Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 20

I was thrown into a family where children were not the deeply desired answer to two people in love. (Perls1977, 247)

Perls recalled experiencing great affection up until the age of nine. He quoted a remark by his grandparents: »He is made from such stuff that gathers love from God and Man« (Perls 1977, 247). Even when he had grown very old, this picture of a distant golden age endured. »I must have been a lovable child indeed. Affectionate, eager to please and to learn« (ibid. 247). Studious little Fritz knew how to read and do arithmetic even before he entered school. His grandparents’ many books were available to him (Mark Twain, for example), as were the servant girl’s mystery novels. His father kept his own books in a locked room. Entering the forbidden room of his patriarchal father, the »secret room,« (ibid. 251) was a key childhood experience even though all it contained were books on Freemasonry. To me, this personality trait appears to be typical for Perls. He wanted to reveal secrets and enter forbidden chambers where experience and knowledge might lie hidden. On this occasion, he also stole a gold coin which had been earmarked for the dowry of one of his sisters. When the theft came to light, he ran off in panic and spent several days on the street and with friends. Upon returning home, he had to face an assembly of the family which had been expanded by the presence of the key male figures from his mother’s side. He did not feel that the absolution his father ultimately granted was genuine. He believed that it was not true forgiveness but rather a false, quasi-theatrical gesture in the sense of contrived Masonic humanism. This event occurred during a disconcerting period that traumatized his selfesteem. He expressed it with the words, »I was ›good‹ for many years until I slowly turned ›bad‹« (ibid., 247). His transition from elementary school to a Gymnasium, which was proceeding in parallel, was fraught with problems. Fritz had grown accustomed to having only the best grades, so when he encountered difficulties in the entrance examination it came as a shock. He had experienced the elementary school atmosphere as »warm,« but found the Gymnasium »strange and rigid« (ibid., 248).

Perls’s failure in secondary school can certainly be viewed as a massive violation of his childhood self-confidence, and its intensity was co-determined by a change in atmosphere at home. Traditionally, it was his mother who attended to his education, and now »the great ambition of her life melted away« (ibid., 252) as her son’s performance at school dropped. A kind of combative relationship developed between mother and son. Out of fear of his parents, Fritz began to lie and cheat. He intercepted official disciplinary letters from school and forged his parents’ signatures below poor test grades. His mother apparently reacted with helpless disappointment and, as was the custom of the times, with physical blows. Fritz became »untamable« (ibid., 252) and cut off the strips on the cat o’ nine tails, a kind of whip she used to beat him. Other instruments she used to hit him fared no better. »My mother used those carpet beaters on me. She did not break my spirit; I broke the beaters« (ibid., 280). On a different occasion, he wrenched free from her grasp, slammed a door behind himself, broke the pane of glass, and made faces at her. Several passages in the biography Perls wrote as an old man reveal how greatly his rebellion and his belated and circuitous route to success were still influenced by his yearning to fulfill his parents’ expectations, particularly his mother’s. It is as if Grete, his favorite sister, is assuming the position of his mother when she expresses her pride »that her black sheep of a brother is becoming famous (ibid., 182). Nor did Perls forget to quote his sister as saying, »If only Mama could have experienced it« (ibid.) The following remark is also one that I do not view as irony, but rather as an expression of a deep sense of injustice and yearning from his childhood days: »At that time in Germany it never occurred to anyone that the drop-out of a bright, warm kid might not be his fault alone« (ibid., 252).

In his monograph on autobiographies that were written in the 1920s, Peter Sloterdijk cited diverse examples to point out the childhood memories of experiencing social conflicts, inconsistencies, and power structures that repeatedly emerge there. He speaks of »proto-political experiences,« describing them as the experiential foundation that is »necessary to construct a political identity if it is not to be imposed from without or assimilated through identification, but instead grows out of self-articulated politico-social experience« (Sloterdijk 1978, 140).

In this sense, I would definitely interpret Perls’s nonconformism, rebelliousness, and massive ego-assertion as an authentically »political« posture toward society, fed in part by the early experiences discussed here. Perls’s erratic-associatory biographical work contains the »little scenes that capture the atmospheric details of his childhood« (ibid., 142) that Sloterdijk analyzed and which at the same time reflect early sensory experiences of power relationships that were ultimately societal in nature. In the days when authoritarian families and authoritarian character prevailed, God, the Emperor, the state, the father, parents, or teachers formed the chain of those who ruled, whose word was incontestable law, and who were permitted to enforce such law through intimidation, punishment, and violence.

