Did this mean that Fritz was oblivious of his tyrannical instincts? Not at all.
“Once, when I was on good terms with him,” remembers Dick Price, “and he was trying to get something from me, I said, ‘Hey, Fritz. I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations.’
“He turned to me and said, with good humor, ‘Oh yes, you are.’”
Was he, then, a hypocrite in not practicing what he preached? I think not. Fritz’s authoritarianism was simply a matter of his “doing his thing.” If you didn’t like it, “your thing” ought to be to resist him. He was not out to protect you or make it easier for you to take a stand by blunting his own desires. Indeed, some part of his telling others to do their own thing was, I am sure, done in order to help them resist his persuasiveness. He often, both at work and at play, respected people who openly stood up to him.
“I know what a satori experience is,” wrote Fritz, “though I have not made the total enlightenment grade, in case such a thing exists.”
That bit of double-talk lies at the heart of Fritz’s contradictory attitude toward the mystical, for satori is the total enlightenment grade. Not that it lasts forever. Nothing does.
Fritz’s antagonisms toward Peter Hurkos, the Maharishi, Baba Ram Dass (whom he was proud of having “bested” in a joint television appearance), and the mystical was, I believe, the attitude of a man who comes in fighting but hopes to be convinced. Unfortunately, he was such a good battler that no one could overcome his defenses.
Fritz didn’t believe in the mystical simply because he had never experienced it. That is what he would have required in order to Believe. Still, he was intrigued. Otherwise why go listen to Hurkos in the first place?
The thing Fritz found most difficult to accept about himself was his lack of perfection. Thus, in spite of his writing, “Friend, don’t be a perfectionist . . . be proud of your mistakes,” he always strove for perfection. When he wrote Garbage Pail, he would repeatedly ask his friends, “Do you like it? . . . Do you really like it?” When the answer was affirmative, he glowed. When old friends—such as Erv Kempner, a Cleveland Gestaltist, and New York’s Isadore From—said that they thought it needed substantial editing and wasn’t really worthy of him, he was insulted and furious. At other times, after a good demonstration, he would ask: “How’s that? Good? Good? I’m still the best therapist around.”
The very last Gestalt demonstration that he gave at Esalen was one before a hundred people. It went quite well. When it was over, Fritz went up to Dick Price and said: “Dick, I was finally perfect.”
Anyone who spent some time with Fritz or has read all that he has written realizes that he was fully cognizant of all these discrepancies within himself. It was, in fact, his own success and his own discoveries in partially resolving these dilemmas in his own life that he passed on to others in both his theories and his clinical practice. Yet, understanding the contradictions did not make them disappear.
He would, for instance, make snide references to Will Schutz as being merely an “integrator” of other people’s ideas, as someone who offered “instant joy.” One would think, by comparison, that Fritz was against quick cures and respected only originality. And he did.
But this is the same Fritz Perls who offered “three-month cures” in Canada, who showed films depicting “instant breakthroughs,” who knew, according to Jim Simkin, that “there weren’t any quick cures, yet looked for them and kept putting others down for looking for them.”
And who was a better integrator and synthesizer of other people’s ideas than Fritz Perls himself? And what is wrong with integrating other people’s ideas? Nothing, I submit, unless you feel you have to do something better, unless you feel you are not an original article yourself, unless you are a perfectionist.
In truth, there is no such thing as an original idea. All our concepts and discoveries have been made by and/or shared by others. Freud was not the first to recognize infantile sexuality. Native women on Caribbean islands realized that crying infant boys could be pacified by playing with their penises long before Freud made his “discoveries.” And as far as dream interpretations were concerned, Joseph worked with the pharaoh’s dreams thousands of years before the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams.
What originality any of us have stems from the selection and blending we make of the ideas of others. Part of Fritz knew this. That’s why he called himself the “finder or refinder” of Gestalt and not a founder or an original discoverer.
