20540-4 * $3.

50 * A BANTAM BOOK
\

Fritz Peris
The Gestalt
Approach
Eyewitness
to Therapy
The last and most
comprehensive work by the
genius who fathered
Gestalt Therapy
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/gestaltapproacheOOfred
 "The Gestalt Approach
&
Eye Witness to Therapy
«»

is the most concise and at the same time the

most profound piece of Gestalt literature i
have ever seen. Fritz gives new depth to his
philosophy and theory. The transcripts provide
excellent illustrations of his techniques.”
'—Stella Resnick,
Gestalt Institute of
San Francisco
Bantam Books by Fritz Peris, M.D., Ph.D.
Ask your bookseller for the books you have missed

THE GESTALT APPROACH & EYE WITNESS TO THERAPY

GESTALT THERAPY
(with Ralph F. Hefferline, Ph.D,
and Paul Goodman, Ph.D.)
GESTALT THERAPY VERBATIM
IN AND OUT THE GARBAGE PAIL
The Gestalt Approach
&
Eye Witness to Therapy
FRITZ PERLS, M.D., Ph.D.
 This low-priced Bantam Book
has been completely reset in a type face
designed for easy reading, and was printed
from new plates. It contains the complete
text of the original hard-cover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

THE GESTALT APPROACH & EYE WITNESS TO THERAPY

A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with
Science and Behavior Books, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Science and Behavior Books edition published May 1973
2nd printing .... November 1973
3rd printing.August 1974
4th printing .... December 1974
5th printing.August 1975
Bantam edition / January 1976
2nd printing.May 1976 4th printing . .. January 1980
3rd printing .... March 1978 5th printing .... August 1981

Photograph of the author on back cover by Deke Simon

The publisher gratefully acknowledges permission granted by
Aquarian Productions, Ltd. for the use of transcripts based on
their film productions as text in this book. Aquarian Produc¬
tions, Ltd., 13 Lonsdale Avenue, North Vancouver, B.C., is
distributed by Films Incorporated, 1144 Wilmette Avenue, Wil¬
mette, Illinois 60091 (U.S.A.) and by the Visual Education
Centre, 95 Berkeley Street, Toronto 2a, Ontario (Canada) and
worldwide.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1973 by Science and Behavior Books, Inc.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by
mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
For information address: Science and Behavior Books, Inc.
Box 11457, Palo Alto, California 94306
ISBN 0-553-20540-4

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

: _ - TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD Vii

INTRODUCTION i Xi

PART 1 j THE GESTALT APPROACH \

1 | Foundations ,
Gestalt Psychology 2
Homeostasis - 5
The Holistic Doctrine 9
Contact Bondary 26
■ \

2 | Neurotic Mechanisms
Birth of Neurosis 25
Introjection 32
Projection 35
Confluence 38
Retroflection 40

31 Here Comes The Neurotic 44

4 | Here And Now Therapy 63

5 j Peeling The Onion 74

6 | Shuttling, Psychodrama, And Confusion 86

7 | Who Is Listening? 103

PART 2 | EYE WITNESS TO THERAPY

Publisher's Not® 113

81 Gestalt In Action
What is Gestalt? 120
Awareness 126
Marriage 135
Gestalt Prayer h 141
Couples No. 1 152
Couples No. 2 159
Memory and Pride 172
Philosophy of the Obvious 179
Madeline’s Dream 188
Everything is Aware Process 194
Fritz, Friend, and Freud 201
 FOREWORD

The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Ther¬

apy can be read together as one entity and also as two
separate works. Fritz Peris was working on both books
at the time of his death and had both concepts in
mind. I think he would have liked the economy of this
presentation.
The Gestalt Approach undoubtedly will become a
basic work in gestalt literature. I think Fritz succeeded
remarkably well in the task he set for himself. “Any
reasonable approach to psychology not hiding behind
a professional jargon must be comprehensible to the in¬
telligent layman and must be grounded in the facts of
human behavior.” Fritz wrote The Gestalt Approach
because he was no longer satisfied with his two pre¬
vious theoretical works. Both Ego, Hunger and Aggres¬
sion (1947) and Gestalt Therapy (1952) are difficult
to read and both are outdated. Fritz had integrated a
great deal in the intervening twenty years from many
sources; particularly Eastern religions, meditation, psy¬
chedelics and body work. Most important, he had lived,
loved, fought and practiced for two more decades,
Fritz was unique. He was not limited by the role of
physician, enemy, charismatic gadfly, lover, dirty old
man, artist or writer. He did not age as we usually think
of it in the West. Instead age brought increased ability
to live in the now and virtuosity in the arts he prac¬
ticed.
Fritz wrote most of The Gestalt Approach in the
1950s, before residing at Esalen during the 1960s. He
continued to work on it at Cowichan where he moved
in May of 1969. Cowichan is a small lumber town on
vii
viii j Foreword
an inland lake fifty miles north of Victoria on Van¬
couver Island, British Columbia. Fritz wanted to de¬
velop a gestalt community there. I think he had little
preconception of the exact form it would take. He
hoped a life style would emerge which would encourage
increased awareness, with each person integrating dis¬
owned parts of his personality and taking responsibility
for his own state of consciousness. He wanted a center
where therapists could live and study for several months.
I was in Cowichan the last two months that Fritz
was there. Fritz said he had never been happier. He
evolved a steady mellow pate blending teaching, ther¬
apy, play, loving and writing as the need emerged.
Fritz became increasingly concerned that many ther¬
apists were copying his techniques with limited under¬
standing of his overall theory. He wanted to develop
teaching materials that would pull together his per¬
sonal philosophy and his theory and practice of psycho¬
therapy into a concise exciting form. He asked me to
publish Eye Witness to Therapy. It would utilize theory
from The Gestalt Approach, transcripts of his films
and transcripts of his lectures at Cowichan. Fritz en¬
trusted these materials to me before leaving Cowichan
in early December, 1969. He was to return in the
spring to complete this work. Fritz died that winter. I
have asked Richard Bandler to undertake editing these
materials.
The Gestalt Approach can be read by itself. It also
serves as an introduction to Eye Witness to Therapy.
Richard Bandler has chosen films that are chiefly self-
explanatory introductory gestalt work. Several tran¬
scripts are included that contain more advanced gestalt
work and are representative of transcripts that will ap¬
pear in later volumes.
A second volume, Legacy From Fritz completes the
task that Fritz assigned to me. It contains Fritz’ lectures
at Cowichan. These lectures are informal, sometimes
very moving, and show the influence of Eastern philos¬
ophy. They are interwoven with unpublished transcripts
of tapes and films of advanced gestalt work. Fritz liked
these films and recommended intensive study of the
films with the transcripts.
 Foreword j foe
A major part of the volume entitled Gifts from
Cowichan is written by Patricia Baumgardner. She
describes her work with Fritz during his last three
months of teaching, and how she has integrated these
teachings in her clinical practice.
Robert S. Spitzer, M.D.
Editor-in-Chief
Science and Behavior Books
 INTRODUCTION

Modem man lives in a state of low-grade vitality.

Though generally he does not suffer deeply, he also
knows little of true creative living. Instead of it, he has
become an anxious automaton. His world offers him
vast opportunities for enrichment and enjoyment, and
yet he wanders around aimlessly, not really knowing
what he wants and completely unable, therefore, to figure
out how to get it. He does not approach the adventure
of living with either excitement or zest. He seems to feel
that the time for fun, for pleasure, for growing and
learning, is childhood and youth, and he abdicates life
itself when he reaches “maturity.” He goes through
a lot of motions, but the expression on his face indi¬
cates his lack of any real interest in what he is doing.
He is usually either poker-faced, bored, aloof, or irri¬
tated. He seems to have lost all spontaneity, all capacity
to feel and express directly and creatively. He is very
good at talking about his troubles and very bad at cop¬
ing with them. He has reduced life itself to a series of
verbal and intellectual exercises; he is drowning him¬
self in a sea of words. He has substituted psychiatric
and pseudo-psychiatric explanations of life for the pro¬
cess of living. He spends endless time trying either to
recapture the past or to mold the future. His present
activities are merely bothersome chores he has to get
out of the way. At times, he is not even aware of his
actions at the moment.
All this may seem a sweeping statement, but the
time has come when such a statement needs to be
made. The last fifty years have seen an enormous
growth in man’s understanding of himself. They have
xi
xii ( Introduction
seen an enormous growth in our understanding of the
mechanisms—both physiological and psychological—by
which we maintain ourselves under the constantly
changing pressures and conditions of life. But they have
seen no corresponding increase in our capacity to en¬
joy ourselves; to use our knowledge for our own inter¬
ests; to expand and widen our sense of aliveness and
growth. Understanding human behavior for the sake of
understanding it is a pleasant intellectual game, an
amusing or tortured way of whiling away time, but it
has no necessary relationship to or usefulness in the
daily business of living. As a matter of fact, much of
our neurotic dissatisfaction with ourselves and our
world stems from the fact that, while we have swal¬
lowed whole many of the terms and concepts of modem
psychiatry and psychology, we have not digested them,
tested them, or used our verbal and intellectual knowl¬
edge as the tool of power it is supposed to be. On the
contrary, many of us use psychiatric concepts as rational¬
izations, as ways of perpetuating unsatisfactory present
behavior. We justify our current unhappiness by our
past experiences, and wallow in our misery. We use
our knowledge of man as an excuse for socially de¬
structive and self-destructive behavior. We have gradu¬
ated from the infant’s “I can’t help myself,” to the
adult’s “I can’t help myself because . . . my mother
rejected me when I was a child; because I never learned
to appreciate my Oedipus complex; because Fm too
introverted.” But psychiatry and psychology were never
meant to be after-the-fact justifications for continuing
neurotic behavior, behavior which does not permit the
individual to live up to the maximum of his capacities.
The aim of these sciences is not merely to offer explana¬
tions of behavior, it is to help us arrive at self-knowledge,
satisfaction and self-support.
Perhaps one of the reasons psychiatry in particular
has lent itself to this perversion is that too many of the
classical theories of psychiatry have been petrified, by
their proponents, into dogma. In the effort to fit all the
different shapes and sizes of human behavior into the
Procrustes’ bed of theory, many psychiatric schools
either ignore or condemn those aspects of man’s ways
 Introduction | xiii
of living which stubbornly resist explanation in terms of
their own pet arguments. Instead of abandoning or
changing a theory when it no longer adequately con¬
forms with the facts, and when it no longer adequate¬
ly serves to solve difficulties, they twist the facts of be¬
havior to suit the theory. This serves neither to increase
understanding nor to help man solve his problems.
This book is an explanation of a somewhat new ap¬
proach to the entire subject of human behavior-—both
in its actuality and its potentiality. It is written from
the belief that man can live a fuller, richer life than
most of us now do. It is written from the conviction that
man has not yet even begun to discover the potential of
energy and enthusiasm that lies in him. The book en¬
deavors to bring together a theory and a practical ap¬
plication of that theory to the problems of daily life and
to the techniques of psychotherapy. The theory itself
is grounded in experience and observation; it has
grown and changed with years of practice and appli¬
cation, and it is still growing.
PART I THE GESTALT APPROACH
 1 FOUNDATIONS

Gestalt Psychology
Any reasonable approach to psychology not hid¬
ing itself behind a professional jargon must be com¬
prehensible to the intelligent layman, and must be
grounded in the facts of human behavior. If it is not,
there is something basically wrong with it. Psychology
deals, after all, with the one subject of most interest
to human beings—ourselves and others. The under¬
standing of psychology, and of ourselves, must be con¬
sistent. If we cannot understand ourselves, we can
never hope to understand what we are doing, we can
never hope to solve our problems, we can never hope
to live rewarding lives. However, such understanding
of the ‘self’ involves more than the usual intellectual
understanding. It requires feeling and sensitivity too.
The approach here presented rests on a set of prem¬
ises that are neither abstruse nor unreasonable. On the
contrary, they are, by and large, common sense assump¬
tions which experience can easily verify. As a matter
of fact, although they are frequently expressed in com¬
plicated terminology which serves the triple function of
confusing the reader, inflating the self-importance of
the writer and obscuring the issues they are meant
to enlighten, these assumptions underlie a large part
of contemporary psychology. Unfortunately, too many
psychologists take them for granted and push them into
the background, while their theory gallops further and
further away from reality and the observable. But if we
bring these premises, simply expressed, out into the
open, we will be able to use them continually as a
2
 Gestalt Psychology | 3
yardstick against which to measure the reliability and
the utility of our concepts, and we will be able to under¬
take our exploration with both pleasure and profit.
Let us introduce the first premise through an illus¬
tration. We said earlier that the approach outlined in
this book is in many ways new. This does not mean that
this approach has no relationship to any other theory of
human behavior or to any other applications of theory to
the problems of daily life or psychotherapeutic practice.
Nor does it mean that this approach is composed ex¬
clusively of new and revolutionary elements. Most of
the elements in it are to be found in many other ap¬
proaches to the subject. What is new here is not
necessarily the individual bits and pieces that go to
make up the theory, rather it is the way they are used
and organized which gives this approach its unique¬
ness and its claim on your attention. The first basic
premise of this book is implicit in that last sentence.
The premise is that it is the organization of facts, per¬
ceptions, behavior or phenomena, and not the individ¬
ual items of which they are composed, that defines
them and gives them their specific and particular mean¬
ing.
Originally, this concept was developed by a group
of German psychologists working in the field of percep¬
tion, who showed that man does not perceive things
as unrelated isolates, but organizes them in the percep¬
tual process into meaningful wholes. A man coming into
a room full of people, for example, does not perceive
merely blobs of color and movement, faces and bodies.
He perceives the room and the people in it as a unit,
in which one element, selected from the many present,
stands out, while the others recede into the back¬
ground. The choice of which element will stand out is
made as a result of many factors, all of which can be
lumped together under the general term interest. As
long as there is interest, the whole scene will appear
to be organized in a meaningful way. It is only when
interest is completely lacking that perception is atom¬
ized, and the room is seen as a jumble of unrelated ob¬
jects.
Let us see how this principle operates in a simple
4 | Foundations
situation. Suppose that the room is a living room, and
the occasion is a cocktail party. Most of the guests are
already present; the latecomers are gradually dribbling
in. A new arrival enters. He is a chronic alcoholic, and
he wants a drink desperately. To him, the other guests,
the chairs and couches, the pictures on the walls—all
will be unimportant and will recede into the back¬
ground. He will make straight for the bar; of all the
objects in the room, that one will be foreground to him.
Now another guest comes in. She is a painter, and the
hostess has just purchased one of her works. Her pri¬
mary concern is to find out how and where her picture
is hanging. She will select the painting from all the
other objects in the room. Like the alcoholic, she will
be completely unconcerned with the people, and will
head for her work like a homing pigeon. Or take the
case of the young man who has come to the party to
meet his current girl friend. He will scan the crowd,
will search among the faces of the guests until he finds
her. She will be foreground, everything else back¬
ground. For that peripatetic guest who flits from group
to group, from conversation to conversation, from bar
to couch, from hostess to cigarette box, the room will
appear to be patterned differently at different times.
While he is talking with one group, that group and that
conversation will be foreground. When, towards the
end of his chat, he feels tired and decides to sit down,
the one vacant seat on the sofa will be foreground. As
his interests shifts, his perception of the room, the
people and objects in it, and even himself, changes.
Foreground and background are interchanged, they do
not remain static as they do, for example, to the
young swain, whose interest is fixed and invariable. Now
comes our last guest. He, like so many of us at cock¬
tail parties, didn’t want to come in the first place and
has no real interest in the entire proceedings. For him
the entire scene will remain disorganized and mean¬
ingless unless and until something happens to make him
focus his interest and attention.
The school of psychology which developed out of
these observations is called the Gestalt School. Gestalt
is a German word for which there is no exact English
 Homeostasis | 5
equivalent. A gestalt is a pattern, a configuration, the
particular form of organization of the individual parts
that go into its make up. The basic premise of Gestalt
psychology is that human nature is organized into pat¬
terns or wholes, that it is experienced by the individual
in these terms, and that it can only be understood as a
function of the patterns or wholes of which it is made.

Homeostasis

Our next premise is that all life and all behavior are
governed by the process which scientists call homeosta¬
sis, and which the la3unan calls adaptation. The homeo¬
static process is the process by which the organism
maintains its equilibrium and therefore its health under
varying conditions. Homeostasis is thus the process by
which the organism satisfies its needs. Since its needs
are many, and each need upsets the equilibrium, the
homeostatic process goes on all the time. All life is
characterized by this continuing play of balance and
imbalance in the organism. When the homeostatic pro¬
cess fails to some degree, when the organism re¬
mains in a state of disequilibrium for too long a time
and is unable to satisfy its needs, it is sick. When the
homeostatic process fails, the organism dies.
A few simple examples will serve to make this clear.
The human body functions efficiently only when the
level of sugar in the blood is kept within certain limits.
If the blood sugar content falls below these limits, the
adrenal glands secrete adrenalin; the adrenalin makes
the liver turn its stores of glycogen into sugar; this
sugar passes into the blood and brings the blood sugar
up. All of this occurs on a purely physiological basis;
the organism is not aware of what is happening. But a
drop in the blood sugar level has still another effect. It
is accompanied by the sensation of hunger, and the
organism satisfies its dissatisfaction and disequilibrium
by eating. The food is digested, a certain amount of it
becomes sugar, and the sugar is restored to the blood.
Thus, in the case of eating, the homeostatic process
6 J Foundations
demands awareness and some deliberate action on the
part of the organism.
When the blood sugar rises excessively, the pancreas
secretes more insulin, and this causes the liver to re¬
move sugar from the blood. The kidneys also help to
remove this excess; sugar is excreted into the urine.
These processes, like the first ones we described, are
purely physiological. But the blood sugar content can be
lowered deliberately, as the result of an act of aware¬
ness. The medical term for that chronic failure of
homeostasis which results in a constant excess of
blood sugar is diabetes. The diabetic’s system appar¬
ently cannot control itself. However, the patient can
supply a control by artificially adding insulin through
injection. This reduces the blood sugar content to the
proper level.
Let us take another example. For the organism to
be in good health, the water content of the blood must
also be kept at a certain level. When it drops below
that level, sweating, salivation and the excretion of
urine are all diminished, and The body tissues pass
some of their water into the blood stream. So the body
sees to it that it conserves water during such an
emergency period. This is the physiological side of the
process. But when the water content of the blood
drops too low, the individual feels thirst. He then does
what he can to maintain the necessary balance. He
takes a drink of water. When the water content of
the blood is excessive, all these activities are reversed,
just as they are in the case of the blood sugar. Even
more simply we could say this: The physiological term
for loss of water in the blood is dehydration; chemical¬
ly it can be expressed as the loss of a certain number
of units of H20; sensorially it is felt as thirst, 'with its
symptoms of mouth dryness and restlessness; and psy¬
chologically it is felt as the wish to drink.
Thus we might call the homeostatic process the
process of self-regulation, the process by which the
organism interacts with its environment. Although the
examples I have given here involve complex activity on
the part of the organism, they both deal with the sim¬
plest and most elemental functions, all of which operate
 Homeostasis | 7
in the service of survival for the individual and, through
him, of the species. The need to maintain the level of
blood sugar and water within certain limits is basic to
all animal life. But there are other needs, not so closely
related to questions of life and death, in which the
process of homeostasis also functions. The human being
can see better with two eyes than with one; but if one
eye is destroyed, the victim is able to continue living.
He is no longer a two-eyed organism. He is a one-eyed
organism and he soon learns to function efficiently
within this situation, to gauge what his new needs are
and to find the adaptive means for satisfying them.
The organism has psychological contact needs as well
as physiological ones; these are felt every time the
psychological equilibrium is disturbed, just as the physi¬
ological needs are felt every time the physiological
equilibrium is disturbed. These psychological needs are
met through what we might call the psychological coun¬
terpart of the homeostatic process. Let me make it very
clear, however, that this psychological process cannot
be divorced from the physiological one; that each con¬
tains elements of the other. Those needs that are pri¬
marily psychological in nature and the homeostatic or
adaptive mechanisms by which they are met constitute
part of the subject matter of psychology.
Human beings have thousands of such needs on the
purely physiological level. And on the social levels,
there are other thousands of needs. The more intensely
they are felt to be essential to continued life, the more
closely we identify ourselves with them, the more in¬
tensely we will direct our activities towards satisfying
them.
Here again, the static concepts of the older psycholo¬
gies have stood in the way of understanding. Noting
certain common drives among all living creatures, the
theoreticians postulated the “instincts” as the guiding
forces in life, and described neurosis as the result of the
repression of those instincts. MacDougalTs list of in¬
stincts included fourteen. Freud considered the two
basic and most important to be Eros (sex or life) and
Thanatos (death). But if we could classify all the dis¬
turbances of the organismic balance, we would find
8 J Foundations
thousands of instincts, and these would differ among
themselves in intensity.
There is still another weakness in this theory. We can
agree, I think, that the need to survive acts as a com¬
pelling force in all living creatures and that all show,
at all times, two important tendencies: to survive, as
individuals and as species, and to grow. These are fixed
goals. But the ways in which they are met vary, from
situation to situation, from species to species, from
individual to individual. If a nation’s survival is threat¬
ened by war, its citizens will take up arms. If an indi¬
vidual’s survival is threatened because his blood sugar
level is too low, he will look for food. Scheherezade’s
survival was threatened by the Sultan, and to meet the
threat she told him stories for a thousand and one
nights. Shall we then say that she had a story telling
instinct?
The whole instinct theory tends to confuse needs with
their symptoms, or with the means we use to achieve
them. And it is from this confusion that the conception
of the repression of instincts arose.
For the instincts (if they exist) cannot be repressed.
They are out of reach of our awareness, and thus out of
reach of our deliberate action. We cannot repress the
need to survive, for example, but we can and do inter¬
fere with its symptoms and signs. This is done by inter¬
rupting the ongoing process, by preventing ourselves
from carrying out whatever action is appropriate.
But what happens if several needs (or instincts, if
you prefer) come into existence simultaneously? The
healthy organism seems to operate within what we
might call a hierarchy of values. Since it is unable to do
more than one thing properly at a time, it attends to
the dominant survival need before it attends to any of
the others; it operates on the principle of first things
first. Once in Africa I observed a group of deer grazing
within a hundred yards of a pack of sleeping lions.
When one of the lions awoke and began to roar in
hunger, the deer took speedy flight. Now try for a
moment to imagine yourself in the deer’s place. Suppose
you were running for your life. Soon you would run
out of breath, then you would have to slow down or
 The Holistic Doctrine | 9
stop altogether until you got a second wind. At that
point, breathing would have become a greater emer¬
gency—a greater need—than running, just as running
had previously become a greater need than eating.
Formulating this principle in terms of Gestalt psy¬
chology, we can say that the dominant need of the
organism, at any time, becomes the foreground figure,
and the other needs recede, at least temporarily, into
the background. The foreground is that need which
presses most sharply for satisfaction, whether the
need is, as in our example, the need to preserve life
itself, or whether it is related to less physically vital
areas—whether it is physiological or psychological. It
seems to be a need of mothers, for example, to keep
their infants happy and contented; discomfort in the
child produces discomfort in them. The mother of a
young baby may be able to sleep soundly through the
noises of rumbling trucks or even through, crashing,
deafening peals of thunder, but she will waken in an
instant if her baby—in another room at the end of a
long hall—so much as whimpers.
For the individual to satisfy his needs, to close the
gestalt, to move on to other business, he must be able
to sense what he needs and he must know how to
Uianipulate himself and his environment, for even the
purely physiological needs can only be satisfied through
the interaction of the organism and the environment.

The Holistic Doctrine

One of the most observable facts about man is that
he is a unified organism. And yet this fact is completely
ignored by the traditional schools of psychiatry and
psychotherapy which, no matter how they describe their
approach, are still operating in terms of the old mind-
body split. Since the emergence of psychosomatic medi¬
cine, the close relationship between mental and physical
activity has become increasingly apparent. And yet,
because of the persistence of psycho-physical paral¬
lelism, even this advance in understanding has not
10 j Foundations
achieved as much as it should. It is still tied to the
concepts of causality, treating functional disease as a
physical disturbance caused by a psychic event.
What seems to have happened in the development of
psychological thinking is as follows. We observe that
man is able to function on two qualitatively different
levels: the level of thinking and the level of acting. We
are struck by the differences between the two and by
their apparent, independence from one another. And so
we postulate that they are different orders of matter.
Then we are compelled to postulate the existence of
some as yet undiscovered structural entity, the mind,
which is described as the seat of mental activity. Since
the development of depth psychology, springing out of
the observation that man is not purely a rational crea¬
ture, the mind, which previously had been considered
exclusively as the font of reason, now becomes also
the seat of the murky unconscious and a structure
which is capable of exercising its will, not only over
the body, but also over itself. Thus, the mind can
repress thoughts and memories it finds offensive. It can
convert symptoms from one area of the body to an¬
other. It is the little deus ex machina which controls us
in every respect.
Because the quantitative analysis of physiological
processes progressed so much more rapidly than the
quantitative analysis of mental processes, we also
tended to accept considerably more as given about the
body than about the mind. We do not quarrel with the
scientific facts of physiology and anatomy. We can
describe the heart, the liver, the muscular and circula¬
tory systems, and we know how they operate. We
recognize that the ability to perform certain physical
and physiological activities is built into man, and we
have lost our sense of wonder at our marvelous effi¬
ciency. We know, too, a great deal about the brain and
the way it functions, and we are learning more every
day. But until we have gone further in this study, we
will still have limited understanding of another one of
man’s basic built-in capacities: the ability to learn and
manipulate symbols and abstractions. That ability seems
 The Holistic Doctrine J 11
to be associated with the greater development and com¬
plexity of his brain. And it is as natural to man as is
his ability to clench his fists or walk or have sexual
intercourse.
This symbol-using capacity shows itself in what we
call mental activity, whether it is directed towards the
production of scientific theories or towards the produc¬
tion of a trite statement about the weather. Even what
we consider a low order of mental activity requires a
great deal of ability to deal with symbols and to com¬
bine abstractions. Comparably, even what we consider
a low order of physical activity—the state of sleep, for
example—requires a considerable use of our built-in
physiological capacities. The muscles are not as active
during sleep as they are in the waking state, but some
degree of activity there inevitably is.
Given, then, that the human being has a built-in
ability to use symbols and to abstract (and even the
most rigid behaviorist has to admit this; if the ability
did not exist he could not conduct an argument about
its existence) what is the human being doing when he
uses it? He is, I maintain, acting in effigy. He is doing
symbolically what he could do physically. If he thinks
about a scientific theory, he could write it down or
explain it verbally. Writing and speaking are physical
actions. That he can think up scientific theories is truly
remarkable—but it is really no more remarkable than
the fact that he can write or speak.
Thinking, of course, is not the only mental activity
we engage in. The mind has other functions, too.
There is the function of attention. When we say, “I
put my mind on a problem,” we do not mean that we
take some physical body from inside ourselves and
deposit it heavily and with a thud on that problem. We
mean “I concentrate much of my activity and my sen¬
sory perceptions on this problem.”
We also talk of awareness, which could be described
as the fuzzy twin of attention. Awareness is more dif¬
fuse than attention—it implies a relaxed rather than a
tense perception by the whole person.
And we talk of will. Here the area of attention or
12 | Foundations
awareness is highly limited In scope, and the person
focuses on initiating and carrying through a certain set
of actions directed towards certain specific goals.
In all of these mental activities, the relationship be¬
tween what we do and what we think is very clear.
When we are aware of something, or focus attention
on it, or attempt to exert our will on it, there are at
least some overt signs by which the spectator can see
that these processes are at work. The man who is con¬
centrating hard on understanding what someone else is
saying is likely to be sitting forward in his chair; his
whole being seems to be aimed and directed towards
that in which he is interested. The man who makes up
his mind not to take that fifth piece of candy is likely
to make a motion towards it, and to stop his hand sud¬
denly and withdraw it before it reaches the candy dish.
But let me return to the area of thinking. It is here
that most of the confusion arises. We understand think¬
ing to include a number of activities-—dreaming, imag¬
ining, theorizing, anticipating—making maximum use
of our capacity to manipulate symbols. For the sake of
brevity, let us call all of this fantasy activity rather than
thinking. We tend to attach the notion of reason to
thinking and of unreason to dreaming, and yet the two
activities are very much alike. Let me make it very
clear, however, that I do not mean, by using the word
fantasy, to imply that there is anything unreal, eerie,
strange, or false about these activities. Fantasy activity,
in the broad sense in which I am using the term, is that
activity of the human being which through the use of
symbols tends to reproduce reality on a diminished
scale. As activity involving the use of symbols, it de¬
rives from reality, since symbols themselves are initially
derived from reality. Symbols begin as labels for objects
and processes; they proliferate and grow into labels for
labels and labels for labels for labels. The symbols may
not even be approximated in reality, but they start in
reality.
The same thing is true of fantasy activity, which is
internal symbol-using activity. Here the reality repro¬
duction may stray far from its origins, from the reality
with which it was originally connected. But it is in some
 The Holistic Doctrine | 13
way always related to a reality which has a meaningful
existence for the person into whose fantasy activity it
enters. I do not see a real tree in my mind's eye, but the
correspondence between the real tree in my garden and
my fantasy tree is sufficient to make it possible for me
to connect one with the other. When I mull over a
problem, trying to determine which course of action I
will take in a given situation, it is as if I were doing two
very real things. Firstly, I have a Conversation about my
problem—in reality I might have this conversation with
a friend. Secondly, I reproduce in my mind’s eye the
situation into which my decision will precipitate me. I
anticipate in fantasy what will happen in reality, and
although the correspondence between my fantasy antici¬
pation and the actual situation may not be absolute, just
as the correspondence between the tree in my mind’s
eye and the tree in my garden is not absolute, just as
the correspondence between the word “tree” and the
object tree is only approximate, it is close enough for
me to base my actions upon it.
Thus mental activity seems to act as a time, energy,
and work saver for the individual. The lever, for ex¬
ample, works on the principle that a small force applied
at one end of the instrument produces a large force at
the other. If I put one end of a lever under a five-
hundred pound rock and bear down heavily on the
other end of the tool, I can move an object so heavy
that it would otherwise resist all my attempts to change
its position.
When I fantasize, or put my attention on a problem,
I use a small amount of my available energy internally
in order to produce a larger amount of efficiently dis¬
tributed body or external energy. We think about prob¬
lems in fantasy in order to be able to solve them in
reality. Instead of simply going to the supermarket
with absolutely no idea of what she will purchase, the
housewife decides beforehand what she needs and she
is thus able to act more efficiently once she gets to the
store. She does not have to rush from display case to
display case, deciding at each step of the way whether
or not she needs the particular item available for pur¬
chase. She saves time, energy, and activity.
14 j Foundations
Now we are ready to formulate a definition of the
functions of the mind and a definition of mental activity
as a part of the whole organism we call the human
being. Mental activity seems to be activity of the whole
person carried on at a lower energy level than those
activities we call physical. Here I must stop to point
out that by using the word “lower” I am implying no
value judgment at all. I simply mean that the activities
we call mental require less expenditure of the body sub¬
stance than do those we call physical. All of us take it
for granted that the sedentary professor can get along
on fewer calories than the ditch-digger. As water
changes to steam by the application of heat, so covert
body activity changes to the latent, private activity we
call mental by a diminution of intensity. And con¬
versely, as steam turns into water by the application of
cold, so the latent, private activity we call mental
changes into overt body activity by an increase of in¬
tensity. The organism acts with and reacts to its environ¬
ment with greater or lesser intensity; as the intensity
diminishes, physical behavior turns into mental behavior
As the intensity increases, mental behavior turns into
physical behavior.
One further example should serve to make this con¬
cept entirely clear. When a man is actually attacking an
enemy, he shows enormous overt body activity. He
contracts his muscles, his heart beats faster, adrenalin is
poured into his blood stream in large quantities, his
breathing becomes rapid and shallow, his jaws are
clenched and rigid, his whole body becomes tense.
When he talks about how much he dislikes this enemy
he will still show a large number of overt physical signs,
although there will be fewer of these than when he is
actually fighting. When he feels anger, and thinks about
attacking an enemy, he still shows some overt physical
signs. But these signs are less visible and less intense
than they were when he was actually fighting, or when
he was talking about it. His behavior is now of still
lower intensity. His overt physical activity has changed
to covert mental activity.
Our capacity to act on a level of diminished intensity
—to engage in mental behavior—is of tremendous ad-
 The Holistic Doctrine | 15
vantage not only for the individual human being in
solving his own particular problems, but for the entire
species. The energy man saves by thinking things out
instead of acting them out in every situation can now
be invested in enriching his life. He can make and use
tools which further save him energy and therefore offer
him even greater opportunities for enrichment. But
these are not the only advantages. Man’s ability to ab¬
stract and to combine abstractions, his capacity to in¬
vent symbols, to create art and science—all these are
intimately connected with his ability to fantasize. The
basic ability to create and use symbols is enhanced by
the real products of symbol using. Each generation
inherits the fantasies of all preceding generations, and
thus accumulates greater knowledge and understanding.
This conception of human life and behavior as made
up of levels of activity does away once and for all with
the disturbing and unsatisfying psycho-physical parallel¬
ism with which psychology has been coping ever since
its birth. It enables us to see the mental and physical
sides of human behavior not as independent entities
which could have their existence apart from human
beings or from one another, which was the inevitable
and logical conclusion to the older psychologies, but to
look at the human being as he is, as a whole, and to
examine his behavior as it manifests itself on the overt
level of physical activity and the covert level of mental
activity. Once we recognize that thoughts and actions
are made of the same stuff, we can translate and trans¬
pose from one level to another.
Thus we can introduce finally into psychology a
holistic concept—the concept of the unified field—
which scientists have always lodged to find and towards
which the contemporary psychosomaticists have been
groping.
In psychotherapy, this concept gives us a tool for
dealing with the whole man. Now we can see how his
mental and physical actions are meshed together. We
can observe man more keenly and use our observations
more meaningfully. For how much broader now is the
surface which we can observe! If mental and physical
activity are of the same order, we can observe both as
16 | Foundations
manifestations of the same thing: man’s being. Neither
patient nor therapist is limited by what the patient says
and thinks, both can now take into consideration what
he does. What he does provides clues as to what he
thinks, as what he thinks provides clues as to what he
does, and what he would like to do. Between the levels
of thinking and doing there is an intermediate stage, the
stage of playing at, and in therapy, if we observe keenly,
we will notice that the patient plays at a lot of things.
He himself will know what his actions, his fantasies and
his play-actings mean, if we but call them to his atten¬
tion. He himself will provide his own interpretations.
Through his experience of himself on the three levels
of fantisizing, play-acting, and doing, he will come to an
understanding of himself. Psychotherapy then becomes
not an excavation of the past, in terms of repressions,
Oedipal conflicts, and primal scenes, but an experience
in living in the present. In this living situation, the pa¬
tient learns for himself how to intergrate his thoughts,
feelings, and actions not only while he is in the con¬
sulting room, but during the course of his everyday life.
The neurotic obviously does not feel like a whole per¬
son. He feels as if his conflicts and unfinished business
were tearing him to shreds. But with his recognition that
he is, being human, a whole, comes the ability to regain
that sense of wholeness which is his birthright.

Contact Boundary
No individual is self-sufficient; the individual can
exist only in an environmental field. The individual is
inevitably, at every moment, a part of some field. His
behavior is a function of the total field, which includes
both him and his environment. The nature of the rela¬
tionship between him and his environment determines
the human being’s behavior. If the relationship is
mutually satisfactory, the individual’s behavior is what
we call normal. If the relationship is one of conflict, the
individual’s behavior is described as abnormal. The
environment does not create the individual, nor does the
 Contact Boundary | 17
individual create the environment. Each is what it is,
each has its own particular character, because of its
relationship to the other and the whole. The study of
the human organism alone, of what goes on entirely
inside him, is the province of anatomy and physiology.
The study of the environment alone, of what goes on
entirely outside him, is the province of the physical,
geographical and social sciences. In these sciences, ele¬
ments of the total field—which includes both the indi¬
vidual and the environment—can be abstracted and
studied alone because the concern of these fields is
precisely with those elements which exist independently
of one another. The structure of the human eye has no
influence on the structure of the objects it sees. Nor
does the structure of these objects affect the structure
of the eye. But psychology cannot make such abstrac¬
tions, nor can it deal with structure per se. The study
of the way the human being functions in his environ¬
ment is the study of what goes on at the contact boun¬
dary between the individual and his environment. It is
at this contact boundary that the psychological events
take place. Our thoughts, our actions, our behavior, and
our emotions are our way of experiencing and meeting
these boundary events.
With this concept we come to a parting of the ways
with the older psychologies. They established another
split. Like the mind-body split, they proceeded to treat
their postulated abstraction as a factual reality, and
then compounded the confusion in their effort to extri¬
cate themselves from the mess they had gotten them¬
selves into. They split experience into inside and outside
and then were faced with the insoluble question of
whether man is ruled by forces from without or from
within. This either-or approach, this need for a simple
causality, this neglect of the total field, makes problems
out of situations which are in reality indivisible.
True enough, I can divide the sentence “I see a tree”
into subject, verb, and object. But in experience, the
process cannot be split up in this way. There is no sight
without something to be seen. Nor is anything seen if
there is no eye to see it. Yet by splitting experience into
inside and outside in this way, and then dealing with
 18 j Foundations
their abstractions—inside and outside—as if they were
experiential realities, scientists had to find some ex¬
planation of each. And of course, in actuality, neither
can be explained without the other.
To explain the inner experience, the theory of the
reflex arc was devised: first the stimulus (the outside)
reaches the receptor (the sensory organs), then impulses
are carried through the intermediate system (the nerves)
to the effector (the muscles). True enough, we act
through two systems, the sensoric and the motoric. But
the organism reaches out towards the world with both.
His sensory system provides him with an orientation,
his motor system with a means of manipulation. Neither
is a function of the other, neither is temporally or
logically prior to the other, they are both functions of
the total human being.
With this new outlook, the environment and the
organism stand in a relationship of mutuality to one
another. Neither is the victim of the other. Their rela¬
tionship is actually that of dialectical opposites. To
satisfy its needs, the organism has to find its required
supplements in the environment. The system of orienta¬
tion discovers what is wanted; all living creatures are
observably able to sense what the outside objects are
that will satisfy their needs. The hungry puppy is not
confused by the myriad of shapes, smells, noises, and
colors in the world; he goes directly for his mother’s
teat. This is the foreground figure.
Once the system of orientation has done its job, the
organism has to manipulate the object it needs in such
a way that the organismic balance will be restored, the
gestalt will be closed. The mother wakened by her cry¬
ing baby will not be content to lie comfortably back in
her bed listening to her offspring wail. She will do
something to eliminate the disturbance. She will try to
satisfy the baby’s needs, and when they are satisfied,
she too can return to sleep. The puppy, having found
the teat, will suck.
These concepts, too, have meaning in psychotherapy.
First of all, the conception that effective action is action
directed towards the satisfaction of a dominant need
gives us a clue as to the meaning of specific forms of
 Contact Boundary- | 19
behavior. Secondly, it gives us a further tool for an
understanding of neurosis. If, through some disturbance
in the homeostatic process, the individual is unable to
sense his dominant needs or to manipulate his environ¬
ment in order to attain them, he will behave in a dis¬
organized and ineffective way. He will be trying to do
too many things at once.
You will, I am sure, have noticed in your own expe¬
rience that if your attention is divided between two
objects of interest* you cannot concentrate properly on
either. This inability to concentrate is a frequent com¬
plaint of the neurotic. When there are more than two
objects demanding our attention, or if the object of
interest is hazy, we feel confused. If there are two in¬
consistent situations requiring our attention we speak of
conflict. If these are permanent and apparently insol¬
uble, we regard them as neurotic conflicts.
The neurotic has lost the ability (or perhaps he never
developed it) to organize his behavior in accordance with
a necessary hierarchy of needs. He literally cannot con¬
centrate. In therapy, he has to learn how to distinguish
the myriad of needs from one another, and how to
attend to them, one at a time. He must learn to dis¬
cover and identify himself with his needs, he must learn
how, at every moment, to become totally involved in
what he is doing; how to stick with a situation long
enough to close the gestalt and move on to other busi¬
ness. Organization plus environment equals field.
Let me return for a moment to the discussion of the
organism’s relationship to the field, or, in more specific
terms, the individual’s relationship to his environment.
Not only does he have needs and a system of orienta¬
tion and manipulation with which to achieve their satis¬
faction, he has attitudes towards those things in the
environment that can help or hinder his search for satis¬
faction. Freud described this by saying that objects in
the world receive a cathexis. In Gestalt terms, we would
say that these objects become figure. Those that are
desirable because they help to satisfy the individual’s
needs and to restore die disturbed equilibrium are said
to have a positive cathexis. Water has a positive cathexis
for a thirsty man, a soft bed for a tired man. Those
20 } Foundations
that are undesirable because they threaten the individual
or tend to upset his equilibrium, or do not satisfy his
needs, have a negative cathexis. For the hunter threat¬
ened by a rampaging elephant, the elephant has a nega¬
tive cathexis.
Man is suspended between impatience and dread.
Each need requires immediate gratification without any
lapse of time. Impatience, then, is the emotional form
which excitement—produced by the presence of a need
and the disturbance of balance—assumes first. Impa¬
tience is the basis of positive cathexis. Dread, on the
other hand, is the basis of all negative cathexis; it is
the anti-survival experience. The dreadful is experienced
as vague, undifferentiated danger; as soon as there is
an object to cope with, dread diminishes into fear. As
the positive cathexis indicates the life supporting sup¬
plements, so negative cathexis indicates danger, dimin¬
ished support, or even death. In any case, it threatens
that some or all of our existence is at stake, whether it
is the physical being (illness), sexual integrity (castra¬
tion), self-concept (humiliation), Weltanschauung (ex¬
istential confusion), security (economic depression), or
any one of a number of other things.
The individual wants to appropriate or take over
those objects or people in the environment which have
a positive cathexis; the young man in love wants to
marry the girl of his choice, the hungry man wants to
eat. In trying to acquire the positively cathexed objects,
the individual contacts his environment, he reaches out
towards it. On the other hand, the individual has an
entirely different orientation towards those objects or
people that have a negative cathexis. These he wants
to annihilate or remove from the field. This applies to
our fantasy as well as to the actual world. The farmer
will try to shoot the fox that is raiding his chicken coop.
We try to remove “bad” thoughts and unwanted emo¬
tions from our “minds” as if they were actual enemies.
The safest way to annihilate the enemy is, of course,
to destroy him or render him harmless. This means de¬
stroying those of his qualities that support his threat
against us. When Delilah cut off Sampson’s hair, she
did just that. The next best thing would be to frighten
 Contact Boundary | 21
*•

