Fritz

by Martin Shepard

  Fritz wrote, with biting undertones.

  “In one of my groups there was a guy who was involved in a number of ‘far out’ things—yoga, massage, therapy, Charlotte Selvers sensory awareness. His name is Bernie Gunther. He is a good entrepreneur—not very creative, but capable of synthesizing and putting to use what he takes from different sources. He, like Bill Schutz, certainly turns people on. I have little doubt that he will climb up the ladder to the top.”

  Bernie tried to spend as much time with Fritz as he could, to absorb, as completely as he was able, Fritz’s Gestalt message. He seemed willing to ignore, avoid, or overlook the ungracious personal feedback he received. Shortly after beginning in group, for instance, Fritz was attempting to put Bernie in touch with his capacity for aggression.

  “He conned me into that ‘Louder’ business,” said Bernie, an unusually soft-spoken, soft-stepping, muscular man. “I was into weight-lifting and was a husky guy then, and one time he asked me to pound the coffee table that he had. I pounded it and he said, ‘Do it again.’ He kept egging me on until I broke his coffee table into a thousand pieces. Everybody was quite impressed except Fritz and myself. He was pissed because I broke his coffee table, and I was afraid he was going to make me pay for it, which he eventually did.”

  At other times, Bernie attempted to get closer to Fritz by remaining after group meetings and watching wrestling matches on television with him—a pastime Fritz enjoyed greatly. Except that Fritz “didn’t like to talk very much, at least not to me.

  “I used to go to dinner with him. Gestalt therapists in those days were hard guys. They were really into that Here and Now thing. If you didn’t have something to say that they thought was totally relevant, they wouldn’t answer you or they wouldn’t talk to you. So, I remember those awful meals when that used to happen.

  “Eventually I decided I wanted to help him spread Gestalt Therapy and so I put on a seminar for him at a place called Books in Review. It was a classical bookstore run by Harry Hill, the sort of place where if a new book came in, Harry, who knew all his customers, would let those people know who might be interested in it. Alan Watts would come into town every three months and give lectures upstairs, in the balcony. I knew people from having taught yoga in town and having worked with Charlotte Selver. Harry had lists of people from the Watts lectures—people in the pre-Humanistic swing. So, we had a fantastically successful lecture—a standing-room crowd. Somewhere between fifty and a hundred people in a small room.

  “He was really pleased, because he didn’t think, at that time, that he was a particularly good lecturer. And he was quite nervous, something that in the later years he had gotten over. But he was really nervous that first night. Afterwards, I was talking to him—he always used to call talking ‘shitting’—and he would say, ‘Jesus, I was really shitting well tonight.’ And he really did flow very well. The series went very nicely.”

  Chait’s Hot Springs Hotel, in Big Sur, California, was inherited by Michael Murphy, a recent Stanford graduate and former student of Alan Watts. He and his ex-classmate, Dick Price, were running the place as an inn, which they would rent to people interested in holding seminars in areas that later came to be subsumed under the term The Human Potential Movement. Chait’s, before long, changed its name to The Esalen Institute, after a local Indian tribe, and set its own course instead of being available for charter.

  In Christmas of 1963, Gene Sagan, a Bay Area psychologist, rented Chait’s to organize a program called “The Education of the Imagination,” sponsored by the Berkeley Education Extension. It was an interdisciplinary conference designed to introduce to one another people who were on the cutting edge of their professions; people from the theater, dance, music, sociology, psychology, and body awareness. The program was not open to the public, but was strictly for people in what was to become “The Movement.” Each would share with the others—for room and board—what they were into.

  Fritz and Bernie were both invited. Bernie fell in love with the place and persuaded Mike Murphy to let him stay on and freelance with the inn’s guests and do some “massage, sensory awareness, yoga, and a little Gestalt.

  “Fritz didn’t like Esalen at all,” Bernie continued. “He thought it was a screwed-up place, pretty primitive, with a lot of dropouts running around.”

