Timeless Experience : Laura Perls's Unpublished Notebooks and Literary Texts 1946-1985 [1 ed.] 9781443894289, 9781443888899

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Timeless Experience

Timeless Experience: Laura Perls’s Unpublished Notebooks and Literary Texts 1946-1985 Edited by

Nancy Amendt-Lyon

Timeless Experience: Laura Perls’s Unpublished Notebooks and Literary Texts 1946-1985 Series: The World of Contemporary Gestalt Therapy Series Editor: Philip Brownell Edited by Nancy Amendt-Lyon This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Nancy Amendt-Lyon All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8889-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8889-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii Series Editor’s Introduction ........................................................................ ix Editor’s Introduction .................................................................................. xi Chapter I ...................................................................................................... 1 Timeless Experience of a Total Life Crystalized, dated 1976 Chapter II ..................................................................................................... 3 Notebook 1, dated 1946; 25, Raymond Street, Bellevue, Johannesburg, S.A. Chapter III ................................................................................................. 35 Magic Mirror, poem, dated 1946 Chapter IV ................................................................................................. 37 Having a Bath, short story, dated 1947 Chapter V .................................................................................................. 41 Notebook 2, dated 1954–56; 315 Central Park West, N.Y., N.Y. 25 Chapter VI ................................................................................................. 85 Notebook 3, dated 1957–1958 Chapter VII ................................................................................................ 95 Notebook 4, dated 1959–1960 Chapter VIII ............................................................................................ 111 Notebook 5, undated; 7 West 96th Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10025 Chapter IX ............................................................................................... 115 Notebook 6, dated 1972; 7 West 96th Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10025

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Chapter X ................................................................................................ 119 Endcase: A psychedelicathooliganism, poem, undated Chapter XI ............................................................................................... 121 Letter to Hans Wongtschowski, dated 1985; 7 West 96th Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10025 Chapter XII .............................................................................................. 123 Interview with Laura Perls conducted by Daniel Rosenblatt, dated 1972

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the joys of completing a publication is the opportunity to thank those who inspired, guided, and supported me along the way. The inspiration for this volume—and, of course, the basic material—came from Renate Perls, who dreamt that her late mother wanted me to have the latter’s unpublished works. This was the initial spark for what has now been a project of two and a half years. When Renate personally handed over Laura’s handwritten notebooks and other texts, she had already gone through much of the material and added some explanatory notes. I consulted often with Renate concerning passages I couldn’t decipher, names that were a mystery to me, addresses at which the Perls family lived, and other questions I had about Laura’s life history. Both Renate and her daughter, Leslie Gold, were of tremendous support in providing copies of further texts, photos, and facsimiles for this publication, and wonderfully helpful in determining the location and date of many photos. Giving me the unpublished treasure chest of their beloved mother and grandmother was an act of trust for which I am very grateful. Harvey Platt, the lawyer who had been responsible for the estates of Fritz and Laura Perls, is owed my gratitude for encouraging and inspiring the aims of this project, which was agreed upon with Renate Perls and Leslie Gold. I am deeply indebted to Patrick Fiska, the archivist in Vienna whose expertise in reading and deciphering Laura’s penmanship was incredibly helpful, particularly when I came upon pages of German text in Kurrent, the handwriting of her era in Germany. Recalling our marathon sessions of deciphering drafts of short stories and poems in Laura’s notebooks, I realize how lucky I was that Patrick Fiska was also enthused by the contents of our work. With a smile on my lips, I remember how we repeatedly worked as a team on “cracking” the hieroglyphics of Laura’s handwriting and codes for corrections of her own texts, and how we rejoiced when our efforts were successful. I am grateful to James Pritchard and the Daniel Rosenblatt Foundation for allowing me to publish the extensive interview that the late Daniel Rosenblatt conducted with Laura Perls in 1972. It has been translated into and published in German, but is appearing in English in this volume for the first time.

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It was Sharon Rork from the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, who helped me to determine the reference for Paul Goodman’s playbill from Faustina, which was performed at the Living Theatre. I thank her for her prompt and kind assistance. My colleagues Dan Bloom and Beatrix Wimmer were frequent sources of encouragement during the development of this book project, and I thank them for their humor and pep talks. I am deeply indebted to my colleague Bernd Bocian for the gift of his unwavering, knowledgeable support. He read early versions of the editor’s introduction, offered his critique and corrections, and generously shared his recent research findings. Ulf Rathje kindly provided photos of the Posner gravestone and Perls footstone in the Jewish section of the Pforzheim Cemetery, and one of the Stolperstein for Toni Posner. I thank Hans Peter Dittler and the heirs of Anja Römer-Hahn for permitting me to print her article that was published in the Pforzheimer Zeitung on the occasion of Laura’s death, and Margot Elsässer for allowing me to print the photo that appeared with this article. Daisy Goodman deserves my gratitude for having provided me with and permitting me to publish a photo of her father, Paul Goodman. Nele Brauner-Cave did an excellent job of copyediting and proofreading the manuscript before submission. I deeply appreciate her for her precision and persistence. As the Series Editor, Phil Brownell gave me very valuable guidance in the process of preparing the manuscript for publication. I have been fortunate to benefit from his strong support and advice. Many thanks are due to Victoria Carruthers and Amanda Millar from Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their professional assistance, advice, and patience throughout the editorial process. Their fine work is much appreciated. My husband, Gerhard Amendt, has been a solid, reliable source of support since the conception of this book. He has read and commented on earlier versions of the editor’s introduction, served as a sounding board when I needed resonance, and boosted my mood when I felt overwhelmed by the vastness of the chore. He knows how grateful I am.

SERIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

This book on Laura Perls’s papers is the fourth book in the series The World of Contemporary Gestalt Therapy. There has been the Handbook for Theory, Research, and Practice in Gestalt Therapy (Brownell, 2008), Continuity and Change: Gestalt Therapy Now (Bloom & Brownell, 2011), and Global Perspectives on Research, Theory, and Practice: A Decade of Gestalt! (Mistler & Brownell, 2015), all of course published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The goal of the series is to expose the thinking and practices of Gestalt therapists to readers—not just the theory or its practice, but the world of Gestalt therapy. Thus, the first book in the series described the theory and practice of Gestalt therapy in the context of the growing awareness at that time of Gestalt therapy’s need for a research tradition of its own. The second book in the series documented one of the international conferences of the Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy, an international community, and the third provided a hard copy record of most of the contents of one of Gestalt’s first online journals, Gestalt!, spanning over a decade of material during which the literature of Gestalt therapy exploded and the fine tuning of Gestalt’s theoretical base picked up its pace. This book, edited so carefully and lovingly by Nancy Amendt-Lyon, is a masterpiece in the history of Gestalt therapy and provides insight into the ground of contemporary Gestalt therapy. As contemporary Gestalt therapy perseveres in refining its theory and practice, assimilating elements from the fields of continental philosophy, neuroscience, and kinesthetics, and as more and more Gestalt researchers aim to understand how therapy works, this book looks back at a person and a time from whence Gestalt therapists all came. Part of the development of Gestalt therapy theory involves understanding the thinking of the founders. In reaching for contemporary relevance, the field of Gestalt therapy never severed its tether to its founders. Therefore, this very rich resource that Nancy Amendt-Lyon has produced helps people understand Laura Perls and simultaneously contemporary Gestalt therapy. The way Nancy writes about Laura is a mix of memoir and science. She writes in scholarly detail of Laura Perls—the “what” and “how” of one of the founders of Gestalt therapy and the person most associated with sustaining the founding institute in New York—and she does so through the very personal writings and reflections belonging to Laura herself.

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Furthermore, Nancy shares the story of her own relationship with and her experience of Laura. It is an intimate visitation. It is a piece of qualitative research. I am immensely happy I could help bringing this book to print and include it in the series on contemporary Gestalt therapy. I believe it will become a primary resource for the work of others for many years. Philip Brownell, MDiv, PsyD From Above Mizzentop Warwick, Bermuda

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

How I became the editor of this book One evening in the spring of 2013, Renate Perls called me at my home in Vienna from her New York apartment. .

“I have something for you, Nancy,” Renate said. I expected news about her well-being, or possibly about something thrilling happening in the New York Gestalt community. Never in my wildest dreams was I prepared for what she said next. “Last night, somewhere between sleeping and waking, I sensed my mother with me as she told me in no uncertain terms to give her journals to you, Nancy. I’ve told you before that from the moment she died, Laura had come to me every now and then with her feelings and messages,” Renate said, and then she paused. I held my breath, waiting for her to continue. “So I was not surprised when she left this request. It took me a moment to realize what she meant and in the morning I decided to call you and give you her notebooks.” “To me? You are giving Laura’s notebooks to me?” I managed to ask. “Yes, I want you to have them. I know that Laura loved you and trusted you. She would want it this way. The notebooks will be in the best hands possible. Do with them whatever you want. Publish them. Do research. Whatever. They are yours!”

Renate then gave me some insights into the notebooks and mentioned the obstacles she expected me to have in deciphering Laura’s handwriting. I was still processing the fact that Laura’s very personal writing was being placed in my hands. Although Laura and I had had a deep affection for each other, it was quite a large step from this appreciation to the realization that I had been chosen to be the recipient of such a significant gift. Not only was I surprised, I was overwhelmed. Yet Renate insisted that I accept the notebooks, read through them, and then decide what I could make of them. We arranged to meet in Manhattan during my summer vacation that coming July, when I planned the next extended stay in New York, the city of my birth. As Renate wanted to hand over these notebooks to me personally, sending them by mail was out of the question for her. I immediately understood her reasons. The notebooks were

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precious material, and so I had to contain my curiosity for another few months. Needless to say, Renate’s phone call was one of those incidents that I will later recall as one of the memorable ones in my life. The gift of Laura’s heretofore unpublished notebooks ranks among the most amazing gifts that anyone has ever given to me. After several months of fantasizing about what I would one day be able to read in Laura’s notebooks, I flew to New York in the summer of 2013. Renate and I had lunch in SoHo and she ceremoniously gave me a sturdy folder with the notebooks. She had already read the notebooks before giving them to me, and left me little notes with her comments, clarifications, reminiscences—all of which I include as such. One year later, in August of 2014, Renate and her daughter, Leslie Gold, met me and my husband, Gerhard Amendt, at the Manhattan office of Harvey Platt, the charming and committed lawyer who had been responsible for both Laura and Fritz Perls’s estate. It was there that I was officially entrusted with the task of publishing the notebooks so that Laura’s background as a writer and thinker, who contributed so greatly to the development of Gestalt therapy, could come more clearly to the fore. Compiling a list of Laura’s writing and publications that focused on her was another aim, which I have begun as a work-in-progress. To me, the notebooks represent not only a gift, but also a deep commitment. Being entrusted with the personal writings of one of the founders of Gestalt therapy comes with the enormous responsibility of treating them with befitting respect and prudence. The first decision I took was to scan every page of the notebooks and then I began to transcribe them. The second decision was to have the notebooks published, with editorial annotations. As the saying goes: Hindsight is easier than foresight. When I began this editorial project, I was not aware of all the obstacles and difficulties that I would encounter. The transcription of these notebooks is easier said than done. Transcribing Laura’s notebooks has been one of the most challenging tasks of my life and I have been spending much of my spare time outside of my office deciphering and discussing them since I brought them back to Vienna.

Personal encounters with Laura Perls Before I describe the contents of the notebooks and how I went about my editorial work, allow me to turn back the clock about forty years and describe several personal encounters with Laura Perls and the impact that

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this extraordinary woman had on so many aspects of my own development. My initial contact with Laura dates back to April 1976 in Manhattan. At the time I had been living in Austria for several years and visiting family and friends in my hometown. Among the people I visited was Ilana Rubenfeld, who had trained with Fritz Perls and with whom I had begun my Gestalt training while I was working on my master’s degree in New York. In the meantime, I had resumed my Gestalt training in Austria. During a conversation with Ilana, she mentioned Laura Perls and suggested that I meet her. Ilana was convinced that Laura, who still spent months in Europe every summer and enjoyed vacationing in the Austrian Alps, would be delighted to have the opportunity to speak German with me. At the time, Fritz Perls had been in the spotlight as the representative of Gestalt therapy. His books, his demonstration workshops, and his films had made the rounds in psychotherapy circles and the media. I didn’t know anything about Laura Perls, but was curious. A bit unsure of myself yet emboldened by the excitement of getting to know her, I looked up her phone number and called, introducing myself. With amazing cordiality and warmth, she invited me and my then husband to her apartment on West 96th Street. During this first visit she showed interest in our life in Austria and wanted to know about the curriculum of our training and what professional literature we were required to read. She gave us two books in which she had written chapters: Gestalt Therapy Now: Theory, Techniques, Applications, edited by Joen Fagan and Irma Lee Shepherd (1971), and Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy, edited by Paul David Pursglove (1971). We promised to see her the next time we would visit New York and remained in informal contact with her by letter. This initial meeting resulted in my organizing a weekend workshop for her to lead two years later, in 1978, in Styria. Unfortunately, because of the sudden illness and death of my father, I was unable to attend the workshop myself. When the first issue of The Gestalt Journal was published in 1978, she gave me a copy. According to the correspondence with Laura that I saved, we agreed for her to lead a weekend workshop the following year. This workshop in 1979 was the first of several that took place in Graz. Laura tried to coordinate her Graz workshops with her annual summer vacation in Leogang in Salzburg’s countryside. Laura was more or less incognito in Leogang, and enjoyed not being recognized. She delighted in taking walks for hours in the alpine countryside. In a letter that I wrote to her on May 28, 1982, I arranged with her to conduct a weekend workshop in Graz and then give a talk the following Monday on the “Historical Development of Gestalt Therapy,” followed by a

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discussion in a room at the University of Graz. She answered my letter on July 22 from her friend Ursula Mayer’s address in Pforzheim, where she was staying for a while: 7/22/82 My dear Nancy, I am on my European tour already since June. Your letter did not reach me until last week. I love to come to Graz and do a workshop Sept. 18-19. I’ll come a couple of days earlier and stay with you, want to be with the children. During the workshop it may be better to be in a hotel; I shall need some peace and quiet! Particularly if I do a talk on Monday, Sept. 21. I travel on Tuesday, Sept 22 to Frankfurt for a day or two, and then for my last workshop in Holland Sept 26-27. Then back to N.Y. I hope this letter does not come too late for you to make all the arrangements. You can reach me at the above address and telephone number. Later in August I shall be in the Alps, address: M. Oberwaller, A-5771 Leogang 67 Tel. 6533/235 Have a lovely vacation! Love to you all, Laura

Several days before the workshop, Laura arrived in Graz. She needed exercise and the weather was beautiful, so we went to the park together with my children. I must let on that Laura didn’t always practice Gestalt’s process-oriented method of diagnosis, which refrains from using psychiatric labels. When an obviously hallucinating woman, who was speaking loudly to herself, passed us by, Laura whispered into my ear, “She’s a little schizzy, isn’t she?” As a little thank-you for having organized the workshop, Laura wanted to get me a gift. It should be something that I needed and something that I would use. Together we shopped in the old city of Graz for a small pot with a long handle, so that I could warm the milk for my morning coffee in it and think of her every day. This thoughtful present had the intended effect. Whenever I used it, I thought of her. And this gift is exemplary for Laura’s modesty and her unsensational, yet effective way of making personal contact.

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During the workshops that I experienced with Laura, she showed an especially admirable quality: While she was working with a group member, she would join this person and was absolutely present, and afterwards, when the episode of working had ended, she removed herself from this closeness in a very matter-of-fact way. The old issue was passé and she allowed for no hanging on. This experience enabled me to get a feeling for the boundary as a location of connection while Laura was working with someone, as well as the location of separation when Laura retreated after work was completed. It was fascinating to experience her work first-hand. Her preferred style of working in small, digestible steps afforded maximal support to the participants. This was the heart of her concept of “contact and support.” She was succinct, exact, and sparse in her interventions; she could zoom in on an issue with amazing clarity, and yet she was careful and composed. As in her private life, Laura demonstrated a certain noble restraint while working psychotherapeutically, without creating the impression of being insecure or passive. I would like to briefly add some observations I made on her concept of contact and support. Laura clearly distanced herself from the formerly frequently practiced confrontational style of Gestalt therapy that “wouldbe Fritzes” tried to spread as the real thing. She doubted whether this provocative approach was suitable to all patients and disorders. She was skeptical of the supposedly big breakthroughs, since she feared that the resistances of the patients and their self-supports were not being adequately considered by relentlessly confronting them. Laura explained that many forms of resistance resulted from a lack of support. If these deficits in support are not treated with respect, then a boomerang effect might result in even more anxiety. Her motto was to give patients as much support as necessary and as little as possible, so that they can learn to achieve self-support and interdependence. As I experienced them, Laura‘s workshops were characterized by her unsensational style. By working with participants in incremental, assimilable steps, they were not overwhelmed by the therapeutic process. She enjoyed experimenting with whatever emerged at a given moment. She showed us how something new could emerge from the dynamic of the lack of balance, on the one hand, and familiar certainties, on the other, provided that someone was willing to engage in the experiment. Laura encouraged her trainees to attend to the subjective perception of their patients, told them to pick up the latter where they were emotionally, thereby enabling them to experience their own boundaries and make the

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dynamics of how they draw boundaries clear to them (see Schneider, “Meine Wildnis ist die Seele des Anderen,” 108). When a participant was working on an issue, her complete attention was with this person. With the simple question “What’s going on here?” she involved the group in sharing their emotional reactions or asking questions about the process. Typical interventions of hers were invitations to speak directly to fantasized others, i.e. to address them as if they were present instead of speaking about them; to do something intentionally, such as breathe, close oneself off, or exaggerate something in order to make it explicit. Laura enjoyed experimenting with language and the body, especially with breathing and posture. She encouraged the group members to realize how their bodies supported them: “Loosen your knees! See how the pelvis supports the upper body so that it can move freely! The lower back is not to be hollow!” Laura’s bodywork concentrated on the jaw, the spine, and breathing into the lower abdomen. She would invite participants to roll their heads around and from side to side while they breathed in and out, in order to get a better feeling for their spines. Moreover, she would invite them to lie on the floor on their backs and first bring their legs up and over their heads, then lower the legs slowly to the ground while constantly attending to their breathing. Laura emphasized that contact is only possible when sufficient support is available, that is, when we have learned how to muster enough support for ourselves. She emphasized the difference between wanting and needing, and highlighted the young child’s “No!” as the first ego boundary with respect to the mother. She considered feeding to be the child’s first contact with the world. Laura found that biting was an aggressive act, but not in the usual destructive sense of the word. She was fascinated by the way the people ate, how they bit their food off, how they chewed and assimilated, and consequently how they approached other things in their life. She told the group repeatedly that interpretation is at best felicitous intuition, and warned us not to rummage in fantasies, but rather to concentrate on the present. Referring to Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, Laura reminded us that dialogue and the way we address and approach our patients are the crux of psychotherapy. She told us: “You really get to know someone when you know his needs and desires, not just his abilities.” If there are difficulties in the therapy sessions, then this is an issue for the therapist, for the patient is already coming to psychotherapy because of his own problems. In response to a question about human nature and how it influences the therapeutic process, Laura emphasized two crucial issues: the awareness of one’s uniqueness as well as one’s own mortality. In a trialogue between

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Richard Kitzler, Laura Perls and E. Mark Stern in 1982, Laura described a pivotal experience in her psychoanalysis with Karl Landauer: To elaborate, the neurotic is really the person who is afraid to cope with the process of dying and therefore he can’t live. Being aware of one’s own mortality is actually an incentive to being alive. I became aware of that when I was about 24 and I went to the funeral of a young friend who had suddenly died at age 26 from some kind of infection. At the time there was no penicillin or anything like that. It was very shocking and I came away from the cemetery and suddenly everything looked very bright and cheerful and I felt very energetic and I couldn’t explain it and I told my analyst the next day. I said at the time that it struck me that if we weren’t aware of the fact that we would die we would probably live like the cow— that the zest and the drive toward creation is for human beings allied with the awareness of dying. And my analyst said at the time, ‘Now your analysis is finished.’ (Kitzler, Perls, Stern. “Retrospects and Prospects: A Trialogue between Laura Perls, Richard Kitzler, and E. Mark Stern,” 14)

In 1971, Laura wrote: Speaking strictly for myself—the only way a Gestalt therapist can say anything at all—I am deeply convinced that the basic problem not only of therapy but of life is how to make life livable for a being whose dominant characteristic is his awareness of himself as a unique individual on the one hand and of his mortality on the other. (Perls, “One Gestalt Therapist’s Approach,” 121)

According to Laura, knowledge of being mortal is the force behind the vitality and creative powers of every single person. It seems to me that Laura’s emphasis on the knowledge of one’s own uniqueness is connected to her view of personal style as the creative expression of this inimitability. She often said: “Whoever has style doesn’t need therapy,” whereby “style” connotes a comprehensive way of expressing oneself. We develop our own style out of our background and experiences. Discussing with Edward Rosenfeld in 1982, Laura commented: “Style is really the expression of the self-development as it has happened up to that point” (Perls and Rosenfeld, “A Conversation between Laura Perls and Edward Rosenfeld,” 28). Speaking of uniqueness, there was a side to Laura that came to the fore when she lacked the support that she otherwise appeared to enjoy. I had the opportunity to experience a bit of Laura’s own anxiety when she gave a talk to an audience in Graz in 1982. It was one of the big surprises in my life. Shortly before she was to begin speaking, Laura looked at the circle

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of chairs that were set up for her and the audience, then she turned to me and, with a slightly frozen facial expression and frightened eyes, asked me to sit next to her during the talk. The audience was to take their seats in the circle with us. She reached for my hand and asked me in a strange tone of voice to stay by her side until we sat down and she would begin to lecture. Needless to say, I was quite astonished by Laura’s panicky reaction. I had idealized her and was certain that someone who had taught internationally for decades was self-assured and cool as a cucumber, even when speaking publicly. In this moment I realized that Laura’s stage fright had nearly become paralyzing to her. When I recently discussed this incident with Renate Perls, she supposed that Laura’s panicky behavior might have been triggered by a mortifying experience she had endured as a child. Laura had made a slight error during her piano recital, and this shortcoming might have permanently put her off from playing professionally. During the uncomfortable interval before her talk to the audience in Graz, I realized, she used an interpersonal support to assuage her uneasiness. Laura’s strong qualities—being constant, consequent, reliable, committed, cautious, and measured—were best applied behind the scenes, in the structured, supporting background. It was here that I got a better sense of what Laura meant when she wrote about embarrassment, as well as about contact and support: But I think I realized pretty early and it’s really part of my whole approach in therapy and in the training of therapists that embarrassment is the boundary state par excellence. There you are with one foot in what you know, and one foot in what you don’t know. If you can accept your embarrassment, then you’ll begin to make contact with the ‘different,’ the other. As you go with the experience your boundary expands. If, on the other hand, you try to avoid acknowledging your embarrassment and present a well-structured front, you’ll stay within your self-set boundaries, resulting in a feeling of safety and security. But at what a price! (Kitzler, Perls, Stern, “Retrospects and Prospects: A Trialogue between Laura Perls, Richard Kitzler and E. Mark Stern,” 17)

In 1983 I wrote the following text on the invitation to a workshop with Laura in Graz, and the translation from German into English is mine: During the last few years, it has almost become a tradition that Laura Perls, the co-founder of Gestalt therapy, comes to Styria for a weekend workshop in the late summer. What so impresses me is Laura’s style of working, how she conveys the importance of small steps, of digestible, assimilable experiences that enable a free-flowing therapeutic process. Particularly her

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work with ‘contact’ and ‘support’ seems to me to be exemplary for a subtle approach in Gestalt therapy that is in danger of being forgotten.