or threaten him, to chase him out. In addition to these

methods of destruction, we can cope with the negatively
cathexed situation or object by magic annihilation or by
flight from the danger field. Both are means of with¬
drawal.
Magic annihilation is well known in psychotherapy
under the name of scotoma, that is, blind spot. There
are people who literally do not see what they don’t want
to see, don’t hear what they don’t want to hear, don’t
feel what they don’t want to feel—all this in order to
shut out what they consider to be dangerous—the ob¬
jects or situations that have a negative cathexis for them.
Magic annihilation is a partial withdrawal, a substitute
for actual withdrawal.
In this age of psychoanalysis, we tend to think of
withdrawal as one of the symptoms of neurosis. But this
is a misunderstanding of the phenomenon. Withdrawal
per se is neither good nor bad, it is simply a means of
coping with danger. The question of whether or not it is
pathological can only be answered by our answers to
these questions: withdrawal from what, withdrawal to
what, and withdrawal for how long?
The same thing applies to contact. Contact itself is
neither good nor bad, although in our age of concern
for “social adjustment” we tend to value die capacity to
make contact almost above all others. Yet some forms
of contact are anything but healthy. You yourself must
have known people who simply have to stay in con¬
tinual contact with you: the hangers-on. Every psycho¬
therapist knows that they are as difficult to treat as the
deeply withdrawn personalities. There are some people
who feel compelled to stay in contact with their fixed
ideas; they are as disturbed as the schizophrenics who
withdraw almost completely.
Hence, not every contact is healthy and not every
withdrawal unhealthy. One of the characteristics of the
neurotic is that he can neither make good contact nor
can he organize his withdrawal. When he should be in
contact with his environment, his mind is somewhere
else, and so he cannot concentrate. When he should
withdraw, he cannot. Insomnia, a frequent complaint
of the neurotic, is an example of the inability to with-
22 | Foundations
draw, the phenomenon of boredom is another. Boredom
occurs when we try to stay in contact with a subject
that does not hold our interest. We quickly exhaust any
excitement at our disposal; we get tired and lean back.
We want to withdraw from the situations. If we cannot
find a suitable excuse to do so, the over-contact be¬
comes painful, and we express it in exactly these terms.
We’re “bored to death,” or “bored to tears.” If we let
our tiredness take over, we will withdraw to our fantasy,
to a more interesting contact. That our tiredness is
really only a temporary matter is apparent from the
renewed interest we feel when we suddenly find our¬
selves leaning forward to listen attentively to a more
fascinating speaker. Once again we are in contact—we
are “all there.”
Contact and withdrawal are dialectical opposites.
They are descriptions of the ways we meet psychological
events, they are our means of dealing at the contact
boundary with objects in the field. In the organism/
environment field the positive and negative (contact
and withdrawal) cathexis behave very similarly to the
attracting and repelling forces of magnetism. As a
matter of fact, the whole organism/environment field is
one unit which is dialectically differentiated. It is differ¬
entiated biologically into the organism and the environ¬
ment, psychologically into the self and the other,
morally into selfishness and altruism, scientifically into
subjective and objective, etc.
When the cathected object, whether its cathexis is
positive or negative, has been appropriated or annihi¬
lated, contacted or withdrawn from, or dealt with in
some way satisfactory to the individual, both it and the
need with which it is associated disappear from the
environment; the gestalt is closed. The cathected object
and the need have an almost mathematical relationship
to pne another; if the need is a minus, the cathected
object is a plus. If a man is thirsty, he feels a lack of
fluid, his need is experienced as a minus in him. At that
time a glass of water has a positive cathexis for him,
and it is experienced as a plus. The exact number of
units of fluid he needs can be measured, and when he
gets that number from the environment his needs are
 Contact Boundary | 23
<*•

satisfied. The sum, as it were, of the need and the

cathected object is zero.
This contact with and withdrawal from the environ¬
ment, this acceptance and rejection of the environment,
are the most important functions of the total person¬
ality. They are the positive and negative aspects of the
psychological processes by which we live. They are
dialectical opposites, part of the same thing, the total
personality. Those psychologists who maintain a dual-
istic conception of man see them operating as opposing
forces which tear the individual into pieces. We, on the
other hand, see them as aspects of the same thing: the
capacity to discriminate. This capacity can become con¬
fused and can function badly. When it does, the indi¬
vidual is unable to behave appropriately and conse¬
quently we describe him as a neurotic. But when the
capacity to discriminate functions well, the components
of acceptance and rejection, of contact and withdrawal,
are always present and active.
Indeed, this function seems to be part of the very
rhythm of life itself. During the day, when,we are
awake, we are in touch with the world, we are in con¬
tact with it. During the night when we are asleep, we
withdraw, we give up contact. In summer we are usually
more outgoing than in winter. Wintertime withdrawal
is perfectly exemplified by those animals which hiber¬
nate, sleeping through the entire season.
Contacting the environment is, in a sense, forming a
gestalt. Withdrawing is either closing it completely or
rallying one’s forces to make closure possible. The
prize-fighter makes contact with his opponent’s jaw but
he does not leave his fist there. He withdraws it for the
next blow. If contact is overprolonged, it becomes in¬
effective or painful; if withdrawal is overprolonged, it
interferes with the processes of life. Contact and with¬
drawal, in a rhythmic pattern, are our means of satisfy¬
ing our needs, of continuing the ongoing processes of
life itself.
Now we have the hierarchy of needs, the equipment
—sensory and motor—with which to satisfy them, the
positive and negative cathexes of the field, contact and
withdrawal, impatience and dread. This brings us to the
24 | Foundations
question of the force which basically energizes all our
action. That force seems to be emotion. For although
modem psychiatry treats emotions as if they were a
bothersome surplus that had to be discharged, emotions
are the very life of us. We can theorize and interpret
the emotions any way we will. But this is a waste of
time. For emotions are the very language of the or¬
ganism; they modify the basic excitement according to
the situation which has to be met. Excitement is trans¬
formed into specific emotions, and the emotions are
transformed into sensoric and motor actions. The emo¬
tions energize the cathexes and mobilize the ways and
means of satisfying needs.
Here again are some cues for psychotherapy. Earlier,
we described neurosis as the illness which arises when
the individual somehow interrupts the ongoing pro¬
cesses of life and saddles himself with so many un¬
finished situations that he cannot satisfactorily get on
with the process of living. The interruptions we de¬
scribed as psychological, or neurotic, were, as con¬
trasted with those that we call physiological, of the kind
that take place either on the level of awareness or on a
level which can be made aware. We now see something
else about the neurotic. His contact-withdrawal rhythm
is out of kilter. He cannot decide for himself when to
participate and when to withdraw because all the un¬
finished business of his life, all the interruptions to the
ongoing process, have disturbed his sense of orientation,
and he is no longer able to distinguish between those
objects or persons in the environment which have a
positive cathexis and those which have a negative
cathexis; he no longer knows when or from what to
withdraw. He has lost his freedom of choice, he cannot
select appropriate means to his end goals, because he
does not have the capacity to see the choices that are
open to him.
 2 NEUROTIC MECHANISMS

Birth of Neurosis

The individual’s chance of physical survival is

almost nil if he is left entirely to himself. Man needs
others to survive physically. His psychological and emo¬
tional survival chances are even lower if he is left alone.
On the psychological level, man needs contact with
other human beings as much as, on the physiological
level, he needs food and drink. Man’s sense of related¬
ness to the group is as natural to him as his sense of
relatedness to any one of his physiological survival im¬
pulses. Indeed, this sense of identification is probably
his primary psychological survival impulse.
The gestalt approach, which considers the individual
as a function of the organism/environment field, and
which considers his behavior as reflecting his relatedness
within that field, gives coherence to this conception of
man as both an individual and as a social creature. The
older psychologies described human life as a constant
conflict between the individual and his environment. We
see it, on the other hand, as an interaction between the
two, within the framework of a constantly changing
field. And since the field is constantly changing, out of
its own nature and out of what we do to it, the forms
and techniques of interaction must necessarily be fluid
and changeable themselves.
What concerns us as psychologists and psychothera¬
pists, in this ever-changing field, are the ever-changing
constellations of the ever-changing individual. For he
must change constantly if he is to survive. It is when the
individual becomes incapable of altering his techniques
25
26 | Neurotic Mechanisms
of manipulation and interaction that neurosis arises.
When the individual is frozen to an outmoded way of
acting, he is less capable of meeting any of his survival
needs, including his social needs. And the very large
number of alienated, unidentified, and isolated indi¬
viduals we find around us is ample evidence that this
inability can easily arise. If we look at man in his
environment, as both an individual and a social crea¬
ture, as part of the organism/environment field, we can¬
not lay the blame for this alienation either at the door
of the individual or of the environment. In our first
chapter, in talking about the old mind-body problem,
we pointed out that a causal relationship cannot exist
among the elements that go to make up the whole. And
since individual and environment are merely elements
of a single whole, the field, neither of them can be held
responsible for the ills of the other.
But both of them are ill. A society containing a large
number of neurotic individuals must be a neurotic
society; of the individuals living in a neurotic society, a
large number must be neurotic. The man who can live
in concemful contact with his society, neither being
swallowed up by it nor withdrawing from it completely,
is the well-integrated man. He is self-supportive because
he understands the relationship between himself and
his society, as the parts of the body instinctively seem
to understand their relationship to the body-as-a-whole.
He is the man who recognizes the contact boundary
between himself and his society, who renders unto
Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and retains for him¬
self those things that are his own. The goal of psycho¬
therapy is to create just such men.
The ideal of a democratic community, on the other
hand, is to create a society with the same characteristics,
a community in which, as its needs are determined,
each member participates for the benefit of all. Such a
society is in concernful contact with its members. In
such a society, the boundary between the individual and
the group is clearly drawn and clearly felt. The indi¬
vidual is not subservient to the group nor is the group
at the mercy of any individual. The principle of homeo¬
stasis, of self-regulation, also governs such a society. As
 Birth of Neurosis j 27
the body responds to its dominant needs first, so would
the society respond to its dominant needs first. If a fire
threatened the whole community, everyone would help
to extinguish the flames and salvage life and property.
But, as the human-body-as-a-whole fights to preserve
the integrity of any of its members when that one is
under attack, so, in a well-regulated or self-regulated
community, if the fire threatened only one home, the
home owner’s neighbors and, if necessary, the entire
community would join with him in fighting it. The mem¬
bers of the community and its rulers would mutually
identify with one another, and the members would
identify with each other.
Man seems to be bom with a sense of social and
psychological balance as acute as his sense of physical
balance. Every movement he makes on the social or
psychological level is a movement in the direction of
finding that balance, of establishing equilibrium between
his personal needs and the demands of his society. His
difficulties spring not from the desire to reject such
equilibrium, but from misguided movements aimed
towards finding and maintaining it.
When these movements bring him into severe conflict
with society because, in his search for the contact
boundary, (the point of balance) he has overshot the
mark and impinged too heavily on society, we call him
a criminal. The criminal is the man who has arrogated
to himself functions traditionally defined as the preroga¬
tives of the state. The man who arrogates these func¬
tions to himself is, in our society, a criminal.
When, on the other hand, man’s search for balance
leads him to draw back further and further, leads him
to permit society to impinge too heavily on him, to
overwhelm him with its demands and at the same time
alienate him from social living, to push and passively
mold him, we call him a neurotic. The neurotic cannot
see his own needs clearly and therefore cannot fulfill
them. He cannot distinguish properly between himself
and the rest of the world, and he tends to see society as
larger than life and himself as smaller. The criminal
cannot see the needs of others—and therefore stamps
on them—because he too cannot properly distinguish
28 | Neurotic Mechanisms
between himself and the rest of the world. As con¬
trasted with the neurotic, he tends to see himself as
larger than life and society as smaller.
What is it, then, in the organism/environment field,
that permits such disturbances in balance to arise?
Sociologists will examine this question in terms of the
environment. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and psycho¬
therapists examine it by examining what happens in the
individual.
It seems to me that the imbalance arises when,
simultaneously, the individual and the group experience
differing needs, and when the individual is incapable of
distinguishing which one is dominant. The group can
mean the family, the state, the social circle, co-workers
—any or all combinations of persons who have a par¬
ticular functional relationship with one another at any
given time. The individual, who is part of this group,
experiences the need for contact with it as one of his
primary psychological survival impulses, although of
course he does not experience the need as acutely at
all times. But when, at the same time, he experiences a
personal need, the satisfaction of which requires with¬
drawal from the group, trouble can begin. In the situa¬
tion of conflict of needs the individual has to be able
to make a clear-cut decision. If he does this, he either
stays in contact or he withdraws; he temporarily sacri¬
fices the less dominant need to the more dominant, and
that is that. Neither he nor the environment suffers any
severe consequences. But when he cannot discriminate,
when he cannot make a decision, or feel satisfied with
the decision he has made, he can neither make a good
contact nor a good withdrawal, and both he and the
environment are affected.
There seems to be, in all human beings, an inborn
tendency towards ritual, which can be defined as an
expression of man’s sense of social identification, his
need for contact with a group. We find this tendency
not only among primitives, but among highly civilized
groups as well. The play of children is made up largely
of ritual acting and repetition. Parades, festivals, reli¬
gious services, all are expressions of this need. In a
perverted way, the need for ritual seems to underlie the
 Birth of Neurosis | 29
obsessional and compulsive neuroses—those that dis¬
play themselves in such seemingly ridiculous needs as
the compulsion to wash one’s hands every twenty min¬
utes. Obsessional rituals of this sort always have social
as well as personal roots. But they maintain social form
without social content, and at the same time, they are
incapable of satisfying the individual’s changing needs.
They are the most sterile kind of expression—rendering
nothing either to Caesar or to the self.
But normal people, too, seem to feel the need for
ritual. If at an important occasion there were no ritual
at all—no toast, no handshake, no speech, no proces¬
sional, no ceremony of any kind—the whole thing
would seem meaningless and flat. The ritual seems to
give such experience order, form, and purpose. In gestalt
terms, we could say that, it makes the gestalt clearer,
makes the figure stand out more sharply. All of us, for
example, seem to feel the need for some ritual in deal¬
ing with death. Even the most sophisticated citizen of the
world would find it shocking if we simply bundled our
corpses up in bags and disposed of them.
At the same time that it satisfies a deep-seated need
in the individual, the ritual has social value as well.
For ritual reinforces the survival value of group living.
It joins people together. Drill, for example, increases
the coordination of its participants, and at the same
time increases their capacity to act as a group in defense
of their group needs. Magic—which is simply fantasized
manipulation of the environment—serves to enhance
the value of the group as a tool for the achievement of
goals. It is used to evoke the support of beneficial
powers (those that have a positive cathexis) and to
annihilate dreaded powers (those that have a negative
cathexis). Whatever the value for the group may be,
ritual will—and it is meant to—interrupt at least some
of the spontaneous and personal processes of the indi¬
viduals in the group. Once engaged in ritual, all other
activity is disesteemed as profane. The highest concen¬
tration, such as that befitting a dominant survival need,
is demanded and achieved with solemnity and awe.
Only a full participation of the entire personality will
result in that religious feeling of intensified existence.
30 | Neurotic Mechanisms
of exaltation, of integration, without diminishing the
full awareness of both the individual and the group,
both the self and the other, and the full awareness of
the individual that he is part of the group.
But such intensification of feeling is possible only if
his full participation is uninterrupted. If there is any
interruption at all—either from the environment, or if
the individual interrupts in fantasy—the meaningfulness
and integration of the entire activity is gone.
Now suppose that in the process of group activity, or
ritual, the individual suddenly becomes aware of a per¬
sonal survival need which appears more dominant than
attention to the ritual. Suppose, for example, a chorus
is in the middle of its performance, and one of its mem¬
bers suddenly finds that he has to urinate. His survival
need profanely intrudes upon the solemn act. We then
have three possibilities: the individual may withdraw
(but quietly, so as not to call attention to himself), he
may push his need completely into die background and
force it, at least temporarily, out of existence, or he may
vacillate in his attention from his own needs to the
needs of the group. In this last case he tries to stay in
contact with the ritual, to accord it the position of
dominance, but he cannot, and a traumatic conflict
between dread and impatience may occur. The sufferer
might verbalize his experience thusly: “I want to uri¬
nate; I wish I could interrupt the session, but we want
to go on. We don’t like to be disturbed. And it isn’t nice
to disturb the others. So I wish I did not need to uri¬
nate, and I have to control myself. I wish my bladder
would not bother me. It really is a nuisance.”
In this apparendy harmless statement lie hidden a
whole series of confusions that can lead to neurosis. The
speaker is apparently unable to distinguish properly
between himself and his environment, and his statement
contains all four of the mechanisms of meeting boun¬
dary disturbances that Gestalt therapy believes lie be¬
hind neurosis. This does not mean, of course, that he
who utters it is a confirmed neurotic. It does mean that
the attitudes which lie behind the statement, if they
are unchecked, if they represent a continual pattern of
thought and behavior, can develop into full-fledged
 Birth of Neurosis | 31
neurotic attitudes. So let us leave our sufferer for a
moment to discuss what these neurotic mechanisms are
and how they develop. Then we can return to him and
see how this simple situation can be the model for the
development of neurotic patterns.
All neurotic disturbances arise from the individual’s
inability to find and maintain the proper balance be¬
tween himself and the rest of the world, and all of them
have in common the fact that in neurosis the social and
environmental boundary is felt as extending too far over
into the individual. The neurotic is the man on whom
society impinges too heavily. His neurosis is a defensive
maneuver to protect himself against the threat of being
crowded out by an overwhelming world. It is his most
effective technique for maintaining his balance and his
sense of self-regulation in a situation where he feels
that the odds are all against him.
Although we assume that the neuroses, the boundary
disturbances, operate primarily through four mecha¬
nisms which can be distinguished, one from the other, it
woifld be unrealistic to say that any particular kind of
neurotic behavior was an example only of the operation
of any single one of them. Nor would it be reasonable
to say that any single confusion about the boundary—
any single disturbance of the balance in the organism/
environment field—produces neurosis or is evidence of
a neurotic pattern. There are, to be sure, certain situa¬
tions where this does occur, and they lead to what
psychiatry calls the traumatic neuroses. The traumatic
neuroses are essentially patterns of defense that origi¬
nate in an attempt by the individual to protect himself
from a thoroughly terrifying intrusion of society or
clash with the environment. For example, the two-year-
old child whose parents lock him in a dark closet over¬
night 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 manipu¬
lation with neither rights nor powers of his own. There
is no “he” any more, there is only “they” and what
“they” can do. In defending himself against this situa¬
tion, the child is likely to develop rigid patterns of
behavipr. And these may persist long after the danger
32 j Neurotic Mechanisms
is past. They were called into action by a trauma, but
they continue to operate even when the trauma itself
has disappeared from existence.
But the boundary disturbances that lie behind most
neuroses are usually less dramatic than this. They are
nagging, chronic, daily interferences with the processes
of growth and self-recognition through which we reach
self-support and maturity. And whatever form these
interferences and interruptions of growth may take, they
result in the development of continuing confusion be¬
tween the self and the other.

Introjection
All of us grow through exercising the capacity to
discriminate, itself a function of the self-other bound¬
ary. We take from the environment, we give back to it
We accept or reject what the environment has to offer.
We can only grow if, in the process of taking, we digest
completely and we assimilate thoroughly. What we have
really assimilated from our environment becomes ours,
to do with as we please. We can retain it, or we can
give it back in its new form, its distillation through us.
But what we swallow whole, what we accept indiscrim¬
inately, what we ingest and do not ingest, is a foreign
body, a parasite that is making its home in us. It is not
part of us, even though it may look as if it is. It is still
part of the environment.
Physically, this process of growth by assimilation—
by destructuring and digesting—is easy to see. We grow
and maintain ourselves not through the food we swallow
whole, but through the food we chew (which begins the
process of destructuring) and digest (which continues
the process by further changing the food into chemical
particles which the body can use). Physical food, then,
properly digested and assimilated, becomes part of us—
it is converted into bone, muscle, and blood. But food
which is swallowed whole, which we shove down our
gullets, not because we want it, but because we have to
eat it, lies heavily on the stomach. It makes us imcom-
 fntrojectlon | 33
Portable, we want to throw it up and get it out of our
systems. If we do not, if we suppress our discomfort,
nausea, and desire to get rid of it, then we finally suc¬
ceed either in painfully digesting it or else it poisons us.
The psychological process of assimilating is very
much the same as its physiological counterpart. Con¬
cepts, facts, standards of behavior, morality, and ethi¬
cal, esthetic or political values—all these come to us
originally from the outside world. There is nothing in -
our minds that does not come from the environment,
but there is nothing in the environment for which there
is not an organismic need, physical or psychological.
These must be digested and mastered if they are to
become truly our own, truly a part of the personality.
But if we simply accept them whole-hog and uncriti¬
cally, on someone else’s say-so, or because they are
fashionable or safe or traditional or unfashionable or
dangerous or revolutionary—they lie heavily on us.
They are really undigestible. They are still foreign
bodies even though they may have taken up residence in
our minds. Such undigested attitudes, ways of acting,
feeling and evaluating, psychology calls introjects, and
the mechanism by which these alien accretions are
added to the personality we call introjection.
I am not saying that this process of swallowing whole
does not occasionally serve a useful purpose. The stu¬
dent who crams the night before an examination in
order to get a passing grade in a very dull subject has
a legitimate reason for his actions. But if he deludes
himself into thinking that he has really learned anything
from his cramming, he will be in for a bad shock when,
six months later, he is again quizzed on the same sub¬
ject. For by that time he will have lost the greatest part
of what he “learned.”
Nor am I saying that the individual should reject any
psychological food that comes from the outside world.
It is as impossible to feed off oneself psychologically as
it is to feed off oneself physically. What I am saying is
that the psychological food with which the outside world
presents us—the food of facts and attitudes on which
our personalities are built—has to be assimilated in
exactly, the same way as is our actual food. It has to be
34 | Neurotic Mechanisms
destructured, analyzed, taken apart, and then put to¬
gether again in the form in which it will be of most
value to us. If it is merely swallowed whole, it con¬
tributes not at all to the development of our personali¬
ties. On the contrary, it makes us something like a
house so jampacked with other people’s possessions that
there is no room for the owner’s property. It turns us
into waste baskets of extraneous and irrelevant informa¬
tion. And what makes it most tragic is the fact that if
this material were to be tempered, altered and trans¬
formed through us, it could be of enormous value to us.
The dangers of introjection, then, are twofold. First
of all, the man who introjects never gets a chance to
develop his own personality, because he is so busy hold¬
ing down the foreign bodies lodged in his system. The
more introjects he has saddled himself with, the less
room there is for him to express or even discover what
he himself is. And in the second place, intro jection con¬
tributes to personality disintegration. If you swallow
whole two incompatible concepts, you may find yourself
tom to bits in the process of trying to reconcile them.
And this is a fairly common experience today.
Our society, for example, teaches all of us from in¬
fancy two entirely different and apparently opposing
sets of attitudes. One is the Golden Rule, “do unto
others as you would have them do unto you.” The other
is the law of the survival of the fittest, which has been
reduced to the slogan, “dog eat dog.” If we were to
introject both of these bits of dogma, we would wind up
trying to be, at the same time, kind, gentle, undemand¬
ing, and wantonly aggressive. We would love our neigh¬
bors, but we wouldn’t trust them any further than we
could throw them. We would emulate the meek, and
at the same time would be ruthless and sadistic. Those
who do introject both of these concepts, or any other set
of warring ideas, make a battleground of their own
personalities. And the neurotic’s internal conflict is
usually fought to a stalemate, where neither side wins,
where the personality is immobilized for any further
growth and development.
Introjection, then, is the neurotic mechanism whereby
 Projection | 35
we incorporate into ourselves standards, attitudes, ways
of acting and thinking, which are not truly ours. In
introjection, we have moved the boundary between our¬
selves and the rest of the world so far inside ourselves
that there is almost nothing of us left. To go back to
the example in our last chapter of our suffering singer’s
statement, “It isn’t nice to disturb the others,” is an
example of introjection. Who, after all, said that—he
or they? Does he really believe that his own needs are
so unimportant that the needs of the group must always
be given preference? When the introjector says, “I
think,” he usually means, “they think.”

Projection

The reverse of introjection is projection. As intro¬

jection is the tendency to make the self responsible for
what actually is part of the environment, so projection
is the tendency to make the environment responsible for
what originates in the self. Clinically, we recognize that
the disease of paranoia, which is characterized by the
development of a highly organized system of delusions,
is the extreme case of projection. The paranoiac has
been found to be, in case after case, a highly aggressive
personality who, unable to bear the responsibility for his
own wishes, feelings, and desires, attaches them to
objects or people in the environment. His conviction
that he is being persecuted is in fact the statement that
he would like to persecute others.
But projection exists in much less extreme forms
than this, and we have to be careful to distinguish be¬
tween projection, which is a pathological process, and
assumption based on observation, which is normal and
healthy. Planning and anticipating, skirmishing and
maneuvering in a game of chess and many other activi¬
ties all involve behavior based on observation and
assumptions about the outside world. But these assump¬
tions are recognized as assumptions. The chess player
who'thinks ahead several moves is making a whole
36 | Neurotic Mechanisms
group of assumptions about his opponent’s mental
processes based on his observations. Essentially, he is
saying, “If I were he, this is what I would do.” But he
recognizes that he is making assumptions which will not
necessarily govern his opponent’s behavior, and he
recognizes that these assumptions are his own.
On the other hand, the sexually inhibited woman who
complains because everyone is making passes at her, or
the cold, withdrawn, haughty man who accuses others
of being unfriendly to him—these are examples of
neurotic projection. In these cases the individuals have
made assumptions based on their own fantasies and
have failed to recognize that they are only assumptions.
In addition, they have further refused to recognize the
origin of their assumptions. Artistic creation, too, de¬
mands a kind of assumptive-projective behavior. The
novelist often literally projects himself into his charac¬
ters and becomes them while he is writing about them.
But again, he does not suffer from the confusion of
identity which characterizes the projecting neurotic. He
knows where he leaves off and his characters begin,
although in the heat of creative activity he may tem¬
porarily lose his sense of boundary and become some¬
one else.
The neurotic does not use the mechanism of projec¬
tion only in relation to his dealings with the world out¬
side himself. He also uses it on himself. He has a
tendency not only to disown his own impulses, but also
to disown those parts of himself in which the impulses
arise. He gives them, as it were, an objective existence
outside himself so that he can make them responsible
for his troubles without facing the fact that they are part
of him. Instead of being an active participant in his own
life the projector becomes a passive object, the victim
of circumstances.
Our singer’s plaintive statement about his bladder,
“It really is a nuisance,” is a neat little example of pro¬
jection. The it has reared its ugly head; our fellow is on
the verge of being victimized by his own bladder. “It
just has to happen to me; I have to suffer,” he is saying.
We are witnessing the birth of a tiny bit of paranoia.
For just as the answer to the introjector’s question “who
 Projection | 37
said that?” is “they,” so the answer to the projector’s
statement is, “it’s your bladder, it’s you that wants to
urinate.” When the projector says “it” or “they” he
usually means “I.”
In projection, then, we shift the boundary between
ourselves and the rest of the world a little too much in
our own favor—in a manner that makes it possible for
us to disavow and disown those aspects of our person¬
alities which we find difficult or offensive or unattractive.
And usually, by the way, it is our introjects that lead
us to the feelings of self-contempt and self-alienation
that produce projection. Because our hero has intro-
jected the notion that good manners are more important
than the satisfaction of pressing personal needs, because
he has introjected the belief that one should learn to
“grin and bear it,” he must project or even expel those
impulses in him which are at odds with what he now
considers external activities. So no longer does he want
to urinate; he is a good boy, he wants to stay with the
group and continue singing. But that nasty, inconsider¬
ate bladder, which just happens to have its residence in
him, and which he now conceives of as being an intro-
ject-—a foreign element introduced forcibly into him
against his will—wants him to urinate. Like the intro-
jector, he is incapable of distinguishing between those
facets of his total personality which are really his and
those which are imposed on him from the outside. He
sees his introjects as himself and he sees those parts of
himself which he would rather be rid of as undigested
and indigestible introjects. By projecting, he hopes to
rid himself of his fancied introjects, which are, in fact,
not introjects at all, but aspects of himself.
The introjecting personality, who becomes a battle¬
ground for warring unassimilated ideas, is paralleled by
the projecting personality, who makes the world the
battleground on which his private conflicts must be
fought out. The over-wary, over-cautious person, who
tells you he wants friends and wants to be loved, but
who tells you at the'same time that “you can’t trust
anyone, they’re all out for what they can get,” is a pro¬
jector par excellence.
38 | Neurotic Mechanisms

Confluence
When the individual feels no boundary at all between
himself and his environment, when he feels that he and
it are one, he is in confluence with it Parts and whole
are indistinguishable from one another. Newborn infants
live in confluence; they have no sense of any distinction
between inside and outside, between the self and the
other. In moments of ecstasy or extreme concentration,
grown people, too, feel confluent with their environ¬
ment. Ritual demands this sense of confluence, in which
boundaries disappear and the individual feels most him¬
self because he is so closely identified with the group.
Part of the reason ritual produces a sense of exaltation
and heightened experience is that normally we feel the
self-other boundary quite sharply, and its temporary
dissolution is consequently felt as a tremendously im¬
pactful thing. But when this sense of utter identification
is chronic and the individual is unable to see the differ¬
ence between himself and the rest of the world, he is
psychologically sick. He cannot experience himself be¬
cause he has lost all sense of himself.
The person in whom confluence is a pathological
state cannot tell what he is and he cannot tell what
other people are. He does not know where he leaves off
and others begin. As he is unaware of the boundary
between himself and others, he cannot make good con¬
tact with them. Nor can he withdraw from them. In¬
deed, he cannot even make contact with himself.
We are built from millions of cells. If we were a con¬
fluence, we would be a jelly-like mass and no organiza¬
tion would be possible. If, on the other hand, every cell
were separated from one another by a porous mem¬
brane, then this membrane is the place of contact, of
discrimination, as to what is “accepted” and what is
“rejected.”
If our component parts, however, which operate not
only as parts of the total human being but also perform
 Confluence
4?
| 39
their own particular functions, are brought together and
kept together in pathological confluence, neither will
be able to perform its own job properly. Let us take as
an example some chronic inhibition. Suppose that on
several occasions you wanted to cry, but you prevented
yourself frpm doing it by deliberately contracting the
muscles of your diaphragm. Suppose further that this
pattern of behavior, which originally arose as a con¬
scious effort to suppress the need to cry, became habit¬
ual and unaware. The breathing and the need to cry
would have become confused and confluent with one
another. You would then have lost both activities—the
capacity to breathe freely and the capacity to cry. Un¬
able to sob, you would never release and work through
your sorrow; probably after a while you would even
forget what you were sad about. The need to sob and
the contraction of the diaphragm as a defense against
the expression of this need together form a single sta¬
bilized battle line of activity and counteractivity, and
this perpetual warfare goes on constantly, and in isola¬
tion from the rest of the personality. The man who is in
pathological confluence ties up his needs, his emotions,
and his activities in one bundle of utter confusion until
he is no longer aware of what he wants to do and how
he is preventing himself from doing it. Such pathological
confluence lies behind many of the diseases now recog¬
nized as psychosomatic. The breathing-sobbing confu¬
sion we mentioned above may lead to asthma, if it per¬
sists long enough.
Pathological confluence has serious social conse¬
quences, too. In confluence, one demands likeness and
refuses to tolerate any differences. We often find this in
parents who consider their children to be merely exten¬
sions of themselves. Such parents lack the appreciation
that their children are bound to be unlike them in at
least some respects. And if the children are not con¬
fluent, and do not identify with their parents’ demands,
they will meet with rejection and alienation: “You are
not my son.” “I don’t love such a naughty child.”
If the members of the United Nations were to appre¬
ciate, or even esteem the differences between the nations
40 | Neurotic Mechanisms **
that go to make up the organization, they would have
good contact, and there would be a good chance of
working out the problems that now beset the world. But
as long as differences are not tolerated, and as long as
each nation demands that all the others should share its
outlook, point for point, conflict and confusion will
continue. As long as differences are not appreciated,
they are likely to be persecuted. The demand for total
agreement, for confluence, is like the statement, “If you
won’t be my friend, I’ll crack your skull open!”
Our singer’s statement, “We want to go on,” when in
fact it is they who want to go on and not he—he wants
to leave and urinate—is a statement of confluence; a
statement that he no longer knows how to distinguish
between himself and the rest of the group. When the
man who is in pathological confluence says “we” you
can’t tell who he is talking about; himself or the rest of
the world. He has completely lost all sense of boundary.

Retroflection
The fourth neurotic mechanism can be called retro-
flection, which literally means “turning back sharply
against.” The retroflector knows how to draw a bound¬
ary line between himself and the environment, and he
draws a neat and clean one right down the middle-—
but he draws it down the middle of himself. The intro-
jector does as others would like him to do, the projector
does unto others what he accuses them of doing to him,
the man in pathological confluence doesn't know who
is doing what to whom, and the retroflector does to
himself what he would like to do to others. When a
person retroflects behavior, ’ he treats himself as he
originally wanted to treat other persons or objects. He
stops directing his energies outward in attempts to
manipulate and bring about changes in the environment
that will satisfy his needs; instead, he redirects his
activity inwards and substitutes himself in place of the
environment as the target for behavior. To the extent
 Retroflection | 41
that he does this, he splits his personality into doer and
done to. He literally becomes his own worst enemy.
Obviously, no human being can go through life giving
free reign to every one of his impulses. At least some of
them have to be held in check. But deliberately resist¬
ing destructive impulses with the recognition that they
are destructive is quite different from turning them
against oneself. The harassed mother at the tail end of
a long and hectic day in which the washing machine
went berserk and tore the clothes, her five-year-old son
went berserk and scribbled with red crayon all over the
living room wall, the man who was supposed to fix the
vacuum cleaner didn’t show up and her husband came
home an hour late for dinner is likely to feel absolutely
murderous. It would not be advisable for her to kill the
child or her husband, but it would be equally foolish
for her to cut her own throat.
How does the mechanism of retroflection display
itself? As introjection displays itself in the use of the
pronoun “I” when the real meaning is “they”; as pro¬
jection displays itself in the use of the pronouns “it”
or “they,” when the real meaning is “I”; as confluence
displays itself in the use of the pronoun “we” when the
real meaning is in question; so retroflection displays
itself in the use of the reflective, “myself.”
The retroflector says, “I am ashamed of myself,” or
“I have to force myself to do this job.” He makes an
almost endless series of statements of this sort, all of
them based on the surprising conception that he and
himself are two different people. What does our singer
say? “I must control myself.”
The confusion between the self and the other that lies
behind neurosis shows itself also in utter confusion
about the self. To the neurotic, the self is a beast or an
angel—but the self is never myself.
Freud in describing the development of personality
contributed to this confusion. He talked about the ego,
(the “I”) the id, (the organic drives) and the super¬
ego, (the conscience) and described the individual’s
psychic life as a constant conflict between them—
clenched in an endless and unbreakable embrace with
42 | Neurotic Mechanisms
himself—man struggles until death. The retroflector
seems to be acting in accordance with the Freudian pic¬
ture of man. But stop to consider for a moment what
the super-ego actually is. If it is not part of the self, the
“X,” the ego, it must of necessity be a bundle of intro-
jects, of unassimilated attitudes and approaches imposed
on the individual by the environment. Freud talks of
introjection as part of the moral process of growth; he
says for example that the child intro jects the “good”
parent images and establishes them as his ego-ideals.
The ego, then, becomes a bundle of introjects too. But
study after study of neurotic personalities shows us that
problems arise not in relation to a childhood identifica¬
tion with “good” parents, but in relation to identification
with the “bad” parents. The child does not, in fact,
introject the attitudes and ethics of the “good” parents.
He assimilates them. He may not be aware in compli¬
cated terms and psychiatric jargon of what he is doing,
but he is translating the attitudes that lie behind his
parents’ satisfying behavior into terms which he can
understand; reducing them, as it were, to the least
common denominator, and then assimilating them in
their new form, a form which he can use. He cannot
comparably reduce his parents’ “bad” attitudes; he has
no means for coping with them, and certainly no
built-in desire to cope with them. So he must take them
over as undigested introjects. And that is where the
trouble begins. For now we have a personality made up,
not of ego and super-ego, but of I and not I, of self and
self-image, a personality so confused that it has become
incapable of distinguishing one from the other.
Indeed, this confusion of identification is in fact
neurosis. And whether it displays itself primarily through
the use of the mechanism of introjection or of projec¬
tion or of retroflection or of confluence, its hallmark is
disintegration of the personality and lack of coordina¬
tion in thought and action.
Therapy consists in rectifying false identifications. If
neurosis is the product of “bad” identifications, health
is the product of “good” identifications. That leaves
open, of course, the question of which are the good
identifications and which are the bad. The simplest
 Retroflection | 43
and, I think, the most satisfactory answer—and one
based on observable reality—is that “good” identifica¬
tions are those which promote the satisfactions and
goal-fulfillments of the individual and his environment.
And “bad” identifications are those which result in
stunting or thwarting the individual, or destructive be¬
havior toward his environment. For the neurotic not
only makes himself miserable, he punishes all those
who care for him by his self-destructive behavior.
In therapy, then, we have to re-establish the neu¬
rotic’s capacity to discriminate. We have to help him to
rediscover what is himself and what is not himself; what
fulfills him and what thwarts him. We have to guide
him towards integration. We have to assist him in find¬
ing the proper balance and boundary between himself
and the rest of the world. It is simple to say, “just be
yourself,” but for the neurotic, a thousand obstacles bar
the way. Understanding now, as we do, the mechanisms
through which the neurotic is preventing himself from
being himself, we can settle down to try to remove the
road blocks, one by one. For this is what should happen
in therapy, and therapy is what we shall now discuss.
 3 HERE COMES THE NEUROTIC

