“From my mother,” said Renate, in recalling those years, “and from what I see of photographs, Fritz adored me. He carried me around on his shoulders and showed me off to everybody. I know that up until age four we were close. He cared. Up until then, I had everybody: my mother, my father, my nurse, and the black man who worked for us. Then my brother was born. My mother had to divide her time between work, Steve, and myself. Next, my father took off for Europe and the Congress. He came back a very different man. I’ve been furious with Fritz ever since.
“There were a few pleasant moments afterwards. I remember that we went for a walk in the field near where our house was—a lovely place with a roof garden, tennis courts, and swimming pool. And I was walking ahead of him in the tall grass, a bitty six-year-old having a lot of fun. Other times he’d take me to restaurants and hangouts. We’d have lunch or he’d get me an ice cream soda, meet friends, and play chess. But these were the only contacts we had. I often felt lost at these places, particularly when there were all adults around.”
Although Fritz came to have nothing but scorn for Renate in later life and described her, in Garbage Pail, in both a fleeting and contemptuous way, he also acknowledged a great fondness for both her and Laura at the time of Renate’s birth. “I even began to reconcile myself, somewhat, to being a married man. But later, when I was blamed for anything that went wrong, I withdrew more and more from my role as paterfamilias.”
Laura herself had a busy schedule and was unavailable for full-time mothering. When Steve or Ren cried or complained or seemed at loose ends she, possibly out of her own sense of guilt, faulted Fritz for his even lesser involvement. This, in turn, only seemed to establish a vicious cycle with Fritz removing himself even more from contact with his children. Fritz came to resent what he felt to be a clutching, symbiotic relationship between Ren and Laura in which Laura would act as The Supreme Giver and Comforter and Ren would be The Perpetual Taker and Sufferer. Although this may have satisfied Laura’s desire to see herself as a good mother and Ren’s childish desire to be pampered, the bond between the two of them left Fritz out in the cold. He also, no doubt, resented the extra burden of his second child and begrudged whatever attentiveness Laura gave the two of them.
In any event, he became increasingly detached, both emotionally and hourly, from his family. The next four years were spent pursuing projects that did not involve the others. Fritz had his patients and Laura had hers. Meals were often taken separately, as patient schedules had priority over family interaction. When they did dine together, Fritz and Laura discussed their clinical work or read books or newspapers.
The type of professional life Fritz led in South Africa is best described by the following passage from Garbage Pail:
“I was caught in the rigidity of the psychoanalytic taboos: the exact 50-minute hour, no physical eye and social contact, no personal involvement (counter-transference!). I was caught by all the trimmings of a square, respectable citizen: family, house servants, making more money than I needed. I was caught in the dichotomy of work and play: Monday to Friday versus the weekend. I just extricated myself through my spite and rebelliousness from becoming a computing corpse like most of the orthodox analysts I knew.”
Fritz kept going through the motions, but his heart was obviously not into being a suburban husband. Each Sunday night, Laura had an open house, creating, as best she could, a cultural salon in the generally dreary South African ambience. Fritz participated when he felt like it and was brusque and unavailable when he didn’t. For amusement, he continued at his sports, had a number of sexual encounters with the children’s nurse, and tried his hand at directing some amateur films and plays.
In a more serious vein, he decided to develop his therapeutic ideas. Freed by geographical distance and cultural isolation from other analysts, his therapeutic style softened, became more flexible, more experimental, and more open. Enlarging upon the paper he presented at the Congress, incorporating the helpful elements of his work with Reich, and including some of his familiarity with existential thought, he completed his first book, Ego, Hunger and Aggression, in 1940. Subtitling it A Revision of Freud’s Theory and Method, he was, while on the attack, not yet willing to make a clean break. Initially published in Durban, South Africa, in 1942, it established a position that set him still farther apart from other psychoanalysts when, in that work, he challenged some fundamental Freudian scripture. For one, he declared that Freud oversexualized life. He began by pointing out the obvious: how self-preservation (hunger) takes precedence over species preservation (sex), and that our developing attitudes toward food—the behavior patterns surrounding eating—set a precedent for the way we relate to the world that is more basic than later-developing sexual motivations.
After opening the motivational system beyond Eros (sex) and Thanatos (aggression/death) by including hunger, he went on to postulate an endless series of motivations that flow, one into another, from moment to moment. He stressed the importance of present time and criticized Freud for being preoccupied with the past and Alfred Adler for overstressing the future. His awareness of polarities (opposites) made him point to the areas that the psychoanalysts (mind-dissectors) left out, namely, the body and synthesis (the importance of new experiences).
He denied the usefulness of the analytic theory of Transference. That concept states that the neurotic tends to see present-day people in terms of the early figures of his life. If a woman’s father was cruel, she sees the analyst and others as cruel. If her mother was overpossessive, other older women are seen that way. Analytic treatment dictated that the therapist be a neutral blank screen, the better to have the patient “transfer” these attitudes, which could then be analyzed, appreciated, and dispelled. Fritz took a different tack, pointing out that the “cruelty” or “overpossessiveness” were more readily related to the patient’s unacceptable impulses:
“The whole complicated process, both aspects—the cruel father and the cruel analyst—boil down to the patient’s own personality. In other words: dealing with the transference means an unnecessary complication—means a waste of time. If I can draw water from a tap in my room, it is unnecessary to go down to the well.”