An idea is no less great because it lacks originality. The great messages have always been simple ones: Love. Peace. Harmony. Living in the present. They have been taught by different teachers throughout the ages, be they Christ, Moses, Lao Tse, Buddha, Freud, Fritz, or the neighborhood hippie.
Fritz had an antipathy toward people who attended groups simply for the fun of it. This was one of his criticisms of Schutz and Gunther, the “instant turner-oners.” When he conducted a group, it was for the more serious purpose of “work”—just as he would perpetually work on his own problems. In his preference for work over play, he betrayed not only his perfectionism, this treadmill of always striving to be better and therefore never arriving, but a Calvinistic streak as strong as his Jewish Buddhism.
This philosophical bias toward not accepting yourself as you are but as you hope to be is inherent in nearly all psychotherapeutic systems. Exponents of Eastern thought, such as Alan Watts and Baba Ram Dass, teach that you are already there, that perfection needn’t come tomorrow, but it exists right now. Fritz and the Gestaltists who followed him not only span Eastern and Western psychotherapeutic thinking but are caught up in the dilemma of the middle: proclaiming the validity of the Here and Now but implying that you must work on yourself for a better tomorrow.
“I am not responsible for anyone but myself. I take none for you. I am available to work with you if you desire it. If you wish to go crazy or kill yourself, that is up to you.” This was the message that Fritz frequently broadcast upon starting a workshop or a demonstration.
But again, we have a paradox. Why would he have struggled so long and so hard to present a new psychology to the world unless he hoped in some way to save it? He obviously believed that Gestalt thinking would ease the self-torture and self-doubts of many people and contribute to more harmonious and less blaming interpersonal relations among people.
Ann Halprin’s observations about Fritz during the last months of his life have, I think, much validity
“In spite of the fact that he said, ‘You take care of yourself and everybody’s responsible for themselves,’ I felt that part of his sense of being tired and exhausted with the world and man’s inhumanity to man was that he imagined, or, in some Jewish way, felt responsible. No matter how much he did, it wasn’t going to change things. And he wanted to. That was the whole anachronism of this man.
“There were very trying times just before he died, both politically and socially. Our leaders were all being shot off. He was absolutely sure we were going to have another Nazi Germany here. That’s why he went off to Canada.
“He was sarcastic and flippant, true. But underneath that all, he cared so desperately.”
And underneath all that, there were Bernie Gunther and Will Schutz.
“If I knew then what I know today,” said Bernie, “I would never have hung around him as much as I had. Because there were times when he really put out bad vibes. I was very admiring of him. And I don’t think he dug that very much. He knew I was there to get what I could from him. But my trip has always been to try, if I could, to give and take. In a lot of ways, in my relationship to Fritz, I think I gave him a lot.”
Fritz’s disrespectful attitude must have been based, in some measure, on disbelief. He could not accept Bernie’s true admiration in the face of his repeated rebuffs. Bernie’s friendliness made Fritz increasingly uncomfortable and led Fritz to view him with even greater conte
mpt as a “patsy.”
“Our second falling out occurred at a workshop he was giving at Esalen, in which we started out very close. The people in it wanted to learn massage, so he asked me to teach it. And he offered to pay me a certain amount. It was less than I was already getting from anybody else. I decided that I didn’t want to work for the price he was offering me, mainly because he was only going to pay me for one hour and I was going to wind up working an hour and a half or two hours in these sessions. I didn’t want to do it for less. He wanted to pay me $15 an hour and I was getting $25 from everybody else. So I said, ‘Look. I want twenty-five bucks for each massage session.’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t want to give you that much.’
“’Okay. But I don’t want to do it then. And that shut him off totally. He looked at me and he said, ‘Fuck you. You’re already getting three times as much as a major craftsman would get—a carpenter or some kind of artisan.’ And I said, ‘Fritz. I’m an artist. A therapist. Not a craftsman. And that’s what I want.’ And so he said, ‘Forget it.’
