Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 11

Our history is the background of

our existence, it is not an accumulation

of facts but the record of how we become

what we are. (Fritz Perls 1973, 76)¹

The only remembering that is fertile

is that which simultaneously reminds us

of what remains to be done. (Ernst Bloch 1985, 516)

Fritz Perls, generally considered the founder of Gestalt therapy, achieved fame as a kind of counter-cultural guru on the American West Coast in the late sixties of the last century. Transcending the conventions of established psychotherapy during his times, and definitely those of Freudian psychoanalysis, he undertook daring existential encounters with his group clientele. His direct style of communication brought about healing, caused harm, and most certainly expanded the spectrum of therapeutic intervention. Hardly anyone viewed his appearance as a figure against the background of a life that had already spanned more than 70 years. The person who does will discover that many a formulation with a seemingly superficial ring and many a hardly explained theoretical or practical approach drew upon a life that was steeped in the experience of survival and had assimilated copious amounts of theory.

Behind the »dirty old man,« as Perls often referred to himself, whose external appearance during the last years of his life presented a mixture of Rabbi, Santa Claus, and Rasputin, with a bushy full beard and bib overalls, and whose funeral in San Francisco in 1971 would have done great credit to a hippie king, behind this lies the life of Friedrich Salomon Perls who was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1893.

Perls trained as a neurologist at major medical institutions and as a Freudian psychoanalyst in Berlin and Vienna, the most important international centers of the discipline in his day. He worked as a training analyst for several years with the official recognition of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and must be considered an experienced clinician. Behind the popular image of the eccentric from the American West Coast, there is a man who stood as a lifelong representative of the so-called Expressionist generation. He »grew up« on the bohemian scene in Berlin, participated in Expressionism and Dadaism, and experienced the turning of the artistic avantgarde toward the revolutionary left. Deployment to the front line, the trauma of war, anti-Semitism, intimidation, escape, and the Holocaust are further key sources of biographical influence. The »detailed study of a life that was slashed by two world wars and emigration, and a mind that was moved by all of the streams typical for the era,«² instilled me with a substantial degree of respect for the old man’s life experience and the approach that he inspired.

For me, central positions, theories, and methods of Gestalt therapy are part of the tradition of the European-oriented cultural avant-garde in Berlin³ during the years of the Weimar Republic. They were later driven out by the Nazis, and what fled Germany in 1933 along with Fritz⁴ Perls were essentially the experiences of the so-called Expressionist generation. Moreover, the history of the development of the Gestalt approach as a therapeutic method is part of psychoanalytic history in the German cultural region, in particular the history of Freudian psychoanalysis in exile. For historians of psychoanalysis, Perls does not exist as a candidate at the Berlin Institute, nor is the fact recognized that for some time he held an official position as an IPA training analyst in South Africa. The present book fills a gap in the pre-Nazi history of psychoanalysis in that respect. It is my intention to examine the first years of Perls’s emigration in a further monograph and also in that context to research the reasons for the withdrawal of his accreditation as a training analyst.

Elsewhere, I have analyzed in detail the course of Gestalt therapy’s evolution from the revision of Freud’s theory, methods, and critique of culture (see Bocian 2000). The revision of orthodox positions that was begun by Fritz and Lore Perls as a psychoanalytic couple, and carried forward together with Paul Goodman, looks back on a line of ancestors composed overwhelmingly of dissidents from the Freudian school.⁵ One of the main objectives Perls and Goodman pursued in their foundational work, »Gestalt Therapy,« was to understand and integrate as complementary polarities⁶ diverse innovations within psychoanalysis. The innovations concentrated on certain areas of human reality which they considered valuable but had been driven into dissidence by the orthodox mainstream at the time (see Perls et al. 1996, 236f., Stoehr 1994, 300f.).

Since psychoanalysis, as Perls once remarked, is a »research project« (Perls 1977, 142) and, »as a science of the human being cannot be monopolized« (Cremerius 1992, 34), Gestalt therapy for me remains a figure against the ground of psychoanalytic history, theory formation, and practice. It is characterized in particular by the preservation and continuance of radical elements in Freudian psychoanalysis, by which I am referring to its relational, contextual, and socially critical aspects (see Bocian 2000, 98 f., Lichtenberg 2005, Lothane 1997).

Accordingly, in the context of the present monograph I will also point out the origins of the culturally critical line of tradition within psychoanalysis which made its influence felt in the Expressionist milieu through Otto Gross. In my opinion, Gestalt therapy is also part of this tradition.

With reference to the fact that Perls was an emigrant, I share the opinion expressed by Uwe Peters in his book »Psychiatrie im Exil« (Psychiatry in Exile), namely, that the emigrants are little remembered. In keeping with Peters, the present book also makes an effort to »do a small part of the necessary mourning work, to contribute a tiny piece toward a saveur diachronique and thereby to counteract somewhat the emigrants’ lamented, traceless disappearance from German history« (Peters 1992, 397).