He also made a case for ending the artificial anonymity of the analyst with this argument:
“The orthodox psycho-analyst will agree with me when I introduce another formula for termination of the analytical cure by maintaining that not only has the psycho-analyst to understand the patient but the patient has to understand the psycho-analyst. He has to see the human being and not a screen upon which he projects his “transferences” and the hidden parts of his self. Only when he has succeeded in penetrating the veil woven out of hallucinations, evaluations, transferences and fixations, has he learned to see things as they are: he comes to his senses by applying his sense. He achieves genuine contact with reality in lieu of a pseudo contact with his projections.”
The final section of Ego, Hunger and Aggression he entitled “Concentration Therapy.” Within these pages Fritz elaborated upon those concepts that, when attended to, brought him some peace of mind. These had to do with focusing awareness in the present moment, stopping unproductive historical ruminations and blame, and realizing the nature of projections. This part can be read either as a unique self-help book or as a primer that underlines and explains the “magic” that Fritz performed in his subsequent work with patients. Chapter by chapter, he suggests procedures to help the reader realize the importance of the moment, of internal silence, of simple task observations, of body concentration, and of how one externalizes inner conflicts.
On January 19, 1942, the year his book appeared, he volunteered for service in the army. The wheel had come full circle as he now joined the English side in a war against the Germans. For the next four years, until February 20, 1946, he served, alternately, near Pretoria, Potchefstroom, and, from May 1945 on, back in Johannesburg as a medical officer. The work was routine and
uninspiring. Rarely home, prior to his return to Johannesburg, he and Laura pursued largely independent lives. As his hated father had done before him, Fritz drew still further away from his own family.
“Basically he wasn’t around very much,” recalls Steve. “My major recollections are of him coming and going and not being there.
“He’d come maybe once a month, or every few months, on a weekend pass. My mother would have men friends visit and they would stay for a few days when my dad was in the Army. They’d play Ping-Pong with me and were nicer than my dad was most of the time. I was nine years old, so I enjoyed them.
“As far as I can recall, I was never spanked by him. He’d yell, occasionally, if I would do something that would annoy him. The only thing that I can remember that annoyed him was making noise with my friends kicking a soccer ball around the backyard when I was six. He’d tell me to be quiet, because they both had their offices in the house. That’s my recollection of my parents during my elementary-school years. Even in older years, they had the office in our home. I could never walk in the front door to the bedroom or dining room without going through the waiting room. Many times, there were patients waiting to see the doctor. Life centered around them seeing patients.”
If Steve remembers his father with empty detachment, Renate recalls him with fear and dislike.
“I was often sent on vacations to dreadful farms, places I hated and where I felt like an outcast. I don’t remember Fritz paying very much attention to us. He was an absent father, very involved with his own work. But during the war, he was hell when he was home. ‘Thou shalt not exist. Thou shalt not have any friends unless I say so.’ Things like that. With him, practically everything was ‘No.’ With Laura, it was invariably ‘Yes.’ No middle ground.
“I know that I was always afraid of Fritz—terrified of him. He’d hit the living bejeesus out of me. He never touched my brother. Fritz had a temper you wouldn’t believe.
“I remember the first time he lost his temper. I was five years old and he locked me up in a garage for the whole afternoon. I don’t remember what I did. John, the gardener, wanted to let me out but he said, ‘I can’t. I’ll lose my job. He’ll fire me if I let you out.’
“The first time he actually hit me, my brother was bugging the hell out of me. He was turning the radio up loud and I wanted it turned down. There was a pen lying about and so I jabbed Steve with it. Fritz hit the shit out of me to the point where my bones rattled. Another time, my mother was away somewhere. My nurse was at the table, my father was at the head of it, and I heard him grunting and snorting while he was eating his food. I leaned over and I said to the nurse, ‘Hey, Mira. Poppy eats like a pig.’ She told him this. Back to the box room again. This was a smaller room, when we were living in another house.
“And another thing that confused me. We moved to this shitty house at the outbreak of the war. Fritz had a package of flags from all over the world. Every day my friend Peggy and I would decide to wear different flags to school. Each day I’d pick out two flags and we’d wear them. One day I happened to pick out the swastika. I didn’t know what the hell it was. I’d never seen it before. Fritz shook me until I rattled like a skeleton. I pissed in my pants. I was so embarrassed. He never told me the reasons why. Now I understand that. But you don’t do that to an eight-year-old. You explain why it’s not right.”
Fritz’s reaction to the Nazi banner may not have been a thoughtful one, but it is certainly understandable emotionally. Had not both his mother and sister Else perished in the Ravenstadt concentration camp? As for his quickness to hit, one might also point out that Ren doesn’t recall being struck by him before the age of seven, and even then the episodes that come to mind are fewer than can be counted on the fingers of one hand. What is undeniable in both Steve’s and Ren’s reflections is the lack of warmth, lack of communication, and lack of love that existed between their father and themselves, together with Fritz’s unwillingness to work to bridge that gap.
