Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 17

The tendency to disdain physicality and sensuality which accompanied the Enlightenment, along with its one-sided preference for rationality and the intellect, provoked criticism and a counter-reaction within the Enlightenment itself. The concept of totality seen in early Romanticism, for example, was also directed against such fragmentation of life and can be read as a critique of the alienation phenomena that arose based on the division of labor in emergent industrial society.

Published in 1795, Friedrich Schiller’s letters, »On the Aesthetic Education of Man,« represent one of the central works on the classical German idea of humanness. Schiller addresses the topics under examination in the present monograph using terminology that was to re-surface at the end of the 1940s when Gestalt therapy was conceived in New York. This has to do with the fact that Gestalt therapy belongs to the tradition of self-critical enlightenment, represented by Schiller among others.¹⁶ In the letters, Schiller laments that the human being has been split into reason and sensuality, and he sets out in search of a »sensuous-rational nature« (Schiller 1965, 45). Schiller also describes the ordering reason, that is, the power of thought, as an »instinct to create form.« He refers to the object of that instinct as a »Gestalt« (shape and form), while »the object of the sensuous instinct« or of the passive »material impulse,« »is named life in the widest acceptation« (see ibid., 58 f.). On a very abstract level, Schiller sees a synthesis of both poles in the »play instinct,« a »middle state« (Hamburger in ibid., 147) he also refers to as the »aesthetic state.« Another term he uses to refer to this middle state, which can be experienced in the perception of beauty, is »lebende Gestalt« or »living form« (ibid., 59).

The concept of self developed by Fritz and Lore Perls as a couple along with Paul Goodman involves something comparable, namely, a self that is in the »middle mode« (Perls et al. 1996, 376), neither passive and idle nor active and deliberate, but rather productive and creative, much like an artist or a child that is absorbed in its work. This concept, which also attempts to overcome the Freudian duality of primary process and secondary process (see Bocian 2000, 38 f.), is not merely a question of the aesthetic state one experiences when beholding beauty, as it is for Schiller, but involves the moments when experience and action coincide. Which is to say, moments when individuals find themselves engaged in a dance with the circumstances – in play, during artistic creativity, while making love, or in the unfolding of a spontaneous, intense human encounter. It is a question of the »beautiful experience of aesthetic-erotic absorption, when the spontaneous awareness and muscularity drinks in and dances in the environment as if self-oblivious, but in fact feeling the deeper parts of the self« (Perls et al. 1996, 261).