“But there were very bad vibes that came from all that. The people in the workshop were all disappointed. And I put myself in a very bad emotional place because of it. I was bothered that those vibrations were coming from him. So I thought it over and I went up to him the next day and I said, ‘Look, Fritz. In the interest of harmony and Esalen and all that I’m willing to do it for the price you offered me.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I thought you’d do that. You always make compromises.’
“He was just very shitty about it. I really felt like saying ‘Fuck you and forget the whole thing.’ He and I were never particularly close after that.”
It must have galled Fritz all the more to find that by 1968 Bernie Gunther, his erstwhile lackey, was becoming more of a Superstar than Fritz. Bernie’s book, Sense Relaxation—a photographic guide to touching/feeling/massaging—was running just behind Bill Schutz’s book, Joy, in terms of attracting people to Esalen. Was it right that two brief books should give these men instant acclaim and influence that Fritz, after decades of effort, had only begun to achieve? And hadn’t Schutz himself sat in on Fritz’s groups? And didn’t he use many Gestalt techniques in his encounter sessions?
The more popularity that befell Bill and Bernie, the more Fritz resented them. What sort of cosmic injustice was this that these people, thirty years his junior, should garner such recognition for work which was so “superficial” and inferior to his own; that they would upstage him in his hour of triumph?
“For a while,” said Dick Price, “there was a publicity sweepstakes. The main entries were Bill, Bernie, and Fritz. And when they were off and running, Fritz came in third.”
Fritz’s response was immediate, despite the fact that Bill and Bernie were among his top boosters (indeed, it was Schutz who—even after his falling out with Fritz—suggested that I work with the old Gestalt master). Fritz redirected his most caustic comments from Freud to the “turner-oners” and tried to lessen their influence at the Institute. When it was clear that his campaign was making no headway, he decided to establish his own center in British Columbia.
Will Schutz is a soft-spoken articulate man with bright eyes. His premature baldness, smooth-shaven skin, and firm jaw make him appear cherubic and stern at one and the same time. Bill’s account of his relationship with Fritz was given with great thoughtfulness and, if anything, understatement.
“I came to Esalen in sixty-seven. In preparing to come here, I asked all the people who were here who I would have something to do with—Virginia Satir, Bernie Gunther, Mike, Dick, and Fritz—how they’d feel about my coming. Fritz was very warm and supportive. He said he would like the idea very much, and he had told some friends of mine how I was the most authentic person he knew. It was a very good feeling that I had toward Fritz. And the first year was a very good year with him. We got along well and more or less were allies against the establishment. We would share a good deal of what would happen when we went out. He’d show me his newspaper clippings—how he was successful here and there. We more or less amalgamated ourselves without differentiation as people who were more into Here and Now feelings, body oriented, and so forth—as opposed to ‘Them.’ There was a close alliance and that was nice. Not personally close—I don’t think Fritz had such relationships—and ours wasn’t intimate.
“Still, he would tell me about his life and loves sometimes, and I would tell him of some of mine. I never had the feeling he was interested in my personal life, but we would talk a great deal about professional matters. I would invite him to my house for parties frequently, and my image of him was his always sitting in a corner while a party was going on, hoping that somebody would come over and talk to him, and feeling quite uncomfortable at a party. And really needing someone to pull him out and help him.
“But that was the first year. We essentially had two years together. The first year was a good one and the second was pretty difficult. And mostly from his side. I didn’t feel that I wanted to be alienated from him. I wanted to be closer and he wanted to push me aside.
“There was a television program—I think it was California Girl—that wanted to make a documentary of Esalen. They were out on deck over by the lodge and asked me to run a group. So, we just picked a few people who were out on the deck. The edited tape would run on television for about three minutes. Fritz was there. He said he’d like to be in my group. So, after a few minutes we obviously had to confront each other, and we sat down in front of the cameras and had about a ten-minute encounter, which essentially consisted of ‘I would like to be closer to you, Fritz,’ and he would push me away with a ‘No,’ or ‘Not yet,’ or something like that.
