an either/or
situation. Either there is contact, or there is not. Such a
misunderstanding has led Gordon Wheeler in his recent book,
Gestalt Reconsidered, to criticize this model and propose his
revisions to correct that error. Wheeler suggests that these
interruptions shape whatever contact is made, so that there
are contacts of various kinds, (Wheeler, 1991, p. 116) to serve
particular functions of the organism. So, he declares, there
may be contacts with a “heavy reliance on introjection . . . well
suited to certain goals and processes and ill-suited to others.”
Wheeler is, of course correct; but we do not need his
correction. It is clear in Goodman, and to us, that all interrup-
tions serve as creative adjustments; “Neurotic behaviors are
creative adjustments of a field in which there are repressions.”
(Perls, et al, p. 447). And since there are always repressions in
the “human condition”; where social harmony is “quite
desirable” (Perls. et al., p. 318) there is always contact with
some aspect of loss of ego functioning.
40
BLOOM
In his concluding chapter of Speaking and Language,
Goodman writes, “I have suggested that the wisest method of
exploring language is to analyze how it operates in actual
concrete situations. . . .This is similar to the literary analysis of
particular works; and as in literary criticism, conversation and
discourses fall roughly into genres, such as small talk intimate
talk, gang talk, public exchange of information, talk of
different social classes, poems, journalism, dialogue, neurotic
verbalizing, scientific exposition, etc.” (Goodman, 1971, p.
227. He then proposes the value of a kind of literary analysis
of these genres. I am particularly intrigued by this concept of
neurotic verbalizing as a kind of literary form.
Just as the artist creates as if to insist on his own
immortality as against the clear knowledge of certain death, so
does the neurotic verbalizer use language to make time stand
still: to interrupt the process of contact. When contact is
complete, there is a letting-go, a kind of pathos (Perls, et al.,
p. 422). Neurotic repetition is a holding back from this final
surrender. And petrified in the fossil of neurotic verbalization
is the moment of dangerous spontaneity interrupted and
repressed by inhibition (Perls, et al., p. 293).
Let us look at this more closely. What I suggest here is
that if we examine neurotic verbalization with the same kind
of attention we bring to poetry, understand its various creative
devices as inherently poetic in nature, we will be able to
revivify this fossil and restore living breath to the imprisoning
words.
Every speaker is like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, each
with a tale to tell, and each looking for the willing wedding
guest who, by listening to him, will free him from the burden
he carries. Speaking is a physical act, alive in the chest, throat,
lips, tongue, and palate of the speaker; and reflected in his
eyes, his expression, his gestures. In verbalized speech, there
is the always evidence of the unfinished; we need only shake
the words to hear it rattle. In every sound uttered in speech,
we may hear, if we listen well, evidence of a pre-verbal outcry,
a song waiting to be sung through words of contact.
In Gestalt therapy, we create an artificial situation for
our patients. We establish grounds of safety so that there may
41
be a special form of contact, therapeutic contact. It is true that
all contact is therapeutic and that is the glory of our method.
But let’s be real. The world is dangerous. And unpredictable.
So that the ideal circumstances of spontaneous creativity, fluid
figure formation, contact where the background truly empties,
for example, is, frankly, utopian. Yet, in the relationship
between therapist and patient, we can try to establish a safer
environment. We as therapists, DO listen. Our patients may
rely on our best efforts in this regard. And we listen with a
special kind of attention to the structure of the moment so
that our interventions make reference to privileged under-
standings.
When we listen for evidences of interruptions of
contact, we are listening for the private language of the
individual. We are listening for his poetry. The literary critic
Harold Bloom compares poetry to psychic defenses in his essay
“Breaking the Form” (Bloom et al., 1988, pp. 1 - 37). He
suggests there are two kinds of figures of speech in poetry that
I think are relevant here: metonymy and synecdoche. Both of
them are a form of naming, according to Bloom. “Metonymy
is a mode of repetition . . . but synecdoche is an initial mode
of identification. A metonymy names, but a synecdoche begins
a process of un-naming” (Bloom, et al., 1988, p.11).
This is very dense stuff. Synecdoche is from the Greek,
“taking up together” and is defined as a figure of speech in
which the part stands for the whole and this something else is
understood within the thing mentioned, as in “give us this day
our daily bread” (Cuddon, J.A., 1991). It thus opens to
another dimension of meaning. Metonymy is also from the
Greek, meaning name change. It is defined as a figure of
speech in which the name of an attribute or a thing is substi-
tuted for the thing itself, for example, the crown for the
monarchy. As a poetic device, it has a more narrow connota-
tion. Bloom further suggests that metonymy is akin to obses-
sive repetition, while synecdoche hints at disorders of psychic
drives. In synecdoche we see an opening in meaning from one
level to another. We see a part standing for and opening up
potential meaning to a larger unstated whole. I suggest that
what we listen for in the verbal productions of our patients is
42
BLOOM
this synecdoche, the trope, or turn of speech which begins a
process of un-naming. When we listen with such an ear, to
quote Richard Kitzler, “Words are people.”
In a usual encounter in Gestalt therapy, the patient
speaks about something. This is the content and we are
trained to acknowledge it, yet, respectfully look beyond it.
Words carry the accumulation of individual contacts as part of
the formed personality of the self as well as the inherited
learning in the history of word use. Each word has specific
meaning to the individual alone as well as bears the common
code. Every learned word is an artifact of previous social and
personal uses. Each word is a here-and-now historical record
of the individual. It is a private personal utterance. And it is
proof of membership in the community of this language.
This is what we listen for, with the content as back-
ground. In the developing dialog of the therapy process,
through the exchanges between therapist and patient, there
will emerge a language unique to this process, with its own
understandings and conventions. It will develop first through
the un-naming where the surface meanings of words are
flaked off and the unfinished yearnings beneath them allowed
to emerge.
It will emerge through the therapist’s supportive
challenge of the speaker as he notices the tropes, the evidence
of the background unfinished situations pressing forward:
“what do you mean by X,” “I noticed when you said Y, your
voice dropped,” “Can you speak to M as if she were here, in
that chair?” “Could you try to say that sentence again, softer,
louder, faster, slower, after a breath?” “What was your experi-
ence when you said Y” “Could you try replacing your words
with physical gestures and tell me that story again?”. This list
can continue as each of you recalls your own ways to attend to
the moments of a session.
Eventually a new language will emerge as the familiar
neurotic verbal structures are deconstructed; it will be the
language of therapeutic contact where what was lost is now
regained. It will be a process of re-naming.
This new language of therapeutic contact parallels the
early idiosyncratic language of the infant/nurturer field,
43
where the freedom and innocence of the child’s play assisted
its learning and development.
It is a restoration of that primitive private language
unique to the contact-boundary of the speaker/hearer. And as
such, it is a return to the plastic creativity of speech where
sounds are the language of the self. With its own music and
personal rhythm, meter, breath, and perhaps, rhyme, it is the
song of the self in contact.
It is the speech of Adam, the language of Eden.
References
Berman, Art. 1988. From the New Criticism to Deconstruction.

Champaign: University of Illinois Press
Bloom, Harold, de Man, P., Derrida, J., Hartman, G., Miller,

J. H. 1979. “Breaking the Form,” in Deconstruction &
Criticism, Bloom et al. New York: Continuum Press
Cuddon, J.A. 1991. A Dictionary of Literary Terms (third edition).

Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
Goodman, P. 1971. Speaking and Language. New York: Random

House
Kristeva, Julia. 1981. Black Sun. New York: Columbia Univer-

sity Press.
Perls, F., Hefferline, R. & Goodman, P. 1951. Gestalt Therapy:

Excitement and growth in the human personality. New York:
The Julian Press
Rank, Otto. 1932. Art and Artist. New York: W.W. Norton
Wheeler, Gordon. 1991. Gestalt Reconsidered. New York: Gard-

ner Press
44
GESTALT THERAPY IDENTITY:
The Search for an Identity Continuum
Theo Skolnik
This is the first of several articles in which I am

exploring the question of a Gestalt Therapy Identity. I’m going
to look at some of our history and underlying philosophy. My
immediate concern is that those readers who have had
negative experience reading obtuse philosophical tracts will be
driven away. Though philosophy sometimes requires aggres-
sive chewing of an extended explanation I will make my
political pledge to you that I will write this to be as readable as
I can. (But then can you ever trust the pledge a politician
makes?) I also want to emphasize that, I believe the philosophy
to be essential to who we are as therapists, and to the vital
continuation and growth of our school of thought.
Each of these articles will contain both factual informa-
tion and portions which may be considered dialogues with
myself and you, the Gestalt therapists in our international
community. Certainly there are many questions which require
consideration from many points of view. The foremost
consideration, as my title suggests, is the Identity of our school
45
GESTALT THERAPY IDENTITY
of thought. I intend to maintain this emphasis throughout
these dialogues, and, as an integral part of this emphasis,
remind myself that we do not have the luxury of being only an
academic ivory tower Idea. As therapists, we are an organized
portion of the Gestalt which is societal mind, and the Societal
Mental Health Delivery System. We function both to advance
knowledge, and heal the wounded. I know, in the early years
there were Gestalt therapists who saw themselves as elitist.
They said that Gestalt therapy was too valuable just to be used
for people who need help. Perhaps only half jokingly they
considered that it was to be for people who were functioning
just fine, and also wanted personal growth. I will suggest here
that everyone has suffered from a less than perfect fit with
society and needs to heal some wounds.
If we are to be proud of our Identity, we have a
responsibility to be highly effective in both of these functions,
i.e., advancing knowledge and healing the wounded. For our
Identity, I need to ask, in my dialogues, are we creating a more
accurate picture of what BEING is all about, how people get
injured, and what is the best way we can provide therapy, both
for the individuals and the society which may be doing the
injuring.
I am not pretending to come to the table without bias,
so read with that in mind. Schools of psychotherapy, just like
schools of psychology and philosophy overstate the case for
their point of view. For the same reasons of dominance in the
marketplace of ideas we, the consumer public, are often asked
to choose between one incomplete idea or theory and
another. No school has the whole picture, all the answers, or
a monopoly on The Truth. Even in trying to recognize this fact
I will, nevertheless, emphasize what I believe Gestalt therapy
has to offer which other schools do not.
As I begin this set of articles, I am faced with a market-
ing problem. I ask myself the question, “do therapists sitting in
their offices, talking with patients, really care very much about
the underlying philosophy of their brand of practice?” The
manufacturers, or, in this case, training institutes, care very
much about brand loyalty. After all, when potential trainees go
to the supermarket shelves to choose which package of cereal
— ah, school of therapy — they want to get training from, they
46
SKOLNIK
do undergo some internal decision making process involving
issues of Identity.
Though I began these articles several years ago the
crucial importance of Gestalt Therapy Identity, for its survival
and continued growth, was brought home to me at the
International Gestalt Therapy Conference in Montreal, Ca-
nada, August 2000. The opening speaker, Bob Harman,
pointed out that Gestalt therapy, which was once flourishing
in his home state of Florida, is now on “life support.” In my
conversations with therapists from different parts of the world
(55 countries were represented) it appears that Gestalt therapy
is in various stages of struggle for survival of the fittest in
different parts of the world. Here in the U.S. all forms of
dynamic psychotherapies are adversely affected by the
corrosive influence of the Managed Care System, which I have
heard many physicians call Mangled Care. In addition Gestalt
therapy, which has often been misrepresented in textbooks of
the psychotherapies, is now often conspicuously absent. There
is almost no ongoing research, and precious few Gestalt
therapists are teaching in universities. I must add, and this is
no light matter, with the extraordinary excitement over the
decoding of the human genome the pharmaceutical and
medical model practitioners have the definite image advan-
tage. It is going to be an enormously uphill battle to convince
the public that there is something called Mind, not just the
biological Brain.
Gestalt therapy must be in touch with its own excite-
ment and growth or it will wither, or be assimilated and dis-
appear. The identity I am proposing is one which not only
distinguishes it from other therapies around it, including
“modern” psychoanalytic therapies, but hopefully is an
Identity which engenders the necessary enthusiasm and
excitement in its practitioners for them to devote some energy
to its growth. Today the most important issue for a young
person considering therapy training is whether they will be
able to use it to earn a living under Damaged Care. There
were recently some political stirrings in regard to Mental
Health so maybe there is a brighter future for dynamic
psychotherapies.
47
Some of the issues I have heard about, in the past, in
discussions with potential trainees, and people who have
undertaken training from other schools of therapy, have
involved such things as: power, or effectiveness as a therapist,
upon completion of the training in a particular methodology;
status of the brand in the world; the range of life problems the
school can prepare them to address; the amount of money
they can charge (Damaged Care presently favors short term
behavior modification vs. long term psychodynamic cereals);
and how comfortable is the training process going to be?
Under this heading I have heard such questions as cost;
number of hours; convenience of class schedules; and
personality of leaders and training staff. I recall one recent
bitter diatribe, by a woman who had received training in
another school of therapy, about how uncomfortably narcissis-
tic the leaders of that school of thought, which purported to
be concerned with the subjective experience of both patient
and therapist, were. I suppose I might consider this a philo-
sophical issue of integrity, or congruence between the
theoretical assumptions and the finished product, i.e.,
between advertising and quality control in the manufacturing
process.
Because of so much false advertising in the world
around us there is certainly a question of honesty and trust
when it comes to a societal institution which presents itself as
wanting to care about and improve the lives of other people.
This is certainly a deep underlying issue for people who are
choosing a helping profession rather than a profession which
does not particularly involve other people, or even one which
is self-serving. But then there are other personality questions
that go into choosing a helping profession. It is seen as less
competitive, and therefore requiring less dominant aggression
than the corporate marketplace. For someone who is not
comfortable with aggressive contact with other people a
helping profession might be a preferred choice. The school of
therapy would then be evaluated in terms of how much
aggression would be expected for the therapist to use with
patients. For a time Gestalt was viewed as an aggressive, or
confrontational, style of therapy, and avoided by less assertive
people. After all, Frederick Perls’ first text on Gestalt therapy
48
SKOLNIK
was Ego, Hunger and Aggression. I don’t think this is so much
the case today, but the image of such an identity still lingers.
I will need to have a little dialogue with myself in regard to
aggression and assertiveness. I’ll look at this a little later in this
article.
Primatologists have been trekking around for years
now observing primates other than ourselves. These Anthropol-
ogists in the Wild have a great deal to tell us, not just about our
cousins, but about ourselves. Yes, it is important for us to come
away from those Public Television nature programs feeling
compassion for other species, but the far more important, and
much more difficult Aha experience for us to come away with
is compassion for ourselves. We experience all those highly
stressful social interactions that the gorilla’s and baboons do,
and we suffer much of the same ulcers and other stress
diseases as a consequence.
It would appear, in fact, when we examine both the
primates with less consciousness, and the human animal, that
evolution has built into our body chemistry such hormones as
testosterone and oxytocin, which affect such behaviors as
dominance and subordination. However, I want to emphasize
here that a higher differentiation of consciousness — an
avowed goal of Gestalt therapy — dramatically changes the
equation between mental processes and biology. (Bruner,
1990).
A confrontational style of therapy gives the therapist an
opportunity to be a bully. We know that when a baboon is
bullied by baboons of higher social status, i.e., parents,
siblings, dominant adults in the group, low and behold they
grow up to be bullies as well, looking for someone of lower
status to confront — someone like a patient.
Of course we can rationalize being bullying baboons by
saying that the baboons who sit behind their patients, passively
waiting for the gift of free association from the supine baboon
paying the fee, are just aggression averse. They are chickens,
not baboons like us who have sharpened our dental aggres-
sion.
True, a passive one-down therapy position isn’t such a
great therapy style, for patient or therapist. Neither is a
confrontational one-up therapy style. There must be some sort
49
of middle ground. Should we call this assertiveness, which
encourages contact and an assertive dialogue in return? And
here I will assert that “meeting a patient where they are at”
sometimes calls for outright aggression. When I worked in a
psychiatric hospital and a patient, who had a history of
murder, attacked a social worker. The mental health therapy
aide, a former policeman and body builder, and myself, ran to
stop him. In the aggression that ensued the aide, “Shoo,” had
his thumb broken. I only had my watch band broken. Maybe
this is an extreme example, but sometimes violent kids in
schools, all too common today in our drug infested environ-
ment, need to also be met with aggression.
Aggression and Assertiveness
I know this little dialogue will not be a complete