And now here comes our neurotic—tied to the

past and to outmoded ways of acting, fuzzy about the
present because he sees it only through a glass darkly,
tortured about the future because the present is out of
his hands. Into the consultation room he walks, shame¬
faced or brazen, shy or bold, dragging his feet or trying
to step jauntily. To him the therapist may be a dis¬
embodied pair of ears, or perhaps a fairy godfather
who has but to wave his magic wand to transform the
beast into a beautiful young man, handsome of feature,
long of limb, and loaded with cash and charm. Or
maybe he suspects that the therapist is nothing but a
fraud and a charlatan, but is willing, out of the despair
of his problem and the goodness of his heart, to give
him one quick chance.
Whatever fantasies flit through his head as he ap¬
proaches, whatever appearance he presents, the patient
comes for treatment because he feels that he is in an
existential crisis—that is, he feels that the psychological
needs with which he has identified himself, and which
are as vital to him as breath itself, are not being met by
his present mode of life. The psychological needs that
assume this life-or-death importance are as many and
as varied as the patients themselves. To one, keeping
up with the Jonses and surpassing them, if possible, is
a dominant need. Such a person identifies his total
existence with his social existence, and if his social
position is threatened he is in an existential crisis. To
another, having the single-minded devotion of wife,
husband, or lover is a dominant need. If such a person
cannot achieve this goal, or having achieved it, loses it,
44
 Here Comes The Neurotic 1 45
he is in an existential crisis. To one neurotic, “self-
control” is an existential need; to another, “self-expres¬
sion.” Whatever the existential needs are, the fact that
he comes for therapy is the patient’s admission that
they are not being met. He consults the therapist be¬
cause he hopes to find in him the environmental support
that will supplement his own inadequate means of
support.
He thinks that with the therapist’s help he will be
able to satisfy these needs which neither he nor his
environment can now satisfactorily meet. He feels as if
he is in a bottomless pit. This may be because he has
set himself an impossible task. Then, in the course of
successful therapy, his goals will alter; his existential
needs will change. It may be because his experience and
training have not developed in him enough self-support
to make it possible for him to attain fairly simple goals
on his own. Then successful therapy will give him
greater self-support.
It is not the therapist’s task to make value judgments
about his patients’ existential needs. The therapist may
not be particularly interested in business, but if his
patient feels success in business to be an existential
need, the therapist must help him to achieve the self-
support that will make this goal possible. It is not the
therapist’s task to reduce all his patients to uniformity,
to present them all with the same set of existential
needs, tailor-made to fit either the least or most compe¬
tent of them. His task is to facilitate for each of them
the development that will enable them to find goals that
are meaningful to them and to work towards these goals
in a mature way. For, as of the moment when he begins
therapy, the patient cannot do these things for himself.
His homeostasis is not working properly; he flails, he
rushes about, and like Alice he has to run like the wind
to stay where he is. But it is working well enough so
that the imbalance produces a need to right it, and this
need is felt as a positive cathexis of the therapist.
Well, what does the patient need from us? A wailing
wail, a shoulder to cry on? An ally to condemn his wife
or his boss, a patient listener? Somebody to punish him
for his sins or, if he has punished himself enough
46 | Here Comes The Neurotic
already, to forgive and to redeem him? Does he need
reassurance, a shot of confidence? Is he dreaming of
acquiring magical power of submitting to a painless
wonder cure? Does he want reinforcement of his self-
control, an increase of his sexual potency, a short-cut
to happiness? Does he want appreciation or love, a
prop for his lacking self-esteem, rescue from the bore¬
dom of life, salvation from intolerable loneliness, im¬
provement of his memory? Does he want meanings and
interpretations, hoping that they will bring about under¬
standing of himself? Or does he want confirmation of
his feeling that he is such a sick person that he cannot
fight life all alone?
Whatever it is, he cannot secure it for himself and,
apparently, he cannot secure it from his environment.
Otherwise he would not have come to the therapist.
But he certainly has tried to get the support he needs,
and certainly he has been partially successful. If he had
failed completely, he would be mad or dead. To the
degree that he has not succeeded, however, he comes to
us frustrated and without having achieved full satis¬
faction.
However, he does not come empty-handed. He brings
with him his means of manipulation, his ways of mobil¬
izing and using his environment to do his work for him.
And let us not delude ourselves into thinking that these
manipulatory techniques are not clever. The neurotic is
not a fool. He has to be pretty shrewd in order to sur¬
vive since in fact he is lacking, to a marked degree, one
of the essential qualities that promotes survival—self-
support. He literally has a handicap, and it takes con¬
siderable ingenuity to get along with it. Unfortunately,
however, all his maneuvers are directed towards mini¬
mizing its effects instead of overcoming it. The maneu¬
vers may have been deliberate at one time and by now
be so habitual that the neurotic is no longer aware of
them, but that does not mean that they are not maneu¬
vers and that they are not clever. We recognize the
shrewdness of the platinum blonde babe who coaxes
diamonds and minks out of a sugar daddy. The whiny,
dependent woman who coaxes attention and support out
of her husband, her children, and even her acquaintances
 Here Comes The Neurotic | 47
is no less shrewd. We acknowledge the cleverness of
the politician who rides roughshod over his opposition.
The desensitized neurotic who is blind and deaf to what
he does not want to know is equally clever. The neu¬
rotic’s problem is not that he cannot manipulate, but
that his manipulations are directed towards preserving
and cherishing his handicap, rather than getting rid of
it. If he learns how to devote as much intelligence and
energy to becoming self-supportive as he does to mak¬
ing his environment support him, he cannot but succeed.
For his capacities to manipulate are his achievements,
they are his pluses, as his inability to meet his existen¬
tial crisis is his minus. And it is from his pluses that we
can start to build. When the patient becomes aware that
he is manipulating his environment in a fashion that, no
matter how intricate, is self-defeating, and when he
becomes aware of his manipulatory techniques them¬
selves, he will be able to make changes.
His means of manipulation are manifold. He can
talk, often drowning us with words. He can sulk and
go on strike. He can promise and make resolutions; he
can break promises and resolutions. He can be sub¬
servient, he can sabotage. He can hear the slightest
nuances, or he can play deaf. He can remember or he
can forget, as the situation requires. He can pull the
wool over our eyes and lead us up the primrose path.
He can lie and he can be compulsively honest. He can
move us to tears with his misery, or he can bear his fate
with a stiff upper lip. He can hypnotize us with his
monotonous voice or he can irritate us with his shrill¬
ness. He can flatter our vanity and hurt our pride. He
can, as long as he himself is left out, bring us his “prob¬
lems” neatly wrapped in a parcel adorned with the
flowers of his psychological jargon, expecting us to
unwrap it for him and to explain the contents of the
package to his satisfaction. If the therapist is an intel-
lectualizer, the patient will argue until doomsday; if he
is looking for a childhood trauma, the patient will help
with true or manufactured instances. If the therapist is
keen on transferences, the patient will make everybody
his pappa and mamma, with a few siblings to be rivaled
for good measure.
48 | Here Comes The Neurotic
Most of all he manipulates with dissociations and
with questions. If we point out that he does not produce
any relevant associations, he accuses us of a breach of
faith, because what he said was what came into his
mind. But was he really so unaware of interrupting and
avoiding the relevant? As to his questions, their func¬
tions are innumerable. Masked as an appeal to our
omniscience, they are intended to pump us for informa¬
tion which is forgotten a minute later; they test us, they
are intended to embarrass and entrap us—they are the
patient’s main tools for not coming to grips with his
problems. As such, they are very valuable indications of
the areas of his confusion and, properly handled, pro¬
vide us with an excellent counter-tool.
But what about the negative cathexis, the patient’s
fear that therapy, instead of helping him,, will plunge
him even deeper into a no-man’s land, will completely
knock the props out from under him? It is, roughly—
but very roughly—related to the phenomenon of resis¬
tance. Such a resemblance must not deceive us, how¬
ever. We must not fall into the trap of believing that
resistances are bad and that the patient would be better
off without them. On the contrary, resistances are as
valuable to us as the resistance movements were to
the Allies during the Second World War. Otto Rank
very properly called resistance negative will. If the
therapist disapproves of resistances, he might as well
give up. It does not matter whether he expresses his
disapproval openly or not; the patient’s intuition is sel¬
dom so dulled that he does not feel it. The neurotic,
like everyone else, is geared to live by manipulation of
his environment. Because he usually sees the environ¬
ment as hostile he is often very sensitive and ready to
outguess, outfeel, and outwit his opponent. He easily
penetrates the mask of those orthodox analysts who, in
dread of a counter-transference, have de-emotionalized
themselves. Shrinking from any contact, dead as dino¬
saurs, they present the patient with a poker-face. Any¬
way, the patient does not think of his resistance as re¬
sistance; he usually experiences it as assistance. He
wants to help.
For what he dreads is rejection, disapproval, and ulti-
 Here Comes The Neurotic | 49
mate dismissal by the therapist (the brazen ones, of
course, do not permit this to show). So the patient ma¬
nipulates the therapist by putting on the appearance
erf the good child. He tries to bribe the therapist with
submission and pseudo-acceptance of his wisdom and
his requests. At the same time, he may have a very un¬
stable self esteem, he may be very sensitive to real or
imagined criticism. So he gets tense every time the
therapist speaks to him.
The patient has taken great pains to build up a self-
concept. This self-concept is well known in psychiatry
under such names as reaction-formation, self-system,
ego-ideal, persona, and what not. It is often a complete¬
ly erroneous concept of himself, each feature represent¬
ing the exact opposite of its actuality. This self-concept
can give the patient no support whatsoever; on the
contrary, he is busy nagging, disapproving of himself,
squashing anything of genuine self-expression. He not
only exhausts himself in this Sisyphus struggle, but he
also needs the permanent environmental support of ap¬
proval and acceptance. He has projected his own power
of discrimination, that is, his capacity to accept or re¬
ject, to such a degree that any pat on the back, no
matter from whom it comes, is welcome. He has also
foregone his ability to accept genuinely, so no praise is
assimilated, and he remains greedy and dissatisfied with
whatever affection he gets.
This is a striking example of how lacking the support
of self-esteem will result in a constant need for external
support—the need to be esteemed by others. And be¬
cause this environmental support is sought for the self-
concept, it can never contribute to the growth of the
self. Man transcends himself only via his true nature,
not through ambition and artificial goals. They lead, at
best, to pride and vainglory.
The true nature of man, like the true nature of any
other animal, is integrity. Only in an integrated spon¬
taneity and deliberateness does he make a sound exis¬
tential choice. For both spontaneity and deliberation are
in the nature of man. Awareness of and responsibility
for thp total field, for the self as well as the other,
these give meaning and pattern to the individual’s life.
50 J Here Comes The Neurotic
So much has been written about the superstructure
of the self-concept under such names as over-compen¬
sation, the inferiority and superiority complexes, and so
on, that it has become one of the most thoroughly
examined phenomena of psychiatry. Even the layman
talks about his “second nature.” Yet with all the dis¬
cussion of the self-concept and its superstructure, ther¬
apy only rarely achieves a true penetration to the self. In
my opinion this is because in most forms of therapy not
enough attention is paid to the layer of confusion
which separates the self from the self-concept. Since
confusion is extremely unpleasant, it works as a power¬
ful deterrent, and the patient mobilizes every means at
his disposal to avoid viewing clearly his areas of con¬
fusion. In this respect he behaves quite differently from
Socrates, who freely admitted his intellectual and exis¬
tential confusions, and who dedicated his life to, and
developed, a technique of deconfusing.
Confusion is a matter of inadequate orientation,
and unacknowledged confusion is one of the character¬
istics of neurosis. Any action based on confusion will
show embarrassment, faltering, and disturbances of all
kinds. When we are confused and do not know it, we
have no freedom of choice, we deal with our experi¬
ences as if certain specific techniques of manipulation
were necessities and absolutes. Psychiatry has devoted
a good deal of attention to the ambivalence confusion,
where the patient feels that he should either love or
hate, that he is either good or bad. We merely have
to replace the either/or by “this as well as that,” and
we are in the clear, making the positive or negative
cathexis dependent on the context in which it occurs.
We can love one moment and feel good, and we can
hate the next and feel bad, depending on the satis¬
factions or frustrations involved in the situation. Am¬
bivalence presupposes that states of permanent satis¬
faction or frustration exist. It is again a static concept—
as if our emotions could be petrified in time or as if we
ourselves could be petrified in time.
In therapy, if the environmental support the patient
expects from us is not forthcoming, if we don’t give
him the answers he thinks he has to have, if we don’t
 Here Comes The Neurotic 51

appreciate his good intentions, admire his psychological

knowledge, congratulate him on his progress, we shall
get the negative cathexis of frustration. But Gestalt
therapy also constantly gives him much of what he
wants—-attention, exclusive attention—and we don’t
blame him for his resistances. In this way therapy starts
out with a certain balance of frustration and satisfac¬
tion.
The field is now set for the therapeutic operation.
What shall we do with our patient? Is he to lie down
on the couch, close his eyes, and associate freely? Do
we ask him to dwell on his recollections of the Oedipal
phase, his interpersonal relations, his motor armor?
Are we concerned with his past or his present, his
capacity to flit from subject to subject in a flight of
ideas or to concentrate steadily on any one for even a
brief time? Are we dealing with his mind or his body?
Are we to worry about why he censors and interrupts
himself and his expressions, or how? Shall we deal with
the subterranean depths of his personality, or with his
surface? Are we to depend on his words or his actions?
Do we treat his physical symptoms in psychological
terms or his psychological symptoms in physical terms?
Shall we observe him or interpret him? Is he to learn
through his own experience or are we going to lecture
him after he provides us with the subject matter for our
dissertation?
The techniques of the conventional therapies are
based on the theory that what the patient lacks is an
understanding of the whys of his behavior, and that
these whys can be uncovered if we dig deeply enough
into the past, into his dreams, and into his uncon¬
scious. Depending on the therapist’s affiliation, these
whys may be any one of a number of factors, separately
or in combination. Freud, for example, made certain
observations leading to the theory of the Oedipus Com¬
plex as the dominant source of problems; Reich spoke
in terms of the motor armor and the need for orgastic
potency; Sullivan in terms of the self-system and inter¬
personal relationships;-Salter in terms of the need for
self-expression; Adler in terms of the inferiority com¬
plex; .and so on.
52 | Here Comes The Neurotic
Each of these contributions is valid, but all of them
miss the basic point because they are still limited by
an approach which does not see the organism/environ-
ment field as a whole. All of them are abstractions from
the total process.
The Sullivanians come closest to taking into account
the play of the field itself, but even here the emphasis is
distorted by the basic dualism of the concept. Our ap¬
proach, which sees the human being as simultaneously
and by nature both an individual and a member of the
group, gives us a broader base of operations. Let me
repeat once again our explanation: A neurosis is a
state of imbalance in the individual that arises when
simultaneously he and the group of which he is a mem¬
ber experience differing needs and the individual can¬
not tell which is dominant. If this kind of experience
is repeated often enough, or if a single experience of
this sort is impressive enough, the individual’s sense of
balance in the field will become sufficiently disturbed
so that he loses the ability in any situation to judge the
balance position properly. He will then respond in a
neurotic way to situations which have no intrinsic con¬
nection with the experience or experiences in which the
imbalance initially arose. The neurotic’s general way of
meeting situations is to interrupt himself; the criminal’s
pattern is to interrupt the environment.
Our broader definition does not lead us to look for
a single cause for neurotic behavior. We therefore re¬
ject as definitive answers any of the specific constella¬
tions which the other schools advance.
In traditional therapy, the assumption is that by
recalling and reinterpreting the events of the past, thera¬
pist and patient together can piece out the effects of the
patient’s experiences on him, and that once they have
done this* the patient will no longer be disturbed by
his problems. He will either learn how to live with
them or he will resolve them.
These assumptions seem to us invalid for several
reasons. In the first place, therapy based on any assump¬
tion of a single set of simple “causes” concentrates on
those aspects of the personality which are related to
 Here Comes The Neurotic | 53
these “causes” and is blind to all of the other factors.
Its own orientation is as limited as the patient’s. It may
improve his ability to get around within the limitations
imposed jointly by his neurosis and the theory, but
it does not open up broader areas of awareness. In
other words, it is as if both patient and therapist were
wearing blinders with magnifying glasses attached to
them. Their vision directly ahead may be acute, but
they see nothing of what is happening on either side.
And the either/or emphasis on “mental” and “physical”
—with most schools dealing with mental factors and
the Reichians dealing with physical factors—limits the
patient’s increased maneuverability within the limited
field and limits the therapist’s ability to handle it.
The unitary Gestalt approach, on the other hand,
makes it possible to increase the breadth of orientation
and to improve the means of the therapeutic maneuver¬
ing. We believe that any situation or situations—acute
or chronic—which the individual has learned to handle
by an unsatisfactory process of self-interruption can
lie behind neurosis. We cannot settle for any single
“cause.” We believe further that the “mental-physical”
or “mind-body” split is a totally artificial one, and that
to concentrate on either term in this false dichotomy is
to preserve neurosis, not to cure it.
Since in our terms, fantasy is diminished reality and
thinking is diminished acting, we can use fantasizing in
a therapeutic way as it relates to acting, and we can use
acting out in a therapeutic way as it relates to fantasiz¬
ing. Our patients often use fantasies in a harmful way
as a vicarious means of satisfying real needs; we can
teach them to use it therapeutically to discover and
satisfy real needs.
A second reason we feel therapy oriented to the past
is invalid is because the whys of the patient’s neurosis
really explain very little. Why does a situation produce
neurosis in Mr. A while the same situation leaves Mr.
B untouched? Why did the situation arise in the first
place? And why did the circumstances come into exis¬
tence that created if? “Why” opens up an endless
series of questions which can only be answered by a
 54 | Here Comes The Neurotic
first cause that is self-caused. If a man is neurotic “be¬
cause” his mother died in childbirth and he was raised
by a stern maiden aunt who gave him no chance to do
anything he wanted, and this forced him to repress cer¬
tain desires, how will an explanation which makes the
aunt the villain in the piece solve his problems? On the
contrary, such an explanation only gives the patient
license to project all his difficulties onto the aunt. It
gives him a scapegoat, not an answer. And this kind
of scapegoatism is very often the result of many ortho¬
dox therapies.
But there is a valuable clue to therapy in the recital
of the facts of this case, and this is related to the next
point. If the aunt did not let him do the things he
wanted, his childhood was a constant series of inter¬
ruptions, both from the outside, the aunt, and from the
inside, himself. If our patient learns the how of his own
interruptions—past and present—if he actually ex¬
periences himself interrupting himself, and feels the
ways in which he is doing it, he can work through his
interruptions into his real self and the activities he
wants to carry out.
If therapy is successful, it will leave the patient self-
supportive, no longer at the mercy of interrupting forces
he cannot control. Additionally, problems are caused
not only by what we have repressed but by those things
about ourselves which our self-interruptions have pre¬
vented us from learning. Many of the neurotic’s diffi¬
culties are related to his unawareness, his blind spots,
to the things and relationships he simply does not sense.
And therefore, rather than talking of the unconscious,
we prefer to talk about the at-this-moment-unaware.
This term is much broader and wider than the term
“unconscious”. This unawareness contains not only re¬
pressed material, but material which never came into
awareness, and material which has faded or has been
assimilated or has been built into larger gestalts. The
unaware includes skills, patterns of behavior, motoric
and verbal habits, blind spots, etc.
As the conscious is purely mental in nature, so is
the unconscious. But the awareness and unawareness
 Here Comes The Neurotic | 55
are not purely mental. In terms of our definition, both
awareness and unawareness seem to be a property of
protoplasm, of which all living creatures are composed.
In so complex a creature as man, the areas of unaware¬
ness are quite wide. We are unaware of our vegetative
processes, of the forces that impel us to breathe, to eat,
and to excrete. We are unaware of many of the pro¬
cesses of growth. But as our areas of unawareness are
wide, so are our areas of awareness; they include not
only our overt sensory and motor activities, but also
many of those faded activities we describe as* mental.
A school of psychotherapy which has a unitary ap¬
proach to the unitary organism, man, cannot concern
itself only with mental material, repressed or expressed.
It must concern itself with the total pattern of be¬
havior, and must direct itself towards making the pa¬
tient aware of as much of that total pattern as is
necessary for health. Thus, as opposed to the orthodox
schools, which put their emphasis on what the patient
does not know about himself, we put ours on what he
does know—on his areas of awareness, rather than
his areas of unawareness. Our hope is to increase his
awareness of himself progressively on all levels.
Perhaps the meaning of this difference in approach
can be seen best in a discussion of what has become
in recent years one of the most fashionable terms in
psychiatry and cocktail party conversation: psychoso¬
matic. What is a psychosomatic manifestation? If we
maintain the old mind-body split to which the highly
limited concept of the unconscious is so closely related,
we can describe it either as a somatic disturbance re¬
lated to a psychic event or as a psychic disturbance
caused by a somatic event. But with our unitary point
of view we do not have to fall into this trap of causality.
We describe a psychosomatic event as one in which the
gross physical disturbances are more impressive than
the ones that occur on a mental or emotional level. The
laws of support, contact, and interruption apply to
each level; it is impossible to draw a line between psy¬
chosomatic manifestations and psychosomatic illness.
Forgetting, for example, is a psychosomatic manifesta-
56 | Here Comes The Neurotic
tion, but I doubt whether the most union-conscious
M.D. would claim this symptom as belonging in his
orbit. On the other hand, there are many instances of
severe psychosomatic manifestations, such as ulcers,
asthma and colitis, which require the support of drugs
and medical care.
Let me discuss for a moment one of the classic psy¬
chosomatic manifestations, the headache. Headaches
are used as excuses for withdrawal in thousands of cases
in daily life. But except for the outright chronic liar,
the headache is not only an excuse. In each case there
is likely to be a genuine physical experience, a body
language which says, “this situation gives me a head¬
ache,” or “you make me sick.” The headache is part of
the whole interruption of contact mechanism. Each bit
of excitement the organism creates at any given mo¬
ment should enable it to cope with the actual situation
through the transformation of the excitement into emo¬
tion and relevant action. But if the excitement is
directed against the self, a supportive function is
changed into an inhibition and so is bound to create a
psychosomatic manifestation, or even a symptom. We
try to deal with the totality of the headache experience,
we do not shrug it off as a trivial symptom nor can we
dispose of it permanently with drugs. We believe that
such a psychosomatic manifestation deserves attention
in psychotherapy. Nor, as you will see later, do we
have to resort to interpreting the patient’s “uncon¬
scious motivation” to deal with it.
To the orthodox therapist transference is the ex¬
planation of the therapeutic process. The neurotic, ac¬
cording to Freud, transfers onto the therapist a series
of emotional responses and attitudes the patient once
displayed in his dealings with a person or persons from
the past. Thus, in transference the patient is acting out
a form of delusion; what he believes to be personal
contact with the therapist is actually an intra-organismic
event of his own making. It is not contact, but some¬
thing that prevents contact. For contact involves appre¬
ciation of what the other actually is, not what one
construes him to be.
 Here Comes The Neurotic | 57
Yet this explanation, despite its great value, does
not fully explicate the feelings the patient often de¬
velops towards the therapist in the course of treatment.
Are we to assume that they have no actuality, that
everything the patient feels is unreal, to be explained
away by his history? Is there no being or becoming?
If we follow up the concept of cathexis, which origi¬
nated with Freud, and apply it to the transference
situation, we come to a conclusion directly opposite his. .
What is active in therapy is not what has been; on the
contrary, it is precisely what has not been—a deficit
or something missed. What has been is a finished situa¬
tion. It progresses through satisfaction and integration
into the making of the self. The unfinished situation,
which is the failure of development from environmental
to self-support, is the heritage of the past which re¬
mains in the present.
In other words, we maintain that transference, with
its relations of actual feeling plus the patient’s fantasied
hopes, plus the expected support (which the patient
takes for granted) stems from his “lack of being,” and
not from what was and has been forgotten. Our history
is the background of our existence, it is not an accumu¬
lation of facts but the record of how we become what
we are. Only the disturbances in the background that
interfere with supporting our present lives push for¬
ward and have to become foreground so that they can
be attended to. Then they can change from being de¬
ficiencies (incomplete gestalts) into support functions.
In the beginning of therapy, few patients will ask
much support of the therapist. They are ready to burst,
if we only give them the opportunity. But their lack of
being appears increasingly as therapy progresses and
the patient steps up his demands and manipulations.
The therapist receives more and more cathexis—posi¬
tive or negative—as he more and more symbolizes what
the patient lacks.
What does this mean in the techniques of therapy?
Let us take the case of a patient whose transference
the orthodox therapist would describe as very strong,
and whom I would describe as feeling that the therapist
58 | Here Comes The Neurotic
represents his entire lack of being. Such a patient fre¬
quently shows the following pattern: he wants to
become a therapist; he is eager to use psychiatric jar¬
gon; he takes over the therapist’s manner and style.
If the therapist works in terms of the classical definition
of transference, he will look for the historical precedents
for this action, for the individual in the patient’s past
towards whom he displayed this same kind of intro-
jecting behavior. He will look for substance, and having
found it will hope that the patient eventually will learn
to differentiate himself from the introjected other, who
may be his mother or his father. But we, on the other
hand, will look at the process rather than the sub¬
stance. For the process is active today, as it was in the
past. We will concentrate on the fact that, as an intre¬
jector, he looks for shortcuts, that he is lazy in assimi¬
lating the world, and that he interferes with his growth
and self-realization. For as long as the patient is an
accumulation of introjects, he is not he and he cannot
support himself. For as long as he persists in the
pattern of introjecting, support will be lacking. If in¬
tro jection is his primary technique for meeting the
world, even if we are successful in exorcising one or
two intro jects—pappa and mamma, for instance, he
will still go on accumulating others. So we must con¬
centrate on getting him to see how he swallows whole,
how he consistently interrupts the process of destruc¬
turing and assimilating.
With a unitary approach we can handle this problem
on both the levels of fantasy and actuality. As I pointed
out earlier, if the organism swallows something it can¬
not assimilate, it will normally vomit up the undigesti-
ble stuff. The emotional side of this vomiting up is
called disgust. By erecting some type of an inner barrier
against the disgust, he fails to feel it. How does he
build such a barrier? The patient either desensitizes
himself or he avoids the experience by an elaborate sys¬
tem of over-estheticism. The introjector has to learn
what the experience of disgust is, for it is by interrupting
—feeling it that he continues to “swallow” others. If
we can help him to become aware of his disgust and
 Here Comes The Neurotic | 59

to see that it is due to swallowing whole the advice or

values of another, the path is cleared for him to get
relief from disgust, and to create himself, his own
decisions, roles, and other potentials.
This does not mean that it is not equally important
for him to learn that the therapist is not mamma or
pappa or, in general, what the difference is between
him and other people. But this he learns as he learns
that he introjects and how he introjects. As he learns
this, he also learns that his introjects are not his authen¬
tic self.
Full support for the self—overcoming the need for
environmental support—can come only through mak¬
ing creative use of the energies that are invested in the
blocks that prevent self-support. Instead of permitting
our patients to see themselves passively transferring
from the past, we have to introduce the mentality of re¬
sponsibility, which says: “I am preventing myself . .
“how do I prevent myself,” and “from what do I pre¬
vent myself?”
If the therapist gives the patient environmental sup¬
port—in other words, supports his transference need
—he is only playing into the hands of the patient’s
neurosis. But if, on the other hand, he makes it possible
for the patient to assimilate the blocking and the
blocked material through identifying himself with it and
differentiating himself from it, he facilitates the patient’s
development.
We must use the same approach to the dream, that
fascinating bit of human creation that provides both
patient and therapist, in orthodox analysis, with hun¬
dreds of hours of mouth-watering talk. Freud described
the dream as a wish fulfillment and assumed that by
shuttling between the content of the dream and its asso¬
ciations, its meaning would become clear. For although
we know that the dream is our own creation, it is usual¬
ly not meaningful to us; it seems to come from a
strange world of its own.
But an explanation of the dream merely as wish ful¬
fillment and a reduction of the dream to a series of
crude verbal symbols seems to go against the very
60 | Here Comes The Neurotic
essence of the aliveness of the dream. Take the night¬
mare, for example. True, if you bracket it off into a
series of static pieces, you can isolate the wish hidden
among the horrors. Or you can come closer to Freud’s
contention that the entire dream is a wish fulfillment
by calling it instead the interruption of a wish. But at
face value it is absurd to call the whole nightmare a
wish fulfillment.
The dream seems to be instead (and this applies not
only to the nightmare, but to all dreams), rather an
attempt to find a solution to an apparent paradox. The
dream is an artistic creation in which two seemingly
incompatible strivings are set against one another. In
the nightmare, the paradox is not integrated; in the neu¬
rotic’s daily life his paradoxes, too, remain unintegrated.
Harry Stack Sullivan has pointed out that if we could
solve our problems during the day we would not need to
dream at night.
To make sense of the dream, we do well not to inter¬
pret it. Instead of speculating about it, we ask our
patients to live it more extensively and intensively, to
discover the paradox. In an orthodox analysis, through
association, the patient extends his dream. From a
short descriptive passage of one of his own dreams,
Freud derived page on page of associations and inter¬
pretations. But to intensify the dream—to attempt to
relive it—the patient must be open to much more than
purely verbal interpretations and what comes into his
mind; he has to admit sensations, emotions, and ges¬
tures as well. He can only integrate the dream and
come to a solution of the paradox by re-identification,
particularly with the interfering aspects of the dream.
Most psychiatric schools agree that the dream is a
projection, that all the characters and objects that ap¬
pear in it are actually the dreamer himself, and that the
dream action is often an attempt to solve a paradox by
disowning responsibility for one’s own hopes and de¬
sires. The dream that one’s enemy has been murdered
by someone else is a perfect example of this.
Let me give you two specific instances of how we
work with dreams. In both cases the reader will note
 Here Comes The Neurotic | 61
that we ask the patient to identify with all the parts in
his dream, and to try to become aware of the paradox it
represents and to solve it.
In the first case, a young woman patient presented
this dream: “I am going upstairs with a bundle under
my arm.” Her fantasies, as she identified with the dif¬
ferent objects in the dream were: “If I am the staircase,
somebody is using me to get on top. That’s my hus¬
band, of course, who is ambitious and is now studying.
He depends on me to help financially. If I am the bun¬
dle, then he has to carry me. This is also true. He
has to take me along to the intellectual heights he is
going to reach.” Here we see what appears to the pa¬
tient to be the paradox of her life situation: she is
carrying a load and at the same time she is a load.
In the following case we tried to work out, in the
therapeutic session, some solution to the paradox in¬
volved in the dream: A man patient presented a dream
in which he saw a man pushing down some garbage
that had clogged up a toilet bowl. He pushed and
pushed until finally the entire toilet fell through the
floor. There is room for much interpretation here; the
action fitted in well with the patient’s entire attitude
towards the unpleasant. But instead of interpreting the
dream for him, I asked the patient what, if he were the
man in his dream, he could have done instead. He re¬
plied that he could take a hook and extract whatever
was clogging the bowl. Then, by fantasizing this, he
exposed all the disgusting material to his view. Immedi¬
ately thereafter he felt a constriction in his throat
which corresponded to the bottleneck of the toilet bowl.
By constricting his throat he prevented himself from
vomiting, from bringing up the disgusting material.
Thus the dream content, his behavior, and the psycho¬
somatic symptom became integrated. The underlying
paradox—the paradox of the introjector who swaUo\ys
material that is disgusting to him and should be cen¬
sored by his taste—could not be solved in that session.
We worked a bit on it, but there the patient had a
blank, a blind spot. His palate was completely desensi¬
tized.
62 J Here Comes The Neurotic
From the foregoing, the reader can see some of the
significant differences between Gestalt therapy and the
more conventional techniques. But the most important
differences, I think, have not yet been discussed ex¬
plicitly.
 4 HERE AND NOW THERAPY

Implicit in the emphasis of orthodox psycho¬

therapy is the point of view that the neurotic is a person
who once had a problem, and that the resolution of
this past problem is the goal of psychotherapy. The
whole approach to treatment through memory and the
past indicates this assumption, which runs directly
counter to everything we observe about neurosis and
the neurotic. From the Gestalt viewpoint the neurotic
is not merely a person who once had a problem, he is
a person who has a continuing problem, here and now,
in the present. Although it may well be that he is acting
the way he is today “because” of things that hap¬
pened to him in the past, his difficulties today are con¬
nected with the ways he is acting today. He cannot get
along in the present, and unless he learns how to deal
with problems as they arise, he will not be able to get
along in the future.
The goal of therapy, then, must be to give him the
means with which he can solve his present problems
and any that may arise tomorrow or next year. That
tool is self-support, and this he achieves by dealing
with himself and his problems with all the means pres¬
ently at his command, right now. If he can become
truly aware at every instant of himself and his actions
on whatever level—fantasy, verbal or physical—he can
see how he is producing his difficulties, he can see what
his present difficulties are, and he can help himself to
solve them in the present, in the here and now. Each
one he solves makes easier the solution of the next, for
every solution increases his self-support.
If therapy is successful the patient will inevitably
63
64 | Here and Now Therapy
have taken care of the tag ends of his past unsolved
problems, because these tag ends are bound to cause
trouble in the present, and so they are bound to come
up in the course of the therapeutic session, disguised in
any number of different ways—disassociations, nervous
habits, fantasies, etc. But these tag ends of the past are
also current problems which inhibit the patient’s par¬
ticipation in the present.
The neurotic is, by accepted definition, a person
whose difficulties make his present life unsuccessful. In
addition, by our definition, he is a person who chron¬
ically engages in self-interruption, who has an inade¬
quate sense of identity (and thus cannot distinguish
properly between himself and the rest of the world),
who has inadequate means of self-support, whose psy¬
chological homeostasis is out of order, and whose be¬
havior arises from misguided efforts in the direction of
achieving balance.
Within this general framework, we can see what must
be done. The neurotic finds it difficult to participate
fully in the present—his past unfinished business gets
in his way. His problems exist in the here and now—
and yet too often only part of him is here to cope with
them. Through therapy, he must learn to live in the
present, and his therapeutic sessions must be his first
practice at this hitherto unaccomplished task. Gestalt
therapy is therefore a “here and now” therapy, in which
we ask the patient during the session to turn all his
attention to what he is doing at the present, during the
course of the session—right here and now.
Gestalt therapy is an experiential therapy, rather
than a verbal or an interpretive therapy. We ask our
patients not to talk about their traumas and their prob¬
lems in the removed area of the past tense and mem¬
ory, but to re-experience their problems and their
traumas—which are their unfinished situations in the
present—in the here and now. If the patient is finally
to close the book on his past problems, he must close it
in the present. For he must realize that if his past
problems were really past, they would no longer be
problems—and they certainly would not be present.
In addition, as an experiential therapy, the Gestalt
 Here and Now Therapy | 65
technique demands of the patient that he experience as
much of himself as he can, that he experience himself
as fully as he can in the here and now. We ask the pa¬
tient to become aware of his gestures, of his breathing,
of his emotions, of his voice, and of his facial expres¬
sions as much as of his pressing thoughts. We know
that the more he becomes aware of himself, the more
he will learn about what his self is. As he experiences
the ways in which he prevents himself from “being” now
—the ways in which he interrupts himself—he will
also begin to experience the self he has interrupted.
In this process, the therapist is guided by what he ob¬
serves about the patient. We shall discuss the therapist’s
role in more detail in a later chapter. Here let it suffice
to say that the therapist should be sensitive to the sur¬
face the patient presents so that the therapist’s broader
awareness can become the means by which the patient
is enabled to increase his own.
The basic sentence with which we ask our patients
to begin therapy, and which we retain throughout its
course—not only in words, but in spirit—is the simple
phrase: “Now I am aware.” The now keeps us in the
present and brings home the fact that no experience
is ever possible except in the present. And the present,
itself, is of course an ever-changing experience. Once
the now is used, the patient will easily use the present
tense throughout, work on a phenomenological basis
and, as I will show later, provide the material of past
experience which is required to close the gestalt, to
assimilate a memory, to right the organismic balance.
The “I” is used as an antidote to the “it” and devel¬
ops the patient’s sense of responsibility for his feelings,
thoughts, and symptoms. The “am” is his existential
symbol. It brings home whatever he experiences as part
of his being, and, together with his now, of his be¬
coming. He quickly learns that each new “now” is
different from the previous one.
The “aware” provides the patient with the sense of
his own capacities, and abilities, his own sensoric and
motor and intellectual equipment. It is not the con¬
scious—for that is purely mental—it is the experience
sifted, as it were, only through the mind and through
 66 | Here and Now Therapy
words. The “aware” provides something in addition
to the conscious. Working, as we do, with what the
patient has, his present means of manipulation, rather
than with what he has not developed or what he has
lost, the “aware” gives both therapist and patient the
best picture of the patient’s present resources. For
awareness always takes place in the present. It opens up
possibilities for action. Routine and habits are estab¬
lished functions, and any need to change them requires
that they should be brought into the focus of awareness
afresh. The mere idea of changing them presupposes
the possibility of alternative ways of thinking and act¬
ing. Without awareness, there is no cognition of choice.
Awareness, contact, and present are merely different
aspects of one and the same process—self-realization.
It is here and now that we become aware of all our
choices, from small pathological decisions (is this pencil
lying straight enough?) to the existential choice of de¬
votion to a cause or avocation.
How does this “now I am aware,” this here and now
therapy work in action? Let us take the example of a
neurotic whose unfinished business is the unfinished
labor of mourning a dead parent. Aware or unaware,
such a patient fantasizes that his guiding parent is still
around; he acts as if the parent were still alive and con¬
ducts his life by outdated directions. To become self-
supportive and to participate fully in the present as it
is, he has to give up this guidance; he has to part, to say
a final good-bye to his progenitor. And to do this suc¬
cessfully, he has to go to the deathbed and face the
departure. He has to transform his thoughts about the
past into actions in the present which he experiences as
if the now were the then. He cannot do it merely by
re-recounting the scene, he must re-live it. He must go
through and assimilate the interrupted feelings which
are mostly of intense grief, but which may have in
them elements of triumph or guilt or any number of
other things. It is insufficient merely to recall a past
incident, one has to psychodramatically return to it.
Just as talking about oneself is a resistance against
experiencing oneself, so the memory of an experience—
simply talking about it—leaves it isolated as a deposit
 Here and Now Therapy | 67
of the past—as lacking in life as the ruins of Pompei.
You are left with the opportunity to make some clever
reconstructions, but you don’t bring them back alive.
The neurotic’s memory is more than simply a hunting
ground for the archeologists of man’s behavior we call
psychoanalysts. It is the uncompleted event, which is
still alive and interrupted, waiting to be assimilated and
integrated. It is here and now, in the present, that this
assimilation must take place.
The psychoanalyst, out of the vast stores of his
theoretical knowledge, might explain to the patient:
“You are still tied to your mother because you feel
guilty about her death. It was something you wished
for in childhood and repressed, and when your wish
came true, you felt like a murderer.” And there may
be elements of truth in what he says. But this kind of
symbolic or intellectual explanation does not affect the
patient’s feelings, for these are the result not of his sense
of guilt, but of his interruption of it when his mother
died. If he had permitted himself fully to experience his
guilt then, he would not feel distressed now. In Gestalt
therapy we therefore require that the patient psycho-
dramatically talk to his dead mother.
Because the neurotic finds it difficult to live and ex¬
perience himself in the present, he will find it difficult
to stick to the here and now technique. He will inter¬
rupt his present participation with memories of the past,
and he will persist in talking about them as if they were
indeed past. He finds it less difficult to associate than
to concentrate and, in concentrating, to experience him¬
self. Whether concentrating on his body sensations or
his fantasies—although at first he will find this a miser¬
able task—his unfinished business makes concentration
a major project for him. He no longer has a clear sense
of the order of his needs—he tends to give them all
equal value. He is like the young man Stephen Leacock
once spoke about who got on his horse and galloped off
madly in all directions.
It is not a desire to make his life miserable that lies
behind our request to 'make him capable of concentra¬
tion. If he is to move towards full participation in the
present, to take the first step towards productive living,
68 | Here and Now Therapy
he must learn to direct his energies—that is, to concen¬
trate. He will be able to move from “now I need this”
to “now I need that,” only if he truly experiences each
now and each need.
In addition, the concentration technique (focal aware¬
ness) provides us with a tool for therapy in depth,
rather than in breadth. By concentrating on each symp¬
tom, each area of awareness, the patient learns several
things about himself and his neurosis. He learns what
he is actually experiencing. He learns how he expe¬
riences it. And he learns how his feelings and behavior
in one area are related to his feelings and behavior in
other areas.
Let me return for a moment to that classical psycho¬
somatic manifestation, the headache. Patients frequently
list this as one of their most annoying symptoms. They
complain that their headaches bother them and now,
when they come for treatment, they want to bother us
with their symptoms. They are, of course, welcome to
do so. But we in turn bother them—we ask them to
take more responsibility and less aspirin. We do this
by asking them to discover through experiencing how
they produce their headaches. (The “aha” experience of
discovery is one of the most powerful agents for cure.)
We ask them first to localize the pain and to stay, or sit,
or lie with the tension. We ask them to concentrate on
the pain, not to dispose of it. In the beginning only a
few will be able to stand the tension. Most patients will
tend to interrupt immediately with explanations, asso¬
ciations, or by pooh-poohing what we are doing. Conse¬
quently, the therapist has to work through one way of
interrupting after another, and he has to change these
interruptions into “I” functions. This means that even
before we work on the headache itself, we have already
done a considerable amount of integration. Suppose, for
example, the therapist asks the patient to stay with his
pains and the patient says, as often happens, “this is all
nonsense.” If he learns to say, instead, “what you are
trying to do is all nonsense,” he is taking a tiny step
forward. With such a small step we have transformed a
minute particle of “it” into a contact junction, into a
self-expression. We might even follow up his statement
 Here and Now Therapy | 69
and ask the patient to elaborate on it. This would give
him an opportunity to come out with a lot of his un¬
spoken skepticism, distrust, and so on, and all of these
are part of the unfinished businesses that are preventing
his total participation in the present.
But finally the patient will be able to stay with his
headache, and with his pains, which he can now localize.
This staying with is opening up the possibility for de¬
velopment of contact with the self. If he stays with his
pains he may find that he has been contracting some
muscles or that he feels a numbness. Let us say that he
discovers his pains are associated with muscle contrac¬
tions. Then we will ask him to exaggerate the contract¬
ing. He will then see how he can voluntarily create and
intensify his own pains. He might then say, as a result
of his discoveries up to now, “It’s as if I were screwing
up my face to cry.” The therapist might then ask,
“Would you like to cry?” And then, if we ask him to
direct that remark directly to us, to say it to our face,
he might well burst out crying and weeping. “I won’t
cry, damn you! Leave me alone, leave me alone!” Ap¬
parently, then, his headache was an interruption of the
need to cry. It has become apparent that he has lost his
need to interrupt his crying by giving himself headaches.
At best, the patient may lose his need to cry, too, for if
the therapy can be concentrated on this one factor for
a long enough period of time, he may be able to work
through the past interruptions that also led to the need
to cry in the present. But even before this stage, progress
has been made. The patient has transformed a par¬
tial involvement (headache) into a total involvement
(weeping). He has transformed a psychosomatic symp¬
tom into an expression of the total self, because in his
short outburst of despair he was wholly and totally
involved. So through the concentration technique the
patient has learned how to participate fully in at least
one present experience. He has learned at the same time
something about his process of self-interruption and the
ways in which these self-interruptions are related to the
totality of his experience. He has discovered one of his
means of manipulation.
The ^neurotic is, as we said, a self-interrupter. All
70 J Here and Now Therapy

schools of psychotherapy take this fact into account.