  Bernie was still imbued with the idea of putting Gestalt Therapy on the map and was interested, personally, in more Gestalt training for himself. During one of his visits back to Los Angeles, he pressed Fritz to establish a training group for therapists at Big Sur.

  Fritz was initially against the idea, but Bernie persisted, pointing out that The Esalen Institute was ideally located, being halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

  “You organize, I function,” said Fritz, finally relenting.

  Bernie was to organize quite well. He cleared the project with Mike Murphy and Dick Price, sent out a mailing, made some phone calls, and collected registration fees. When Fritz returned to Esalen in the summer of 1964, he was not simply one among many, but was there to teach Gestalt Therapy to people who had come up solely to see and work with him. On second inspection, given a chance to “do his own thing,” the ambience had apparently changed, for he wrote:

  “The target Esalen scored a bull’s-eye with the arrow Fritz Perls. A landscape comparable to Elath; beautiful people on the staff as in Kyoto. An opportunity to teach. The gypsy found a home and soon a house.”

  He found something else as well. A respite for a sick heart.

  8. The Esalen Institute, Big Sur

  Esalen is a cliffside community situated along Route 1, a third of the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Behind it loom the Big Sur Mountains. In front lies the vast Pacific.

  There is a heaven/hell atmosphere to the place, from its Edenesque grounds to the Beelzebub smell of its hot sulphur baths. I arrived there on December 23, 1972. The next evening, Alan Watts, dressed in clerical garb, conducted a mock Christmas Eve ceremony—half pagan and half Christian, rich in ritual and mysticism but poor in following orthodox religious custom. Those who live, work at, or visit Esalen profess a love of nature and man. Yet, the quality of this love is offensive to Bible-thumping fundamentalists, for Esalen is a temple of sensuality as well as of the spirit.

  “People expect life to be different here,” says Suzanne Williamson, a displaced Yankee who works in the office. “It isn’t. It’s just more intense.

  “We have the same rip-offs, deceits, backbiting, gossiping, and criticizing that goes on in the outside world. Only it happens under maximum view and is subject to closer scrutiny.”

  “Your style doesn’t change so much,” added Carole Rosenblatt, another young staffer, “it’s just that you come to see it more quickly.”

  Esalen was the better mousetrap that finally brought the world to Fritz’s doorstep. The Institute itself is small—comfortably accommodating up to sixty people. By utilizing Southcoast, a motel down the road, somewhat over one hundred people can be housed, if necessary. Although these numbers are not large, Esalen’s popularity and year-round operation—from day-long to month-long programs in the areas of psychology, mysticism, the humanities, and the arts—results in several thousand people passing through each year.

  Esalen burst into the public’s consciousness in 1966 because of its utilization of novel and exciting ways of waking us ordinary mortals out of our deadened, somnambulistic state. Willing to allow any approach that might turn people on to life, nature, harmony, freedom, grace, or awareness, the Institute offered workshops in yoga, meditation, sensory awareness, encounter groups, massage, religion, nude therapy, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Fritz’s Gestalt Therapy groups were just one of these etceteras.

  Esalen psychologist William Schutz wrote a best-selling book in 1967, Joy, which explained some of the encounter techniques he was utilizing at the Institute. The interest in that book contributed, of co
urse, to Esalen’s ever-growing fame, as did the movie Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, a gentle comedy of what happens to two couples who turn on, at a fictionalized version of Esalen, to the concepts of honesty, sensuality, and following your feelings.

  To be sensitive to the needs of your body, follow your impulses, and start to relate straightforwardly was a most appealing notion to many people in the 1960s. Doing this in groups with other people made the concepts even more enticing. For the malady of the times was alienation accompanied by a quiet, ritualized despair.

  Large sections of the population had been through the psychoanalytic mill and found it left them unfulfilled. They might have come to recognize the causes of their complexes, but had failed to achieve a more zestful existence. Even more souls considered themselves normal and felt no need to see a therapist. Yet, these “normals” also sensed a lack of excitement in their lives—so hooked in were they to their time/performance slots in our mechanized society.