To my dismay, there was not enough enrollment for this workshop and it had to be cancelled. I will never forget Laura’s reaction to this misfortune. She was angry about it and claimed that this was a nasty shock to her. Since we never discussed her financial situation, I was not in the picture about how financially dependent she indeed was on these workshops taking place. Faced with her anger and despair, I was dismayed by not having been able to fulfill her expectations. However, Laura’s anger dissolved after she expressed it, as if she had written it off to experience. In private conversations, Laura was composed and aesthetically inclined. She was patient and at the same time precise and knew just what she wanted. Her sense of humor was keen and she could also enjoy it when the joke was on her. Allow me a little anecdote on the “here and now.” Laura told me that she once called her granddaughter, Leslie, who was then a young girl, on the phone, and asked her what she was doing. Leslie answered impatiently: “I’m talking to you, silly!” Laura had to laugh out loud! Another example of her self-irony: When I visited Laura in Manhattan with my daughter, who was just over one year old, Laura presented her with a little stuffed sheep. Laura asked Rosa: “Where is your sheep?” and my daughter pointed her finger at Laura, who began to laugh and nodded in confirmation: “Yes, yes, I am your sheep!” Laura was a very sensuous woman, aware of her body and how she moved, and she watched her weight carefully. I remember how she studied the menu in restaurants, looking for the appropriate meal, commenting with raised eyebrows: “In my kitchen there are no carbohydrates, no macaroni!”

Laura was exemplary for the bourgeois, educated class of her era. Her humanistic education was reflected in her eloquent, expressive diction. The German classics and Greek mythology were quoted effortlessly when she expressed her ideas or wrote poetry and prose. To spend time with her was to relish a rich source of culture and knowledge. In this editorial introduction to Laura’s unpublished notebooks and other literary works, I would like to describe a posthumous encounter with her. For ten years I had worked on a novel, titled Case Unclosable, which was published in 2013. What initially gave me the impetus to begin writing were recurrent nightmares about my father, who died at a relatively young age in 1978 and who included in his legacy to me the

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typewritten manuscript of a novella. He was a lawyer, not a writer, and this manuscript told the gripping story of one of his cases. After suffering for months from persistent nightmares, I took my Gestalt training and Laura’s words about recurrent dreams to heart: I addressed myself to the unresolved situation with my father and lack of closure due to his sudden, untimely death. I realized that the “unfinished business” called for me to engage myself in activities that would help me to attain more closure, and these activities pertained to his novella. Once I decided to publish his manuscript, the nightmares, to my great relief, disappeared quickly. The writing experience that was in store for me, however, was a complex, transformative process. After a decade of writing and revising, what began as a brief introduction to this novella had become quite a different piece of prose. I had interwoven chapters of my own reflections on the relationship to my father and to the characters in his novel with the original chapters in his novella. There seemed to be many parallels and similar transgenerational issues in the novel and my own family history. Vivid dreams comprised the starting point and the ending of the narrative. One of the influences on my long writing process can be traced to my preparations for a lecture on Gestalt therapy theory, when I re-read an article Laura published in 1989 in The Gestalt Journal. In this article, she paraphrased Erv Polster’s popular book Every Person’s Life is Worth a Novel and turned the premise upside down: Long before the establishment of psychology—let alone psychotherapy— as scientific disciplines and methods of problem solving, literature demonstrated and explicated human experience in all its facets: Love and hate, passion and indifference, happiness and suffering, learning and ignorance, innocence and experience, crime and punishment, war and peace, conflict and resolution, failure and success. (Perls, “Every Novel is a Case History,” 5)

Laura described how fascinating it can be when transformative dialogues develop between writers and readers of fine literature. Stimulated by reading Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Laura recounted how the imagination, intellect, and communicative abilities are heightened, how the paths to the reader’s emotions become more accessible: It begins with a detailed prescription and description of how to read a book, and the book to be read is the book being written at the same moment! Being the writer, the reader and the narrator all at the same time seems, quite paradoxically, not to interfere with the production of a book, but to release the creative powers, for all through these (also quite

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amusing) shenanigans a story is emerging the course of which I don’t know yet, as I had to interrupt my reading to produce this paper which is actually the direct result of starting Calvino’s book. (Every Novel, 10)

Laura went on to discuss Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars, where she read that it would be better to speak of talented, gifted readers than of talented, gifted writers. She realized that these transformative dialogues between author and reader enable the latter to become “an active collaborator, even the essential protagonist of the book” (ibid.). As yet unknown aspects of one’s own life as well as the lives of others may come to the fore. It took me a while to comprehend what Laura derived from reading Calvino and Pavic: A reader subjectively transforms what has been written and this person’s life is transformed by reading. By carefully re-reading my father’s novella, I was transforming it and being transformed. Slowly but surely, I grew to become the author, reader, and protagonist of the story. Now that I have Laura’s unpublished notebooks and other writing in my hands, with the intention to transcribe and publish them, I find myself in a situation similar to that of having inherited my father’s unpublished novella. Once again I have received an extraordinary legacy in the form of unpublished works from someone who was very close to me. This time they are Laura’s own. And once again the story began with a dream, although this time it was Renate Perls who did the dreaming. Hopefully you, the reader, will engage in the kind of transformative dialogue that Laura described with the contents between the covers of this book. As the editor of this publication, I have attempted to illuminate the less well known sides of Laura Perls through the presentation of her heretofore unpublished writing, to offer information about the people with whom she resonated, and to provide some of the rich cultural background which inspired her entire being.

The contents of this treasure chest: Notebooks and other literary texts The notebooks of Laura’s in my possession began in 1946 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the Perls family lived after having fled from persecution by the rise of National Socialists in Germany in 1933 to Amsterdam. Since they never obtained a work permit for the Netherlands, the Perlses turned to Ernest Jones, who intervened on their behalf and they set out for South Africa in 1934.

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Numerous entries were written in pencil. Nearly seventy years later, many pages were often terribly faded and had to be read with great concentration. A good part of the first notebook was in English, and I could decipher Laura’s writing reasonably well. However, she also entered a number of pages in German, which she wrote in Kurrent, the penmanship of her era, and these pages were practically illegible to me. Luckily, I was able to engage Patrick Fiska, a Viennese archivist and historian, to support me in deciphering her handwriting, particularly the entries written in German. What I transcribed from the Notebook Number 1, which she began to write in 1946 at her home on 25, Raymond Street, Bellevue, Johannesburg in South Africa, were her own original poems, beginning with “Original Sin” on two loose pages, then an untitled short poem followed by a long poem titled “Jacob’s Ladder,” which is subdivided into four sections marked in Roman numerals. There are two different sections of “Jacob’s Ladder” that are both marked III. The stanza that Laura deleted and substituted with another one is still legible. Since I don’t want to deprive the reader of this verse, it has been added at the end of the poem as a fragment and marked accordingly. Between “Original Sin” and “Jacob’s Ladder” is a one-line quote from Erich Fromm, whom Laura knew as a colleague and fellow émigré. Erich Fromm, who was born in 1900 in Frankfurt on Main, Germany, and died in 1980 in Muralto, Switzerland, was a social psychologist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and a Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst. Fromm fled from National Socialism to New York, where he was involved in forming the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry and the founding of the William Alanson White Institute. He also taught at Columbia University and Bennington College. The one-line quote by Fromm after Laura’s poem “Original Sin” is not by chance. Fromm’s humanistic world view stems from his own interpretation of the consequences of Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge. Instead of viewing them as having sinned, Fromm felt that Adam and Eve had become aware of being part of nature while at the same time separate from it. They realized that they were mortals, and therefore subject to the impact of nature and society, which resulted in their existential anxiety and what is conventionally seen as their guilt and shame. Fromm’s solution to this dilemma was the development of human beings’ abilities to love and reason. He was a prolific, widely received author. His most famous works include Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, and The Art of Loving, which was an international bestseller.

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“Jacob’s Ladder” is followed by a text titled “Open the Floodgates of Fear,” part prose, part poem. Also included were her translations of German poems into English, for instance Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Hälfte des Lebens,” which she titled “Turning Point of Life,” and Heinrich Heine’s “Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder,” which she begins with the line “My child, we have been children.” In between her translations, I transcribed her own poem, “In Springtime” (“Im Frühling”). Particularly impressive and stirring is the short story titled “Awakening,” which was originally interrupted by Heine’s poem and other entries on the handwritten pages 41 to 45 in Notebook Number 1. This entry was written on a total of sixteen pages, including blank pages, and did not follow in regular succession. While transcribing, I rearranged the succession of pages so that “Awakening” could be read in one piece. Then, in August, 2014, I was given a typewritten copy of the first chapter of “Awakening” by Renate Perls and Leslie Gold, and realized that this was the final version. Instead of including my transcription of Laura’s handwritten version in this volume, I have decided to complement the final version by including some of Laura’s corrections to her first version as footnotes. “Awakening” appears to be an autobiographical piece, capturing Laura’s very palpable experience with her mother, younger sister, and infant brother in their home in Pforzheim. Reading this narrative was an aesthetic and gripping experience for me in the true sense of the word! I can’t remember ever having read a text that so convincingly captures the sensory world and emotional experience of a young child. It is truly a kinesthetic piece of writing. Immediately following “Awakening” is a text marked “II.,” therefore I concluded that this is the second chapter of “Awakening.” Judging from the contents of this story, this appears to be the case. In this text, I discovered what appears to be an autobiographical experience of the author as a young girl with two elderly women running a handicraft shop in the neighborhood where she was born and spent her early years. This chapter has been heavily revised by the author, including an alternative paragraph towards the end of this chapter, which I have included. The subsequent chapters III., IV., and V. of “Awakening,” unfortunately, merely consist of two- or three-word ideas for their plots. Following “Awakening,” Detlev von Lilienkron’s poem “In einer großen Stadt” was translated into English by Laura as “In a big city.” In this notebook are two humorous poems of Laura’s and several other, more serious poems of hers, all untitled. A German-language version of Section IV from the poem “Jacob’s Ladder,” which appeared at the beginning of Notebook Number 1 in English, follows various brief contributions.

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Sketches, doodles, words written in Greek letters also appear in the notebook. As an explanation for her bizarre poem titled “Even-song,” Laura noted on the opposite page with a connecting arrow: “Written with ‘flu, temperature, temper, lucid confusion and enjoyable exasperation; August 30, 1946.” In the case of the initial notebook from 1946, the first half of the notebook is mostly filled with her own writing. Then I had to flip to the back cover and turn the notebook around in order to resume reading from the back cover. The main body of the second half of Notebook Number 1 consists of quotes from other writers. Here Laura begins with quotes from Erich Fromm’s book The Fear of Freedom, as it was known outside of North America and which was published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., London, in 1942. It was first published in English as Escape from Freedom in 1941 by Farrar & Rinehart. What follows seem to be Laura Perls’s notes and quotes that she took from this text, the numbers referring to the pages in Fromm’s book. I found myself transcribing drafts of her personal letters, dreams, names and addresses of persons she wanted to contact, fragments of thoughts that she jotted down, her own short stories, as well as quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, T.S. Elliot’s “East Coker,” Heinrich Heine’s poems, Palinurus’s (Cyril Conolly) The Unquiet Grave, and Julian Green’s Memories of Happy Days. Laura also muses about Ferenc Molnar’s play Liliom, which was adapted into the musical and film Carousel, and a poem by Eduard Friedrich Mörike. By repeatedly reading these texts, I have realized that these authors provide the background and resonance for her reflections and her own writing. When I make mention of Laura’s own writing, I am referring not only to her professional publications, which have been published elsewhere, but also to her prose and poetry, which will be published in this volume for the first time. This realization is what excited me most: Now it is finally possible to publish the rich treasure of Laura’s personal reflections during the decades of her life from 1946–1985. Although most entries were in English back in 1946, judging from the fluidity of her handwriting, I imagined that writing in the penmanship of her youth, in her native German, came easier to Laura. Moreover, Laura had her own system of writing, which prevailed throughout her notebooks, creatively marking passages to insert on other pages, changing the order of words, sentences, paragraphs or entire pages, flipping the notebook over and upside down in the middle and beginning anew from the back of the notebook, interrupting a story or poem with a new entry and continuing

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the story—unmarked—several pages later. Sometimes she would enumerate the pages, sometimes she didn’t. At times, Laura drafted an initial version of a poem or story on the left-hand page of the notebook, only to write the final version on the right-hand page. Notebook Number 2 was written during the years 1954 to 1956 at Laura’s New York address on Central Park West in Manhattan. This notebook includes a pensive letter to a colleague and friend named Paul, yet it is unclear whether she is referring to Paul Goodman or Paul Weisz. Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was a New York social critic, philosopher, and writer whose works not only strongly influenced education, community planning, and political movements in the 1960s, but also the classic textbook on Gestalt therapy, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, which he wrote with Fritz Perls and Ralph Hefferline in 1951. Viennese-born Paul Weisz had training in internal medicine, neurology, and biochemistry. He worked as a research scientist in New York. His education was humanistic, his outlook European, and he was particularly interested in the practice of Zen Buddhism. Laura considered him to be a Renaissance man. Through his wife, Lottie Weisz, a psychiatrist, he met both Perlses and began Gestalt training with Laura. Paul Weisz was one of the founding members of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy in the 1950s and among the trainers of the group that founded the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. After several years of estrangement, Goodman and Weisz resumed their friendship in the mid 1960s. During a “conciliatory dinner” at Goodman’s apartment in 1965, Weisz died suddenly of a heart attack. For more information about this era in the development of Gestalt therapy, the interested reader is referred to Taylor Stoehr’s book Here Now Next: Paul Goodman and the Origins of Gestalt Therapy, which was published in 1994 by Jossey Bass/Gestalt Institute of Cleveland in San Francisco, and to an article by Paul Weisz titled “The Contribution of Georg Wilhelm Groddeck,” published in The Gestalt Journal XIII, no. 2 (1990): 85–98. Following this letter are the notes for a publication of two case studies that first appeared in Case Reports in Clinical Psychology (1956) of the Department of Psychology, Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn, New York, and were then published in 1971 as “Two Instances of Gestalt Therapy,” a chapter in Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy, edited by Paul David Pursglove, and finally in Laura Perls, Living at the Boundary. The Gestalt Journal Press, which owns the copyright to this book chapter, has unfortunately denied publication permission for this volume. In Laura’s handwritten notebook, the actual first names of her two patients appear. If I had been permitted to include this transcription, I would have

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omitted these and kept the pseudonyms in order to protect their identities. The draft for the above-mentioned book chapter, which I had intended to include in the present volume, is followed in her notebooks by notes that she made that have not been included in the published versions, whereas sections that have already been published in Living at the Boundary are missing in my transcription. In the sections in which my transcribed text overlaps with the above-mentioned book chapter, it is nearly identical, with minor exceptions in punctuation, the beginnings of paragraphs, and choice of vocabulary. The interested reader is referred to the published text, either in Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy or in Living at the Boundary. Also in this notebook is a brief poem titled “Provincetown Problem,” describing the obstacles to writing that Laura experienced, apparently during a vacation at the beach in Provincetown. The New England town of Provincetown is located on the outermost tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and is famous for fishing, magnificent beaches, and as a popular vacation spot on the East Coast. Since the end of the nineteenth century, more and more writers and artists began to make their homes there, not only during summer vacations, but all year round. In the 1960s Provincetown attracted many hippies, and in the 1970s the gay and lesbian community began to grow rapidly. In Notebook Number 2 the reader will find other journal entries, some lively childhood memories, and notes for writing projects. There is also a short story titled “Fire Escape” which begins mid-sentence in the notebook and may be a fragment of a longer piece. The myriad of characters that Laura depicts in this text could be her own case studies. With sensitivity and irony she depicts a critical event of their life as tenants in an apartment building that had been set on fire. The two brief letters from Laura to Fritz in Notebook Number 2, which were possibly never sent to him, comprise particularly heartrending contributions to this notebook. They give the reader insight into how Laura emotionally handled the declining relationship to her husband. Further treasures, such as the poems that Laura wrote in Notebook Number 2 about love, ageing, and death, are also deeply moving. They become all the more vivid when seen in light of Laura’s stroke in 1955. She contemplated Gottfried Benn’s thoughts on the differences between early accomplished artists and artists who are most productive as mature individuals. She drew on the treasure trove of what she read by such English writers as Gerald Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, George Granville Barker, Emma Orczy, and William Butler Yeats, by the German author of children’s books Tony Schumacher, the German writers

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Christian Morgenstern, Erich Kästner, and John Höxter, the German philosopher Paul Tillich, the American writers Peter Viereck, Maxwell Bodenheim, and James Agee. In addition, Laura drew on works by the German-American philosopher and social scientist Herbert Marcuse, a fellow émigré who is associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory along with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Herbert Marcuse was known as an important theorist of the New Left and a leading figure in the student movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. Laura recollects the vicissitudes of friendships during her years in South Africa, and mused about old friends from Germany, among them Tilly and Max Ludwig Cahn. Max L. Cahn, who was born in Mainz in 1889 and died in Frankfurt in 1967, was a lawyer and notary public who brought home medals from fighting on Germany’s side in World War I. In 1938 he was briefly interned in the concentration camp in Buchenwald, but released thanks to his important consulting services to British firms. He survived the war years, reduced to activities as a “jüdischer Konsulent,” German for Jewish legal advisor. Cahn avoided deportation in March 1945 by going underground. After the war, he became co-founder of Frankfurt’s Jewish Community and resumed his work as a lawyer. His wife, Tilly Cahn, née Schulze, who was born in 1892 and died in 1980, was not Jewish. Their diaries and letters from the years 1933 to 1943 have been published in 1999 in German as „Tagebuchaufzeichnungen und Briefe von Max L. Cahn und Tilly Cahn aus den Jahren 1933–1943,“ in the Archiv für Frankfurts Geschichte und Kunst, Bd. 65, in Frankfurt am Main, 182–221. The interested reader is also referred to Jay H. Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and to Die Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland, edited by Birthe Kundrus and Beate Meyer and published in 2012 by Wallstein as Volume 20 of Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus. In her journal entries Laura reflects on what she has in common with some of the characters she created in her short story “Fire Escape.” Moreover, in Notebook Number 2 a dream is included that stimulated Laura to write lively descriptions of childhood memories with relatives. Listening to classical music, South African landscapes are conjured up and written down. Furthermore, I found various rough drafts of the beginning and a longer version of the short story “A Peg to Hang My Hat On,” an associative, convoluted tale. In this story, Laura is inspired by such artists and writers as John Höxter, Max Bodenheim, and James Agee, whose tremendous talents were impacted by their abuse of either alcohol or drugs, to create a character named Isaac Rosenfeld.

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In the interview with Laura that Daniel Rosenblatt conducted in 1972 (Perls, Meine Seele ist die Wildnis des Anderen, 92–93), Laura states that the protagonist of her short story, “A Peg to Hang My Hat On,” was indeed based on the writer, Isaac Rosenfeld. Born in 1918 in Chicago, Rosenfeld studied at the University of Chicago and went to New York City to study philosophy, which he gave up shortly thereafter. Rosenfeld held a prominent position in the elite circle of intellectuals and writers in Greenwich Village, writing poetry and fiction, but mostly book reviews and essays. He published in the New Republic, Partisan Review, Commentary, New Leader, and The Nation. Rosenfeld returned to live in Chicago before he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age thirty-eight. Fearing that his writer’s block was caused by sexual inhibition, Rosenfeld began reading Reich’s publications, ventured into psychotherapy with a student of Reich’s, Dr. Richard Singer, and hoped that orgone therapy would cure him. He applied an orgone box he produced himself. Laura described a friendly get-together with Rosenfeld during which he agreed to be blindfolded and have the others experiment with the orgone box on his arms and legs. Regretting that he overexerted himself to the point of exhaustion, she mentioned in the 1972 interview that Rosenfeld wrote a piece in Partisan Review about fantasy being like riding a bicycle uphill. In her short story, “A Peg to Hang My Hat On,” Laura picked up this metaphor to create her bicycle-riding protagonist. In Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, published in 2011 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Christopher Turner describes the overlapping social circles of Rosenfeld and the Perlses, suggesting that at least Fritz Perls went to see Rosenfeld’s orgone box in action. Preserving the Hunger. An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader, published in 1988 by Mark Shechner, offers an unexpected reference to Laura and her short story. In addition, it features a heart-warming foreword by Rosenfeld’s boyhood friend and rival, Saul Bellow, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize. In the editor’s preface, Shechner describes the responses he received in 1976 from readers to his essay on Isaac Rosenfeld. Shechner got letters, reminiscences, tips on obscure publications, and offers of unpublished material. The psychotherapist Dr. Laura Perls sent me a story she had written shortly after Rosenfeld’s death: ‘A Peg to Hang My Hat On (Requiem for Isaac Rosenfeld).’ (18)

This short story is to be published in this volume for the first time.

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Isaac Rosenfeld inspired not only Laura to base characters on him. Saul Bellow’s King Dahfur in Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Wallace Markfield’s Leslie Braverman in To an Early Grave (1964) were modeled on Isaac Rosenfeld. Sidney Lumet’s film Bye Bye Braverman (1964), starring George Segal, was based on Markfield’s novel. Other sources of inspiration for this story were comments by a friend of long standing about Laura’s own restlessness, Laura’s reflections on the Wandering Jew, and the deeper meaning of wearing a hat. According to Christian legend, the Wandering Jew is a figure who was condemned to live until the end of the world because he derided Christ on the way to crucifixion on Mount Calvary. This legend has been dealt with in numerous works of poetry and prose, as well as in many works of visual art. As for the significance of wearing a hat, it can be noted that in Jewish tradition, a head covering must be worn during prayers. Observant Jewish men wear a hat or skull cap and observant Jewish women cover their hair with a scarf or hat, or wear a wig outside of places of worship as well. Allusions to Laura’s Jewish roots become figural in this narrative, including her own transliterated version of Kaddish, an essential part of Jewish prayer services. There are many forms of Kaddish, but when one “says” Kaddish, this refers to the ritual of mourning, “Mourner’s Kaddish.” This Hebrew prayer for the dead comprises a hymn extolling God despite the loss of a loved one. The timeless nature of God, his eternality, and his greatness are praised in the congregation’s response in this prayer: “May His great name be blessed forever, and to all eternity.” The notes for the short story, “A Peg to Hang My Hat On,” begin with an entry on March 12, 1956 and continue till July 18, 1956, and I have included them. Laura resumes her writing with several entries comprising a more substantial version of the story, authored during the period of July through December 1956. During the summer months, Laura was writing in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In the middle of an entry dated December 1, 1956, Laura notes down the name Elsie Clark and the address 11 West 65, N.Y.C. Unfortunately, I have neither been able to determine who Elsie Clark was nor whether or not she had anything to do with the entry for the short story. To my astonishment, among the newly discovered treasures that I received in August 2014 was a final, polished version of the short story “A Peg to Hang My Hat On (Requiem for Isaac Rosenfeld),” that I had already transcribed with great difficulty from Notebook Number 2. This typewritten text comprised several loose pages and was dated 1955. I was surprised to see this text attributed by Laura to the year 1955, considering the fact that all the handwritten drafts of the story “A Peg to Hang My Hat

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On” in Notebook Number 2 are spread over the year 1956. I assumed that the carefully edited, typewritten last version of the text was simply misdated as having been written in 1955. I decided to include the transcription of one of the early handwritten sections of this story and substitute the typewritten final version for the other transcribed drafts. There follows a letter from Laura to Rochelle M. Wexler in Brooklyn with her curriculum vitae in which she is introducing herself and describing her professional career. I searched the internet successfully for clues to Ms. Wexler’s identity. I found a psychoanalytically oriented publication by Karen Machover and Rochelle M. Wexler titled “A Case of Manic Excitement,” published in the Rorschach Research Exchange and Journal of Projective Techniques 12, no. 4 (1948): 179–201. Ms. Wexler is noted as a staff psychologist at the Psychiatric Division of King’s County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. In my search for further information about Ms. Wexler, I checked the U.S. Federal Population Census over several decades, and found information from the 1940 census about a woman named Rochelle Wexler, born in 1923 in New York, residing with her parents, Louis, who emigrated from Rumania, and Sarah Wexler, who emigrated from Poland, in Brooklyn. Rochelle Wexler died in 2006. I strongly suspect that the woman listed in the 1940 is also the coauthor of the article on manic excitement as well as the recipient of Laura’s letter. A clue to the mystery of the connection between Laura and Rochelle Wexler is the fact that Laura’s publication of “Two Instances of Gestalt Therapy” was first published in Case Reports in Clinical Psychology of the Department of Psychology at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. Ms. Wexler worked for the Psychiatric Division of this hospital as a staff psychologist. A list of names and numbers are also to be found in Notebook Number 2, possibly group members and the fees they paid. At the end of this notebook I found two loose pages with what I found to be a sensational text: a hand-written dialogue, written alternately, between Laura and a deaf-mute female patient. From Laura’s duplicate copy of her application for Who’s Who of American Women, I learned that she became a naturalized American citizen in 1955, the year that she suffered a stroke and her self-image was so profoundly shaken. Notebook Number 3 comprised the years 1957 to 1958 in Laura’s life. Some of the entries have been paginated by Laura Perls. However, if there is pagination, it is quite idiosyncratic, skipping from left to right, ignoring the sequence of pages and numerical order. Sometimes the page numbers skip around from left to right, sometimes Laura Perls backtracked and

