Fritz

by Martin Shepard

  Paul Weisz introduced Fritz to Zen. “Fascinated with Zen,” Fritz wrote, “its wisdom, its potential, its nonmoral attitude,” he attempted to create techniques “of opening up this kind of self-transcendence to the Western man.” More than any other practicing therapist, he managed to bring about a “marriage,” to use Alan Watts’s term, between psychotherapies East and West, between psychoanalysis and living totally in the Here and Now (in a Zen state of enlightenment).

  “In his sessions in the early fifties he was never interpretive,” said Elaine Kempner, a Gestaltist who trained with Fritz in the early days, “nor had he yet developed his hot seat technique. Instead, it was ‘What are you doing now? . . . What are you experiencing? . . . What are you feeling?’—all awareness techniques. He philosophized as well, talking about Gestalt Therapy as the Here and Now and that everything exists in the present moment. If the aim of therapy is to enable people to get through their impasses at the places they are blocked and stuck, they are blocked and stuck at this moment in time. He also stressed, much more than he did subsequently, the encounter between patient and therapist. If you were his patient, he would quite explicitly work with your projections of what you thought was going on in him—all the things you were making out of him—and then he would tell you what he was actually experiencing.

  “I remember working with him one time in Cleveland. I was depressed. He was a very impressive and a very frightening figure to most of us in those days because he was a very confronting, sharp, sometimes quite hostile person, sometimes quite paranoid. Anyway, I was claiming that he was never feeling anything but good. After I finished, he said, ‘That’s your fantasy.’ Then he shared his own state, which was depressed, feeling pretty down, and anxious.”

  Fritz’s willingness to share his own feelings was a further departure from Freudian technique, which insisted upon the analyst’s anonymity. Another advancement occurred in the mid-fifties, when Fritz introduced the idea of having patients be (act out) the people, moods, and things in their dreams. Prior to that, the New York Gestalt group had interpreted dreams as indications of the ways by which a person might fulfill himself in the real world, already a step beyond the Freudians’ attempts to analyze dreams for “deeper” meanings.

  One of the things that Fritz became increasingly aware of as he traveled about the country was that he was received far better on the road than he was at home in New York. In later years, Fritz established a reputation as a person who couldn’t take criticism. That came, undoubtedly, from having had his fill of it from his wife, his colleagues, and his students at the New York Gestalt Institute from 1952 through 1956.

  Although the Institute began under Fritz’s and Laura’s aegis and the training group was led, officially, by Laura, it soon developed into a peer session. As in all groups, a distinct pecking order developed.

  Elliot Shapiro is a giant of a man who looks today a bit like Lyndon Johnson did in his heyday, but radiates warmth, informality, and gentleness. Quick to laughter, truly modest, and with no bones to pick, he described the situation that existed: “Laura was the leader of the group and the two big brains were the two Pauls—Goodman first and then Weisz. The group was very quick to hit and hit hard, to cut through the ‘bullshit,’ as Fritz would say.

  “My remembrance of Fritz was that even when he was angry he seemed to be in good humor; that when you talked directly to him, even very, very critically, his response bordered on a joke, as it were. While Fritz, at first, had an aura of deep respect due to his Ego, Hunger and Aggression, he lost it rather quickly. Eventually, Paul Goodman’s comments in the group, even about treatment, were listened to a little more carefully than were Fritz’s.

  “In Fritz’s work with people, he exhibited a mischievousness the way a little boy might in order to catch your attention and point out certain elements in your behavior or attitude. He was most often right. But at the same time, the need came more from him and not so much from the therapeutic situation. He was being a little tiny bit malicious, but it was a maliciousness that had some humor about it. He wanted you to see something, especially if you were egregiously bullshitting. But it was also, partially, to enter into a somewhat longer relationship—on a teasing basis—wherever that would go. Maybe, finally, to an affectionate relationship.