Freud, as a matter of fact, built his therapy around a
recognition of this phenomenon. Of all the possible
forms of self-interruption he chose a very decisive one,
which he called the Censor. He said, “Do not interrupt
the free flow of your associations.” But he also assumed
that the Censor was the servant of embarrassment, and
thus spoke Freud: “Do not be embarrassed.” Precisely
with these two taboos he interrupted the patient’s expe¬
rience of his embarrassment and his experience of its
dissolution. This results in a desensitization, an inability
to experience embarrassment, or even (and this applies
still more to patients in Reichian therapy) in over¬
compensating brazenness. What has to be tackled in
therapy is not the censored material but the censoring
itself, the form that self-interruption takes. Again, we
cannot work from the inside out, but only from the
outside in.
The therapeutic procedure (which is the re-establish¬
ment of the self by integrating the dissociated parts of
the personality) must bring the patient to the point
where he no longer interrupts himself, that is, to the
point where he is no longer neurotic. How can we do
this without making the mistake of interrupting the
interruption? We have previously mentioned Freud’s
command, “do not censor,” which is in itself a censoring
of the censor, an interruption of the process of censor¬
ing. What we have to do is notice and deal with the
hows of every interruption, rather than with the censor
—which is Freud’s postulated why of interruption. If
we deal with the interruptions per se, we deal with the
direct clinical picture, with the experience the patient is
living through. Again, we deal with the surface that
presents itself. There is no need to guess and to inter¬
pret. We hear the interruption of a sentence or we
notice that the patient holds his breath or we see that
he is making a fist, as if to hit someone, or swinging his
legs as if to kick, or we observe how he interrupts con¬
tact with the therapist by looking away.
Is he aware of these self-interruptions? This must be
our first question to him in such a situation. Does he
know that this is what he is doing? As he becomes more
 Here and Now Therapy | 71

aware of the ways in which he interrupts himself, he

will inevitably become more aware of what he is inter¬
rupting. As our example of the headache showed, it
was in staying with his interruption, his headache, that
he discovered how he was using this mechanism to
interrupt his own crying. This example shows how, by
concentrating on the interruption per se—on the hows
of it, not its whys—the patient comes to an awareness
of the fact that he is interrupting himself, and becomes
aware of what he is interrupting. He also becomes able
to dissolve his interruptions and to live through and
finish up one unfinished experience.
The neurotic mechanisms of introjection, projection,
and retroflection are themselves mechanisms of intro¬
jection, and often developed in response to interruptions
from the outside world. In the normal process of
growth, we learn through trial and error, through testing
our lives and our world as freely and uninterruptedly
as possible.
Imagine a kitten climbing a tree. It is engaged in ex¬
perimenting. It balances itself, it tests its strength and its
agility. But the mother cat will not leave it alone; she
insists that it come down. “You may break your neck,
you naughty kitten,” she hisses. How this would inter¬
rupt the kitten’s pleasure in growing! It would even
interrupt the growth process itself. But cats, of course,
do not behave so stupidly. They leave the pursuit of
safety to the human beings.
On the contrary, the cat, like any other animal and
any sensible human being, will consider it the essence of
up-bringing to facilitate the transformation of external
into self-support. The newly bom kitten can neither
feed, transport, nor defend itself. For all this it needs its
mother. But it will develop the means to do these things
itself, partly through developing its inborn instincts,
and partly through environmental teaching. In the
human being, the transition from external to self-
support is, of course, more complicated. Consider only
the need to change diapers, to dress, to cook, to choose
a vocation, or to gain knowledge.
Since we are forced to learn so much more through
education than by using our inherited instincts, much of
 72 | Here and Now Therapy

the animal's intuition as to what is the right procedure

is missing. Instead, the “right” procedure is established
by composite fantasies which are handed over and
modified from generation to generation. They are mostly
support functions for social contact, such as manners
and codes of behavior (ethics), means of orientation
(reading, weltanschauungen), standards of beauty (aes¬
thetics), and social position (attitudes). Often, how¬
ever, these procedures are not biologically oriented,
thus disrupting the very root of our existence and lead¬
ing to degeneration. Psychiatric case histories show over
and over how our depreciatory orientation towards sex
can produce neurosis. But whether these procedures are
anti-biological or anti-personal or anti-social, they are
interruptions in the on-going processes which, if left
alone, would lead to self-support.
Such interruptions are the nightmares of Junior’s up¬
bringing. There are the interruptions of contact, the
“don’t touch that!” and the “don’t do that!” that fly
around his ears day in and day out. Or “leave me alone!
Can’t I have a moment’s peace,” interrupt his wish to
interrupt mamma. His withdrawals are also interrupted.
“You stay here now, keep your mind on your home¬
work and don’t dream,” or “you can’t go out to play
until you finish your dinner.”
Shall we then follow a policy of utter non-interrup¬
tion? Like any other animal, Junior has to test the
world, to find his possibilities, to try to expand his
boundaries, to experiment with how far he can go. But
at the same time he has to be prevented from doing
serious harm to himself or others. He has to learn to
cope with interruptions.
The real trouble begins when the parents interfere
with the child’s maturation, either by" spoiling him and
interrupting his attempts to find his own bearings or by
being overprotective, and destroying his confidence in
his ability to be self-supportive within the limits of his
development. They regard the child as a possession to
be either preserved or exhibited. In the latter case, they
will tend to create precocity by making ambitious de¬
mands on the child, who at that time lacks sufficient
inner support to fulfill them. In the former case, they
 Here and Now Therapy | 73

will tend to block maturation by giving the child no

chance to make use of the inner supports he has de¬
veloped. The first child may grow up self-sufficient, the
second dependent—neither self-supportive.
Our patients come to us having incorporated their
parents’ interruptions into their own lives—and this is
introjection. Such patients are the ones who say to us,
for example, “grown men don’t cry!” They come to us
having disowned the offending parts of themselves—
the ones that were interrupted in their childhood—this
is projection. “These dam headaches! Why do I have to
suffer from them!” They may turn the qualities their
parents called bad, and the display of which they inter¬
rupted, against themselves. This is retroflection. “I must
control myself. I must not let myself cry!” They may
have become so confused by their parents’ interruptions
that they give up their identity completely and forget
the difference and the connection between their internal
needs and the external means of satisfying them. This
result is confluence. “I always get a headache when
people yell at me.”
Through making our patients aware, in the here and
now, by concentration, of what these interruptions are,
of how these interruptions affect them, we can bring
them to real integrations. We can dissolve the endless
clinch in which they find themselves. We can give them
a chance to be themselves, because they will begin to
experience themselves; this will give them a true appre¬
ciation both of themselves and others, and will enable
them to make good contact with the world, because
they will know where the world is. Understanding means,
basically, seeing a part in its relation to the whole. For
our patients, it means seeing themselves as part of the
total field and thus becoming related both to themselves
and to the world. This is good contact.
 5 PEELING THE ONION

We can now go on to a more extended discussion

of techniques and results. First of all, we would like
to make explicit certain observations which themselves
form a large part of the rationale behind our procedure.
In the “Now I am aware” experiment, discussed in
the fourth chapter, the patient’s area of awareness is
usually limited to external sensory impressions when
he first tries it. Later, it broadens to include many other
factors, internal as well as external, as he continues. In
other words, simply becoming aware that you are aware
increases your potential area of operation. It gives a
wider orientation and greater freedom of choice and
action.
This fact is extremely important for the neurotic. As
I pointed out earlier, he does not lack the ability to
manipulate his environment, but he does very definitely
lack an orientation within it. He is boxed in by his un¬
awareness both of himself and of the external situation
and has very little room in which to maneuver. But as
soon as his awareness is increased, his orientation and
his maneuverability are also increased. He is then in
better contact since contact requires orientation to the
moment.
This is important for the neurotic. He has little sense
of self; he is always interrupting his self. It only rarely
gets through to him. Consequently, he cannot easily
express himself. Even this rudimentary and rather
simple way of expression is a great step forward.
I am convinced that the awareness technique alone
can produce valuable therapeutic results. If the therapist
were limited in his work only to asking three questions,
74
 Peeling the Onion | 75
he would eventually achieve success with all but the
most seriously disturbed of his patients. These three
questions, which are essentially reformulations of the
statement, “Now I am aware” are: “What are you
doing?” “What do you feel?” “What do you want?”
We could increase the number by’two, and include these
questions: “What do you avoid?” “What do you ex¬
pect?” These are obviously extensions of the first three.
And they would be enough of an armamentarium for
the therapist.
All five of these are healthily supportive questions.
That is, the patient can only answer them to the degree
that his own awareness makes possible. But at the same
time, they help him to become more aware. They throw
him on his own resources, bring him to a recognition
of his own responsibility, ask him to muster his forces
and his means of self-support. They give him a sense
of self because they are directed to his self.
His verbal answers to them may come from the intel¬
lect, but his total response, unless he is completely
desensitized, comes from his total person and is an
indication of his total personality. Aside from the pat
answers which are always readily available to him there
will nearly always be some additional reaction—a con¬
fusion, a hesitation, a knitting of the brow, a shrug of
the shoulder, a suppressed “what a silly question!” a bit
of embarrassment, a wish not to be bothered, an “oh,
gosh, here he goes again,” an eager leaning forward,
and so on. Each of these responses is many times more
important than the verbal answer. Each one of them is
an indication of the self and of the patient’s style. At
first the patient’s behavior may be of more value to the
therapist than it is to him. The therapist, having a wider
area of awareness, can see the behavior as a function of
the total personality. The patient, whose awareness is
still limited, may be completely oblivious to anything
but his verbal answer. Or, if he is not oblivious, he may
be unable to grasp the significance of his style of
response. But eventually there will be a click in the
patient’s awareness, too. This will be the first big step
he makes in therapy.
The therapist can help the patient to this self=
76 { Peeling the Onion
discovery by acting, as it were, as a magnifying mirror
for him. The therapist cannot make discoveries for the
patient, he can only facilitate the process in the patient.
By his questions he can bring the patient to see his own
behavior more clearly and he can help the patient de¬
termine for himself what that behavior represents.
And the acute therapist can find plenty of material
right under his nose; he needs only to look. Unfortu¬
nately, even this is not so easy, for to look and to see
requires that the therapist be completely empty and
unbiased. Since contact always occurs on the surface,
it is the surface that the therapist must see. But make
no mistake about it, that surface is much broader and
more significant than the orthodox therapist will admit.
First of all, their preconvictions prevent them from seeing
much of it. And second of all, they tend to take it for
granted, to talk about it contemptuously as “obvious.”
This is where they make their biggest mistake. As long
as we take anything for granted and dismiss it as ob¬
vious we have not the slightest inclination to make a
change nor do we have the tools with which to do it.
But consider for a moment this fact: everything the
patient does, obvious or concealed, is an expression of
the self. His leaning forward and pushing back, his
abortive kicks, his fidgets, his subtleties of enunciation,
his split-second hesitations between words, his hand¬
writing, his use of metaphor and language, his use of
“it” as opposed to his use of “you” and “F’; all are on
the surface, all are obvious, and all are meaningful.
These are the only real material the therapist has to
work with. His preconvictions will not help the patient
at all.
The therapist’s questions, then, will be based on his
observations and directed towards bringing certain fac¬
tors within the area of the patient’s awareness. He uses
the technique of asking questions rather than of making
statements so that the burden of recognition and action
is placed where it belongs—on the patient. But his
questions are actually translations of his observations.
Such as: “Are you aware of your speech?” might repre¬
sent the following observation and might be turned into
the following statement: “I am aware that you speak
 Peeling the Onion | 77
extremely rapidly. I also notice that you are continu¬
ously short of breath. It would be beneficial to you to
become aware yourself of what you are doing so that
we can cope with the excitement you are dissipating in
this way.”
There is, however, one way of asking questions—
used by most orthodox therapists—which seems to me
of little therapeutic value. These are the questions start¬
ing with “why?” I have discussed this somewhat before,
but the subject seems to me to be of sufficient impor¬
tance to return to it again.
The “why” questions produce only pat answers, de¬
fensiveness, rationalizations, excuses, and the delusion
that an event can be explained by a single cause. The
why does not discriminate purpose, origin, or back¬
ground. Under the mask of inquiry it has contributed
perhaps more to human confusion than any other single
word. Not so with the “how.” The how inquires into
the structure of an event, and once the structure is clear
all the whys are automatically answered. Once we have
clarified the structure of the headache we can answer
all the questions of the whys-guys ad libitum. Our
patient had headaches “because” he suppressed his
crying, “because” he did not express himself, “because”
he contracted his muscles, “because” he interrupted
himself, “because” he had introjected a command not
to cry, and so on. If we spend our time looking for
causes instead of structure we may as well give up the
idea of therapy and join the group of worrying grand¬
mothers who attack their prey with such pointless ques¬
tions as “Why did you catch that cold?” “Why have you
been so naughty?”
Of course, all of the therapist’s questions are inter¬
ruptions of some on-going process in the patient. They
are intrusions, very often miniature shocks. This leads
to an apparently unfair situation. If the therapist has
to frustrate the demands of the patient but feels himself
free to fire questions, is this not an unfair situation, an
authoritarian procedure, completely antithetical to our
effort to elevate the therapist from the position of a
power figure to a human being? Admittedly, it is not
easy to find the way through this inconsistency, but
78 | Peeling the Onion
once the therapist has resolved the psychotherapeutic
paradox of working with support and frustration both,
his procedures will fall correctly into place.
The therapist is not, of course, the only one who can
ask questions. And it is impossible to enumerate the
many things the patient can do with this technique. His
questions can be intelligent and therapy-supporting.
They can be irritating and repetitious. They can be the
“what did you says” and the “what do you means” of
the semantically blocked. Nor is it always apparent
from which area of confusion the patient’s questions
arise. Sometimes he does not know whether he can
trust the therapist, so he will use questions to test him.
If he has obsessional doubts, he will ask the same ques¬
tion over and over again.
The majority of questions the patient asks are seduc¬
tions of the intellect, related to the notion that verbal
explanations are a substitute for understanding. As
long as such patients are fed with interpretations, espe¬
cially if they are emotionally blocked, they’ll snuggle
happily back in the cocoon of their neurosis and stay
there, purring peacefully.
The idea of frustrating the patient’s questions is as
old as psychotherapy itself. Even such a simple response
as “why do you ask this question?” is meant to throw
the patient back on his own resources. But, as previ¬
ously pointed out, the wh}r question is a very inadequate
tool. We want to elicit the structure of the patient’s
question, its background; and possibly we can reach
the self in this process. And so our technique is to ask
our patients to turn their questions into propositions or
statements.
At first they will merely circumscribe the questions
in other words but stick to the questioning—“I am
curious . . .” Then we repeat our request. Now the
patient might say, “I am of this or that opinion; what do
you think?” This is at least one step forward—now the
patient displays to himself his unsureness and his need
for intellectual support. We can go further and ask for
another reformulation, and then the patient may loosen
up and a lot of material that has been held back may
be released. Take this example:
 Peeling the Onion | 79
Patient: What do yon mean by support?
Therapist: Could you turn that into a statement?
Patient: I would like to know what you mean by
support.
Therapist: That’s still a question. Could you turn
it into a statement?
Patient: I would like to tear hell out of you on
this question if I had the opportunity.
Now we have a direct bit of self-expression. True, it
is hostile, but socially inacceptable as it may be, it gives
the patient a tiny bit of increased self-support by giving
him an increased self-awareness. Although the therapist
could get along with the five questions mentioned early
in the chapter, he does not limit himself to these. For
as the therapist’s initial awareness questions are a way
of getting through to the patient’s self, so the patient’s
statements and ways of manipulating the therapist give
us clues as to the neurotic mechanisms through which
he is shoring himself up against what he considers to be
existential collapse. The patient’s statements are always
clues for further questions, and possibly more specific
ones.
What the patient does through these mechanisms is,
in essence, to shirk responsibility for his behavior. To
him responsibility is blame, and as afraid as he is of
being blamed, so is he ready to blame. “I’m not re¬
sponsible for my attitudes, it’s my neurosis that’s at
fault,” he seems to be saying. But responsibility is really
response-ability, the ability to choose one’s reactions.
Whether the neurotic dissociates himself from himself
through projection, introjection, confluence or retro-
flection, he is in a position where, having abdicated
responsibility he has also given up his response-ability
and his freedom of choice.
To reintegrate the neurotic we have to make use of
whatever share of responsibility he is willing to take.
The same thing applies to the therapist. He has to take
full responsibility for his reactions to the patient. He is
not responsible for the patient’s neurosis, nor for his
misery or misunderstandings, but he is responsible for
his own motives and his handling of the patient and the
therapeutic situation.
80 | Peeling the Onion
The therapist’s primary responsibility is not to let go
unchallenged any statement or behavior which is not
representative of the self, which is evidence of the
patient’s lack of self-responsibility. This means that he
must deal with each one of the neurotic mechanisms as
it appears. Each one must be integrated by the patient
and must be transformed into an expression of self so
that he can truly discover his self.
How do we deal with these mechanisms? The ex¬
amples given earlier of the crying-headache and the
gasping-anxiety attack indicate some of the ways we can
work with confluences. Both of these psychosomatic
symptoms are, in essence, evidence of confluence. The
victims have locked control of the muscles around their
eyes with control of the need to cry in the first case and
have locked control of their breathing with control of
their emotional responses in the second. Having estab¬
lished an identity between two different terms of two
different relationships, they interrupt the second term
of each one by interrupting the first. We help the patient
dissolve the clinch by helping him discover, through
his experience of the symptom, how he has artificially
connected the two together, substituting the symptom
for the self-expression and self-experience.
What are the evidences of retroflection? These we
find often in the patient’s physical behavior as well as
in his use of the “myself ’ language. For example, sup¬
pose that the patient is sitting talking about something
and we notice that he is punching one of his palms with
his other fist. This is, fairly obviously, retroflective be¬
havior. If the therapist asks him, “Whom would you
like to punch?” the patient may at first look at the
therapist in bewilderment—“Oh, that’s just a nervous
habit.” In other words, for this behavior, at this point,
he is not willing to take responsibility. But as therapy
continues and the patient’s area of awareness broadens,
his responsibility will broaden, too. If the nervous habit
continues, the patient will one day, in response to the
therapist’s question, give a direct answer that comes
from the self. It may be “my mother,” or “my father,”
or “my boss,” or “you.” Whatever it is, the patient will
 Peeling the Onion | 81
at this point have become aware of his behavior, of its
object, and of his self. We do not leave the situation
there, of course, but I do not want here to describe
further ways of handling it. They will be discussed in
general in the next chapter.
It is very often startling to someone who has had
limited experience with Gestalt therapy to see how
quickly, how clearly, and how smoothly the response is
made. It is almost as if the patient has been waiting
desperately for a chance to express himself. It is star¬
tling not only to the observer, but often to the patient
himself.
When the patient makes a statement that seems to
the therapist to be a projection, we can handle it by
asking the patient to do one of several things. If he has
been talking in “it” terms—“it bothers me,” as with
the headache, we have to get him first to associate him¬
self with his headache. This he does by seeing how he
produces his headaches so that the headache is no
longer an it but a part of him. If he expresses opinions
of others which are projections, “they don’t like me,”
“they’re always trying to push me around,” we ask him
to reverse the statement. “I don’t like them,” or “I’m
always trying to push people around,” and we may have
him continue repeating it until it emerges as a felt self-
expression.
We can deal with introjection in just the opposite
way by making the patient aware of his attitude towards
the introjected material. It is interesting to see how
quickly the emotional awareness of swallowing whole
can turn into actual physical nausea and the desire to
throw up.
Often we will request the patient to try an experi¬
ment, the material for which has been provided by our
observation of him—either what he does or what he
does not do. The purpose of the experiment is to help
the patient find out for himself how he interrupts him¬
self and prevents himself from succeeding. The goals in
our therapeutic experiments are not likely to be reached.
Whatever the patient can do to manipulate the therapist
remains strong, but the patient will not be content to
82 j Peeling the Onion
leave the situation at that. He will go on and on, always
meeting tolerable frustration, until the time comes when
he becomes aware of what he is doing.
If, on the other hand, the patient is genuinely
blocked, he will show signs of this, too. He may blush
or stammer. Now we continue our experiment in fan¬
tasy, since the patient cannot begin as yet to carry it out
in either the real or the playacting levels.
Therapist: If you said it, could you imagine what
my response would be?
Patient: Yes, you will think “what a horrible
creature you are.”
Therapist: Could you imagine a situation where
you could say to me, “what a horrible
creature you are?”
Patient: (In an animated voice) Yes, that’s ex¬
actly what I thought. What a horrible crea¬
ture you are to put me in such an embar¬
rassing position.
Therapist: Could you give me more details as to
how I like to put people into embarrassing
positions?
The patient is now freer than he was. And he may
be ready to do some psychodrama in fantasy about how
someone makes people embarrassed, thereby changing
one more projection <the therapist wants to embarrass
me) into self-expression. By the time the session is
over, the patient might realize that he interrupts the
pleasure he gets from embarrassing others by being em¬
barrassed himself.
We have now internalized the projected conflict and
we can easily integrate its two components: to interrupt
and to embarrass. We might find, for example, that the
patient feels that by stopping me in my therapeutic
endeavors he would embarrass me. In this way, he
would control me and make me feel helpless. Obviously
we have here an attitude which, if not quickly un¬
covered, would sabotage the whole treatment. So we
suggest that he fantasize about his need to control
people. We might find wild fantasies about crushing
people so that they cannot hurt him. Now we can
internalize the projected hurting and integrate to crush
 Peeling the Onion | 83
and to hurt, as before we integrated interruption and
embarrassment.
At this point the therapist will probably notice that
the patient is beginning to use his muscles; perhaps he
makes a fist or there is some sudden movement of the
arm or leg. Now more of his total personality is in¬
volved in his self-expression. While before he might
have been rigid from the elbow up, now he is, for the
first time, moving his shoulders. Instead of feeling
crushed, as he so often does, he might now feel like
crushing, which means that he is taking the first step
towards manual and dental aggression, towards destruc¬
turing and assimilating.
Although this account is oversimplified, it shows three
important things: The therapist can always work with
the events present, either in physical actuality or in
fantasy. Secondly, he can integrate immediately what¬
ever comes up in the course of the session and does
not have to let the unfinished situations accumulate.
And finally, the therapist can work with experiences,
and not only with verbalizations or memories. As a
matter of fact, there is hardly a patient in Gestalt
therapy who does not tell us that he has more expe¬
riences in the first few sessions of our therapy than he
had in many months of analysis. Even if we make
allowances for the patients’ need to manipulate the
therapist with flattery, these remarks are made too
regularly to be disregarded.
There is one problem in Gestalt therapy which exists
in all other therapies too. That is, that the patient ad¬
justs himself to our technique. Then he may start to
manipulate the therapist with manufactured and irrele¬
vant experiences just to please him and at the same
time avoid coping with his own difficulties. Then the
accent in therapy has to shift from having experiences
to faking them, and the therapist has to cope with the
patient’s “let’s pretend” attitude.
We ask all our patients to try doing some homework,
and many are capable of speeding up their therapy con¬
siderably in this way. All of them, of course, are full of
good intentions when the request is made, and all of
them promise to do their assignments faithfully, but a
84 | Peeling the Onion
good number of them fail. As soon as they come close
to the danger zone—and the awareness technique has
been developed for just this purpose—they detour
themselves in one way or another.
Theoretically this homework is so simple that it seems
incredible that the patient should go to such great
lengths to avoid it. It is, after all, a considerable saving
of time and money. But although the neurotic wants to
be “cured,” he also feels safer and better-dressed with
his neurosis than without it, and he is afraid that suc¬
cessful therapy will hurl him into a bottomless pit. He
would rather bear those ills he has than fly to others
that he knows not of. But eventually, as therapy pro¬
gresses and the patient develops more areas of self-
support, he becomes more able to cope with his home¬
work.
The homework consists of reviewing the session in
terms of a systematic application of the awareness tech¬
nique. A review of some sort is bound to occur in every
kind of therapy. Some patients will remember a few
interesting points in the session, some will react to the
session—they will be pleased, resentful, pondering, de¬
pressed. Others will forget what has happened as soon
as they leave the consulting room.
What we ask the patient to do, in line with our entire
approach, is to imagine himself back in the consulting
room. What does he experience? Can he go over the
entire session without difficulty? Can he find blanks? If
so, is he aware of these blanks—that is, does he feel
there was something vaguely disturbing that he cannot
put his finger on? Did he express everything there was
to be expressed towards the therapist? Can he do it
now and can he do it with his whole self? Can he be¬
come aware of avoiding and interrupting any of the
aspects of the total expression—in other words, is he
preponderantly involved with his emotions or his move¬
ments or his sensations or his visualizations or his ver¬
balizations? Does he say what he feels and does he feel
what he says?
The examples I have given and the techniques I have
outlined may seem rather mundane and undramatic, as
contrasted with the archaeological expeditions in ortho-
 Peeling the Onion | 85
dox analysis, which one day recover the castration com¬
plex,. the next day dig up the remnants of the Oedipal
situation, the third day recall all the traumatic events
of the primal scene. But in fact the emotional charge in
each session of Gestalt therapy, no matter how mundane
its subject matter, is extremely high. If emotion is, as I
have hypothesized, the basic force that energizes all
action, it exists in every life situation. One of the most
serious problems of modem man is that he has de¬
sensitized himself to all but the most overwhelming kind
of emotional response. To the degree that he is no
longer capable of feeling sensitively, to that degree he
becomes incapable of the freedom of choice that results
in a relevant action.
No, there is nothing foolish or wasteful or petty about
our method of getting at problems. Since the aim of
therapy is to give the patient a tool—self-support—with
which he can solve his own difficulties, we can work
effectively with each situation as it presents itself. We
can open one door at a time and peel off one layer of
the onion at a time. Each layer is part of the neurosis,
as it is dealt with it changes the problem, as the prob¬
lems change, so the specifics are changed. At each step
of the way, since the patient’s self-support has been in¬
creased a trifle in each session, the next step becomes
easier to take.
 6 SHUTTLING, PSYCHODRAMA, AND
CONFUSION

There is one obvious limitation to the awareness

technique used alone. It would probably take years to
achieve its results, as do most of the orthodox therapies,
and at that rate, psychiatry could never catch up with
the constantly increasing number of people who are
mentally disturbed and the still more rapidly increasing
number of people who live far below their potentials.
Although the analytical approach has failed to provide
us with a tool that can cope with the social emergency,
the awareness technique by itself would be equally
limited.
But, having recognized the relationship between fan¬
tasy and actuality, we can make full use in therapy of
fantasizing and all its increasing states of intensity
towards actuality—-a verbalized fantasy, or one which
is written down, or one which is acted out as psycho¬
drama. We can play at psychodrama with our patients,
or we can ask them to play at this game alone, a game
which we term “monotherapy.”
In this latter ca*se, the patient creates his own stage,
his own actors, his own props, direction and expression.
This gives him a chance to realize that everything he
fantasizes is his, and gives him a chance to see the con¬
flicts inside him. Monotherapy thus avoids the contami¬
nation, the precepts of others which are usually present
in ordinary psychodrama.
We make use of several other techniques as well. The
first I would like to discuss is the shuttle technique. As
an approach, it is nothing new. The Freudians handle
86
 Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion J 87
dreams in precisely this way, by asking the patient to
shuttle between the manifest content of a dream and its
associations. But the systematic application of the tech¬
nique in Gestalt therapy and the particular way in
which it is applied are both new. I have already demon¬
strated its use in our experiment on acute anxiety, in
which I asked the patient to shuttle his attention from
his breathing to his muscles, from his muscles to his
breathing, until the relationship between the two be¬
comes clear and the patient can breathe freely. This
shuttling helps us to break up patterns of confluence,
such as we see in the headache that turns out to be a
disguised crying.
One of my first “miracle” cures was due to an in¬
tuitive application of this technique. A young man came
for therapy whose major complaint was sexual impo¬
tence. He told me in great detail about his background,
family situation, social activities, etc. But what was most
interesting was his remark that although his health in
general was good, he was under treatment by an ear-
nose-and-throat specialist for chronic nasal congestion.
This struck me as the most vital clue to his problem,
and remembering the Fleiss-Freud observation that
swelling of the nasal mucous membrane was often a
displacement from the genital area, I asked him if he
would be willing to stop medical treatment temporarily.
He agreed. During his next session, I requested him to
direct his concentration alternately to his nasal sensa¬
tions and his non-existent genital sensations. And an
extraordinary thing happened. The nasal swelling de¬
creased and the tumescence of the penis increased. Now
he could both breathe freely and have sexual relations.
He had not only interrupted his penis erections and
displaced both the sensation and the tumescence to his
nose, he had even begun to compartmentalize his symp¬
toms and to pander to his dissociations by having dif¬
ferent specialists attend to them. While the ear-nose-
and-throat doctor was used to working on dissociated
symptoms and local “causes,” the Gestalt approach en¬
abled me to look for the total situation, to examine the
structure of the field, to see the problem in its total
context and to treat it in a unified way.
88 | Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion
When we look at displacements in this way, it be¬
comes evident that they cannot be dealt with where they
occur because they have no functional meaning in that
place. The displacement must be brought back to where
it belongs; it can only be resolved in the area where it
has meaning. The patient who suffers from pains in the
eyes which are due to the retention of tears, can dis¬
solve his pains only in crying. The patient who has dis¬
placed from the testicles (in the vernacular, the balls)
where there is retained semen—to the eyeballs (and I
have had several such patients) will have to shift his
pains back to where they belong before they can be
dealt with. Not until then can he enjoy a good orgasm
and lose his symptoms.
Now let me present another example, less dramatic
but equally valid. Here we shuttle, not as the orthodox
analyst does, between memory and associations, but
between the reliving of a memory and the here and
now. As I have previously mentioned, we treat all time
during the therapeutic session as if it were here and
now; for awareness and experience can only take place
in the present. But even with the most vivid visualiza¬
tion and reliving of a memory, the knowledge that it
is something from the past remains in the background.
This is not true, however, with what we call the proprio-
ceptions—the internal, muscular kinesthetic sense. The
proprioceptions are timeless, and can only be expe¬
rienced as here and now. Thus, if we shuttle between
visualization and proprioception we will be able to fill
in the blanks and complete the unfinished business of
the past. The trained therapist will also take into ac¬
count any involuntary movements the patient makes—
shrugging his shoulders, kicking his feet, etc., and draw
the patient’s attention to them.
Suppose the patient has fantasized a return to a re¬
cent experience which bothered him. The first thing he
says when he comes into the consulting room is that
his job is getting on his nerves. Nobody, he says, treats
him with enough respect. There isn’t anything special
that he can put his finger on, but the whole atmosphere
is distasteful to him. Little things get him down. Some¬
thing very unimportant happened in the company res-
 Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion | 89
taurant that very day. It disturbed him, and he cannot
understand why he should have been so upset by it.
We ask him to return, in fantasy, to the experience
that bothered him. This is what might happen:
Patient: I am sitting in our cafeteria. My boss
is eating a few tables away.
Therapist: What do you feel?
Patient: Nothing. He is talking to someone. Now
he is getting up.
Therapist: What do you feel now?
Patient: My heart is pounding. He is moving
towards me. Now I am getting excited.
He is passing me.
Therapist: What do you feel now?
Patient: Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Therapist: Are you aware that you are making a
fist?
Patient: No. Now that you mention it, though,
I feel it. As a matter of fact, I was angry
that the boss passed right by me but talked
to someone else whom I dislike very much.
I was angry at myself for being so touchy.
Therapist: Were you angry with anybody else, too?
Patient: Sure. With that guy the boss stopped to
talk to. What right has he got to disturb
the boss? See—my arm is shaking. I could
hit him right now, the dirty apple-polisher.
We can now take the next step and shuttle between
the patient’s feelings and his projections. Still better, we
could go over the scene again. The phrase “apple-
polisher” makes us suspicious. Perhaps the patient was
not angry with the boss when he felt the short pang of
excitement or anxiety early in the scene.
Therapist: Let’s go back to the moment when your
boss gets up from the table. What do you
feel when you visualize that?
Patient: Wait a minute ... He is getting up. He
is coming towards me. I am getting excited;
I hope he will talk to me. I feel myself get¬
ting warm in the face. Now he is passing
me. I feel very disappointed.
This was a minor traumatic situation for the patient.
90 | Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion
The excitement that was mobilized when the boss ap¬
peared could not find appropriate expression and the
positive cathexis towards the boss (I hope he will talk
to me) changed into a negative one—towards the
patient’s competitor. This negative cathexis, it later
turned out, was actually directed towards the patient’s
projections, from experiencing and satisfying his own
needs and desires.
The new patient usually finds considerable initial
difficulty in working with the shuttle technique to re¬
cover missing abstractions. But with time it becomes
easier, and it brings important rewards. Some patients,
for example, never listen; others have no emotions to
speak of; still others cannot verbalize; yet a fourth
group has no power of self-expression at all. Let’s work
a bit on the theoretically simplest problem—the inability
to express oneself.
Take the case of a fairly successful middle-aged man
who seems to be in need of a wailing wall. He will start
out by complaining to the therapist no end about his
wife, his children, his employees, his competitors, etc.
But we do not let him continue this indirect expression.
We ask him either to visualize himself talking to them
or, psychodramatically, to talk to the therapist as if he
were the offending wife, children, or whatever. As is our
usual practice, we make it clear to him that he should
not force himself to succeed—he should not interrupt
himself. We make it clear to him that our experiments
are carried out for the purpose of making him more
aware of the ways in which he is blocking himself, and
that what we want him to do is to convert the blocked
areas, or repressions, into expressions.
In such a situation we actually have three positions
among which to shuttle: the patient’s complaining (his
manipulation of the therapist for support), his inade¬
quate self-expression (which is a lack of good contact
and self-support), and his inhibitions (which are the
patient’s self-interruptions). The following is the kind
of thing that might happen:
Patient: My wife has no consideration for me.
(This is a complaint, one of his techniques
 Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion | 91
of manipulating the outside world to give
him the support he cannot give himself.)
Therapist: Can you imagine telling this to her face?
(We are asking him here not to call on us
for support, but to express himself direct-
iy)
Patient: No, I can’t. She’d interrupt me as soon
as I began. (A complaint again.)
Therapist: Could you tell her that? (Again a re¬
quest that he express himself directly.)
Patient: Yes. You never let me talk. (This is
still a complaint, but at least it is direct.
The therapist notes that the soft voice in
which the patient uttered it belies his
words.)
Therapist: Can you hear your voice? (Here we
have shuttled from the complaint to the
inadequate means of self-expression.)
Patient: Yes. Sounds rather weak, doesn’t it? (A
self-interruption.)
Therapist: Could you give an order—something
starting with the words “you should”? (In
other words, the therapist is asking the pa¬
tient to express himself simply, directly,
and appropriately.)
Patient: No, I could not.
Therapist: What do you feel now? (Here we shut¬
tle to the sensations that accompany the
patient’s actions.)
Patient: My heart is beating. I am getting anx¬
ious.
Therapist: Could you tell this to your wife?
Patient: No. But I’m getting angry. I feel like
saying, “shut up for once.” (And now we
have something more than complaining,
self-interrupting, and inexpressiveness. We
have an indirect self-expression.)
Therapist: You just said it to her.
Patient: (Shouting) Shut up, shut up! SHUT
UP!! For heaven’s sake, let me get a word
in. (Explosive self-expression.)
92 | Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion
The therapist says nothing; the patient is now on his
way alone. And very soon he says: “No, I could not
say ‘shut up’ to her, but now I can imagine interrupting
her.” And he begins to play-act that interruption:
“Please, let me say something.”
How far can we permit this acting to go? For acting
out his neurotic tendencies is often harmful to the
patient. Freud saw this and warned against the danger
of acting out in daily life, outside the consulting room.
He wanted the patient to keep in mind the neurotic
tendency he was repeating. Our emphasis is a little
different. We say that we want the patient to become
aware, in the consulting room, of the meaning of what
he is doing. And we believe that he can achieve this
awareness by acting out—in therapy, on the fantasy
level—whatever there is to be completed. This, as a
matter of fact, is the basic concept of Gestalt therapy.
The patient feels compelled to repeat in daily life every¬
thing that he cannot bring to a satisfactory conclusion.
These repetitions are his unfinished business. But he
cannot come to a creative solution in this way because
he brings his interruptions along with his repetitions, his
acting-out. Thus, if he is acting out a neurotic tendency
in his extra-therapeutic life, we ask him, during his
sessions, to repeat deliberately in fantasy what he has
been doing in actuality. In this way we can uncover the
moment at which he interrupts the flow of experiences
and thus prevents himself from coming to a creative
solution.
Let’s take an example almost directly opposite the
one we described before. Our patient has difficulties
with his wife which are unquestionably related to the
fact that he is acting out his neurotic tendencies in
every-day life. As therapy progresses he becomes more
and more aware that there are many things he would
like to say to her which he will not express; they would
hurt her. But he still has not come to a creative solu¬
tion, and he interrupts his direct expression by being
indirectly sadistic. He is consistently late for dinner, he
ignores her, in general he behaves in a manner calcu¬
lated to be irritating. If we ask him to act out in therapy
what he cannot do in reality, to remove his interruptions
 Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion | 93
and fantasize and express in her absence what he would
say in her presence, were he not afraid, we will find
initially the same reluctance to talk to her in fantasy
as we find in actuality. But as the reluctance diminishes,
and the patient is able to express—to the therapist, as
if the therapist were his wife—more and more of his
resentments, he will learn how to cope with them and
he will have no need to return to his indirect sadism.
There are other patients who simply don’t listen.
They may drown the therapist with words. They may
interrupt him. They may look attentive, but it is obvious
that anything the therapist says goes in one ear and out
the other. They may literally not hear him. They may
misinterpret his requests and his statements. We let
these patients shuttle between talking and listening to
themselves. At first we ask them, after each of their
sentences: “Are you aware of this sentence?” They
usually remember having said the words, but they often
say that they were not aware of them as they spoke. If
there is a desensitization of the mouth, as there fre¬
quently is in these cases, we often ask the patient to
become aware of his lips and tongue as he speaks. Once
he has learned to listen and to feel himself speaking, he
has made two important steps.
They can also now listen to others, and they have
opened the road to the non-verbal in being and com¬
municating. For their compulsive talk drowns out both
their environment and their selves. It is their technique
of self-interruption. What are they interrupting? Further
investigations and experiments help us to find out.
Most often we discover that once we have prevented
such patients from using up all their excitement—all
their emotional investment—in constant chatter and
verbalism, they show tremendous anxiety. Talking has
become a compulsion with them, and like all compul¬
sions there is great stress if it is interrupted.
There are, besides the shuttle techniques, still other
short-cuts to awareness that we can use. The shuttle
technique sharpens awareness by giving the patient a
clearer sense of the relationships in his behavior. These
other techniques, by encouraging self-expression, also
produce both greater awareness and greater self-support.
94 | Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion
There are several schools besides ours which make use
of the method of self-expression as a means to re-
identification. All of them are essentially integrative
approaches, but I would like to select Moreno’s psycho-
dramatic technique as one of the most lively and as a
further demonstration of how we can apply the shuttle
technique.
Moreno’s way of handling the psychodramatic situa¬
tion is essentially to ask the patient to switch over from
one role to another—for instance, from the harassed
child to the nagging mother. That way the patient can
realize that his nagging super-ego is his fantasized
mother (his introjection), that actually he himself is
doing the nagging, that he is not just listening to it but
is nagging and being nagged at the same time. Its
therapeutic significance is that it facilitates the release
of the clinch, the constant quarrel between topdog and
underdog, not by adjustment, but by integration.
The psychodramatic technique shows its value in the
follow-up to the treatment of the headache we talked
about in an earlier chapter. You will remember that
ultimately this manifestation boiled down to the pa¬
tient’s statement of two mutually contradictory impera¬
tives: “Don’t cry,” and “Leave me alone.” Now the
stage is set for a psychodrama in fantasy. The patient,
realizing that the statement demonstrates a split in his
own personality, can actually play out both the “don’t
cry” and the “leave me alone” roles. While he is playing
the “don’t cry” part, he may discover “I cry when I
want to,” or “I don’t care if I am a sissy,” and actually
feel his defiance. While he is playing the “don’t cry”
part, he may feel his contempt for people who behave
like sissies. And yet, a minute or two later, he may
whisper, sympathetically, “don’t cry.” At that moment
the negative cathexis—people who cry are fools and
sissies—changes to a positive one—I feel for people
who cry—and the road opens for integration. Perhaps
now he will experience his “leave me alone” as “don’t
interrupt my crying for the wrong reason, for the
reason that I’m a sissy. Interrupt it by feeling sorry for
me.” And the session might finally end up with a need
for confluence—“I cry because I have to leave you, but
 Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion | 95
I don’t want you to see it; I don’t want to show you
how much I need you.”
We are now back were we started in the first place.
We are back to the patient’s lack of self-support. But
there is a great difference. The patient is now miserable
not, as Freud would say, for neurotic but for human
reasons. In our language we would say that now he is
no longer concerned with his dissociation, his headache,
but with himself. He is, at this moment, fully unified,
unhappy in his loneliness. But he expresses it, becomes
fully aware of it, and now he may be ready to take
the next step, to take responsibility for it and do some¬
thing about it.
When the patient first came into the consulting room,
bearing his headache with him, he was certainly not in
contact with the therapist. He was in contact with his
headache, and his headache was in contact with the
therapist. He offered for contact his headache as others
offer a mask or a facade. The patient will not part with
the mask as long as his feeling of safety behind it out¬
weighs the discomfort of wearing it, and he will cer¬
tainly object to having his mask tom off his face. The
fact that he brought his headache into therapy means
that he was ready to acknowledge an unfinished situa¬
tion; in this respect he was at one with the therapist.
It is as if he said: “Make me feel so comfortable that I
don’t need this symptom or mask or persona or
armor.” But the therapist could not make him feel
comfortable, for the patient was not in contact with
him, but with his symptom, the headache.
This is a good example of how we work with psycho¬
somatic symptoms in general. Although the interruption
is taking place on the somatic level, where it displays
itself in this case as a headache, we have to complete
the picture by finding the fantasy that promotes the
interruption. We invariably find, when we do this, that
the patient will fantasize some command which is
opposed to his demand. In this case, the demand was
“leave me alone.” The commands were “don’t cry!”
and “a man doesn’t cry,’! and “don’t be a sissy!” There
might even be a command reinforced by a threat: “If
you don’t stop crying I’ll give you something to cry
96 | Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion
about!” In other words, the patient behaves as if some¬
body was ordering him to interrupt his tears. Whatever
phrases were impressed on him in the past are now his,
and he fantasizes and obeys them.
We can deal with these commands without delving
into the unconscious, for there are two possibilities once
we have reached this point. Either the patient is aware
that he is making inhibiting demands on himself, which
is usually the case, or he is not. In the latter case, he
will be aware of the demands, but as a projection, as
an assumption that the therapist is the one who is
opposed to his crying. Once he has gathered enough
strength to burst out into “leave me alone,” he can take
a stand against the counter demand, whether he local¬
izes it as part of his own anti-self (an introjection) or
in the therapist as the frustrator of his spontaneous
feelings. If he localizes it in the therapist, the next step,
(which again has nothing to do with the unconscious)
is taken when the patient sees the paradox of accusing
the therapist of wanting to interfere with his crying at
the same time that he sees the possibility that the thera¬
pist might have been in favor of it. If die therapist has
taken no sides in this controversy, which is, after all,
not his but the patient’s, the patient will discover for
himself the absurdity of making the therapist respon¬
sible for his interruptions, and he will see the symptom
as his own responsibility. And so, by the time the ses¬
sion is over, the patient is in contact with himself, and
this is the first step to making contact with others.
You may have noticed that, in the dissolution of the
headache, we made use of some of Reich’s findings. I
do not want to enter into the violent controversy over
Reich or the equally sharp controversy over Hubbard,
but I do at this point want to say that I have found their
work in certain areas valuable as an adjunct to the
awareness technique. Wherever else they may have gone
astray, Reich’s work on motoric interruptions (the
headache, for example) and Hubbard’s work with the
sensorically experienced return (the cafeteria episode,
for example) and with verbal interruptions can provide
the therapist with extremely useful tools in the restitu¬
tion of the functions of the self.
 Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion J 97
The sensorially experienced return is not new. This
method was described more than a decade ago, using
the procedure of asking the patient to fill in more and
more details of the actually visualized situation. This
is re-experiencing on the fantasy level. As far as verbal
interruptions are concerned, the idea of repetition has
also been used extensively. Repeating over and over the
significant maxims of the past, which are actually among
the patient’s introjections, can also have a therapeutic
effect. These maxims apparently have had a profound
effect on the patient, as we saw in the headache case.
However, I differ from Hubbard in believing that these
maxims have their effect not through a traumatic expe¬
rience but through their every-day intrusion into the
patient’s life.
There is one disadvantage to any of these techniques:
the patient must already be able to express himself to
a certain degree. And for the psychodrama he must be
able to identify with a role he dislikes. But even if the
techniques provide us with no more than an experiment
in ferreting out the patient’s resistances against self-
expression, they are very useful.
Another important therapeutic technique is the ap¬
proach to the areas of confusion via the manifest
interruptions. Confusion is a bad support for contact,
and the patient’s problem is often displayed in his areas
of confusion. Before I discuss how this technique works,
however, let me say that the experience of confusion is
very, very unpleasant and, like anxiety, shame and dis¬
gust, we have a strong desire to annihilate it—by
avoidance, by verbalism, or by any other kind of inter¬
ruption. And yet a good part of the fight against neu¬
rosis is won merely by helping the patient to become
aware of, to tolerate, and to stay with his confusion and
its correlative, blanking out. Although confusion is
unpleasant, the only real danger is in interrupting it and
consequently becoming confused in action. For confu¬
sion, like any other emotion, if left alone to develop
uninterrupted, will not remain confusion. It will be
transformed into a feeling which is experienced more
positively and which can produce appropriate action.
Confusion is generally associated with a lack of
98 | Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion
understanding accompanied by a need to understand.
The only real guarantee of total freedom from confu¬
sion is complete unconcern with understanding. If I
am among a group of people who are talking about
higher mathematics and I feel a lack of interest it is
possible to withdraw: “This is none of my business.”
But if, for one reason or another, I become interested,
my limited knowledge of the subject is bound to make
me confused. Confusion, in other words, usually results
from an effort to make contact in an area in which, for
one reason or another, contact is not possible—perhaps
there is not enough understanding to support good con¬
tact, perhaps there is not enough interest but there is a
need to show interest. Most people try to handle their
confusions, because they are so unpleasant, by inter¬
rupting them with speculations, interpretations, ex¬
planations, and rationalizations. This is the pattern of
many neurotics, and especially intellectuals. And it is
almost encouraged by certain forms of therapy. Much
of Freudian analysis, for example, is based on the error
that symbolic, intellectual knowledge is equal to under¬
standing. But such knowledge is usually itself an inter¬
ruption, a premature arresting of development, leaving
behind itself a trail of existential confusion. This in turn
contributes to a lack of self-support, to the need for
external support, and to the development of a narrow
orientation, which has to come from the environment
and not from the individual.
Although considerable attention has been paid to the
factor of confusion in dealing with psychosis, little
attention has been paid to its role in neurosis. Yet every
patient in therapy is himself a picture of confusion.
And this the therapist cannot fail to see if he will just
observe what is going on right under his nose. Every
“er” and “ah,” every breaking up of a sentence, covers
a small or large area of confusion. Each one is an
attempt to hang on and maintain contact, while the
patient’s real need is to withdraw.
Once the patient has learned to accept the fact that
he has areas of confusion, he will be willing to co¬
operate with the therapist. If he returns to the gaps in
his speech he can recover much material which he
 Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion | 99
blanked out or brushed aside during his interruption.
Although this material will often be irrelevant, it pro¬
vides all sorts of helpful clues as to what the patient is
doing on the fantasy level. For during these times of
confusion he is engaging in faded motoric behavior (all
hiding under the collective name of thinking) and much
of the activitv which is missing in his day-to-day be¬
havior and which constitutes some of the unfinished
business of his neurosis, can be found tucked away in
those crevices, right here and now.
Let me present a few examples of how this works in
practice. The blank, as I said before, is the correlative
of confusion. It is an interruption of confusion, the
effort to wipe it out completely. This we see most often
in dealing with the problem of visualization and visual
imagination, areas of blind or nearly blind spots for
many patients.
If we ask a patient to visualize something, he may tell
us that his fantasy images are hazv. When we ask him
to go on, he might continue and report that it is as if
they are in a cloud or a fog. This fog or cloud the thera¬
pist considers to be a self-concept, a character structure,
a system of verbalizations. Apparently the patient has
to put a smoke screen around his images and shroud
them in a cloud. And the therapist should not be de¬
ceived by the patient’s complaint that he would like to
be able to visualize clearly. Although this is doubtless
true, it is not the whole story. We can assume that he
must have at least some areas where he has to prevent
himself from looking, otherwise he would not go to the
trouble of making himself half fantasy blind. If the
patient can stay with his fog long enough, it will clear
up.
Take the case where the fog cleared into a whitish
grey, which the patient reported was like a stone wall.
The therapist asked the patient if he could fantasize
climbing over that wall. And when the patient did, it
developed that there were green pastures there. The
wall had enclosed the patient’s jail; he was a prisoner.
Our patient may have, on the other hand, a complete
blank. He sees black. Suppose he describes the black¬
ness as a black velvet curtain. Now we have our patient
100 | Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion
and a prop. We can ask him in fantasy to open the
curtain. And often enough he will discover behind it
that which he was hiding from himself. Perhaps his
blackness is literally nothing, a blindness. We can still
get some orientation by asking him to play the blind
man.
The final step in dealing with the areas of confusion
is an eerie experience, often approaching a miracle
when it first occurs. Eventually, of course, it becomes
routine and is taken for granted. We call it withdrawal
into the fertile void.
To be able to withdraw into the fertile void two con¬
ditions must be obtained. One must be able to stay with
one’s techniques of interrupting it. Then one can enter
the fertile void, which is a state something like a trance,
but unlike the trance is accompanied by full awareness.
Many people have the experience before falling asleep,
and the phenomenon has been described as hypnogogic
hallucination.
The person who is capable of staying with the expe¬
rience of the fertile void—experiencing his confusion to
the utmost—and who can become aware of everything
calling for his attention (hallucinations, broken up
sentences, vague feelings, strange feelings, peculiar sen¬
sations) is in for a big surprise. He will probably have
a sudden “aha” experience; suddenly a solution will
come forward, an insight that has not been there before,
a blinding flash of realization or understanding.
What happens in the fertile void is a schizophrenic
experience in miniature. This, of course, few people can
tolerate. But those who find confidence, having success¬
fully cleared away a few areas of confusion, and having
found that they did not fall to pieces completely in the
process, will acquire the courage to go into their junk¬
yards and return more sane than when they went in.
The most difficult part of the whole experiment is to
abstain from an intellectualizing and verbalizing of the
on-going process. For this would be an interruption and
would put the experimenter in the position of being
split between the explaining onlooker and the experienc¬
ing performer. The experience of the fertile void is
neither objective nor subjective. Nor is it introspection.
 Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion | 101
It simply is. It is awareness without speculation about
the things of which one is aware.
The extremes of the reaction to the idea of the fertile
void can be typified in the intellectualizer on the one
hand and the artist on the other. The former might say:
“Have you suddenly gone mad? This is utter nonsense.”
But the latter would probably greet the idea thusly:
“What’s all the excitement about? I spend most of my
time in this state. If I’m working and I get stuck, I
just relax or doze off and the block goes.”
The aim of consulting the fertile void is basically to
deconfuse. In the fertile void, confusion is transformed
into clarity, emergency into continuity, interpreting into
experiencing. The fertile void increases self-support by
making it apparent to the experimenter that he has
much more available than he believed he had.
Let us return for a moment to the approach to the
areas of confusion through the interruptions in which
they manifest themselves. Even in this work we can
operate successfully only within an extremely limited
space of time.1 Three minutes is often all the area we
can cover and recover in toto if we use a mental micro¬
scope. It is all very well for the Freudians to demand a
recovery of the total life span as a goal for psycho¬
analysis, but try to experiment for yourself and see if
you can recover exactly what you or someone else said
or did only a few minutes ago. There are, of course,
some people who can do this. They are the type whom
Jaensch called eidetic persons. Goethe was such a one.
These people register with photographic fidelity on a
presomantic level. They register everything they sense,
meaningful or not, and they can consequently make use
of all their recordings when they want to.
As for the rest of us, and we are the majority, we
can restore quite a bit of the lost eidetical faculty
through the fertile void and other means of eliminating
the interruptions and blanks. One only has to consider
that every one of us has developed his own style, his
own character. Our patients’ interruptions and dissocia¬
tions will show up in their Rohrschach tests, their

1This insight is the contribution of my colleage, Dr. Paul Weiss.