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wrote, i.e. page 7 preceding page 4, or she wrote a rough draft on one page and on the opposite page the revised version. In these cases, I will note the number of pages in an entry, but omit the pagination. There is no indication of an address in this notebook. This notebook begins with a draft for a play modeled after Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of An Author. Here Laura experiments by embellishing the characters with aspects of her own life history and style of being in the world with others. She struggles with conflicting traits in her personality, with the undesirable consequences of menopause and ageing, with potentials and aptitudes she never fully actualized. Amid these struggles and self-doubts, she discusses with Arnold Simmel, who bolstered her mood by remarking that he saw Laura as a bridge-builder. Arnold Simmel was the grandson of the renowned German sociologist Georg Simmel and eldest son of the physician Hans Simmel, who, having been denounced by a patient, suffered in Dachau after the November pogrom for his anti-Nazi convictions. Hans Simmel, his wife, and all four children were able, however, to immigrate to the U.S. in 1940, via England. Arnold Simmel was born in Jena in 1926, studied at Columbia University, and went on to teach at City of New York College and Columbia. The interested reader is referred to Simmel’s book chapter, “Privacy is not an Isolated Freedom,” in Privacy & Personality, edited by James R. Pennock and John W. Chapman and published in 1971 by Transaction Publishers, and, if you can read German, to Dirk Käsler’s book Soziologische Abenteuer: Earle Edward Eubank besucht europäische Soziologen im Sommer 1934, published in 1985 in Opladen by Westdeutscher Verlag. According to a facsimile of correspondence I found during my research, Simmel lived near Laura, at 549 Riverside Drive, in Manhattan, so these two German refugees may have had many a productive exchange of ideas. Renate Perls recalled that the two were on friendly terms. Simmel attended Laura’s 65th birthday party at Renate’s home in Leonia, New Jersey. Following this draft for a play, we find journal entries and short poems dealing with memory, ageing, and recollections of dreams. Special attention is given to Laura’s eidetic memory of the geography of places she had visited. In one of the journal entries on her difficulties in writing and how she dealt with having both the English and German languages in her mind, Laura briefly reverted to writing in German, which I have translated. Notebook Number 3 ends with a longer poem titled “Flight to the West,” which touches on the concepts of time, history, and infiniteness of the universe. In this poem Laura quoted a line of verse from Goethe’s Faust, “In Brudersphären Wettgesang,” prompting me to find and include

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a proper English translation of four lines of this verse from the “Prologue in Heaven.” During the years 1959 to 1960, Notebook Number 4 was written. This notebook begins with what I have recognized to be Laura’s notes for a discussion among prominent therapists of five different methods of psychotherapy, dating back to 1959. Reading through Laura’s notes, I found nearly identical sections of the following publication: Laura Perls, “One Gestalt Therapist’s Approach,” in Perls, Living at the Boundary, and which was also revised for publication in Gestalt Therapy Now: Theory, Techniques, Applications, edited by Joen Fagan and Irma Lee Shepherd, published by Harper Colophon in 1971, which had been published in 1970 by Science and Behavior Books, Inc. and was reprinted by arrangement. It was originally published as “The Gestalt Approach” in Annals of Psychotherapy Special Combined Issue edited by J. Barron & R.A. Harper, vols. 1 and 2, 1961. In the volume edited by Fagan and Shepherd, “One Gestalt Therapist’s Approach” begins with the note: At the Fourth Annual Conference of the American Academy of Psychotherapists in New York in 1959, leading therapists of five different orientations were asked a series of questions about their theoretical views and therapeutic approaches. Representing Gestalt therapy, Dr. Laura Perls gave the following answers. (125)

After the five panelists responded to the set of questions that were posed to them, there ensued a debate among them. The handwritten notebooks I transcribed include the very notes that Laura Perls jotted down during this exchange in 1959. The Gestalt Journal Press owns the copyright to this article and has refused to grant me publication permission for this volume. Although the transcribed draft for the published book chapter will regrettably not be included here, the unpublished additional material from the debate will be available. I have included these notes despite their sketchiness and incompleteness. This entry comprised pp. 1–18 in the notebook, according to Laura Perls’s pagination. The interested reader can access the published book chapter in Gestalt Therapy Now: Theory, Techniques, Applications or in Living at the Boundary. According to Laura’s notes, the other panelists were: Rudolf Dreikurs, Jules Nydes, Carl Whitaker, and Carl Rogers. Dreikurs was born 1897 in Vienna and died 1972 in Chicago. He was a psychiatrist and educator, and founder of the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology. Nydes, born in 1931 and died in 1977, was a psychoanalyst and student of Theodor Reik. Whitaker, who was born in 1912 in New York and died in

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1995 in Wisconsin, was one of the founders of family therapy. Rogers, who was born in 1902 in Illinois and died in 1987 in California, was the founder of client-centered psychotherapy. Also in Notebook Number 4 are sketches, possibly a self-portrait, the poem titled “Song of the Good People,” and an untitled short story about a profound, touching encounter between the protagonist, presumably the author, and a young, pregnant woman while shopping for Christmas presents. What follows appears to be notes for another story. Then the reader must turn to the back cover of the notebook and turn it around to continue reading: Laura noted pages of quotes from Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague, another author who seems to have contributed to the literary, cultural background from which the figures of Laura’s writing emerged. First published in French in 1947, The Plague was available in English as a McGraw Hill Text publication in 1948. The novel is based on a cholera epidemic that hit the Algerian city of Oran, and it is set in the 1940s. Camus gave special attention to themes touching the human condition, the essence of destiny, and the philosophical concept of the absurd. The Plague has been interpreted as a metaphor for French resistance to the Nazi occupation of France during WWII. The plot deals with isolation, exile, resistance, religion, solidarity, and community, all themes that touched Laura deeply. Notebook Number 5 is undated, but it bears the address 7 West 96th Street, NY, NY 10025. This notebook begins with a moving entry dedicated to two friends of the Perlses who likewise fled from the Nazis to South Africa: the artist Hanns Katz and the educator Karl Wilker. Actually, Laura meant to dedicate a chapter to these two men, but she did not indicate where this chapter and introductory dedication were to be published. Both men belonged to the circle of friends who provided one another with emotional and intellectual support during their early years in exile in South Africa. Wilker, who was born in Osnabrück in 1885, was an innovator in the German public education and penal systems before the Nazi takeover. It was not because of racial or religious persecution that Wilker first fled to Switzerland in 1933, then to South Africa in 1937, since he was a Quaker, but rather for political reasons. He lost his university position due to his convictions, which were subversive to the Nazi regime. In the interview that Daniel Rosenblatt conducted with Laura in 1972, published already in German by Anke and Erhard Doubrawa in 1997/2005, Laura seems to have confused the names of the educators and the schools in which they worked: Karl Wilker didn’t work in the school in Wickersdorf. He worked with troubled youth at Der Lindenhof, an

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institution for juvenile delinquents in Berlin-Lichterfeld, Germany. The school in Wickersdorf, known as the “Freie Schulgemeinde Wickersdorf” (The Free School Community Wickersdorf) was founded by Gustav Wynekens and Paul von Geheeb in 1906. In 1909 von Geheeb broke with Wynekens and left the school. Together with his wife, Edith, Paul von Geheeb founded the Odenwald School in Ober-Hambach near Heppenheim, Germany, in 1910. The interested reader is referred to Stephan Lhotsky’s article, “Karl Wilker’s Der Lindenhof,” Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Problems 3, no. 2 (Summer 1994): pp. 53–55, and Karl Wilker, Der Lindenhof: Werden und Wollen (Heilbronn: LichtkampfVerlag Hanns Altermann, 1921). Wilker’s first teaching position in South Africa was at the Native High School in Phokeng near Rustenberg in Transvaal. Renate Perls remembered many childhood vacations at the Wilkers’ farm in Rustenberg. She also recalled Wilker as being a very unhappy man when the Perlses visited him at his home in Amanzimtoti. What amazed Renate was that all the walls in the Amanzimtoti house were replicas of the exquisite paintings he had originally done on the walls of the Rustenberg house. What Laura did not know when she wrote Notebook Number 5 was that Wilker returned to Germany in 1964, and died in Bad Camberg in 1980. He was given an honorary doctorate from the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt on Main in 1975. Hanns Ludwig Katz was born in 1892 in Karlsruhe, and moved to Frankfurt on Main in 1920, after having studied painting, architecture, and art history. Despite initial success and renown as an expressionist painter, Katz had to work in a whitewashing company with his partner in order to support himself and his first wife, Franziska. A pianist who was affectionately called Fränze, she died in 1934. Katz was active in the Jüdischer Kulturbund and fled to South Africa in 1936, followed by his second wife, the artist Ruth Wolf, after plans for a Jewish settlement in former Yugoslavia failed to materialize. According to Renate Perls, Ruth Wolf was not only Laura’s best friend in Johannesburg, but had also been a very close friend of Laura’s aunt, Emmy Wilkens, her mother’s younger sister and only eight years Laura’s senior, when Ruth still lived in Germany. When the Perlses lived in the Observatory neighborhood of Johannesburg, Hanns and Ruth Katz lived very close by. Hanns Katz’s paintings were denounced by the Nazis as “degenerate art.” In South Africa, Katz‘s works never found the recognition he had in Germany, and he was again forced to revert to house painting to support himself and his wife. Katz developed cancer and died in 1940 in abject poverty. Laura was an important emotional support to Hanns during his

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final months, when he realized he was dying, and she also helped to support the couple financially. After he died, Ruth gave drawing classes for children in a small atelier near her single, rented room. Renate Perls took lessons with her as a ten-year-old. In 1992, commemorating the centennial of his birth, a wonderful retrospective of Katz’s paintings, mostly cityscapes and portraits, was shown, first at Frankfurt’s Jewish Museum, then at other museums, including one in South Africa. The interested reader is referred to the catalogue of the exhibition, for which Georg Heuberger was responsible: Hanns Ludwig Katz 1892–1940, edited by Helga Krohn and K.-L. Hofmann, (Frankfurt/Main: Edition Wienand, 1992). In the foreword to this catalogue, Heuberger mentioned that Hans Wongtschowski, who later became a businessman, and Katz first met in Frankfurt in 1934–35. Wongtschowski, who was in possession of numerous paintings and pastel drawings by Katz, had been working intensively since 1984 to locate other works by Katz and contact their owners, most of whom were friends of the artist. Driven by his conviction that Katz was a significant representative of German Expressionism whose artistic recognition was denied him after he immigrated to South Africa, Wongtschowski strove to prevent Katz from being completely forgotten in Germany. He was instrumental in accessing works by the artist for this retrospective, not only lending his own collection of paintings and drawings by Katz, but also contributing a chapter to the catalogue about his recollections of the artist. Besides being one of the great German Expressionists, Katz was, in Wongtschowski’s eyes, the most educated, intelligent, and talented person he had ever encountered. Wongtschowski recalled having attended the art historical lectures as a twenty-year-old that Katz used to offer in his studio in Frankfurt. He was among a small, dwindling group of young Jews who gathered there regularly, enjoying the lectures and atmosphere in the painter’s studio, and escaping from the increasingly threatening atmosphere brought to their lives in Frankfurt by Hitler’s Brownshirts and the SS. When he lost his job in 1936 because the company he worked for in Frankfurt had been aryanized, Wongtschowski decided to follow several friends, likewise enthusiastic mountain-climbers, to South Africa. His girlfriend, Else Reinheimer, a silversmith, arrived several months later, as did Hanns and Ruth Katz, née Wolf, who arrived by boat in Capetown in October 1936. The two couples joined forces and rented houses together that could accommodate a studio in which Hanns could paint, Ruth could sculpt, and Else could work as a silversmith. On weekends, they enjoyed hikes in the mountains.

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Although Hanns Katz had a few commissions for works of art, the four years he spent in South Africa were drastically different from his previous creative periods. After fleeing to South Africa, he neither painted selfportraits nor other human beings, but rather limited his artistic expression to landscapes. In a phone conversation and ensuing email to me on March 6, 2015, Renate Perls informed me that she had been in contact with Hans Wongtschowski, whom Laura addressed as Hans Wong in a letter included in this volume. In this letter, when Laura recalls having met Wongtschowki in the Kulturverein, she is referring to the Unabhängige Kulturvereinigung (Independent Cultural Association) in Johannesburg, where German-born intellectuals and politically interested émigrés grappled with their origins and cultural background. Conflicted and searching for a new identity in an anglophone country, they organized discussions, lectures, films, theatre performances, and concerts. Unfortunately, Renate retained no copies of the correspondence she had with Wongtschowski. In the Federal Archives (Staatsarchiv) of Karlsruhe, Germany, there is a study by Hans Wongtschowski of Hanns L. Katz, undated, comprising 59 pages. This manuscript is part of an estate (see https://www.deutschedigitale-bibliothek.de/item/A5CPTQT457ZDUM2UXJAWEK3KO UAOXJTW). Also to be found in Karlsruhe’s Federal Archives is correspondence with Hans Wongtschowski, the brother-in-law of Elisabeth Klaas, and collector of Hanns Ludwig Katz’s paintings, author of a study on Hanns Ludwig Katz, https://www.deutsche-digitalebibliothek.de/item/FPM2IGZUMQ6WBOXSMKFADGCK24GUA6Z5; December 1, 2015). As an aside, it is noteworthy that the ardent mountaineers Hans Wongtschowski and Jan de Villiers Graaff were the first to climb Spitzkoppe Mountain in Namibia in November 1946 (see Klaus Dierks’ Chronology of Namibian History: From Pre-Historical Times to Independent Namibia [December 2000], http://www.klausdierks.com/ Chronology/94.htm; March 06, 2015)! In order to continue reading Notebook Number 5, I had to turn to the back cover and flip the notebook around. The sections of the final entry in Notebook Number 5 are marked by scattered Roman numerals, which I follow to transcribe the text. The entry comprises fourteen pages and has been paginated by Laura Perls, including pages 3a, 3b, and two pages marked 10. It appeared to me that this must be Laura’s manuscript for a lecture. Flipping through all available sources of Laura’s writing that are at my disposal, I soon found a revised version of this entry published as a

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book chapter titled “Some Aspects of Gestalt Therapy” in Laura Perls’s compendium Living at the Boundary, edited by Joe Wysong. Wysong noted at the end of the chapter: ‘Some Aspects of Gestalt Therapy’ was presented as a paper at the 1972 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Group therapy Association which met in Washington, D.C. It was published in German in 1979 in the GestaltBulletin. (135)

Therefore, it is apparent that what Laura wrote down in her notebook was indeed the manuscript for the professional talk she gave in 1972 and which was published in her compendium twenty years later. This assumption would date Notebook Number 5 as having been written during or before 1972. The copyright for “Some Aspects of Gestalt Therapy” belongs to The Gestalt Journal Press, which has sadly refused its publication permission in this volume. The text that I transcribed from Laura’s notebook appears to be her handwritten manuscript that later underwent minor editorial revisions (punctuation, vocabulary, order of words, etc.) before publication. The published version of this text can be accessed in Living at the Boundary. Notebook Number 6 was actually a folder containing several pages of writing dated 1972. This notebook consists of Laura’s handwritten eulogy for Paul Goodman and a typed version of the same, dated Oct. 22, 1972, plus a copy of her “Portrait Sketch of Paul Goodman,” which she composed for the playbill of the Living Theatre, dated December 1952. On the occasion of Paul Goodman’s death, Laura Perls apparently first wrote the eulogy by hand, then typed it on letterhead stationery, and finally read it aloud at a memorial service for him. The typed text is nearly identical to her handwritten draft. Although I have not been able to find a published version of Laura Perls’s eulogy for Goodman, there were, of course, other published eulogies for him. Susan Sontag published “On Paul Goodman” in The New York Review of Books, September 21, 1972 issue, and Nat Hentoff, Gloria Channon, Wilbur Rippy and George Dennison published “The Legacy of Paul Goodman” in Change 4, no. 10 (Winter 1972/1973), 38–47 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/40161622; August 02, 2015). The playbill I am referring to is from the program titled Faustina, created by Paul Goodman and performed at the Living Theatre. With the kind and prompt assistance of Ms. Sharon Rork from the Billy Rose Theatre Division, I was able to determine the exact citation: The Living Theatre records, 1945–1991. *T-MSS 1988-005 (b. 60, f. 1) Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

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Judging from these papers in Notebook Number 6, for the eulogy she delivered for Paul Goodman in 1972, Laura slightly revised her original 1952 portrait sketch of him for the playbill. What follows is taken from a xeroxed, typed page of text, the original playbill, upon which Laura Perls wrote the date “Dec. 1952,” made several handwritten corrections, and virtually gave herself stage directions for presenting the eulogy. Her corrections included substitutions of one word for another, but also underscoring for emphasis and minor punctuation corrections, most likely to facilitate her reading this text aloud at Paul Goodman’s funeral. This entry has been corrected according to Laura Perls’s revisions, which will be described in footnotes. In July, 2014, Renate Perls called me from New York with the exciting message that she and Leslie unexpectedly came upon lots of new material, including various pieces of Laura’s writing, which were copied for use in this publication. One of the copies was an undated, slightly revised version of a part of a poem written by Laura that I had already transcribed from Notebook Number 1. The title was deleted on this loose one-page copy, and it began with the line: “There is no step to kneel on, no prayer to pray.” In Notebook Number 1, these two stanzas comprised “Jacob’s Ladder, I. Lament.” I have included the differences between this version and the handwritten, much longer poem, as footnotes in Notebook Number 1. Another typewritten text, dated January 1947, and personally signed by Laura, is a short story titled “Having a Bath.” Laura must have written this just before she left South Africa for New York with both her children. The protagonist is an old man lost in his own reflections while soaking in a bathtub, comparing his impressive boyhood adventures in the mountains to his adult experiences at the same site. At the same time, it is a touching, aesthetic text focused on ageing and unlived aspects of life. A striking piece of writing is a short text from November 1976 in which Laura described how she began to write. This brief text is such a revealing and concentrated description of the driving forces behind Laura’s literary works that I decided to stray from the chronological order of manuscripts and placed it at the beginning of the book. With extraordinary poignancy, Laura explained how the pain of being cut off from her family and friends in Europe during the war prompted her to process her suffering into literary forms. She began to assimilate vivid memories into short stories, playing with the idea of autobiography as fiction and vice versa, fiction as autobiography. Laura was stimulated by the idea of writing her own story neither as mere autobiography nor as the strict factual history of Gestalt therapy. She summed up her realization:

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“Truth is not in the single temporal facts, but in the timeless experience of a total life crystallized—if at all—into a personal mythology.” The next text is a very short one, titled “Endcase: A psychedelicathooliganism.” Leslie sent me this handwritten, undated text of her grandmother’s in September 2014. Laura must have delighted in creating this experimental piece. It consists of wild, wayward word medleys. The subtitle, “A psychedelicathooliganism,” combining the terms psychedelic, delicate, and hooligan, led me to wonder whether or not the rascal in Laura was teasing the prospective reader, testing her skill at appearing to have been under the influence of drugs. In addition to the discovery of Laura’s texts in the summer of 2014 were other materials that Leslie copied for me to use in this publication as research material. Some of them will be included in this book as facsimiles: several pages of Laura’s doctoral dissertation (1932) from the University of Frankfurt on Main in Germany, which I received in its entirety, the compiler’s copy of Laura’s application to Who’s Who of American Women, a family tree of both Laura and Fritz Perls as compiled by Renate Perls and Leslie Gold, an obituary for Laura Perls by Daniel Goleman from the July 18, 1990 issue of the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/18/obituaries/laura-perls-84-dies-ingermany-founder-of-gestalt-psychotherapy.html), and an obituary written for Laura by her childhood friend, Anja Römer-Hahn, from July 26, 1990, published in German on page 6 of the Pforzheimer Zeitung. Anja RömerHahn and Laura had known each other for seventy-eight years. Immediately after Laura died, Renate and Leslie visited Römer-Hahn to tell her of her oldest friend’s death. Laura’s letter to Hans Wongtschowski, dated October 10, 1985, relating to Hanns Ludwig Katz’s works, and her poem about Katz, titled “Magic Mirror” and dated 1946, will also be included in this volume.

Laura Perls interviewed by Daniel Rosenblatt in 1972 Further materials given to me encompass the transcribed interviews that Daniel Rosenblatt conducted with Laura Perls from March through May 1972. This series of interviews are being published in English for the first time in this volume. They were recorded on separate dates and focus on four phases of Laura Perls’s life: her early years in Pforzheim and Frankfurt, her years in Berlin, her life in South Africa, and finally her life in New York. Thanks to the kind permission of James Pritchard of the Daniel Rosenblatt Foundation, these very personal interviews are now available to the English-speaking world.

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They have already been translated from English into German and were first published by Anke and Erhard Doubrawa in 1997 as Der Weg zur Gestalttherapie: Lore Perls im Gespräch mit Daniel Rosenblatt (Wuppertal: Edition GIK im Peter Hammer Verlag). In 2005, the same editors published the interviews again in the volume Meine Seele ist die Wildnis des Anderen: Der Weg zur Gestalttherapie; Laura Perls im Gespräch (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer). It would not have been possible for me to reproduce the English text in its entirety from the copies of the transcribed interview without the reliable and competent support from my colleague, Bernd Bocian. We compared my copy of the English text with his copy, both of which included numerous blanks, handwritten corrections, poorly legible sections, and entries marking inaudible sections of the tapes. Bocian’s copy of the interview manuscript had, to our surprise, several handwritten corrections that differed from those in my copy of the interview. After comparing our versions with each other, I compared the results with the German translation, just to be sure that questionable sections of the manuscript were as correctly deciphered as possible. The inaudible sections of the tapes, which were originally transcribed in English, have been noted as such throughout the manuscript. My best educated guesses at barely legible words or blanks, judging from the context, are enclosed in brackets with a question mark. For better orientation, I have, as the editors of the German version have done before me, provided subheadings to sections of the interviews. What fascinated me about this extensive interview, particularly in my position as editor, were the illuminative parallels it drew to Laura’s unpublished works. Clearly, not only Laura’s childhood and adolescent experiences with family and friends and the course of her relationship with Fritz were described in the interview, but also the personal experiences she made fleeing from persecution by the Nazis, first in her exile in Amsterdam, then in South Africa, and finally settling in New York; the loss of contact with her European roots; her political activities and cultural involvement as well as her increasingly critical perspective on classical psychoanalysis. All these life events fueled her writing, and Laura was no exception to the rule here. Many of the exiled psychoanalysts and social scientists, the majority of whom were persecuted Jews, struggled in the wake of Fascism, fearing that the masses would again be seducible to the manipulations of totalitarian regimes. Some sought the solution to this dilemma by concentrating their efforts on strengthening democratic abilities in individuals through individual or group psychotherapy. Others, such as Adorno et al. in their well-known study, The Authoritarian

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Personality, published in 1950 by Harper and Row, conducted sociological studies on prejudice. All of these émigrés wore the scars of their persecution in Europe and loss of their former life, friends, families, and their native language. Each of them processed the rise and fall of National Socialism in their own, personal way, and all of them were marked by the horrors of the war. Laura’s unpublished texts seem to be reflected in the interview that Rosenblatt conducted with her, and vice versa. In Rosenblatt’s interview, there were numerous references made to precisely those texts of Laura’s that I have transcribed for publication in this volume. Moreover, in the interview she made mention of friends and colleagues who are described or whose works are quoted in her journals. Just to name a few such parallels: Rosenblatt inquired about Laura’s earliest memory, which is recorded in the short story, “Awakening”; Rosenblatt asked about Laura’s early experiences with modern dance and body movement, which comprise a journal entry describing how she explained the Dalcroze method to her mother and aunt; Rosenblatt delves into the way National Socialism affected Laura’s family, and her poem, “Jacob’s Ladder,” began with a lament on the loss of her sister, Liselotte. Rosenblatt inquired about her knowledge of Reich’s theory and practice, and Laura mentioned how a writer friend of hers had used an orgone box. The short story she authored about this writer is published here as “A Peg to Hang My Hat On (Requiem for Isaac Rosenfeld).” I felt tempted to engage in “parallel reading” of Laura’s unpublished texts and the interview conducted by Rosenblatt! Most sections of the interviews need no further explanation, but there are several passages or individuals mentioned deserving of illustration in each interview. Therefore, my brief explanatory notes will be included here in the introduction. On March 4, 1972, Daniel Rosenblatt conducted the first interview with Laura, focusing on her early years, first in Pforzheim and then in Frankfurt. In describing her very first memory, Laura described a kinesthetic memory she had in early childhood, about which she wrote a short story. This is the short story titled “Awakening” (1946), which is published for the first time in Notebook Number 1 in this volume. To describe the environment in which she grew up, Laura made a reference to her family having been similar to the one portrayed in Vittorio De Sica’s unforgettable film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, that came out in 1970, based on Giorgio Bassani’s novel of the same name. In the film, a wealthy Italian family lives in contented isolation and ignores the signs of the times: the rise of Fascism and the imminent threats to their lives.

