Fritz

by Martin Shepard

  “He did a lot of therapy when he was intimate with me. I needed to do a lot of sucking, so he would put his hand in my mouth. He could connect to those kinds of needs. At that time, I did a lot of crying. It was like reexperiencing being a baby. He could see that that’s what I really needed rather than fucking. I wouldn’t really consider it balling. A lot of time in bed allowed for anything that concerned contact. He eventually came. And he helped me a lot.”

  Marty Fromm recalls that “Fritz had a lot of ego involved in lovemaking—in turning women on. So, a refusal might whet his appetite, where he could show off and do his thing.

  “His potency varied in the last few years. He gracefully withdrew from fucking, and enjoyed kissing and playing in the baths. He always had a marvelous mouth and hands and always enjoyed producing orgasms for women. I really did enjoy playing after Fritz. I grew up, sexually. Everything I learned I learned from him and I’m grateful not only for what he did for me as a therapist but as a lover.”

  Fritz’s capabilities as a jester also helped make him bigger than life, for his comic sense ranged far and wide. He could ham it up, slapstick-style, for the entertainment of others by his parody of flamenco dancing, his satirical improvisations of other people, and his cutting one-liners.

  As a phrasemaker, his wit was razor-sharp. Once, when asked his opinion on meditation, he responded with: “Meditation is neither shit nor get off the pot.”

  During his campaign to end mystical programs at Esalen, he referred to the Institite as “a spiritual Coney Island.”

  In putting down the Freudian’s insistence on explaining all illness in terms of childhood traumata, he said: “Psychoanalysis is an illness that pretends to be a cure.”

  Fritz took great delight in twitting intellectuals who denied their animal instincts and their creature intuition.

  “Intellect is the whore of intelligence,” he wrote.

  Since his Gestalt Therapy was grounded in immediate experience and awareness, Fritz had little patience with intellectual theoreticians—”mind-fuckers,” as he caustically called them. His ability to satirize their endless quest for explanations was one of his chief weapons in countering their academic pretensions:

  “Why, at best, leads to clever explanation, but never to an understanding. Why and because are dirty words in Gestalt Therapy. They lead only to rationalization, and belong to the second class of verbiage production. I distinguish three classes of verbiage production: chickenshit—this is “good morning,” “how are you,” and so on; bullshit—this is “because,” rationalization, excuses; and elephantshit—this is when you talk about philosophy, existential Gestalt Therapy, etc.—which I am doing now. The why gives only unending inquiries into the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause.”

  Some of his most famous quips were directed toward other luminaries in the so-called Human Potential Movement. Abraham Maslow was known as the Founding Father of “Third Force Psychology.” He preached a view of man that paid attention to ideals, values, choices, actualization, and spirituality. Although this was a more humanistic conception than that held by orthodox Freudians, it was equally rigid in its insistence upon a newer, liberal stereotype.

  And what was Fritz’s opinion of Maslow?

  “A sugar-coated Nazi.”

  Rollo May, the preacher-turned-psychoanalyst, is another psychological Superstar who established a reputation for himself as an existentialist. Fritz referred to him, while at Esalen, as “an existentialist without an existence.”

  Bernie Gunther also recollects Fritz’s ability to laugh at his own absurdity.

  “In my position as the Masseur of Big Sur, I naturally found my way into the hearts and membranes of many a lovely and not so lovely woman. Those were the days when I was a Jewish boy in a pastry shop. It was hard to say ‘No.’ And I ran into this little girl who had the blackest raven hair you’ve ever seen—a little bit on the thin side but really buxom. Very lovely. Olive skin, attractive, young. The personification of the pretty, not particularly nourishing type of girl I used to go for.

  “She and I had gotten together the night before and came down and went into the dining room. I had to go talk to somebody, so I left her in the dining room to wait for me. Well, Fritz was in the bar, and he apparently saw her standing there. I had said whatever I had to say and was coming back. But I saw him moving toward her and I thought I’d stay in the background and see what happened.