102 | Shuttling, Psychodrama, and Confusion
handwriting, and their behavior. They will manifest
themselves in the smallest details of thinking and feel¬
ing. If we change the patient’s attitude about the inter¬
rupting behavior he presents in the consulting room, his
changed attitude will eventually spread and finally en¬
gulf his style, his character, his mode of life. His be¬
havior here and now is a microscopic cross section of
his total behavior. If he sees how he structures his
behavior in therapy, he will see how he structures it in
every-day life.
 7 WHO IS LISTENING?

When the patient walks into the consulting room,

for the first time or the twentieth, he brings with him all
the unfinished business of the past. Yet out of this multi¬
tude of possible events, he brings one event at a time
into the foreground. Muddy as his gestalt formations
are, even they have form and organization; if they were
utterly fragmented he could not operate at all. What
the patient brings into the foreground is always dictated
by the ruling survival impulse operating at the time.
Although the connection is often remote, it is our job in
therapy to trace it through. Usually we find that this
dominant need is for security or approval from the
therapist. We have expounded in detail the specific bias
of our school: that the patient comes for help and for
him help means environmental support, since he is
lacking in self-support.
This above explanation seems to come closer to hit¬
ting the mark than does any other. Yet we cannot in any
specific case know it to be true unless the patient states
it to us convincingly. Since the goal of therapy must be
related to the patient’s experience of his needs, and
since he may not experience his needs in this fashion,
perhaps we should talk in terms of an even more gen¬
eral goal, and one on which all schools of psychotherapy
agree: successful therapy frees in the patient the ability
to abstract and to integrate his abstractions.
To do this, the patient must come to his “senses.” He
must learn to see what is there, and not what he
imagines to be there. He must stop hallucinating, trans¬
ferring, and projecting. He must stop retroflecting and
interrupting himself. He must liberate his semantic
103
104 j Who Is Listening?
faculties. He must understand himself and others, and
stop twisting and distorting meanings through the off-
axis glasses of introjection, prejudices, and convictions.
Then he will acquire freedom of action (which is part
of health) by transcending the limits of his specific
character, and by learning to cope with each new situa¬
tion as a new situation, and to cope with it by making
use of his total potential.
Since the therapist’s abstractions are dictated by his
own interruptions and by the things he looks for in the
patient, how can he set out to help? Ideally, the thera¬
pist would act in compliance with the demands of the
Eastern sages: “make yourself empty so that you can be
filled,” or with Freud’s rephrasing of that concept in
the demand that the therapist’s attention be free-floating
and he himself free from complexes.
But such an ideal therapist does not exist—and I am
not sure he would be any help if he did. For he would
be a registering and computing machine; not a human
being. He would be free from private and personal
troubles, preferences, and limitations. In short, he would
be free from himself. If he were genuinely bothered by
a toothache, for instance, he would be expected to
bracket off his pain and free his attention entirely for
the patient.
The real-life, flesh and blood therapist will inevitably
display his own personality and his own prejudices in
the therapeutic situation. The associationist will look for
associations; that is, verbal and pictorial content. The
behaviorist will look for verbal and motoric operations.
The moralist will look for good and bad attitudes. The
Gestaltist will look for finished and unfinished situations.
But the more the therapist relies on his convictions
and prejudices, the more he has to depend on specula¬
tion to figure out what is going on within the patient.
Though many of these psychiatric speculations have
been so generally accepted that they have assumed
almost the character of reflexes—the phallic symbol
hidden in every elongated body, for instance—does not
alter the fact that they are speculations and fixed ab¬
stractions, like the neurotic’s fixed abstractions. As
 Who Is Listening? | 105
such, they prevent the therapist from seeing anything
else.
In other words, whatever we say about the patient’s
interruptions, fixed abstractions, etc., applies in a lesser
degree to the therapist. There is neither a clear-cut
qualitative difference between the two, nor is there an
absolute equality. There is a hierarchy of greater or
lesser freedom from neurosis. In our group therapy
sessions, we often find two patients playing a folie a
deux, and invariably it develops that the one with less
need for environmental support (in other words, the
less neurotic one) will be the therapist—that is, he will
facilitate the other’s development—even if that other is
more intent on playing the therapist.
If the therapist has a strong power drive, he will not
assist the patient towards self-assertion, but on the con¬
trary will prevent him from even reaching towards it.
If he needs the support of rigid theories to make up for
his lack of self-support, he will squash the patient by
ascribing any difference in point of view to resistance.
If the therapist is deeply withdrawn, he will talk about
interpersonal relationships, but he will not reach the
patient.
In all these cases, and in the many others which are
possibilities, he will actually be falling for the patient’s
manipulations, for he will be unaware that the patient’s
superficial acceptance of his preachings and interpreta¬
tions will produce no changes in behavior.
Usually there are three courses open to the therapist,
regardless of his bias or theoretical approach. One is
sympathy, or involvement in the total field—awareness
of both the self and the patient. Another is empathy—
a kind of identification with the patient which excludes
the therapist himself from the field and thus excludes
half the field. In empathy, the therapist’s interest is
centered exclusively around the patient and his reac¬
tions. The ideal therapist I mentioned earlier is an
empathist. Lastly, there is apathy—disinterest, repre¬
sented by the old psychiatric joke, “who listens?” Obvi¬
ously, apathy gets us nowhere.
Most psychiatric schools, in their quest for an ideal
106 | Who Is Listening?
therapist, look for him to be empathetic. This develops
partly out of their pre-field, dualistic approach. But
even so, there is a good reason for the reduction of
sympathy to empathy. If the therapist is in sympathy
with his patient, he may be inclined to give the latter
all the environmental support he wants, or to become
defensive and feel guilty if he does not. Therapists often
have experiences in which they become too involved
with their patients; they do not realize the tremendously
subtle nature of the patient’s manipulatory techniques.
In these cases, therapy can be unsuccessful. For to
bring about the transformation from external to self-
support, the therapist must frustrate the patient’s en¬
deavors to get environmental support. This he cannot
do if sympathy blinds him to their manipulations.
Yet if the therapist withholds himself, in empathy,
he deprives the field of its main instrument, his intuition
and sensitivity to the patient’s on-going processes. He
must, then, learn to work with sympathy and at the
same time with frustration. These two elements may
appear to be incompatible, but the therapist’s art is to
fuse them into an effective tool. He must be cruel in
order to be kind. He must have a relational awareness
of the total situation, he must have contact with the
total field—both his own needs and his reactions to
the patient’s manipulations and the patient’s needs and
reactions to the therapist. And he must feel free to
express them.
Actually, if you examine this proposal for a moment,
you will see that it comes closer than any other ap¬
proach to making the consulting room a microcosm of
life. In our daily relations with people—if they are not
clouded over by hostility and other unfinished busi¬
nesses—this is the situation that is obtained. A truly
satisfactory and healthy relationship between any two
people demands of each of them the ability to blend
sympathy with frustration. The healthy person does not
trample on the needs of others, nor does he permit his
own needs to be trampled on. Neither is he resentful of
his partner’s assertion of his own rights.
Of course, the other therapeutic procedure of em¬
pathy is also like a real-life situation. But the weakness
 Who Is Listening? | 107
is that it is like precisely those situations which en¬
gender and strengthen neurotic development. There can
be no true contact in empathy. At its worst it becomes
confluence. What about the therapist whose approach
is consistently a frustrating one? He is duplicating the
situations of constant interruption which the patient has
incorporated into his own life and which show them¬
selves as neurosis.
With sympathy alone, the therapist becomes the
patient; if we were to talk in old-fashioned terms, we
could say he spoils the patient. With frustration only,
the therapist becomes the hostile environment, with
which the patient can cope only in a neurotic way. In
either case, therapy gives the patient no incentive to
change.
In sympathy, as in all forms of confluence, the con¬
tact boundary is absent. The therapist becomes so much
the patient that he can have absolutely no perspective
on the latter’s problems. He is immersed in the field so
completely that he cannot be witness to it. I have known
therapists who had such strong needs to mother and to
be helpful that they were in chronic confluence with
their patients. It is hardly surprising that they should
have been very much liked. Their patients depended on
them completely, and so no decisive change could
occur. If there is too much identification, the therapist
can frustrate the patient only as little as he can frustrate
himself. And that is nil in those areas of confusion and
crisis which are relevant for the production of neurosis.
There is one exception. The empathetic, non-frustrat¬
ing technique is helpful in the initial phase of treatment
of psychosis. Some therapists, notably Fromm-Reich-
mann, Rosen and Steinfeld, use precisely this approach.
Their intuitions of the patient’s wants, and their ability
to make contact is high. And in the case of psychosis,
frustration is already present in the patient to such a
high degree that the therapist does not need to produce
any. His contact with the patient can itself facilitate the
transformation of support. But first the patient must
become aware of, and, if possible, develop enough self-
support from communication alone to enable him to
express his needs, even though he may speak in a lan-
108 | Who Is Listening?
guage which is incomprehensible to most of us. In
dealing with psychotics, we are very careful not to use
the tool of frustration too much. We are careful, too, to
let them and their behavior—rather than our fantasies
and theories about psychosis—guide us.
A demonstration of Gestalt therapy was made in a
large mental institution with a patient who had been,
for several years, in a close to catatonic state. No one
and nothing had been able to reach her. When she com¬
municated at all, she said only that she felt nothing. I
noticed, when I began to work with her, that there was
a slight trace of moisture in her eyes. Since this might
have been indicative of a desire to cry, I asked the
patient if she would be willing to repeat, several times,
the phrase “I won’t cry.” (This repetition technique has
already been mentioned.) The patient was quite com¬
pliant. She droned out the phrase several times—tone-
lessly, expressionlessly, dully. I noticed, however, that
while she was mechanically repeating the phrase, she
was slapping her arm against her hip. And so I asked
her what that movement reminded her of. Then she
burst into speech.
“It’s like a mother hitting a child ... all my mother
can do is pray for me.”
“Can you pray for yourself?” I asked her.
More animated than at the beginning of the session,
but still rather apathetic, she began repeating some
prayers. This went on for a while. The prayers were
now sensible, now pure mumbo-jumbo. But all of a
sudden she called out, pleadingly, “God give me
health!” And she broke into a torrent of tears.
This was the first time she had shown any emotion
at all. But even more significant, her prayer was a form
of self-expression. It was, for the first time, a statement
of her needs. It was the opening to her self. And just
as the neurotic transforms a repression or a resistance
into an expression he is demonstrating some degree of
self-support—so this psychotic began to discover, in
her outburst, that she had at least enough support avail¬
able within her to make her needs known.
The completely frustrating approach and the sadistic
attitude are actually the stock in trade of those thera-
 Who Is Listening? J 109
pists who, in dread of a counter-transference and fear¬
ful of their own feelings, present the patient with a
poker-face. They would deny it vociferously, but they
frustrate the patient through their apathy.
Can we call them sadists? Sadism itself can be de¬
fined as unnecessary cruelty. But this definition sounds
like a loose formulation. Is not all cruelty unnecessary?
Apparently not. Animals kill one another and we our¬
selves kill steers and pigs for meat. True, the cut-and-
can-fed urbanite lives quite removed from the primitive
cruelties of life, but he replaces the horrors of the
slaughterhouse and the jungle with his horror movies
and Mickey Spillanes. Hurting as a fixed pattern of
making contact is sadism, but hurting as a means or
meaning can be beneficial. We hurt our children when
we deny them unreasonable requests, but this is not
sadism. We are cruel in order to be kind; this is essen¬
tially the meaning of such maxims as “spare the rod
and spoil the child,” although in application it is not
always easy to say how much of this may be a rationali¬
zation to cover up the sensual satisfaction of beating,
which without question would be sadism.
It seems unnecessary frustration, and therefore sad¬
ism, to impose unnecessary suffering on the patient in
therapy. Too many therapists present their patients with
long lists of “thou shalt nots.” They force taboos of
abstention on them, they blame them for their resis¬
tances. If the therapist has a strong power drive, his
reasons for making these demands are sadistic. But
usually this is not the case. Usually the therapist be¬
lieves, in good faith, that by limiting the patient’s be¬
havior outside the consulting room, he reduces the
frustrations the patient will suffer. Here he makes a
mistake. These frustrations are out of control anyway;
if they were not, the patient would not be in therapy.
And we do not change environmental support into self-
support by increasing our patient’s frustrations in daily
life. What we frustrate is his endeavor to control us by
his neurotic manipulations. This forces him to fall back
on his own resources and develop self-support. Then he
can.direct all his manipulatory skill towards the satis¬
faction of his real needs.
110 | Who Is Listening?
The over-frustrated patient will suffer, but he will
not develop. And he will find, with the neurotic’s
shrewd intuition and distorted vision, all kinds of ways
to circumvent the long-range frustrations the therapist
imposes on him.
But frustration must be used. I had a patient who
had only three months available for therapy; at the end
of that period he was to leave the city. Whether in this
case it was the spadework of other therapists, or the
pressure of time, or my own skill and the techniques of
Gestalt therapy that produced important improvements
in him I am not prepared to say. But improvements
undeniably occurred. And they were so apparent that
the patient left feeling that I was a miracle-worker.
When he first appeared, he was nearlv mute. He felt
weak and incapable; he felt that he had to run away
from people—he could not carry on any conversation
at all and he suffered real torments if he had to be in
any kind of social situation. Additionallv, he had a
pretty fully developed system of prelections; he felt
persecuted and was convinced that others thought him
a homosexual.
The first six weeks of therapy—more than half the
available time—were spent in frustrating him in his
desperate attempts to manipulate me into telling him
what to do. He was by turn plaintive, aggressive, mute,
despairing. He tried every trick in the book. He threw
the time barrier up to me over and over again, trying
to make me responsible for his lack of progress. If I had
yielded to his demands, undoubtedly he would have
sabotaged my efforts, exasperated me, and remained
exactly where he was.
One day he came in complaining that he behaved
like a baby. I then suggested to him that he play the
baby, fantasizing all the satisfactions he could get out
of that. From that point on, his progress was enormous.
He played out, with enormous satisfaction, all of the
phases of his development, from infancy through ado¬
lescence. He relived and expressed in fantasy any
number of disturbing events and unfinished situations.
By the time the three months were over, he had reached
a point where, having achieved satisfaction in the areas
 Who Is Listening? | 111
where he had been previously frustrated and blocked,
he was able to move on to new satisfactions and self-
support.
What I want to demonstrate here is that no develop¬
ment can take place before the patient achieves satis¬
faction in all areas in which he is confused, blank, or
stuck. And the prerequisite for full satisfaction is the
patient’s sense of identification with all the actions he
participates in. including his self-interruptions. A situa¬
tion can only be finished—which means full satisfaction
can only be achieved—if the patient is totally involved
in it. Since his neurotic manipulations are ways of
avoiding total involvement, they must be frustrated.
For this reason, the analytic and cathartic procedure
is as insufficient as is the procedure based on the thera¬
pist’s attempt at interpretative integration. In the first
case, with purely cathartic discharge, there is no trans¬
formation of emotion into action, into self-expression
and integration. On the contrary, the energv that will
support the contact functions is drained off, and the
balance of power is in favor of the self-concept. In the
second case, although looking upon his behavior as
meaningful allays much of the patient’s confusion, sub¬
tractive therapy—taking away symptoms and confusion
—does not develop the self-support we need to make
and realize our existential choices. The patient may
“understand” himself completely, but he is incapable
of doing anything himself.
Gestalt therapy makes the basic assumption that the
patient is lacking in self-support, and that the therapist
symbolizes the patient’s incomplete self. The first step
in therapy then is to find out what the patient needs. If
he is not psychotic (and even sometimes if he is, as
the case described earlier indicated) the patient is partly
aware of his needs and can at least partially express
them. But there are some areas in which the patient is
either unaware of his specific needs, or is blocked in
demanding what he wants. Often the therapist finds
that the patient is ashamed to make certain requests,
equally often he finds that the patient is convinced that
the only valuable help he can get is help that is guessed
and given without being asked for. Often he does not
112 | Who Is Listening?
know how to ask, or he is confused about what he really
wants. But once he can express his demands, his orders,
his commands, and his requests directly and actually
mean what he says, he has made the most important
step in all of his therapy. Instead of covering himself
over with his techniques of neurotic manipulation, he
shows and commits himself to his needs. The self and
the supplementing other (the therapist) are now clearly
defined and the patient comes face to face with his
problem.
The imperative is the primary form of communica¬
tion. It ranges from the primitive signal to the most
elaborately woven network of highly abstract objective
statements which render the signals, per se, unrecogniz¬
able. Yet we react even to these as if they were signals
pure and simple, imperatives, and demands. There was
a time not too long ago when Einstein’s formulations,
which we now take for granted, were felt bv many
scientists to be a challenge. It was to them as if Einstein
had said, “Look what I have found. I dare you to
accept it or knock it down.”
For the neurotic it makes all the difference in the
world whether he deals with the therapist through im¬
plicit insinuations or through open, explicit demands.
In the first case, he is trying to manipulate us to support
his neurosis, and we cannot fall for that trick. In the
second case, when the patient makes an explicit de¬
mand, he has already begun to clarify and discover his
lack of being. We must not supply the supplements he
is looking for, but now that he begins to recognize his
needs he will begin to learn how to satisfy them for
himself.
Here, however, we have to distinguish between ex¬
pressive and impressive speech, that is, between speech
which is meant to give vent to one’s feelings and de¬
mands, and speech which is meant to produce a reaction
in someone else. And such instances of relatively pure
expression and impression do exist as extremes of the
communication scale. To express joy, for example, we
do not need anyone around to impress with our state.
But to impress, we need an audience and need it badly.
In impressive speech we will do anything to get atten-
 Who Is Listening? | 113
tion. Even if there is nothing to express, we will conjure
something up or rake our memories for suitable con¬
versational tid-bits.
Genuine communication is at neither end of the scale.
It functions as a field event; it is of concern and it is
real to both sender and receiver. The primary demand
—which is a genuine communication—is not differen¬
tiated into expression or impression. There is a world
of difference between the babv’s anguished cry, to which
a mother responds automatically, and the attention¬
seeking howling of the spoiled brat, to which the mother
might respond—but with anger, not concern.
What is wrong with getting attention? The “hear ye,
hear ye,” of the town crier, the “Shma Yisroel” of the
pious Jew, the “silence in court,” the drowning man
crying for help—are they not all seeking full attention?
The difference between these cases and the baby on
the one hand, and the exhibitionist and the brat on the
other, lies in the difference between genuine expression
and the “as iff’ attitude. The brat conjures up his howl¬
ing and can replace it at any moment with a tantrum
or anything else that will interrupt what his mother is
doing. He is manipulating, but he is not communicating
his real need, which is not attention but may be escape
from his boredom. The baby cries for something for
which he has no self-support, as does the drowning
man. But the brat cries for something in an area in
which he should already be self-supportive.
The genuine imperative corresponds to the natural
figure-ground formation; it points directly to the posi¬
tive and the negative cathexis. Kurt Lewin said that the
cathected object has an “Aufforderungs character,” that
is, it is provocative, it has a character of demand. The
positively cathected object demands attention, the nega¬
tively cathected one annihilation. To annihilate it, we
don’t necessarily need to destroy it. If there is someone
who infuriates and irritates you, you do not have to
shoot him, throw him bodily out of the room, or put
adhesive tape over his mouth. You merely demand,
“Get out,” or “shut up.”
The imperative is, by its nature, the most powerful
tool of moulding the individual into a socially required
114 | Who Is Listening?

shape. From the primitive’s taboos and the Ten Com¬

mandments, down to mother’s dos and don’ts, its im¬
portance has never been underestimated. There is
nothing wrong with the imperative per se; the trouble
begins if, for biological or psychological reasons, the
receiver js unwilling or unable to receive the message.
This is merely another reformulation of our basic thesis
on the genesis of neurosis—neurosis arises if there are
present, simultaneously, social and personal imperatives
which cannot both be met by the same action.
If the demand and the thing demanded are accept¬
able, the gestalt is closed. The baby’s demand for
mother, the request of the unsure for guidance, the
responsibility relieving commands given the soldier; they
are all a unit, they go together hand in glove. They are
gracefully accepted. But if there is a resistance and the
imperative is executed nevertheless, we have resentment
and neurosis. If, on the other hand, the imperative has
assumed the status of natural law, “honor thy father
and mother,” for instance, and is nevertheless rejected,
we have either criminality or we have the neurotic feel¬
ing of guilt.
The neurotic’s trouble usually begins if, in childhood,
the imperative is against his grain but is nevertheless
accepted in good faith. Then an area of simple or
double confusion is created, and whatever decision is
made leads to despair.
The command “don’t cry,” for example, when there
is a genuine experience of grief, is a simple confusion.
This confusion is compounded if a semantic confusion
is tacked on to it. Orders like “act your age,” and “be¬
have yourself,” and others that have extensive connota¬
tions leave the child utterly mixed up. “What is it to act
my age?” “What is behaving myself?” We have found
in clinical experience that sticklers for detail were often
confronted with such vague demands in their childhood.
It is not exaggerating the situation to say that each
time a patient has integrated the dissociated parts of a
neurotic event like a symptom, and has managed to put
across a fully felt imperative—“leave me alone,” for
example—he has cleared away one area of confusion.
This is something he has wanted to say for years, but
 Who Is Listening? j 115

his introjecting pattern has forced him to interrupt his

expression.
But now the patient’s demand is a genuine impera¬
tive. It expresses his needs. It is meaningful to him and
to the therapist. The therapist can and should do what
he can to satisfy such truly felt needs and demands, as
the mother does what she can to soothe her fretting
baby. We could sum up the therapeutic approach pre¬
sented here and the therapist’s use of the tools of frus¬
tration and satisfaction by saying that the therapist
must frustrate those of his patient’s expressions which
reflect his self-concept, his manipulatory techniques,
and his neurotic patterns. He must satisfy those of the
patient’s expressions that are truly expressions of the
patient’s self. If he is to help the patient to any sort of
self-realization, he must, by definition, discourage any
satisfaction of the patterns which prevent self-realization
(the neurosis) and encourage exhibitions of the essen¬
tial self the patient is trying to find.
This again indicates the degree to which, as therapy
progresses, the therapeutic session becomes more and
more like the ideal of daily life. As the patient’s expe¬
rience of himself increases, he becomes more self-
supportive and better able to make good contact with
others. As he casts aside more and more of his neurotic
techniques of manipulation, the therapist needs to frus¬
trate him less and less and is more and more able to
help him towards satisfaction. As was said earlier, self-
support is very different from self-sufficiency. When the
patient is discharged from therapy he will not lose his
need for other people. On the contrary, he will for the
first time derive real satisfactions from his contact with
them.
PART I! EYE WITNESS TO THERAPY
 PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Fritz Peris might have begun the introduction to

this section with his admonition that “Gestalt therapy is
a commitment to boredom.” Many of us attending his
workshops had grown used to seeing what appeared to
be miraculous cures. We were jaded by the succession
of people working in the hot seat who were suddenly
released from self-imposed torture games. In his later
years Fritz grew increasingly tired of this game of
Lourdes. In a sense this was a come on.
Fritz knew he now had an audience of serious stu¬
dents. In his proposed book Eye Witness to Therapy
Fritz wanted to start with verbatim film transcripts of
introductory gestalt work. He wanted the student to
study these films and the transcripts in detail. He did
not see his work as enigmatic or miraculous. He be¬
lieved once we really understood the gestalt process
these isolated miracles would all fall in place. He hoped
these films and books would de-mystify the cult of
Fritz Peris.
The purpose of this volume is to encourage serious
introductory study. Richard Bandler chose excerpts
that are largely self-explanatory. In later volumes he
will present more advanced gestalt work which will
be accompanied by commentary by Karl Humiston,
Virginia Satir, and other therapists who have lived and
worked with Fritz Peris.
There are some obvious problems in studying the
transcripts without the film. Fritz placed great emphasis
on voice tone, inflection, and non-verbal communica¬
tion. The films are essential for these dimensions. Also
there is a problem with time distortion. The word
118
 Publisher’s Note | 119
“pause” can represent two seconds or two minutes, and
we read much faster than we talk. A half-hour session
can be read in five minutes. All these factors can add
to the illusion that Gestalt therapy is instantaneous and
defeat a major purpose of this study.

Robert S. Spitzer, M. D.
Editor-in-Chief
Science and Behavior Books
 3 GESTALT IN ACTION

What is Gestalt?

The idea of Gestalt therapy is to change paper

people to real people. I know, it’s a big mouthful. And,
to make the whole man of our time come to life and
to teach him to use his inborn potential to be, let’s say,
a leader without being a rebel, having a center, instead
of living lopsided. All these ideas sound very demand¬
ing, but I believe it’s now possible that we can do it;
that we don’t have to lie on the couch for years,
decades, and centuries without essential changes. The
condition under which this can be achieved is this:
Again, I have to jump back and talk about the social
milieu in which we find ourselves. In the previous de¬
cades, the man of society lived for what is right, and
he did his job, never mind whether he really wanted
the job, or whether he was suited for it. But the whole
society was ruled and regulated by ‘shouldism’ and by
Puritanism. You did your thing whether you liked it
or not. Now I believe the whole social milieu has
changed. Puritanism has changed into hedonism.. We
begin to live for fun, enjoyment, for being turned on.
Anything goes as long as it’s nice. Sounds good, too.
Sounds superior to moralism. It is, however, a very
serious setback. Namely, that we have become phobic
towards pain and suffering. Let me repeat that word—
we have become phobic towards pain and suffering.
Anything that is not fun or pleasant is to be avoided.
So we run away from any frustration that might be
painful and try to short-cut it. And the result is a lack
of growth. When I talk about the readiness to encoun-
120
 What is Gestalt? | 121
ter unpleasantness, I certainly do not mean an educa¬
tion towards masochism; on the contrary, a masochist
is a person who’s afraid of pain and trains himself to
tolerate it. I’m talking about the suffering that goes
along with growing up. I’m talking about facing hon¬
estly unpleasant situations. And this is very much
linked up with the Gestalt approach. I don’t want to
talk too much about the phenomenon of Gestalt, how¬
ever. The main idea of Gestalt is that a gestalt is a
whole, a complete, in itself, resting whole. As soon as
we cut up a gestalt, we have bits and pieces and not
a whole anymore. We come across this thing several
times, but just let me say that if you have three pieces
of wood, here one piece, here one piece, and here one
piece, these three pieces of wood are very inaccurate
gestalts. If you put them together like that then you
see immediately that there’s a triangle, but as soon as
you take this apart, the triangle disappears and the
gestalt disappears. Now, in the biological gestalt for¬
mation, the gestalt has a dynamic which regulates all
organic life.
The gestalt wants to be completed. If the gestalt is
not completed, we are left with unfinished situations,
and these unfinished situations press and press and
press and want to be completed. Let’s say if you had a
fight, you really got angry at that guy, and you want to
take revenge. This need for revenge will nag and nag
and nag until you have become even with him. So
there are thousands of unfinished gestalts. How to get
rid of these gestalten is very simple. These gestalts will
emerge. They will come to the surface. Always the most
important gestalt will emerge first. We don’t have to
dig a la Freud, into the deepest unconscious. We have
to become aware of the obvious. If we understand the
obvious, everything is there. Every neurotic is a person
who doesn’t see the obvious. So what we’re trying to
do in Gestalt therapy is to understand the word ‘now,’
the present, the awareness and see what happens in the
now. And to understand the now will take you any¬
where from four weeks to twenty years.
‘Now’ is such an interesting, difficult concept be¬
cause on the one hand, you can only work and achieve
122 | Gestalt In Action
something if you work in the now and the present.
On the other hand, as soon as you make a moralistic
demand out of it, you immediately see it’s impossible.
If you try to grasp the now, it’s already gone. It’s such a
paradox, to work in the now and still be unable to hold
on or even to focus on it.
The second point I have to make in regard to our
therapy is the word ‘how.’ In previous centuries, we
asked ‘why.’ We tried to find causes, reasons, excuses,
rationalizations. And we thought if we could change
the causes we could change the effect. In our electronic
age, we don’t ask why anymore, we ask how. We in¬
vestigate the structure, and when we understand the
structure, then we can change the structure. And a
structure in which we are most interested, is the struc¬
ture of our lifescript. The structure of our lifescript—-
often called karma or fate—is mostly taken up with self-
torture, futile self-improvement games, achievements,
and so on. And then two people meet, and they have
some different lifescripts, and then they try to force the
other person to your lifescript or you’re willing to please
the other person and efface your needs and become
part of his script—and then there is involvement, con¬
fusion, fighting; and people get stuck with each other
and the whole lifescript is being messed up, which again,
is part of the lifescript.
So what we want to do is to reorganize our life-
script. And the ways and means to do it can be under¬
stood to quite an extent. Right now, I am interested
in meeting some of you and I have to admit I have
a very bad memory for names, and I have to know a
person pretty well or have a shock or great joy when
I meet this person so that I can recall the names. In
order to work I brag about the six components of my
work. To work I need my skill, the so-called hot seat;
which in this case is very beautiful (Laughter), the
empty chair, which has the task of taking up roles which
you have disowned, and other people which we need
to understand our lifescript. We need something which
is absent, and I hope maybe today that we don’t need
it—that is kleenex, my cigarettes, and ashtray, and
 What is Gestalt? | 123
then I’m in business. (Laughter) So, I invite anyone
who wants to come forth and work with me to take the
hot seat.
(Don comes up; he is a bearded man, about forty,
and teaches art )
Fritz: Your name is ... ?
Don: Don.
Fritz: Don. I have only one request to make to you,
to use the word ‘now,’ if possible, in every
sentence.
Don: Like now I feel my heart beating. Now I
wonder why I’m sitting here. (Laughter) Why
did I wish to fill the void? Now I’m wondering
what there is to work with.
Fritz: Yah. Let me interrupt you here and switch
back to Freud and his psychoanalysis. Freud
said, a person who is free of guilt feelings and
anxiety is healthy. My own theory about
anxiety and guilt is this. Guilt is nothing but
unexpressed resentment. And, anxiety is noth¬
ing but the gap between the now and the later.
As soon as you leave the secure basis of the
now and jump into the future, you experience
anxiety, or in this case, stagefright. You get
excited, your heart begins to race and so on
—all the symptoms of stagefright. The fact
that we don’t very often notice our chronic
anxiety is simply that we fill the gap of the now
and later with insurance policies, rigid char¬
acter formations, daydreams, and so on. If we
reduce the later to the now, the anxiety is
bound to collapse. So, let’s do this now. Close
your eyes, and tell us in detail, what do you
experience now?
Don: Physically, I feel the warmth of one hand in
another. I feel, now I feel, um, tension through¬
out mv body. Especially up here. (Points to
his chest.)
Fritz: Fine. Can you enter this tension?
Don: It’s as if I’m being stretched this way. (Pulls
" his arms crosswise across his chest.)
124 | Gestalt (n Action
Fritz: Can you do this to me? Stretch me.
Don: (Gets up and pulls at Fritz’ shoulders.) It’s
as if I’m being pulled out this way.
Fritz: More. Do it as much as you need to. Okay.
Sit down.
Don: Now it’s gone away. (Laughter)
Fritz: If you learn to do unto others what you are
doing unto yourself you stop repressing your¬
self and preventing yourself from what you’re
going to do. I don’t understand your need to
stretch me—and here I have to shock you—
because here I have to introduce one of the
technical terms in Gestalt therapy, which is
mind-fucking. The very moment we just play
these intellectual games, like they do usually in
group therapy—they throw opinions on each
other, explanations, people interpret each other
—so nothing happens except these intellectual
word games. So what do you experience now,
Don?
Don: My own mind-fucking. (Laughter) Explain¬
ing to myself why I would want to stretch you.
Fritz: Okay, let’s introduce the empty chair. Ask
Don this question.
Don: Don, why do you want to stretch yourself
or another person?
Fritz: Now, change seats. And, this is the decisive
phrase—start to write your script between the
two opponents.
Don: Well, Don, you’re not good enough the way
you are so you’ve got to stretch.
Don: Yeh, that’s quite possible. One never knows
what one’s potentials are unless one does
stretch. I agree, I should stretch.
Don: Yes, um, you seem to have got the message,
and all you have to do is do something about
it.
Don: Yeh, I do try to do something about it, um,
sometimes. I’m constantly aware that I’m sup¬
posed to do something about it. I don’t always
do something about it. Once in awhile.
Fritz: Oh! We make now the first acquaintance
 What is Gestalt? | 125
with one of the most frequent splits in the hu¬
man personality. That is the topdog-underdog
split. The topdog is known in psychoanalysis
as the superego or the conscience. Unfortunate¬
ly, Freud left out the underdog, and he did
not realize that usually the underdog wins in
the conflict between topdog and underdog. I
give you the frequent characteristics of both.
The topdog is righteous, some of the time right,
but always righteous. He takes for granted that
this topdog that tells him he should stretch him
to prove the topdog is correct. The topdog al¬
ways says you should and the topdog threatens
if not, then . . . However, the topdog is pretty
straightforward. Now the underdog looks for
the different method. The underdog says, yeh,
or I promise, or I agree (laughter) or manana,
if I only could. So the underdog is a very good
frustrator. And then the topdog, of course,
doesn’t let him get away with it and it praises
the use of the rod and so the self-torture game
or self-improvement game, whatever you want
to call it, goes on year in and year out, year in
and year out and nothing ever happens. Right?
Don: Not quite, but ... the topdog keeps pushing,
and he gets ...
Fritz: Say this to the topdog.
Don: Yeh, you keep pushing and sometimes I give
you something but I often feel it isn’t adequate
enough for you—doesn’t quite meet your de¬
mands.
Fritz: So be the topdog and demand. What are
your demands? You should .. .
Don: You should get much more organized and
you could be far more intelligent about how
you go about things than you are right now.
Fritz: Okay. Now, again. You do unto others what
you do to yourself. Say the same sentence to
these people here. You should get better or¬
ganized.
Don: (Sigh) Bill, if you want to improve, you
should get much better organized and make
126 J Gestalt In Action
much better use of your time and energy. Ann,
you should get much more organized and be
more intelligent about how you go about how
you go about things and you’ll go a lot further.
Gail, you can do the same.
Fritz: How do you feel when you say this to others
and not to yourself?
Don: I feel that they could tell me to go to hell.
Fritz: (To group.) Tell him to go to hell. You
keep on nagging and nagging and no one tells
you to go to hell.
Gail: Go to hell.
Don: Haven’t I told you often enough (laughter)
that you should work harder?
Gail: As a matter of fact, you have.
Don: Ann, can’t you work harder? Can’t you or¬
ganize yourself better?
Ann: I don’t want to, thank you, Don Babcock.
(Laughter)
Don: How about you, Bill? You could go much
further if you organized yourself better. You’d
be a wealthy man now. (Laughter) You’d
have a fantastically successful business if you
organized yourself better and worked harder—
with your talent.
Fritz: Okay, how do you feel now?
Don: I feel like a very self-righteous . . . (Laugh¬
ter)
Fritz: How’s your stagefright?
Don: Oh, it’s sort of gone away.
Fritz: Yes, but this being self-righteous is part of
your lifescript and so you need a lot of people
you can be self-righteous with.