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When asked about her studies in Frankfurt, Laura mentioned her secondary subjects, philosophy with well-known Martin Buber and Paul Tillich, and physiology with Albrecht Bethe, who is not so familiar to Gestalt therapists. Bethe was a professor of physiology at the University of Frankfurt from 1915 to 1937, when the National Socialists forced him out of his position. In the second interview, concentrating mainly on her years in Berlin, Rosenblatt asked Laura about Fritz’s year in Vienna in 1927. She mentioned Fritz having worked with Schilder at Vienna’s Wagner-Jauregg psychiatric hospital. Austrian-born Paul Ferdinand Schilder (1886–1940) was a Viennese psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who studied with Freud and became a member of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Association in 1919. Schilder immigrated to the U.S. in 1928, where he helped to initiate New York’s Bellevue School of Psychiatry. He was a prolific scientific researcher and unorthodox thinker who is known for his concept of the body image. Moreover, Schilder is appreciated for his foundational work in psychoanalytically oriented group psychotherapy. He died tragically in an auto accident in New York at the age of fifty-four (see Elke Mühlleitner, Biographisches Lexikon der Psychoanalyse: die Mitglieder der Psychologischen Mittwoch-Gesellschaft und der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung von 1902–1938, 286–288 [Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1992]). When Rosenblatt revisited Laura’s adolescent years in the second interview on April 14, 1972, and explored her initial experiences with movement and modern dance, Laura depicted a scene in which she was shamed by her aunt for her juvenile guilelessness. Laura recorded this very incident, involving Toni Posner and Laura’s Aunt Erna, in her Notebook Number 2 on August 29, 1955, which has been published in this volume. As an aside, Rosenblatt asked Laura about her life in South Africa after her brief stay in Amsterdam, and posed questions about how she and Fritz finished their psychoanalytic training and where she went for supervision in Johannesburg. According to Bocian’s research results, Laura must have been in supervision with van Ophuijsen in 1937, since he had immigrated for approximately one year to Johannesburg. From 1936–1938, van Ophuijsen was vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In fact, when Fritz fled to Amsterdam, he knew van Ophuijsen as the man who founded the Dutch psychoanalytic association called Vereniging voor Psychoanalytici in Nederland (VPN) in Den Haag in 1933, which was promptly recognized by the IPA. Among the members of this new psychoanalytic association were Maurits Katan, August Stärcke, and immigrants such as Karl Landauer, Theodor Reik, and

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August Watermann. At first, Fritz was accepted as a candidate. After completing his supervision with Landauer, Fritz was accepted as a full member, and his address was noted as being in Johannesburg. During this interview, Rosenblatt pursued questions about the influence of Wilhelm Reich on the Perlses, asking about Reich’s sexcounseling clinics. Laura incorrectly located these clinics in Denmark or Sweden, but, as Bocian points out, Reich had no sex-counseling clinics in Berlin or in his countries of exile, but rather, beginning in 1928, in Vienna. Together with psychoanalytic colleagues and socialist physicians, he founded the “Socialist Society for Sex-Counseling and Sex-Research.” This society began to open “socialist sex-counseling centers” in the poor, working class districts of the city, in which counseling was offered to working class youths, most of whom were girls, free of charge. Information was offered about sexuality, contraception, abortion, and other topics. During the year Fritz spent in Vienna from 1927–28, he had been in Reich’s seminar on technique for about six months. When Reich’s book, Character Analysis, came out in 1933, it was then the most modern form of the developing psychoanalytical ego-psychology (see the chapters in Bocian, Fritz Perls in Berlin, on Perls in Vienna with Reich, 173–180, and Perls in Berlin with Reich, 208–215). The third interview, conducted on April 15, 1972, aimed at her life in South Africa, but there were some questions about Amsterdam and her connections to psychoanalysts there. Laura praised her former analyst, Karl Landauer, whose contribution to the development of psychoanalysis has been, with a few exceptions, neglected (see Bernd Bocian “Karl Landauer [1887–1945]: A Frankfurt psychoanalyst almost forgotten by psychoanalysis and Gestalt therapy,” Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane XLIX, no. 1 (2015): 37–58; or Hans-Joachim Rothe, “Ein exemplarisches Schicksal: Karl Landauer [1887–1945],” in Psychoanalyse in Frankfurt am Main: Zerstörte Anfänge, Wiederannäherung, Entwicklungen, ed. Tomas Plänkers et al., [Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1996], 87–108; or Mühlleitner, Biographisches Lexikon, 205–207). Landauer, who had been in psychoanalysis with Freud, died of starvation in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. A close friend and collaborator of Max Horkheimer’s, Landauer was one of both Laura and Fritz Perls’s analysts, and an independent, creative thinker. Landauer’s concepts, which anticipated contemporary psychoanalysis and Gestalt therapy theory, include a soft application of active psychoanalysis, an emphasis on thinking and feeling independently, close attention to affects and body language, similar to subsequent developments in infant research, and a focus on the influence of social factors.

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Within her psychoanalytic circles in Johannesburg, Laura mentioned reporting on a text by Helmut Kaiser. Bocian kindly reminded me that Fritz made positive mention of Kaiser in his autobiography. Fritz and Kaiser were both Reich’s students in Berlin and each carried on Reich’s character- and resistance-analysis in his own way. For further information on Kaiser and Gestalt therapy, see Edward Smith, Embodied Gestalt Practice: Selected Papers of Edward L. Smith (Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 2011), 377–378; for Kaiser’s original text, see Helmut Kaiser, “Probleme der Technik,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 20 (1934): 490–522. After having discussed Laura’s dear friend, the educator Karl Wilker, whom she knew so well in South Africa, with her, Rosenblatt then referred to someone who also worked with delinquent boys, but not by name. He was referring to Austrian-born August Aichhorn (1878–1949), an elementary school teacher who became a psychoanalyst. Aichhorn’s counseling centers for troubled youths developed into a system of child guidance clinics across Vienna. The book he wrote about juvenile delinquents was published in English as Wayward Youth by Viking Press in New York in 1935. Aichhorn did not immigrate to the United States, as Laura claims. He remained in Vienna during the Nazi regime because his son was captured by the Nazis when attempting to flee into Switzerland and held prisoner in Dachau. August Aichhorn was one of the few psychoanalysts who remained in Austria during WWII and was instrumental in rebuilding the Viennese Psychoanalytic Association (WPV) after the war (see Mühlleitner, Biographisches Lexikon, 20–23). Rosenblatt was curious if she had been in connection with Fritz Redl, but Laura denied that there had been contact between them and also doubted that Redl was connected with psychoanalysis, but she was mistaken. Austrian-born Fritz Redl (1902–1988) studied in Vienna with Anna Freud and August Aichhorn. Redl, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1936, is known for his work with troubled youth, ideas that stimulated the development of milieu therapy, and for creating the life space interview (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Redl; July 21, 2015). Laura also denied having had much to do with John Dewey when Fritz, Goodman and she developed Gestalt therapy. American-born John Dewey (1859–1952) was an educational reformer, psychologist, and philosopher. He was a leading proponent of the American school of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology. Dewey was known for advocating democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey; July 21, 2015). As Laura described her close relationship to the artist Hanns Ludwig Katz, she mentioned that his paintings hung in the Städel. The Städel is a

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museum in Frankfurt am Main that houses one of the most important art collections in Germany. In Heuberger’s foreword to the Hanns Ludwig Katz catalogue, he mentioned that Katz’s drawings hung in the Städtische Galerie in Frankfurt, and were confiscated there by the Nazis. When Rosenblatt asked her about the Perlses’ decision to immigrate to the States after the end of WWII and how they obtained the necessary affidavits, Laura mentioned, besides Karen Horney, Dr. Brill. It appears that Laura is referring to A. A. Brill, who died in 1948. Austrian-born Abraham Arden Brill (1874–1948) came to the U.S. at a tender age and struggled to finance his studies. He finally obtained his medical degree from Columbia University in 1903. Brill translated Freud into English and was in close contact with Eugen Bleuler. As head of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, Brill made a concession to Freud by sanctioning a limited number of lay analysts to the profession. Brill was instrumental in finding employment for professionals fleeing persecution from the Nazis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Brill; July 21, 2015). Before he actually immigrated to the U.S. via Canada, Fritz was in England to confer with his publisher, Allen & Unwin, and also with someone Laura referred to as Whyte. Scottish-born Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) was a prolific industrial engineer and financier who proposed “the unitary principle” to unify physics theories (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Lancelot_Law_Whyte; July 21, 2015). In the fourth interview, conducted on May 26 and 27, 1972, Rosenblatt concentrated on Laura’s life in New York. The conversation quickly turned to Paul Goodman and how the Perlses became familiar with his writing. Laura mentioned the journal Politics, in which some of Goodman’s works were published. Dwight MacDonald (1906–1982) edited the journal Politics from 1944–1949. MacDonald was a writer and social critic who was politically radicalized during the Great Depression. A left-wing anti-Stalinist, he opposed both fascist and communist totalitarianism. From 1937–1943, MacDonald was editor of Partisan Review, but left the journal over a dispute about the practice of political, cultural, and literary criticism. His reaction was to found the journal Politics, where his editorial perspective was forthrightly leftist. Thanks to this position, MacDonald was able to promote a number of renowned intellectuals who had a strong influence on public life. Among them were Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Bruno Bettelheim, and C. Wright Mills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_Macdonald; July 06, 2015). Also mentioned in this interview is the connection to the William Alanson White Institute, from which both Laura and Fritz got numerous

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referrals. The William Alanson White Institute was founded in Manhattan in 1943 by Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Frieda FrommReichmann, David Rioch, Janet Rioch, and Clara Thompson. The founders, some of whom were trained in Europe, had been members of traditional Freudian psychoanalytic training institutes. Clara Thompson, for instance, was a student of Sándor Ferenczi’s. Having grown dissatisfied with the orthodox approach, they established the White Institute as an autonomous, interdisciplinary alternative. Their spirit of dissent posed a challenge to the increasing rigidity in American psychoanalysis, which was strongly dominated by psychiatry. They criticized the hierarchical system of training, the ivory tower attitude, rigidities in the practice of psychoanalysis, and the limitation of patients to the affluent few who could afford treatment. While coming from a Freudian tradition, the William Alanson White Institute was trailblazing in its interdisciplinary attitude, its consideration of social and cultural aspects in treatment, its emphasis on the patient-therapist relationship, and what became known as the interpersonal approach. Aiming to offer its services to the less privileged social strata, the White Institute’s Clinical Services opened its doors in 1948. For a while, the White Institute was the only renowned psychoanalytic training institute to offer equal training to members of the psychological and medical professions. All these breaks in tradition became a challenge to the increasing grip of organized medicine on psychoanalysis. Legal efforts on the part of the orthodox American Psychoanalytic Association to disqualify the White Institute’s teachers and leaders, and edge them out of the psychoanalytic scene during the 1950s, were met by opposition and failed. Fritz Perls had close contact to the institute for quite a while, went to H. S. Sullivan’s seminar, and held a lecture there. The White Institute’s concept of interpersonal psychoanalysis is one of the main influences, besides British object relations theory, on the development of Relational Psychoanalysis in the 1980s (see Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis Aron, Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition [Hillsdale, N.J.: The Analytic Press, 1999] and http://www.wawhite.org; July 06, 2015). When describing her first encounters with Goodman, who was enthused about Reich and had been in therapy with Alexander Lowen, Rosenblatt asked Laura if Goodman had used an orgone box. Laura promptly told Rosenblatt about a short story she wrote about the writer, Isaac Rosenfeld, who was known in her circles for enthusiastically using one. As previously mentioned, this short story will be published for the first time in this volume.

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When the conversation turned to Goodman’s contacts with the Becks from the Living Theatre, Laura mentioned that they had been patients of his. The American poet Julian Beck and German-born American actress Judith Malina founded New York’s Living Theatre in 1947. It is the oldest experimental theatre in the U.S. Laura Perls’s eulogy for Paul Goodman from 1972 in Notebook Number 6 in this volume relies heavily on a playbill from a theatre production of Goodman’s at the Living Theatre. Toward the end of the fourth interview, Rosenblatt was joined by his nieces, Leah and Naomi, who were then about 10 and 12 years old, and his sister-in-law, Judy, in interviewing Laura. When it is unclear which niece posed which question, their questions will be marked as “Q,” otherwise their questions will be marked “N” for Naomi and “L” for Leah. Judy Rosenblatt’s questions will be marked “JR.” When discussing where Gestalt therapy can be applied and in which fields Gestalt therapists work, Laura mentioned Head Start. The Head Start Program of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was launched in 1965, conceived as a summer school for low income children. Its aim was to teach these children what skills they needed to have in order to begin elementary school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_ Start_Program; July 24, 2015). Copies of further materials, published by Paul Shane and Ilene Serlin, were given to me by Renate Perls, and served me well as background material. They are included in the reference list.

The joys and tribulations of editing Laura Perls’s unpublished works Now that I have slowly and at times painstakingly made my way through these incredible notebooks, I have realized several tendencies in the way Laura Perls authored her texts. She had a penchant for writing inserts, be they additions to a story, fleeting afterthoughts, or corrections, in minute letters in the margins. Sometimes she included indications of where these sentences were to be inserted: asterisks, symbols, or capital letters. The location for insertion may have been on the same page, but there could also have been several pages of separation between the insert and its intended location. When she did indeed indicate where sentences were to be inserted, I was relieved. When there was no indication, I figured this out by using my best judgment, according to the contents and context in the manuscript. When Laura left a line of a poem or short story in parentheses, followed by her preferred version of this line, I have left the original line within parentheses, i.e. (abcdefg). However, there are many

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corrections and substitutes for words, phrases, and entire sentences throughout her texts, and she has crossed them out in her writing. I have included many, but not all, of these original versions in the footnotes of each notebook, when I found it informative and illuminative to the reader to follow the development of her writing. This way, we can read what she initially wrote, then how she filed and polished the first version. Laura obviously relished in using adjectives and adverbs. Her sophisticated command of the English language never failed to amaze me, particularly since her life in an anglophone country began when she was nearly 30. If a word, phrase or sentence is absolutely illegible, this is indicated as ellipses within brackets, i.e. [. . .]. At times I was unsure of how correct my reading of certain barely legible words was, so I made my best conjecture, judging from the context, and indicated this with a question mark within brackets, i.e. [?]. In quoted texts from other authors, Laura used the symbol “c/” and “z/” to indicate “versus” or “in contrast to.” Minor spelling errors have been corrected without comment. When Laura used British spelling, I have left this untouched. Otherwise, this book abides by the rules of American English spelling. The end of an entry, for example, the end of a poem, short story, or notes for a text, will be indicated by three asterisks. Other entries in her notebooks were lists of synonyms, lists of names and numbers, words that rhyme, sketches, doodles, and marks that may indicate the structure of a poem. Most of these will be included in this publication, along with facsimiles of several pages of her inimitable handwriting. Photos of Laura, the persons mentioned in her notebooks, and the places where she lived will, when possible, be included as well. I have attempted to briefly describe the cited authors and personal acquaintances she mentioned, in order to enable the interested reader to access the rich, multifaceted background from which the figures of Laura’s writing emerged.

Challenges during Laura Perls’s years in Johannesburg and New York Although the introduction to the present volume by no means claims to comprise a complete biography of Laura Perls, at this point I would like to sketch out some basic information on Laura’s life in South Africa and New York, since this is where she lived while writing her notebooks. These specifications serve as background material for the literary works published in this volume, so I will zoom in on this phase before I present a

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general overview of her entire path of life and her theoretical and practical accomplishments. In both South Africa and New York City, the Perls family lived at several different addresses. As stated in the first brochure of the institute, which Milan Sreckovic quotes on p. 98 of his chapter on the history and development of Gestalt therapy, “Geschichte und Entwicklung der Gestalttherapie,” in the comprehensive handbook which he edited together with Reinhard Fuhr and Martina Gremmler-Fuhr in 1999 under the title Handbuch der Gestalttherapie, published by Hogrefe in Göttingen, they founded The South African Institute of Psychoanalysis in Yeoville, Johannesburg, Founded and Controlled by the South African Psychoanalytical Group affiliated to the British Psychoanalytical Society, on April 1, 1934. Ernest Jones helped to organize their immigration to South Africa and seemed to have promised Fritz fine perspectives for his psychoanalytic career in Johannesburg in cooperation with Dr. Wulf Sachs, who was already practicing there. Fritz had finished his psychoanalytic training and Laura’s psychoanalysis with Landauer had ended, but her psychoanalytic training was not yet complete. Laura maintained that both she and Fritz were granted permission by the IPA to practice as teaching analysts, because of the extenuating circumstances, but this appears to be what the Perlses, and many other psychoanalyst émigrés in similar situations, both hoped for and selectively perceived during this critical phase in their lives. In his comprehensive and detailed book, Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893–1933: Expressionism—Psychoanalysis—Judaism, published in English in 2010, Bernd Bocian described the course of their recognition. Karl Landauer, Fritz Perls’s training supervisor during their exile in Amsterdam, wrote Fritz a positive evaluation that enabled him to become a member of the second association for psychoanalysis in the Netherlands, consisting mainly of émigrés, which in turn was recognized by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In this way, Fritz became a member of the IPA. Due to the fact that Laura never officially finished her psychoanalytic training, she does not appear on any list of members in the IPA archives. Bocian’s most recent research revises his own statements concerning the recognition of the institute in South Africa by the IPA, which had been based on information that Laura had once provided, in the book he published about Fritz Perls. Bocian’s latest research findings are based on correspondence from Max Eitingon, who was head of the IPA’s Education Committee at the time, to Fritz Perls, to this effect: Eitingon was wary of Fritz, due to the latter’s “difficult” personality and, as Bocian suspects, particularly after his psychoanalysis with Wilhelm Reich, who had been

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expelled from the IPA for political reasons (see Bocian, Fritz Perls in Berlin, 240). Since he had been Reich’s trainee, Fritz had difficulties having his training recognized by Eitingon, who required Fritz to undergo a further training psychoanalysis with Landauer in Amsterdam. Bocian, who is still researching documents and letters between Eitingon, who was responsible for the training program, Ernest Jones, and Anna Freud, asserts that the Perlses’ institute was always a private one. Although the curriculum of the Perlses’ South African Institute of Psychoanalysis matched the official IPA curriculum, it never officially attained full recognition by the IPA or any authority in England as a training institute, and Fritz never officially achieved the status of training psychoanalyst. At the IPA conference in 1936 in Marienbad, Czechoslovakia, a resolution was passed which revoked the permission to train psychoanalysts from all those training psychoanalysts who were not in this position before they emigrated. For a long time, it remained unclear to me whether this resolution was a direct consequence of the provocative paper that Fritz presented in Marienbad, or whether this decision had a completely different rationale. Might this resolution simply be meant to tidy up the messy situation of those psychoanalysts who fled from the Nazis and direly needed recognition as training psychoanalysts as a kind of professional security in their new places of residence? With his most recent research findings, Bocian disabused me of the misconception that the resolution from 1936 targeted Fritz. Since Fritz never had the position of training psychoanalyst to begin with, it could not have been revoked. Eitingon had written to Fritz about the lack of qualified teachers in the South African Institute, mentioning that training analysts must first acquire this qualification. Laura and Fritz developed their ideas on oral resistances, which grew out of Laura’s observations and experience of nursing and weaning an infant, culminating in a paper that Fritz presented titled “Zur Theorie der oralen Widerstände” (German for: “On the Theory of Oral Resistances”), based on Laura’s research (see Perls and Rosenfeld, “A conversation between Laura Perls and Edward Rosenfeld,” 22), at the conference of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1936 in Marienbad. This was about two years before the National Socialist takeover of Austria and three years before the invasion of Poland. Fritz’s presentation was met, for the most part, with frosty reactions. The perspective taken by the Perlses on oral resistances was not shared at that time by their psychoanalytic colleagues. Fritz hadn’t counted on such hefty rejection and returned quite dejected to South Africa.

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Shortly thereafter, Karl Landauer, as an exception to the rule, published an article on the subject of “oral education” and resistances, referring favorably to Fritz’s lecture at the IPA conference in Marienbad (see Bocian, Fritz Perls in Berlin, 216). The German psychoanalyst HansJoachim Rothe edited a volume of Landauer’s works in 1991, including the article on oral education. For the majority of his Freudian colleagues, however, Fritz’ presentation on oral resistance seemed to be considered to be in the leftist, Reichian tradition. As Laura Perls once commented on Fritz’s lecture on oral resistance: “It was more Reichian, and Reich was already suspect” (see Bocian, Fritz Perls in Berlin, 240). After a while, the tension between the Perlses and Wulf Sachs resulted in the dissolution of their cooperation. The Perlses removed themselves more and more from the IPA, yet continued to work in their practice as much sought-after psychoanalysts. Left to their own devices, they acquired much practical experience, which they discussed with a handful of European émigré friends in Johannesburg, and began to revise the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. During this phase of their lives, they enjoyed an extremely comfortable life style. According to the handwritten notebooks and Renate Perls’s recollections, Laura and Fritz Perls owned a house that was specially built for them in Johannesburg at 8, 7th Street, Lower Houghton. This was a house in Bauhaus style. Renate remembers loving that house and resented having to leave it. She informed me that her parents sold that house in Lower Houghton when WWII broke out, because they were afraid that if the Nazis came to South Africa, they would have to run again and they wanted ready money. Thereupon the family moved to a rented house at 18, Urania Street, Observatory, Johannesburg, which had a garden with all kinds of fruit trees, among them pears, apricots, and figs. Renate recalled that house as having been ugly despite the rich garden. Later the family moved to a house at 25, Raymond Street, Bellevue, Johannesburg, which was built by Sir Herbert Baker, who had also built the Union Buildings in Pretoria. According to Renate Perls’s recollections, Laura was keen on moving into the house on Raymond Street, despite Fritz’s objections. Yet, since he was in the Medical Corps of the South African Army during the war, he spent little time at home and Laura’s wish prevailed. During his military duty, Fritz would come home for weekends while he was at the military base hospital outside of Pretoria, then once or twice a month after he was transferred to the Vereeniging area. A close friend of the Perlses during this phase of their lives was a Dutch historian and writer named Hugo Posturnys, whose nickname was Jumbo. His English was excellent and he supported the Perlses by helping them to write their professional

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papers in English. Renate Perls recollected that Laura spent her spare time playing the piano, either by herself or playing duets with Anna Tischauer from the Berlin Philharmonic, or with Betty Pack on cello, as well as with other musicians who fled from National Socialism, including members of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Laura’s life at this time was involved with her practice, her children, her chamber music friends, and the weekend visits from Fritz. During these years in South Africa, they were rather cut off from the international psychoanalytic community. They discussed their professional issues not only with one another, but also with friends, mostly European émigrés like themselves, from various backgrounds: artists, educators, and historians. While Fritz was doing his military service in the South African Army, Laura worked from early morning till the evening in her private practice, with a break for lunch and a nap. Working on her own during these years, Laura had room to enrich her awareness of difficult interpersonal issues and develop her own style of interacting with her patients. In retrospect, it was Laura who was engaged for decades in constant psychotherapeutic work with patients and trainees, whereas Fritz, driven not only by Wanderlust but most likely also the traumatic effects of WWI and persecution by the National Socialists, preferred the time-limited settings of workshops and weekends, and these were mostly with trainees. Notebook Number 1 was written at this last address in South Africa, where the Perls family lived till 1947. In 1946 Fritz left for England and the United States. Fifteen months later, in 1947, Laura and the children immigrated to the United States, joining Fritz in New York. During these last years in South Africa, Laura had serious doubts about still being a psychoanalyst, having continuously developed her own psychotherapeutic style of working with patients, attending particularly to breathing, coordination, posture, movements, voice, and facial expressions. Whereas she had begun her work as a traditional psychoanalyst sitting (and knitting) behind the couch, slowly but surely she began to sit opposite her patients and was experimenting with body work. These innovations were doubtlessly Laura’s integration of her lifelong interest in the Dalcroze method and the Loheland School of dance. Renate Perls recalled that she found out much later in life that European friends of Laura and Fritz had rented a ship in case the Nazis did indeed come to South Africa during WWII. By having the ship at hand, these friends planned to be able to flee South Africa quickly by sea, but they didn’t relay this plan to Fritz and Laura, because the Perlses had children, and children might “make noise.”