  “He started moving toward her in this beautiful, leering, focused way that he had. And when he got within four or five feet of her, she said, ‘Do you want something, Grandpa?’ It’s the only time I’ve ever seen Fritz totally freeze up. He just stopped, then laughed, and when he realized there was no way of moving forward, he turned and walked back.”

  During this time, Fritz gave many people the gift of specialness. Though countless souls felt they shared a rare moment with this man, the moments, in fact, were more common than they have assumed. At least they were for Fritz. One of his former assistants at Esalen put it this way: “People always wanted to be near him. And, periodically, he’d pick a fish out of the pond and it was very attractive. One day it was Marsha. She was the most important person in his life right now. And then, one day, he would drop her. Just as he dropped me.

  “Everybody who worked with him thought that they were his favorite. And it surprised them to find out that there would soon be someone else. But it was great at the time.

  “That was the nature of the man. And my reaction, like that of many others, was that of someone who wanted more.”

  The legion of people who felt that they had something extra special with this otherwise lonely and isolated man helped propagate the legend of Fritz Perls. Not only were there a string of ladies but also a host of “heirs apparent”—people who claimed the number two post in the Gestalt hierarchy after Fritz.

  With the possible exception of Laura Perls, Jim Simkin has laid the longest-lasting claim to Gestalt “leadership.” One of his most impressive credentials is having worked amicably with Fritz since the Gestalt Institute of New York was founded. Few can match both his durability and longevity.

  In his Esalen phase alone (and, later, at Cowichan), Fritz asked a number of people to be his assistants. Aside from Jim, these have included Abe Levitsky, Bob Hall, Claudio Naranjo, Dick Price, Teddy Lyon, and Janet Lederman. A few he turned on, bitterly, as time went by. Others went their separate ways. Some remained his friends.

  When Laura claims, “We never parted . . . I was still the one he was closest to,” or when Marty Fromm states, “We never really left each other,” both are in good company. Dozens of Fritz’s other, briefer, more trifling intimacies report the same enduring and timeless quality of relationship.

  “You’re going to have a hard time with Fritz’s relationships,” Teddy Lyon told me when I interviewed her, “because Fritz had moments when he related to each one of us deeper or as deep as any of his human relationships. But to say ‘he had a friend’ is a hard thing to say. And I’m not sure that I’d say it.”

  Boredom had always been a problem for Fritz: what to do when he was not working. The stability and support he was now receiving enabled him to channel even this restlessness into ways that were to lead him to new heights of creativity.

  Dick Price recalls seeing Fritz “restless for something to do when he wasn’t conducting a group, wandering around wondering who’s about to play chess with. And then, occasionally, he would get fascinated with something like the videotape. And then drop the tape suddenly as a child would drop a Christmas toy. ‘Now I’m going to be on stage and do my own directing . . . Now I’m going to be an author.’ Almost like a very groovy child, completely into whatever he was doing.”

  This “groovy child” not only saw videotape as a way of giving people additional feedback, but recorded—both on tape and on film—a remarkable selection of
his work with people, visual documents that would be widely shown and add, immeasurably, to both public and professional interest in Gestalt Therapy.

  The quality and conciseness of his work also sharpened. Fritz felt that he was becoming better and better. Some of his work, taped in 1967 and 1968, was edited into his third book, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, which was eventually published in 1969. The clarity and crispness of that work stand in sharp contrast to the ponderously coauthored Gestalt Therapy.

  As his reputation spread, he launched what he called his “circus,” where he gave demonstrations of Gestalt Therapy in front of a hundred people or more upon a stage that he had rigged. These demonstrations gave rise to his well-known “hot seat”—an empty chair beside him that members of the audience could occupy if they wished to work with him. The beckoning quality of this empty chair and the dramatic tensions that ensued from people working alongside him led him to bring the hot-seat technique back from the circuses and into the smaller workshops that he ran.

