Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 30

Max Reinhardt’s views on acting and the theater awakened something in Perls that remained a vital part of him to the end of his life. In Reinhardt’s sense of the word, Perls was – and also wanted to be – an actor and comedian.

Nowhere do human beings reveal themselves more authentically, in purer, more childlike form than in acting. Bourgeois life is full of conventional lies. The actor’s goal is the ultimate innermost truth, because his profession is not to mask but to unmask, to reveal in all his transformations his innate personality. (Reinhardt 1993, 82)

Time and again, Reinhardt expressed outrage that bourgeois conventions blocked and flattened emotional life. It was important to him that the »emotional organs« were also working: »We unmistakably feel the way heartfelt laughter can liberate us, a deep sob relieve us, and an outburst of anger release us. Indeed, we often seek such outbursts with unconscious hunger« (ibid., 52).

The emotionally liberating element,³⁶ the cathartic therapy of Breuer and Freud that stood at the beginning within the psychoanalytical context, was revisited in Ferenczi’s neo-catharsis. Wilhelm Reich, in particular, assigned this element a permanent place within his character analysis and was split off from orthodox psychoanalysis along with it, whereas Gestalt therapy, which assumed the legacy of Reich’s character analysis (see Bock 2000), always retained it as an important component.

In the early 1930s, Perls was impressed by the »acting« ability of his psychoanalytic teacher, Reich, who imitated his patients (see Ottersbach ibid., 6). And Perls repeatedly established contact with the world of the theater. For example, when he was in exile in South Africa he directed a theater circle, and during his period of collaboration with Paul Goodman in New York, his further contacts included Julian Beck and his wife Judith, founders of the experimental Living Theatre. Both of them were also of Jewish origin. Born in 1926 in Kiel as the daughter of a rabbi, Judith Malina studied together with Julian Beck at the New York Dramatic Workshop which was headed by Erwin Piscator, an émigré from Berlin (see Bundeszentrale 1991, 125).

Perls’s early theater experiences under Max Reinhardt, the techniques he drew from Moreno’s psychodrama and applied in modified form particularly during his last years, and impulses from collaborations with the Living Theatre, continued to live on in his famous/infamous demonstration sessions at Esalen Institute in California, which he himself referred to as his »circus.« Here, he could be confrontational or communicate gently. He often behaved like a stage director, guiding a person who had been seated on a chair in the middle of the group and making the individual act out and experience the polarities of his personality or dreams. During this period, Perls considered himself a »good actor and performer, easily achieving a chameleon-like transformation« (Perls 1977, 284).

In terms of Reinhardt’s thinking, Perls differentiated between avocation³⁷ [sic] and pretending. In a[e]vocation, he wrote, »you use the role as a vehicle to bring your essence across. You are supported by your skill, genuine feelings, and sensitivity. (…) In pretending, you lack this self-involvement. You fake an emotion that is not there, you lack the confidence in your ability. In short, you are a phony« (ibid., 138).

During the popularity of his later years, Perls was certainly a person who presented himself in the sense of »a[e]vocation.« The critics who see him more as a theater director than as a Gestalt therapist in this process, appear to remain on the surface in my opinion. For one thing, Perls was an experienced psychiatric and psychoanalytic clinician and clearly recognized the difference between a therapy session with a client as opposed to a demonstration session surrounded by an audience consisting predominantly of professionals (see Perls ibid., 215, 229, 262), a point which was also confirmed by his extremely critical wife (see L. Perls 2001, 29). For another, this was a question of his style of Gestalt therapy, which he only demonstrated effectively to an audience during the last years of his life. It was a »synthesis of drama and therapy« (Clarkson et al. 1995, 36) that was very much a part of the cathartic-psychoanalytic tradition. Breuer and Freud (1991) dramatized remembered scenes and inner conflict externally and, in the case of »Anna O.,« for example, reenacted them quite concretely in the therapy room. In this respect, Perls’s dramatization of fantasies, dreams, and inner conflicts as part of his work with the two chairs can definitely be viewed as both a resumption and a further development of Ferenczi’s experiments with »forced fantasies« (see Bocian 2009).

In addition to Perls’s many years of therapeutic experience with serious emotional disturbances, his »strong stubborn intellect« (Perls 1977, 248) combined here with his great intuition and a willingness »to risk his life and reputation« (ibid., 98 ) in the truest sense of the word in therapeutic situations. With the authority of a theater dramaturgist, Perls arrogated the right to determine what was genuine and false in the »scene« presented. There are any number of testimonials concerning the gentleness and sensitivity of his approach as well as his tough, confrontational manner which opened new perspectives for some clients and deeply injured others (see Gaines 1979; Clarkson et al. 1995; Cohn et al. 1991, 299 f.). The popularity of his late demonstrations led to increasing numbers of therapists viewing these techniques as the essence of Gestalt therapy and shifting their emphasis one-sidedly to triggering emotional outbursts quickly; Perls himself was disquieted by this. For him, Gestalt therapy was a growth path that takes its time and, above all, does not shy away from working through sorrow or sidestepping pain. This explains why he repeatedly mentioned the importance of Freud’s »magnificent work on grief«³⁸ and his concept of »the work of mourning« (see Perls 1977, 277). Accordingly, he took a stand against confusing Gestalt therapy with a technique and against the »pseudo-spontaneity of the turner-onners« (Perls 1969a, 3).

It appears to me that the following remarks by Max Reinhardt reverberated in Perls who passed them on along with all of their positive and negative implications:

The comedian’s greatest power is truth, the ultimate, innermost, burning truth. Courageously show those who are wearing make-up what their faces look like without it, and leave (…) the false poses to them, the conventional lies, the artificial pathos, and the mass-produced, ready-made emotions. Don’t buy anything, don’t borrow anything, produce everything yourself. (…) Become substantial. It is not the world of appearances that you are entering today, it is the world of reality. The person who can hold his ground over the long run is not the one who does something, but only the one who is something. (Reinhardt 1993, 33)

Ongoing, daily therapeutic work has long since developed away from such riskladen intensity and moved in the direction of clinically sound, less spectacular channels with all of their advantages and disadvantages. But in my opinion that does not negate the fact that this message can still be found at the core of the Gestalt approach and continues to account for some of its attractiveness.