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According to the notebooks and Renate Perls’s recollections, after Laura and both children arrived in New York in August 1947, the Perls family lived at several different addresses on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Laura began to work in private practice at the beginning of 1948. It wasn’t long before they were able to buy a house on West 71st Street and then, when Fritz began his wandering years, Laura moved to an apartment on 95th Street and remained there until late 1951. The next move was to a duplex apartment at 315 Central Park West, where Paul Weisz had an office as well, after first Laura, then Fritz returned from an extended stay in California. Eventually Fritz’s sister, Grete, and her husband moved in with the family for a while, after having spent years in exile in China. It was in this apartment, where the Perlses lived and practiced, that the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy (NYIGT) was founded in October 1952. Shortly thereafter, Laura was elected as the founding president of the NYIGT. Approximately in 1956 Laura moved to an apartment at 7 West 96th Street, across the street from Central Park, where she remained for thirty-three years. During the last ten of those years, Renate lived with her. At the latest in 1957, it was apparent that Laura and Fritz had finally separated for good as a couple. Therefore, Laura’s writing in Notebooks Number 2 and 3 reflects the turbulence and dismay she experienced during these crucial years when the marriage was clearly crumbly. What began as a passionate love affair and continued for years as intimate emotional, cultural, and intellectual mutuality was then transformed into a cooperative partnership on a professional and family level, only to become a relationship characterized by alternate phases of acrimony, chagrin, rapprochement, and estrangement.

“Timeless experience of a total life”: A thumbnail sketch As I mentioned, the first part of the title of this publication was taken from the last sentence of an untitled text that Laura wrote in 1976. For better comprehension, I will quote the last two sentences of this text: Thus if I continue writing my own story I shall be writing neither straight autobiography nor a factual history of Gestalt therapy. Truth is not in the single temporal facts, but in the timeless experience of a total life crystallized—if at all—into a personal mythology.

I was deeply moved by the succinctness of these two sentences, which brilliantly capture all the intentions of her writing.

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Laura was born Lore Posner on August 15, 1905 in Pforzheim, Germany. About one month before her eighty-fifth birthday, after having lived on three continents, she died on July 13, 1990 in the city of her birth. From this vantage point, the remarkable woman who founded Gestalt therapy together with Fritz Perls and Paul Goodman came full circle. The Posners were a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family. Laura’s father, Rudolf (1870–1933), owned a jewelry factory. Her mother, Toni Posner née Eber (1884–1941), was at home with their three children, Laura, Liselotte, and Robert. Rudolf and Toni Posner made sure that their children were imparted the nineteenth-century ideals of German high culture and the bourgeois, educated class. Laura was a bright girl, artistically talented in many ways. She was the only girl in her class at the Reuchlin Gymnasium, a humanistic high school that taught Greek and Latin. According to Sreckovic (“Geschichte und Entwicklung der Gestalttherapie,” 22), Rudolf Posner conveyed to his daughter that she, being a very gifted and highly intelligent young Jewish German woman, must behave in an inconspicuous manner if she wants to achieve recognition and appreciation in life. Rudolf Posner must have seen signs of the political times, because he taught his oldest child to behave in a lowkey manner, without attracting attention. Laura learned to play second fiddle, so to speak, at an early age, and left the limelight to others. Although she was extremely intelligent and motivated to excel in school and her artistic hobbies, she took her father’s advice to heart and avoided spiteful remarks or actions by attempting to be second or third best in her class. It came as no surprise that she kept this attitude as an adult as well, notably in her marriage to Fritz Perls and in their professional careers. Laura began piano lessons at an early age and became an accomplished pianist. She delighted in her lessons in expressive dance, which she describes as the Dalcroze method in her notebooks as well as mentioning her early study of Ludwig Klages’ work in expressive movement and creativity in “Conceptions and Misconceptions of Gestalt Therapy.” This article was originally presented as an address given at the European Association for Transactional Analysis in Seefeld, Austria, in July, 1977, and first published in VOICES: Journal of the American Association for Psychotherapy 14, no. 3 (1978): 31–36, and later in Perls, Living At The Boundary. This training had a life-long effect on her, influencing not only her private life, but also the development of her own personal style of practicing psychotherapy. As she increasingly included posture, breathing and movement into her work, Laura moved farther away from her psychoanalytic training and wandered on new paths, already in the 1930s.

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À propos of the Dalcroze and Klages methods: In a letter to Renate Perls dated June 10, 1999, Laura’s childhood schoolmate and lifelong friend, Anja Römer-Hahn, explained that the Loheland School near Fulda played a major role in Laura’s development. This letter was written shortly before Römer-Hahn died on September 15, 1999. Römer Hahn, née Dittler, born on November 13, 1904 in Pforzheim, was a ballet dancer who later became a dance teacher, choreographer, and author. The letter, in which Römer-Hahn describes the school of “bodywork” strongly based on dance that was founded by two women, was written in German, so the translation is mine: Certainly Laura never had anything to do with Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, who also developed eurhythmics. Once therapeutic eurhythmics was prescribed for me, but it didn’t work and didn’t convince me or Laura for that matter. You really garbled the name, the LOHELAND School was our real source of dancing. Lore used it for her Gestalt therapy, I used it in the direction of dancing theater; it served us during our entire lives artistically as well as health-wise, the best thing I ever found. The Loheland School near Fulda still exists. Its founders were Miss von Rohden and Miss Langaard. . . . This school trained teachers, made sure that only one teacher was permitted to work in each city; thus we met our first one, Else Trier, in Pforzheim. I know that when Laura was studying in Frankfurt, she took lessons from such a Loheland teacher.

Römer-Hahn’s recollections of the close friendship between the two women and their respective careers had already been published shortly after Laura died in Pforzheim in a eulogy in the Pforzheimer Zeitung on July 26, 1990, page 6, titled “Die Freundin aus Kindertagen” (German for: “The girlfriend from childhood days”). After graduating from high school, Laura first began to study law at the University of Frankfurt on Main, since she was quite interested in juvenile court work and the psychological aspects of the field. However, Laura soon realized that she was bored by the actual subject matter of law in her courses, and she opted to study psychology. In 1929 Laura began to study the Gestalt theory of perception with Max Wertheimer, and she studied holistic, organismic theory with Kurt Goldstein. She was a doctoral candidate of Adhémar Gelb’s until 1932, when she finally completed her studies. Her 1932 dissertation, Die Erscheinungen des simultanen Kontrastes und der Eindruck der Feldbeleuchtung, German for „The Phenomena of Simultaneous Contrast and the Impression of Field Illumination,” focused on themes typical for Gestalt psychology research of her day: how human perception is impacted by phenomenal changes of the field, color contrasts, and color constancy. Laura’s in-depth studies on

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field phenomena contributed to the field orientation of the theory and practice of what later became Gestalt therapy. It was indeed Laura who emphasized the crucial importance that Gestalt psychology had for the development of Gestalt therapy: Anybody who wants fully to understand Gestalt therapy would do well to study Wertheimer on productive thinking, Lewin on the incomplete gestalt and the crucial importance of interest for gestalt formation, and Kurt Goldstein on the organism as an indivisible totality. (Perls, “Concepts and Misconceptions of Gestalt Therapy,” 33)

Her philosophy studies with Martin Buber and Paul Tillich had a lifelong impact on Laura’s approach to listening, responding, and conducting a dialogue. For her gestalt therapeutic orientation, Laura learned from Buber how healing encounters between two human beings can be. A further major influence on Laura and the development of Gestalt therapy was Tillich’s concept of the boundary as the true and productive location of our awareness, insights, and knowledge. Laura received her psychoanalytic training first in Frankfurt, then in Berlin, and finally in exile in Amsterdam. Her training analysis was first with Clara Happel, then with Karl Landauer. Her psychoanalytic supervision was with Otto Fenichel. Laura described Fenichel’s taciturnity and his style of being very reserved and sparse with his responses to her case studies as having actually been an impetus to her growing autonomy. Although she eventually learned to rely on herself as a psychoanalyst, and she did appreciate him as a theoretician, what Laura experienced as Fenichel’s aloofness made her unsatisfied with him as a teacher. In 1930, despite resistance from her parents, Laura married Friedrich Perls and her father agreed to give the couple some financial support. The Perlses lived in an apartment in Berlin, where Fritz was working as a psychoanalyst. Their first child, Renate, was born on July 23, 1931. Laura managed to finish her dissertation in 1932. Both Fritz and Laura were politically aware and involved. They were both active in anti-Fascist movements, both of Jewish descent, and someone tipped them off that they were blacklisted by the National Socialists. First Fritz, then Laura fled with Renate to Amsterdam in 1933, where they lived in poverty. Laura Perls continued her psychoanalytic supervision with Karl Landauer. During my work in the Board of Directors of the EAGT, Daan van Baalen, the late Daan van Praag and the late Ken Evans and I had the opportunity to see the house in which the Perls family lived in Amsterdam. A photo of this house shall be included in this publication.

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It was Ernest Jones who then helped the Perls family to find safety on another continent. He originally suggested that the Perlses go to South Africa to join forces with the country’s lone psychoanalyst, who desperately needed help. The Perlses fled to Johannesburg, South Africa, where they founded The South African Institute of Psychoanalysis in Yeoville, Johannesburg. Their son, Stephen, was born on August 23, 1935 in Johannesburg. At this point I would like to briefly digress from Laura’s life history and introduce essential background information about her family of origin. Of all the members of Laura’s family of origin, only she and her brother, Robert, survived World War II. In March 2015, I made the acquaintance of the German archivist, Ulf Rathje, thanks to Renate Perls. Rathje has a special interest in the Posner family and generously shared the fruits of his research with me. In 1976, Rathje’s own parents bought the house at Friedenstraße 80 in Pforzheim that the Posners had lived in until 1938. Thus Rathje grew up in the house that Laura inhabited with her family and even attended that same high school as she did! Laura lived at this address from 1918, when her parents bought the house, until she began her studies in Frankfurt in 1923. Rudolf Posner died in 1933, and Ulf Rathje informed me that the remaining Posners sold the house in 1938. Toni Posner was deported to Riga on December 4, 1941, and was most likely murdered upon arrival. The “Löbliche Singer” organized a Stolperstein (German for: “stumbling stone”; “stone of remembrance”) to be placed in front of this house in September 2013, in commemoration of Toni’s death. In the interview that Daniel Rosenblatt conducted with Laura in 1972, she said that Toni visited the Perlses in 1936 in South Africa, and stayed eight or nine months before returning to Germany. It seemed that Toni still had considerable funds and reasoned that if she were to be taxed so heavily in the future that her money would run out, then she would leave Germany. Toni was forced to relocate to Hamburg, where she grew up, and was deported from there to a concentration camp in Riga. She has been reported as missing. Laura deeply regretted not having kept Toni in Johannesburg and felt guilty about failing to get her mother out of Germany when the situation became even more precarious, due to quotas for refugees and other complications in South Africa. The friction between Fritz Perls and his mother-in-law was palpable, and Laura had a highly ambivalent relationship to her mother, so Toni’s death must have haunted Laura for the rest of her life. To compound this devastating situation, Laura’s sister, Lisel, Lisel’s husband, and their daughter had fled to Holland. From Holland they were all eventually deported and murdered in Auschwitz.

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Bernd Bocian, known for his numerous publications on Gestalt therapy and psychoanalysis but particularly for his comprehensive volume on Fritz Perls’s forty years in Berlin, informed me of a book published by the city of Pforzheim in 1985, written by Gerhard Brändle and titled Die jüdischen Mitbürger der Stadt Pforzheim (German for: “The Jewish Citizens of the City of Pforzheim”). It lists, if available, the name, maiden name, place of birth and death, date of birth and death, and profession, of Pforzheim’s Jewish citizens. According to this source, the following information about the Posners has been gathered: Dr. Lore Perls, née Posner, born 15.08.1905 in Pforzheim, emigrated to the Netherlands 1933, then to South Africa in 1934; Robert Posner (Laura’s younger brother), businessman, born 04.04.1909, emigrated to Great Britain 1938, then to the U.S. in 1939; Rudolf Posner, manufacturer, born 01.03.1870—died 26.03.1933 in Pforzheim; Toni Posner, née Eber, born 01.11.1884— deported to Riga 04.12.1941; William Posner (Rudolf Posner’s older brother), jewelry wholesale merchant, born 29.08.1862 in Koschmin, Poland, was deported to Theresienstadt on February 14, 1945. Back to the red thread of Laura’s life: When the Perlses decided to leave South Africa for the United States, Fritz again left first, like a scout, and Laura joined him with both children in 1947 in New York City. Once in the States, she changed her name from Lore to Laura, began to work in private practice, and together with Fritz she continued to develop their new psychotherapeutic approach, which they initially called “Concentration Therapy.” Although she expressed doubts that her approach was still psychoanalytic, she still “officially” called herself a psychoanalyst until 1950. When the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy (NYIGT) was founded by the Perlses in 1952, Laura was elected as president, which she remained for the rest of her life. Many of the trainees came, through their contacts with Lottie and Paul Weisz, from Bellevue Hospital, a wellknown psychiatry clinic in Manhattan. The Gestalt Institute of Cleveland (Ohio) was founded in 1954, and Laura was among the first trainers. For decades, Laura was the hearth of the foundational New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, which represents a clinical, theory-oriented tradition, and kept the flame of Gestalt therapy alive. The best way to describe the way that Laura presided over the NYIGT can be summed up in the term “commitment,” a concept that she expounded upon with reference to the film The Woman in the Dunes, directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, and released in 1962. Laura’s opening address at the 8th Annual Conference on the Theory and Practice of Gestalt Therapy on May 7, 1985 was first published in The Gestalt Journal IX, no. 1 (1986): 12– 15), and later as a chapter titled “Commitment” in her book Living at the

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Boundary. By describing commitment as the kind of dedication involving discipline, which in turn implies limitations, she compares the plot of the Japanese film with certain constrained situations in her own life, including the founding of the NYIGT. In this case, as in many others, by accepting the limitations imposed on her, Laura was able to take responsibility for her actions and develop productive solutions. Laura’s possibilities, despite temptations and doubts, were able to become realities: she was instrumental in creating generations of Gestalt therapists and the NYIGT was thriving. As of the mid-1970s, Laura stopped conducting psychotherapy with patients and confined her work to the training of Gestalt therapists in the U.S. and Europe. Her special approach influenced the style of many Gestalt therapists. In 1981 she gave a lecture on the fundamental concepts of Gestalt therapy at the Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe University in Frankfurt on Main, her alma mater. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of earning her doctorate, she was granted a “golden doctorate” from this same university. Her native city, Pforzheim, made her an honorary citizen in 1989. In the beginning of 1989, Laura began to complain of pains, but the source of the pain could not be found. Although the diagnosis was unclear, it became apparent that she was seriously ill. As her condition deteriorated and she weakened, the decision was taken with her children and Harvey Platt, the executor of the Perlses’ estate, for her to relocate with Renate to Germany, where, with the proper care, Laura hoped to recover. Unfortunately, Laura’s condition worsened and she died in Pforzheim in 1990. Renate was with her when she passed away. Several minutes later her granddaughter, Leslie, arrived with Ilene Serlin to say good-bye. Until shortly before she passed away, Laura lived and worked in New York. In his eulogy for her in the New York Times on July 18, 1990, Daniel Goleman (http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/18/obituaries/lauraperls-84-dies-in-germany-founder-of-gestalt-psychotherapy.html) described her as the co-founder of Gestalt therapy, comparing her to Fritz Perls, who died in 1970: But among many Gestalt therapists, Laura Perls was seen as the mainstay of the movement, heading the major Gestalt training institute for almost 40 years, and an unacknowledged contributor to the early books by her husband that formulated the approach.

Michael Vincent Miller’s “Elegy for Laura,” included in the volume of his essays that was published by the Gestalt Journal Press in 2011 under

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the title Teaching a Paranoid to Flirt: The Poetics of Gestalt Therapy, is a moving reflection of his relationship with her. I found myself nodding as Miller eloquently described Laura’s vibrant appearance, rich cultural background, and her style of working with individuals in groups. In the Fall issue of The Gestalt Journal XIII, no. 2 (1990), the Board of Directors of the Center for Gestalt Development, Jack Aylward, Molly Rawle, and Joe Wysong, shared their memories of Laura, along with several authors of this issue, including Michael Vincent Miller, Theo Skolnick, and Jon Frew, following their contributions. Gerry Kogan’s eulogy for Laura was published as “Laura Perls, 1905– 1990” in the British Gestalt Journal 1, no. 2 (1991): 60–62. Kogan described her life and legacy, also comparing Laura’s style as a Gestalt trainer to Fritz’s: If he did very expressive, dramatic, theatrical, flamboyant demonstrations of Gestalt therapy, she was steady, committed, consequent, and dependable. Her work was in-depth, economic, supportive, non-dramatic, aesthetic, and ever-present. (61)

Another brief eulogy was published in the Pforzheimer Zeitung on July 18, 1990, titled “Ein Leben für die Gestalttherapie. Dr. Laura Perls wurde vom Tod abberufen,” German for “A Life for Gestalt Therapy. Death has recalled Dr. Laura Perls,” summarizing her life history and the accomplishments of the woman who spent her early years in this city.

Theoretical contributions to the origins and development of Gestalt therapy Laura Perls’s theoretical contributions to the origins and further development of Gestalt therapy were quite significant, although she preferred to leave the authorship of mutually developed concepts to her husband and Paul Goodman. Goodman’s eulogy of Fritz in 1970 gave Laura long-overdue credit for all that she contributed to the foundational book of Gestalt therapy: Frederick Perls, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (New York: Julian Press, 1951). In a carefully researched homage to Laura Perls, published as “An Illegitimate Child: The Relationship Between Gestalt Psychology and Gestalt Therapy” in the International Gestalt Journal 26, no. 2 (2003): 23–46, Paul Shane depicted her contributions to Gestalt therapy. Shane describes in detail how Laura’s university studies gave her the sound

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foundation for implementing the Gestalt psychological and philosophical sources of what was to later become Gestalt therapy. Laura’s studies of Gestalt psychology at the University of Frankfurt and her doctoral dissertation solidly established her as the historical connection between Gestalt psychology and Gestalt therapy. Laura’s dissertation, supervised by A. Gelb and K. W. Meissner, bore the title The Phenomena of Simultaneous Contrast and the Perception of Field Illumination. Gelb had worked with Kurt Goldstein at the Frankfurt Hospital for Brain Damaged Veterans, then with Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Frankfurt. Gelb’s research included publications on brain lesions and their effects on perception, speech and color vision, as well as publications on figure-ground and color contrasts, and space and time perception. He adapted Wertheimer’s tachistoscope for use in Goldstein’s hospital as a diagnostic test of attention, concentration and memory. Laura’s second supervisor, Meissner, conducted experiments on color wavelengths and has been called the father of modern spectroscopy. In her doctoral research, Laura experimented with figure-ground contrast effects and confirmed Gelb’s stance “that the field effect of overall illumination is the most influential factor affecting the visual perception of color contrast” (Shane, “An Illegitimate Child,” 41). By concluding that the overall lighting conditions of the field were more important than other factors, such as the strength and type of retinal stimulation, she confirmed the Gestalt position on how field conditions affect sensory perception. In her dissertation, Laura clearly upheld the Gestalt psychological field perspective that was taken by Lewin, Koffka and Köhler. Her experimental design combined quantitative and qualitative measurements of subjective visual perception. Shane affirms that this “qualitative method derives from the phenomenological tradition of Brentano and Stumpf, and was termed by Koffka as experiential observation (Koffka, 1916/1925; 1924)” (ibid. 40–41). Laura was the only Gestalt psychologist among the founders of Gestalt therapy. She was well-trained in Gestalt theory and scientific experimentation. Even while the Perlses still lived in Berlin, as the young, nursing mother of Renate, Laura reflected on her phenomenological experiences. She was concerned with the idiosyncrasies of nurslings while sucking, but also during the phase of weaning. She was not only interested in the drinking habits of infants, but particularly in the transition from liquid to more solid foods, that is, the transition from sucking to chewing. Her reflections on this topic, supported by her own experiences as a nursing mother, were pivotal for the illustration of such concepts as oral resistances, which were described in Ego, Hunger and Aggression: A

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Revision of Freud’s Theory and Method. The book was originally published under Fritz Perls’s name first in 1942 in South Africa by Knox Publishing Company (2nd Edition: 1945), then in 1947 by George Allen & Unwin in London, in 1966 by Orbit Graphic Arts in San Francisco, California, followed by its publication 1969 by Random House in New York. Dedicated to Max Wertheimer, this book was meant to be a revision of Freud‘s drive theory and later became known as the beginnings of Gestalt therapy. The method of choice is called “concentration therapy” in this initial publication. Within a psychoanalytic frame of reference, resistance was described as an oral, rather than anal phenomenon. During the transition from sucking to chewing, the Perlses saw the beginnings of an infant’s healthy way of approaching the outside world as being successful aggression or de-structuring, as opposed to destructive annihilation. They postulated aggression as a healthy attribute, and found analogies between eating habits and the ingestion of mental nourishment as well as the development of interpersonal relationships. Laura authored two chapters in this book: “The Dummy Complex,” which dealt with the fixed Gestalt that impedes change and with substitutes for satisfaction that hamper a person’s free development, and “The Meaning of Insomnia,” which depicted the meaning of sleeplessness as an expression of an unresolved situation, an incomplete Gestalt. This publication marked the beginning of the Perlses’ transition from psychoanalysis to the Gestalt approach, and it was a joint effort in rethinking the theory in which they had been trained. Isolated in South Africa from their psychoanalytic roots in Europe, they slowly began to innovate. They transformed the typically historical-archeological Freudian perspective into an existential-experiential one. Eventually, one of their essential innovations was to abandon the psychoanalytic couch for face-toface sessions with their patients. Laura personally communicated the fact that she was the moving spirit of this innovation, because she needed to see the patient’s face! The Perlses worked with breathing, posture, movement, facial expression, and gestures. The summative, piecemeal handling of individual elements—the whole is the sum of its individual parts—so characteristic of association psychology, was substituted by a holistic, field-phenomenological approach: psychotherapeutic work involved the entire human being, not just the verbal aspects of interactions. This approach had been practiced already by Reich, whose expulsion from the IPA marginalized these innovations to the classical psychoanalytic technique. Laura’s infant research and her mutual reflections on it with Fritz further developed their psychoanalytic knowledge. Today relational

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psychoanalysts are referring again to Reich’s character analysis. The rise of infant research, in particular Daniel Stern’s findings and his concept of implicit knowledge, focus attention on the body. Laura and Fritz Perls had been doing this since the 1930s. Attention was given to the immediate awareness in the here-and-now instead of embracing the dictum that the psychoanalyst is responsible for the interpretation of dreams and recollections. They eventually abandoned the cultivation of transference and began to promote direct contact between their patients and themselves. Moreover, they gave up the concept of the ego as an entity with boundaries, and developed the concept of the ego as being the genuine boundary phenomenon itself, the true contact function of identification and alienation, a process. The concept of health was associated with freely flowing Gestalt formation. In an interview with Milan Sreckovic that was published in German, Laura later described her renunciation of psychoanalysis as a kind of adolescent rebellion, and she gave the theory that she practiced for so long and which she came to revise clear acknowledgment. When Sreckovic posed a question about which concepts of psychoanalysis were important for the development of Gestalt therapy, she replied: It’s not so much a question of which concepts—we have our own. But I find that the knowledge of psychoanalytic theories is important for the foundation for every theoretical orientation. We all come from Freud. (Laura Perls, “Leben an der Grenze—ein Gespräch mit Milan Sreckovic,” in Leben an der Grenze, ed. Milan Sreckovic [Köln: EHP, 1989], 181–182 [italics in the original, my translation])

I assume that Laura was referring to schools of psychotherapy following psychoanalytic and humanistic psychology traditions. After they left South Africa and settled in New York, the cooperation between Laura and Fritz with Paul Goodman resulted in the transformation of Concentration Therapy into Gestalt therapy and the publication of its foundational text by Perls, Hefferline und Goodman in 1951. Laura recounted that the manuscripts for this book were intensely discussed and revised together. She added that, without Paul Goodman’s efforts, there would have been no coherent theory of Gestalt therapy. Her perspective on the basic concepts of Gestalt therapy was philosophical and aesthetic, rather than technical. From Laura’s standpoint, Gestalt therapy offers a philosophical frame of reference for approaches that are existentialphenomenological, experiential, and experimental, the famous three “e’s” of Gestalt therapy practice.