scholarly work, and will therefore, not satisfy all the readers.
Some of you will want to take these ideas and explore them
further for yourself. Some of you will want to assertively
challenge me, and some of you will want to aggressively attack.
Maybe you will want to compare reactions with each other to
help in developing the differentiation I am sketching here.
At the time that the first full statement of Gestalt
therapy, Ego, Hunger and Aggression (Perls, 1969, 1947) was
written, the world was still in shock from witnessing the brutal,
violent aggression of the Nazi atrocities in WWII. This was not
a subtle event which could be rationalized away. The human
need for meaning reached out in the search for an explana-
tion for humans treating other humans in this horrendous
way. There was a very important investigation of The Authoritar-
ian Personality (Adorno, et al., 1950), looking, not just at this
aggression, but trying to understand the underlying personal-
ity which was capable of participating in such cold blooded
violence. Hundreds of studies of Hitler’s character have been
published, even up to very recently. Psychoanalytic analysis of
the child rearing practices in pre-Nazi Germany appeared
(Miller, 1984). This vicious aggression must be considered as
an important ground against which the figure of Gestalt
therapy was created.
50
SKOLNIK
The concern about aggression has to be considered a
significant portion of our Identity. I believe, if we state our
point of view very simply, that if we repress and neglect the
natural, organismic aggression of the human animal, in an
effort to be a “civilized” BEING, the energy will inevitably
become twisted and distorted and we will pay a severe price.
The sad human history of cycles of violent aggression
and over civilizing repression can be seen as a failure to deal
appropriately with human-animal energy.
In the wake of the barbaric suicide-murder of Septem-
ber 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center in New York and at
the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., we must remind ourselves
that repression of the natural human energies remains both
a critical societal issue and a dangerous threat. These nineteen
individuals, who readily gave up their bodily existence, were
already disembodied psychologically long in advance of their
service as human missiles. Elie Wiesel, the author and Nobel
Prize winner for peace, commented, in a T.V. interview, that
the terrorists didn’t even bother to communicate with us. The
message is that we Americans are beneath them, and not even
worth communicating with. Their action was then one of
humiliation as well as violence. This is the first time in human
history that repression of the natural human energies has
been so thorough that the terrorists carrying out their actions
are, in effect, zombies, both physically and mentally.
But, I have jumped ahead of myself in my dialogue. Do
we, in fact, know that aggression is natural? Do we know that
our presupposition about repression of what is natural results
in distortions such as sadomasochism, violence and terrorism?
What is a good working definition of aggression? What is the
significance of the distinction between aggression and
assertiveness?
Of course these questions are interlinked. A good deal
of what we know about aggression is extrapolated from animal
research. As for sadism and terrorism as the aftermath of
repression no one has tried to replicate this phenomenon in
the laboratory. Even for those who insist on the “scientific
method” this may be too sadistic. But, on the other hand,
some very sadistic things have been carried out in the labora-
tory, in the name of science. Plenty of fundamentalist families,
51
of all religions, have done this experiment of repression, with
devastating results. These, to my mind, expected results, would
nullify the Null Hypothesis. There should, at least be a
sociological study, to investigate this phenomenon. But, I
guess those who want laboratory proof will pretty much have
to go unfulfilled. Isn’t that sadistic of me? There certainly is a
large body of analytic investigation into the question. One of
Gestalt therapy’s analytic grandparents, Wilhelm Reich (1942,
1949), does make some quite convincing arguments for the
negative effects of repression.
Probably since the very beginning days of the emer-
gence of human consciousness the human animal sought to
separate itself from the animal side of its nature. In this
attempt at separation several different tactics have been tried.
Humanity would be strictly defined as: I think; I am able to
control those “lower” urges of sexuality (for women), nurtur-
ance and security needs (for men), and brute aggression (but
not necessarily corporate aggression); I am a believer in some
religion or myth which tells a meaningful story about my
non-animal origins and purposes. This need to create distance
from our animal nature has sometimes taken drastic and
desperate form. It has often been extremely duplicitous. Of
course extremes are necessary, to drive an intense wedge, in
any attempt to separate what is absolutely inseparable. Yes!
Humans have more consciousness. Yes! Humans have just as
much animal energies as every other animal. Without our
animal energies we are profoundly diminished in our capacity
to function in any of our “higher” functioning.
Human beings have natural energies. The human
animal, just like all the animals that evolved before, feels urges
and desires, and impulses that go along with those natural
energies. Whenever urges and desires have been shut out of
consciousness the energies are blocked. The Chinese have
known this for thousands of years and they developed meth-
ods for unblocking the natural flow of what they call these
“Chi” energies.
People, as we look at them, can be perceived from
many different points of view. A fashion designer may see the
shape of the body, and think how to drape cloth on and
around it to accentuate and/or disguise parts of the shape. A
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biologist may see all the different organs, how they are
connected, and how they either help or hinder each other’s
functioning. A psychologist may see different qualities in the
personality and how they either help or hinder each other. A
sociologist may see how these different qualities help or
hinder their functioning with other people. I could go on, but
I’m sure you get the picture. Every person has parts, and these
parts interact either smoothly and effectively or they don’t.
Each of these individual persons has a task of knowing as many
of its parts as really matter to them, and developing and
organizing these parts into a well functioning person. In order
to function the parts, whether bodily organs or aspects of
personality, have to move in the way they are supposed to.
Movement requires energy to move them. There go those
pesky animal energies again.
The history of human consciousness can be seen as
filled with attempts to describe both the parts and the energy
for moving our parts. History never goes directly forward in a
straight line since humans, just like their parts, get into
tensions and conflicts, and their energies get blocked and
diverted along false paths.
We can only hope that along the way we get to differen-
tiate more about these parts and these energies and how they
can be best organized into the best functioning individuals,
groups and societies. But, people still don’t want to acknowl-
edge our animal nature.
Look at all our fancy clothing (throughout the ages),
makeup, adornments etc., pathetically trying to disguise the
brute fact that we all have bodies. Just like all other animals
these bodies come in a great variety of shapes, sizes, and
colors. And behind the visible body are all the hormones
which, no matter how much consciousness we have, still
energize a great proportion of our thoughts, feelings and
actions.
These intense efforts to deny the animal side of our
nature, precisely because it is an impossible obsession, and can
never be accomplished, always result in distortions and
twisting of the flow of our energies. There aren’t too many
certainties in this life, but this is definitely a certainty, like
death, we can count on. Gestalt therapy recognizes this
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absolutely certain equation. Denying and repressing our
“organismic” (pronounce that animal) nature results in
trouble. With this recognition Gestalt therapy has identified
with the struggle to resist all such denial and repression
whatever form it took. In this sense Gestalt therapy is a
resistance, and therefore, is appreciative that a person’s
resistance is not always a negative that needs to be analyzed
away. However, it is important for the Gestalt therapist that
this resistance be recognized as an act of Will, i.e., a positive,
accepting, active, aware, intentional, choice, rather than an act
of Willfulness, which is rejecting, negative, oppositional,
unaware and often unintentional. Will says, “I can.” Willfulness
says, “I can’t.” I’ll want to discuss Will and Willfulness as part
of my article on Existential Identity.
What about a working definition of aggression and this
distinction between assertiveness and aggression? The
dictionary, as dull as that sounds, is an important place for us
to begin to differentiate our meaning.
Aggressive: Tending to, or characterized by,

aggression; as, an aggressive war; disposed to
attack or encroach; self-assertive; also, enter-
prising; as, an aggressive sales manager.
Synonyms: Aggressive, militant, assertive,

self-assertive, pushing. mean conspicuously or
obtrusively energetic.
Aggressive implies the disposition to dominate,