Awareness
Now this workshop is somewhat different from the
usual workshop, but in both cases, there’s, we have
two things, or one thing in common. In both cases, we
are dealing with a learning process. Learning is mostly
 Awareness | 127
misunderstood. My definition of learning is to discover
that something is possible. It’s not just the taking in of
some information. And all I want to do here is to show
you that it is possible to discover means and ways
whereby you can grow and develop your potential, and
iron out difficulties in your life. Now this, of course, can
not be done in a short workshop. But, maybe I can
plant a few seeds, take a few of the covers that will
open up possibilities. Again, let me repeat—learning
is to discover that something is possible. We are using
most of our energies for self-destructive games, for self¬
preventing games. And as I mentioned already, we do
this and prevent ourselves from growing. The very
moment something unpleasant, something painful comes
up, at that moment we become phobic. We run away.
We desensitize ourselves. We use all kinds of means and
ways to prevent the growth process.
If you try to be aware of what’s going on—then, you
see, very soon you leave the secure basis of the now,
and become phobic. You start running away into the
past and start to associate freely, or you run into the
future and start to fantasize the terrible things that will
befall you if you stay with what’s going on or you do
all kinds of things. Suddenly you discover that you’ve
taken up too much of the group’s time, and this is the
task of the therapist or if you work with somebody
else—the task of the partner—to see that he or she
stays in the focus of the experience and understands the
very moment and uncovers what makes him or her run
away. There’s a very complicated process of self-
deception involved. And as I’ve said before, a little bit
of honesty goes a long way and this is what most of us
are afraid of—being honest with ourselves and stopping
the idea of self-deception. As T.S. Eliot says, “Most
of you are self-deceivers taking infinite pains, but sel¬
dom are successful.” And Eliot said something else,
“You’re nothing but a set of obsolete responses.” And
if you are not in the present, you cannot have a creative
life.
Again, we have to go another step further and say
that neurotic suffering is suffering in imagination—-
suffering in fantasy. Somebody calls you a son of a
128 | Gestalt In Action
bitch, and you think you are suffering. You feel hurt.
But you don’t really; you don’t feel hurt. There are no
bruises, there are no actual injuries there. It is your so-
called ego or vanity that is hurt. You can even go a step
further and say when you feel hurt you actually feel
vindictive, and you want to hurt the other person. So,
what I’d like to do in the beginning is to take a few of
you and ask you to come on the hot seat and work on
the phenomenological basis. This means work on the
awareness of the on-going process. If you live in the
present, you use whatever is available. If you live in
your computer or in your thinking machine, or in these
obsolete responses or in your rigid way of coping with
life, you stay stuck. So let’s take a few of you, whoever
wants to come forth. And the more stagefright, the
better. (Pause. Marek comes and sits in the hot seat.)
Fritz: Let’s work very primitively, even if we
structure the whole thing a little bit. Rigidly,
pompously, for the first moment, you will very
soon see the meaning of it. So start with the
sentence, ‘now I am aware of.’
Marek: Now I am aware of, um, tension in my
right arm, now I am aware of faces (smiles)
looking in my direction. Now I am aware of
you, Fritz. Now I am still aware of my hand.
And now I am aware of changing my position
to a more relaxed position. Now I am aware
of the box in front of me. Now I am aware of
waiting for the pressure to be taken off me.
(Smiles)
Fritz: You see, at this moment he jumped into
the future. The word waiting for means he
stopped being aware of what’s going on. Ex¬
cept we now reduce his anticipation to the
ongoing process—and we do it with the re¬
quest of ‘how.’ How covers all possible means
of behavior. How do you experience waiting?
Marek: I experience waiting as this moment has
tremendous tension here. Definitely tension
throughout my whole body, plus a certain
fearful blankness is starting to cover my think¬
ing process.
 Awareness | 129
Fritz: Now I have to add what I’m aware of. Fm
aware that you’re doing a lot of smiling. And
even when you talk about unpleasantness—
like unpleasant tension—you are still smiling,
and to me this is inconsistent.
Marek: (Laughs) This may be true, uh, it’s a
weapon, I suppose.
Fritz: What are you doing now?
Marek: Intellectualizing?
Fritz: Yes, you’re defending yourself. Are you
aware of that?
Marek: Yes, now.
Fritz: So, maybe my remark was unpleasant to
you?
Marek: Perhaps, a little bit, yes. (Bites lip, smiles)
Fritz: Are you now aware of your smile?
Marek: Uh, don’t you like me smiling?
Fritz: Were you aware of what you did with that
sentence?
Marek: I thought I expressed a certain amount of
hostility, perhaps.
Fritz: You attacked me.
Marek: I didn’t mean to attack you, but...
Fritz: Now again, are you aware that you’re get¬
ting defensive?
Marek: Yes. I have a very defensive nature, I think.
Fritz: Okay, now the next one. I just want a short
example to reinforce the awareness basis. You
see, what we’re doing is simply sampling;
simply getting acquainted with the on-going
process of awareness and how the different
people avoid the full involvement in what is
there. We can now take the next step and see
what you are in touch with. There are three
possibilities—you can be in touch with the
world, you can be in touch with yourself, or
you can be in touch with your fantasy life.
The fantasy life—or the middle zone—was
first discovered by Freud under the name of
complex, and it’s the middle zone which is
the insane part of ourselves. It’s the fantasy
whenever this fantasy is taken for a real thing.
130 | Gestalt In Action
The real insane person is known as the person
who says I am Napoleon, and that he actually
believes he is Napoleon. If I say I would like
to be Napoleon, you wouldn’t call me crazy.
If I say, I’m Napoleon, go, march to Aus-
terlitz or whatever it is, you say, what is this
queer behavior of that guy? And especially
there is a zone in which we are fully and
absolutely crazy. That is in our dreams. You
see later on, just these dreams, the middle
zone, has assumed so much importance in
our lives that we are out of touch with the
reality which is either that reality of the world,
or the other reality of our authentic self. All
right, (turns to Don in the hot seat) will you
start with this experiment—now I am aware
of.
Don: Um, I’m immediately aware um that your
attention has turned from me, uh, turned on
to me, that my voice seems quavering. Um,
that my mind is sort of split between a fantasy
and being aware of my body.
Fritz: Now, my mind is split between fantasy and
body. For me, mind is fantasy. (Pause) And
when you say my mind is split, I guess you
say my attention is split.
Don: Right. Exactly. If my body is in my mind,
my mind is on my body, that’s where my
attention is. Uh, I still feel a quivering, like a
shivering leaf in my chest. I notice that my
hand is fluttering around a little bit. I point
it to my chest. Uh, the quivering is rising into
my throat. I’m aware that I’m staring at the
carpet. People’s feet are moving.
Fritz: Are you also aware that you’re avoiding
looking at me, looking at anybody?
Don: Yeah. I’m not looking—before now—peo¬
ple seem very tense, sort of suspended. But
very real.
Fritz: So, now you can start shuttling between
self-awareness and world awareness. The self-
 Awareness | 131
awareness is symbolized by the word T and
the world by the word ‘you.’ I and thou. And
if you have too much I, you are self-centered,
withdrawn and so on. If you have too much
thou, you’re paranoic or aggressive or a
businessman or something like that.
Don: (To group) Well, I have been looking at
you. I am looking at you now and the more
I look at you the less quivering I feel inside
myself. Uh, some of you seem to look right
straight at me, and some of you look out
from the side of your head or from the top
of your head. Shirley, you seem to be looking
at me from below/above. Dawn, you seem
to be from the side of your head, and other
people ...
Fritz: Now, shuttle back to self-awareness.
Don: (Cough) Uh, I feel a great ball of tension
in here. My mouth is dry.
Fritz: Now shuttle back to world-awareness.
Don: Uh, I seem to want to focus on one or . . ,
Fritz: You’re still in the T.’
Don: Um, Gordon, you’re looking very confi¬
dent, but a bit fierce. (Smiles)
Fritz: Now you saw him. Now shuttle back to
yourself.
Don: That makes me feel confident that you’re
(chuckles) confident.
Fritz: Now you see you get an integration. World
and I are one. If 1 see, I don’t see, the world
just is there. And as soon as I see, I strain, I
pierce, and do all kinds of things except hav¬
ing a world. Okay, thank you. (Pause, Penny
comes to the hot seat.)
Fritz: Your name is?
Penny: Penny.
Fritz: Penny, yah, you’re Penny.
Penny: Um, I’m aware of my heart beating. My
hands are cold. I’m afraid to look out and my
heart’s still pounding.
Fritz: Were you aware how you avoided me? You
132 | Gestalt In Action
looked at me and quickly looked away. What
are you avoiding? Were you aware of smiling
when you looked at me?
Fenny: Mmmmhhhmmm.
Fritz: What kind of smile did you experience
when you looked at me?
Penny: I’m afraid. I try to hide my fear. (Holds
back tears, bites lip)
Fritz: Is your fear pleasant or unpleasant? Do
you feel comfortable with your fear?
Penny: Yes. My heart’s not pounding so much,
anymore.
Fritz: Mmmbhmm, Now, try to get more of the
rhythm of contact and withdrawal. Of coping
and withdrawal. This is the rhythm of life.
You flow towards the world and you with¬
draw into yourself. That is the basic rhythm
of life. In winter we are more withdrawn—in
summer more outgoing. During the night, we
withdraw deeply and during the day we are
more busy with coping. If I miss a word, I
withdraw to my dictionary, and come back
when I’ve found the word to fill in the gap in
the sentence. So this rhythm goes on and on,
I and thou, together form a unit. And if you
have this middle zone, then this middle zone
comes between you and the world and stops
you from functioning adequately. In this
middle zone especially, there are catastrophic
expectations, or complexes that distort your
view of the world and so on. We have to deal
with this later. Right now, I want to give you
a feel of the contact and withdrawal situation.
Withdraw as deep as possible. Go even away
from this room, and then come back and see
us again. And see what will happen if you try
this rhythm.
Penny: Coming back is more comfortable.
Fritz: So go on with this rhythm. Again, close
your eyes. Withdraw, and each time verbalize
where you are going to. Are you going to the
beach? Are you going into your thinking bit?
 Awareness | 133
Are you going into some muscular tensions?
Then come out again, and say what you are
aware of.
Penny: I feel more relaxed. It’s, it seems more, uh,
just go inside myself. (Pause) But, I don’t
want to stay. (Pause) I get bored with it.
Fritz: You remember what our basic contract
was? Always to say, now I am aware. So,
when you looked at me what were you aware
of?
Penny: (Pause) Groping for an answer.
Fritz: Yah. You see, apparently this is now un¬
pleasant. So, you stop being aware. You start
to think and play around with probing, look¬
ing. In other words you are still withdrawn
into your computer. You’re not with me.
You’re not in the world yet. So, close your
eyes. Go away. (Sigh from Penny) Last time
you went away, you found boredom. Is your
feeling of boredom pleasant or unpleasant?
Penny: Unpleasant.
Fritz: Ah, so stay with it and tell us what is un¬
pleasant about being bored.
Penny: (Pause) I feel frustrated. I want to do
something.
Fritz: Say this again.
Penny: I want to do something. (Pause, closes her
eyes)
Fritz: Now, come back. What do you experience,
here, now?
Penny: (Looks around) The colors are bright.
Fritz: Pardon?
Penny: The colors are bright.
Fritz: The colors are bright. That is a good symp¬
tom. This is what we call in Gestalt therapy,
a mini-satori. She begins to wake up. Did you
notice—the world becomes real, the colors
are bright. This sounded very genuine and
spontaneous. (Pause) Will you come for¬
ward? Your name is?
Ann: Ann.
Fritz: Ann. (Pause)
134 | Gestalt In Action
Ann: I’m aware of a tension in my head. It’s all
around my head. I feel it as a tingling and a
tightening. Uh, like my head is going to sleep,
like a limb goes to sleep. And it, uh, bums, as
well.
Fritz: Now, go to the world. What are you aware
of in your environment?
Ann: (Pause, she looks around and starts to
cry) I’m aware of, a boy here looking very
kindly towards me, you. I feel him very kind
and understanding.
Fritz: Now we come to another condition in
Gestalt therapy. We always try to establish
contact. Can you say the same sentence to
him instead of gossiping about him? Say this
to him.
Ann: I feel, I feel, that you’re, that you feel very
kindly and sympathetic.
Fritz: Now withdraw again. (Pause) Were you
aware that you were crying a little bit?
Ann: Mmmhhmm.
Fritz: So why don’t you say so?
Ann: I’m aware, I’m aware of crying. Um, sort
of just being upset. (Sighs) I feel that it’s sort
of, uh, the upsetness is sort of, um, patterns
sort of broken up in some way.
Fritz: Now come back to us. This time, you came
to me; how do you experience me?
Ann: I experience you as, uh, a very, very, uh,
sort of real, sort of definite person, who’s
quite close and is, uh, is here with me. Well,
not with me, but with everybody that’s here.
Fritz: Now go away from me again. Parting is
such sweet sorrow. (Grins)
Ann: (Pause) I feel, I’m aware of, uh, tension
in my head. Sort of a tightening particularly
above my ears.
Fritz: Can you close your eyes?
Ann: Mmmhhmm.
Fritz: And find out how you do this. What are
you tensing, how do you produce your tight¬
ness?
 Marriage | 135
Ann: (Pause) I feel I pull things in and I pull
things together.
Fritz: Mmmhhmm. So come back once more.
Ann: (Looks around) I feel the, uh, group, uh,
is sort of opened up a bit.
Fritz: Yah. Good. Thank you. (Shakes her hand)
Now, this is the basis of expanding aware¬
ness. We don’t need LSD or any of the artifi¬
cial means of jazzing us up. If we produce our
own awareness, if we do it ourselves and
not rely on artifacts, we have all the basis for
growth that we need. So, let’s have a break.

Marriage

We spoke yesterday about the lifescript of a person,

and this lifescript has a number of other people in¬
volved, in that we need other people for a certain
amount of support for our self-esteem. We need other
people for feeding or sexual needs. But in many cases
our lifescript demands marriage. And the trouble in a
marriage starts if the spouse does not fit into that life-
script. In other words, if that person is not in love with
that spouse, but with an image of what the spouse
should be. Now very rarely does the image of the
spouse and the real person fit. So there are frustrations
and difficulties, especially if a person is cursed with
perfectionism. Then, you’re really in for trouble. The
curse of perfectionism is the worst thing that can befall
any person. Once you’re a perfectionist, you have a
yardstick, where you can always beat yourself and beat
other people, because you demand the impossible. And
once you start demanding the impossible from your
partner, then the resentment starts—the blaming game,
the irritations, and so on and so on.
So, in our marriage game, we can’t do much more
than just playing games here and finding some basis
for where people stand with each other. Let’s start with
the-same kind of communication approach that we used
in the awareness. In other words, I and you. Let’s first
136 | Gestalt In Action
get you two here (Don and Claire sit in the hot seats)
and you will face the enemy. (Laughter) So, your
name is?
Claire: Claire.
Don: Don.
Fritz: Claire, Don and I would like you to do this
in exchange—withdrawing into yourself with
the word ‘I* and then come back to Don and
say ‘you.’ Go back again—I and you. And
you do the same . . . shuttle and see to what
degree a simple communication is possible.
What we are most interested in, of course, is
what kind of communication you avoid. Of
course, there are plenty of catastrophic ex¬
pectations. If I tell you what I really think
about you, you will not like me, you will leave
me, or whatever the catastrophic expectations
are.
Claire: Uh, I find it hard to go into myself.
(Pause) I want to go out to you, and uh,
assure you that I’m with you.
Fritz: Go back again.
Claire: Go into myself, and I want to be myself
too. (Smiles)
Fritz: Are you aware that you are full of good
intentions—I want, I want, I want this.
You’re not telling us what you’re aware of,
but what you want. In other words, you’re
not in the now, you’re not telling us what
you’re doing but what you want. Okay, Don.
Don: Um, I’m back to the clutch in myself, here,
and I find it’s easy to go into myself, and uh,
more difficult to come to you. And, uh, I
think, I, I was, was aware, am now remem¬
bering when I looked at all the people, I
didn’t look at you when I sat here, before.
Fritz: This is very simple. A clear symptom of
avoidance. If you avoid looking at another
person, it means that you’re not open. Your
turn, Claire.
Claire: (Pause) I’m aware of tension, inside my-
 Marriage | 137
self. Sort of a throbbing. (Pause) Quivering
sort of expectation. I’m aware of your calm.
(Smiles) Uh, your certainty, what’s under¬
neath. I’m aware of my inadequacy to express
myself. Holding my thumb. Being unsure.
Fritz: Are you aware of your voice?
Claire: Quiet.
Fritz: Can you talk to Don about your voice and
what you’re doing to him with your voice?
Claire: Well, I hope it’s not so quiet that you have
to, to strain to hear me.
Fritz: Your hoping. What are you doing?
Claire: I’m talking softly. Hesitantly. (Pause) Un¬
certainly.
Fritz: By the way, this low voice is always a
symptom of hidden cruelty. It’s one of the
best means of torturing other people.
Claire: It’s not always soft. (Smiles)
Fritz: Don.
Don: I’m aware that I’m calmer now. And uh, I
think I’m calm partly because I feel your
uncertainty, and your fear, and this places a
demand on my being here and being present.
Uh, inside, I feel a kind of rigidity. Uh, I
think I’m trying to say to you ...
Fritz: Are you aware that you’re always saying
I think, I’m trying. Could you tell us what
you’re aware of?
Don: (Sigh) I’m aware of a sense that I’m be¬
coming like concrete. Sort of setting.
Fritz: Sort of.
Don: Like I am setting. Moving towards rigidity.
Everything is still. (Pause, Claire looks at
Fritz)
Fritz: What do you want from me?
Claire: (Turns back to Don) Um, I feel...
Fritz: What do you want from me?
Claire: Well, I was going to start to speak to him,
and uh, I guess I was checking with you.
Fritz: You’re checking up on me.
Claire: No, I didn’t feel that way.
138 | Gestalt In Action
Fritz: Mmmmm?
Claire: I guess, guidance that I was doing the right
thing.
Fritz: Could you tell him the same thing?
Claire: I don’t like to tell him the same thing—
that I’m looking to him for guidance. But I
realize my attitude has implied that. I was
going to say that I felt resentful that you
became rigid when you felt that I was fearful
that I can handle my own feelings, and it
made me feel quite strong.
Fritz: Okay, let’s have couple number two. I
don’t want to go any deeper yet. I just want
to get the first idea of how much communi¬
cation is there. Your name is?
Russ: Russ.
Penny: Penny. (Pause)
Fritz: Look, once more. The experiment is so
simple. I don’t mind you being somewhat
rigid about it. First, what am I aware of in
regard to myself—what am I aware of in
regard to you. If this is too much of a task,
please say so, then we have to deal with your
difficulty in comprehending such a simple
request.
Russ: I’m aware that I’m afraid of what you’re
going to say. (Pause) I can listen.
Fritz: Your turn, Penny.
Penny: I’m aware of the tenseness in my chest. I’m
aware of your looking at me very intensely,
that you seem to want me to carry the ball.
(Laughs)
Fritz: Is this what you’re aware of or is this what
•x you think?
Penny: It’s what I think.
Russ: I’m aware that I want you to do that. I
want you to get me primed, and I’m aware
that I’m ...
Fritz: Are you aware of what your hands are
doing? Now, please try the most difficult task
of all. Stick to the obvious. It’s obvious that
you just made this movement with your head.
 Marriage | 139
It’s obvious that you’re holding your hands
this way. It’s obvious that you’re nodding
your head. Try to get to the difficult task of
simplicity.
Russ: I’m aware that I’m trying too hard. I’m
trying to relax and trying to hold on at the
same time.
Fritz: How are you doing this trying?
Russ: With my hands, and my body’s rigid. I’m
rigid.
Fritz: (To Penny) Now, what are you aware of
there?
Russ: Your hands are saying something. Quietly,
softly—you’re leaning away from me.
Fritz: Now, the first time that he sees, yah? Now
go back to yourself, again. What happens in
this interval? Are you rehearsing?
Russ: I think so.
Fritz: So tell her how you rehearse.
Russ: I want to say the right thing. I want to do
the right thing. I’m not really sure where I’m
at with you, all the time I’m not sure that I’m
really hearing you, or whether I’m projecting.
Fritz: You talk, Penny.
Penny: I’m aware of the pressure on my right arm.
I’m aware that I’m leaning away from you. I
feel myself pulling back away from you. I’m
afraid of being sucked in.
Fritz: Your turn, Russ.
Russ: (Pause) I want to suck you in.
Fritz: Are you aware of that? Um, another diffi¬
cult moment—we are very much inclined to
do this mind-fucking bit. Talk, talk, talk—
just tell us your response, what you actually
feel. You feel yourself sitting on the chair,
you feel yourself nodding your head, so be
simple.
Russ: Fine. I feel I’m putting a lot of pressure
on my right arm.
Fritz: That’s it. See, this I believe.
Russ: I’m holding myself back with my left.
Fritzr Now we get to a bit of reality. Now, open
140 j Gestalt In Action
your eyes again. What do you see? What do
you hear?
Russ: I guess, I can’t come all the way out.
Fritz: Okay. Thank you. Next couple. (Pause)
It’s unbelievable that people who live together
have so little communication between them,
once you get to the brass tacks level—to the
real level.
Ann: I’m aware of ...
Fritz: What’s your name?
Ann: Ann.
Bill: Bill.
Fritz: Ann; Bill.
Ann: I’m aware of my heart pounding, and that
I’m aware of the, sort of, sitting in this chair,
sort of, very solidly back in the chair, with
my arms kind of propped on each side. And
I’m aware of you looking very, uh, intently
into my eyes. (Pause) And breathing more,
uh, quickly, uh, at least I’m aware of your
breathing.
Fritz: Bill.
Bill: My heart is thumping. And I’m leaning a
little bit on my left arm. The thing is, I seem
to totally, to be settling, settling down, com¬
ing to the center. (Pause) And I see you,
Ann. I see your face as being soft, but a bit
tense. And I see your right shoulder, just very
slightly tensed and ...
Fritz: Are you aware of what your eyes are
doing?
Bill: They’re wandering around.
Fritz: What are you avoiding when you look at
her?
Bill: I’m trying to find myself, right now, I
think. And I’m not prepared to deal with
what’s out there until I come back here.
Fritz: Very good. Close your eyes and withdraw.
So, this is a very good example—he’s not
ready to cope, so he needs more time for
withdrawing into himself, and to get support
from within. So, what do you experience?
 Gestalt Prayer | 141
Bill: I experience a need, really, to re-adjust my
position and to come right down to the
center ... to come back to, urn ...
Fritz: Take your time. When you’re ready to
come back, come back.
Bill: I’m experiencing some tension in my knees
right now. My legs are shaking a bit.
Fritz: Now, let’s integrate these two things. Tell
her of your inner experiences.
Bill: I’m feeling a bit of trembling now—I’m a
little bit uncertain, nervous, twitchy. (Pause)
That’s changing now.
Fritz: Ah, you notice what happened. From the
conceptual, from the intentional, to the atten¬
tion, to using this experience as a means of
communication. Now he doesn’t hide his
trembling anymore, he gives it to her. And, as
soon as you express yourself genuinely, all
discomfort disappears. Or, if you feel uncom¬
fortable you can be sure that you’re not in
honest communication. Okay, thank you.

Gestalt Prayer

This time I want to start, so to say, at the end of the

road. Namely with the Gestalt prayer. I would like you
to repeat after me and then I would like some couples
to see what they can do with these sentences. Now the
Gestalt prayer goes something like this: I am I,
Group: I am I,
Fritz: And you are you.
Group: And you are you.
Fritz: I’m not in this world to live up to your
expectations.
Group: I’m not in this world to live up to your
expectations.
Fritz: And you’re not in this world to live up to
mine.
Group: And you’re not in this world to live up to
mine.
142 [ Gestalt In Action
Fritz: I is I,
Group: I is I,
Fritz: And you is you.
Group: And you is you.
Fritz: Amen. (Laughter) So, let’s have some
couples and see what they can do with this
Gestalt prayer. (Don and Claire come for¬
ward)
Don: Um, you expect me home every night at
3:00 and I’m not gonna be there. (Laughs)
Qaire: I don’t think I expect that. (Laughs)
Don: Um, I think you do.
Claire: I like to feel I share with you certain
things—I sometimes feel you’re unwilling to
share with me. (Pause) I really am trying to
be I, and perhaps I don’t let you be you
enough. (Qears throat) And the more I try
to be I, it doesn’t seem to always be enough.
It seems I have to be that much more. I never
seem to catch up with myself.
Don: (Pause) Um, well, if you’re feeling a bit,
a bit bad about being yourself, and dissatis¬
fied, that’s not my problem.
Qaire: Then I guess I worry about what you are,
perhaps, too much, in addition to (laughs)
worrying about where I am.
Don: If you worry about where I am or what
I’m doing ...
Fritz: Yah, now you see what happens. I gave
them a task, and immediately the whole Ge¬
stalt approach is thrown out of the window.
No more talking about the present experience.
No more talking about really what is happen¬
ing. Instead of really communicating on the
level on which they are, they start the famous
mind-fucking game, which finally ends up in
the blaming game. Let’s try again, but at the
same time, stay with the now. Always tell the
other person your reactions and your thoughts.
And the simplest way is to think aloud. As a
matter of fact, I guarantee each one of you
to become a writer within six weeks, if they
 Gestalt Prayer | 143
can sit down on the typewriter and write out
exactly each word as they think it. It would
go like this—Fritz told me I could become a
writer in six weeks. I don’t believe it. I think
it’s all rubbish. Now what shall I write now?
I don’t know. I’m stuck, nothing comes. To
hell with Fritz. (Laughter) You know, if
you’re exact and honest, each word just ap¬
pears in your thinking, because thinking is
nothing but sub-vocal talking. What we usu¬
ally do in our so-called thinking is that we
rehearse; we try out and let it go through a
censor, and then let only those sentences out
as they are required to manipulate the other
person. We usually produce sentences to hyp¬
notize the other person—to persuade, to de¬
ceive, to convince. Very seldom do we speak
in order to express ourselves and bring our¬
selves forward. The result is that all those
encounters between human beings usually are
sterile. Usually either mind-fucking or manip¬
ulation. So, try again, on this basis, to say
what the basis of the expectation is. Then, to
save time, say I experience now, this, and so
on. And don’t rehearse. The therapy situation
is a safe emergency situation. You can try
out all kinds of things and realize that the
world doesn’t fall to pieces if you’re angry
or if you’re honest. And then you go out into
the world and you might get some more confi¬
dence. You see that people appreciate hon¬
esty much more than you expect them to.
Sure, many people will be offended and
peeved, but those are mostly the people that
are not worthwhile cultivating as friends.
Claire: I see that you seem apprehensive and
you’re clutching at your fingers, like search¬
ing for something to say.
Don: Um, you, um, I, uh, I’ve noticed that too,
that I’m pinching myself, and I’ve been
wondering why I’ve been doing this—fiddling
with myself.
144 | Gestalt In Action
Fritz: Yah. Now what a person does on a non¬
verbal level usually applies to that person
who is implicitly or explicitly in the thing.
If he pinches himself, it means he wants to
pinch her. (Pause) We usually do to our¬
selves what we want to do to others. So pinch
her.
Don: (Laughs, leans over and pinches Claire on
the leg) That was a gentle pinch. (Laughter)
Maybe I think there’s some truth in that
because, uh, I was saying to you just before
we came up here, you should tell that dream.
Claire: You were pushing me.
Don: I was being a pusher, and I think it was
none of.my business what you did, because
I also have a dream.
Claire: Yeah.
Fritz: Another most important non-verbal ex¬
pression is the mask a person is wearing.
Now you notice she is grimacing ail the time
and he is always wearing the serious pro¬
fessor face. Talk a bit to each other about
your faces. What do you see? What do you
observe?
Don: Well, I like your face, but it does smile a
lot, and uh, I think it reflects an uneasiness
and you’re trying to do something to people
with your smile.
Fritz: He’s interpreting her.
Claire: Well I agree, uh . . .
Fritz: And every interpretation, of course, is an
interference. You tell the other person what
they think and what they feel. You don’t let
them discover themselves.
Claire: Well I think it’s quite true. I, uh, mask how
I feel by smiling. And uh, I don’t like to hurt
people or maybe be too honest. (Smiles)
Maybe that’s it. Um, I find you look quite
steadily and honestly—slightly quizzical.
Fritz: How don’t you like to hurt him? Tell him,
I don’t like to hurt you, by being, so and so.
Claire: Uh, maybe by being honest. (Laughs)
 Gestalt Prayer | 145
Showing that maybe I’m too dependent or,
uh, wanting something that you’re unwilling
to give.
Fritz: You see, when she stops grimacing she can
be quite beautiful.
Don: (Pause) You are beautifuL
Claire: (Laughs) That’s really . . . (sigh) that
stops the conversation. (Laughs)
Fritz: A sentence which I would like you to use—
let’s call them gimmicks for the time being.
Two gimmicks I would like to introduce here.
One is, be very honest with where you stand.
Like, I’m stuck, I don’t know what to say
now. You embarrass me. It’s very simple if
you’re aware of yourself, then just to make
that statement; that immediately produces
some kind of reaction and some communica¬
tion. The other is, to translate the famous
projection screen, ‘it’ into I or you. ‘It’ takes
all the responsibility. (Pause) Okay, let’s
take the next couple, who was number two?
(Russ and Penny go to the hot seat) So start
also with the Gestalt prayer and then see
what you can do with it. You say this to him
and you say this to her.
Penny: I expect you to work. You expect me to
work. (Laughs) I expect you to be interested
in my interests. You expect me to forget
mine.
Fritz: You notice the smirk that came up in her?
Just keep your eyes and ears open.
Russ: (Pause) I expect you to be interested in
my interests. (Pause) I am blank. (Pause)
I expect you to communicate to me but I
don’t expect myself to communicate to you.
(Pause) Something like that. (Sigh)
Penny: I expect you to have some of the answers
and you expect me to have all of them.
Russ: I expect you to have children. I expect you
to be a good mother.
Fritz: I can’t see from here whether you’re look¬
ing at her. Say this again and look at her.
146 | Gestalt In Action
Russ: I expect you to be a good mother ... to
me. (Laughs, laughter in the room) I expect
you don’t want to be that.
Penny: I know you expect that.
Russ: I expect you to give me hell at times in
that respect. And, I expect that until I stop
wanting that, I expect your support in that
respect.
Fritz: Now let’s work a little bit on this. Put
that mother you want—the wife-mother—in
that chair, and talk to her.
Russ: I want your support. I want your love. I
want your guidance.
Fritz: Okay, now be this. Change seats and give
him all he wants. Give him support, guidance,
love, cuddling the tit, uh, the whole works.
Russ: (Laughs, shakes head) That’s not my role.
Fritz: Say this to him.
Russ: That’s, that’s not my role. I’m not sup¬
posed to do that. I’m .. .
Fritz: Fake it. (Laughter) At least, I expect you
to have an image of what you want. What is
important is that many people still carry their
parents with them. Need a mother and so on,
even sometimes if they are fifty or sixty, and
they do this in order to maintain their status
as a child. It’s part of their reluctance to
grow up. So, be the mother. Give him what
he wants. He . ..
Russ: I don’t know how.
Fritz: Okay, change seats. Tell the mother how,
tell that mother, wife, what you want.
Russ: (Pause, then kicks hassock across the
room; goes and fetches it, sits down. Sighs,
looks at empty chair)
Fritz: What do you experience now?
Russ: Animosity. Anger.
Fritz: You don’t sound angry. You don’t look
Jewish. (Laughter) But say this to that
mother.
Russ: I’m angry at you. I want your love and
attention, but I feel I can’t get it.
 Gestalt Prayer | 147
Fritz: Okay. Now, again. Take that seat and give
him love and attention. Russ, I love you, I
give you all the love and attention you want.
Russ: (Pause) Do you, you know I love you,
son. But you have to be a man. You can’t do
those things. You have to stand on your own
feet. You have to be the man in the family.
(Changes seats) Mom, I’m not a man. I’m
a little boy. I want the things a little boy
wants.
Fritz: Yah. Now, you see, here is where the
dream work comes in. He started on this
same problem in his dream. The road that
has to support him. It’s, uh, let’s call it more
individual therapy—individual growth in¬
volved—then he can work it out with her.
Okay, go back. Now, can you remember the
Gestalt prayer? Can you say it again?
Penny: (Sigh) I expect your support.
Fritz: No sweetie, you might need a pair of new
ears. This is one of the cases of lacking ears.
She probably talks. And people who talk
mostly have no ears. They expect other peo¬
ple to have ears but they themselves are deaf.
(To Russ) Can you remember the Gestalt
prayer?
Russ: I remember the first part of it.
Fritz: Say it to her.
Russ: I am I. You are you. I can’t remember any
more of it.
Fritz: Could you say I don’t want to remember?
Russ: No, I do want to remember. Well. (Pause)
Fritz: What do you experience now?
Penny: Ah, I feel kinda dumb.
Fritz: What do you feel about her not remem¬
bering?
Russ: She is not dumb.
Fritz: When you don’t remember, you’re dumb.
If she doesn’t remember, she’s not dumb.
Russ: (Laughs) She’s kind of uptight right now.
Fritz: Mmmhmm.
148 J Gestalt In Action
Russ: That doesn’t help memory too much.
(Sigh, long pause)
Fritz: Maybe give him, serve him chicken soup.
(Laughter)
Russ: (Clears throat, pause) Uh, I can’t, 1 can’t
put forth.
Fritz: (To Penny) You’re looking at me. What
do you want from me? As soon as I asked
you, your eyes went away from me. What’s
going on?
Penny: I, (laughs) all right, I’m not seeing any¬
thing.
Fritz: So we are probably here at an impasse.
The impasse—you get confused, dumb, go
on a merry-go-round, repeating the whole
thing all over, trying to get out of it, but
you’re stuck. And the two really seem to be
stuck with their expectations. But once they
have established the script, this goes on for
ever and ever and ever, if you don’t get
through the impasse. And this is—let’s call it
my pride. I think in Gestalt therapy, for the
first time, that we’re capable of going through
the impasse. If you don’t get through the
impasse, all you’re interested in is keeping the
status quo. Whether in therapy, whether
you’re in a conflict within your marriage, all
you achieve is retaining the status quo; at
best change therapists, change marriage part¬
ners, change the nature of the inner conflicts,
but the nature of this being tom apart remains
a lifescript—remains unchanged though the
actors might replace each other. Thank you.
So, couple number three. (Turns to Bill) So
tell her the Gestalt prayer.
Bill: I am I. And you are you. And I will have
no expectations of you. And I will accept no
expectations of me from you. (Pause) I am
I. And you are you. Amen.
Fritz: Now you say it to him.
Ann: I am I. And you are you. I will have no
expectations of you. And you can have no
 Gestalt Prayer j 149
expectations of me. I am I and you are you.
Bill: That’s great. (Sigh) That’s the way the
world is. It operates just beautifully that way.
Ann: I don’t feel it’s really that way for me.
(Laughs) I feel that it’s, it would be, you
know, that...
Bill: Right now, it’s not that way for you.
(Pause) How is it now for you?
Ann: I feel, uh, I feel that you’ve, uh, um, come
to me, and I haven’t really come to you. So,
I, I feel, in a sense, I feel an expectation, that,
you know ...
Bill: You feel I’m making a demand. Sort of
saying, turn here.
Ann: Yes. When you say, it’s great, that this is,
um, this is some sort of demand that I feel,
you know, it’s great too. (Starts to cry)
BK1: Would, would you believe that it, if I said
that was just the way I felt, when I said, when
I say that now?
Ann: Say it. Say it again.
Bill: (Sigh) I am I. And you are you. (Pause)
And I can’t say now that that’s great because
some tension has come into here.
Fritz: You see, it’s easy to repeat a sentence.
And to hypnotize yourself into the belief that
the sentence is a reality.
Ann: I, I feel, um, (crying) ah, this is, no feeling
that I have with you, that kind of, you know,
that some, that you sort of felt that something
was really good for you and I sort of put a
damper on it because I didn’t, uh, sort of
build it up or, you know, sort of give what
you want, sort of, you know, sort of fly away
with it. How did you feel then, you know,
when Fritz said that...
BiH: I just, uh, I just experienced, uh, some
tension in here. When, I suppose when you
asked me to' say it again, then I felt, uh, some
kind of compulsion to say it. And, uh, then it
wasn’t real.
Ann: How did you feel about me then?
150 | Gestalt In Action
Bill: (Pause) I, at the time, then, remembering
back now, I felt, I felt patient.
Ann: Condescending. Patient. What do you
mean by patient?
Bill: I didn’t feel that you should do anything.
And, you know, I often do. Then I didn’t.
The should factor wasn’t there. (Pause)
Now, you’ve found out, where I’m sort of at.
Now, now where are you at?
Ann: Mmmm. I, uh, I’m just trying to find my¬
self again. I think I, sort of, well, that was
thinking.
Fritz: Are you stuck?
Ann: Uh, yes, I am.
Fritz: So, describe the experience of being stuck.
Ann: (Pause) I feel that Fm sort of, uh, sitting
here, somewhat immobilized, waiting for
something to unstuck me. (Pause) Uh, I feel
some, uh, tingling around my eyes.
Fritz: How do you feel stuck?
Ann: I, I feel an unwillingness to move. (Pause)
Uh, I feel that I don’t really know where I
am. (Pause) On the other hand, I don’t just
want you to (laughs) tell me. I want to
find...
Bill: My, you know, my temptation is to, to find
it for you, or something. (Pause)
Fritz: We can roughly categorize speech into
three different categories. One is aboutism, or
signs, or gossip—when you talk about an¬
other person or about your feelings, never
touching the heart of the matter. And this is
what is usually also done in group therapy—
people talking with each other or at each
other. The second category is not quite ex¬
plicit here, but is the basis of the bad com¬
munications. This is shouldism, or moralism.
Always being dissatisfied with what is. You
should be different; you should do this; I
should do this; should, should, should. And
this is identical with expectation. I expect
you to listen to my commands and demands.
 Gestalt Prayer | 151
And the third is is-ism, or existentialism.
This is what it is. A rose is a rose is a rose. I
am stuck now. I feel I want something from
you. I don’t know what to do. I would like
to say to Fritz, to hell with you. I am bored.
Whatever it is. So let’s try a bit more on a
more honest level of shouldism. Tell each
other what you should do and you tell him
what he should do and what you should do
and so on.
Ann: You should, um, you should be there when
Fm lost. But (crying) not show me the way.
Just be there. You shouldn’t give me any
direction.
Fritz: Now this is a very important form of
manipulation. Playing the crybaby. I notice
this is one of your favorite roles.
Ann: Mmmhhmm.
Fritz: Instead of making him cry, you cry. Crying
is a very well known form of aggression.
Look what you’re doing to me, say this to
him. Look what you’re doing to me.
Ann: Look what you’re doing to me.
Fritz: * Again.
Ann: Look what you’re doing to me.
Fritz: Louder.
Ann: Look what you’re doing to me.
Fritz: Louder.
Ann: (Crying) Look what you’re doing to me.
Fritz: Now you begin to communicate. Now he
should feel guilty and down in the shit house.
Don’t you?
Bill: No. (Laughter)
Fritz: And so, start again. (Laughter)
Ann: (Laughing) He’s been through this too
many times.
Bill: I think you wonder what Fm doing to you.
Fritz: You’re no,t living up to her expectations.
You’re a very naughty boy. (Laughter)
152 | Gestalt In Action

Couples No. 1

Each one of us has this lifescript which he wants to

actualize. Now, sometimes you meet a person who
apparently fits into your lifescript, and then you marry
this person, and then comes the great moment when
you are stuck with each other. Now, this idea of
being stuck is quite known. What is less known is that
no marriage can be improved or made to function
well until you are fully attentive to the way you are
stuck. Some of you have seen the picture “The Woman
in the Dunes.” You remember how this man wanted to
get out of being stuck and the more he tried the more
he got into quicksand. And we have experienced the
same with the war in Viet Nam. The more we tried to
get out, the more we got stuck in the quicksand of that
whole thing there. And, I pride myself to have over¬
come what the Russians call the sick point. The Rus¬
sians have seen that in the center of each neurosis there
is a sick point, and they are satisfied to realize they
can’t get beyond the sick point. So leave the sick point
where it is and organize the energies around it, so to
say, and sublimate them. I believe that we can get
through that impasse provided we pay full attention to
the way we are stuck. Again, it’s not pleasant. It’s much
nicer to play the blaming game. You should be differ¬
ent from what you are, and so on, rather to realize that
one is stuck and find out how one is stuck and to work
from there. So, I like to give at least a superficial picture
of how you married or in love people are stuck with
each other. So, I would like each couple to come for¬
ward and spend a few seconds or minutes with me.
Your name is?
Russ: Russ.
Penny: Penny.
Fritz: Russ and Penny. So, you tell Penny, Penny
Fm stuck with you. Tell her how you are
stuck with her.
 Couples No. 1 j 153
Russ: Tell her how Fm stuck with her? Fm stuck
with you. How I’m stuck with her?
Fritz: It’s okay. (Laughter) Now, we’ll talk later
on about the holes in a personality. Appar¬
ently, Russ hasn’t got ears. So, Fm going to
be helpful. I say, tell her how you are stuck
with her.
Russ: (Pause)
Fritz: Okay, Penny, can you tell him how you
are stuck with him?
Penny: I’m stuck with you. You’re a lazy ass. I’m
stuck with your idleness, I’m stuck with your
greatness, Fm stuck with your motorcycle.
(Laughter)
Fritz: Okay Russ, you talk now.
Russ: I’m stuck with your bitchiness (Laughter),
Fm stuck with your, sometimes, extravagance,
Fm stuck with your practicality.
Fritz: How do you dream? (Pause) What did I
say?
Russ: Couldn’t hear.
Fritz: (To Penny) What did I say?
Penny: How do you dream?
Fritz: Can you tell us?
Penny: How I dream? Colorfully, vividly.
Russ: Hazily. I usually don’t remember.
Fritz: Okay, let’s have the next couple.
Mark: Do you want me to start? (Pause) Fm
stuck with your dreams, your wholehearted
impetuousness, your poetic qualities, your
dreams.
Fritz: By dreams, you mean daydreams or night-
dreams?
Mark: (Pause)
Jenny: I’m stuck with you not wanting me to do
certain things, your criticism. Fm stuck with
your fears, Fm stuck with your conservatism.
Fritz: What about your nightdreams? Do you
have dreams at night?
Jenny: Yes. You’re looking for a repeating pattern
in my dreams?
154 | Gestalt In Action
Fritz: Yes, possibly.
Jenny: Fm not conscious of a repeated pattern,
but I do have dreams.
Fritz: How about you?
Mark: I was thinking of a dream that she has quite
often. I was thinking of the one—the stair¬
well and there’s no stairs. The threatened
figure, that turned out to be something like
the...
Jenny: Well, my dreams are usually about adven¬
tures and doing things; things that are some¬
what harrowing.
Fritz: Okay, thank you. Let’s have the next
couple.
Sylvia: I feel like I have to invent things. I can’t
think of anything.
Ken: I get stuck with your pushiness, your,
sometimes, aggressions, your sloppy generali¬
ties, and your demands.
Fritz: What about your dreams? Do you have
nightdreams? Repetitive nightdreams?
Sylvia: You mean the same one all the time?
Fritz: Something similar. Yah.
Sylvia: No. All different.
Fritz: And you?
Ken: Uh, just one I had not too long ago. It was,
I kept, I seem to forget.
Fritz: Okay.
Ken: It involved Sylvia and I climbing a moun¬
tain with my cat (Laughter) and there was a
railway track going up the mountain and I
couldn’t understand how the train would go
straight up. And we were climbing very high
up and my cat would keep jumping off the
ledge and then it would be up again and keep
jumping down...
Fritz: Okay.
Judy: Why don’t you start?
Nick: I don’t feel stuck at all, I’m afraid.
Fritz: Say this to her. !
Nick: I don’t feel stuck at all.
Judy: Well I’m stuck.
 Couples No. 1 j 155
Tell him how you’re stuck.
Well, he knows that I’m stuck, but I, I
mean there aren’t specific ways that I can say
it, because I feel that he is a stuck person, in
the sense that everything in him is blocked
in. And so, I can’t say that I’m stuck by
certain things about him because I can be
objective and say, I like you, but in our rela¬
tionship, you’re stuck because nothing comes
out. But if I want something I always have
to go in and get it.
How do vou dream?
I dream very infrequently and when I do I
can usually remember in a sort of semi¬
conscious state. When I first wake up, I can
remember it very vividly, but never after¬
wards.
And you?
I dream a lot and a mood repeats itself in
my dreams although the circumstances always
change. I have very elaborate sets, but the
same moods.
Okay, thank you.
I feel I’m stuck with your, sometimes, in¬
confidence, with your sort of mucking up my
environment, so to speak. Moving things
around, cumbersome ways, really. I feel I’m
tripping over them, sometimes.
And you? Your name is?
Ann. There’s a lot of little things that I feel
stuck at the time with you, but the main thing
is a whole game thing, that we play, and
there’s all sorts of little things in you that
annoy me when we’re doing this, you know,
things like, well, mostly things that I feel put
on me ... I become the sort of guardian of
your prison, and I become the person who
sort of limits you.
Now that’s an interesting remark—I be¬
come the guardian of your prison—which
makes it immediately suspicious that he might
need a prison in his lifescript. So, you select
156 1 Gestalt In Action
somebody who will provide the prison. His
lifescripts are really the most intricate things.
It’s unbelievable—anybody would just write
down a drama or comedy, and wouldn’t be¬
lieve that he could use all these things himself.
What’s your dream like?
Ann? I dream a lot and I remember a lot. I have
twq that recur.
Fritz? And you, Bill?
Bill? I dream, I think more occasionally. There’s
sort of a repeated dream. It’s a freedom
dream.
Fritz? Good. Fine. Prison—freedom. (Laughter)
So, the next couple.
Dick? Fireaway.
Julie? Pm stuck with your irritability, your im¬
patience, your condescending attitude.
Dick? Fm stuck with sort of, us, and um, sort of
the way that I need you to stop me from
carrying my impetuousness to an extreme,
where I would ...
Fritz? He needs a power brake.
Dick: Is that where it’s at? (Laughter)
Fritz? Okay, thank you. Any more couples? How
many couples do we have so far?
Question: I think Nick is just so used to the word
“stuck” and the connotations that you’re try¬
ing to find out the bad things about it or the
wrong things about it, when, you know, we’re
used to that word.
Answer: I think Fritz did it. You, I immediately
resented you for saying that fantastic gener¬
alization about people being stuck. It’s like
something you’ve thought out and seen in a
lot of couples, and therefore it was true for
everyone, and I felt bound by your cliche. I
can say I resent things but I, I couldn’t say
I’m stuck with them.
Question: Doesn’t that mean that we’re bound by
semantics?
Answer: Well, maybe, maybe. Well, I choose to be
 Couples No. 1 | 157
stuck and therefore Fm not stuck, you know.
I mean, I choose to be. (Laughter)
Question: The word stuck implies that you want to
get out of it.
Answer: Maybe that’s just a semantic problem.
Question: Well, is mankind going to be stuck with
marriage for a long time to come or can we
find a better institution?
Fritz: Would any of these couples here think of
going to a marriage counselor or look for any
help in their marriage? Well, then, I think that
the whole thing is out of gear. You can make
a film on marriages, only the main idea is
how to help dead marriages to improve. Well,
what you might do is to try to improve the
marriage as though you’re not tearing on your
chains. (Laughter) Okay, next couple. (Ellen
and Gordon come forward) Now the first
thing you notice here, and the essential thing
in Gestalt therapy, is, the non-verbal is always
more important than the verbal. Words lie
and persuade; but the posture, the voice, the
non-verbal behavior is true. Have you noticed?
First thing is a closed posture. What’s your
name again?
Ellen: Ellen.
Fritz: Ellen. You notice Ellen is a closed system.
Legs are closed, hands are closed. Very
difficult to communicate with a closed system.
So, will you do me a favor?
Ellen: Mmmhhmm.
Fritz: See what would happen if you were to open
up. How does this feel?
Ellen: Easier.
Fritz: So, will you talk to Gordon and tell him
how you’re stuck with him?
Ellen: I don’t know. I haven’t seen Gordon for a
long time. ,
Fritz: Gordon, will you tell Ellen how you’re
stuck with her?
Gordon: I don’t feel stuck with you now.
158 j Gestalt In Action
Ellen: I didn’t understand your word. Oh, I
thought you said stuck and I was trying to
understand it.
Fritz: Stuck. Stuck. (Laughter)
Ellen: I don’t feel stuck wth Gordon—I feel, I
feel myself.
Fritz: So, there are no complaints in your mar¬
riage?
Ellen: Uh, well, there have been*
Fritz: But there are no more.
Ellen: Well, because we aren’t living, we aren’t
living together.
Fritz: Then you’re not stuck with each other.
(Laughter) Do you have any fantasies about
coming together again?
Ellen: I don’t Slink I do, anymore.
Fritz: What about your position, Gordon?
Gordon: I feel there’s something incomplete. We’ve
just sort of agreed to be apart, but there are
still the children to think about and there are
still, I’m still concerned in some way.
Fritz: What about you?
Ellen: Well, I’m concerned, but that doesn’t neces¬
sarily mean being together.
Fritz: So what do you want from him? You say
there are certain things that should still be
discussed. What about your position? Where
do you stand?
Ellen: I think there’s plenty that could be dis¬
cussed. But I don’t see, I haven’t any par¬
ticular expectation of, uh, coming together
or staying apart, or uh, whatever.
Fritz: Doesn’t matter one way or another. I
wouldn’t say this, ‘but!’ You probably have a
‘but’ somewhere on your hands.
Ellen: (Laughs) Maybe you have.
Fritz: There are two killers. One is the sneer or
the, let’s say, malicious laugh, and the other
is the word ‘but.’ These two are the psycho¬
logical killers. First say yes. Then comes the
but. Boom! There’s a little story about it
 Couples No. 2 | 159
Uh, mother says to her daughter, well, he’s
ugly but he has thirty thousand dollars. And
the daughter says, mother, you’re so right. He
has thirty thousand dollars but he’s ugly.
(Laughter)