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In addition to the gestalt therapeutic ways of dealing with dreams which she and Fritz developed together, Laura emphasized that recurring dreams should be given special attention for they are indications of unresolved situations (see Nancy Amendt-Lyon,“Laura Perls,” in Personenlexikon der Psychotherapie, ed. Gerhard Stumm et al., [Vienna: Springer, 2005]). When she was leading groups that met regularly, she began to promote interactions between the members, a first step in the direction of treating the group as an entity, instead of perpetuating individual therapy in groups as had been the custom, especially in training or demonstration groups. If she felt it was beneficial to the group process, she would refrain from intervening and just stay out of the way. Her careful and precise style was process- and relationship-oriented.

Laura Perls’s legacy To write comprehensively about Laura Perls’s legacy would be a Herculean task. In this introduction, I have begun describing how she impacted generations of Gestalt therapists internationally and how she presided over the NYIGT from its inception until her death. In addition, I have compiled lists of publications written about Laura Perls, interviews with her that have been published, and publications that she authored. The entire Spring issue of The Gestalt Journal III, no. 1 (1980), edited and published by Joe Wysong, was a Festschrift for Laura Perls in Celebration of Her 75th Birthday. Daniel Rosenblatt served as guest editor of this issue and composed the introduction. Besides the message from the editor, there were contributions from Sonia and Ed Nevis, Erv Polster, Robert Epstein, Joseph Zinker, Magda Denes, Edward Rosenfeld, Bernard Belasco, Daniel Rosenblatt, Jennifer Andrews, Janie Rhyne, Martin Washburn, Michael Vincent Miller, Bruce K. Eckman, Richard Van Egdom, Miriam Polster, Eric Marcus, Robert Morphy, Eva Titus, Roger March, James Simkin, and Martin Stephen Frommer. In 1982, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the NYIGT, an issue of Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, published by the American Academy of Psychotherapists, was entirely dedicated to Laura Perls. The title of this issue was: Keeping the Flame: Laura Perls and Gestalt Therapy. It included a trialogue between Laura, Richard Kitzler and E. Mark Stern, a conversation with Edward Rosenfeld, a talk with Nijole Kudirka, as well as brief contributions by Albert Ellis, Bud Feder, Isadore From, Robert L. Harmann, Cynthia Oudejans Harris, Patrick Kelley, Gladys Natchez, Erving Polster, Ruth Ronall, Elliott Shapiro,

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Elizabeth Cole Stirling, and Bradford Wilson. A workshop with Laura had likewise been transcribed here. This was followed by articles highlighting Laura’s contribution to Gestalt therapy by J. Randoph Burnham, Marvin Lipschitz, Joseph C. Zinker, and Daniel Rosenblatt. In 1990, the talk that Laura had given years before on the occasion of the NYIGT’s 25th anniversary was published posthumously as “A Talk for the 25th Anniversary” in The Gestalt Journal XIII, no. 2 (1990): 15–22, actually beginning with two pages of Isadore From’s introductory words. It was also printed in Laura Perls compendium, Living at the Boundary, published in 1992. In 2005, the first joint conference of the German-speaking countries, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, took place in Munich, commemorating Laura’s centennial. Dan Bloom and Renate Perls came from New York to give their lectures; the other speakers were from the three host countries. The main lectures presented at this conference were published in German in two issues of the journal of the German Association for Gestalt Therapy (DVG), Gestalttherapie: Forum für Gestaltperspektiven 19, no. 2 (2005) and 20, no. 1 (2006), and in the Swiss journal, Gestalt no. 55 (2006), and will be listed below. Moreover, a documentary film by Wolf Lindner and Christof Weber, titled At the Boundary: Laura Perls and Gestalt Therapy was produced for the DVG in German in 2005 and presented at the conference. It was released in 2007 in English. On April 19, 2013, the “Haus der seelischen Gesundheit—Lore Perls” (“House of mental health—Lore Perls”) was officially named after Laura Perls in the city in Pforzheim, where she was born and where she died. There was an exhibition dedicated to her, and Norbert Pöhm, who had the benefit of having trained with Laura Perls, gave the keynote speech. He honored her life history, her contributions to the development of the theory and practice of Gestalt therapy, characterized her personal style, and described Gestalt therapy and its current significance to the audience. The fact that Laura Perls kept these heretofore unpublished texts with her personal items for decades, moving from South Africa to New York, and in Manhattan to many different addresses, right until her death, indicates how meaningful they were to her. Renate Perls kept them safe for many more years before she bestowed them upon me, indicating that Laura would have wanted me to have them and thereby initiating the process of creating the present volume. Laura Perls’s writing speaks for itself, brilliantly presenting the figure she eventually became in relation to her personal, cultural, political, and literary background. She was exemplary as a daughter of the early 20th century German Jewish bourgeoisie, one of the few female students in higher education, enthused

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about Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis. Courageous and politically alert, she anticipated the impending disaster of the rise of National Socialism, fled in due time from Germany to the Netherlands, and yet again to South Africa, and finally ventured a new beginning in New York after World War II. She was the co-founder and keeper-of-the-flame of Gestalt therapy. I have edited and annotated her texts to the best of my ability, emphasizing the historical, cultural and political background and personal relationships that brought forth Gestalt therapy, so that, instead of being buried in oblivion, Laura Perls’s personal writing can be enjoyed by many readers.

Selected Bibliography The following references are a work-in-progress of publications written by or about Laura Perls in English and German. Amendt-Lyon, Nancy. “Begegnungen mit Laura Perls.” Gestalttherapie. Forum für Gestaltperspektiven 19, no. 2 (2005): 3–13. —. “Laura Perls.” In Personenlexikon der Psychotherapie, edited by Gerhard Stumm, Alfred Pritz, Paul Gumhalter, Nora Nemeskeri, and Martin Voracek, 362–364. Vienna: Springer, 2005. Bernard, Janine. “Laura Perls: From Ground to Figure.” Journal of Counseling & Development 64, no. 6 (1986): 367–373. Bloom, Daniel. “Laura Perls: The Aesthetic of Commitment.” Gestalttherapie. Forum für Gestaltperspektiven 19, no. 2 (2005): 14– 28; also published as: “A Centennial Celebration of Laura Perls: The Aesthetic of Commitment.” The British Gestalt Journal 14, no. 2 (2005): 81–90. Bocian, Bernd. “Der Frankfurter Psychoanalytiker Karl Landauer (1887– 1945): Ein vergessener Lehrer von Lore und Friedrich Perls.” Gestalttherapie 11, no. 2 (1997): 3–18. —. Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893–1933: Expressionism—Psychoanalysis— Judaism. Translated by Philip Schmitz. Bergisch Gladbach: EHP Verlag Andreas Kohlhage, 2010. Originally published in German as: Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893–1933: Expressionismus—Psychoanalyse— Judentum. Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 2007. —. “Karl Landauer (1887–1945): A Frankfurt psychoanalyst almost forgotten by psychoanalysis and Gestalt therapy.” Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane XLIX, no. 1 (2015): 37–58. Originally published in German as: “Der Frankfurter Psychoanalytiker Karl Landauer (1887–

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1945): Ein vergessener Lehrer von Lore und Friedrich Perls.” Gestalttherapie 11, no. 2 (1997): 3–18. Brändle, Gerhard. Die jüdischen Mitbürger der Stadt Pforzheim. Edited by Stadt Pforzheim, Pforzheim: Adolf Klingel, 1985. Clarkson, Petruska and Jennifer Mackewn. Fritz Perls. London: Sage Publications, 1993. Humphrey, Karen. “Laura Perls: A Biographical Sketch.” The Gestalt Journal IX, no. 1 (1986): 5–11. Kitzler, Richard, Laura Perls, and E. Mark Stern. “Retrospects and Prospects: A trialogue between Laura Perls, Richard Kitzler, and E. Mark Stern.” Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy; Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists; Keeping the Flame: Laura Perls and Gestalt Therapy 18, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 5–22. Kogan, Gerald. “Laura Perls, 1905–1990.” The British Gestalt Journal 1, no. 2 (1991): 60–62. Krauss-Kogan, Wiltrud. “Der Körper als Stütze (self-support)– Unterstützung (support) für den Körper. Die Rolle des Körpers in der Gestalttherapie.” Gestalttherapie: Forum für Gestaltperspektiven 20, no. 1 (2006): 6–18. Landauer, Karl. Theorie der Affekte und andere Schriften zur IchOrganisation. Edited by Hans-Joachim Rothe. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1991. Levi, Nurith. “Über den jüdischen Hintergrund der Gestalttherapie.” Gestalttherapie: Forum für Gestaltperspektiven 20, no. 1 (2006): 18– 33. Miller, Michael Vincent. “Notes on Art and Symptoms.” The Gestalt Journal III, no. 1 (1980): 86–98. Miller, Michael Vincent. “Elegy for Laura.” In Teaching a Paranoid to Flirt: The Poetics of Gestalt Therapy, 387–391. Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 2011. Oehlmann, Johannes. “Was ist Zeit? Perspektiven des Zeitgewahrseins.” Gestalttherapie: Forum für Gestaltperspektiven 20, no. 1 (2006): 59– 66. Perls, Frederick. Ego, Hunger and Aggression: The Beginning of Gestalt Therapy. New York: Random House, 1969. Perls, Frederick, Ralph F. Hefferline, and Paul Goodman. Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Julian Press, 1951. Perls, Laura. Die Erscheinungen des simultanen Kontrastes und der Eindruck der Feldbeleuchtung. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung

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der Doktorwürde der Naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der JohannWolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt a. M., 1932. —. “How to Educate Children for Peace.” Lecture for the Women’s Peace Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1939, originally written in German (“Erziehung zum Frieden”), 1938; first published in Perls, Laura. Leben an der Grenze, edited by Milan Sreckovic, 11–18. Köln: EHP, 1989. First published in English in Perls, Laura. Living at the Boundary, edited by Joe Wysong, 37–44. Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992. —. “Notes on the Mythology of Suffering and Sex.” (1949) In Perls, Laura. Living at the Boundary, edited by Joe Wysong, 45–59. Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992. First published Perls, Laura. Leben an der Grenze, edited by Milan Sreckovic, 19–31. Köln: EHP, 1989. —. “The Psychoanalyst and the Critic.” Complex 2 (1950): 41–47. Also in: Perls, Laura. Living at the Boundary, edited by Joe Wysong, 61–70. Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992. —. “Notes on the Psychology of Give and Take.” In Perls, Laura. Living at the Boundary, edited by Joe Wysong, 71–81. Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992. Originally published in Complex 9 (1953): 24–30, and reprinted in: Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy, edited by Paul David Pursglove, 118–128. New York: Harper Colophon/Harper & Row, 1971. —. “Notes on Fundamental Support of the Contact Process.” Originally prepared for presentation to the NYIGT in 1953, first published in Perls, Laura. Leben an der Grenze, edited by Milan Sreckovic, 53–60. Köln: EHP, 1989; first published in English in: Perls, Laura. Living at the Boundary, edited by Joe Wysong, 83–91. Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992. —. “One Gestalt Therapist’s Approach” in Perls, Laura. Living at the Boundary, edited by Joe Wysong, 115–123. Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992, and which was also published in Gestalt Therapy Now: Theory, Techniques, Applications, edited by Joen Fagan and Irma Lee Shepherd, 125–129. New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper Colophon, 1971, which had been published in 1970 by Science and Behavior Books, Inc. and was reprinted by arrangement. It was originally published in Annals of Psychotherapy Special Combined Issue edited by J. Barron & R.A. Harper, vols. 1 and 2, 1961. —. “Notes on Anxiety and Fear.” Originally prepared for presentation to the NYIGT in 1965. First published in Perls, Laura. Leben an der

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Grenze, edited by Milan Sreckovic, 87–90. Köln: EHP, 1989; first published in English in Perls, Laura. Living at the Boundary, edited by Joe Wysong, 125–128. Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992. —. “Two Instances of Gestalt Therapy.” In Perls, Laura. Living at the Boundary, edited by Joe Wysong, 93–113. Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992, which was also published in Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy, edited by Paul David Pursglove, 42–63. New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper Colophon Books, 1971, and which originally appeared in Case Reports in Clinical Psychology. Brooklyn, NY: Department of Psychology, Kings County Hospital, 1956. —. “Some Aspects of Gestalt Therapy.” Lecture held at the Mid-Atlantic Group Therapy Association, Washington, D.C. in 1972; first published in: Orthopsychiatric Association (1973); first published in German in: Gestalt-Bulletin 1, no. 1/2 (1979); also published in Perls, Laura. Living at the Boundary, edited by Joe Wysong, 129–135. Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992. —. “Comments on the New Directions.” In The Growing Edge of Gestalt Therapy, edited by Edward W. L. Smith. 221–226. New York: Brunner Mazel, 1976. —. “Concepts and Misconceptions of Gestalt Therapy.” Voices: Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists 14, no. 3 (1978): 31–36. This article was originally presented as an address given at the European Association for Transactional Analysis in Seefeld, Austria in July 1977. —. “A Workshop with Laura Perls (1980).” Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy; Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists; “Keeping the flame: Laura Perls and Gestalt Therapy” 18, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 54–70. —. “Opening Address: 8th Annual Conference on the Theory and Practice of Gestalt Therapy—May 17, 1985 (Commitment).” The Gestalt Journal Vol. IX, no. 1 (1986): 12–15. —. “Every Novel is a Case History.” The Gestalt Journal XII, no. 2 (1989): 5–10. This article was originally presented as a talk for the NYIGT in 1988. First published in Perls, Laura. Leben an der Grenze: Essays und Anmerkungen zur Gestalt-Therapie, edited by Milan Sreckovic, 121–127. Köln: EHP, 1989. —. Leben an der Grenze: Essays und Anmerkungen zur Gestalt-Therapie, edited by Milan Sreckovic. Köln: EHP, 1989. —. “A Talk for the 25th Anniversary.” The Gestalt Journal XIII, no. 2 (1990): 15–22.

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—. Living At The Boundary. Edited by Joe Wysong. Gouldsboro: The Gestalt Journal Press, 1992. —. Meine Seele ist die Wildnis des Anderen: Der Weg zur Gestalttherapie; Lore Perls im Gespräch mit Daniel Rosenblatt u.a. Edited by Anke and Erhard Doubrawa. Peter Hammer: Wuppertal, 2005. Perls, Laura and Daniel Rosenblatt. Der Weg zur Gestalttherapie: Lore Perls im Gespräch mit Daniel Rosenblatt. Edited by Anke and Erhard Doubrawa. Wuppertal: Edition GIK im Peter Hammer Verlag, 1997. Perls, Laura and Edward Rosenfeld. “A conversation between Laura Perls and Edward Rosenfeld.” Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy; Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists; “Keeping the flame: Laura Perls and Gestalt Therapy” 18, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 22–29. Perls, Renate. “Zuhause bei Laura.” Gestalttherapie: Forum für Gestaltperspektiven 19, no. 2 (2005): 40–47. Rosenblatt, Daniel. “An Interview With Laura Perls.” The Gestalt Journal XIV, no. 1 (1991): 7–26. Rothe, Hans-Joachim. “Ein exemplarisches Schicksal: Karl Landauer (1887–1945).“ In Psychoanalyse in Frankfurt am Main: Zerstörte Anfänge, Wiederannäherung, Entwicklungen, edited by Tomas Plänkers, Michael Laier, Hans-Heinrich Otto, Hans-Joachim Rothe and Helmut Siefert, 87–108. Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1996. Saner, Raymond. “Kaffeetrinken mit Laura in der Upper West Side.” Gestalttherapie: Forum für Gestaltperspektiven 19, no. 2 (2005): 48– 54. Schneider, Kristine “Meine Wildnis ist die Seele des Anderen: Erinnerungen und Reflektionen zu Lore Perls.” In 100 Jahre Fritz Perls: Tagungsband der Internationalen Psychotherapietagung der Fachsektion für Integrative Gestalttherapie ÖAGG, edited by Christine Freiler, Domna Ventouratou-Schmetterer, Claudia Reiner-Lawugger, and Roland Bösel, 100–110. Vienna: Facultas, 1994. Schulthess, Peter. “Die Fähigkeit zur sozialen und politischen Verantwortung als gestalttherapeutisches Ziel.” Gestalttherapie: Forum für Gestaltperspektiven 20, no. 1 (2006): 34–45. Serlin, Ilene. “Tribute to Laura Perls.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 32, no. 3 (1992): 57–66. Serlin, Ilene and Paul Shane. “Laura Perls and Gestalt Therapy: Her Life and Values.” In Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology: A Historical and Biographical Sourcebook, edited by Donald Moss, 374– 384. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.

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Shane, Paul. “An Illegitimate Child: The Relationship Between Gestalt Psychology and Gestalt Therapy.” International Gestalt Journal 26, no. 2 (2003): 23–46. Shane, Paul. “Return of the Prodigal Daughter: Historiography and the Relationship between Gestalt Psychology and Gestalt Therapy.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Saybrook Graduate School & Research Center, San Francisco, CA, 2002. Shechner, Mark, ed. Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader. Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1988. Sreckovic, Milan. “Geschichte und Entwicklung der Gestalttherapie.” In Handbuch der Gestalttherapie, edited by Reinhard Fuhr, Milan Sreckovic, and Martina Gremmler-Fuhr, 15–178. Göttingen: Hogrefe, 1999. Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy; Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists; “Keeping the flame: Laura Perls and Gestalt Therapy” 18, no. 2 (Summer, 1982). Votsmeier-Röhr, Achim. “Das Kontakt-Support-Konzept von Lore Perls und seine Bedeutung für die heutige Gestalttherapie.” Gestalttherapie: Forum für Gestaltperspektiven 19, no. 2 (2005): 29–39. Wysong, Joe, ed. “A Festschrift for Laura Perls in Celebration of her 75th Birthday.” The Gestalt Journal 3, no. 1 (1980): 3–158.

CHAPTER I TIMELESS EXPERIENCE OF A TOTAL LIFE CRYSTALIZED, DATED 1976

November 1976 It happened in 1944 in South Africa during the war when all contact with family and friends of my European past was broken, that I started to write. I made use of the memories of crucial events in my childhood and youth, letting my phantasy play with the eidetic images, the echo of voices, filling in and inventing what I did not remember. At the time I had no intention at all of writing an autobiography but was interested only in writing short stories, a literary form that had always attracted me as the prose form most closely related to poetry in its condensation and integration of diverse experiences into strongly focused unified images. From several finished stories emerged the concept of autobiography as fiction, or fiction as autobiography. I started to develop it writing poems, vignettes, and stories following at irregular ever-increasing intervals. But since I started to practice and teach Gestalt therapy in America, I had less and less time, energy, and concentration available for imaginative writing. Only during the last few years under the pressure from friends and professional circles, has the idea of an autobiography re-emerged and developed from reassessment of accumulated published and unpublished articles, essays, interviews, tapes, journals, stories, and poems, into a more definite plan. My focus has shifted somewhat from the predominantly literary interest to my function and place as an originator and developer of Gestalt therapy. Yet, until 1952 when we started the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, my professional interests and activities were only one facet of my life. Long before I became a student of psychology and a therapist, I was a musician on a professional level and a dancer. I was involved in social and political issues. I married and had children. I lived in different communities and acquired a new language. And in spite of having written less and less and not published anything except some professional articles, I still consider myself a writer. Thus if I continue writing my own story I shall be writing neither straight autobiography nor a factual history of

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Gestalt therapy. Truth is not in the single temporal facts, but in the timeless experience of a total life crystallized—if at all—into a personal mythology.

CHAPTER II NOTEBOOK NUMBER 1, DATED 1946; 25, RAYMOND STREET, BELLEVUE, JOHANNESBURG, S.A.

Dr. Lore Perls1 25, Raymond Street Bellevue, Johannesburg2 Original Sin3 In the jammed closet4 my warm winter cloths, Securely put away, are worn by moths, While fool perennial, as the year grows old, Clad in torn summer shreds5 I shiver in the cold. Hail! I have got my coat! But, buttoned wrong. One end of it hangs short, the other long. One leg entangled, one left bare and cold, I stumble forth, don’t know where pull, where hold? My righteous left is unaware of what My clumsy (gauchy) right is up to. On the mat, Half-man, I lie knocked out by that half-ape in me, With one cramped arm6 still dangling in the tree.

1

Laura Perls wrote her name and address on the inside cover of the notebook. South Africa. 3 On two loose pages at the front of the notebook, a poem titled “Original Sin” has been written. 4 Corrected from: drawer. 5 Deleted: of spring. 6 Corrected from: hand. 2

4

Chapter II

*** Man is greed and love, seed and fruit, means and end.7 Man is genius and robot, science and art, city and country.8 Man is right and left, digestion and thought, coercion and freedom, Man is frustration and hope, conflict and link, birth and death. Man is knowledge9 and innocence, reason and faith, sin and salvation10 Uncertainty without anxiety!11 Prayer//Yawning! Suffering times infernal bliss and blessed damnation, Dying my quick life, living my slow death. *** Jacob’s Ladder I. Lament (In memory of L., who died at the hands of the Nazis, May 1944)12 There is no step to kneel on, no prayer to pray, No God to listen. Childhood is dead and so is God. There is no grace; the raving hounds of reason Unleashed are hunting down the isolated adult. There is no link. Familiar memories recede Unshared into the darkness of an alien past. The lovely untenable myth of childhood’s togetherness Has turned to stone, untelling hieroglyphs Inconceivably high On the desolate walls of desecrated existence. 7

First page of notebook proper; cf. pp. 19–20 and German version of this poem on pp. 61–62 of the handwritten notebook. 8 Deleted: Man is digestion and thought, right and left, coercion and freedom. 9 Corrected from: guilt. 10 Corrected from: redemption; deletion is illegible. 11 Cf. quotation from Fromm. 12 L. most probably stands for Laura Perls’s sister, Liselotte (Lisel) Lisser, who was murdered by the National Socialists. In August, 2014, Renate Perls and Leslie Gold gave me a copy of an undated, slightly revised, typewritten version of the first two stanzas of this poem. Deviations from the original are as follows: “the raving hounds” corrected to: the mad dogs of reason; “adult” corrected to: victim; “desecrated” corrected to: separated.