sometimes by indifference to others’ rights. but now, more
often, by determined, forceful prosecution of one’s ends;
militant also implies a fighting disposition but suggests not
self-seeking but extreme devotion to a cause, movement, etc.,
assertive and self-assertive stress self confidence and boldness
(in the case of the latter, bumptiousness) in action and in
expressing oneself; pushing, sometimes close to aggressive,
more often implies officiousness, offensive intrusiveness, or
the like. (Webster, 1960).
I am making a distinction between what I am calling,
in the absence of any one single word to describe it, natural,
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contactful aggression, on the one hand, and repressed,
distorted aggression.
My dictionary doesn’t make the distinction between
natural aggression and distorted aggression that I want to
differentiate here. I can highlight some of those qualities I am
attributing to the natural state. Aggression attacks, encroaches,
it is enterprising (indeed, for humans it is even an important
aspect of innovation and creativity), it is energetic, even
vigorous, it dominates by determined, forceful prosecution of
one’s ends, it can have extreme devotion, it has confidence
and boldness. Since humans do have consciousness, I will want
to make a further distinction between contactful aggression
and raw, blind aggression.
Unfortunately, the word “aggression” has lost many of
its subtler meanings in the everyday vocabulary. As a result of
this diminution of meaning it becomes difficult to make the
distinction I am making here between natural aggression,
which we value as healthy expression, and distortions of
aggression, which we, along with most of the international
community, abhor. It is, I argue, important to restore the full,
rich range of meaning to the word aggression. The aggressive
efforts, to repress aggression, are a result of this diminished
understanding of the word. In an effort to crush the rageful,
violent, distorted expression of aggression, the natural,
vigorous determined portion is attacked. A narrowing and
diminished understanding is, itself, a result of repression.
Repression becomes a self-feeding degenerative process.
What can we call non-repressive child-rearing and
psychotherapy? I don’t know if we even have a word for the
promotion and encouragement of the full, exuberant expres-
sion of human energies. Could we say we value the vitalization
of vitality? A little clumsy?
Although assertiveness is important, and the combina-
tion of aggressive energy with contactful, context appropriate,
expression is very important, the word assertive is too cerebral
to carry the meaning of vigorous, vital, spontaneous, passion-
ate, sometimes sweaty, bodily energy. This is aggression, not
assertiveness.
Among those animals with minimal consciousness the
natural aggression we observe is usually instinctually hard-
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wired, but sometimes still remains quite contactful. The
animal shows aggression to get food, defend its life, or engage
in battles for dominance and to mate. Most often this domi-
nance aggression is contactful, and does not result in mindless
killing. They communicate with each other as to who is the
dominant one and they part, alive. Add consciousness, among
primates, and you have lots of aggression which is deceitful
(consciousness allows for planning, lying, manipulating etc.).
The aggression can get out of hand and distorted. There are
two types of chimpanzees. One type is very peaceful and
loving. They engage in a great deal of harmonious sexuality.
The other type of chimpanzee is constantly engaged in
aggression and battles for dominance.
Given consciousness, can we assume differences in
child rearing with something equivalent to repression, and
therefore distortion? I don’t know if Primatologists have asked
that question.
I’ll return my dialogue to the human social context.
People engage in this strange behavior called meeting, dating
and mating. It’s a difficult process full of pitfalls, mischief,
missteps, miscommunications, humiliations, disappointments,
wonderful exhilarating moments, triumphs, tenderness and
aggression. If people are able to balance the tenderness and
aggression comfortably, they will develop the necessary
sophisticated social skills and negotiate this meeting, dating,
mating relatively comfortably. If not, they will be awkward,
inappropriately, sadistically hostile, or artificially polite
(disguising the frustrated rage underneath) or openly vicious
like the Taliban.
What sense can we make out of that strange culture,
where the men are so horrendous towards the women? I
would have to believe that, to be so repressive, the men have
to be terrified of the women. They have institutionalized an
enormous rationalization to disguise their own inability to be
contactfully aggressive. With their repressed, twisted aggres-
sion they would, of course, be exposed to terrible humiliation
if they had to meet, date, mate, the way other cultures do.
These vicious fighters are socially impotent. This builds in a
rage that needs some channel of expression, a distorted
aggression.
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The human animal, like many other animals who give
birth to vulnerable offspring, requires shelter and protection
for themselves and their offspring for an extended period of
time. The woman has built into her hormonal “motivators” to
find a male who will provide both aggressive strength and soft,
protective tenderness. A recent interesting computerized study
“morphed” the faces of the computer images of males from
sharp, angular, “testosterone” types to softer, rounder male
types. Female test subjects preferred the aggressive “testoster-
one” face for a brief encounter, and preferred the softer,
rounder male for the long term relationship.
In our culture women do look for strength, whether it
is in the form of physical strength and confidence to protect
them, or the kind of social strength that will provide them with
financial protection and security. Both types of strength
require comfort with their aggression.
Someone might get the impression, from this dialogue,
that only the male of the species has natural aggression. Not
so. Females have their own aggression for meeting, dating,
mating, creativity, and providing security and protection for
themselves and their offspring. The lioness is one example of
an animal where the female exhibits most of the aggression,
for providing food and protection. I know some human
lionesses. In many cultures, even our own, we have, culturally,
tried to raise the female as the sweet, dainty little thing. Yes,
the female has a lower testosterone to estrogen balance than
the male — except in androgenized females and hermaphrod-
ism, Wolman, B.B., & Money, J. (1993), but this daintiness is
still a repressive violation. We see plenty of distorted aggres-
sion in the female population as well. Anytime people are
biting and nasty beyond the appropriateness of the context it
is a good indication that we are seeing twisted aggression.
The kind of repression I have been addressing here is
from external forces, but the interruption of the natural flow
of energy can be internally induced. I’ll give you the scenario
of children growing up in a family where they observe out of
control, violent behavior, e.g., a Taliban household, a poor
Ghetto household, or even a middle class household with a
severely neurotic parent (I have certainly seen too many in-
stances of this in private practice). The children become
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averse to their natural aggression and they develop defenses
which block their own energy. In the language of Gestalt
therapy, they retroflect. This also has negative effects on
thinking and emotional processes, sometimes impacting on
learning in school. It is absolutely appropriate to call learning
to read “word attack skills.” When the natural energy to
aggress is blocked in getting food, getting education, getting
friends, getting work, etc., life turns empty, meaningless and
depressing — all from blocked aggression. Sometimes these
children are, indeed, sadomasochistically aggressive, so no one
would acknowledge that they suffer from blocked aggression.
Now of course, if you are aggression averse, you will be
very shy about using the word aggression and you will prefer
something a bit more cerebral, like assertiveness. It is true that
assertiveness which is contactful, intentionally directed by
conscious awareness etc., has an important place. However
“dental assertiveness” doesn’t convey the kind of spontaneous,
vigorous energy that “dental aggression” does. The averse
person doesn’t want to be reminded of the violence, terrorism,
blind rage, etc. The aggressive, uninterrupted flow of my
energy has a definite natural place in human life. We will need
to make some clear distinction between free, natural, contact-
ful aggression and distorted, interrupted, blocked and twisted
aggression.
When you weren’t looking, I snuck in a new concept,
freedom. Fritz Perls had a catch phrase he liked, “lose your
mind and come to your senses.” He wanted to encourage less
cognitively mediated, free, spontaneous action. Because of this
our Gestalt Therapy Identity was criticized as anti-intellectual.
I suppose if we always promoted total mindlessness we might
warrant such criticism. Don’t forget, however, that both Fritz
and Laura Perls were highly cultured people. They loved
music. Fritz was willing to travel all over the world to hear
good opera. Laura was a highly accomplished pianist, and Fritz
was an avid chess player. I doubt they could be accused of
mindless anti-intellectualism. What about yourself? Are you
anti-intellectual even as you encourage spontaneous, free,
natural aggression?
A person who grew up under horrendous conditions of
repression and/or violence would not trust the expression of
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their own aggression. Their own internal condition is volatile,
threatening and dangerous. Is it appropriate for a therapist to
be aggressive with such a patient, to encourage the expression
of aggression? There are some schools of therapy which say
that the therapist should model the behavior for their
patients. When Gestalt therapy is done as a confrontational
style, this is the case. What does it accomplish? Does it unblock
the repression? Does it give permission to a frightened person
to be aggressive? Maybe. If the repression has been slight, it
can have a salutary effect. If aggression is experienced as
dangerous, it must be approached gently, with contact and
dialogue.
I made a leap from the social context of aggression and
protection to the therapeutic. Does a patient, who is seeking
psychotherapy, because something in their life isn’t working
for them, likewise seek some combination of aggression and
protection from a psychotherapist? I suspect that if the
therapist is too timid, too intimidating or too detached, all
indicators of some distortion of the natural flow of aggression,
the therapeutic enterprise would not come to a good end.
We must not forget that there are individual differ-
ences in adaptation level for such things as anxiety and
aggression. If you live under a certain level of aggression, you
are uncomfortable, even anxious, when placed in an environ-
ment too different from the one you adapted to. That is, too
little aggression and too much aggression would both leave
you uncomfortable. Can a therapist meet patients where they
are at? Can a school of psychotherapy adapt to train therapists
in this kind of flexibility?
Doing Gestalt Therapy in Style
Why do therapists need to be concerned with encour-

aging and developing contact and dialogue in the first place?
Isn’t everyone who comes into the therapist’s office ready to
learn and change? No, therapists are not the first ones to
discover defensiveness and resistance.
I like to think that many of the human dynamics that
we therapists deal with today have been with us since the first
time humans, or even the earlier Cro-Magnon people, got
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together in a group to get something done. The archeological
evidence seems to indicate that the Neanderthal people didn’t
learn and change very much during their days on Earth, but
that Cro-Magnon people developed many changes in the
shape and functions of their tools, and presumably their style
of life. When they went out to get something done in a group
there were some who were more competent than others and
they tried to teach the less capable. Some students were eager
to learn and some were defensive and resistant. The profes-
sions of education and psychotherapy were born. I suspect it
was a very confrontational style. Archeologists have uncovered
some skulls that show evidence of a vigorous form of educa-
tion. But then, maybe some of the holes and fractures in the
skulls are due to failure to learn from their own mistakes.
The problems of defensiveness and resistance still
remain and frustrate educators and psychotherapists. Of
course, some educators and psychotherapists still like to use
the Cro-Magnon’s tools, but there are some Gestalt therapists
who are eager students.
There are some people who readily seek out and utilize
feedback from their environment. These are people who
demonstrate what we call in animal research, “intelligence.”
There are others, of course, who are resistant, avoidant, and
defy learning and change. Not only are there individual
differences between people, but within people as well. Some
things are learned more easily, and learning is differential
under different interpersonal conditions. The kind of feed-
back from the “teacher” makes a significant difference in
learning. If the “teacher” (or therapist) takes the position of
being the one-up master there is likely going to be more
resistance and avoidance than from someone who is engaged
as an equal in a mutual learning process. Of course any
teacher working in a ghetto school will scream bloody murder
at me. How can I have mutual learning and still maintain any
semblance of discipline in the room? That needs a whole
other discussion. O.K., less resistance, more learning is better.
But does all this tap something perfectly natural in people?
Gestalt, as an existential therapy, wants to develop its
methodologies to match whatever can be revealed to be
natural to BEING. This is far easier said than done. What a
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philosopher such as Hume, in his Treatise on Human Nature,
(published in 1739, and still having an enormous amount of
influence on behavioristic thinking and the general public’s
view of humanity) believes is human nature, what a philoso-
pher such as Sartre (1956) believes is human BEING in the
1950's, what a biologist such as Ehrlich (2000) says is Human
Natures (note the plural), or what a Taliban Mulla believes is
natural don’t exactly agree. Which model of BEING is a
therapist supposed to follow? It does make a huge difference.
Intelligent, learned people, some years ago, struggling with
such questions of Truth and Meaning, attempted to design a
means of examining and testing such questions. The Scientific
Method was born. Now, mind you, this method, like every other
human invention, still has its serious flaws, and does not
guarantee truth, by itself. We need only point to the fifty years
or so when the holy scientific method was utilized by
behavioristic learning theorists to “prove” so much which was
grounded in false presupposition in the first place. Neverthe-
less, the scientific method has certainly done wonders to move
human knowledge forward in so many areas. I suggest that the
phenomenological method, in conjunction with the statisti-
cally grounded aspect of the scientific method, is likely to
move knowledge forward most effectively. In fact, this is the
case in studies of subatomic physics and many other
meta-physical areas as well. I will extend this discussion in my
article on Phenomenology.
Overcoming resistance to change is not an easy matter.
Psychoanalysis recognized that patients may enter therapy with
and/or develop resistances to discovering important
awarenesses in themselves. Working from a philosophical
presupposition that people must be made to be open to
learning, psychoanalysis focused a great deal of its efforts on
analyzing the resistance in the patient. Thus was born the
doctor induced disease “analytica interminalis.” The Gestalt
therapist, wanting to avoid this interminable condition, and
provide shorter term treatment, asked itself the questions, “are
resistances sometimes natural?” “what is the message that
resistance is sending?” “is there something in the way this
therapeutic relationship is organized which is contributing to
the development of resistance?” The first question opened up
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a look at contact and withdrawal. The second led to Gestalt
therapists acknowledging their own contribution to what is
taking place in the moment of the session (psychoanalysis
called this counter-transference). I believe the third question
encouraged the development of what is now being called a
dialogical Gestalt, rather than a confrontational approach. If,
indeed, mutual dialogue can be shown to be more efficacious
than either analyzing resistance, confrontation, assignment of
behavioral homework, or other approaches, then we may ce-
lebrate this as growth. Given individual differences, in patients
and therapists, then all approaches may be recognized and
measured for best fit.
Approach and Avoidance
Gestalt therapy identity has long been associated with