Couples No. 2

Fritz: Well, we’ve got a new couple here in this

group, and I’d like to find out what might
happen with the people who have not been
initiated into the Gestalt approach. Will you
take seats? And your name is?
Irwin: Irwin.
Fritz: Irwin. And yours is?
Nancy: Nancy.
Fritz: Nancy. Would you start out talking for a
couple of minutes to each other?
Irwin: Hello.
Nancy: How are you?
Irwin: Fine. (Pause) How’d you like lying in the
sun?
Nancy: It was very restful. I enjoyed it.
Irwin: Yeah. (Pause) It’s hard to talk to you, in
a way. I don’t know what to say.
Nancy: Well, maybe you don’t have to say any¬
thing.
Irwin: Um, I feel sort of, that I should be saying
something. But I don’t know what to say.
Uh, first time I’ve looked this long into your
eyes. I haven’t looked this long into your
eyes. Uh...
Fritz: So may I have your single opinion? What’s
your impression of your marriage?
Irwin: Uh, some ways good, some ways, not so
good. Uh, in the way that it’s good, there’s
sometimes a warmth between us, there’s a
cuddliness. Uh, where it’s no good, or maybe
not so good, is sometimes I play the master
160 J Gestalt In Action
and she plays the nigger. Sort of a master-
slave relationship.
Fritzs Well, you see the topdog-underdog game is
not confined to the struggle within. We very
often like to project it, act it out, and then we
only are aware of the topdog in ourself, not
the underdog, because the underdog always
is there. And vice versa. Nancy, what’s
your...
Nancy: Well, I think lots of times I play underdog
and then I become resentful when, and then,
I guess I like to play topdog, too, to a degree,
in a way.
Fritzs Yah. Now, when you work with each other,
we’re going to play some marriage games.
And nothing you say will be taken as evi¬
dence against you. It means, if you promise
something here, or you say something, it only
holds good for within this situation here. So,
I want to say this so that it might be able to
mobilize your fantasy. So, let’s first play the
evocation game. When we address somebody,
we want this person to be there; we always
evoke the other person. With darling, or you
son of a bitch, or sweetie, or Jesus Christ.
(Laughter) Now, I would like to play this
evocation game in this way. You say Nancy,
and wait a moment, repeat it again. And you
nod your head, or shake your head, and see
whether he can reach you simply with evok¬
ing your name.
Irwins Okay. (Sigh) Nancy...».. Nancy
Nancy (Pause) Stink.
Nancy: (Laughs)
Irwin: Asshole.
Fritz: Just stick to the name Nancy.
Irwins Mrnhhmm. Okay. Nancy.Nancy
..Nancy.Nancy.
Nancy.Nancy! Nancy.Nancy
.Nancy.
Fritzs Now, let’s reverse it. See whether you can
evoke him.
 ' Couples No. 2 | 161
Nancy: Irwin. (Clears throat) Irwin.
Fritz: (To Irwin) Can y6u shake your head or
nod your head, so that...
Irwin: Yeah. First time I thought you, you got to
me. Second time ... (Shakes head)
Nancy: Irwin.Irwin.Irwin .. e. 0 2
Irwin.
Fritz: I notice, each time she calls you, you’re
looking away. Well, a lot is going on, just
simply with these two names. Did you feel
how much you experienced during this simple
game? This is the best test of communication.
Now, let’s play the resentment game. You
say, Nancy, I resent this and this in you, and
you say a sentence, Irwin, I resent this in you.
So, play resentment Ping-Pong.
Irwin: Okay. (Sigh) Yeah. I resent that you don’t
keep the house as orderly as I’d like it to be.
Nancy: I resent that you want me to keep house
the way your mother keeps house.
Irwin: Uh, I resent that you, uh, sometimes don’t
understand what I’m feeling. You don’t feel
along with me.
Nancy: I resent that you demand me to feel along
with you.
Fritz: You notice what happens—she just hits
the board again. Will you now say half a
dozen sentences of I resent this.
Nancy: Okay, right. I resent, uh, I resent that
you’re always nagging at me.
Irwin: Mmmm. ..
Fritz: No, just give us some more resentment.
Nancy: Oh me, okay. I resent that, uh, somehow
you make me feel guilty. I resent that you
don’t spend more time with me and the chil¬
dren at times. I resent that you don’t en¬
counter me at times. Uh ...
Irwin: Uh, I resent when I’m angry at you, that
you put sometimes, put your hands in the
air, and you go away yelling or screaming,
and not letting me, well, I don’t know, get
162 | Gestalt In Action
angry. But I resent that you put your hands
in your ears when I’m angry at you.
Fritz: All right, now let’s do the same with ap¬
preciation.
Irwin: Uh, okay. When I call you, I appreciate
that when I call you that sometimes you’re
there. I appreciate your holding me some¬
times and giving me a nice feeling of warmth,
a nice feeling of cuddliness. I appreciate,
sometimes, your ideas.
Nancy: And I appreciate your strength, and your,
uh, givingness, at certain times, when I need
it. Uh, I appreciate your sense of humor. And
I appreciate your bringing home ideas to
share. I appreciate, uh, some of, (Pause) your
spontaneity.
Irwin: I appreciate your daredevilness. You’re
willing to take more risks than myself. In a
way.
Fritz: Ya. Let’s go back to the resentment game*
Start resenting again, and follow up your
resenting with a should. Behind every resent¬
ment there is a demand.
Irwin: Mmhhmm, Uh, you should, uh, sense that
I sometimes need you. I think sometimes you
guess what I’m saying before I say it or some¬
times to sort of make it easy for me to say
what I want to say.
Fritz: Can you reinforce this? Say you should do
this, you should do that. Make your demands
very explicit so that she knows where she
stands.
Irwin: Okay. Uh, the other day I had sort of a
run in with one of the teachers at the school.
And, uh, I was feeling bad; I didn’t seem to
come off good with him and I was feeling
hurt. And when I went to the bedroom, uh,
you should have sensed my hurt and re¬
sponded to this hurt.
Fritz: Now you give him a resentment, Nancy*
Make a demand.
 Couples No. 2 j 163
Nancy: Uh, I resent sometimes that you demand so
much time that I don’t have time to do the
other household things that need doing or to
take care of little things. You become too
hurt over my, uh, doing anything but paying
attention to you. I think you should enjoy me
while I’m there and then say, be able to say
good-bye.
Fritz: Now you give her a demand.
Irwin: Okay. Uh, when I’m feeling closed, don’t
come o\er and sort of open me up. Uh, don’t
just jump at me. I don’t know what you could
do—perhaps sort of indicate that you’re
about to come to me. That doesn’t make any
sense, but, uh, at least don’t, uh, when I feel
closed don’t come into me. Then when I feel
open, be open to me. Specifically, sometimes
in the morning you’ll come over and hug me
and I’ll feel closed—so don’t hug me when I,
when you sense I’m closed.
Fritz: Now you demand, Nancy.
Nancy: Um, I don’t want to feel so guilty. I don’t
know whether you make me feel guilty or I
make myself feel guilty. But I don’t think
you’re somehow helping the situation. I don’t
exactly know how to tell you not to make me
feel guilty, because that’s silly. But, um, I
think you get messed up in it somehow.
Fritz: Okay. Next step. He makes a demand on
you and you are spiting him. You say, all
right, if you want to be closed, I’ll come with
an axe and break you open. Just get the
wildest spite into this. (Laughter)
Nancy: Mmm. Okay.
Fritz: This is the best way to improve marriages,
believe it or not.
Irwin: Yeah. This actually happened last week.
(Laughter) Uh, I feel like just taking a walk
and being by myself and I don’t want to walk
with you. I feel like walking to the school
by myself, and I stay home and I just need
164 | Gestalt In Action
a moment of aloneness, and don’t come with
me. Stay where you are, stay on the couch*
And uh, good-bye.
Fritz: Spite him.
Nancy: I feel very furious that, that you’re doing
that. I’m going to ...
Fritz: No, no, no. That’s not spiting. When you’re
going to school I’m going to hang onto
you...
Nancy: Yeah, Fm going to hang onto you.
Fritz: Frustrate him to the gills.
Nancy: I will, I will cry. I will throw a temper
tantrum, I will jump up and down, I will say
don’t go. I will make you feel terribly guiltye
Fritz: You see, now she becomes alive.
Nancy: Uh, yes, right. (Laughter) Uh, I will jump
up and down. I will make you feel very guilty
by telling you how much you’re neglecting
me and uh, that you don’t, that you really
should, that your duty is to stay with me.
Fritz: Okay. Now you give him a demand. And
you spite her. And you see how good you are
in spiting.
Nancy: Uh, take out the garbage.
Irwin: No, I’m not taking out the garbage. I have
to go upstairs and I have to read and, uh,
and let’s see, I’ve got a lot of things to do.
I’m really too tired. You take out the garbage.
Uh, I’ve got to go down and do some sculp¬
turing. Fve got to do something that is more
important than taking out the garbage. Uh,
I’m not going to do it. You should do it.
Fritz: You make a demand. Spite her again. You
notice that she’s much better at spiting and
you also probably noticed in the beginning
that she’s the good girl. And behind the good
girl and the good boy, there’s always the
spiteful brat.
Irwin: Uh, let’s see, okay. Drive carefully. Now
remember, put the clutch all the way in and
don’t forget you’re supposed to be in fourth,
not in third. I told you hundreds of times
 Couples No. 2 | 165
that when we’re past thirty five that you put
it into fourth.
Fritz: Now spite him.
Nancy; Well, uh, so I won’t go over thirty five. So
then I won’t go into fourth and that’ll teach
you. (Laughter)
Fritz: Good. Now you make a demand on him.
Nancy: Uh, I would like to go to the symphony,
and I know you don’t want to go, so Fm
going to find some of my friends and go with
them.
Irwin; Well, maybe Fll go wifi you. And, uh, if
the music is not to my liking, I’ll make it
really difficult for you. I’ll tell you how
crappy it is, and how modem it is and how
shitty it is and Fll indicate that this kind of
music is-too, uh, too new for me, and Fll
make you feel really crummy. Fll indicate
that the music is shitty because I know you
like music.
Fritz: Now, let’s play the compliance game. You
make a demand and you exaggerate this
compliance.
Irwin: Uh, rub my feet. Would you?
Nancy: Oh, I’ll rub your feet. Fll rub them all
night long. I’ll rub them so hard I can . . e
they’ll get sore. (Laughter)
Fritz: Make a demand. See if she’s capable of
complying.
Irwin: Okay. Uh, (Sigh) when I feel bad, when I
feel hurt, when something goes wrong at
, school, can you come up and give me re¬
assurance, can you tell me that the world is
not going to fall apart and that the, uh, that
everything is okay?
Nancy: I can try. I can make it. Should I make it
absurd?
Fritz: No. I want to test you out whether you’re
capable at all to be cooperative and suppor¬
tive and compliant. Or whether you’re just a
spiteful brat
 166 j Gestalt In Action
Nancy: Um yes, I can come up and, uh, perhaps,
urn...
Fritz: Perhaps. I try. You know the typical lan¬
guage of the underdog. Let me repeat the
underdog-topdog behavior in this context.
The topdog is the righteous bully. The one
who tells the underdog how to behave and so
e*
on. Usually straightforward in his demands
and commands. The underdog says yeah, I
try my best, if I could do it. In other words,
the underdog usually wins. The topdog con¬
trols and the underdog is in control. Okay,
thank you. That’s as far as I want to go.
Nancy: Thank you.
Fritz: So, next couple. Your name is?
Marty: Marty.
Susan: Susan.
Fritz: So, I like Marty and you. See how much
more we can get into the understanding of
spite. We’ll start with the resentment game.
Let’s also start with the evocation game.
(Pause)
Marty: Okay. Um, I resent the fact that you don’t
give me more freedom and you should be
willing and able to give me more freedom
than you do.
Susan: I resent, uh, not having freedom also. And
I resent the feeling of guilt when I do have-
take freedom.
Marty: I resent, I resent you when you turn, when
you turn off to me. When you pretend to be
angry.
Fritz: Tell her you should. Follow up with you
should.
Marty: (Sigh) You should, and you should not do
this.
Fritz: Say this again.
Marty: And you should not do this?
Fritz: Can you cut out the and?
Marty: You should not do this.
Fritz: Say it again.
Marty: You shouldn’t do it
 Couples No. 2 | 167
Fritz: Louder.
Marty: You shouldn’t do it!
Fritz: Scream it at her.
Marty: You shouldn’t do it!
Fritz: You shouldn’t do what?
Marty: You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t play angry at
me when you’re not really angry.
Fritz: Now, give him your resentment and make
your demands very explicitly.
Susan: I resent when I am truly angry at you—
of your walking away and not listening, and
you should listen.
Fritz: Just say listen, listen, listen,,
Susan: - You should listen.
Fritz: Again.
Susan: You should listen.
Fritz: Louder.
Susan: You should listen!
Fritz: Are you aware of what you’re doing with
your face?
Susan: No.
Fritz: I would like you to verbalize what I see
in your face. Tell him, I despise you.
Susan: Teil him I despise him?
Fritz: Yes.
Susan: I despise you.
Fritz: Again.
Susan: I despise you.
Fritz: Can you feel it?
Susan: No.
Fritz: What is this smirk of yours? Let’s try an¬
other formulation which might be closer—I
can’t take you seriously.
Susan: I can’t take you seriously.
Fritz: Again.
Susan: I can’t take you seriously. (Pause)
Fritz: True?
Susan: True.
Fritz: Now. Reinforce this. Elaborate on this.
Susan: I can’t take you seriously because you
don’t want me to take you seriously and you
shouldn’t do, uh, shouldn’t do that and you
 168 | Gestalt In Action
shouldn’t tell stories in circles. Shouldn’t tell
me things in circles. (Sigh)
Fritz: What do you experience right now?
Marty: Frustration.
Fritz: Tell her that.
Marty: I feel frustration. I feel a little, as if I don’t
quite follow what you’re trying to say.
Fritz: Could you say, please say, I refuse to
follow what you say.
Marty: I refuse to follow what you say.
Fritz: Again.
Marty: I refuse to follow what you say,
Fritz: What’s your reaction?
Susan: I believe him.
Fritz: Say this to him.
Susan: I believe you...
Fritz: Again, in a louder voice.
Susan: I believe you because, uh, you do that all
the time. You turn off your ears.
Fritz: Follow up every one of your sentences
with I find you ridiculous.
Susan: I find you ridiculous.
Fritz: Yah. Each sentence from now on. (Pause)
What do you experience now?
Marty: I experience a little amusement at, when
you told her to add, I find you ridiculous at
the end of a sentence.
Fritz: Say this to her.
Marty: I felt a little humor when Fritz said to add
ridiculous.
Fritz: What do you experience now?
Susan: I want to ask you why, but you’re not sup¬
posed to ask why, so how come—which is
the same thing.
Fritz: Ask him why.
Susan: Why? (Pause)
Fritz: Before you wanted to ask him, what did
you experience?
Susan: I, um, felt truth. I felt that it was true, in
being ridiculous, in you being ridiculous, and
you know it and that’s why you felt funny.
Fritz: (Pause) I would like to try a game with
 Couples No. 2 | 169
you. Could you go over there to the door and
play Christ on die cross? (Pause) Now you
go over and take the nails out. Take him off
his cross.
Marty: I have a sword in my side.
Susan: I didn’t stick the sword in your side.
(Laughter)
Marty: Take it out...
Fritz: Can you come down to us mortals now?
Marty: Yes. Okay.
Fritz: Where did you meet? If you could see her
for the first time, what would you see?
Marty: A physically attractive girl. (Sigh) Who I
don’t know yet but, urn, I’m interested in get¬
ting to know.
Fritz: Now the next thing, I notice all the time
that you have no hands. Your hands are still
chained to each other. No, no, keep your
hands this way. Now7 talk to her, touch her
this way, make love to her this way. See
what it feels like if you are that closed with
your hands.
Marty: What, uh, what was the matter when you
woke up this morning? I noticed that you
didn’t feel very well.
Susan: My back and my leg hurt from when I fell
yesterday.
Marty: Were you surprised when Russ didn’t come
today?
Susan: Yes.
Fritz: Now, make a round and touch a few of us
this way, with your hands like they are locked
in handcuffs. Now, can you open your hands
and see what it feels like to have hands? That
you perhaps may be able to handle people.
Can you try to handle her now? Handle or
mishandle, whatever you do.
Marty: Your hands are cold.
Fritz: Tell him, I freeze you out
Susan: I freeze you out...
Fritz:J Again.
Susan: I freeze you out
170 | Gestalt In Action
Fritz: Can you feel it?
Susan: No.
Marty: (Pause) I do.
Fritz: Okay, that’s as far as I want to go. Now,
Gordon and Ellen. We still have a few min¬
utes’ time. Could you talk to each other about
what happened since the last or first en¬
counter you had here?
Ellen: Here?
Fritz: That was two or three days ago, wasn’t it?
Ellen: Yes.
Fritz: Tell him and you tell her, what happened.
Try to share your experiences—or have you
already discussed it?
Gordon: Not very much. (Pause)
Ellen: Well, I remember after telling you some
of the things I resent, uh, realizing that what
I was resenting ... was that I had let some of
this happen.
Fritz: Now, give him the post-dated orders—
you should have...
Ellen: I can’t remember what I told him I re¬
sented, now.
Fritz: Very convenient. And I think you are
lying.
Ellen: I think I can get it. Um, you shouldn’t,
should never have talked down to me. You
should have accepted me as an equal and let
me feel.
Fritz: Okay. Let’s use this. Now tell him, don’t
talk down to me, Gordon.
Ellen: Don’t ever talk down to me.
Fritz: Louder.
Ellen: Don’t ever talk down to me.
Fritz: Say this with your whole body now.
Ellen: Don’t ever talk; down to me!
Fritz: Again.
Ellen: Don’t ever talk down to me!
Fritz: Can you say it more from your guts than
from your throat?
Ellen: Don’t talk down to me! Just don’t! Don’t
laugh either!
 Couples No. 2 | 171
Fritz: Now let’s reverse it. You play Gordon.
You talk down to him.
Ellen: Why do you always mess around with the
hardest things there are to do in the studio—
you know, you could be a fine artist and do
lots of good things if you didn’t always have
to be trying the hard things.
Fritz: Go on, give him hell.
Ellen: You’re ridiculous. You’re always com¬
plaining of not getting approved of. And you,
you just make it impossible. You’re always
defeating yourself.
Fritz: Always tell him what he should do.
Ellen: You should stay with one thing. You
should really get going on one thing and stay
with it—you know, long enough to do some¬
thing. (Pause) You shouldn’t have to feel
superior.
Fritz: Can you also say to him, I don’t have to
feel superior.
Ellen: I don’t have to feel superior.
Fritz: What would happen if you couldn’t feel
superior—wouldn’t have to feel superior?
Ellen: I would just feel me.
Fritz: So, could you try it now on him? And let
him be as he is. (Pause)
Ellen: Yes, yes.
Fritz: Can you tell him that?
Ellen: I guess that’s the way you are, and that’s
the way you-should be then.
Fritz: Do you mean that or is it just to please
me?
Ellen: No, I think I mean it. (Pause) I think I
mean it because I feel, uh, it doesn’t matter
as much to me.
Gordon: I don’t believe you. It’s a put * on—a
sudden switch. I’m not convinced.
Fritz: Can you try my formulation? You don’t fit
my lifescript. You should.
Ellen: Me?
Fritz: Yah. Tell him, you don’t fit my lifescript.
You should be this and that. I don’t know
172 | Gestalt In Action
what you want from me—what’s your life-
script of your husband?
Ellens You don’t fit my lifescript because, uh,
you should be willing to be a partner, to share
equally. (Pause)
Fritzs Okay. Can you now say a sentence with,
Gordon, I appreciate this—whatever you ap¬
preciate in him.
Ellens Oh, I appreciate, uh, the humor, the. * s
Fritz: Talk to him.
Ellens The excitement...
Fritz: And give him resentments.
Ellens I resent not being able to find myself in
that creative art world. I resent it. I still re¬
sent it.
Fritzs Can you tell him, he’s responsible for your
not being able to find yourself?
Ellens No, I can’t really, because I don’t believe it
Fritz: Then, where’s the resentment?
Ellens Well, maybe (Laughs) the resentment was,
is going away.
Fritzs Uh huh. Can you get a balance between
resentment and appreciation? Maybe by say¬
ing thank you. Is there anything you can be
grateful for?
Ellens Oh yes, sure. Fm grateful that my, that uh,
that I had a sudden, a really sudden change
of course in my life when I met you. And a
lot of things about it have been very good.
(Pause) I’m especially grateful for the chil¬
dren, and I appreciate some of the many
people I’ve met, mostly because of you.
Fritzs Okay, can you shake hands?
Ellens Sure.

Memory and Pride

Fm scanning my intellectual material to find what I

can give you to continue work on your own. I know
some of you had some growth experiences that will stay
 Memory and Pride | 173
with you and. go on, but I would like to give you some
more general ideas about how to work on yourself and
on others. To do this we have to talk a little more about
the projection material. Most of the alienated part of us
is projected—either into dreams or onto the world.
Now many people suffer from self-consciousness. Does
anyone here? (Laughter) Okay, will you come for¬
ward? (Dawn goes to the hot seat. She is a tall, slim
young woman about 23.)
Dawn: I felt very tall when I walked across the
room, and I feel self-conscious about . . c
about that. I...
Fritz: Okay. Take that seat. (Points to the empty
chair) Now, play the audience.
Dawn: (Pause) You are very big. Uh, you’re a
bit awkward actually. Um ...
Fritz: Change seats. Now, watch this. Has any¬
body noticed when she went up, that she was
very big? (Voices dissenting) Not one person.
(To Dawn) Isn’t that amazing?
Dawn: Um, it’s just that when you stand up and
everybody is sitting down, it felt like being
in LUliput Land.
Fritz: Pardon?
Dawn: It felt like being in Lilliput Land.
Fritz: Ah, that’s different. Now, get up. Now
you’re the giant and look at us Lilliputians.
(Laughter) Talk to us.
Dawn: (In a deep voice) Hello, down there.
Don’t be afraid of me.
Fritz: Do you still feel self-conscious?
Dawn: I feel like I’m holding in.
Fritz: Where? What?
Dawn: Here. (Indicates pelvis) I’m, I feel like
I’m quite powerful but I’m not allowing it to
come out.
Fritz: Okay. Take this seat. Tell Dawn, don’t let
your power come out.
Dawn: Don’t let your power come out.
Fritzs Go on, give her the works.
Dawn: Uh, am I to be the power? I’m just the
audience.
174 | Gestalt In Action
Fritzs Let’s call it your inhibitions. You’re your
‘‘don’t.”
Dawn: I won’t let your power come out. Uh, listen
to me because I’m actually protecting you.
What will they think if they know what you
think about yourself? (Changes seats) They
might be afraid of me.
Fritz: Now can you change ‘they’ into ‘you’ and
talk, and say this to the audience?
Dawn: You might be afraid of me.
Fritz: Again.
Dawn: You might be afraid of me.
Fritz: Now stand up and say the same sentence
as a giant.
Dawn: You would be afraid of me. (Sigh) You
might not be afraid of me. You might, uh,
you might think that that’s a silly idea. You
might laugh at me.
Fritz: Okay. Laugh at Dawn. (She laughs) Make
fun of her.
Dawn: You foolish girl. (Pause) Why can’t you
just be what you are?
Fritz: Okay, stand up and say this to us. Make
fun of us. Tell us how foolish we are.
Dawn: You are all quite foolish, but I ... I
wouldn’t tell you that. I wouldn’t hurt you by
telling you that.
Fritz: Say this again.
Dawn: I wouldn’t hurt you by telling you that.
Fritz: Can you do the reverse? Hurt them. Put
them in the chair and hurt them. Make them
cry.
Dawn: You fools. Here looking for answers. Dar¬
ing to think that there are answers. You all
look so silly. You’re not going to find out
anything this way.
Fritz: Now say this actually to the members of
the group.
Dawn: You’re not going to find out anything this
way. (Looks around at group) And still you
smile. (To Marek)
Marek: But I’m finding out. You’re finding out a
 Memory and Pride | 175
lot of things about yourself. I share a lot of
your feelings about this whole situation and
how phony it is. But it’s a long road and
maybe this is a step on it. (Pause) No smile.
Fritz: (To Dawn) How do you feel now?
Dawn: Um ... (sniffing) smaller.
Fritz: Okay. I would like you (indicates Marek)
to put phoniness in that chair. Talk to phoni¬
ness.
Marek: Phoniness is sitting in that chair. (Pause)
Phoniness, phoniness. I have to feel out that
word. Phoniness, you’re going to tell us all
where it’s all at. You know. You know that
we don’t know. That we know about frag¬
ments. That we know about crying and smil¬
ing—that we know about certain facets of
ourselves, but you know everything.
Fritz: Play phoniness.
Marek: (Sigh) Well, it’s those little phony games
that Fm going to play with all your heads, but
they just might mean something. It’s up to
you. I may be phony, but I want you to
realize that you’re phony, and perhaps . . .
hm, Fm being phony myself, right now, be¬
cause actually, I don’t feel . . . yeah, I feel a
lot of tension. I’d like to withdraw myself at
this point. Phoniness is going to withdraw into
itself. (Laughs) Phoniness, I feel a lot of
shaking inside. My whole gut is shaking.
Fritz: You think that shaking is phony?
Marek: No. For phoniness it’s real. That’s where I
am right now, is phoniness. So, (Sigh) if Fm
going to be phoniness, then I feel really
strong.
Fritz: Ya. Now wait a moment, phoniness. I want
to make you real, because your support is in
your shaking. Can you dance your shakiness?
Marek: (Walks around, shakes his arms) Yes. A
little bit of it. Yes. A little bit.
Fritz: So, go back. Talk to phoniness once more.
Marek: (Sigh) Fve lost contact with you, phoni¬
ness. I like to feel myself. I feel my heart
176 j Gestalt In Action
beating. I don’t see ... I see a stool. I feel
a pain in my feet from having jumped up.
That’s a real feeling. And I see people in the
room—Gordon, Ami, yourself. You.
Fritz: What happened to your smirk? (Laughs)
Now it’s back.
Marek: Yeah. Well, I mean, I ... some smiling
may be possible, isn’t it?
Fritz: Okay, you notice a beautiful other polarity
—-phoniness, and the reverse, being real and
authentic. Now let’s finish up by putting that
smirk in the chair. Talk to your smirk.
Marek: Smirk, I don’t like you. But, you have
crooked teeth behind that, and when they
were fixed, you tried to smile. Fd rather see
you ... Fd rather see you than what you had
before. It was a snarl. (Explodes, kicks the
stool and then throws a chair) Those fucking
Hitler’s pigs! (Irwin stops him)
Fritz: Okay, sit down. Close your eyes and attend
to your breathing.
Marek: (Pause, Marek breathes deeply) Fm five
and a half years old. (Crying, then stops) No,
I don’t believe it. I don’t want to go back
there.
Fritz: Before you go back, come back to us first
Can you see me?
Marek: Yeah, I can see you.
Fritz: Are you... do you really see me?
Marek: Yeah, I see you.
Fritz: You see where you are, in actual time?
Marek: (Pause) Yeah, I think so.
Fritz: Okay. Now close your eyes. You are five
and a half years again. What do you en¬
counter there?
Marek: (Sigh) We’re thirty kilometres from War¬
saw. They’re burning it. They’re partisans.
There’s a fat S.S. man. He’s got a big ruddy
face. He lifts me on his shoulders. (Sigh) No,
no...
Fritz: What do you actually see? With your eyes
closed. Now this is very important. Listen to
 Memory and Pride | 177
me. Do not try to remember. Just be five and
a half years of age and tell me what you see,
feel, and hear.
Marek: (Pause) Fm five and a half. (Laughs)
Playing in a garden with a friend. (Sigh)
They’re all around. The partisans rob us. The
Germans.
Fritz: Do you see it?
Marek: Yeah, I see them. They’re...
Fritz: What do you see?
Marek: There’s three of them. They’re coming to
the house. It’s a big mansion. I’ve got to . . „
I want to go in and warn everybody . . . well,
I know, you’re not going to make me go back
there. Sorry. That’s it
Fritz: Say this to me.
Marek: No. Like, Fm in Canada, man. (Laughs)
That’s it.
Fritz: You want to preserve that memory. What
do you need this memory for? ,
Marek: To beat myself over the head with.
Fritz: Whom else do you want to beat over the
head?
Marek: Everybody. I think I just did it. (Pause)
Fritz: Come back to us again. (Marek looks
around the room)
Marek: Well, if I seem hostile to you, it’s there,
and there’s a lot of hatred. There’s a lot of
hatred for everyone of you, but, maybe there’s
a lot of love, too. Not much. But there is
some.
Fritz: Okay. Close your eyes. Go back again.
Take your time machine and be a child again.
Marek: I’m in the corridor of Uka Vitza which is
about thirty kilometres from Warsaw. It’s ...
I’m in this corridor. There’s an old man at
the end of this corridor. He’s painting. No
one can approach him. (Looks at Fritz)
You’re the old man, Fritz.
Fritz: Look at me. Am I the old man?
Marek: (Laughs) No.
Fritz: Put the old man in that chair and compare
178 | Gestalt In Action
him to me. What are the similarities, what are
the differences?
Marek: The similarity is that you, old man, when I
was five and a half . . . you are at the end of
a hall, and I am approaching you. And Fritz,
you seem to be at the end of an avenue of
people, and I also am approaching you. You
have grey hair and he has grey hair. You’re a
painter and you paint with everything you
do. You’re a sculptor of people. And an
artist. And he’s an artist.
Fritz: And how are we different?
Marek: You speak. He never spoke a word.
Fritz: Say this to him, now.
Marek: You never spoke a word. But, you were
always so different because you painted and
that’s when I started drawing. You taught
me how to draw. And I guess (turns to Fritz)
you’re teaching me something too. (Pause)
You are two different people.
Fritz: Can you realize this now?
Marek: Oh, yes.
Fritz: Okay. Now go back to the Germans. To
the unpleasantness.
Marek: No.
Fritz: What’s your objection?
Marek: I object.
Fritz: What’s your objection?
Marek: That happened a long time ago.
Fritz: You’re still carrying it with you.
Marek: I’ll carry it for a long time, probably.
Fritz: Can you talk to that memory once more?
Say, memory, I won’t let you go ... I hug
you in my bosom, carry you day and night.
Marek: Memory, Tm going to carry you in my
bosom day and night. No, that’s not true. No,
I guess it . . . (laughs) Tm retreating into
phoniness, perhaps.
Fritz: Change seats. Be the memory.
Marek: (Sigh) Marek, you cannot get rid of me
... I am you. You like me. It makes you feel
good. It makes you feel better than everyone
 Phiiosophy of the Obvious j 179
else. You suffered, kid. So Fm going to stay
with you . . . everybody else had it soft. And
you know that’s wrong. (Pause)
Fritz: What’s going on now?
Marek: I uh, thought—memories—it isn’t impor¬
tant now.
Fritz: Say, bye-bye memory.
Marek: See you. (Laughs)
Fritz: Nietzsche once said, memory and pride
were fighting. Memory said it was like that
and pride said it couldn’t have been. And
memory gave in. You see, we treat the mem¬
ory as something belonging to the now.
Whether the memory is true or distorted, we
still keep it. We don’t assimilate it. We keep
it as a battleground or a justification for
something. Really, we don’t need it. So, I
think we’ll finish up for this morning.