Notebook Number 1

5

II. Aus meinen großen Schmerzen mach ich die kleinen Lieder. Heine.13 14 II.15 There is no code. Recognisable is only Pain and grief, the outcast’s inexhaustible heritage, Compressed into ten short lines upon a page of paper, Fixed and transfigured. There is more than grief For the one lost playmate; there is more than the pain Of temporary isolation; living eternally In the lines of the poem grief and pain replace Unforgettably all the vanished and forgotten memories. There is more than consolation, there is reprieve and redemption In the guilty elation of converting the design For suffering, of snatching from the floods of Lethe16 In the net of eternalized sorrow the lost past. There, too, is confusion and doubt: Why guilt? Why elation? What is good about sorrow? What is bad about salvation?17 Question is denial and division, indivisible the Self— 13

Writing on pp. 3, 4, and 5 of the notebook has been deleted. Inserted on p. 5 are two names and addresses: 64 Terrace Road Judith Pearl 24– 3833; Mrs. Rabinowitz 48, [illegible] 56, 6th Avenue. 15 The following quote from Heine was deleted, but appears in both versions of section II. of Jacob’s Ladder: “Aus meinen großen Schmerzen mach ich die kleinen Lieder.” This is the beginning of a poem in Heinrich Heine’s (1827) Buch der Lieder. At https://archive.org/stream/heinesbookofsong00heiniala#page/86/mode/2up/search/t he+little+songs, on February 9, 2015, I found an English translation under the heading “Lyrical Intermezzo 1822–1823, 38. Aus meinen großen Schmerzen” in Charles G. Leland, Heine’s Book of Songs (Philadelphia: Frederick Leypoldt, 1861), on p. 87: “From the great pain of my spirit / Come the little songs I am singing, / Which, in music their flight upswinging, / To her cold heart fluttering bear it.” 16 According to Greek mythology, Lethe was the river of forgetfulness, one of five rivers in Hades, the Underworld. Lethe literally means: forgetfulness, oblivion, concealment. Lethe is related to the Greek word “aletheia,” which means truth. The prefix “a-” connotes “opposite,” thus aletheia literally defines truth as the opposite of forgetting. 17 Order of sentences changed by numbers. 14

6

Chapter II

Forced by frustration into creation—finds For its own suffering its own salvation, As innocent as an injured animal, That licks and heals its wounds.18 III. O wounds of man! Bleeding bewilderment, festering Despair, barely crusted by cynicism and swathed In the embarrassed bandages of uniformity. What healing? What is to stir the hereditary stagnation? What to correct the premature interpretation of the original human’s rise? What antidote against the poisonous snake-bite of temptation, Turned conscience? From the eternal indigestion Of the paradisiacal friend, what purification? Cast by the barren branches of the tree The shadow falls on the straight and narrow path To bored normality, while from the prolific seed Of the neglected fruit neurotic overgrowth Smothers the undulating plains of Paradise. We keep to the path. In crowded hostility We spy upon each other, lest anyone Discover his own direction, lest anyone tear on the fruit, And sneaking our secret course, we lose our way, And gobbling the furtive fruit, we lose our guts. O the betrayal of creation! Man who has lost His courage to conscience cannot recognize Himself in the angel or in the sharpness of the sword, But in the dull disorientated animal Slinking away in shame From the self-guarded gates of biological bliss. The self-made beast of burden—to the self-cursed labour. The inexperienced God, mistaking the privilege of error, Laments the loss of animal perfection, Resents as punishment his own productive powers, Condemns his own creativeness as crime.

18

Pp. 9–12 deleted, text corresponds to pp. 13–15.

Notebook Number 1

7

Man has but little time To atone for his fear of knowledge, the suicidal sin, To check the ignorant slide and patiently to climb The self-realising steps to wholeness and maturity. Not one and narrow is the gate, but wide And manyfold: the whole world is a door to Eden. Man’s guide his self-enlightened sense, his keys: Discrimination without condemnation, Uncertainty without anxiety,19 Diversity without disintegration, Responsibility without guilt.20 IV.21 The window is the open fields and the close chamber, The sunlit garden and the intimate darkness, The solitary quiet and the communal noise of the city. Rain is the burst of the cloud and the soil’s thirst; Stream, the rain-black earth and the light-white breakers; Sea, the shore’s limitations and the vastness between continents. The birds flight in heaven and earth. Fruit is the earth’s offering and man’s greed. Man is greed and love, seed and fruit, means and end.22 Man is knowledge and innocence, reason and faith, sin and salvation; Man is frustration and hope, conflict and link, birth and death. The path is backwards and forward; The step is past and future: I am the world and God. ***

19

Cf. quotation from Fromm below. Deleted: He shall eat of the fruit, and his will be the life. Pp. 17–18 of the handwritten notebooks deleted. 21 Cf. p. 1 and German version of this poem on pp. 61–62. 22 Order changed by numbers. 20

8

Chapter II

On white paper23 The pool of sun-light rippling in the fluttering shadow of the Jacaranda tree. — (. . . The convulsions of the epileptic sea foaming at the shore.)24 Foaming at the shore the epileptic sea. — . . . and the storm strumming the multidimensional harp of rain. — concrete dawn stemming the flood of the open country downwards. —25 *** Open the floodgates of fear. The European spectacle: floodgates of our civilization collapsing not under the pressure of the spontaneous waters, but from their own weight. But where is the flood? And when the gates collapse, the floods will flow.26 A grain of truth in our mendacious harvest. *** Flood of spontaneous brutality released, but where is the spontaneous flow of creativeness to be expected when the inhibitions of civilization collapse? It is bound up in the structure of the floodgates, and collapses with them. Save the pieces! How to disentangle from the debris of civilization the imprisoned creative spirit?

23

The following verse marked III. has been deleted, but the verse is legible. It seems that this verse has been omitted and substituted by another verse marked III., beginning on p. 13, following the section marked II., beginning on p. 7. This first version of III. has been included as a fragment at the end of the poem. Deleted: III. Land and Sea . . . 24 This line—in parentheses—seems to be replaced by the following one by Laura Perls. 25 Deleted, but has been used in Verse III.; cf. quotation from Fromm: Responsibility without guilt, uncertainty without anxiety. 26 On p. 21 of this notebook there are two rows of short horizontal lines each followed by the number one, a vertical line dividing the upper part of the page in half, then a row of short horizontal lines and either a 1 or an S written between them. Under the first row of short horizontal lines: grain, brain, stain, strain, under the second: rain.

Notebook Number 1

9

Water has gone into cementing the walls for its own confinement. — Will the timid trickle, Oozing invisibly from the European ruin Break surface as a thundering waterfall, A chattering stream, a contemplative pool? *** Turning Point27 of Life//Hälfte des Lebens With yellow pears the land, And teeming with wild roses, Droops down to the lake, You lovely swans, And drunk from kisses You plunge your heads In the holy-sober water. Alas, where do I, when The winter comes, get flowers, and where The sunshine And shade of the earth? The walls remain Speechless and cold, the vanes Clank in the wind. (Hölderlin)28 ***

27

Deleted: Pivot. This is Laura Perls’s own translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Hälfte des Lebens” in Elegien (Potsdam: Hermann Kasack, 1920). Published English translations of this poem up to the date of Laura Perls’s notebook entry were compared with her version, and they were not identical. See the different translations in Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin: The Fire of the Gods Drives Us to Set Forth by Day and by Night, trans. James Mitchell (San Francisco: Hoddypodge, 1978); Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin Books, 1998); Friedrich Hölderlin: Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems, trans. David Constantine (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1990). 28

Chapter II

10

In Springtime (Im Frühling)29 Here, lying on the hill of spring: The cloud becomes my wing, A bird flutters abreast. O tell me, all-only Love, where you Abide, that I abide with you! But you and the zephyrs, you have no rest. Sunflower-like my heart is opening, Waiting, Dilating, In loving and hoping. Spring, what is your intent?30 Shall I be content? The passing cloud behold and the stream. Of Helios’ kiss the golden gleam Invades my pulsing life-blood deep. The eyes, inebrious with glee, Pretend to go to sleep, Only the ear discerns the humming bee. I think of this and think of that, I long for, I don’t know quite what; It is half31 pleasure, half dismay; My heart, oh say, You weave what kind of memory In golden branches’ dusky greenery? Old unfathomable days! ***

29 Laura Perls rewrote and corrected the following verses on the next two pages. Her draft is on the left side, the final version on the right. Only the final version has been transcribed. 30 Laura Perls rewrote and corrected the following verses on the next two pages. Her draft is on the left side, the final version on the right. Only the final version has been transcribed. 31 Corrected from: Half it is.

Notebook Number 1

11

future frustration of past deprivations; autumnal ancestry.32 *** Awakening33 When the curtain of infantile innocence splits open, she is sitting on the floor. All around her34 a wide expanse of purplish carpet, in the distance a gleaming mountain of mahogany and glass—the big wardrobe that in ten years time will yield 35 the manifoldness of glamorous 36 garments for dressing up, when mother is not at home. Then, the carpet will be a rather smallish square on the edges of which your feet get stuck and you stumble when you are in a hurry to parade in mother’s trailing dresses before the narrow mirror. Then, the wardrobe, too, will look drab and unimportant; but it will be the same wardrobe, the same carpet, the same room. She is sitting on the floor, woven into the flower-pattern of the carpet, built into the multi-coloured precarious structure of building-blocks, staring with the glassy gaze of the teddy bear, covered with the bunny’s silken fur—at once animal, flower and stone in the fantastic jungle of early childhood. The open doors of the balcony on her left admit the light and warmth of the morning-sun, the smoky smell from the factory yard down below, the call of the labourers unloading heavy machinery, the shrill chatter of the factory girls. But she is sitting on the floor, wholly unaware of the world beyond the balcony—the fires behind the smoke, the people behind the voices. For her, light and warmth and smell and noise emanate from the landscape of the room itself, belonging in some undefinable way to the deep union of herself with the glittering surfaces of glass and wood, the wooly carpet, the animated toys.

32 Two lines, probably fragments, on page facing “Awakening,” a short story by Laura Perls. 33 The story titled “Awakening” was originally interrupted by Heine’s poem and other entries (pp. 41–45) in Notebook Number 1. This entry was written on a total of sixteen pages, including blank pages, and did not follow in regular succession. I have rearranged the pages so that “Awakening,” in all possible versions, can be read in one piece. Deleted: Chapter I. 34 Deleted: is. 35 Corrected from: produce. 36 Corrected from: miraculous.

12

Chapter II

She is sitting on the floor; squinting sideways to the right she catches a dim glimpse of a long, low mahogany hill topped by shining white linen clouds. Enthroned on the clouds—like the Lord God himself—reclines a white-clad figure crowned with a mahogany-coloured halo. The gratifying harmony is vaguely disturbed by some clicking, flickering flurry, faint but rhythmical, like the wing-beat of a metallic bird. More faintly still, from far away behind the hill and almost to be ignored, a little irrelevant wail infiltrates her plantlike placidity. With a sharp click the bird’s flutter suddenly ceases. “Pick it up, please.” The voice cutting through the clouds breaks into the jungle like lightning, illuminating and transforming. In a flash, the adult outlines of the room come clear; from the confused harmony the objective chaos breaks forth. She is sitting on the floor, shocked and bewildered, looking for the fallen bird. “Over there! Pick it up!” The impatient voice draws her dazed gaze upward to the top of the hill. Unwillingly she beholds billowing clouds clotting into the tightly stuffed shapes of pillows—the vague, warm, all-permeating Presence congealing into the precise feminine figure, the pale face (framed in a halo of mahogany-coloured hair) of mother lying in bed, holding in her hands a half-finished baby’s bonnet. Behind the bed, in the cradle, the little wail is gradually growing into an inescapable scream.37 “Come here, come here!” the feeble calls discordant from inside the room. Magically drawn by the persistent sound, she gets up from the floor. She looks around; the bird is nowhere to be found. On the purple carpet amongst the toys, foreign and frustrating, a long knitting needle aims its glittering point at the open door. The bird, the bird! Whither did he fly? Down into the gabbling grey factory-smell, up into the calm golden-blue fragrance of the summer sky? Oh scintillating lure of otherness! Still searching for the bird of phantasy, but fascinated already and enraptured by the quest for reality, she runs out onto the balcony. There he is darting across the yard. The bird! And there another one, and another one, and another one, twittering and fluttering top notes to the seductive symphony of sound, smell, colour, and motion, which are contrapuntally balanced by the chatter and clatter from the yard below. 37

Deleted: In a frantic effort to extract some meaning from the untenable situation, she turns her back on mother, brother, needle, noise and glitter, and makes for the door.

Notebook Number 1

13

She is standing on the balcony, hot hands clasped around, flushed face pressed in between two iron poles, hair blown by the midday breeze, sailing giddily a capricious course along the wanton waves of inexperienced exploration, soaring high up into the golden glistening smoke and the swallows, sliding down into the dubious depths of unfathomable phenomena in the factory yard, up down, up down, up down, wilder and wilder, the spattering spray of sunlight and laughter breaking on the bow of the balcony, faster and faster, through clouds of dust and darting birds, up down, up down, up down—until a huge wave of howling siren-sound drowns all perception, scatters people, noise and birds in all directions and throws her back onto the solid shore of the room. Panting she lands on the purple carpet, frantically groping for the familiar feel of former orientation, the protective compound of diffused awareness and vague warmth—the world she knew not but was part of. Now the jungle is cleared; she is sitting on the floor, different and depressed,38 discriminating and distraught, shivering in the cold of isolation, expelled and exposed. There is no meaning, only menace in the strange mahogany-shapes, or her own unrecognized reflection in the mirror or the baby’s wail or the grinning grimace of the teddy bear.39 Oh, to belong, once more, to be one once more. Expectantly she turns towards the habitual source and confirmation of unity, always acknowledged as her own extension and fulfilment, the warm body, the affectionate face, the helpful hands that are her own in the close biological union of mother and child. But what is there now? Alienation, separation, hostility. She cannot recognise herself in this frowning face, these threatening hands, this tantalizing voice: “You are very naughty! Quickly now! Pick up my needle!” What magic in command! Perversely,40 it established a new union, a lopsided one composed of domination and dependence, which is infuriating and revolting, but nevertheless irresistible by the sheer force of the alternative terror of isolation. Compelled and repelled at once, numb with fear and sick with disgust, she scrambles up from the carpet and totters towards the bed.41

38

Corrected from: small and exposed; order reversed: depressed and different. Deleted: And mother’s face, that was her own, has extension and fulfilment. 40 Corrected from: subversively. 41 The following sentences were deleted: Furious, frightened and revolted, she returns, unable to resist the magic of command [corrected from: demand]. She feels sick with rage and disgruntled, her ears are singing, she is swaying on her feet. When everything goes black, a strong grip around her wrist brings her back. 39

14

Chapter II

A malicious machine, she allows her hand to be clasped around the shining steel. “Thank you! That’s a good girl! You must always do what mother tells you.” The grip is released, the vision clears. There is mother’s face, the freckled skin, the dark-brown eyes, the smiling mouth, the tilted nose. (For years to come it will remain inexplicable that people could call it beautiful.) She lifts her little hand and with unstrangled strength she fiercely strikes the face.42 II.43 Through their lashes of old-fashioned lace, the two little shop-windows sleepily watch the busy street. The late-morning slant of the sun throws silent lace-patterns on the polished floor; the dusty display of wool in the windows seems to separate the shop from, rather than to connect it with, the intentions of potential customers, thus protecting the two old ladies behind the counter from unwanted attention. The street-noises are muffled by the stacks of wool around the walls; the only sound in the shop is the tick-tock of the old Swiss clock in the corner, accentuated occasionally by the hoarse call of the cuckoo. When the girl enters the shop, the cuckoo nods his head and croaks eleven times, the two old ladies alight from the counter and44 swishingly swoop down on the little girl, smothering her in the wings of smug benevolence and crying curiosity.45 “How are you, my dear? And how is your dear mother? It is ages since we have seen you last!” She cannot remember ever having seen these two horrifying hags before. Who are they? What do they want from me? I want to buy wool. For the first time in her life, she is making an important purchase all on her own. With self-conscious elation she looks up and down the shelves, comparing colours and qualities with the premeditated image of the garment she is going to make. How irritating the musty smell of mothballs, which seems to radiate not from the wool but from the two gushing old women, as if they themselves had just been taken off the shelf and shaken to scatter their stale chatter and odour all over the shop. In the face of their flashingly flaunted familiarity the girl feels strangely distant and humiliated. Dimly she perceives that, stored away in those antiquated There is no escape: struggling and screaming, the torrents of tears flooding her face, she is led to lift the needle. 42 Lines indicating end of chapter. 43 “Awakening,” Chapter II. 44 Deleted: like birds of prey. 45 Deleted: The air is heavy with the stale smell of mothballs.

Notebook Number 1

15

shelves, there must be some archaic secret that she is supposed to share with these two old birds,46 a secret that endows them with indisputable intimate rights which not to acknowledge would be sacrilege. Even to dream refusal 47 dreads mistakes. But how preposterous, how utterly impossible48 to be taken in by these two crazy birds of prey. For what reason or purpose? I am not looking for birds now, I am looking for wool. I am not a baby anymore . . . not a baby, . . . a baby . . . And through the veil of sudden resentment, she discerns from the vociferous ramblings the excited exclamation: “Don’t you remember, when you were a baby, you came to see us here nearly every day. You were born in this house!” Can I help that? I must have been born somewhere. Why did it have to be here? How insulting to take advantage of me like that! I certainly don’t want to see them now and they won’t ever see me again. Can49 I help that? What an outrageous trick to take advantage of me like that, the eternal baby! I must have been born and been a baby somewhere. Why did it have to happen here with these two old scarecrows around? I am sure I did not want to see them then, and I certainly don’t want to see them now or ever again! With embarrassed determination she withdraws from the affectionate flutter of the two black birds. “Thank you very much, indeed, but I don’t think you have what I am looking for.” Thrilled and surprised by her own poise and independence, she crosses the threshold and firmly closes the door of childhood behind herself. Leaving 50 the two black spinsters helplessly flapping their belated affections, she takes an embarrassed but determined departure. III. Lover into mother

46

Deleted: Ridiculous, what can I have in common with them? Deleted: feels. 48 Deleted: that I should have anything in common with these crazy [deleted: vultures] birds of prey. 49 In the handwritten version, Laura Perls wrote this paragraph, from “Can I help that” to “I certainly don’t want to see them now or ever again!” as an alternative to the preceding one, so I have included it here. 50 This sentence, written in different ink, offers yet another possible ending to this short story. 47

16

Chapter II

IV. Johannes fire > Individuality V. Living > Dying51 *** (Heine)52 My child, we have been children, Two children, small and gay; We crept into the chicken coop And hid beneath the hay. And if some people passed us, Like roosters did we crow, Cock a doodle doo! They did believe It was the rooster’s crow. From the cases in the back yard We made a wall-papered room And lived in it together And made a distinguished home. The neighbor’s ancient she-cat Came sometimes to the door; We made her bows and curtseys And compliments galore. We anxiously asked her “how do you do?” And had a friendly chat; Since then we said the very same things To many an old cat.

51

III., IV., and V. were possibly chapters of “Awakening” that the author was planning to write. 52 Laura Perls’s translation of Heine’s poem “My child, we were two children”; originally “Mein Kind, wir waren Kinder.”

Notebook Number 1

17

And often we sat talking53 How Love and Trust and Faith Have vanished from the earth And how expensive the coffee And how the money so scarce. Gone are the games of youth54 The money, the world and the times And Faith and Love and Truth. *** In a Big City (Liliencron)55 Drifting me by within the urban sea Now this, now that one, one after the other. One glance into the eye, already past. The organ-grinder grinds his song. Dripping me by with the sea of naught Now this, now that one, one after the other. One glance upon his hearse, already past. The organ-grinder grinds his song. A funeral swimming in the urban sea; Across the people, one after the other. One glance upon my hearse, already past. The organ-grinder grinds his song. 53

Laura Perls did not complete her translation of the next three lines of verse. An alternative English translation of this verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, quoted in The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. by Kuno Francke (New York: The German Publication Society, 1913), 41, is: “We also sat and wisely / Discoursed as old folks do, / Complaining how all went better / In those good old times we knew.” 54 Laura Perls did not translate the next line of verse. An alternative English translation of this stanza by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ibid., is: “The children’s games are over, / The rest is over with youth— / The world, the good games, the good times, / The belief, and the love, and the truth.” 55 This is Laura Perls’s translation from the German of Detlev Liliencron’s poem “In einer großen Stadt,” which was published in 1883. Liliencron was a German lyric poet and novelist, who was born 1844 in Kiel, and died 1909 in Rahlstedt, now a part of Hamburg.

18

Chapter II

*** There was a young painter from Potchefstroom Whose pictures were hung in a Bolschie’s56 room. But all artistic urges Were disposed of in purges, And the O. B.57 obliged to watch his room.58 *** There was a young man from the Pondo Who of driving a car was so fond, oh! He had no spare cash So in rather a rush He bought Mehitabel59 on a bond, oh! *** Can we avoid the conclusion? Clouded in doubt and confusion We cling to the paltry protrusion In the rock of lack and illusion. *** Ascending the ladder of premises We swing from trellis to trellises Our trembling hearts put promises In the brain’s barren crevices. 56

Possibly slang for: Bolshevik. I couldn’t determine what this abbreviation stands for. Possibly Laura referred to O.B.E, which stands for Officer of the British Empire. 58 Laura Perls mentions the artist, Hanns Ludwig Katz, in Notebook Number 5. Deleted: Man and mountain—Basuto Landscape (In memoriam H. L. Katz) “A continent within a picture frame / Humanity within the frail frame of man. / Structure of geological strata. / Secrets of centuries confined in stone.” 59 Mehitabel may be the name that this young man gave to his automobile. The characters Archy and Mehitabel, a fictional cockroach and cat, respectively, were originally made famous by Don Marquis in his newspaper cartoons. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel; on February 9, 2015. 57

Notebook Number 1

19

Can we avoid the formation? Recoiling from complication We seek our sorry salvation In sedative simplification. Can we avoid the decision? Arrogance blurs our vision. We scorn with brazen derision The rapids of rabid division.60 With unrelenting rigidity We freeze into febrile frigidity Our turbulent timidity Laments equivocal validity. No creditable criterion Prevents our playing Hyperion We drop from deceit to delusion Can we avoid the conclusion?61 Dying I leave behind the heritage of alien lives, Living I set my sails for the light of my own (lonely?) death.62 *** Contemplation, e.g. the awareness of inner data, superseded by calculation, e.g. the manipulation of external data. *** Freud: The neurotic suffers from “memories.” He suffers from the obligation of being human, incapable of time-binding. ***

60

Note from Renate Perls attached to this page: “Synchronicity: Here I am ‘with’ my mother and on the radio is that lovely piece of music she always played— Bach’s Italian Concerto in F (here played by Murray Perahia). Think she is with me?? RP.” July 27, 2013. 61 Deleted: Dying my strange life, living my own death. 62 New version of these lines on p. 63 of this notebook.