the temporal dimension of human existence. It has almost
become a popular parlor joke that Gestalt therapy takes place
in the present tense. The very nature of time, however, is that
there is movement, the present does not stand still. One very
important aspect of this movement that Gestalt therapy has
chosen as a major interest is the movement of people toward
people and interests and the movement away from people and
noxious feelings and things. People don’t always achieve a
successful, effective balance in being able to approach and
avoid. It is quite crippling to a gratifying and productive life
not to be able to do so. Indeed, I would venture to guess that
almost everyone coming in for psychotherapy needs more
effective skills in this temporal dimension. Whether it has to
do with people and relationships, negative habits, repetition
of harmful patterns in living, or some other difficulty, im-
proved approaching and avoiding makes a significant differ-
ence
When we look at one celled organisms under a
microscope, we can observe a very curious phenomenon. They
move toward things and they move away from things. Now, as
you yawn and say “so what,” you are already exhibiting one
half of the vital activity of BEING already observable in this
primitive one-celled creature. You are disengaging or detach-
ing. The other half, of course, is when you say “oh, how
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fascinating.” You become absorbed, fully engaged. You have a
very different intentionality. Lets take a huge leap in evolution
and look at human mothers and infants. Infants play a very
vital game in the observable mother/infant interaction
rhythms. Investigators call this contact and withdrawal ‘gaze
and dodge’ (Davis, 1982). This simple activity, this observable
behavior, has enormous emotional consequences for the well
being of people. The effective maneuvering back and forth
helps the infant to distinguish the kind of messages being
transmitted. Human BEING requires a feeling of full contact
and engagement at least in some time in its life. It says to the
individual, “I am whole, I am vitally alive, I am passionate.”
The dodging, avoidance and disengaging is also just as
important for well being. It says to the infant and the adult
person, “I have some command of my boundary and with it
who I am, when I am, and what I am. This strong sense of
I-AMness is also crucial for what existential philosophy calls
Will, and choices in living. Not everyone achieves a smooth
flow of engagement and detachment. Less than good mastery
of this moving toward and moving away, which the Parame-
cium does so effortlessly, feels rotten. We clinicians stand
back, in our smug detachment and label the failures as
obsessive, hysteric, narcissistic, depressed, and particularly that
piece of paranoia found with all people who have neurotic
difficulties. For the people involved this lack of full compe-
tency in living simply feels impoverished.
Many people who come in for psychotherapy have
suffered from traumatic experiences in their lives. I am not
just talking about the horrendous trauma that is presently
receiving a great deal of attention in the press, for example,
the shock of being near the World Trade Center at the time of
the September 11, 2001 attack, or the trauma of war. I am
talking about the kind of ongoing trauma of, e.g., living in an
impoverished ghetto, living with an out-of-control parent,
living with physical and/or sexual abuse, living with parents
too preoccupied with narcissistic and/or career interests to
recognize the child’s individuality, etc. People growing up
under such traumatic conditions come in for therapy because
they have become incapacitated. They have lost the ability to
avoid reliving the life trauma in their own minds. They may
63
have developed some fantasy that, if they could achieve, would
finally give them relief. They can’t effectively approach this
success, and they can’t avoid their own constant reliving of
their life trauma.
These patients I am talking about do not qualify under
the DSM-IV definition of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Nevertheless their neurotic and characterological defenses
are, indeed, lifestyles designed post trauma, in an attempt to
create, for themselves, some means of giving meaning to, and
coping with, the trauma. Since these defenses were initially
created under adverse conditions they are severely simplified
in their organization and have extremely limited room for
adaptation to changed conditions. The task for the Gestalt
therapist has at least a twofold demand. One is to encourage
experiments for learning avoidance from the traumatic closed
loop memory and approaches to new learning, and secondly
to encourage experiments that shed light on more flexible
organization.
I am arguing that the emotional full engagement is a
fundamental force of BEING. (Very recently neurological
studies showed that when the person is fully engaged, when
meditating, e.g., the frontal lobe is lit up and the two cerebral
hemispheres darken.) It expresses itself authentically as
passionate loving, absorption in creativity and work, play and
sport. Very often there are intrapsychic and external forces
which conspire against full emotional engagement. At those
times people still want and need the sense of engagement.
What they achieve then is an imitation. It is false, and it is not
very gratifying. But at least it is something. Successful full
engagement yields an elevation of the brain chemistry, such as
Dopamine and Seratonin, having to do with hedonic experi-
ence.
Studies have been made on Zebra fish. Those which
win the battles for dominance have highly elevated dopamine
levels, their stripes are brighter, their fins are larger, their
gonads are larger, and they get to mate with the females.
Dopamine, of course, is important to good mental health.
Anti-psychotic medications work on Dopamine receptors.
When people are depressed, their Seratonin levels are
diminished. The medications, such as Prozac, make more
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Seratonin available at the nerve junctures, i.e., the synapses,
help to raise the level, but do nothing about contact and
engagement.
Gestalt therapy can be a Seratonin agonist! Anything
that can encourage a heightened awareness and sensitivity,
such as meditation, body work, and hallucinogenic drugs, such
as mescaline affects an increased production of Seratonin.
This neurotransmitter, when elevated, is available throughout
the brain systems. While hallucinogens are indiscriminate,
turning up the volume, color and bandwidth on both signal
and noise, Gestalt therapy can gently turn up the significant
signals and Seratonin, while damping the noise.
I want to be careful with my language here. I say
‘damping’ because I do not want to suggest that Gestalt
therapy represses or masks the noise. The noise comes from
many places, e.g., neurotic attitudes and beliefs, cultural,
religious and peer pressures, false advertising, etc. Gestalt
therapy encourages this noise to surface as well, and just like
all corrosive sediments and deposits they need to be cleaned
away to allow clear transmission of pleasure signals.
Which Therapy to Choose?
I haven’t heard very much discussion about the

longevity of a school of thought from new trainees, but
certainly anyone who has been in the trenches working with
people for a while is deeply concerned about the truth, i.e.,
the congruence between theory and the ability to make a
significant positive influence in people’s lives. The theories
behind both Psychoanalysis and behavior modification have
been seriously discredited in the scientific community, but
word hasn’t gotten out to the people yet. Even though the
practice of psychoanalysts has shrunk, it is still the status
brand, and blame is simply placed on economics, not on an
underlying philosophical failure. Behaviorism, and the
underlying associationistic philosophy, have been found
wanting, but behavior modification still goes strong in
education, and therapy. For longevity, if truth has anything to
do with it, I’ll still take Gestalt therapy, and its underlying
philosophy of phenomenology and existentialism.
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But, I must not forget that, while phenomenology and
existentialism, were very much in vogue in the 60's, when
Gestalt therapy was the hot new product in the marketplace,
neither of these philosophies are very much discussed today in
America. There is still some discussion in Europe, but they
can’t exactly be called the status brand. Would it be to its
detriment for Gestalt to emphasize this connection?
Psychotherapy is just one way people have to attempt
to seek knowledge that can make a difference in their lives.
For the most part, outside of large cities, it is the last place
people will go, and then only if some authority dictates that
their problem is severe and disruptive to the school or
community around them. In some more intellectual circles it
is accepted as a philosophy and a practical help with some
answers. Otherwise you can speak with a friend, a minister, a
bartender. You can join a religious organization, a political
party or a cult. You can volunteer in a soup kitchen. You can
consult an astrology chart, you can read a book, you can
meditate, you can go to a twelve-step self-help meeting, you
can take a pill, you can self medicate with street drugs, or
alcohol. What makes you think you have a better set of answers
or methodology for a teenager than the kids all hanging out
in front of the pizza place or coffee bar? Or you can log onto
the Internet. Have you considered that the Internet is becom-
ing a source of meaning to some people in competition with
religion, psychotherapy and the bartender.
Have you examined how you derive your knowledge
lately? Can your package of cereal motivate meaningful
changes and a liveable life?
Do you create your own life, or does something else?
How does a person become motivated to believe in the
existential message — you are the author of your script? For
many people — the poverty stricken, the substance abusers,
the genetically challenged, women in a male dominated
culture, etc. — this may feel like a near impossible belief to
arrive at. I don’t know if the Existential-Gestalt message is for
everyone. However, a fundamental aspect of Gestalt identity,
if it is existential, is that, in the face of the human existential
truth — We All Die — we want to choose how we Live.
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Gestalt Therapy Personality
What constitutes the identity of Gestalt therapy? What

is it that is so valuable that it ought to be preserved? Or is
“preserve” the wrong word since it conjures up images of
pickling in vinegar, or even formaldehyde and/or a mush of
berries in a jelly jar. What is at the core of Gestalt therapy —
the Self that does not change while all around the rest grows?
I have suggested that, at the core, is a philosophical founda-
tion that includes an image of human nature, or BEING, i.e.,
an Ontology, and a system of how people interact with the
world so they take in and organize new knowledge, i.e., an
Epistemology (and thanks to those ancient storytellers, who
gave us the book of Genesis, we know that eating the fruit
from the tree of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing —
we may recognize our nakedness).
I suggest also there is something a bit less tangible, but
just as important to its continued vitality. Gestalt therapy has
a personality. There is no question about what gave Gestalt
therapy its dynamic personality in its heyday. In the 1960's
Gestalt therapy’s artistry was its self promotion. There were
instant on-stage insights and revelations at the Gestalt therapy
demonstrations. This was not about its therapeutic or philo-
sophical truth even though it underscored one-trial learning,
which rejected both behaviorism and psychoanalysis. It had
everything to do with what it was not. It flew in the face of the
establishment! It challenged conventional, repressive rules.
Above all else it was the extraordinary irreverence and
impudence that gave Gestalt therapy its power to attract
devotees. The plain, outright distaste for phoniness (non--
truth, or as Sartre is variously translated, bad faith and
self-deception), small, medium, and large (chickenshit,
bullshit, and elephant shit) was a personality issue for Freder-
ick Perls and those who got his message. Fritz was extremely
offended by dishonesty, hiding real feelings, whether they be
kindness or harsh brutality. The spontaneous, unflinching
candor was an important part of Gestalt Therapy Identity.
People were encouraged to explore their inner landscape and
then to reveal it authentically. Social sincerity gave way to
personal authenticity.
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While Frederick Perls was doing public demonstra-
tions, a very healthy part of the Gestalt marketing appeal was
the insistence on Authenticity. This was the 1960's when
authentic being was a part of the public debate, brought to the
table by the several protests against ‘establishment’ morality,
and authenticity was held in high esteem. Today, though a few
people may still believe in authenticity and integrity, in the
wider marketplace the concepts of authenticity, and related
humanism and liberalism, have had their meanings distorted
and are devalued. Perhaps in the mediocre, conformist level
of expected moral development people are encouraged to
display sincerity, and that only in some select situations.
Sincerity, of course is sham authenticity, it need not have a
genuine core. It is, in the present teenage vernacular, “front-
ing.” It is a social skill. I mean to suggest that skill is an
externally observable behavior, while the person inside may
remain hollow.
I suggest that authenticity is a central, and very
important value, for Gestalt Therapy Identity. When they sing
songs about ‘fronting’, teenagers do, in some vague way,
recognize that authenticity has gone missing in society. When
teenagers are oppositional and defiant they are often attempt-
ing to defend the remnants, the last vestiges, of their experi-
enced authenticity. Could you imagine a Gestalt therapist
today going into a school and recommending to administra-
tors to encourage defiance? Gestalt therapy, as an anti
establishment philosophy, was itself defiant in the 1960's. How
can it express and encourage the expression of authenticity
today? Is there some way, other than unmitigated rage, to be
authentic, when society doesn’t value authenticity?
We must never minimize the incredible fertile energy
and dominant challenging spirit of those times. There was a
great deal of experimentation with different structures for the
therapeutic session; no appointments, no time limits, whatever
fee you could afford, therapist confrontation, hot seat demon-
strations, etc. Something addressed by those experiments,
which has only recently returned to the dialogue (Hycner and
Jacobs, 1995) is the encouragement of authentic realness in
the person of the therapist and the I - Thou (Buber, 1970),
contact with the patient. Laura Perls often spoke about Martin
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Buber when I was in training with her. Whatever the actual
results of these experiments and demonstrations they were a
part of the identity, the personality, of Gestalt therapy.
If the extraordinary showmanship and instant, on stage
transformations were the total substance of Gestalt therapy, it
would not be alive today. Mind you, without the showmanship
people might not have taken notice of it in the decade of
revolution and psychedelic phantasmagoric light shows (inside
and outside people’s heads). Gestalt therapy definitely had the
right marketing at the right time. Gestalt got to be known as
more populist, less dragged out, and less authoritar-
ian-repressive, than its comparison product, psychoanalysis.
And for a while the identity as the low priced spread was
vitalizing and attractive.
Other therapies have since sprung up as the challeng-
ers to the now surprisingly “establishment,” name brand,
Gestalt therapy. They have done a good job of marketing.
They advertise, sometimes a speedier, hypnotic, more efficient
problem solver, sometimes a newly revitalized analytic depth
(with a big “NEW” boldly emblazoned on the package), and
sometimes a more laboratory-scientific cognitive/behavioral
response to problem stimuli. In this marketing climate there
are Gestalt therapists who have been drawn to merge with the
shiny new and better box office therapies.
Will the now fifty-year-old champion retire with dignity,
go into the ring swinging, or somehow maintain its youthful
vitality and relevance to the rapidly changing life space it is
engaged in?
Psychotherapy has something terribly important to
bring to the table. Society has assigned to psychotherapy the
task of dealing with real live human beings, in real life
situations. It has done, in my estimation, a rather mediocre,
C+ average, job of meeting this demand. It has largely de-
signed itself for staying in the secure hot house, office environ-
ment for the middle and upper-middle class client. It has not
made adequate plans and adjustments to venture out of the
office to be truly effective and useful in the schools, hospitals,
corporate environment, and maybe even in the political arena
(is that a boxing match?). It has not adequately looked beyond
itself to have the desperately needed societal impact on
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prevention of drugs and other abuses, in one direction, and
wars and terrorism, in another direction. It has not adequately
made use of the public information highway for its voice to be
heard by all of society, which desperately needs its insights.
Just in the psychology, neuroscience, philosophy domain,
bringing real live human concerns in real life situations could
have an extraordinary, salutary effect on how we conceptualize
mind and consciousness. No matter how much we finally
identify how neural firing produces Mind, we must still know
how that Mind thinks and feels when it comes to organizing
beliefs, solves problems, and converts the thought into action.
Psychotherapy has been wrestling with these questions for
about one-hundred years. I believe that the fifty-year-old
Gestalt therapy, which has looked at the educational and
corporate world, ought to speak out more clearly, and reach
out more forcefully to societal needs.
Past Concerns
The Spring 1996 issue of The Gestalt Journal was