  Fritz also discovered the Good Mommy he never had, in the person of Teddy Lyon, a woman in her mid-forties, who evolved from patient to maid to lover to secretary to disciple to assistant. She was in daily contact with him for the last three years of his life both at Esalen and Cowichan (the Gestalt “kibbutz” Fritz subsequently founded in Canada). Teddy was privy to Fritz’s personal affairs in a way few others had been, for he came to trust her implicitly. Unlike any woman he had previously known, she was loyal, undemanding, and willing to quietly “be there” for Fritz. And, aside from some initial sexual possessiveness on his part, he was never to foul up their relationship by becoming romantically involved with her.

  An ascetic-looking, slim, gaminish, older Audrey Hepburn–type, Teddy, with short grey pageboy hair, deep eyes, and a soft manner, first met Fritz in January 1965, at a workshop he was giving at Esalen. Her life had centered around her children; the “mothering” role was a very essential one for her to play in order to validate and give meaning to her existence. Two years before she signed up for Fritz’s workshop, her son had been killed in an automobile accident and her younger daughter went off to college. So, at the time, she was undergoing a process of great despair/unhappiness/transition.

  Although she saw Fritz and Jim Simkin on and off during the next two years, she failed to make much headway in finding new meaning and involvement in her life. Then, in the summer of 1967, she signed up for a month-long program that Fritz was giving.

  “At the end of that month I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t feel like leaving Esalen and I didn’t want to go home. Fritz had, in the interim, built the round house and moved into it. It was very dirty because there wasn’t anybody cleaning. I said to him that I would like to stay there for a few days and that I would be glad to clean his house in exchange. It needed it. I said that the only thing worse than a Jewish mother was a Presbyterian mother—which I was. And he said, ‘Fine.’ I asked how long did he think he could stand me, and he said, ‘Maybe five days.’ So, we had an utterly loose agreement.

  “The first day I started out, I cleaned really hard. The place was absolutely filthy. Fritz had gone to rest in the guest room, where I was staying. Just about the time I was finishing, he got up and came into his room. I asked him one of those things that you ask when you’ve been cleaning for hours, like ‘Where does this go?’ And he said, ‘Please. I’ve just had a nightmare that women are putting order in my life.’ I answered that ‘If that’s the worst trouble you’re in, you’re not in real trouble.’ And he laughed. From then on, except for one brief fight we had with each other, I worked for him until he died.

  “I lived in the round house for about a month and a half. Then we had a terrible fight and both decided that we hated living with each other, that it was an enormous relief not to anymore and we stopped it. The trouble began when he went away for a trip. In leaving, he had said to me, ‘Misbehave.’ I took him very literally, being very dumb and stupid. So I went out and had an affair with a much younger man. Fritz comes back, finds out about that, and claims there’s something I’m supposed to have done that I haven’t done because I’m playing around. Something I’m supposed to get in the mail. And he seemed mad about that.”

  The old anger was rising up once more—the same anger he felt when Marty shared her favors with someone else in Miami, the hurt and resentment he must have experienced as a child when his mother showed greater involvement with another rival, his sister Else. His resentfulness erupted at his seminar that evening and carried over for a few more days until he put the pieces back in perspective so that he and Teddy might establish a more platonic, respectable, and enduring relationship. Teddy continues: “That night there was a group. I attended all of his groups at that point. Everyone was saying where they’re at. They get around to me and I’m sitting, rocking back and forth on this chair. I’m feeling very hot. And Fritz asks, ‘What do you resent?’ I answer that I don’t resent anything. Fritz says, ‘You’re such a liar.’ And then, of course, I did resent something. I instantly resented him telling me I’m a liar.

  “He said, ‘Rocking is always a sign of resentment.’ And I was confused. I wasn’t aware of it, but if I look for something, I can always find it. Yet, I wondered if rocking was always a sign of resentment. That was all in public.