  “I remember and always marvel that Fritz was constantly coming up with a new idea. Whether the idea seemed worthwhile or not, I really cherished his ability to look at things freshly. There were times he would come in eager to be with us because he really felt that he had something to share; that this was a real jump in therapy. Perhaps his ebullience turned people off. One doesn’t think of an intellectual as being ebullient. And when it came out with great good humor and with a few Anglo-Saxon adjectives being thrown in at the same time, we didn’t pick it up as part of an intellectual style. Maybe that was because there was something Talmudic about us; that we considered an intellectual to be someone who pulls at his beard.

  “Fritz was in the position of being a prophet without honor in his own home, really. He would come back from his tours around the country and come into the sessions again with new ideas—like the idea in dream analysis of making believe that you are every part of your dream—being every character and even pieces of furniture in the dream. He was criticized even for that in this group. The criticisms seemed to me, at that time, ‘professional.’ At one point, I recall Fritz saying to Laura, ‘You always knock me down.’ I caught that with a certain surprise because I hadn’t felt that, hadn’t been aware of such an attitude on Laura’s part toward Fritz.

  “He’d come back with a great deal of satisfaction of being successful here or successful there. Then he would get hit very hard, especially by Paul Goodman. And what Paul would say very directly to him is ‘You’re saying this or using this device because you don’t really have a verbal gift. . . . You’re not really an intellectual and you therefore depend on a technique.’ This was picked up by a number of the members of the group from time to time so that after a little while, it seemed to me, Fritz had a feeling of ‘Who needs this? After all, I’m going around the country, having a certain amount of adulation. I come back here and get insulted all the time.’

  “If you ever get to be the parent of adolescents, you’ll see the same thing. That’s really what was happening at the time.”

  In 1956, after four years of this treatment, Fritz decided to leave New York, migrating to the warmth and ocean waters of Miami.

  I met with Laura Perls on two occasions in the winter of 1972–73 to talk to her about Fritz. She was a smartly dressed tiny woman with short-clipped white hair, sparkling brown eyes, and a warm and cordial manner. Elegant where Fritz was coarse, smiling while he often scowled, intellectual whereas he was intuitive, proper while Fritz was ribald—it is easy to see how the two of them complemented one another. Photographs and posters of Fritz adorn the walls of her office-apartment on West Ninety-sixth Street. Her interpretation of Fritz’s move to Florida was far from flattering: “I think he left New York because he wasn’t the only one . . . was not the only big fish—not the leading psychotherapist, nor even the leading Gestaltist. What he showed, afterwards, was that he would rather be a big fish in a comparatively small pond in Florida or the West Coast. But when the operation became bigger and there were other people involved, either in New York or at Esalen, he couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  Although that analysis may contain some kernel of truth, it seems to me to miss the point and contains, perhaps, a mixture of Laura’s feeling of superiority and the hurt reaction of an abandoned wife. Clearly, New York was a no-win situation for Fritz. The pleasure of his friendships with “Isad” From and Paul Weisz and his involvement with The Living Theater was more than offset by the consistently negative feedback he was getting from his peers. Much of this resulted from a rivalry that developed between Fritz and Paul Goodman in which Paul was readily besting Fritz. Paul was more Laura’s kind
of person: cultured, refined, academic, a prolific writer, and a “real” intellectual. The two of them formed a mutual admiration society with Paul respecting his ex-therapist’s “genius,” and she his. Paul dedicated his best-known work, Growing Up Absurd, to Laura. In groups, Paul expressed with waspish and direct tongue many of Laura’s quietly felt attitudes regarding Fritz. Instead of awarding kudos for Fritz’s enthusiasms and accomplishments, the Gestalt group, led by Paul, threw tomatoes.

  Laura has the quality of gentility and of intransigence that made it difficult to ask her highly personal questions about her life with Fritz. She was reluctant to talk about him and seemed unwilling to elaborate upon any details of their personal life that might reflect adversely upon herself, in any conventional sense. For example, Fritz made a total of four brief and passing references to her in Garbage Pail. In one, he wrote about having “voyeuristic compulsions centered around Lore.” I asked, on our second meeting, what this phrase referred to.

  “I don’t know what he meant,” Laura gently smiled.

  Two of Fritz’s outstanding qualities were the strength of his sexual drive and the range of his sexual interests. During the years he and Laura lived in New York, tales of their amatory escapades ran rife. How did this affect their marriage?

  “You know how stories spread,” Laura answered, implying that rumor far outdistanced fact.

  Arthur Ceppos, who had some familiarity with the New York Gestaltists, doubts the many stories that he, too, heard. “With the exception of Paul Goodman, most of those people just talked a good sexual game.”

  Ralph Hefferline’s impression of Laura was that of a “deeply conventional person.”

  Still, Marty Fromm (the woman he subsequently fell in love with) says Fritz told her that his and Laura’s sex life was always very rich, varied, full, and included other people.

  For me, the details of Fritz and Laura’s sexual relationship are unimportant. I can appreciate the fact that it is nobody’s business but her own. Nonetheless, attitudes toward something as fundamental and as “animalistic” as sex are indicative of more general attitudes toward life. Certainly, when a husband is such an avowedly open sexual being, his wife’s perspective in this area might provide important insight into even more basic aspects of their marriage. One element that seemed illuminated, for me, by Laura’s parrying my questions was her concern with respectability and her image.

  And why not? The fact of her being a psychotherapist aside, she is also a woman, a wife, and a mother. How many women, one wonders, would relish being married to a man who had such a reputation for sexual adventures with countless other people? Who among us could readily endure the knowing smiles, the perpetual gossiping, the smug condescension that others might register? How is one to justify a marriage to a man who loses no opportunity, in his autobiographical ruminations, to declare his lack of passion for his spouse? How is one to contend with all these elements and at the same time behave and speak as a highly cultured woman, an understanding wife, and a person who has her own house, psychologically speaking, in order?

  The causes of marital discontent were many. Where Fritz wanted real adulation, Laura seems to have offered studied support. She gave this “support” because she felt, empathically, his deficiency in this regard and because, at least initially, she loved him.

  Yet, this “giving” to compensate for and heal his weakness offered a steady unspoken reminder that “You are, indeed, an inadequate person. But my compassion, perceptions, and interventions will eventually make you well.”

  I could sympathize with Laura’s well-intentioned motivations and told her that it sounded like she was a good mother to Fritz.

  “I was that way from the very first,” she answered. “I protected Fritz from any kind of attacks from the outside. He didn’t realize how many people attacked him. First my family. And then people who relied on him in some way and from whom he then withdrew or resented in some way. I was continuously protecting him. Even when he was rather hostile. And I’m still doing it now that he’s dead.”

  Fritz may have worn blinders when it came to self-respect, but he had an uncanny sensitivity to the transactions people tried to engage him in (“agendas,” or “manipulations,” as he contemptuously called them). Instead of a “thank you” for her well-meaning efforts, Laura received the sort of scorn that an adolescent boy reserves for his protective mother.

  When Fritz, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman were working on Gestalt Therapy, Fritz told Ralph that Laura “wanted to keep me tied to her apron strings.”

  “That made it sound,” said Ralph, “like he wanted her to be Mommy—or she wanted to be Mommy—and he wanted to be a big boy. I don’t know about that, but it certainly seemed that a great deal of what he did was flamboyant acting like he was a big boy.”

  Sensing the dynamics behind Fritz’s cavalier responses, Laura persisted nonetheless.

  “Fritz had a carry-over of his father’s attitude toward him, which was always denigrating. His father called him a ‘piece of shit,’ which was terrible. If I did anything, it was to counteract that—to give him a feeling, or get him to the point where he could get a feeling of his own worth. But when I said anything that was at all critical, he felt completely devastated. As if I was calling him ‘No good.’ And I certainly never did. Not even at the time when he was most hostile and rejecting.”

  But again, her solicitousness reflected adversely upon Fritz’s strength. It was this motivation and his response that led to their never-ending “Can you top this?” game.

  Fritz told many people that he felt at a competitive disadvantage with Laura, who could out “one-upsmanship” him. Indeed, many of Laura’s comments contain sweetly voiced put-downs. Take this remark, when I commented that Fritz seemed like a very lonely person to me: “He was very narcissistic and I think most geniuses are in a way. They are self-involved. And whoever could go with that, he thought he loved. He loved being loved. But he couldn’t take any kind of criticism.”

  It is not so much that Laura is correct or incorrect in her assessments. For me, it is what particular truths about Fritz stand out in her mind that is of importance, what it is that is “foreground” for her.

  In commenting, for instance, about Fritz as a clinician, she had these critical remarks to make: “Actually, long before Fritz was in medicine, let alone in psychoanalysis, he was in the theater. He was in the Reinhardt school. He wanted to become a director. And he did. That is what he fell back on, in the end, in the last three years or so. And that is when all the films of him were made. Unfortunately, people think that this is all there is to be done . . . the hot seat and the empty chair. Yet this is just a way in which he could keep himself from getting involved.”

  One impression that I have of Laura is that she resents, somewhat, the fuss that is made over Fritz, resents the fact that he achieved the credit of being the founder of Gestalt Therapy, and feels that she and Paul Goodman, her friend and protégé, were not really given their due. To her, it must seem like a cruel accident that Fritz, this impulsive, vain, restless, and somewhat slipshod man—a man who couldn’t even make it as the kingpin of the New York Gestalt Institute—should achieve all the accolades as the founder of a “New School,” when she, Paul, and the others knew as much, if not more, about these same concepts. It must have hurt additionally to see their academia outpaced by Fritz’s show-business style. Still, she might, to herself, take credit.

  “You take Laura,” said Arthur Ceppos, “and she’ll give you Laura. She made him, which was unquestionably Fritz’s biggest hang-up. He knew that she didn’t make him. But not only did she insist that she did, but she represented that which, to a very large degree, emasculated him. And this was the phony academic achievement and approval. So, it was quite a struggle for Fritz, who was so talented, with Laura always projecting that she was the scholar and he was an uninformed, relatively illiterate person who was dabbli
ng in psychology, and that his particular recognition was only due to the aura which came from her and kind of touched him. But he was aware of it. He tried to fight it. He fought it very beautifully once he left New York.”

  Fritz claimed that he left New York to get away from Laura. But, according to Laura, “He never really left me. He just stayed away from home longer and longer. He was like Peer Gynt, the character he always wanted to play as an actor, the eternal wayfarer who always comes home to his mother, and later, his wife. Even in his final illness he sent for me.”

  If Fritz was playing Peer Gynt, as Laura claims, she was certainly being Solveig, the good wife/mother who always accepted him back whenever the wayfarer returned. Whenever he came to New York to visit or work, he stayed at her place—even after his unflattering descriptions of their life together in Garbage Pail.

  Gestalt Therapy presumes that when we invest emotion upon someone else, it is often our hidden unresolved self that we see in the other person. Using this principle as a guide, it is interesting to review not only what Fritz and Laura accused each other of, but of how very similar, in many ways, they were to one another.

  Laura, for instance, criticizes Fritz for his narcissism, and yet she can be affectionately recalled, by Elliot Shapiro, to have a similar quality.

  “Laura’s vanity was not to be right all the time, but to let you know that she could do something very, very well. She always indicated that she did things very, very well and had great talent. It didn’t come out as heavily as Fritz experienced it, and in fairness to Laura, she wasn’t that boastful. It wouldn’t be deadly or anything. But she did a tiny bit of name-dropping. And it was always her name.”