dedicated to Isadore From. For me, the strongest impression
I am left with, from the articles and interviews in the journal,
as well as from my personal memories of Isadore, is his
intellectual integrity.
Isadore was not just a great therapist and trainer he was
the philosopher who insisted that we never forget our philo-
sophical roots. Frederick Perls brought Isadore into the
discussion in the select group of founders of The New York
Institute for Gestalt Therapy precisely because of his studies in
philosophy at The New School for Social Research.
Isadore, in his lifetime, had done much, both in the
formulation of the theory, and in the protection of its identity.
The question of Gestalt Therapy Identity is important, not just
for the present, but for the future cohesiveness of our own
school of thought. The biggest threats to Gestalt Identity come
from encroachment by careless cobbling together of Gestalt
therapy and XYZ therapy. The indiscriminate combining of
Gestalt with other therapies (which is a widespread practice)
I would suggest, happens as a result of lack of knowledge on
the part of the institutes training Gestalt therapists. Gestalt
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therapy training ought to include a deconstruction of the
psychology and philosophy which trainees bring in from the
universities. For many decades American psychology was
totally dominated by Behaviorism, grounded in an
associationistic philosophy of consciousness. Even the contact
process, a core principle in Gestalt therapy, was elaborated as
an associationistic, concatenated chain. Anyone who is in
touch with the phenomenology of their own contact process
is aware that it is not a linear chain event but an interactional
event which feeds back and feeds forward. This serves to
underline the importance of a solid grounding in the
phenomenological understanding of the organization of
consciousness.
I am not suggesting that other schools of therapy, or
other methodologies, have nothing to give us. On the con-
trary, there is much that is very valuable that is not presently
part of the Gestalt repertoire. I myself have obtained training
from many other sources and have integrated them into my
work. It has always been after considering how I can make it
consistent with Gestalt philosophy. As I write this it sounds
arrogant, “I can do it and you can’t.” I don’t know how
successful I have been in this attempt to integrate, but it is a
concern.
Isadore lives on with us, because, as Gestalt therapy
matures, and we wonder what the core continuum of Gestalt
Identity is, Isadore and his concerns must be very much
present in the ensuing dialogue.
Gestalt therapy, from its beginning, was about more
than just individual psychotherapy. The founders were
cultured, and socially conscious people. All the acknowledged
important influences, such as the Gestalt Psychologists, e.g.,
Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Goldstein
(1939), Wilhelm Reich (1949), and Otto Rank (1932), were
social critics as well as scientists. A system of thought about
people in their social context, about growth and change,
about being therapeutic for people who are in some way
dysfunctional, must ask itself many questions as it formulates
a continuing identity. Now that the original founders are no
longer here to advocate for their ideas, we have a responsibil-
ity to take a serious critical look at the identity of Gestalt
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therapy. Our responsibility is toward the present and the
viable future of this system of thought.
Do we measure the identity of a school of thought
whose major theoretical text is about excitement and growth,
from what it has been, its past? Growth suggests learning and
change into the future. If we are interested in growth of the
theory we are talking about a dynamic identity, and we must
be interested in its epistemology (the origin, nature, methods
and limits of knowledge, or in other words, how the theory
takes in and organizes new information). Gestalt therapy also
thinks of itself as a systems theory. We might characterize the
theory, practice, practitioners and end users (clients and
societal institutions) as a living system. If so we can imagine a
system that has feedback and feedforward loops that excite
and inhibit, that extend out and contract. Our own contact
process ought to be reexamined as a feedback system.
I would like to emphasize that a school of psychother-
apy, just like an individual, lives in the world (space), and has
a history (time). It interacts with others in its world, it has
experiences, and these experiences influence its future per-
ceptions and experiences (Gestalt Illusions?, Transference?).
Living in the world, for me, suggests that it has both friendly
dialogue with, and competition with, other schools of psycho-
therapy as well as other institutions in the world. By this I
mean that a school of psychotherapy is a system of ideas that
can provide meaning and hope as do some other myths, e.g.,
religion and science. A school of psychotherapy serves the
society in which it lives as one agent of change along with such
things as education and the criminal justice system. Often
society looks to a school of psychotherapy, or even demands of
a therapy, that it be able to do far more than the therapy
claims for itself or believes it can accomplish. Nevertheless the
practitioners and the society may be very disappointed, angry,
and even disillusioned, when expectations are not met.
Practitioners, out of their own need to be able to meet
expectations, have been drawn to merge Gestalt therapy with
some other institution. Thus we have practitioners of Gestalt
and XYZ therapy, and we have Gestalt and XYZ myth, psychic
prediction, or religion. Since therapists, myself included, work
in many different settings, from prisons to schools to corpora-
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tions (maybe these are not all so dissimilar), we are always in
search of what will help us meet the people “where they are
at.” This, I recall from conversations with Laura Perls, is
considered a fundamental Gestalt principle. Adding knowl-
edge and skills from other schools of thought is certainly
admirable. Insisting that this too is Gestalt, without any
investigation into “goodness of fit” (an important criterion in
Gestalt Psychology for forming a whole gestalt) is distorting to
the process and identity of Gestalt therapy. I understand why
Isadore From was upset at people doing this.
For the original developers of Gestalt therapy an
important expression of this interactivity is called the contact
process. Is it meant to be a statement of how people take in
from the world? This is certainly what we understand from
Laura Perls. She tells us she identified dental aggression and
oral resistance when she was breast feeding her infants.
Frederick Perls presented a paper on oral resistance (at a time
when only anal resistance was recognized) to a psychoanalytic
congress at Marienbad. Freud, who had a silver jaw after a
cancer operation, just wanted him to go home. This, we
understand, as a seminal event in the birth of a breakaway
school of therapy, which came to be called Gestalt. The name
was in recognition for Gelb, the Gestalt psychologist that
Laura had studied with, and Kurt Goldstein, whom Fritz had
trained with. It identifies Gestalt therapy as distinct from its
parent, psychoanalysis.
Dental aggression and the contact process serve to tell
us that in order to take in new information there is an assertive
(or is it aggressive?) process, an act of Will, involved in taking
it in, organizing it, and making it your own (in order for it to
have any nutritive value). As a way of describing the taking in
of new knowledge Associationism just doesn’t come anywhere
near this kind of description. The phenomenological descrip-
tion (which I’ll discuss in a separate article) is, in fact, the
most kindred spirit. Thus the contact process shapes the
non-interpretive, non-analytic style of the Gestalt therapy
interaction. It is, therefore, an epistemological statement in
the identity of Gestalt therapy.
However, the contact process is also an ontological
statement. It says, “this is the nature of human living in the
73
world. Contact with others is central to our Being.” As an
ontological aspect of Gestalt Identity the therapy wants to
encourage contact which more closely approximates who we
are as human beings.
The contact process is also a statement about
intentionality (an important principle in phenomenology).
What is the focus of my attention? Am I making contact with
another person; with a thought or feeling within myself; with
a school subject I am trying to learn; or with a piece of art I am
trying to create? For phenomenology all consciousness is
intentionality. In Sartre’s phenomenology consciousness and
Being itself are being created through a project into the
future, an action. Intention brings me to the tension forces of
motivation. What are the motives for wanting to carry my
intention into action and what are the motives for resisting the
action? Is my motivation authentically personal, e.g., my bliss
or gratification? Is my motivation just a means to an end;
market profit, one upsmanship, vengeance, power, envy?
Because I personally, may take a negative view of
means-to-an-end motivation is it any less authentic? Buber tells
us that I-It relating is just as much a part of being human as
I-Thou relating.
These motivational forces are always ambivalently
possible. To the extent that I have not made contact with
them, brought them forth into awareness, and acknowledged
them, I will not have a unifocal intention and my contact will
be scattershot — and easily distractable. I will be deficient in
my attention. Does this say something to what is now being
called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? My experience
is that for most of the kids I see today with ADHD there is
definitely a biological component. Their parents were
“turning each other on” with drugs and alcohol when they
were conceived. And/or the medication they are taking for
asthma makes them hyperactive. (The question of biology
needs a whole other study). However, I am suggesting that
intentionality is also an important factor in ADHD. If we can
do something to make that intentionality more energized,
what Heidegger calls the Will to Will, we have an avenue for
helping youngsters who are suffering with ADHD. With the
overwhelming increase of substance abuse among young
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people our society is coming to the drowning point with
ADHD babies. And the schools wonder why nobody is learn-
ing.
Present Context
Gestalt therapy is growing. Its youthful exuberance

must not be replaced by a stodgy middle age as it seeks to
establish a solid ground. I used to hear a wonderful catch-
phrase from Laura, “The difference between excitement and
anxiety is self-support.” What is our self-supportive grounding?
Today, as Gestalt therapy goes through growth pains, we want
to define an identity. We must not lose its challenging,
experimental, existential delightful, irreverence. Yes, we want
to pursue Truth, and be truly therapeutically effective for the
greatest diversity of people as we can. However, I plead that we
don’t become proper, and too respectable, and lose the spirit
of adventure that puts color in our cheeks.
Now I must add a cautionary caveat. Creative experi-
mentation that hurts people has no justification. Therapists,
no matter how outrageous they want to be to make a point of
values, must never ignore the cognitive and emotional
intelligence that informs our work. Outrage and aggression
are not automatically creative. It often feeds the narcissistic
need of the therapist more than it serves the patient, or the
therapeutic modality.
But irreverence for the “established” morality, I hasten
to add, does stem from a set of values. Conventional and
conformist morality, the psychologists who study morality tell
us, is only a middling level of development. Sometimes
unconventional morality is at a low level, as it is in the psycho-
path, but sometimes it represents a much higher level of
development, as it does in Maslow’s Self-Actualizing personal-
ity. This is what Gestalt Therapy Identity ought to be aspiring
to.
Frederick Perls had the brilliance and wisdom from the
time he came to this country from South Africa (as well as the
dominant, theatrical personality) to attract people of bril-
liance. (Rosenfeld, 1996). These extraordinary minds, (did
they not have bodies?) through dialogue with each other, as
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early as the 1950's, gave shape to the philosophy, science,
techniques and values that make Gestalt therapy the interna-
tional treasure it is today. However, some of the philosophical
justification came after-the-fact. Not until the late 60's, when
Fritz returned from a trip to Japan, did he recognize the
similarity between Gestalt therapy and Zen Buddhism.
Without the written word we would distort into rumor and
forget.
If I think about my identity as an individual, I think
about those things about myself that I value a great deal.
There are strong emotional reasons for what I value. If I have
put a great deal of work into something — as did the group of
founders of Gestalt therapy — I consider it “Me,” whether it is
right of wrong. We all know people who have beliefs or aspects
of their personality that are not open to question or explora-
tion. Look at the religious rationalizations for war and
terrorism. Look at the defenders of the politically correct left,
and the conservative right — they are both wrong. You know
the expressions, “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is
made up” or, “I don’t care if it is good art or bad art, I know
what I like.”
No one can afford such closed mindedness when it
comes to a school of psychotherapy. It is not like a signature
piece of “stand alone” architecture. It has importance precisely
because it relates to its surround, its context. It makes refer-
ence to its past, but it is far more important that it compels the
imagination as an experiment, that it raises questions about
the present and the future, and, as an adventure, breaking
down dysfunctional belief systems, it perhaps must ask a lot
more questions than it can provide answers for. It is not
compelled to prove all truths, while it does hold high the value
and pursuit of Truth.
Is there anything we can do to facilitate this kind of
inquiry? Some of the questions that occur to me have to do
with how Gestalt therapy relates to its surround. I invite you,
the reader, to also generate questions.
Is the new reality run by software? T.V., the Internet,
and computer software are certainly major influences in
shaping the consciousness of the present generation. In an
age when technology allows you to be anywhere — virtual
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space or the World Wide Web — what does it mean to be in
real space?
Everything is being built for the short term, out of non-
durable materials. We have virtual relationships, complex
interactive forms, and multiple screens. Do boundaries have
the same meaning they had in the past? This age of extraordi-
nary rapid change is all about anticipating the future, all about
transition. What does here and now, or the durable relation-
ship mean?
Gestalt therapy, in the past, was all about the present
moment. As with exquisite poetry it gives us an extraordinary
sensitivity to the slightest moods, it gives us an intellectual
discipline for delicate, poignant as well as explosive emotional
revelations. There was a vast vitality that asked questions of
life, love and art. It challenged us to grow because it height-
ened sensibilities to art and to what was not yet known. When
no one has time for the present, what is the reality of this
present moment?
There is a beginning consciousness in such places as
science and architecture, of the interrelationship of things, of
what William James called the transitive components of
consciousness, and not just the substantive parts of conscious-
ness. Will we become more preoccupied with facade, or less
preoccupied?
I studied with Mary Henle, Soloman Asch, Rudolph
Arnheim and several other Gestalt Psychologists. Despite Mary
Henle’s criticism that she could find no connection between
Gestalt therapy and Gestalt Psychology, discussions with Laura
Perls often revealed the roots of her thinking from various
Gestalt Psychologists. I had the good fortune of studying
Phenomenology with Aron Gurwitch, who studied with
Edmund Husserl and Kurt Goldstein. I’ll use his writings and
notes from his classes in my article on phenomenology.
Gestalt Therapy, Psychoanalysis