Using Fritz Perls as an example, I will also recall to mind the lasting value of specific life experiences of German Jews, thereby also remembering a constituent part of German culture that appears to have been routed, destroyed, and irrecoverably lost. It is important in this context to note that it was the very members of the Berlin cultural avant-garde, and even more decidedly the German Jews among them, who viewed themselves as embedded in a bourgeois-humanistic European culture, which they also legitimized through their direct personal and professional international contacts during the years of the Weimar Republic.

In regarding and designating Perls as a German Jew, a label I will later justify and discuss, it is my intention here to describe the individuals involved not merely as objects and victims, but also to portray them in Rürup’s sense as »individuals who actively participated in and contributed to the shaping of German history« (Rürup in Bundeszentrale 1991, 59). Rürup calls the history of German-Jewish relations a »grand and in some respects unique history that came to an abrupt and terrible end and was so thoroughly destroyed that even its traces in history have been blurred« (ibid.). Robert B. Goldmann, a »pre-war Jew« (Goldmann 1999, 10) living in New York, took a similar stance in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung after the death of Ignaz Bubis, Chairman of the Central Committee for Jews in Germany. Goldmann argues that in America almost the only part of the history of European Jews, and thereby generally also of Jews in the German-speaking countries, for which there is any awareness, entails their flight, expulsion, and murder. Against that background, he makes a case for »an educational system where the history of German-speaking Jews in Central Europe is a key theme« (ibid.). Rürup and Goldmann, as well as Hermand (1996) and Mosse⁷ would like to prevent the creative life of Jews over the course of German history from fading into oblivion. In my opinion, the development of Gestalt therapy presents itself as a good example of this because something of the humanistic European spirit and the personal boundary experiences and survival strategies of those who represented this culture lives on within it.

Nevertheless, it is only possible to speak of German-Jewish culture in unilateral terms, that is, with respect to the majority of Jews living in Germany at the time, and appellations such as »the grand and unique history of a relation ship« must be seen in a relative light. There was practically no interest on the German side in an encounter or a dialogue with Judaism. The Jews who had assimilated themselves into German society and culture turned their Jewishness into a denomination, like the Catholics or Protestants. Ever since their legal emancipation, Jews possessed civil rights, and their assimilation made them members of German society who saw themselves as German citizens of the Jewish or Mosaic faith. Traverso has again pointed out most vehemently that emancipation did in fact dismantle the separate and separatist Jewish »nation,« but because of Germany’s differentiation between national and ethnic identity this for the most part voluntary renunciation was not followed by the acquisition of German ethnicity (Deutschtum) even if a percentage of the assimilated Jews subjectively believed that to be the case. »Whether they realized it or not, assimilated Jews lived in a kind of no-man’s land« (Traverso 1993, 9). The widely discussed and controversial German-Jewish symbiosis only applied to a numerically small although influential group of outsiders, in which national, social, or religious origin played no role (see Gay 1979, Hermand 1996, Mosse 1992, Scholem 1995, Traverso 1993). For me, Perls belonged to this group of often nonconformist individuals, whose view of the world against the backdrop of the European Enlightenment was shaped by Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life), whose experience of life qualified them as members of the Expressionist generation, and who adopted left-liberal to extreme left-wing orientations no later than the German November Revolution of 1918. During the years of the Weimar Republic, that »republic of outsiders« (Gay 1989a), the avant-garde culture these individuals created became influential – although not dominant – and was crowned with success until its protagonists were expelled and sent fleeing, while outside of Germany the cultural myth of the Weimar Republic arose and particularly that of Berlin during »the wild twenties.« The basic fabric of Gestalt therapy, in my opinion, is woven from the intellectual and cultural material of these years; the development of Gestalt therapy through Fritz and Lore Perls preserved many an element of this culture by removing it to safety in the world beyond Germany’s borders.

The so-called Expressionist generation, those social outsiders and pioneers of modernity, were the individuals who experienced most consciously and suffered most intensely under the modernization process that was rapidly taking hold in Germany, particularly in the metropolis of Berlin. From their advanced posts, they were attempting to cope then with what today’s social diagnosticians of that era⁸ are calling an opportunity and a danger for individual identity formation in postmodern or globalized industrial nations. By this I mean phenomena such as the plurality of meanings and interpretations of the world, and also the dissolution of the traditional social and family ties that provide individuals the space potentially to shape their lives on their own terms, while at the same time subjecting them to the constraints and risks of constructing a self based on their own personal responsibility. During that age, only a small group of individuals was affected, namely, the avant-garde. Today, such »risky freedoms« (Beck 1986) confront an increasingly large part of the population. Against this background, the concept of Gestalt therapy presents itself in my view as an attempt to respond to the threats and opportunities raised by an ongoing process of social-psychological change that has encompassed ever larger segments of society since that time. Gestalt therapy carries within itself experiences that contain a utopia of wholeness as well as experience in dealing with disruption, dissociation, and threatened identity. It is an attempt undertaken by concrete individuals to respond to the general demands of modernity as well as its specifically German outgrowths.

