Fritz Perls, An Interesting Figure In The History Of Psychology

Friedrich Salomon Perls, better known as Fritz Perls, was a German physician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He was the father of Gestalt therapy. He was a contradictory and fascinating man who spent his entire life in intellectual circles, conducting theoretical debates and traveling around the world.

Perls was born in Berlin on July 8, 1893, in a Jewish ghetto. He had two older sisters, Elsa and Grete. His father, Nathan, was a wine salesman who was often away from home. His mother, Amalia, came from a lower-middle-class family. She instilled in Perls a deep interest in art that stayed with him throughout his life.

During an interview, Grete described her brother’s childhood as a little “wild.” He was a difficult child, but a good student. He received his secondary education at the Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin. This was an extremely strict school where anti-Semitism was widespread. He was expelled from school when he was thirteen. As punishment, his father forced him to work as an apprentice in a candy store.

Perls’s relationship with his father was always quite strained. In his diaries he defined his father as a hypocritical man with double moral standards. He believed that his father hated his mother and cheated on her with other women. The rejection Perls felt for his father was so strong that he didn’t even go to his funeral.

Fritz Perls and His Encounter with Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Fritz Perls made a personal decision to continue his education at a humanist-oriented school, the Askaniches Gymnasium. That was where he met Max Reinhardt, a theater director who cultivated his love for the arts. This remained so until his death.

Later he started to study medicine. Not long after, World War I broke out and Perls volunteered with the Red Cross. This made a deep impression on him. But he didn’t talk about it until years later in his biography The Agony of Life in the Trenches: The Abomination of Living and the Abomination of Dying .

In 1920 Fritz Perls received his medical license from Frederick Wilhelm University in Berlin. Later he specialized in neuropsychiatry. Then he met the philosopher Friedlander, whose influence was crucial to Perls’s work. In 1923 he decided to go to New York. But he came back frustrated after they didn’t want to validate his driver’s license because he didn’t speak English. This bad period led him to enter psychoanalysis with Karen Horney. This changed his life.

The career switch of Fritz Perls

Perls was fascinated by psychoanalysis. He decided that he wanted to become an analyst. But he had to move to Frankfurt to get a position as an assistant to a psychiatrist named Kurt Goldstein, who was working on his theory of Gestalt psychology. There he met Laura Possner, a college student who became his wife two years later. This was despite his family and Clara Happel, his psychoanalyst, being against the relationship. Perls was 36 years old and Laura was only 24.

A year later he started working as an analyst in Vienna. In 1928 he became a full-time therapist in Berlin. Between then and 1930, Perls conducted psychoanalysis with Eugen Harnick and then Wilheim Reich. The second man was one of Freud’s disciples. But he had abandoned Freud’s theories. Many of the theories Perls later developed were inspired by Reich.

The Birth of Gestalt Therapy

After Hitler came to power, Fritz Perls fled to the Netherlands, but he was not given a work permit. After going through some very hard times with his wife and newborn daughter, Ernst Jones helped him land a job in the field of psychoanalysis in Johannesburg, South Africa. Together with his wife Laura, they founded the South African Psychoanalytic Association. In 1936 he was invited to a conference in Prague. However, the ideas he spoke of caused quite a stir. He was again in a bad position and abandoned traditional psychoanalysis.

With the help of his wife, Perls began to shape his ideas. In 1942 he moved to New York and published his first book: Ego, Hunger, and Aggression: A Revision of Freud’s Theory and Method . Four years later, together with other intellectuals, he started the ‘Group of Seven’. In 1951 he published what some people see as the bible of this new approach: Gestalt Therapy: Arousal and Growth in the Human Personality .

The book came about thanks to the help of the poet Paul Goodman, who gave it a literary note. It is a complex book that uses ideas from Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, existentialism, and American pragmatism. Later, Perls also added some Buddhist concepts after a trip to Japan.

The fate of the theory behind Gestalt therapy was complicated. In 1956, Perls divorced Laura and they both took the theory in different directions. While Laura and Paul Goodman remained completely true to the original principles, Perls shifted from that vision. He added the Zen principles and even some things from the Israeli kibbutz. At the end of his life, he acted more like a guru than a therapist. He eventually died of a heart attack.

The Gestalt Therapy Approach

We could say that Gestalt therapy is a trend that focuses more on the way patients experience their reality than the things they experience. It’s not about what happens to a person. It’s about how that person sees those things. It emphasizes the processes and not the content. This focus is part of humanistic psychology and brings out three basic principles:

The Three Principles of Gestalt Therapy

• Emphasis on the here and now. According to Gestalt therapy, people do not see the past, present and future as separate realities. Those three time periods are part of one unity that exists only in the present. Both the past and the future are just projections of the present. So what it’s trying to work on is the ‘here and now’. And so it tries to help people find a way to solve problems and live a life where they actualize things themselves.
• Consciousness. To achieve a better level of well-being, you need to take a very good look at yourself. This is the foundation for creating new ways to shape your experience in the ‘here and now’. It’s a path that puts you in a position to focus on the way you look at things that aren’t really happening. And it shows you that you need to find a new way to look at your personal experiences.

• Taking responsibility. The process of becoming aware should take you to a place where you can take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. When you accept your mistakes and form ideas about the risks associated with a specific act, you achieve independence. That’s how you can give your existence a direction. A direction with more freedom and meaning.

Fritz Perls’s Gestalt therapy proposes an intervention process to help a person reshape their image of reality. It should also help this person refocus towards a more independent life. He must be able to focus on his own potential. People have applied it in many different areas: the clinical and the social environment and even the workplace.