and Behavior Modification
Gestalt therapy is a depth psychology just like any

school of psychoanalysis. After all Frederick and Laura Perls
where both highly trained and highly regarded psychoanalysts,
77
and Gestalt therapy believes in an unconscious. As evidence of
Frederick Perls’ regard for the value of the unconscious he was
intensely involved in working with dreams up to his last days.
I was in a workshop with him in New York just before he flew
to Chicago and entered a hospital to soon die.
However, it is also just as much without doubt that
Gestalt therapy is interested in what our unconscious can tell
us for different reasons than its parent psychoanalysis holds.
These different reasons inform our methods of revealing our
unconscious, and our methods of dialogue with our uncon-
scious. I suggest that for psychoanalytic philosophy there is an
I-It relationship between the consciousness and the uncon-
scious, while for Gestalt therapy philosophy there is intended
to be an I-Thou relationship between our consciousness and
our unconscious. Since we do not regard our unconscious as
an enemy Id, but perhaps more like a frightened child who
ran off into hiding, we do not need to treat the person as a
dangerous war zone which we, as therapists, only approach
with our full armor and weapons of mass destruction.
Gestalt therapists are not expected to be “fully psycho-
analyzed” and therefore free of all emotions. I remember
asking a woman in a Gestalt group, who had previously been
in psychoanalysis, what she knew about her analyst. Her
response was very telling. She knew he had chrome and glass
tables in his office and he wore very neat gray suits. Gestalt
therapists are not gray suits.
Traditional psychoanalysis believes that, in order for
this enemy id to reveal itself this emotionless chrome and glass
figure is merely offering himself for transference. In fact, that
detachment places him one-up, and in the position of an
authoritarian form of authority. Now, it is true that since the
patient seeks help from the therapist, he or she is automati-
cally assigned some authority. Authority has some usefulness
in such a relationship. However, and this I consider to be
important, there are several different forms of authority, and
these are distinguishing characteristics in different schools of
therapy.
Not only were no emotions permitted in the analyst
(except fully analyzed ones — read this unspontaneous and
suspiciously inauthentic) but the setting had to be as antiseptic
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as a surgery. Indeed, in Freud’s day both the medical practitio-
ner and the analyst called the office, “the surgery.” According
to Anna Freud, the specific arrangement of the analytic setting
was designed to invite the production, not of what was in the
present, but of what was derived from the unconscious. The
patient was expected to ‘submit’ (her word) to complete
relaxation, suspend his critical faculties, so as to make free
associations, and exclude movement, so that even the most
dangerous impulses would be channeled into words instead of
actions (I dare you to ask a restless teenager with high
performance IQ and low verbal IQ scores, to ‘submit’ to this
setting). I invite all of you Gestalt therapists to compare
yourself and your offices to this psychoanalytic ideal.
I recall Laura Perls saying to me “there are as many
ways to do Gestalt therapy as there are Gestalt therapists.” I am
not suggesting that Gestalt therapists let all their emotions
hang out all over the place. However, I am very aware that
Gestalt therapists do not strive to anesthetize themselves from
all their emotions. It is not humanly possible, and robots
would do a much better job of this. Gestalt therapists are, of
course, encouraged to continue their excitement and growth
throughout their lives.
But then this still leaves us with the probability of our
unconscious meeting the patient’s unconscious. I have always
considered it a very good policy to discuss this possibility with
patients early in our relationship, and to encourage them to
let me know what they encounter in me as much as I will
endeavor to hold up a mirror for whatever I encounter in
them. We acknowledge that we are both in the room. Laura
Perls, with her delightful sense of humor sometimes said to me
“Gestalt therapists attempt to break the transference at the
end of each session by picking their nose.” I sometimes can’t
wait till the end of the session.
Noses aside, how do I view my unconscious? If all
Gestalt therapists are different, I can’t presume to speak for all
of you, so I’ll just discuss some of my thoughts about our
unconscious and invite your comments.
As I’ll discuss in my article on existentialism we are
born into this world with other people so I believe this Mitwelt
(relationship world) is very important in shaping who we are.
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Is it more important than the evolutionary biology (Id
instincts) Psychoanalysis contends are primary? We never
escape our biology, but by adding language, with its ultimate
effects on our ability to think, it renders human being an
emergent phenomenon in evolution. We cannot strictly apply
the same laws as apply even to our closest primate relatives.
As modern neuroscience informs us there is no such
place as the unconscious. There is no ‘thing in itself’ that is
encapsulated, frozen, and located in our brain. Rather, the
present belief is that both cognitive and emotional memories
are somehow multi-represented, intermingled, and go
through many changes over time. I’m sorry I can’t be more
specific, but, as far as I know, neuroscience still can’t be more
specific about the nature of memory.
Psychoanalysis made this great leap from evolutionary
instincts to ‘drives,’ motivations for behavior in everyday life.
It was, I must admit, a marvelous marketing device to bring the
power of evolution so directly into our lives. There is, we are
now quite sure, no specific way that evolutionary biology,
which, if anything, is represented as hormones, peptides,
neurotransmitter chemicals etc., is expressed either in pure
‘drives’, thoughts or actions. Not even genes, the directors of
the Genome Research assure us, are directly expressed. It
takes an interrelationship of genes to contribute to the
shaping of a personality. Further, we do know from research
by Dan Lehrman (1966) that even in such lowly creatures as
ring doves, biological drives (shaped by hormones) are not
expressed without environmental releasers. Even ring doves
need their Mitwelt. The very important implications of his work
have never fully been appreciated.
I would further suggest that our Unconscious is also
represented in our musculature, body and brain chemistry,
and perhaps even as a flow and/or blockage of energy which
western science hasn’t yet been able to identify. I am referring
to the ancient Chinese insight about Chi energy. It is my guess
that, with the intense interest in Asian studies at the time in
Germany, which Otto Rank readily acknowledges in his studies
on art, Wilhelm Reich became familiar with Chi energy. He
libidinized this, and called it Orgone energy. We do know,
even from careful research on alternative medicine, that
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Acupuncture (which theorizes that it moves this Chi energy
along its pathways — called meridians), Tai Chi and Chi Gung
practices, can have a healing effect on such physical expres-
sions of “Unconscious” as arthritis and other stress illnesses.
I know this isn’t as exciting as raging child sexuality,
castration anxiety, Oedipus complexes, and oral, anal, and
phallic stages of development. I must apologize to the Gestalt
therapy marketing department for making their job more
difficult.
Even though this is not quite the same unconscious
which so excited the sexually repressed world and made
psychoanalysis such a central part of societal mind, Gestalt
therapy’s unconscious, with its mix of evolutionary biology,
interaction rhythms, neuroscience, environmental releasers,
and body or Chi energy, may yet prove to be interesting to a
more educated consumer (as the clothing store advertises).
And I never said that people are passionless and asexual.
Even dreams, which psychoanalysis considered to be
the royal road to the unconscious, have come in for their
share of research investigation and reassessment. The debate
is still very much ongoing so I wouldn’t venture any final word
on dreams. It does appear, however, that recent events, like
yesterday, play much more of a role than previously thought.
As any good depth psychologist knows, yesterday and today are
filtered, colored, shaped, even distorted, by what is tucked
away in storage. However this storage may be organized it is
still the body and the mind which is there to actively create the
intentionality for our experience and receive and consolidate
the experience in their data files, according to the filing
system it has constructed. Experience isn’t passive. No matter
how ‘passive’ the personality may appear, we are, none of us,
Locke’s Tabula Rasa.
We, as Gestalt therapists, can then actively work with
our patients to reveal what meaning they can find in the
dreams. I have sometimes encountered an interesting dynamic
if I insist that this is a mutual exploration for meaning. My
patient will then insist that I am the expert, and I should hurry
up and tell them what this dream means. Since this is a handy
dandy way for people to resist owning what they have re-
pressed, e.g., their resentment at parental control, depend-
81
ency etc., it is a fine opportunity to look at these dynamics and
put aside the dreams for the moment. “But, I insist, you are
withholding from me — no I don’t really want to look at that
muddy, ugly stuff in my Unconscious” — and so we go on.
Dreams are still a royal road to something.
From the perspective of traditional psychoanalysis,
even Anna Freud was apologetic that defenses were devalued
as merely surface manifestations derived from the deep dark
unconscious. The psychoanalytic concepts of repression and
defense mechanisms need to be revisited in light of the
considerable importance of interaction rhythms, boundaries
and contact processes in the Gestalt therapy theory. Defenses
are not stand alone mechanisms of a stand alone machine.
Defenses are real live actions in response to real live people,
along with what this ‘here and now’ interaction triggers from
storage.
Since we, as Gestalt therapists, can never hope to purify
our emotions or sterilize our setting to encourage some
untouched, encapsulated unconscious to reveal itself, out of
deepest, darkest Eigenwelt (self world), maybe we can let go of
striving to accomplish this feat of legerdemain. We are, in fact,
part of the present Mitwelt so we can participate, with our
patients, in this sometimes painful, sometimes joyful revelation
of what, heretofore was not so readily available to awareness.
As such, I have sometimes called myself a Gestalt Awareness
Trainer. It is not my emotionless, neutral response which
encourages revelation, it is how I respond when we are both in
the room together. Do you, my reader, have any other feelings
about that?
Gestalt therapy is concerned both with the depth of the
personality and with changing behavior to achieve a far more
gratifying creative and effective life style. It is, therefore, very
interested in making contact with and achieving a meaningful
bridge between our unconscious and choices for living. It
recognizes that the past life experiences, which remain as both
cognitive/emotional and bodily representations can hold an
intractable grip on present consciousness and behavior. This
it shares with its grandparents, i.e., talking psychoanalysis and
Reichian Body Analysis. It recognizes, in agreement with
behaviorism, that observable behavior can be a valuable source
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SKOLNIK
of information, and that it is not enough to merely analyze the
unconscious without changing behavior. It agrees with the
joke that a jerk who is analyzed for twenty-five years is now an
analyzed jerk. A desired outcome of Gestalt therapy is a better
life, not just a mind full of knowledge.
Though it values both our unconscious and our
behavior, Gestalt therapy is neither psychoanalysis nor
behavior modification.
One of the great failings I see in behavioral-based
therapies is that they assign no differentiated weighting to
antecedents of behavior. In fact, in strict behavioristic terms
there is only reward or punishment after the behavior. There
is now a federal mandate, under the Individuals with Disabili-
ties Education Act (IDEA) law, that children who exhibit
behavioral problems in school have a Functional Behavioral
Assessment plan as part of their Individualized Education
Plan. Behaviorism, as a theory, is now under serious skeptical
review, if not total discreditation in academia, it is seriously
flawed, but education is jumping on the behavioristic band-
wagon as though it is the new exciting sliced bread. How
absurd. This assessment process does take liberties with strict
behaviorism. It does recognize, logically, that an event which
preceded an acting out behavior, i.e., an antecedent, could
have triggered the undesirable behavior. The teacher is
instructed to observe (remember, nothing exists for behavior-
ism, such as motives and feelings, unless you can observe it)
what these antecedent behaviors are, and then design their
own responses and change what transpires in the classroom so
such antecedents do not occur again. No one has asked the
teacher to be aware of their own feelings and motives. There
is no real attempt to weight the importance of the antecedent
(the individual meaning and significance) in the life of the
child. Breaking the behavioristic dogma, again, the teacher is
asked to ‘speculate’ what function the acting out behavior
serves. Of course, the teacher has a limited list of options to
choose from. The ‘bad’ behavior is to seek attention, or to
escape from doing the academic work which presents diffi-
culty. The teacher is then instructed to design a response
which does not reward attention seeking or escape. They are
further instructed to teach a replacement behavior. I suspect
83
that the reality is, not knowing the meaning of the behavior it
cannot be exchanged with a replacement behavior, and
ultimately the practitioners will declare the program a failure.
To give a fair representation of present day behaviorist-
ic therapy, we have to recognize that the preferred approach
is cognitive-behaviorism. This does recognize that people have
thoughts and attitudes which cannot necessarily be observed.
A patient can be given a questionnaire to choose which
thoughts and attitudes they have. I frankly think this is an
awkward transitional stage for behavioristic therapies. They try
to adhere to the behavioristic language, while borrowing from
dynamic therapies. The dynamic therapies could probably do
well to rely a bit more on what can be observed
(Phenomenological exploration) and less on the therapist’s
rich fantasy life.
Psychoanalytic depth psychology would have us believe
that the person must spend twenty-five years free associating
to ‘understand’ the meaning and emotional weight of the
antecedent (the unconscious). Gestalt therapy believes that
there are far briefer, far more effective means of contacting
the weight of the antecedent and the connection to the
undesirable behavior. The undesirable behavior itself speaks
volumes and probably should not be eradicated immediately.
Once the child can grasp the message he or she is trying to
transmit, a far more gratifying behavior could be found, with
the teacher or therapist.
Gestalt therapy might be just another school of analysis
except for one critical distinguishing factor. Gestalt therapy is
grounded in very different philosophical roots. I am not
talking here about the existentialism, there are psychoanalysts
who call themselves existentialist. The underlying epistemol-
ogy for psychoanalysis is associationism. The underlying
epistemology for Gestalt therapy is phenomenology. I’ll get
into some detail in the article on phenomenology. For now, I
just want to highlight the importance of philosophy for the
identity of Gestalt therapy.
After looking at the several philosophical schools of
thought which are supposed to be the ground for Gestalt
Therapy Identity I believe that we really do not subscribe to all
the tenets of any of them. Indeed, as I will point out in my
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SKOLNIK
articles, there are aspects which markedly conflict and
contradict each other. In the end, true to what we recommend
for all our patients, our tradition of not accepting anything
without a thorough examination, i.e., not swallowing anything
whole hog, each of you will have to spit out what you can’t
digest for yourself.
Gestalt therapists have called themselves existential —
phenomenological therapists. Isadore From, who was an
important contributor to the development of our theory was
a philosophy major at The New School for Social Research. He
also considered that pragmatism should be included as part of
our foundation. John Dewey, a highly significant pragmatist,
was involved in the founding of The New School. I was a
psychology major and a philosophy minor at The New School.
I took courses in Gestalt Psychology, phenomenology, and
existentialism, but I was not aware at the time that I had taken
any courses in pragmatism. I did, however, have the honor of
taking a seminar on “Liberty and Freedom” with an elegant,
brilliant, ninety-five year old professor named Horace Kallen.
I discovered, only recently, that he was probably the only
surviving member of that school of philosophy known as
pragmatism. He had been a student of William James at
Harvard and, as a graduate teaching assistant in 1907, consid-
ered himself to be a disciple and philosophical heir to James.
He wrote a seminal essay on pluralism, called “Democracy
Verses the Melting Pot,” published in 1915. Here he argued
against the anti-immigratiion bigots. I cannot say my schooling
put me in a position to give an in-depth treatment of pragma-
tism, however, it has since piqued my interest so I will have a
go at it. The group of philosophers who were called pragma-
tists did explore topics very important to psychotherapists,
such as, meaning and knowledge. I will look at them in my
next article.
References
Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik,E., Levinson,D.J., and San-