Although Renate’s terror cannot be dismissed, it would be hard to make a case for Fritz’s being an ogre. Ren herself contributed to their negative interaction, her “Poppy eats like a pig” remark being a forerunner to later, periodic goadings. Just as Fritz felt that his mother helped foster his dislike for his own father, he also speculated that Laura subtly aided her children’s dislike of theirs. Steve, for example, claims that Laura told him Fritz never wanted a second child and tried to have her abort him.
By the time he was discharged from the service, Fritz had decided that it was time to leave South Africa. The Perls had already abandoned the palace they had built at the time of the Second World War, since gasoline prices prevented patients from driving out from Johannesburg, so that was no longer an attachment. Jan Smuts,1 the prime minister, for whom Fritz had great respect, had died. Both Fritz and Laura experienced the country as a cultural wasteland. And Fritz sensed the growing indigenous brand of South African fascism—all the more repellent since he had fled to Africa to avoid Hitler’s tyranny.
1 Smuts, in his book, Holism and Evolution, stressed that all phenomena must be studied and understood in terms of their organic unity, not merely in terms of their parts. Gestalt concepts have much in common with Smuts’s Holism.
Fritz’s plan was to go to America alone, establish a practice, and then send for the rest of the family. His leaving was marred by another tussle with Ren, one that underscored both the bitterness and desire she had for him: “The last time he hit me, I was fourteen. It was a week before he left South Africa. I had some friends coming over and he didn’t want me to have anybody. I said, ‘Look. A boy’s coming over to join us. I do not know his telephone number. We are going to be on the other side of the house. We will not disturb you. ‘ He said, ‘You are the most selfish child that I have ever met in my life.’ ‘And you,’ I answered, ‘are the grouchiest old man that I have ever met in my life.’ With that, he went Zap—right in front of my girlfriends.
“I did not talk to him for a week, until the day he left. Then I offered him a piece of chewing gum because I didn’t want him to go off to America while we were on bad terms. But as the years went on, our periods of not talking got longer, somehow.”
Fritz’s friend and benefactress Karen Horney was already in America. So was Paul Goodman, whose articles had captured his imagination and whom he was eager to meet. Karen agreed to be his sponsor. Because he was not able to come to the United States directly, due to an anti-Semitic American consular official, he took a troop ship to England and then voyaged to Canada, staying in Montreal for as few days as it took to secure proper papers to enter the United States.
The twelve years he spent in South Africa led him to formulate all the basic ideas that underlined what he would later call Gestalt Therapy. It had also led him to realize that the roles of father and husband gave him little satisfaction.
Yet, these same years cost him much. Like Sisyphus with his stone, Fritz had first seen his world come tumbling down during the First World War. He pushed his rock up the mountain and rebuilt, only to see the Nazis destroy what external supports he had created for himself. The same pattern repeated itself with even greater losses in South Africa, where he lost his psychoanalytic reputation, his home, his practice, and the affection of his children, and was beginning to lose his wife.
So, here he was—an unhappily married fifty-three-year-old man, with a daughter nearly fifteen, an eleven-year-old son, and an evolving therapeutic approach that was still in the process of being born—once more upon unfamiliar shores, preparing, once again, to roll the stone back up the mountain.
5. New York
For a while, it was touch-and-go as to whether Fritz would stay in the United States or return to South Africa. He arrived in New York in the summer of 1946. The city of noise, concrete, big buildings, oppressive heat, and unfriendly faces reaffirmed the previous distaste he had felt during his 1923 visit. He fled, almost imme
diately, to the home of his brother-in-law in New Haven, where Robert Posner lived with his own family. New Haven was to prove equally inhospitable.
For one thing, Laura’s brother never liked Fritz, resenting, perhaps, Fritz’s seduction of his sister twenty years earlier. Add to this his wife’s passion for tidiness and Fritz’s extraordinary sloppiness—from unmade beds to clothes left about to cigarette ashes strewn everywhere—and it is easy to understand why they eventually asked him to leave. Professionally, there were also disappointments. An opening for a professor of psychiatry at Yale, a post Fritz coveted and was considered for, went, unfortunately for him, to someone else. Lacking professional or personal support, Fritz was about to return to Johannesburg when he met Erich Fromm. Fromm had read Ego, Hunger and Aggression and was impressed.
“Don’t go back,” he told Fritz. “I promise you that within three months you’ll have a practice of your own.”
So, Fritz returned to New York and, with the help of Fromm, Clara Thompson, and other members of The Washington School of Psychiatry (later called The William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute), had a flourishing practice going within three weeks. After firmly establishing himself, he once more sent for his family. Laura and the children arrived in the fall of 1947, fifteen months after he did.
The ten years that Fritz spent in New York were a time of ferment, great upheaval, and marked change in direction. Throughout this period, Fritz struggled to end the discrepancies between his private and professional life—to allow himself to be more of a person as a therapist and more of a therapist as a person. The decade also witnessed the formal birth of Gestalt Therapy. It ended in 1956, when Fritz decided to leave Laura.
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