  “When the group finished that evening, I went up to Fritz and said, ‘I want to talk to you.’ He’s tired and exhausted and doesn’t want to get this straight, but I did. I remember sitting on the bed in his bedroom, and his telling me that all he could hear in my voice was ‘righteous indignation.’ And that made me mad, too. The next morning he looked at me with this terrible look and said, ‘Finished.’ It was the first time he had looked at me that way, though I saw him look at others like that. It was awful. That’s how I initially lost my job with him and permanently left his house.”

  It was not long before Fritz asked Teddy to resume working for him as his secretary. She would help him with “the kinds of things he always hated—which was opening mail, answering it, paying bills, and making arrangements.” Teddy would type his manuscripts, share his excitement as he wrote sections of In and Out the Garbage Pail, and never begrudge him his involvement with other people.

  “Much later on, when he moved to Canada, Fritz asked me if I’d live with him and keep house for him. I said, ‘No.’ I would not do that for him but I was willing to go to Cowichan with him as his assistant.”

  Teddy found new involvement through her relationship with Fritz. At Esalen she served as his chief cook and bottle-washer—someone he could bounce ideas off, someone who approved of him wholeheartedly, someone who could disagree with him in a loving way. And, by being a quietly accepting and faithful Supermother toward him, Teddy could reclaim a role she had been unable to play since her children departed.

  What with his house, his work, his growing fame, and the love that many of those at Esalen felt for him—from Dick Price, to Teddy Lyon, to staffers such as Ed Taylor and Selig, the gardener, to fellow group leaders such as Janet Lederman and Julian Silverman—one might have expected that Fritz would live harmoniously, at Esalen, ever after. Such speculation failed to take account of his growing jealousy of coresidents Bill Schutz and Bernie Gunther. Although Fritz was impatient to establish further refinements relating to Gestalt Therapy, refinements that could be instituted only at a place he was fully in charge of, it was his own destructive envy and rage, more than anything else, that ruined the paradise Esalen had been for him.

  11. Esalen, Concluded

  All great teachers teach what they themselves have learned and need to remind themselves of. If Alfred Adler taught others to appreciate the inferiority/superiority axis, it was because he was deeply enmeshed in this situation himself. Sigmund Freud’s helping people to recognize the strength of their sexual instincts stemmed from the power of his own sexual repressions. Similarly, Fritz’s lessons of “be true to yourself,” “live in
the present,” and “reown your projections” flowed directly from his own difficulties in achieving these same ends. Never was this discrepancy clearer than during Fritz’s final period at Big Sur.

  When I confine myself to thinking of process—the “how” as it occurs in the “now” (the Gestalt-Existential-Phenomenological viewpoint)—I discover that my understanding of Fritz improves to the degree that I can suspend trying to understand him. If, on the other hand, I try to explain him in terms of some irreducible theory, he becomes unexplainable. Fritz, more than most people, was both simpler and more complex than any theoretical system would have us believe. That is why he is best understood in terms of paradox.

  For example, Fritz preached, “I do my thing and you do your thing.” Yet, the most painful contradiction Mike Murphy had to deal with during Fritz’s six years at Esalen was the conflict between his philosophy of encouraging others to be autonomous and then rewarding the sort of behavior that he desired.

  “He wanted Esalen to be a certain way. At the same time, he was saying, ‘Do your own thing.’ Whenever there were changes made in the schedule, he’d come and compliment me or scold me, depending on how it was going. He was intent upon getting the religious, mystical, occult, and Eastern programs out.

  “Once we had a workshop with Peter Hurkos, the famous clairvoyant who solved the Boston Strangler murder case. He and Charles Tart, the psychologist, were running psychometry experiments in which you feel an object—in this case a hair—and describe the person. But it didn’t work out. And Fritz was outrageous this weekend in putting down Hurkos.

  “Finally, when Hurkos was obviously failing, the dramatic moment occurred where Fritz stood up, faced some of the audience, and with a sweeping gesture said, ‘You see vat a fake zis man is.’ He knew just when to get Hurkos, and you could see Hurkos collapse. Because people like him represented the kind of thing Fritz was against.”