In the following, I will review the history of the origins of Gestalt therapy, which is closely connected with the personal histories of Fritz and Lore Perls and the story of their emigration. Even if Fritz Perls, Lore Perls, and Paul Goodman, this »ménage à trois« to use the words of Lore Perls, must be viewed as the collective founders of Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls still remains the »main intellectual initiator« (Frambach 1996, 44) in my eyes.⁹ Without Fritz Perls, Gestalt therapy would not have come into existence. In a certain sense, it was his »baby,« and he was also the one who made the baby known to the world. The picture cannot be complete without Lore Perls, but unfortunately a comprehensive examination of her life and thought has not yet been undertaken. However, Milan Sreckovic (1999) and Dan Bloom (2005) have elaborated the biographically and intellectually important core of such a project.

The time period examined in the present book spans more than half of Perls’s life, and the first forty years of a human lifetime surely contain in more or less pronounced form all of the important factors influencing the development of a personality. Until now, no separate study of the German phase of Fritz Perls’s life has been published, that is, none that exceeds the information contained in the books he or his wife published or provided during interviews.¹⁰ The biography by Shepard (1975) made no further contribution to the then known material on Perls’s German period. That applies as well to the book by Clarkson und Mackewn (1995) which was published almost twenty years later. I am unable to confirm Shepard’s comment that material on Perls’s »formative years« (Shepard 1975, xc) in Germany was inaccessible because of the Shoah, among other reasons. Rather, it appears that until now no one has conducted research in the area, nor has anyone to date delved into the pre-history of Gestalt therapy within the context of that period in German history. The monograph by Gaines (1979) remains valuable because his extensive compilation of personal recollections of Perls has also preserved important biographical material.¹¹

With respect to the analysis of the figuration¹² of personal life experiences and theory production in Fritz Perls, the present study pursues a line of inquiry that Plöger’s article on the methodological problems and perspectives of biographical research sums up very aptly, terminologically speaking, for our purposes, namely, »How did this Gestalt come into existence?« (Plöger in Dickow 1988, 94). In answering this question, I hew to the hermeneutic tradition and regard those concepts of the Gestalt approach which are represented specifically by Fritz Perls as practice that has become symbol, as life which has »coalesced« into texts. By analyzing existing sources and new material, I will attempt to elucidate and interpret his life within the historical context of its times. I will include the political, cultural, and intellectual factors that influenced it, as well as the subjective learning, adjustment, and processing mechanisms that came into play during its course. In keeping with Gestalt therapy’s »contextual method« (Perls et al. 1996, 243 f.), I embed individual biographical memories within the life-environment that served as a backdrop and gives them meaning. To that end, I have drawn on previously unknown and unpublished biographical material from German and Austrian archives and libraries, as well as excerpts from the personal correspondence¹³ of Fritz and Lore Perls during the period.

The interpretation of biographies always remains open-ended. Yet by the same token, every time a life is looked at anew, previously unseen or even forgotten aspects emerge. My efforts to avoid a purely subjective interpretation of Perls’s life were supported – apart from the analysis of the complex historical context of his life – by consulting the published memoirs of people who were his contemporaries and moved in a similar or, partially, even in the same milieu as he. Comparisons showed that similar life experiences led to conclusions pointing in the same direction.

In principle, I prefer an approach that follows Peter Gay’s so-called »horizontal connections« (Gay 1979, 8), which he differentiates from the »vertical connections« in historical studies. In Gay’s view, establishing vertical connections and using historical events »as clues of crimes to come« (ibid.) represents a legitimate method, for example, viewing historical events in Germany from the perspective of the horror of National Socialism. The horizontal perspective I favor in the present monograph concentrates on the actual experiences of the individuals. This method is closer to the »contextual method« typically seen in the Gestalt approach (Perls et al. 1996, 243 f.), that is, closer to what Perls and Goodman called »Gestalt analysis« (ibid. 232).¹⁴ In Gestalt psychology, the traditional assumption is that every subject’s convictions correspond to the inner conditions prevailing during their experiences as well as those characterizing their field, and that reality is always created subjectively in the field of actual life. Accordingly, Gay emphasizes that the horizontal perspec tive focuses its attention on the then present of the individuals, which was »anything but a chamber of potential horrors. It was a blooming buzzing confusion alive with conflicts and uncertainties and gratification. Their present was what the present always is: bewildering, luxuriant in illegible, often contradictory clues« (Gay ibid., 9 f.).

At this point, we cannot avoid mentioning that a researcher’s perspective is always limited and affected by his subjective interests, among other things. The author of a biographical study hopes not only »to gain additional knowledge of the world, but also to increase his insight into himself« (Schwarze 1987, 11). Examining the life of another is arguably always »a process of gaining selfknowledge through the other person« (ibid.).¹⁵