“I did that for six or eight months and finally got tired of the whole thing and just wrote him off. I assumed it would never happen between us, and so I just became civilized. I didn’t try, anymore, to get closer. It coincided with the success of Joy and the fact that I was getting more prominence. I can’t say that’s the reason, but the two things did happen at about the same time.”
In 1968, at the age of seventy-five, Fritz gave up both “compulsive masturbation” and women. Spare hours that were previously spent in sexual pleasure were now available for other pursuits, and one of these was the writing of his own reflections, In and Out the Garbage Pail, a book that might, hopefully, outrank those of his rivals. Fritz wrote the first few pages during a “workshop” visit he made to Atlanta, at the home of Irma Lee Shepherd and Joen Fagan, and, according to Irma, “He was just ecstatic with his creation.”
“He was writing In and Out the Garbage Pail,” confirms Ilana Rubenfeld, “during the second summer I was at Esalen. He’d come over with every chapter, like a kid that had just made the biggest toy you had ever seen. He’d go from person to person, asking ‘Would you read it and tell me what you think?’ And each one of us would go through reading it.
“He’d sit at the table and read us the poems that he was writing. He was just elated. We’d be very patient. After each one he’d read, you would say, ‘Fritz, that really sounds good.’ And he’d say, ‘You really like it?’
“One day he sat across from me and he grabbed a table napkin and wrote the first poem that appears on the front page of the book. I said, ‘When you get that typed up, will you give me the napkin?’ And he said, ‘Sure.’ And he did. He signed the napkin and he gave it to me. He was really into that book. It was quite a thing.”
Mike Murphy, an articulate, clean-shaven, reflective man in his mid-thirties, reminds one—in physical appearance—of the wholesome, amicable boy next door. How does he remember Fritz’s years at Big Sur?
“We had a distant relationship, and, frankly, I was relieved when he decided to go up to Canada and start his Gestalt Center there. For he was a difficult guy for me to be with.
“He saw me as the ‘President’ of Esalen and had a campaign on to turn the place into his vision of what a center should b
e. He was against mysticism and lobbied to get those programs off our calendar. At the end, he also lobbied against Schutz and Gunther.
“He was one of the great phrasemakers and was so very forceful that I had to sit through powerfully rendered and creative prejudice whenever we met. So, I tried to avoid him as best I could.
“He had this incredible gift of seeing into people and also had a strong sense of how people should be. One great game at Esalen is Capture the Flag (influence the program). And Fritz played it harder and better than anyone else. But his campaign against the ‘turner-oners’ made no headway with Dick [Price] and me.
“That was one of the reasons he decided to go to Canada. He wanted a place where he could make his own statement more fully. That, plus his fear of the coming repression. He was shaken by Nixon’s election as president and Reagan’s as the governor of California—felt an indigenous American fascism on the rise. And then there was always his gypsy quality, his restlessness.
“There was a ‘too muchness’ quality to Fritz, at least for me. In the last year, after he decided to go to Cowichan, he was mellower, clear, and easy to be with.”
Given rivals he couldn’t come to terms with and an administration that he couldn’t influence, Fritz had been casting about for a center of his own that he might direct—a Gestalt “kibbutz”—where participants would share work as well as stories and labor as well as receive therapy. By mirroring life more fully, whatever therapeutic feedback occurred ought to be more accurate for those who took part. He also saw it as a great training center for Gestalt Therapists, who might immerse themselves in Gestalt concepts for months at a time.
One property he considered was just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his son Steve lived, but, for some reason or other, it never materialized. After the elections of 1968 and his fear for our evolving body politic, Fritz opted for Canada. He bought an old motel on Lake Cowichan, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, at the end of 1968, and in late 1969—at the age of seventy-six—along with a nucleus of his coterie at Esalen, founded The Gestalt Institute of Canada.
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