Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 16

In most cases, Gestalt therapy is classified as a so-called humanistic orientation within the fields of psychology and psychotherapy. I suggest that this be traced not only to humanistic psychology, that is, the framework within which Gestalt therapy became popular years after its conception. Instead, we should follow its roots back to the significantly older tradition of bourgeois-humanistic education that was introduced into Gestalt therapy through Fritz and Lore Perls. The emphasis on personal growth that is so important for the Gestalt approach ensured the survival of the classical-romantic¹² concept of education that continued to serve as an identity-generating touchstone for German Jews, especially the educated ones, even after they had emigrated.

Beginning in the middle of the 18^th century, a new humanistic movement arose in German-speaking countries. It built on Renaissance humanism and oriented itself on an idealized image of man in ancient Greece, and on »paideia,« the Greek educational ideal that focused on providing the individual with the most comprehensive physical, mental, and social education possible. Humanitarianism and comprehensive education formed an organic interrelationship within this body of thought, and in principle every person enjoyed a right to personality development and individual expression.

A specifically German concept of education began to emerge which then increasingly took on a nationalistic hue within the framework of the war of liberation against Napoleonic France. The preference for classical Greek literature (Homer, Pindar) over the Roman in connection with this was perceived as a »political declaration of war directed at Paris« (H. Blankertz 1992, 92). Yet in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most important representatives of neo-humanism, all anti-French sentiment was lacking, which allows us to view him as an exemplary representative of the classical German, cosmopolitan-humanistic tradition we refer to here.

The Humboldtian type of neo-humanism took sides with the individual, opposed the cooptation of the individual by society, and was against purely utilitarian thinking.¹³ Here, education was viewed as the path of individuality to itself, as an unending life-long task. The goal was to achieve humanness, beyond national, denominational, vocational/class designations and limita tions. Nobility did not arise automatically and exclusively through birth. Instead, individuals could ennoble themselves through education. Goethe and Schiller, the »princes of poetry,« portrayed these views in the field of literature. According to the basic tenor of the numerous »Bildungsromane,« life was an educational journey. »Humboldt viewed individuality as the formative inner power that man uses to transform what he grasps into his own nature« (Blankertz 1992, 101). This already comes very close to Gestalt therapy’s concept of assimilation, whereby the individual does not merely incorporate or adapt to the demands of the environment, but renders the initially alien material from the environment suitable in his or her own self-determined manner, both selecting and destructuring and thus achieving growth. In both cases, education implies activity of one’s own initiative, in other words, selfeducation. The ideal of personal wholeness or totality that was connected to the humanistic concept of education implies a whole that manifests itself in specific individual characteristics.

External form cannot and may not be imposed upon individuality from without. Accordingly, in »Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship« Goethe encapsulated the humanistic educational ideal in the words »to educate myself, just as I am« (in Mosse 1992, 22).

After 1871, cosmopolitanism and the evolution of the individual personality as a process of autonomous, unending inner development became incompatible once and for all with a state that was attempting to create a mighty, unified empire. The object was to exclude everything that was non-German with respect to politics, religion, and race and to foster a mentality of subservience. After the founding of the German Empire in 1871, »when the Germans themselves had generally mutilated the original concept of education to the point of unrecognizability, for German Jews the concept became synonymous with their own Judaism« (Mosse ibid., 23).¹⁴