Philosophy of the Obvious

I would like to call Gestalt Therapy the philosophy

of the obvious. We take the obvious for granted. But
when we examine the obvious a bit closer, then we see
that behind what we call obvious, is a lot of prejudice,
distorted faith, beliefs, and so on. But in order to get
and understand the obvious, we have to first get hold
of the obvious, and that is the greatest difficulty. We
all want to be clever or hide, or intend to be something
worthwhile, and so on.
You noticed what difficulties you all had in dealing
with the obvious. A neurotic is simply a person who
does not see the obvious. But in order to deal with the
obvious, you first must get hold of the obvious. Now,
the most obvious factor we encounter in our sphere is
the fact that we have two levels of existence—an inner
world and an outer World. And the inner world, often
called the mind, looks as if it’s something different or
opposed to the outer world. One of the characteristics
of this inner world is its homeopathic way of being.
180 | Gestalt In Action
Homeopathy is a certain branch in medicine, which is
considered in very small as being effective. Now, what
I mean by the homeopathic way of the mind operating
is this: You want to buy a piece of bread so you don’t
go out across the street to a fur shop and ask for bread.
Then next is a bank; you don’t go there and ask for
bread. No, you rehearse at first. Even if the rehearsing
takes a fraction of a second. You skim the possibilities
*—this is the place where I go to get the bread. So, this
bit of fantasy rehearsing saves a lot of work. And we
do a lot of this fantasy planning. Now the sane mind is
a kind of minute edition of reality. They both click.
They are identical on a smaller scale.
The gestalt that forms in our fantasy has to coincide
with the gestalt in the outer world in order to come to a
conclusion to cope with life—to finish the situation and
so on. When there is no connection between the two
then you have the person who lives on anastrophic and
catastrophic expectation all the time—imagining that he
will be rich and famous and so on. Or if you have
catastrophic expectation, you imagine all the time that
you will be punished, people won’t like you. And the
lack of checking out, the lack of getting the parallel
between the two amounts to the many distortions and
real catastrophes in life.
Now there is one region where we are really insane*
where we have a real private life of insanity—of an
inner life unconnected with the external world, and that
is the dream. The dream appears to be real. As long
as you dream, you are really in that situation. You
really experience this as being your very existence—
especially if you are a self-frustrator—then you dream
in terms of nightmares. You want to cope with the
situation and achieve something—and again and again
you frustrate yourself. You prevent yourself from
achieving what you want to achieve. But you don’t
experience this as you’re doing it. You experience this
as some other power that is preventing you.
Now we started yesterday with the shuttling between
being in touch with the external world and getting in
touch with yourself. And once you got in touch with
yourself, something usually opened up. And if there’s a
 Philosophy of the Obvious | 181
direct connection, direct communication between the
seif and the world, you function fine—then your poten¬
tial is available, you can call on your own resources.
But if you try to withdraw and you can’t withdraw to
yourself but just to that nucleus—that psychotic part in
ourselves, that fantasy life, like the computer, the con¬
ceptualizing, the explaining, the withdrawals to mem¬
ories, to the past—then you never can get to the true
self. As Freud never got to the self—always getting
stuck with the ego. What we can do to understand and
make full use of the dreams is to realize that this inner
world of dreams is also our lifescript, and it’s a much
more explicit way of our lifescript.
Just as in our everyday life we encounter people
and cope with people, so we do in our dreams. Only
that is the beauty of the dream—the dream fulfills many
more functions than just this—but we can start with the
fact that we encounter the people who are the things
in the dreams and that every bit of the dream, every
other person, every thing, every mood is part of our
fractionalized self. Now this is so important that I
would like to reformulate it again. We are as we are
today—fractionalized people—people who are split up
into bits and pieces. And it’s no use to analyze these
bits and pieces and cut them up still more. What we
•want to do in Gestalt therapy is to integrate all the
dispersed and disowned alienated parts of the self and
make the person whole again. A wholesome person is
a person who functions well, can rely on his own re¬
sources, and can resume his growth, wherever the per¬
son gets stuck in his growth.
So what I would like to do is again to start on the
basis of dream work, and I have to say this: When you
meet another person, and this person feels the need to
tell you a dream, then this person will tell you the
dream as a story. Now this is the first step—the story.
The second step is to revive the dream and we do this
by making just a grammatical change. Instead of telling
a story, we tell a drama. And we do it simply by
changing the past tense into the present tense. I am
climbing a mountain. There comes this and this and
this. The third step is we play the stage director, we set
182 j Gestalt In Action
the stage. Here’s the mountain. Here am I. You notice,
slowly we are getting a live performance of the dream.
And often we recover quite a bit of the vividness of the
dream. We begin to realize we are the author, we are
the stage director. So then we can go into the next step
and do more. We become not only the author and stage
director, we become also die actor and the props and
everything that is there. And then we see there are plenty
of encounters possible. Plenty of opportunities for two
things: One is to integrate conflicts and the other is to
re-identify with the alienated parts. If we have alienated
parts of ourselves—if we are disowned—we re-own
them by re-identifying, by becoming those parts again.
We have to become the villain and the demon, and
realize that those are all projected parts of ourselves.
So we encounter for the first time the idea of projec¬
tion. Projection is the disowning of a part of ourself
which then appears in the outer world, our personal
world, and ceases to be a part of ourselves. Now, the
re-owning of many of these parts is unpleasant. We
don’t like to realize that we are a sewer or a policeman.
This is where the moment of learning to suffer comes
in. To suffer from the moment of the idea that we might
be a sewer or a policeman—and then suddenly it ap¬
pears that there are valuable energies somewhere hid¬
den in those projections. We can assimilate these and
make them our own again. There are many more things
to the dream which I don’t want to mention right now.
But the one thing is this: You don’t have to work for
the whole dream. Even if you only take a dream and
re-identify with a few of the items, each time you
assimilate one item you grow—you increase your poten¬
tial. You begin to change.
So, let’s work first a little bit on such little bits and
samples. Let’s go through the four stages with a few
of you just to get the idea across that we can do this
systematically, and something will happen. Who wants
to volunteer?
Russ: I was on this mountain, kind of like the hills
back of here, and there was a friend of mine, a
close friend, and he was sitting on his knees.
And he seemed okay. And he had a pot, and a
 Philosophy of the Obvious | 183
blue plate, and some kind of bowl, just kind of
arranged in a row.
Fritz: Good. Now take the second step. Tell the
whole section of the dream—I guess that’s not
the whole dream—get the whole, the same
section again, in the present tense.
Russ: Chris is sitting—you’re sitting right in front
of me. On your knees. And right in front of
you I see a pot and a blue plate and a bowl.
(To Fritz) Shall I go on with the rest of it?
Fritz: No. I just want to take sections to get you to
set the stage. Make a play out of this. Here’s
your stage. Where does he sit, where is the
plate, and so on.
Russ: Chris, here’s Chris, here’s the pot, the plate,
and this bowl, and then in the background the
mountains, and then there’s kind of straw, dried
grass, around. I’m right here, looking. I was
walking up this trail which continues around
the back of the mountains. And then I just stop.
Fritz: Can you do this once more? I think you’re a
bit lazy. Get up, and really set the stage, show
us the whole drama.
Russ: The trail—it’s coming up here and it con¬
tinues ...
Fritz: Where, where?
Russ: Pardon?
Fritz: Continue around the hill.
Russ: See you later, Chris.
Fritz: Okay.
Russ: There he is again. (Walks in a circle, stops
in front of the hot seat)
Fritz: Don’t look at me, now. You produce, and
you talk to the different actors. You’re now the’
producer.
Russ: (Shrugs) Well, what’s happening? What are
these? The pot, the plate, and the bowl. What
are you doing? (Switches to be Chris) Watch
this. (He takes the plates and starts shooting
around like a nut in a shell game, demonstrating
with a sweeping motion of his hands) Watch
this. Now, what do you think is under this pot?
184 | Gestalt In Action
The blue plate. What do you think is under this
blue plate? The pot.
Fritz: Okay. Now you become all the different
actors. You become your friend, you become
the plate, you become the trail. And if you have
difficulty, you start saying this. If I would be a
trail, I would have this and this kind of exis¬
tence. Let me warn you, there’s only one great
mistake you can make. That is to interpret. If
you start interpreting, you’re lost. You make an
intellectual, Freudian game out of it, and at
best, you will be filing away some very inter¬
esting insights into some intellectual filing cabi¬
net, and make sure nothing real happens. Don’t
interpret, just be that thing, be that plate, be
that pot, be that friend of yours.
Russ: Chris, watch this Russ. See what I can do.
See if you can keep up with me. It’s kind of
catchy.
Fritz: Now for instance, if we would already be
working on him, I would tell him now, turn
around...
Russ: You mean, now?
Fritz: Turn around. Be the same guy, and play this
to the audience.
Russ: (To group) Watch this. See if you can keep
up with it. It’s pretty damn fast. Now, what
do you think’s under this pot? The plate, right?
Okay, now what do you think is under the
plate? The pot. What do you think is under the
pot? The plate—all at the same time.
Fritz: Now, you notice how different he behaves
from the timid guy yesterday? Do you feel
comfortable in that role right now?
Russ: I feel comfortable and evasive as all hell.
Fritz: Good. So be the different other thing. Be
the trail.
Russ: Okay. (Pause) I am a trail.
Fritz: What is your purpose, Trail? What is your
shape and condition?
Russ: I’m a trail. I’m on this mountain. I’m a nice
 Philosophy of the Obvious | 185
trail. It’s comfortable. I’m not too hard to walk
on.
Fritz: Say this again.
Russ: I’m not too hard to walk on. (Pause) There’s
a lot of nice scenery along me. Nice places to
go, a few campsites. I, uh, go up to the top of
the mountain. People walk on me to the top.
Fritz: Say this again.
Russ: People walk on me up to the top. (Pause)
That hurt.
Fritz: See. You didn’t interpret. Something came
through.
Russ: Russ is walking on me, but he stopped. He’s
with Chris now. He’s still on me.
Fritz: Good. Now we have here a definite en¬
counter which we can use. Sit down here. We
interrupt the dream now for some encounter
bit. You are the trail and there’s Russ. (Points
to the empty chair) And you both talk to each
other. Write the script.
Russ: You’re walking on me, I know. You’re not
too bad. Your boots are kind of heavy, more
than most. (Switches to Chris) Well, I think
they have to be to assure good traction, you
know. (Russ) You wear me down. I, you,
you’ve been walking on me an awful lot, fellow,
with heavy boots. Why don’t you get off me?
Why do you need a fucking trail? Shit, you
don’t need me. You got your big boots, go do
your own thing. (Chris) If I get off you, Trail,
I might get lost. I might fall down. You’re safe.
You’re even—it’s all been arranged. Somebody
else has gone there and like I say, I can’t get lost.
Fritz: All right, I want to interrupt here. You
notice that something is beginning to happen
already. You feel that you’re being stirred up.
Russ. Yeah.
Fritz: We just approach a little bit of a segment of
a dream, do a little bit of work. Actually, I
believe if one takes a dream and completes its
work, that’s all the therapy that is required.
186 | Gestalt In Action
Only what usually happens is that once you are
developing a little more of your personality,
another dream will come up which sends you
another existential message. This, for me, is the
meaning of the dream—an existential message.
It’s not just an unfinished situation, it’s not just
a current problem, it’s not just a symptom or
character formation. It’s an existential meaning,
a message. It concerns your total existence,
concerns your total lifescript. Okay, let’s have
somebody else. (Ann goes to the hot seat)
Your name is?
Ann: Ann. This is a dream that I have frequently,
with slightly varying detail, and it’s not. . ,
Fritz: We interrupt again. These are the most im-
portant dreams and here I take a completely
different stand from Freud. Freud saw the com¬
pulsive repetition-having to repeat something
over and over—and he concluded that this was
the function' of the death instinct. I believe
these repetitive dreams are an attempt to come
to a solution, to come to a closure. We have to
get the obstacle out of the way so that the per¬
son can finish the situation, close the gestalt
and then go on to further development. And
you can be sure if there is a repetitive dream,
it’s a very important existential issue at stake.
Ann: I’m traveling on a train, with a group. We’re
all going somewhere—I don’t know where. But
we stop at a station and I leave the group. My
husband is usually a part of the group, and I
leave him as well. He’s going somewhere else.
I go off in another train by myself. And soon
I realize that I’ve forgotten where my destina¬
tion is. When I try and locate myself I realize
I don’t remember where I’ve been so I can’t
locate myself from looking backwards either.
Fritz: Okay, let’s start with the beginning. You
already skipped the first step, you told the story
in the present tense. So now, set the stage.
Ann: I’m traveling on a train with a loosely knit
group. I don’t really know ... I don’t feel, uh.
 Philosophy of the Obvious | 187
these people as being Mends or enemies or
strangers or any particular thing. We’re all just
going along together, and sitting somehow, in
this group. We’re sort of jogging along as the
train moves. (Pauses and rocks in a jogging
motion) I don’t feel that we’re really com¬
municating or that we’re going anywhere in
particular. Just moving. We get to this station
and the group seems to disperse somewhat. We
get off the train.
Fritz: Now can you be the director and tell them
each exactly what they should do? I notice you
were sitting again on your butt, and not getting
off the train and not starting to communicate.
Ann: Okay. We get off the train now. And we
come into a very big station with big pillars—
one of these big old grey stone stations with
huge pillars. And we don’t really go inside to
any room. We stand sort of out in the big foyer
with these pillars. And I’m standing pretty
close to this pillar and I’m not talking to any¬
body. I feel the other group is around here but
we’re not, uh, really not connected. _
Fritz: All right. May I suggest that you pick out
the pillar? Play the pillar and play the station.
If you were a pillar, what kind of existence
would you lead?
Ann: Being a pillar in this huge old railway station,
I see a lot of people come and go here. Some
of them seem to know where they’re going and
some of them stay quite close to me for sup¬
port. (Starts to cry)
Fritz: Something begins to happen. Now be the
station.
Ann: I’m a big old solid railway station. A lot of
people come through me . . . and I give some
comfort. And sort of a place for people when
they’re sort of, when they stop or when they’re
going somewhere. If people want to come inside
I have food for them, and restrooms and a
" place to sit and, and be comfortable.
Fritz: Okay, let’s use this for an encounter. Sit
188 | Gestalt In Action
down here. You’re Ann and this is the station.
You both talk to each other. I guess you
already noticed how much of the personality is
being expressed by the different essences. I
don’t call them symbols, they’re essences of
the personality.
Ann; I have come to you, station, on the train
and stopped here with the group, but I haven’t
come inside (wipes her eyes) where I might
find some comfort (crying) or someone who
would look after me. (Station) Why didn’t you
want to? Why didn’t you want to stop and sit
and have something to eat and sort of rest a
while before you went on? That’s what stations
are for. (Ami) I’m a little afraid of sort of
stopping and being comfortable. I feel I have
to keep moving even if I don’t know where I’m
going. (Station) Why do you ... it doesn’t
make any sense that you keep moving on, get¬
ting on another train and going off somewhere
and you don’t even know where you’ve been
and where you’re going or ... you have friends
here and you leave them behind.
Fritz; Well, this sounds already like a little bit of
an existential message. Okay, this is as far as
I want to go.

Madeline’s Dream

When I first broke away from Freud and psycho¬

analysis, I wrote a book called Ego Hunger and Aggres¬
sion; and I produced, I would say, three basic new
theories—the awareness theory, the theory of the I, and
the theory of aggression. Now you know that the aware¬
ness theory is widely accepted under all kinds of names
—encounter groups, expanding of consciousness, and
so on. The whole awareness kick is becoming a fad in
the United States. For instance, a little bit of aggression
is accepted as being not a bad thing, but a biological
function of the organism. Especially of the teeth and
 Madeline's Dream | 189
assimilation. Aggression is too often equated with hos¬
tility and so on. Again, I don’t want to go into the de¬
tails of this theory—I just want to mention that this
aggression is required to assimilate the world. If we
don’t assimilate what is available, we can’t make it our
own part of ourselves. It remains a foreign body in our
system—something which Freud recognized as intro-
jection. And this leads us to the ego theory. Freud saw
the ego, which in German is the same as ‘I,’ as a con¬
glomeration of foreign substances which, if it’s true,
would always remain a conglomeration of foreign
bodies in our organism. Now here again is where the
merit of the Gestalt approach comes in. A gestalt is
always differentiated between foreground and back¬
ground, and the foreground relation to the background
is called ‘meaning.’ In other words, according to my
idea, as soon as you tear something out of its context,
it loses its meaning or distorts its meaning. Now this
figure background relationship applies very much to
the I. The I is an identification symbol. Let me compare
the two contexts.
The whole semantic approach is completely cock¬
eyed. There are only two semantic approaches known.
One is the so-called absolute approach—a thing means
what it is, or as it is defined by the dictionary or what¬
ever. The meaning of a tree is just as it’s being de¬
scribed, as the so-called absolute semantic. The other is
the Alice in Wonderland semantic. A thing means what
I mean it to mean. The Gestalt approach is different. It
says a meaning is a creation at this moment of the rela¬
tionship of the foreground figure to its background. In
other words, as soon as you tear something out of its
context, it loses its meaning or distorts its meaning.
Take the idea of a queen. In the context of a chess game
it is a piece of carved wood. In the context of the
British Empire, it is a living person that is supposed to
rule millions of people. Now if the absolute semantic
would be correct, you could take this piece of chess
board and put it on the throne of England or we could
take Queen Elizabeth and put her on the chess boar do
It would look a bit funny, wouldn’t it?
Now see how this leads up to our whole neurosis
190 | Gestalt In Action
treatment. In a neurosis, tlie parts of the personality are
ail alienated. If you identify with these alienated parts,
we can now get ready to assimilate disowned parts and
grow again-—become more whole. It’s very interesting
that, for instance, some primitive tribes who do not
differentiate between the self and the world, don’t have
the word “I.” They say “here.” Here’s light, here’s
hunger, here’s anger, here’s thought, here’s a deer. And
a child also has quite a difficulty in understanding the
word I. He says, “Carl is hungry.” He still calls himself
by the name that is given to him.
Now I would like to integrate more the idea of dream
work and total identification work. So, who wants to
work on a dream? (Madeline comes forward—a pretty
dark-haired French girl.) This time, as much as pos¬
sible, I want you to always return to your experience.
Right now—what do you feel right now?
Madeline: Um...
Fritz: You feel him.’ Keep your eyes and ears
open. Every clue is to be accepted.
Madeline: I feel like taking my shoes off. (Laughs) I
feel the need to be clear when I tell my dream.
Fritz: Okay.
Madeline: Uh, the dream I have, I experienced when I
was very young, maybe about eight years old,
and Fve experienced it even lately. Fm stand¬
ing on the shore. The shore is sort of sandy
and soft and there’s wood around me. In front,
there’s a lake that is very round. I don’t see
the other end of the lake where I’m standing
right now, but the lake, I know, is very round,
or I find it out later. But I feel it is very round,
very circular, and not edgy shore. It’s a very
soft lake and the light is very beautiful. There
♦ is not sun, but it is very bright in the sky.
Fritz: Ya. Let me work on the dream a bit. Be the
lake. And Lake, tell me your story.
Madeline: Um, lake, uh, you want to tell me your
story?
Fritz: Be a lake and tell me your story.
Madeline: Uh, I’m a round, round lake. I feel, I sort
 Madeline’s Dream | 191
of feel perfect, perfect lake. I, my water is very
good and soft to the touch.
Fritz: To whom are you talking?
Madeline: To myself.
Fritz: Now you know the third law in Gestalt
therapy. Do unto others what you do unto
yourself. Talk to us.
Madeline: Um ...
Fritz: You’re the lake.
Madeline: I’m the lake. You would like to come in me,
in my lake, in this lake, because it’s very beau¬
tiful, and the water feels very ...
Fritz: The second law in Gestalt therapy—don’t
say it; say I or you.
Madeline: Um ... (moves a little)
Fritz: You notice I’m beginning to become very
officious.
Madeline: You would like to come into me. You can
swim into me very easily and there’s nothing
mucky in my bottom. My bottom is of pure
sand. And when you come into the middle of
my lake, there’s a surprise. There’s something
that you don’t know. And it might frighten you
or you might like it very much, but there’s
something right in the middle of me, in the
lake, that is very strange, and you have to swim
or row to get to it You don’t see it from the
shore, so it’s really worth swimming to go and
see it. (Laughs)
Fritz: See ‘it’?
Madeline: See me. (Laughs)
Fritz: Say this again to the group.
Madeline: It’s worth swimming in me or taking a boat,
not a power boat.
Fritz: Who is‘it’?‘Its* worth.
Madeline: Uh, its worth to you?
Fritz: Who is ‘it,’ ‘it’ is worth?
Madeline: The ... it is worth ...
Fritz: Don’t say ‘it.’ Try ‘I’. T am worth.
Madeline: I am. I am worth—you swimming or taking
a boat and coming to see what’s in the middle
of the lake, because it’s a surprise.
192 | Gestalt In Action
Fritz: ‘It’ is a surprise?
Madeline: Ufa, I am a surprise. You might not solve
the surprise, though. It’s a, I have in . . . the
middle of my lake, I have a statue. It’s a little
boy, and he’s pouring water . . . but many
people . . . when I go in that lake and I come
to drink the water, I wake up, so maybe . . .
Fritz: Wait, stop here. Close your eyes. Go on
dreaming. Now the waking up is a beautiful
gimmick to interrupt the solution to the dream.
Madeline: The...
Fritz: You came back to us. Did you go on dream¬
ing?
Madeline: The same dream? It took a long time before
I came to the dream. I saw the lights in my
eyes and feeling of, of very busy.
Fritz: Gesticulate this. Go on.
Madeline: Very busy. (Moves arms about and laughs)
Fritz: Dance it. (She does a dance mostly with arm
movements.) All right. Now let’s have the story
of the figure of the statue. You’re now the
statue.
Madeline: I’m a statue in the middle of the lake.
Fritz: To whom are you talking?
Madeline: I was trying to talk to Helen. (Laughs) Fm
grey and sort of, uh, Fm pretty classical look¬
ing. I’m looking like most little statues of little
boys you would see. And I hold a vessel. It is
a vase that has a small neck and big in the
bottom. And I hold it, and though I’m in the
water, I pour it—I pour this water in the lake.
I don’t know where it comes from, but this
water is extremely pure, and you would really
benefit from drinking this water. You would
feel all good all over because you had water on
the outside of your body from the lake I am
sitting in the middle of. And the water is really
good outside of your body. But then, I really
want you to drink the water I’m giving from
my vessel because it will really make you feel
good inside, also. I don’t know why, but some¬
times, you cannot drink it, you just come to
 Madeline's Dream | 193
drink it—you’re all happy and then you’re
swimming and you want to drink it and then
you can’t drink it. I cannot bend to you. I can
just keep on pouring my water and then hoping
you can come and drink it.
Fritz: Say that last sentence again to us.
Madeline: I cannot come down and give the water to
you. I just can keep on pouring it and hoping
that you will come and drink it. I just can keep
on pouring it.
Fritz: Okay. Now, play the water. Tell us. You’re
now the water.
Madeline: In the vessel?
Fritz: Yes, the water in the vessel. What’s your
script? What’s your story, Water?
Madeline: (Pause) I don’t know much about myself.
Fritz: And again.
Madeline: I don’t know much about myself. (Pause,
begins to cry) I come. I don’t know how I
come but I know I’m good, that’s all I know.
I would like you to drink me because I know
Pm good. I don’t know where I come from .. 9
I’m in that big vase. It’s a black vase.
Fritz: ^ Now, get up. Say this to each one of us.
Stand up. Go to each one of us and tell us this.
You’re the water.
Madeline: (Crying and sniffing) Fm water in a vase and
I don’t know where I come from. But I know
I’m good to drink. I’m water in a vase.
Fritz: Use your own words now.
Madeline: I look like water and they call me water and
I’m just there in the vase. And there’s no hole
in the vase. I don’t know where, nobody, I’m
just there all the time, I’m just pouring out, and
Td like you to drink me.
Fritz: Go on to the next.
Madeline: I’m there and I’m white and pure, and if you
ask me where I come from I can’t tell you. But
it’s a miracle, I always come out, just for you
to drink me. You have to get out of the other
" water and come. (Goes to the next person,
crying) I’m in a vase, and I don’t know where
194 | Gestalt In Action
I come from but Tm coming out all the time,
and you have to drink me, every little bit of it.
Fritz: Now what are you doing with yourself?
Madeline: Fm holding myself.
Fritz: Do this to me. (Goes over to him and rubs
his arms) Okay, sit down. So what do you
experience now?
Madeline: I feel I’ve discovered something.
Fritz: Yeah? What?
Madeline: I used to think, I thought of the dreams, I
used to think the water in the vase was spiri¬
tuality.
Fritz: Mmhhmm.
Madeline: Beauty of, of birth and . . . it’s such a mys¬
tery for me, the beauty of life, and I thought
that the vase was a secret, and I wasn’t high
enough to drink the water. That’s why I woke
up. When I was very small, it didn’t bother me
—I was just happy of swimming. I didn’t care
not drinking the water, waking up. But as I
grew older I got more and more resentful not
to be able to drink the water...
Fritz: All right. This is as far as I want to go.
Again, you see the same thing that we did
before with dreams. No interpretation. You
know everything; you know much more than I
do and all my interpretations would only mis¬
lead you. It’s again, simply the question of
learning, of uncovering your true self.

Everything is Aware Process

Well, the time has come that we might be ready to

put all the pieces together and see whether we can get
a center of approach. And the basic center is, of course,
to unify the whole world into one. You can do it with
the help of religion—by saying everything is God made.
But then you still are left with the dichotomy between
God and the world, and the doubt whether the world
has made God or God the world. If, however, we con-
 Everything is Aware Process | 195
sider the three dimensions possible—extension, dura¬
tion, and awareness—then we can say everything is an
aware process. We are still very reluctant to attribute
awareness to matter, we are so used to believing that
awareness is concentrated in the brain. It’s very difficult
in the beginning to imagine that the whole world—
and we’re getting more and more scientific proof—
always has awareness.
So, everything is an aware process. Let’s start from
there. I am aware. You are aware. The chair is aware
of me—maybe in a fraction of a billionth and billionth
of a unit of awareness. But I’m sure that awareness is
there. As soon as we accept this, another dichotomy
begins to collapse between the objective and the sub¬
jective. The subjective is always awareness and the
objective is the content of awareness. We have to be
aware that we are not aware of anything. Without aware¬
ness there is nothing. So there is a contrast between the
existent and the non-existent or the nothingness. Aware¬
ness is always linked up with the present experience.
We cannot possibly be aware of the past and cannot
possibly be aware of the future. We are aware of
memories, we are aware of anticipation, and of plans
of the future; but we are aware here and now—a part
of the aware process.
The decisive awareness is the awareness of the
uniqueness of each one of us. We experience ourselves
as a unique something, whether we like to call it
personality or soul or essence. And we are also aware
that we are all the time aware of something different,
that we are in a different place at a different time. So
we try always to get hold and find out—and always
start in Gestalt therapy with the idea: where are you?
Where are you in time; where are you in place? Are
you all there or are you at home attending to some
unfinished business, and where are you in your aware¬
ness? Are you in touch with the world, are you in touch
with yourself, are you in touch with the middle zone—
the fantasy life that is'interfering with being completely
in touch with yourself or the world?
When we are in touch with the world, then something
happens. What makes us get in touch with the world is
196 j Gestalt In Action
the emerging Gestalt, the emerging need, and the
emerging unfinished situation. And if we cannot cope
with that situation, we look for support—something,
somebody to help us to cope. And that support can be
secured by manipulating the environment, by crying
for help, by playing helpless, playing crybaby, or con¬
trolling the world. Or we get the support from within
ourselves—we withdraw into ourselves to find this sup¬
port. And we always find something when we withdraw.
We might find the support from the self, or we might
only find the support from our fantasy life. That sup¬
port has to be thoroughly examined because that sup¬
port might be a catastrophic expectation. That support
might say—don’t cope; if you cope it might be danger¬
ous. Or the support will say—oh yes, grab it, it will be
heaven.
A world of fools. But in each case, in this shuttle
between coping and looking for support for coping, we
start to mobilize our own potential. This, I would say,
is the whole theory and approach in a nutshell. And as
I said before, there’s no better means to get to under¬
stand the middle zone, the disturbing factor, than the
dream. So we always work around the dream and other
non-verbal ways of being to empty out, brainwash,
whatever you want to call it, that cancer or sick part
of the personality. So who’s got a dream they want to
work on? (Helen goes to the hot seat. She is a bright,
plump woman around forty.)
Helen: We’re sitting around in an encounter group
and everybody is in a director’s chair. The
room changes back and forth between two
rooms that Fm familiar with—Maslow and
your living room. The way I know we change
back and forth is that the rug changes from a
thin, sort of red and black dusty rug, to a thick
deep-piled rug...
Fritz: Okay, let’s have these two rugs have an
encounter.
Helen: (Smiles) Fm the thick, juicy, orange, deep
piled, soft rich rug. And, uh, if you sit on me, I
bend very nicely. And I like my warm, orangey
color.
 Everything is Aware Process | 197
And Fm a kind of thin, red and black, dusty,
arid, smelly rug. And everything that touches
me hurts me because Fm so thin. And Fm
neglected ... I feel alone, and as if nobody
really cared to clean me or anything.
Fritz: You’re telling me this. What about telling it
to the other rug?
Helen: I envy you. I really envy you. Because peo¬
ple like to sit on you, and when they sit on me,
they feel their bones. I wish they’d at least put
a pad under me.
(Smiling) I don’t blame you for envying me.
I am very nice and soft. Sometimes people cry
on me, but you can’t see their tears because I
just soak them all up. And even stains don’t
show very much on me, and I don’t have any¬
thing left over to feel very sorry for you. Be¬
cause I’m so busy enjoying myself, and I don’t
really like to look at you because you’re dilapi¬
dated. And Fm just so happy to be me!
(Laughs) Well, I feel a little bad about you.
Fritz: All right, let’s do the same with the opposi¬
tion of the Maslow room and my living room.
Let these two rooms meet each other.
Helen: Fm all made of wood, and I have lovely
grains on my wall, and my rug is deep and
Slick. I have big windows that have lovely
wooden carvings that partially cover the view
from the outside in, but make the view from
inside out even better than it would be without
the shades. My main problem is that the light¬
ing is lousy. Half the time the lighting is wrong
and the heat is wrong.
I’m a cluttered, austere, stony, thin-rugged
room with an unused fireplace, and a view I
can’t see, and so crowded and cluttered, and
unsupportive. But I have something you don’t
have. I have the sound of the ocean very close,
and it fills the room most of the time. And my
heating system is pretty good and I’ve got lots
J of outlets and plugs.
Fritz: You sound defensive and disappointed.
198 ( Gestalt In Action
Helen: Yes, I am. And I feel a little sad. Because
I’m Fritz Peris’ living room and there’s no life
in me, except the sound of the sea. I’m aware
of my dust and hardness and the clutteredness.
(Smiling) I’m the room of dozens of people
and I do feel warm. And another thing, I don’t
like to look at you very much, because I feel
Fve got so much more than you’ve got and
when I look at you Pm aware of what’s lacking.
Fritz: Say this again.
Helen: I really don’t want to look at you.
Fritz: Again.
Helen: I really don’t want to look at you.
Fritz: Louder.
Helen: I really don’t want to look at you!
Fritz: Say it with your whole body.
Helen: I don’t want to look at you!
Fritz: Now change seats.
Helen: For Christ’s sake, I didn’t say you had to
look at me! Don’t look at me if you don’t want
to! But don’t shout at me! (Shouting) I hate
to be shouted at! I’m angry! (Pause) So you
got what you wanted. I don’t have what I want.
I don’t have what I need.
Fritz: Say this again.
Helen: I don’t have what I need. (Pause, continues
quietly) And I don’t know how to get it. There
are structural limitations in stone and cement
and thinness. (Pause) I forgot to breathe for a
minute. (Takes a deep breath)
Fritz: Can you close your eyes and enter your
body and see what you experience physically?
Helen: My cheeks are hot and my voice is hoarse.
My throat is tight. There’s a sadness at the back
of my throat and down in my chest. And Pm
breathing rather deeply, and it feels good. It
comforts and reassures me. Pm wetting my lips
because they feel dry. I’m aware of how Pm
sitting—it’s as if I was about to take off. Pm
also highly defensive and covered. My right
shoulder is way forward and my right hand is
poised as if I were ready to do something.
 Everything is Aware Process | 199
Fritz: To do what?
Helen: Slap.
Fritz: So slap the Maslow room. (She does so a
few times.) Now do it with your left hand, too.
Helen: I don’t want to slap it with my left hand.
(Smiles) I want to touch it. (Reaches out)
Fritz: All right, can you do this alternately now?
Slap with your right hand and touch with your
left. (She does this about three times.) Now
do me a favor, even if it’s phony. Exchange
hands. Slap with your left hand and touch with
your righto
Helen: Mmhhmm. I can touch with my right.
Fritz: What do you experience then?
Helen: It’s nice, I like it. I can feel just as much
with my right hand as I can with my left. I feel
very reluctant to hit with my left.
Fritz: Say this to the Maslow room.
Helen: I don’t want to hit you with my left hand. I
really only want to touch you. I don’t want to
hit you.
Fritz: Try once more.
Helen: To hit?
Fritz: Ya. With your left hand.
Helen: I’m amazed at my reluctance. I really don’t
want to.
Fritz: Say this again.
Helen: I really don’t want to.
Fritz: Again.
Helen: I don’t want to hit you!
Fritz: And again.
Helen: I don’t want to hit you. (Smiling, voice
changes to a more tender, teasing tone) I
don’t want to hit you. (Laughter) I don’t want
to hit you. I just want to touch you.
Fritz: Now, try once more to hit.
Helen: I can do it, but my heart won’t be in it.
Fritz: Well, try it. ,
Helen: (Laughs) Didn’t hurt. (Touches with both
hands) Feels much nicer to feel with both
hands.
Fritz: Well, hit again with your left hand. You
200 | Gestalt In Action
see, I find something irrational here, so Fm
going to work on that.
Helen: If I look at you I can hit you. (Hits chair,
then kicks it very methodically) Yeah, if I look
at you, I can hit you and I can kick you. I can
really hate you. (Pause) You’re shiny. I envy
you. No, I don’t envy you, goddammit, you’ve
got your thing. You’re just different. (Quieter)
I envy you.
Fritz: Change seats.
Helen: Hi. I don’t like it when you hit me. I know
I’ve got a lot that you don’t have, but I just
arrived that way. It isn’t anything that I’ve
grabbed for myself from something else. From
somebody else, from you. I happened just the
way you happened but I didn’t take anything
from you.
One part of me wants to plead with you
and one part of me wants to shove you away.
I wish you weren’t just so lush. A little modera¬
tion in lush. It’s this fulsomeness that I can’t
stand.
Fritz: Say this again with your left hand.
Helen: It’s this fulsomeness that I can’t stand. (To
Fritz) It doesn’t feel right. (Pause) It’s this,
I envy your fulsomeness. (Smiles) I feel rue¬
ful about it. Kind of, as if I wanted something
I really can’t have and I don’t want to be con¬
tent with what I’ve got.
Fritz: Say this to the group.
Helen: I don’t want to be content with what I’ve
got.
Fritz: Can you elaborate on this?
Helen: Yeah, I’ve got a lot, but I’ve had a glimpse
of so much more. And so I want it. And I’m
willing to work very hard and spend a lot of
time and effort to get more. And what I’ve had
a glimpse of is more of me. And I’m really ex¬
cited about me and I’d like to have more of
me; but that involves working with other peo¬
ple and there I get scared Real scared (smiles
at Fritz) in some places, not in others.
 Fritz, Friend, and Freud | 201
Fritz: Okay, that’s how far I want to go. I guess
you noticed something I did. I did very little
directing. But when I feel and notice there is
some irrationality involved, then I work on that
place until the whole issue becomes rational
again. And this is something for which you
really need to develop a tremendous amount
of sensitivity and intuition. This is the key
sentence. If one feels there is a key sentence
involved—something really basic-then I rein¬
force it, let her talk again, speak over again
and reinforce it till the whole personality comes
through. Then you notice something completely
unexpected happens. The personality gets in¬
volved, and the emotions, and there is again a
turning point in the growth process.

Fritz, Friend, and Freud

(Barbara is seated in the hot seat. She is a young
woman who appears to be about 38 years old, with a
rather diffident manner. She is a social worker, and has
worked with Fritz before.)
Barbara: I wanted to be a good girl and have a mag¬
nificent dream for you with lots of goodies in
it. I didn’t manage that, but something else hap¬
pened which is maybe just as well. Last night
I was in bed, and it’s happened to me for a
long time—though not very frequently—and
what happens is I become totally paralyzed and
I can’t move at all. I can’t move my toes and I
can’t open my eyes—I can’t do anything. I’m
just totally paralyzed. And I get very frightened
and then it goes away. It seems like a very long
time, but I think it’s just a few minutes—maybe
not even that long. But it’s like I can’t do any¬
thing, and what it made me think of was, uh,
my inability to handle myself when I get fright¬
ened or angry. (Takes a long drag on her
cigarette) I just get immobilized—so that I’m
202 | Gestalt In Action
the same when Fm awake as when asleep,
Fm still paralyzed.
Fritz: All right. Could you tell the whole story
again and imagine that you are responsible for
all that happens. For instance, “I paralyze my¬
self.”
Barbara: Um, all right. Um, I paralyze, I paralyze
myself ... I immobilize myself. I won’t allow
myself to feel anything or behave any way if it
isn’t civilized and good. I won’t let myself run
away when I’m afraid; I won’t tell people Fm
afraid. I won’t, uh, fight back when I’m angry
or hurt. I won’t ever let people know that I
have bad feelings. (Starts to cry) I won’t let
them know that I hate them sometimes, or that
I’m scared to death and, um ... I put myself
sometimes, to punish myself, in a state of panic
where I’m scared to do anything. I’m scared to
breathe, and then I torture myself with all the
bad things I’ll let happen to me. That’s all I can
think of right now. (Sniffs) Fritz, I don’t want
to cry because I think that crying is very bad
for me. I think I hide behind my tears. But I
don’t know what I... hide.
(Barbara is slapping her thigh with her hand as she
talks.)
Fritz: Can you do this again? With your right
hand. Talk to Barbara.
Barbara: (Slapping her thigh and laughing) Barbara,
you need a spanking!
Fritz:* Spank her.
Barbara: (Still slapping) You’re a bad girl because
you’re phony and dishonest! You lie to your¬
self and to everybody else, and I’m tired of it
because it doesn’t work!
Fritz: What does Barbara answer?
Barbara: (Voice rising) She answers that she never
learned how to do anything else.
Fritz: Say this in quotes.
Barbara: I never learned how to do anything else. I
know about doing other things. I know that
 Fritz, Friend, and Freud | 203
there are other things to do but I don’t know
how to do them.
Fritz: Say this again.
Barbara: I don’t know how to do them! I can only do
them when I’m in a protected, supporting kind
of situation; then I can do it a little bit. But if
I’m out in a cold situation by myself I’m too
scared. And then I get into trouble. I get my¬
self into trouble.
Fritz: Ya.
Barbara: And then I get mad at myself after I’ve got¬
ten myself into trouble, and then I punish and
punish and punish. (Spanks thigh again) And
it’s like there is no end to it, and I’ll never be
satisfied. (Starts to cry)
Fritz: Say this to Barbara. I’ll never be satisfied
with you, whatever you do I’m never satisfied.
Barbara: Barbara, I’m never satisfied with you. No
matter what you do it’s never good enough!
Fritz: Can you say this to your mother or father
as well?
Barbara: Mother, no matter what I do or have done,
it’s never been good enough.
Fritz: Can you also say this to her? M'other, what¬
ever you do it’s never good enough.
Barbara: Uh huh. Mother, whatever you do, it isn’t
good enough.
Fritz: Tell her what she should do.
Barbara: Mother, you should try to know me. You
don’t know me. I’m a stranger, and you let me
pretend . . . you know, and I have a whole per¬
sonality just for you. And that’s not me. I’m
not at all the kind of person that you think I
am.
Fritz: What would she answer?
Barbara: Of course I understand you, you’re my
daughter. I understand everything about you.
And I know what’s good for you!
Fritz: Talkback.
Barbara: Mother, you don’t know what’s good for
- me! Your ways don’t work for me. I don’t
204 | Gestalt In Action
like them and I don’t respect your attitudes. I
just don’t think they’re productive. I think that
they leave you alone, and you never get close to
people. You always disapprove of them too
much. You don’t like anybody, and I don’t
want to be that kind of person...
Fritz® Tell her more what she should do. What
kind of person she should be.
Barbara: You should try to understand how it is for
other people. They experience life very differ¬
ently from you. Couldn’t you just try once to
know what it is to be somebody else?
Fritz: Ya. I would like you to go a step further.
Talk to her in the form of an imperative. “Be
more understanding” and so on.
Barbara: Be more understanding...
Fritz: All imperatives.
Barbara: Be more empathetic! Be more sensitive!
Don’t defend yourself so much, you don’t need
to! Don’t be so suspicious and paranoid! Don’t
believe in magic, it’s crazy to believe in magic!
Don’t always be in a double bind, where you’re
trying to be such a good person, such a saintly
person, such a paragon of the community, such
a matriarch, and hating every minute of it.
Don’t do that!
Fritz: Now, talk like this to Barbara. Also in im¬
peratives.
Barbara: Barbara, don’t be helpless! That’s crazy . . *
uh . . . don’t be afraid of your feelings! Your
bad feelings—you have to express them.
You’ve got to stand up for yourself! You’ve
got to be real! Don’t play hide and seek, that’s
a rotten game! (Starts to cry) Don’t be a mess,
and don’t play games where other people feel
sorry for you or feel guilty. Then they’ll get
uncomfortable and go away and that isn’t what
you want.
Fritz: Now go into more detail. Stick to your im¬
peratives, and each time give Barbara some
prescription—what she should do to follow up.
 Fritz, Friend, and Freud | 205
Barbara: Um . . . don’t be a mime, a chameleon!
Fritz: Tell her how she should achieve this—not
to be a chameleon.
Barbara: Figure out who you are, and what you want
to be and what to do, and do it! Don’t try to
go around looking for other people to imitate
all the time. You’ve imitated thousands of peo¬
ple and where has it ever gotten you? You
still feel like an empty shell. You’ve got to
decide who you are, and what you want to do!
Fritz: Tell her how she can decide.
Barbara: (In a scolding tone) You know what your
own tastes and interests and values are. You’ve
known for a long time. They’re never...
Fritz: Tell her in detail what her interests are.
Barbara: Um, lots of things interest you.
Fritz: Such as?
Barbara: Such as . . . you like to work with people
and it makes you feel very good when you feel
that you’ve been useful—that you’ve allowed
yourself to be used in a productive kind of way
by other people. Do that! And figure out a
way to do it in which you feel successful and
useful.
Fritz: Come on, start figuring out.
Barbara: Well, you have to develop . . . you have to
do two things: You have to make a real effort
to learn from other people who are much more
experienced and skilled than you are and at the
same time you’ve got to be yourself. You can’t
go around imitating Fritz or Virginia Satir or
Dr. Delchamps or whoever the consultant of
the moment is, or wherever the last seminar
you went to was or the last workshop. Don’t
do that, that’s bad! Because you’re not them
and you can’t just go through the motions that
they go through, and say things they say, and
do any good for anybody. They’ll know that
you’re a phony. '
Fritz: You mentioned my name. So, tell me, what
am I? What are you copying of me?
206 J Gestalt In Action
Barbara: Fritz, you’re a man who works with people
and lets them use him—you let people use you
to grow.
Fritz: Ya.
Barbara: And I want to do that too, and I think that
what you do really works . . . but I can’t play
Fritz. That won’t work because I’m not you
and my tendency would be to imitate you.
Fritz: Let me see how you imitate me. You play
Fritz.
Barbara: (Laughs) All right. Shall I do it with you?
Fritz: Ya.
Barbara: All right. (Laughing)
(Long pause) Do you want to work?
Fritz: Yes.
Barbara: Do you not want me to work? For you?
Fritz: Yes.
Barbara: I can’t, Fritz. I can’t work for you.
Fritz: Oh yes you can.
Barbara: No.
Fritz: (With a gleam in his eye) You’re Fritz, you
know everything. (Laughter) You’re so wise.
Barbara: It’s not true. I don’t know everything, and
Fm not that wise. You have to do the work.
Fritz: All right. I try so hard. I would like to work,
but I can’t. I have got a block. (General hilar¬
ity at Fritz’s responses)
Barbara: Be your block.
Fritz: But I can’t see my block.
Barbara: You’re not listening to me.
Fritz: Oh yes, I’m listening very carefully. I just
heard you say, ‘‘You’re not listening to me.”
Barbara: Well, let’s see if we can try something else.
Pretend you’re out there.
Fritz: Out there?
Barbara: Uh huh.
Fritz: Where? Here, or there, or there, or there?
(Pointing to different places in the room)
Barbara: Wherever you choose.
Fritz: You choose for me.
Barbara: I feel like you’re making fun of me. And
maybe trying,..
 Fritz, Friend, and Freud J 207
Fritz: Me? Making fun of you? I wouldn’t dare!
You’re so venerable and I just melt with appre¬
ciation. I wouldn’t dare to make fun of you.
How could I?
Barbara: Let’s try something else then. Can you dance
your veneration of me?
Fritz: Oh yes. (Laughter) Now I can’t do a thing.
You have to give me the music.
Barbara: Uh, try making up the music in your own
head.
Fritz: But Fm not musical, you see.
Barbara: We’re all musical.
Fritz: You do it. (Laughter)
Barbara: I notice that no matter what happens, the
burden returns to me. No matter what I sug¬
gest, you say no, you do it for me, I don’t
know how.
Fritz: Of course. If I weren’t so incapable, I
wouldn’t be here. This is my illness, don’t you
see?
Barbara: Talk to your illness.
‘ Fritz: But my illness isn’t here. How can I talk to
my illness? And if I could talk to the illness,
the illness wouldn’t listen, because this is the
illness.
Barbara: I’ll listen. Did someone give you the illness?
Fritz: (Slowly) Yes.
Barbara: Who?
Fritz: Sigmund Freud. (There is much laughing
among the group at this point.)
Barbara: I realize that Sigmund isn’t here, that
he’s...
Fritz: But for seven years I got infected.
Barbara: (Giggling) Oh, Fm three years above you
because I spent ten years with an analyst.
Don’t tell me how bad it is! Could you talk to
Sigmund?
Fritz: Oh no, I can’t. He’s dead.
Barbara: You’ve changed. That’s the first time you’ve
slipped. What are you aware of now?
Fritz: (Soberly) A great sorrow that Freud is dead
208 | Gestalt In Action
before I really could talk as man to man with
him.
Barbara: (Gently) I think you could still talk to him.
Would you like to?
Fritz: Uh huh.
Barbara: Fine. (Pause) I’d like to listen.
Fritz: Now I’m stuck. I would like to do it. I
would like to be your patient in this situation,
and uh . . . (speaking very slowly) Professor
Freud ... a great man . . . but very sick . . ,
you can’t let anyone touch you. You’ve got to
say what is and your word is holy gospel. I
wish you would listen to me. In a certain way
I know more than you do. You could have
solved the neurosis question. And here lam...
a simple citizen ... by the grace of God having
discovered the simple secret that what is, is.
I haven’t even discovered this. Gertrude Stein
has discovered this. I just copy her. No, copy
is not right. I got in the same way of living—
thinking, with her. Not as an intellectual, but
just as a human plant, animal—and this is
where you were blind. You moralized and de¬
fended sex; taking this out of the total context
of life. So you missed life. (There is quiet in
the room for several moments. Then Fritz
turns to Barbara.) So, your copy of Fritz wasn’t
so bad. (Gives Barbara a kiss) You did some¬
thing for me.
Barbara: Thank you, Fritz.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Frederick S. Perls was born in Berlin in 1893. He

was internationally known as the founder of Gestalt
therapy, which is more and more recognized as the most
effective innovation in psychiatry since Sigmund Freud.
He established the South African Institute for Psycho¬
analysis in 1935, the New York Institute of Gestalt Ther¬
apy in 1952, and the Cleveland Institute for Gestalt
Therapy in 1954. For several years he devoted himself
to the conduct and recording of seminars and profes¬
sional workshops in Gestalt therapy. Most recently he
turned his attention to the application of the principles
of Gestalt therapy to educational practice. He died in
Chicago in 1970.
 /

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Howard Ha I pern
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Manuel Smith
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Fritz Peris
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gestaitapproacheOOfred
gestaltapproacheOOfred
 A clear, comprehensive explanation of Gestalt Therapy.
The Gestalt Approach & Eye Witness to Therapy can be read
together as one entity and also as two separate works. Fritz
Peris was working on both books at the time of his death and
had both concepts in mind. The Gestalt Approach will un¬
doubtedly become a basic work in Gestalt literature. Fritz
wrote The Gestalt Approach because he was no longer satis¬
fied with his previous theoretical works. It also serves as an
introduction to Eye Witness to Therapy which contains tran¬
scripts of films that Fritz believed had great teaching
potential.
_Contents include:_
Foundations What is Gestalt?
Neurotic Mechanisms Awareness
Here Comes the Neurotic Marriage
Here and Now Therapy Memory and Pride
And more.

0 5 40
0

76783 00350

ISBN 0-553-5DS4Ch4