Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 8

When I read this book for the first time in German, I realized that it was an important work and should also be made available in English.

Many professionals hold the opinion that Gestalt therapy originated in the USA with the publication of »Gestalt Therapy« (Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, 1951) – or possibly with the publication of »Ego, Hunger and Aggression« (Perls, 1947) which was written in South Africa, developed by Laura and Fritz Perls out of psychoanalysis, and in that sense paved the way for Perls’s new therapeutic approach. But Fritz Perls had previously spent 40 years of his life in Germany and had received his education in Berlin, the city of his birth. Drawing on our knowledge of field influences, we can easily imagine what an enormous impact the cultural environment of this era must have had on him (and on Laura Perls) as well as on the later conception of Gestalt therapy.

For several years, there has been an interest within the international Gestalt community in rediscovering and reflecting on Gestalt therapy’s European roots. Bernd Bocian has not merely made a further contribution to the biography of Fritz Perls. His detailed descriptions of the historical, cultural, and political events of those years provide more. This book also sheds an interesting historical light on the realities of living in Berlin during the four decades spanning the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, World War I, and the period between the world war and the rise of Nazi fascism.

Although Fritz Perls represents the figure in this story, the book concentrates on his surroundings and the age in which he lived, on the impact of its culture and politics, on the very specific life that German Jews led in Berlin, and on their integration into Germany. For many of them, being a German represented a more pregnant figure than the figure of being Jewish. Many of them considered themselves Jewish Germans, and not German Jews. It was all the more shocking for them when they realized that from the perspective of Nazi ideology they were pregnant in a different sense: the Nazis viewed them as German Jews and proceeded to declare war against Judaism. Many Jewish Germans could not understand how it was possible for such a change to occur and simply did not believe it, until it was too late to escape.

Culturally and politically interested readers, psychoanalysts, and, of course, Gestalt therapists will discover a multitude of fascinating new aspects of this era. The author impressively illustrates the influence of Fritz Perls’s life on his later conception of Gestalt therapy. Readers will see how right-wing and left-wing politicians adopted a holistic viewpoint for ideological purposes. Perls’s emphasis on autonomy that supports social action rather than on becoming confluent with »the whole,« that is, with the »greater idea« or the »higher gestalt,« was very much influenced by his biographical experiences during the age of German fascism. This experience made a positive contribution to his later orientation. It led to his decision to leave South Africa as fascism (Apartheid) emerged there, as well as his decision to leave the USA at a time when fascist tendencies were on the ascendant and Richard Nixon was elected president. Perls disagreed with Maslow, who transformed humanistic psychology into transpersonal psychology exactly at the time when a political shift toward fascism was taking place in America.

The political dimension of Fritz Perls’s approach is still very topical today. Since Gestalt therapy is often combined with esoteric elements, a more indepth discussion should take place with respect to the two different kinds of holistic thinking, namely, that seen in Perls’s concept of Gestalt therapy and the other as conceived by transpersonal psychology and the esoteric schools. Such combinations of Gestalt therapy and esotericism raise a question: to what extent is the view of man espoused by a rational, emancipatory psychotherapy compatible with a regressive, esoteric-evolutionary approach, or are these views of man contradictory and therefore incompatible?

We must be careful about what we integrate into Gestalt therapy as it was intended by Fritz and Laura Perls and Paul Goodman. And if we do not wish to reverse the core of Gestalt therapy into its opposite, we must be mindful of when the limits have been reached for what can be integrated from the esoteric, transpersonal world.

I would like to thank Bernd Bocian for his valuable book and Philip Schmitz for his careful translation. My thanks as well to the German Association for Gestalt Therapy (DVG) and the European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT) for supporting the translation financially. And, of course, I would also like to acknowledge publisher Andreas Kohlhage for his courage to publish in English.

Zurich, July 29, 2010

Peter Schulthess

President, European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT)