“I was in one of his sessions in the summer of fifty-nine. His thing was to become provocative and for you to get mad at him or in some other way invest affect, and then for you to reverse roles—where he’d say, ‘Okay. So I’m mean. Be me and be mean.’ And you’d do something he did to someone else and all of a sudden you’d see that he had you way out on stage in total silence. And you’d say, ‘Wow. What got me mad about him was me.’ Or things like that. And he could do that. He was really good.
“If somebody would just sit there, folded up, like you and I are sitting now, he’d do the same sort of thing. He would just mirror you right down to the glance, just like that. You’d smile, he’d smile. Back and forth. Most people, when they get into that, it makes them very nervous. It’s called hearing one to death. He could do it silently, verbally, anyway. It was just him. It was his natural thing.
“The first time we met was when Van Dusen and Mrs. Van Dusen brought him to our house. We sat at the table by ourselves. The kids were all in the kitchen. My wife came along. She did the cooking. There was a funny rap there. I said something to him when I introduced him to her and my wife took it amiss. It was something she didn’t like. He immediately picked up on that and said something to me that would have left it wide open for her to blast me back. But she didn’t. And then he went no further. We were instantly into the Here and Now. In other words, he detected a slight thing between me and my wife. He was instantly on to it to exploit it. But since she recognized that would lead to trouble, she didn’t say anything. He instantly recognized that she recognized that. And we went right into whatever else there was.
“He was cool at that. If he felt that you didn’t feel like hassling, he didn’t hassle. But if he felt that you wanted to, he would grease the skids all the way. He was a clever fellow.
“Fritz liked emotionality because he was such a ‘header.’ He was a total, calculating Freudian and he didn’t like that. That’s why he enjoyed intense emotional relationships with as many people as possible. When he was alone, he was a lonely intellectual, like Goethe. We talked about that. He said the same thing that every German used to say. ‘Ah. Every German used to talk about Goethe at the breakfast table.’ And he was like that, too. He could continue into that for three straight hours, quoting Nietzsche and Goethe in German.
“Every great man is a tragic figure in some sense, because to get as many turned on as he did, you’re going to have to be sure that he was sensitive to all sorts of really bad things. Freud was a tragic figure. Fritz, too. Anybody who has ever experienced life. Because you’re participating in something of which you know nothing. You think, one day, you’ve made a rational decision and then you discover five years later that it wasn’t rational. There is no such thing as rationality, in my opinion.”
Like Fritz, Paul was, and still remains, a compassionate skeptic. Wary of most psychological medicine men peddling their quick cures, he had, at first, the same wariness regarding Fritz. “You see a lot of these therapeutic hustlers come through with their particular bags,” he said.
“But when he talked to you it was real. You could tell he wasn’t bullshitting you. On the other hand, if you started playing games with him, in the least little bit, boy would he come back hard. That’s why we got along. We both operated the same way. And we never had a hassle. He was my friend from the first minute I ever met him.
“To me, Fritz was a friend; an old man with grey hair and a German accent who was like my father. My father died when I was very young. And then there was my grandfather. I’ve always been very respectful of old men and always liked them. And I just plain liked him. He could be hurtlicht. You know what hurtlicht means? Courtly. Polite. He could put it on, yet it was real.”
How is one to reconcile Paul’s report of Fritz’s social graces when the Van Dusens witnessed the exact opposite? The answer lies in Fritz’s multifaceted personality, one that dared to contradict itself and allowed the situation to dictate the response. As Emerson has stated:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgloblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.”
One of the bonds between the two men was their willingness to mix it up when it came to affectionate teasing, as they both enjoyed bantering repartee greatly.
“One time we were in one of these. Sensitivity sessions. There was a big circle of people. He was putting a guy on and it was just so nasty that I was getting mad at him. I stared at him. I don’t think I said anything. And he said, looking at me: ‘I see murder in those eyes.’
“I said, ‘Maybe you do. But maybe you see a mirror, too, huh?’
“And he goes, ‘Touché. Touché.’
“There was also the story of The Intractable Schizophrenic Woman. It was a dirty trick, but we just wanted to see what he would do. Here was the scene: He came up here, doing his thing, turning people on, doing sensitivity groups periodically. On this particular occasion, there were a tremendous number of hospital employees—technicians, social workers, doctors, residents, anybody interested in the subject. And he was going to show off his technique with the patient. Now we knew enough about his bag to know that there are some people that it just doesn’t do anything to or for. And they are the true schizophrenics. They have that glacial quality about them, like the ocean, almost. So, we picked out one of these for him—Van Dusen, me, and a group of us. And she sat there, like a rock.
“He did everything. She crossed her legs, he crossed his legs. She picked her nose, he picked his nose. She’d scratch her ear, he’d scratch his ear. He just did everything he could to make a fool out of her. And nothing happened. This went on for maybe forty-five minutes. Finally, he said, ‘Okay. . . . Be crazy if you want to.’ And he walked away. To applause.”
Aside from their contacts at Mendocino State Hospital, Fritz, over the next year and a half, paid seven or eight weekend visits to Paul’s home—visits he looked forward to in spite of the three-hour bus ride. To be in the presence of Paul, his wife, and twelve children, to satisfy his intellect with good conversation, to enjoy Paul’s playing Chopin for him on a dilapidated piano, to engage in chess games where the old fox was perpetually outfoxed, and to settle down for dinner gave him profound, if fleeting, moments of satisfaction.
Paul laughed, recalling their chess matches, about the artful ways in which he would defeat Fritz.
“He was chagrined. He was a sore loser. He didn’t kick the board off or anything, but he would make these put-down remarks. And I would outfox him in the cleverest way.
“I was always a good chess player. And I know how old men play. They get tired. So, anyway, I would make a very sophisticated move in the midgame, somewhere. I would always enjoy complex midgames. I would avoid trading and get a whole series of infinitely complex possibilities set up while he was trying to simplify it. Then I would cause him to trade the wrong way. He caught on very fast. Maybe the very next move he knew that it was downhill no matter what he did.
“Then he’d say, ‘Ach. Sometimes I don’t like to play chess.’
“’Well, you know what Freud said,’ I’d answer. ‘When you win it’s the most interesting and best game in the world. And when you lose it’s a waste of time.’
“And he said, ‘Exactly right.’”
In their conversations, the two men shared a mutual interest in the meaningfulness of their lives and their work. Paul was involved in lysergic acid research at Mendocino State and became a conduit for the drug for Fritz, who also shared some of his LSD experiences.
Fritz was envious of Paul’s wife when she took lysergic acid during one of his visits and had a blissful transcendental experience. And he respectfully questioned Paul about his mystical experiences.
“I’ve always regarded myself as a Christian,” said Paul, “but I went further. I s
aid things like ‘Christ is magic and transcends us.’ Being an intellectual doubter, Fritz would ask me why I believe, what it is I believe in fact, and what it does for me. Things like that.
“I’d tell him of certain experiences, describing LSD trips, but it’s indescribable. Something really happened and I experienced it and it was real. But I can’t really tell you what it was like. And that was the way I spoke to him about my views on Christianity.”
Fritz, for all his own experimentation with the psychedelic drugs, had little or no experience with the Beyond. He could never transcend his own ego, and arrogantly believing himself to be Everyman, claimed that the Beyond was a fantasy. When Fritz tripped, he never saw God or felt himself one with Creation. Instead, he played out emotional scenes regarding the facts of his birth, experienced the paranoia that others were threatening his ego, felt himself to be a fraud, and, on one occasion, played chess with himself with Fritz on both sides of the board. It was Fritz, Fritz, Fritz—always in the way—always preventing that fusing, melting, ego-death that is part of the religious/mystical experience. He reached for it repeatedly but always came away empty-handed. It was exactly as Wilson Van Dusen described it: “Enlightenment can be gummed up by reaching for this overwhelming state. The more effort you put into it, the less of anything is there. It comes, if you’re lucky, when you’re not doing a damned thing. It’s the idea of grace. It finds you. The more you try to find it, the more you create the obstacle.”
“Fritz had a lot of bummers on acid,” according to Paul, “the negative Jew trip where he’d conclude ‘I’m just another Jewish charlatan.’”
This feeling of being a charlatan was undoubtedly reinforced by the philosophical conclusions they would arrive at when discussing the relationship and nature of mental illness and psychotherapy. In an existential sense, Paul recognized that a man was neurotic only because he thought of himself thusly, and that therapy consisted of one person in the role of helpless patient consulting someone else who played the more arrogant role of therapist. He saw this interaction as an essentially destructive process, since it reinforced “illness” (the patient, by turning to a higher authority, keeps himself in an inferior, dependent, one-down position).
Paul came to feel that if there was anything he had to teach it was by example, not verbiage, and that to charge people for conversing with them was a “rip-off.” He was to make, instead, a commitment to real work—to farming, carpentry, and raising children—so that when he talked with you it was as a fellow traveler upon life’s road and not as a guru.
Paul was to involve himself so fully in the elements of basic living that he remains, to this day, an obscure figure to the larger world. Willing to talk freely to anyone who seeks him out, he nonetheless is not looking for converts and has started no new psychotherapeutic school. He seems capable of practicing what Fritz Perls preached: the ability to live in and be content with the present moment of existence. He currently lives in a barn that he converted, with children, chickens, and sheep running through his home. He butchers his own hogs, raises his own vegetables, and teaches his kids all the basic fundamentals.
“You could drop his children high up in the Amazon basin,” claims Wilson, “and they would all survive.”
Fritz left the Bay Area for Los Angeles in late 1960, partly because consultation funds at Mendocino State ran out and partly because the paucity of his practice made him restless. Jim Simkin, his friend and former student, had already established a solid, reputable practice in the City of Angels. Jim, as straight and conventional in his own lifestyle as Fritz was unorthodox in his, was able to help Fritz get started.
“He rarely came without a gift,” said Jim, a pleasant-looking man of average height, average weight, and average features. “Which is so unlike Fritz. People don’t know this side of him, for he could hound you for a nickel. When he came to Los Angeles in 1960, I had been in practice about a year and a half. He asked, ‘How are you doing?’ . . . ‘Could be better.’ . . . ‘You need some money.’ . . . ‘Yeah, I could use some money.’ . . . ‘Here.’ And he gave me a thousand bucks, which was a big chunk of dough in those days. ‘You pay me when you get it.’”
Jim helped Fritz, initially, by convincing him to cut down on his use of LSD, for it was clear to Jim that Fritz’s experimentations with that agent had not only adversely affected his relationship with Marty Fromm and the Van Dusens, but had prejudiced severely his subsequent perspectives and dealings with others.
“He got paranoid while he was on drugs,” Jim reported, “and vicious. People were ‘always trying to take advantage’ of him, ‘trying to steal’ his ideas, his theories.
“He always had to have the advantage. He would do the taking advantage of and then project that and experience it the other way. The dynamics of the Injustice Collector.”
The second way Jim helped Fritz was to provide him, again, with some brief but meaningful sense of belongingness. As with the Van Dusens’ children, Fritz, who ordinarily had little tolerance for youngsters, allowed a familial rapport to develop.
“The kids loved him,” Jim continued. “All three of our daughters. He had a delicious sense of humor. We had a parakeet that our little daughter taught to say, ‘Dr. Perls, quack, quack.’ And Fritz could hardly wait to sit in front of that bird and hear him say that. He enjoyed those human touches, sitting around the table and being part of a family where he felt welcome. That aspect of him is also not well known. He didn’t show that often and was, instead, the gruff guy. When he left Los Angeles, he gave one of my daughters his television set.”
Lastly, Jim helped Fritz relaunch his professional efforts: “We started a study group. In less than a month, there were ten top-notch people in training: Bob Gerrard, Walt Kempler, Ev Shostrum, and others. And within eight months, a second group started. Fritz was still difficult in the way he conducted himself in public, but not quite as impossible as when he was in L.A. in the early fifties. More sure of himself and less angry and belligerent.”
Although it may have seemed that Fritz was reestablishing himself, in actuality he was doing little more than relocating—as he did when he gave up on New York and moved into semiretirement in Miami.
“But he was always impatient,” Jim continued. “He started freeway routes. He would go out on the San Bernardino Freeway—go out to some hospitals and private groups, pick up some consultations along the route, and maybe stay overnight. He did the same thing on the Santa Ana Freeway. Things didn’t build up fast enough and he was also getting fed up with what he called the psychiatric racket. So, he decided to go on a world trip. He left in sixty-two, turned over part of the practice to Walt Kempler, who took the San Bernardino Freeway, and I took the Santa Ana Freeway. When he came back, fifteen months later, I still had the Santa Ana Freeway going.”
Fritz’s dropping out was similar, in many respects, to that of Paul Frey, reflecting the lack of belief each came to feel about the validity of their profession. But, whereas Paul found an alternative lifestyle, Fritz did not. His subsequent experiences, however, gave him renewed respect for quiet Here and Now living and enabled him, upon his return, to work, again, with some measure of good faith.
His round-the-world sojourn was by boat—from the Orient, to the Middle East, Europe, and New York, before returning to California. The high points of his journey were Kyoto, Japan, and Elath, Israel, an uncanny coincidence for a man who later jokingly described himself as a Zen Judaist.
Fritz spent two months at the Daitokuji Temple in Kyoto, immersing himself, with a gentle cynicism, in Zen training. He was particularly delighted when the Roshi, on giving him a simple koan—”What color is the wind?”—seemed satisfied with his response of blowing smoke in the Roshi’s face. But it was the tranquility of Kyoto, the city of temples and the seat of Zen, its unhurried nature, and the friendliness in its citizens’ faces that appealed to him the most.
The same tranquility was red
iscovered in Elath. Fritz, who had periodically dabbled in painting, took it up more seriously there, inspired by the colors of the Red Sea. Painting, however, failed to offer the same satisfactions that he had as a practicing therapist. Elath is a drab, dusty, hot city, where he remained for a month after discovering a colony of American beachcombers doing absolutely nothing at all and apparently quite content in their lack of “productivity.” It was Fritz’s first contact with beatnik culture.
“To find the beachcombers was an event,” he wrote. “To find people who were happy just to be, without goals and achievements.”
Fritz returned to Los Angeles somewhat less ambitious and less despairing than when he had left. He was now seventy years old and had demonstrated, to himself, that he could survive apart from his role of therapist/teacher. He seemed more resigned than ever before to the idea of being unremembered for his work on earth. It is one of those perpetual paradoxes that, when least desirous, desire is fulfilled. So it was for Fritz.
Substituting, one night, for a vacationing Jim Simkin, Fritz met Bernard Gunther, a member of Jim’s Wednesday-night group. In the group that night, Bernie, who later became The Esalen Institute’s resident masseur, experienced living in a perpetually flowing present, a feeling he had known before only under the influence of psychedelic drugs. He was so excited by this experience that he arranged to transfer to a group that Fritz led. The more Bernie admired Fritz, the more cavalierly Fritz seemed to treat him, so much so that it often bordered on contempt. How ironical, in view of the fact that Bernie played such a catalytic role in Fritz’s eventual fame.
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