  Esalen was open to Everyman and Everywoman. To attend their programs required only curiosity. If anyone were willing to say, “I could get even more out of my life,” that person was welcome. One no longer had to wear the label “neurotic” in order to try to feel better. Many were attracted by this possibility. For the decent home, decent job, decent car—the end result of a materialism that was supposed to make life richer—had left us poorer instead. Not only had meaning disappeared from life’s labors, but, given the mad scramble for goods and resources, we had forgotten how to share ourselves with family, friends, and neighbors.

  Esalen’s twin promises of a freer lifestyle and freedom from alienation were as appealing to those over twenty-five as was the flower-child movement for those who were younger. No matter that most of Esalen’s leading gurus were, like Fritz, similarly alienated. It was the very depth of their own alienation that impelled them to search for new ways of overcoming it, to replace interpersonal isolation with decent contact.

  It was Esalen’s institutional success that, in large measure, enabled Fritz, at the end of his life, to gain the respect and appreciation that he sought and deserved; that, plus his way of being and his influence upon the other members of the staff. Fritz worked with many of Esalen’s future group leaders, influenced their styles, and, through them, spread his legend and his “truth.”

  “A big part of Fritz’s story was that, especially for a psychiatrist, his life was so different, so damned colorful,” said Abe Levitsky, San Francisco Gestaltist and former student of Fritz’s. “The fact that he lived at Esalen in almost a public way. The fact that thousands of people encountered him at the lunch table and dinner table and at the festivities in the evening and that sort of thing.”

  “And that sort of thing” included flapping like a seal in the baths, performing therapeutic “miracles,” leching after scores of young (and not so young) beauties, and dealing with both staff and seminarians with such regal aplomb and disdain that people were perpetually aware of and expecting the unexpected from this theatrically exciting septuagenarian.

  It was, then, not so much that a “new” or a “different” Fritz arrived at Esalen, but that he was performing his usual act under a microscope through which ten thousand eyes eventually peered.

  Fritz spent five years at Esalen, offending some and intriguing others. It was hard, however, to ignore him or to remain neutral. As Mark Mann, one of the staff, remarked to a newly arrived seminarian: “That’s Fritz Perls. Some people think he’s a genius. I just think he’s a dirty old man.”

  Fritz eventually went through three phases at Esalen. The first was a period of short-tempered, introspective nastiness, which lasted through most of 1965. Part of this mood can be directly attributed to his health, part to the small demand for his work, and part to his usual defensive come-on in a new social/therapeutic location.

  Fritz’s heart condition had deteriorated steadily since his departure from Miami and Marty. Angina pains were so bad, in 1963, that Fritz seriously contemplated suicide. When he first arrived at Big Sur, his condition was so poor that he could not walk down the slope from the lodge to the baths. Special arrangements were made to allow him to drive his Volkswagen to the bathhouse.

  He had been living alone, prior to Esalen, for years. His diet was poor. Never preparing his own meals, he ate at the local diner or some other greasy spoon. His hours were similarly irregular, for there was not much of a schedule to build his time around.

  Because of his lack of stamina, Fritz asked for Jim Simkin’s assistance at the training workshop that Bernie Gunther had organized. This circumstance heralded the offensive qualities Fritz displayed during the early part of his residence.

  “The reason I organized that workshop was that I wanted to become a Gestalt therapist,” said Bernie. “My deal with Fritz was that I would get this whole thing organized and he would let me take the course. And he said, ‘Fine.’

  “But he was going to co-lead with Jim Simkin. And Jim Simkin was very uptight about anybody doing Gestalt Therapy who didn’t have an M.D. or a Ph.D. He told Fritz that if I were in the class, he wouldn’t teach with Fritz. So Fritz told me I couldn’t be in it after organizing this fucking thing. I was really very salty toward Fritz. That was our first big run-in. As far as I was concerned, it was just a dishonest thing on his part. The rationalization he had was, ‘Look. I’m not willing to give up Simkin just for you.’ And my thing was, ‘Fuck it. There wouldn’t have been anything if it wasn’t for me.’”