During his conflict-laden period of upheaval at school, he appears to have experienced at home that he was not loved for his own sake, but that love was contingent on his achievements, on something external. This is where the narcissistic injury and rebellion of a »lovable child« began, a child who fought against parental introjects and against being defined as »bad.« It was to become a life-long theme and, as a result, it re-emerges in Gestalt therapy: self-determination as opposed to heteronomy, or, that which is one’s own as opposed to that of the other. He vehemently opposed his parents’ criticism and accusations, the message they conveyed that »you are bad,« and the projection of their own disappointments and negative feelings for which they held him accountable. He resisted being made into the symptom carrier of his family’s problems. In addition to that, his parents had a bad relationship. There was a lot arguing and physical fighting, and the gravest insults were a daily occurrence. He never forgot that his father often called him »a piece of shit.« He experienced his parents’ reactions²³ (and he added those of »society« and »spouses«) as existentially devastating: »I want to eliminate you. You should not be. Where you are, there should be nothing instead. (…) We educate you … until you become what We, We, We, want you to be« (Perls 1977, 260-261). Elsewhere, Perls cites an example that I suspect is at least mingled with his own experiences. There is a passage where he defined a traumatic neurosis as a defense structure which is used to ward off an »intrusion of society« (Perls 1973, 31). »The two year old child whose parents lock him in a dark closet overnight has been subjected to an almost insupportable strain. He has been reduced by their behavior to nothing – indeed, to less than nothing – to an object of manipulation with neither rights nor powers of his own. There is no »he« any more, there is only »they« and what »they« can do« (ibid., 31 f.).

The response to these experiences with his family was a risk-inclined rebellious »Me, Me, Me.« From here, a direct line can be drawn to the so-called Gestalt Prayer, which I would like to quote in this early context:

I do my thing, and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you and I am I,

And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.

If not, it can’t be helped (Perls 1969a, 4).

This assertion of his ego served as self-defense, but it was accompanied by a search for a warming »we.« It also had a social or, more precisely, a culturally critical dimension. In this respect, Perls shared the same suffering as many in his generation. The self-assertive struggle against an overwhelming, distant father who barely (if at all) acknowledged his son became linked to the fight against the cold, materialistic Wilhelminian values which also stood for one’s own father. The struggle against the phoniness of the bourgeoisie with its double moral standard, and ultimately against the entire hierarchical social order, merged into a huge single theme that was reflected in literature as well. Franz Kafka’s »Letters to His Father« became famous; Hermann Hesse’s brief work on the virtue of self-will (Eigensinn) (Hesse 1988), and Georg Kaiser’s Expressionist drama »Vatermord« (parricide) were typical. Almost all bourgeois biographies from the period report such struggle and agony. Otto Rank’s emphasis on self-will in therapy – which was also reflected in his authority conflict with Freud – has a strong bearing on this topic, as does the radically anti-authoritarian anti-introjection theory of the anarchistic »psychoanalyst« Otto Gross, whose father periodically had him involuntarily committed to a mental institution. In all of these cases, the »I« opposes a »You« that is experienced as authoritarian; self against other. I will return to this topic in the chapter on the Weltanschauung of bohemian Berlin.

Perls has often been accused of having almost no interests beyond his own ego. In my opinion, this can be traced to a lack of detailed knowledge about his life experiences in Germany until 1933. Yet the biographical reality is that for many years he held out hope for a socialistic brotherhood, just like many of his peers and contemporaries. He actively championed this form of »We« until the utopia was brutally demolished by the Nazis. Due to his early experience of falling back on his own ego and his own resources, and due to favorable external support which his risk-inclination enabled him to recognize and utilize, he ultimately survived well and learned his lessons. When other »brothers« in hope and suffering found themselves in exile with shattered dreams and saw their efforts dashed to achieve a more just social order and a meaningful life based on their own standards and ideas, they responded by killing themselves. So it was with Ernst Toller and Walter Benjamin who, like Perls, were born in 1893.