ford, R.N., The authoritarian personality. New York:
Harper & Row, 1950.
85
Bruner, J., Acts of meaning. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1990.
Buber, M., I and thou, Trans., Kaufman, W. New York: Charles
Scriber’s Sons, 1970.
Davis, M., Interaction rhythms: Periodicity in communicative
behavior. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1982.
Ehrlich, P.R., Human natures: Genes, cultures, and the human
prospect. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000.
Goldstein, K., The organism: A holistic approach to biology derived
from pathological data in man. New York: American Book
Co., 1939.
Hycner, R. & Jacobs, L., The healing relationship in gestalt therapy:
A dialogic/self psychology approach. Highland: The Gestalt
Journal Press, 1995.
Lehrman, D.S., Interaction of hormonal and experiential
influences on development of behavior, in, Current
research in motivation, ed.) Haber, R.N.. New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston, 1966.
Miller, A., For your own good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and
the roots of violence. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1984.
Perls, F., Ego, hunger and aggression: The beginnings of gestalt
therapy. New York: Random House, 1969, 1947.
Rank, O., Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development.
New York: W.W. Norton & Co.. 1989, 1932.
Reich, W., The discovery of the orgone: The function of the orgasm.
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1942.
Reich, W., Character analysis. New York: Orgone Institute Press,
1949.
Rosenfeld, E., “A conversation with Isadore From,” in, An oral
history of gestalt therapy. Highland: The Gestalt Journal
Press, 1996.
Webster, New collegiate dictionary, Cambridge: The Riverside
Press, 1960.
Wolman, B.B., & Money, J., Handbook of human sexuality.
Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1993.
86
PARADOXICAL THEORY OF CHANGE
Arnold Beisser, M.D.
Although brief, the “Paradoxical Theory of Change”

is, outside of the works of Frederick Perls, the most
frequently referenced article in the body of Gestalt
therapy literature. Written in 1970, it originally
appeared in Fagan and Shepherd’s Gestalt Therapy
Now, a Harper Colophon Book. It appears here with
the kind permission of the author’s widow.
For nearly a half century, the major part of his profes-

sional life, Frederick Perls was in conflict with the psychiatric
and psychological establishments. He worked uncompromis-
ingly in his own direction, which often involved fights with
representatives of more conventional views. In the past few
years, however, Perls and his Gestalt therapy have come to find
harmony with an increasingly large segment of mental health
theory and professional practice. The change that has taken
place is not because Perls has modified his position, although
his work has undergone some transformation, but because the
trends and concepts of the field have moved closer to him and
his work.
87
THE PARADOXICAL THEORY OF CHANGE
Perls’s own conflict with the existing order contains the
seeds of his change theory. He did not explicitly delineate this
change theory, but it underlies much of his work and is
implied in the practice of Gestalt techniques. I will call it the
paradoxical theory of change, for reasons that shall become
obvious. Briefly stated, it is this: that change occurs when one
becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.
Change does not take place through a coercive attempt by the
individual or by another person to change him, but it does
take place if one takes the time and effort to be what he is —
to be fully invested in his current positions. By rejecting the
role of change agent, we make meaningful and orderly change
possible.
The Gestalt therapist rejects the role of “changer,” for
his strategy is to encourage, even insist, that the patient be
where and what he is. He believes change does not take place
by “trying,” coercion, or persuasion, or by insight, interpreta-
tion, or any other such means. Rather, change can occur when
the patient abandons, at least for the moment, what he would
like to become and attempts to be what he is. The premise is
that one must stand in one place in order to have firm footing
to move and that it is difficult or impossible to move without
that footing.
The person seeking change by coming to therapy is in
conflict with at least two warring intrapsychic factions. He is
constantly moving between what he “should be” and what he
thinks he “is,” never fully identifying with either. The Gestalt
therapist asks the person to invest himself fully in his roles,
one at a time. Whichever role he begins with, the patient soon
shifts to another. The Gestalt therapist asks simply that he be
what he is at the moment.
The patient comes to the therapist because he wishes
to be changed. Many therapies accept this as a legitimate
objective and set out through various means to try to change
him, establishing what Perls calls the “topdog/under-dog”
dichotomy. A therapist who seeks to help a patient has left the
egalitarian position and become the knowing expert, with the
patient playing the helpless person, yet his goal is that he and
the patient should become equals. The Gestalt therapist
believes that the topdog/under-dog dichotomy already exists
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BEISSER
within the patient, with one part trying to change the other,
and that the therapist must avoid becoming locked into one
of these roles. He tries to avoid this trap by encouraging the
patient to accept both of them, one at a time, as his own.
The analytic therapist, by contrast, uses devices such as
dreams, free associations, transference, and interpretation to
achieve insight that, in turn, may lead to change. The behav-
iorist therapist rewards or punishes behavior in order to
modify it. The Gestalt therapist believes in encouraging the
patient to enter and become whatever he is experiencing at
the moment. He believes with Proust, “To heal a suffering one
must experience it to the full.”
The Gestalt therapist further believes that the natural
state of man is as a single, whole being — not fragmented into
two or more opposing parts. In the natural state, there is
constant change based on the dynamic transaction between
the self and the environment.
Kardiner has observed that in developing his structural
theory of defense mechanisms, Freud changed processes into
structures (for example, denying into denial). The Gestalt
therapist views change as a possibility when the reverse occurs,
that is, when structures are transformed into processes. When
this occurs, one is open to participant interchange with his
environment.
If alienated, fragmentary selves in an individual take on
separate, compartmentalized roles, the Gestalt therapist
encourages communication between the roles; he may actually
ask them to talk to one another. If the patient objects to this
or indicates a block, the therapist asks him simply to invest
himself fully in the objection or the block. Experience has
shown that when the patient identifies with the alienated
fragments, integration does occur. Thus, by being what one is
— fully — one can become something else.
The therapist, himself, is one who does not seek
change, but seeks only to be who he is. The patient’s efforts to
fit the therapist into one of his own stereotypes of people, such
as a helper or a top-dog, create conflict between them. The
end point is reached when each can be himself while still
maintaining intimate contact with the other. The therapist,
too, is moved to change as he seeks to be himself with another
89
person. This kind of mutual interaction leads to the possibility
that a therapist may be most effective when he changes most,
for when he is open to change, he will likely have his greatest
impact on his patient.
What has happened in the past fifty years to make this
change theory, implicit in Perls’s work, acceptable, current,
and valuable? Perls’s assumptions have not changed, but
society has. For the first time in the history of mankind, man
finds himself in a position where, rather than needing to
adapt himself to an existing order, he must be able to adapt
himself to a series of changing orders. For the first time in the
history of mankind, the length of the individual life span is
greater than the length of time necessary for major social and
cultural change to take place. Moreover, the rapidity with
which this change occurs is accelerating.
Those therapies that direct themselves to the past and
to individual history do so under the assumption that if an
individual once resolves the issues around a traumatic
personal event (usually in infancy or childhood), he will be
prepared for all time to deal with the world; for the world is
considered a stable order. Today, however, the problem
becomes one of discerning where one stands in relationship
to a shifting society. Confronted with a pluralistic, multifac-
eted, changing system, the individual is left to his own devices
to find stability. He must do this through an approach that
allows him to move dynamically and flexibly with the times
while still maintaining some central gyroscope to guide him.
He can no longer do this with ideologies, which become
obsolete, but must do it with a change theory, whether explicit
or implicit. The goal of therapy becomes not so much to
develop a good, fixed character but to be able to move with
the times while retaining some individual stability.
In addition to social change, which has brought
contemporary needs into line with his change theory, Perls’s
own stubbornness and unwillingness to be what he was not
allowed him to be ready for society when it was ready for him.
Perls had to be what he was despite, or perhaps even because
of, opposition from society. However, in his own lifetime he
has become integrated with many of the professional forces in
his field in the same way that the individual may become
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BEISSER
integrated with alienated parts of himself through effective
therapy.
The field of concern in psychiatry has now expanded
beyond the individual as it has become apparent that the most
crucial issue before us is the development of a society that
supports the individual in his individuality. I believe that the
same change theory outlined here is also applicable to social
systems, that orderly change within social systems is in the
direction of integration and holism; further, that the social
change agent has as his major function to work with and in an
organization so that it can change consistently with the
changing dynamic equilibrium both within and outside the
organization. This requires that the system become conscious
of alienated fragments within and without so it can bring them
into the main functional activities by processes similar to
identification in the individual. First, there is an awareness
within the system that an alienated fragment exists; next that
fragment is accepted as a legitimate outgrowth of a functional
need that is then explicitly and deliberately mobilized and
given power to operate as an explicit force. This, in turn. leads
to communication with other subsystems and facilitates an
integrated, harmonious development of the whole system.
With change accelerating at an exponential pace, it is
crucial for the survival of mankind that an orderly method of
social change be found. The change theory proposed here has
its roots in psychotherapy. It was developed as a result of
dyadic therapeutic relationships. But it is proposed that the
same principles are relevant to social change, that the individ-
ual change process is but a microcosm of the social change
process. Disparate, unintegrated, warring elements present a
major threat to society, just as they do to the individual. The
compartmentalization of old people, young people, rich
people, poor people, black people, white people, academic
people, service people, etc., each separated from the others by
generational, geographical, or social gaps, is a threat to the
survival of mankind. We must find ways of relating these
compartmentalized fragments to one another as levels of a
participating, integrated system of systems.
The paradoxical social change theory proposed here is
based on the strategies developed by Perls in his Gestalt
91
therapy. They are applicable, in the judgment of this author,
to community organization, community development and
other change processes consistent with the democratic
political framework.
92
TO THE MEMORY
OF MIRIAM POLSTER
Then Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of

Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the
women went out after her with timbrels and
dancing. And Miriam sang to them…
Exodus 15, verses 20-21
The death of Miriam Polster from a recurrence of

cancer on December 19, 2001 deprived Gestalt therapy of its
loveliest and warmest diva, if one dare apply this term to
someone who had as much generous nobility of soul as
Miriam. Even noble souls live their lives in human bodies, and
Miriam throughout her life was too down-to-earth and colorful
a personality to be a mere angel, although I have no doubt
that she is residing among the angelic orders now. She was a
genuine diva among teachers of psychotherapy, a natural
aristocrat in a profession that, alas, too often seems to breed
teachers who claim for themselves unearned powers and
accomplishments. It is true that the word “diva” may suggest a
93
TO THE MEMORY OF MIRIAM POLSTER
prima donna, and Miriam had a touch of the prima donna,
although I have never seen anyone wear it more gracefully,
easily, and, if one can accept the oxymoron, humbly. But the
word also suggests a quality that partakes of the divine, and
there was indeed something divine about Miriam. Her death
took from me, along with countless others throughout much
of the western world, our wonderful teacher and friend.
That life is over for Miriam also diminishes the world’s
store of pleasure. Pleasure is not just internal gratification, nor
does it reside wholly in that which yields pleasure. It’s a
relationship that includes the experience of radiating warmth,
well-being, and excitement in response to what one receives
from the world’s abundance. People who make evident their
pleasure at receiving something good give something good
back to the world. Miriam went further; she made pleasure
contagious. To have dinner with Miriam in a gourmet restau-
rant or to listen with her to great music was like going sightsee-
ing in a new city with a wise and enthusiastic guide.
This quality was evident in her teaching and in her
manner of doing therapy. In her work as in her life Miriam
loved to play in all senses of the word. She loved the play of
words, the interplay of dialogue, the staging of a play or
performance, and the moments in a melody line that resemble
the soaring playfulness of a bird’s flight. It’s worth emphasiz-
ing that play does not necessarily suggest something that is
light, happy, or frivolous. The Dutch historian Huizinga
considered “serious play,” as he called it, the most innovative
force in culture. In a sense, Miriam used “serious play” to
create innovative openings for her patients. In one of her best
essays, “The Language of Experience,” originally delivered as
a keynote speech at The Gestalt Journal‘s 1980 Annual Confer-
ence in Boston, she tells how an instance of her playing with
the concrete liveliness and metaphoric resonances of a phrase
made a difference in the life of one patient. The patient was
filled with profound sorrow over all the leave-takings through-
out his life. He was just now retiring from a meaningful career
and ending a long marriage. “In describing his sadness,” writes
Miriam, “he said a phrase that to me was magical. He said, ‘I
94
MILLER
guess I’ll have to pick up my baggage and leave.’ I said to him,
‘It sounds to me as if you are not leaving empty-handed.’ This
was something that had not occurred to him but it had a great
deal of significance for him.”*
Like many of the most important teachers of Gestalt
therapy, her commitment to psychology and psychotherapy
came after an earlier devotion to an artistic discipline. In her
youth she had trained as a serious classical vocalist, a per-
former of lieder and operatic music. Her first college degree
was a B.A. in music. An artistic sensibility remained the found-
ation of her professional as well as her personal life. The idea
that one can draw on the aesthetic element in human experi-
ence to liberate the personality from neurotic fixations is close
to the heart of what makes Gestalt therapy distinctive. Miriam
was among the leading figures who made an aesthetic perspec-
tive a practice as well as a theory. Her very style exemplified it
as did her thinking about Gestalt therapy. During a symposium
that I moderated at the same conference I just mentioned, she
made a beautifully articulated case in musical terms for
dialogue over identity as the pulse-beat of psychotherapy. She
pointed out that “anybody who worries about having an
identity, doesn’t have an identity, and is compelled instead to
take positions, to deal in pat phrases and set attitudes … I talk
about music as much as I can. And it came to me that what you
find in a good performance in music, or in a composition
beautifully written, or in artistry in general, is the spirit of
dialogue.”
“When you listen to a fine performance of a concerto,
for example,” she continued, “what you hear is dialogue
between the solo instrument and the orchestra. The solo
instrument proposes an idea. The orchestra considers it and
responds and the solo instrument is then affected by this, and
it goes back and forth. So what I want to consider then, is how
will we as Gestalt therapists carry on our dialogue with the
environment, with otherness in its myriad forms, without
* The Gestalt Journal, Vol. IV, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), p. 26
95
allowing a struggle for our identity to intrude and become
obsessively figural?” *
The artistic dimension of Miriam’s Gestalt therapy is
among the reasons I consider her one of my most valued
teachers. After my initial training experiences with Frederick
Perls in 1966 and 1970, I decided that I wanted to join my
professional life to Gestalt therapy, and I planned to follow
him to Vancouver for further training. However, Perls died
within days of my making that decision. Then, in the early
1970s, I discovered Erving and Miriam while they were both
still teaching at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, and I spent
two years in a training program that they directed in Boston.
Both of them influenced me a great deal; indeed, they
probably made it possible for me to become a Gestalt thera-
pist. As fascinated as I was with the slashing insights and
powerful theatrical methods that characterized Perls’s
experiential teaching, I didn’t know what to make of his highly
directive, often confrontational manner and his tendency
toward anti-intellectualism. The gentle, good-humored com-
passion with which both Erving and Miriam approached their
work was a revelation to me. At the time I was still teaching at
M.I.T. and deeply involved in the student and faculty protests
against the war in Vietnam. Erv helped me discover the
inventiveness of intuition and feeling. At the same time he
made clear the importance of intellectual and political
awareness. But it was Miriam in particular who opened up for
me the aesthetic possibilities of psychotherapy.
When Miriam worked with a group of trainees, her
presence was dramatic. She had a kind of imperious grace,
quite different from the sly, mischievous hair-trigger graceful-
ness of her husband. They exhibited quite distinct ways of
being alert to the potential for something new inherent in
each moment. Whether standing or sitting, Erving seemed
already moving in response to the forming action, like a
restless shortstop ready to go for the ball no matter where the
* Ibid., p. 12.
96
MILLER
it came from. Miriam was more like an actress or concert artist
waiting eagerly for the curtain to rise, so that she could play
her part in making a yet unknown, improvised script come to
life. Erving’s eyes gleamed with warm curiosity and a hint of
mischief. Miriam’s sparkled with excitement at the perfor-
mance that was about to unfold.
She could be as gentle as anyone I have ever known,
but there was a tougher side to her as well. As with all those
who care about artistic integrity, she had little tolerance for
duplicity or the cliches of inauthentic expression. You might
say that she insisted that the singing be in tune. Support for
expressive truth, I believe, was her guiding ideal. She was
extremely patient, but she also knew how and when to draw
the line. She drew it, however, not with aggressive confronta-
tion but through humor and irony. In the many training
workshops and demonstrations that I participated in with her
during the 1970s, I never once saw her shame a trainee. She
could provoke her students into bringing out their best by
telling jokes, playing pranks, and involving them in inventive
skits of a kind that were never at the expense of a student’s
dignity.
Although I have to delve back nearly thirty years for my
own personal memories of Miriam as a teacher, there was one
incident during my training with her that I have never
forgotten. I think it captures something of her essence as a
teacher. I was a hopeful novice therapist making a transition
from ten years of having been a professor of literature to
becoming a psychologist. I was in the early stages of the two-
year program directed by the Polsters. It was a hot summer
day, and our training group was working outdoors, broken up
into triads, each little threesome busily trying practicum
sessions with one another. Suddenly Miriam appeared,
wearing a peasant blouse, a long skirt, and sandals. She sat
down in the grass to observe my triad. I was playing the role of
therapist, and I instantly became tongue-tied in the face of
having to make therapeutic “interventions” (whatever those
were!) under the judgmental gaze (as I imagined it) of this
commanding woman with her reddish-gold hair tied back like
97
a ballet dancer. I was mostly silent while my “patient” chat-
tered on. At the end, I expected the worst. But Miriam,
looking amused, only said, “Michael, you sure have a noisy
face!”
How liberating I found her words! They have stayed
with me to this day. I realized that I had been responding the
entire time, whether I thought I was or not, whether I wanted
to cover my tracks or not. I felt teased, but not all shamed —
teased, if anything, into being more fully present. And I came
away with an important insight: That therapy was not a matter
of coming up with the right thing to say or a clever interven-
tion, but sprang from the way one was there with the patient.
Like a painter who can change the mood of a canvas with one
brush stroke, Miriam needed only a few words to help me
transform my embarrassed silence from a symptom into a
creative possibility.
98
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
ARNOLD RAY BEISSER received his M.D. degree from

Stanford University School of Medicine in 1949, and
his Diplomate in Psychiatry from the American Board
of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1958. He was director
of the Center for Training in Community Psychiatry
for the State of California Department of Mental
Hygiene, and an associate clinical professor in the
School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry,
U.C.L.A. Dr. Beisser received training in Gestalt
therapy in workshops with Frederick S. Perls and James
S. Simkin. He was the author of The Madness in Sports
(Appleton-Century-Crofts), as well as numerous other
articles in psychiatry and psychotherapy.
DAN BLOOM is a psychotherapist in private practice, as well

as a supervisor and teacher of Gestalt therapy in New
York City. He received a Masters in Social Work and a
Juris Doctor from New York University. He is proud to
include Laura Perls, Isadore From, Richard Kitzler,
and Patrick Kelley as his teachers. Dan is a full member
of The New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy and is its
current president.
MICHAEL VINCENT MILLER, PH.D., is a clinical psycholo-

gist who has practiced and taught Gestalt therapy in
the Boston area for the past twenty-eight years. He will
be moving part of his practice to Manhattan in the
near future. His book Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of
Love in an Age of Disillusion, published by W.W. Norton,
99
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
was selected as one of the Best Academic Books of 1996
by the journal Choice, was a selection of The Psycho-
therapy Book Club, and has been translated into
French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish,
and Japanese.
From 1963 to 1967 Miller taught at Stanford
University and from 1967 to 1973 at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. He co-founded the Boston
Gestalt Institute in 1973 and directed training there
through the 1980’s. Currently he has been training
Gestalt therapists and lecturing in ten countries in
Europe and South America. He has been on the
editorial board of The Gestalt Journal for more than
twenty years. He is a co-founder of the International
Gestalt Therapy Association and is Consulting Editor
to the new International Gestalt Journal.
Miller’s writings have been published in numer-
ous journals and magazines, including the Nation, the
Atlantic Monthly, and Psychology Today, as chapters in
several anthologies, and as introductions to several
books, among them three of the classic works in
Gestalt therapy. He has reviewed books frequently on
psychology and the social sciences for the New York
Times Book Review and the Boston Globe.
THEO SKOLNIK began with an interest in development. He

did child therapy and taught developmental psychol-
ogy at Hunter College. He trained in Gestalt therapy
with Laura Perls in the late 60's and early 70's, and has
been working with individuals, couples and groups,
and training Gestalt therapists, ever since. For the past
seven years, he returned to working with youth as well.
He is engaged in establishing a Mental Health Center
and youth training programs in the Bronx.
100

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EDITOR

Isadore From, 1919-1994

The Gestalt Journal is published semiannually by The Center For

Copyright 2001 by The Center for Gestalt Development, Inc.

FROM THE EDITOR 5

THE SPEAKING BODY (Or, Why Did Wilhelm Reich

THE SONG OF THE SELF: Language and Gestalt

GESTALT THERAPY IDENTITY: The Search for

THE PARADOXICAL THEORY OF CHANGE 87

TO THE MEMORY OF MIRIAM POLSTER 93

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS 99

This is the last issue of The Gestalt Journal under my

The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 2

The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 2

The Center for Gestalt Development will now be

The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 2

This is the final issue of The Gestalt Journal. It seems, as

The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 2

The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 2

This essay is adapted from a talk given in Montreal

Part 1: Historical and Philosophical Background

What can we say at this point in our history about the

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Part 2. Clinical Issues

To what extent are Reich’s concepts still useful in

The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 2

The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 2

Because we have no genetic system of informa-

What drove Reich’s psychology, and perhaps Reich,

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1970. Themes from the Lectures at the

The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 2

Laura Perls once asked her students “What is Gestalt

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The Gestalt Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 2

Berman, Art. 1988. From the New Criticism to Deconstruction.

Bloom, Harold, de Man, P., Derrida, J., Hartman, G., Miller,

Cuddon, J.A. 1991. A Dictionary of Literary Terms (third edition).

Goodman, P. 1971. Speaking and Language. New York: Random