  Simkin’s insistence that all Gestalt therapists hold legitimate postgraduate degrees was particularly ironic, since his mentor, Fritz, could not have met this qualification. Fritz’s M.D. degree was never recognized in this country. His Ph.D. was an honorary award in 1950 from The Western College of Psychoanalysis, a small Los Angeles school unrecognized by any bona fide national accrediting body and currently unlisted in the Los Angeles telephone directory. Although he proudly listed his Ph.D. on all his later publications, it was apparently as bogus as a three-dollar bill.

  Fritz’s harshness was invariably in direct proportion to his own neediness, and he was particularly needy at this time. His attitude and bearing discouraged those who would place him in the role of a nurturing parent or a reassurer. He treated such requests to suck his symbolic teat scornfully or with a logical argument: “What do you need me for?” he might ask. “What do you need your parents for? You’ve got eyes and ears and energy. What do you want to do? Why not say good-bye to us authorities, throw us in the garbage pail, and do things and solve problems on your own?”

  “He had,” reports Abe Levitsky, “an overemphasis on the issues of autonomy and self-support which, I feel, he was almost obsessive about and which reflected his own unresolved problems of dependency. This probably had a great deal to do with his rejection of my depression when he worked with me. Or anybody’s depression. It made him impatient.”

  Impatient or not, Fritz also knew that self-pity was a dead end in depressive states, and he bent over backward to avoid encouraging it.

  Fritz was in a bind when it came to neediness. Wanting something from others offended his sense of dignity, his idea of taking care of one’s own business. His association between desiring support from others and being undignified came, most likely, from his expectations of unrequited love. It is easy to conjure up undignified images of reaching out to people for a loving embrace and finding that the parties you reach for turn their backs on you and move quickly aside. Fritz lived through many such experiences. Little wonder, then, that he had a great reluctance to express his own neediness.

  He was once quite harsh with Diane Reifler, a woman who participated in one of his weekend groups. Subsequently they were intimate. Fritz later invited her to take part in a month-long training workshop he was giving at Esalen. She went up to work on the hot seat and started out by saying, “I want.”

  “And he really zapped me. Because I said ‘I want. . . .’
The first two words out of my mouth. Like ‘How dare you say I want?’

  “He was angry, I think, because I wasn’t fucking him during that month-long program. I didn’t want to, then, but he might have expected that I would. And I didn’t make any overtures toward him. I think he would have liked me to make some overtures but I didn’t He was really caught in his own stew, because he wouldn’t ask me for greater closeness.”

  This instance clearly illustrates his Neediness Paradox. Fritz wanted, but wouldn’t ask. And so, he condemned the wantingness of others.

  One legendary tale of Fritz the Terrible is told by a former assistant who wished to remain anonymous:

  “When I came to Esalen for the first residence program, he was beginning to record his work. He spent five thousand dollars on videotape equipment. He was very tight, and when he spent that much, he really was involved. Yet, he couldn’t get it to work properly. I told him I had been an electronic engineer for fifteen years. That’s how I became his cameraman. For two or three months, I recorded everything he did. It was right, for me. The residence program had just fallen apart and it was a good experience for me to learn Gestalt.

  “I liked him a lot. He once called me ‘twentieth-century man, scientific and aesthetic.’

  “Then one fine day a woman named Marsha Price appeared, zipping down the hill in a red Ferrari with a ‘Whoopee, I’m here.’ She soon saw that the energy at Esalen was where Fritz was, and she registered for all his workshops.

  “In her second month there, she wanted more of a work relationship with him, and he hired her as my assistant, for he was turned on to her. Marsha and I became really close friends and Fritz seemed jealous. She wasn’t into fucking Fritz but was playing with him.