20

Chapter II

Wherever I go, I’ll carry with me the memory Of white indifference and black affection. *** “Song to the evening star”: nostalgic noises Sweeten the evening tea, mix with the cigarette smoke, Rival the flickering fire in the grate. *** Change of63 problem: Not how to stand isolation (fear of freedom) in the face of desire for confluence, but to take separation for granted and to stand the confluent influences, to keep one’s separate integrity against the corruption of confluence. “Suffer me to be separated,” to prize the experience of separation as the most priceless possession. *** Das Fenster ist das offene Feld und die enge Kammer, Der sonnige Garten und das innere Dunkel, Die einsame Ruhe und der gemeinsame Lärm der Stadt, Der Regen ist Wolkenbruch und der Erde Durst; Der Strom frucht-schwarze Erde und licht-weiße Brandung, Die See des Ufers Begrenzung und Weite zwischen Weltteilen. Der Flug der Vögel ist Himmel und Erde. Frucht ist der Erde Opfer und des Menschen Gier. Mensch ist Gier64 und Liebe, Samen und Frucht, Mittel und Zweck, Mensch ist Wissen und Unschuld, Glaub’ und Vernunft, Sünd’ und Erlösung, Mensch ist Enttäuschung und Hoffnung, Zwist und Verbindung, Geburt und Tod.

63 64

Deleted: the numeration III. before the beginning of this sentence. Deleted: Hab-.

Notebook Number 1

21

Der Pfad führt rückwärts und vorwärts. Der Schritt ist vergangen und künftig. Ich bin die Welt und Gott.65 *** Dying I leave behind the dullness of alien lives,66 Living I set my sails for the beacon of my own death. Dying my short and crowded life. Living my long and lonely maturing death, Sacrificing the curse of life eternal For the time-bound benediction of my own dying, Renouncing re-union, Suffering separation, Praying for acceptance, I live and die, die and live, die and die. August 5, 194667 *** The untold story, the unwritten poem: Crazy contractions of the lazy brain. 68 Dream-borne drifting over the dawns of desire, behold through restless clouds69 of conscience thy reflections.

65

Cf. English version of this poem on p. 1 and pp. 19–20 of Notebook Number 1 proper. This is section IV. from “Jacob’s Ladder.” Irrespective of whether she originally wrote the poem in English or German, the translation is by Laura Perls. 66 Cf. p. 51. 67 Note from Renate Perls on July 27, 2013: “Laura was obviously in terrible pain at this time, but because she left no dates, I have no idea what happened. Could be death of either Paul Goodman or possibly Paul Weisz, or something to do with Fritz? I have no clue. Let’s see if I find something further on. RP.” However, this could neither have been Paul Goodman’s death, because he died in 1972, nor Paul Weisz’s death, because he died in 1965. 68 The following three lines have been deleted, followed by various doodles: Little man, little man, the months of love are passing. The lengthening limbs, the comprehending brain Break down the protective layer of languid affection. 69 Corrected from: cloudy cover.

22

Chapter II

Floating on the blue lake of love, shadowing the purple pools of pain, the desperate valleys.70 Do not awaken, dreamer, drowsily dreaming Ambivalent circles round the ambitious summit. Keep gliding, riding the gentle dangerous slope of curiosity Like the sleep-walker sliding along precipitous ledges. With angel-wingtip stroking eternity An animal anxiously beating the hooves of time. Holy ambiguous mediator, endure thy flight, Dream-born drifting on the dawns of desire. August 24, 1946 *** Unjung und nicht mehr ganz gesund, Wie ich mich fühl zu dieser Stund’. Möcht’ ich mich an der Liebe wärmen Und glücklich sein, doch ohne Lärmen. (Heine)71 *** įįįį holy ambiguous mediator ȝȑįȓȐIJȠȡ72 ȝȑįȓȐIJȠȡ ǹȡȓıIJȠIJȑȜȒı73 ȆȜĮIJȦȞ74 22–005/ *** 70

Deleted: of dread/doom. Laura Perls noted the last verse of Heine’s poem, “Der Abgekühlte,” with small modifications. The original is: “Unjung und nicht mehr ganz gesund / Wie ich es bin zu dieser Stund‘, / Möchte ich noch einmal lieben, schwärmen / Und glücklich sein—doch ohne Lärmen.” 72 Greek for: mediator. 73 Aristotle. 74 Plato. 71

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Written with ‘flu, temperature, temper, lucid confusion, and enjoyable exasperation. August 30, 194675 *** Even-Song76 From barking smoke in the bed And Greek philosophers The barking dog corrupts77 The yellow gramophone.78 Chirping the ball at the dead The dusty dusk overlaps The kicking bird, the chilly Knot of the picture frame.79 The football-peals grow dark On whispering window-brakes, While screeching squares light up Their song with a bursting bell. ***80

75

Note from Renate Perls, July 27, 2013: “AHA! Yes! Further on she has the flu. August 30 1946. We were still in Johannesburg—25 Raymond Street, Bellevue. Fritz has gone to the US via UK—a great deal I can’t make head or tail of. Maybe you can—RP.” Indeed, the poem “Even-Song” appears to have been written in an extraordinary state. 76 Evensong is also called Evening Prayer, or vespers. In the Anglican Church it is a form of worship to be said or sung in the evening. 77 Corrected from: reflects. 78 Next verse deleted. 79 Corrected from: garage-door. 80 On the next page are doodles and the sketch of a human head in profile. Notebook Number 1 continues by flipping it upside down and opening the back cover.

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Fear of Freedom (Fromm) Puritan feeling of powerlessness destroys actual contact; projection of aggressiveness and curiosity; frantic driving activity to alleviate the fundamental contactlessness and anxiety. Success = sign of God’s grace. Failure = sign of God’s damnation. Compulsion to work. Work for its own sake, e.g. not expression of biological necessity. Ceaseless effort to prove to oneself that one belongs to the “Chosen.” Page 95:81 “dignity and pride” = primary narcissism = “feel” of oneself. 99: self-love z/82 selfishness. 118: Individual Psychology pocket edition of group psychology?!!! 182: “Ethical principles” above the existence of the Nation!!! 203: Hitler’s essential dualism: Submitting to “Nature,” dominating people; unitary approach: sharing “Nature’s” creativeness and the brotherhood of man. 220: “biologically” z/ emotionally and mentally! 225: Love = contact z/ confluence. “Self is as strong as it is active.” EgoFunction! 226: Emphasis shifted from the present satisfaction of creative activity to the value of the finished product. Anal attitude! 226: The doubt disappears. (??) Doubtful; doubt is part of sanity. Uncertainty without anxiety! 229: Ideals! 239: Social character: lowest common denominator of all individual characters. . . . und weil sie so viel von mir und über mich gelesen haben, denken sie wir sind zusammen gestorben.83 Menschen, denen das Licht (> Erleuchtung) des eigenen Todes bevorsteht.84

81

The page numbers refer to the pagination in Erich Fromm’s book, The Fear of Freedom, which was first published outside of North America by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, in 1942. The book was originally published as Escape from Freedom by Farrar & Rinehart, New York, in 1941. 82 z/ is a sign to indicate “versus.” 83 Cf. p. 11. Translation: “and because they have read so much about me and of what I wrote, they think that we have died together.” 84 Translation: People imminently awaiting the light (epiphany, enlightenment) of their own death.

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Dream of T.S. Eliot, looking like George Sanders in The Picture of Dorian Gray (with little beard and top hat). 85 Reciting a poem, cynical and serious. Towards the end I notice that his intonation is like Hitler’s (14 Jahre . . . !), in waking up I feel that the whole poem is rather trippy, not so much the content, but the form and the way it is spoken, until I realise, fully awake, that the whole thing was in German, but I can recapture only these few lines, which I wrote down immediately. *** Brahms (Not Mahler: Kinder-Totenlieder): Oh, Tod, wie bitter bist Du. Oh, Tod, wie süß bist Du. . . . Und ich davon muß.86 *** My dear Alex, As usual, you were very successful in alarming your mother and I had a duly upset phone call from her. I am not alarmed. I think we have spoken about the possibility of homosexuality before. In a way, it lies in the direct line of a more normal development. If the fetishism is a complete dummy 87 with an entirely lifeless object, homosexuality is a half-dummy, but has as its object at least another human being. What you have to realize is that in homosexuality you avoid the contact with something that is essentially different from you and still make for sameness, e.g. for as little conscious experience as possible. That can be remedied not specifically in the sexual field, but by trying to make full contact with any new experience that occurs. Actually you have a lot of opportunity for that right now, but still don’t make full use of it. That half-contact and homosexuality is one and the same thing. Try to be more on the spot, to make as much contact and to have as many experiences as possible in all possible fields. Then your homosexuality will be just a passing phase. 85

George Sanders (1906–1972) was an English film and TV actor, singer, composer, songwriter, and author. One of his most famous roles was in the film The Picture of Dorian Gray. 86 German for: “Oh, Death, how bitter you are. Oh, Death, how sweet you are. . . . And I must leave.” Renate Perls (RP) notes in pencil: Brahms—“Ein Deutsches Requiem.” Deleted: Mrs. Fuchs [. . .] Beach Road Gordon’s Bay. 87 The term “dummy” is used in the sense of a pacifier, which an infant sucks on.

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*** My dear Robert88 Study visit off, on immigration list, Affidavit necessary, perhaps other from someone influential. Kabak: book to Horney?89 Dr. Cohn? Allen & Unwin90 Letter from Nolan Lewis,91 unable to do anything from distance, willing to help there; quite good chances to settle practice. Can you find a book containing92 the medical laws of all the states? ***93 Palinurus (Conolly): The Unquiet Grave94 30) Requisites for a work of art: . . . validity of the myth . . . or debunking of a myth? “Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.” 40) . . . Vitamin B effect: Toning up of the self, escape from the serious ego . . . “Confidence does not become me.” Deficiency symptoms as valid personal characteristics?! 88

Laura Perls’s brother, Robert Posner, who had already immigrated to the United States. 89 With Karen Horney’s help the Perlses obtained an affidavit to immigrate to the United States. 90 The publishers of Fritz Perls’s first book: Ego, Hunger and Aggression. 91 Nolan Lewis (1889–1979) was an American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, educator, and author. He was head of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University and Director of the Psychiatric Institute. Lewis was among the founders of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, created in 1944 as the first medical school-based psychoanalytic training program at a university in the U.S. The other three founders were: George Danile, Abram Kardiner, and Sandor Rado. Source: http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/psjournal/archive/archives/jour_v19no1/mindful.ht ml; February 9, 2015. 92 Deleted: all. 93 Deleted: squares with numbers; scribbles. 94 The Unquiet Grave. A Word Cycle by Palinurus. The first edition was published for Horizon by Curwen Press in 1944. Palinurus was Cyril Conolly’s pseudonym. Conolly, 1903–1974, a British writer and literary critic, was the editor of the literary magazine Horizon from 1940–1949. This entry comprises four pages. The page numbers refer to the original text by Conolly that Laura Perls quotes.

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40) “Ennui is the condition of not fulfilling our potentialities; remorse of not having fulfilled them; anxiety of not being able to fulfill them, but what are they?” 40) “Does Nature care . . . whether we evolve or not? . . . What monster first slipped into the idea of progress? Who destroyed our static conception of happiness, etc.” Static conception as inadequate as the idea of progress. There is change, e. g. differentiation and development. 43) “The mind has its own womb to which . . . it longs to return”: Und weil sie so viel von mir und über mich gelesen haben, denken sie wir sind zusammen gestorben (!!)95 72) “The classical humanist is the parent, the surrealist is the rebellious adolescent. Both are ‘motherfixed’;96 only ‘Social Realism’ lies outside the family.” 76) . . . 97 77) There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear’s dividend, fear objectivised. 79) “But what becomes of loving Nature, if Nature does not want us?” Projection! 79) “It is to civilization, not to Nature, that man must return.” 80) “If we believe in God, then our duty is to do His will and not our own, . . . ” What is the difference? 86) “Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.” 86/87) “Womb”-psychology: Womb of Poetry (“all poetry is one,” T.S. Eliot)//isolation of the poet (Timelessness of time). 87) “Man exudes a sense of reverence like a secretion. He smears it over everything . . . the wise two-faced man will reverence destructively . . . and reverently destroy.” 92) “. . . bio-psychic equilibrium is such an intense and unfailing source of happiness . . . ” It is happiness!! 93) “. . . without going mad we must learn . . . to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Each one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there is no great art and no profound happiness . . . For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism, and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed.” “We must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.” Without going mad?!! Interest would be better! 95

Cf. same sentence above on p. 3. Possibly: mother-fixated. 97 No entry, just ellipses next to p. 76. 96

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*** Liliom (Molnar): The inarticulate, un-godly animal lacking the grace of man, unwillingly obtains the grace of God, complying—even reluctantly even after death—with the structural pattern of man. *** Rilke: Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge98 I. 6) “Wenn arme Leute nachdenken, soll man sie nicht stören. Vielleicht fällt es ihnen doch ein.” 8/9) “Wer gibt heute noch etwas für einen gut ausgearbeiteten Tod? Niemand. Sogar die Reichen, die es sich doch leisten könnten, ausführlich zu sterben, fangen an nachlässig und gleichgültig zu werden; der Wunsch, einen eigenen Tod zu haben, wird immer seltener. Eine Weile noch, und er wird ebenso selten sein wie ein eigenes Leben.” 24) “Ich bin 28, und es ist so gut wie nichts geschehen.” Vgl. Schiller: “23 Jahre, und nichts für die Unsterblichkeit getan!” 24/25) “Ach, aber mit Versen ist so wenig getan, wenn man sie früh schreibt. Man sollte warten damit und Sinn und Süßigkeit sammeln ein ganzes Leben lang und ein langes womöglich, und dann, ganz zum Schluß, vielleicht könnte man dann zehn Zeilen schreiben, die gut sind. Denn Verse sind nicht, wie die Leute meinen, Gefühle (die hat man früh genug),—es sind Erfahrungen . . . Und es genügt auch noch nicht, daß man Erinnerungen hat. Man muß sie vergessen können, wenn es viele sind, und man muß die große Geduld haben, zu warten, daß sie wiederkommen. Denn die Erinnerungen selbst sind es noch nicht. Erst wenn sie Blut werden in uns, Blick und Gebärde, namenlos und nicht mehr zu unterscheiden von uns selbst, erst dann kann es geschehen, daß in einer sehr seltenen Stunde das erste Wort eines Verses aufsteht in ihrer Mitte und aus ihnen ausgeht.” 31) “Ist es möglich, daß es Leute gibt, welche ‘Gott’ sagen und meinen, das wäre etwas Gemeinsames?” 33) “Es ist, als wäre das Bild dieses Hauses aus unendlicher Höhe in mich hineingestürzt und auf meinem Grunde zerschlagen.”

98

This entry is mostly comprised of twenty pages of quotes from Rilke’s novel. The page numbers refer to the original text. After Laura Perls’s quote from Rilke on p. 98, she quotes T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker.”

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75) “Die Zeit der anderen Auslegung wird anbrechen, und es wird kein Wort auf dem anderen bleiben, und jeder Sinn wird wie Wolken sich auflösen und wie Wasser niedergehen. Bei aller Furcht bin ich schließlich doch wie einer, der vor etwas Großem steht, und ich erinnere mich, daß es früher oft ähnlich in mir war, eh ich zu schreiben begann. Aber diesmal werde ich geschrieben werden. Ich bin der Eindruck, der sich verwandeln wird.” 106) “Mein Gott, wenn etwas davon sich teilen ließe. Aber wäre es dann, wäre es dann? Nein, es ist nur um den Preis des Alleinseins.” 177) “Vielleicht versäumte sie über diesem eingezogenen ländlichen Leben . . . 99 ein anderes, glänzendes: ihr natürliches. Es ist schwer zu sagen, ob sie es betrauerte. Vielleicht verachtete sie es dafür, daß es nicht gekommen war, daß es die Gelegenheit verfehlt hatte, mit Geschick und Talent gelebt worden zu sein.” 183) “Ich, der ich schon als Kind der Musik gegenüber so mißtrauisch war (nicht, weil sie mich stärker als alles forthob aus mir, sondern, weil ich gemerkt hatte, daß sie mich nicht wieder dort ablegte, wo sie mich gefunden hatte, sondern tiefer, irgendwo ganz ins Unfertige hinein).” II. 1) “Die Gefahr ist sicherer geworden als die Sicherheit.” 7) Frauen: “Es ist, als hätten sie im Voraus die Worte vernichtet, mit denen man sie fassen könnte.” Männer: “Könnten wir nicht versuchen, uns ein wenig zu entwickeln, und unseren Anteil Arbeit in der Liebe langsam auf uns nehmen nach und nach? Man hat uns alle ihre Mühsal erspart, und so ist sie uns unter die Zerstreuungen geglitten, wie in eines Kindes Spiellade manchmal ein Stück echter Spitze fällt und freut und nicht mehr freut und endlich daliegt unter Zerbrochenem und Auseinandergenommenem, schlechter als alles. Wir sind verdorben vom leichten Genuß wie alle Dilettanten und stehen im Geruch der Meisterschaft.” 17) “Sie hatte ein gutgeordnetes Gesicht, in dem sich das Einsehen von Zeit zu Zeit erneute, als sähe sie beständig etwas ein.” 24) “Schlaf war etwas, das mit einem stieg, und von Zeit zu Zeit hatte man die Augen offen und lag auf einer neuen Oberfläche, die noch lange nicht die oberste war.” 31) “Er hätte gut mit einer Wahrheit leben können, . . .100 wenn er allein gewesen wäre. Aber es war keine Kleinigkeit, allein zu sein mit einer 99

Omission. Omission: dieser Mensch.

100

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solchen. Und er war nicht so geschmacklos, die Leute einzuladen, daß sie ihn bei seiner Wahrheit besuchten; die sollte nicht ins Gerede kommen: dazu war er viel zu sehr Orientale. ‘Adieu, Madame,’ sagte er ihr wahrheitsgemäß, ‘auf ein anderes Mal. Vielleicht ist man in 1000 Jahren etwas kräftiger und ungestörter. Ihre Schönheit ist ja doch erst im Werden, Madame.’” 36) “Seine Züge waren aufgeräumt wie die Möbel eines Fremdenzimmers, aus dem jemand abgereist war. Mir war zumute, als hätte ich ihn schon öfter tot gesehen: so gut kannte ich das alles.” 39) “Nein, nein, vorstellen kann man sich nichts auf der Welt, nicht das Geringste. Es ist alles aus so viel einzigen Einzelheiten zusammengesetzt, die sich nicht absehen lassen. Im Einbilden geht man über sie weg und merkt nicht, daß sie fehlen, schnell wie man ist. Die Wirklichkeiten aber sind langsam und unbeschreiblich ausführlich.” 43) “Auch die Kindheit würde also gewissermaßen noch zu leisten sein, wenn man sie nicht für immer verloren geben wollte. Und während ich begriff, wie ich sie verlor, empfand ich zugleich, daß ich nie etwas anderes haben würde, mich darauf zu berufen.” 52) “Da ich ein Knabe war, schlugen sie mich ins Gesicht und sagten mir, daß ich feige sei. Das war, weil ich mich noch schlecht fürchtete. Aber seitdem habe ich mich fürchten gelernt mit der wirklichen Furcht, die nur zunimmt, wenn die Kraft zunimmt, die sie erzeugt. Wir haben keine Vorstellung von dieser Kraft, außer in unserer Furcht. Denn so ganz unbegreiflich ist sie, so völlig gegen uns, daß unser Gehirn sich zersetzt an der Stelle, wo wir uns anstrengen, sie zu denken. Und dennoch, seit einer Weile glaube ich, daß es unsere Kraft ist, alle unsere Kraft, die noch zu stark ist für uns. Es ist wahr, wir kennen sie nicht, aber ist es nicht gerade unser Eigenstes, wovon wir am wenigsten wissen? Manchmal denke ich mir, wie der Himmel entstanden ist und der Tod: dadurch, daß wir unser Kostbarstes von uns fortgerückt haben, weil noch so viel anderes zu tun war vorher und weil es bei uns Beschäftigten nicht in Sicherheit war. Nun sind Zeiten darüber vergangen, und wir haben uns an Geringeres gewöhnt. Wir erkennen unser Eigentum nicht mehr und entsetzen uns vor seiner äußersten Großheit.” 66) “Als ob ich nicht gewußt hätte, daß alle unsere Einsichten nachträglich sind, Abschlüsse, nichts weiter. Gleich dahinter fängt eine neue Seite an mit etwas ganz anderem, ohne Übertrag.” 74) “Man kann sich mit Leichtigkeit ein beliebiges Zimmer vorstellen, und oft stimmt es dann ungefähr. Nur das Zimmer, das man neben sich hat, ist immer ganz anders, als man es sich denkt.” 75–78) Büchsendeckel!!

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79) “Es gab Zeiten, da ich diese Bilder für veraltet hielt. Nicht, als ob ich an ihnen zweifelte. Ich konnte mir denken, daß dies den Heiligen geschah, damals, den eifernden Voreiligen, die gleich mit Gott anfangen wollten um jeden Preis. Wir muten uns dies nicht mehr zu. Wir ahnen, daß er zu schwer ist für uns, daß wir ihn hinausschieben müssen, um langsam die lange Arbeit zu tun, die uns von ihm trennt. Nun aber weiß ich, daß diese Arbeit genau so bestritten ist wie das Heiligsein; daß dies da um jeden entsteht, der um ihretwillen einsam ist, wie es sich bildete um die Einsamen Gottes in ihren Höhlen und leeren Herbergen, einst.” 80–81) Der Einsame. 85) “Ich bin nicht abgeneigt zu glauben, die Kraft seiner Verwandlung hätte darin beruht, niemandes Sohn mehr zu sein.” 98) “Ich verließ mich darauf, daß man es merken würde, wenn das Leben gewissermaßen umschlug und nur noch von außen kam, so wie früher von innen. Ich bildete mir ein, es würde dann deutlich und eindeutig sein und gar nicht mißzuverstehen. Durchaus nicht einfach, im Gegenteil recht anspruchsvoll, verwickelt und schwer meinetwegen, aber immerhin sichtbar. Das eigentümlich Unbegrenzte der Kindheit, das Unverhältnismäßige, das Nie-recht-Absehbare, das würde dann überstanden sein. Es war freilich nicht einzusehen, wieso. Im Grunde nahm es immer noch zu und schloß sich auf allen Seiten, und je mehr man hinaus sah, desto mehr Inneres rührte man in sich auf: Gott weiß, wo es herkam. Aber wahrscheinlich wuchs es zu einem Äußersten an und brach dann mit einem Schlage ab. Es war leicht zu beobachten, daß die Erwachsenen sehr wenig davon beunruhigt wurden; sie gingen herum und urteilten und handelten, und wenn sie je in Schwierigkeiten waren, so lag das an äußeren Verhältnissen.” Vgl.101 Home is where one starts from As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. T.S. Eliot (East Coker)102

101

Vgl. is German for cf., i.e. compare. Laura is comparing Rilke with T. S. Eliot here. 102 The second poem in T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets; http://oedipa.tripod.com/eliot-2.html; February 9, 2015.

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100) “Dort waren rasche, unerwartete Erfahrungen an mich herangekommen, und es war deutlich zu sehen, daß sie mich wie einen Erwachsenen behandelten. Es waren lebensgroße Erfahrungen, die sich so schwer machten, wie sie waren. In demselben Maße aber, als ich ihre Wirklichkeit begriff, gingen mir auch für die unendliche Realität meines Kindseins die Augen auf. Ich wußte, daß es nicht aufhören würde, so wenig wie das andere erst begann.” 102) “Mit jeder Zeile brach man die Welt an. Vor den Büchern war sie heil und vielleicht wieder ganz dahinter.” 104) “. . . neue, ausgeruhte Stunden, in denen überall etwas frohes Unüberlegtes geschieht . . .”103 “Da gibt es im Garten keine Hauptsache; alles ist überall, und man müßte in allem sein, um nichts zu versäumen.” Vgl. Mörike: “O flaumenleichte Zeit der dunklen Frühe.”104 111) “Immer übertrifft die Liebende den Geliebten, weil das Leben größer ist als das Schicksal.” 120) “Sie sind nie sehr hoch von einer Hoffnung gefallen, so sind sie nicht zerbrochen; aber abgeschlagen sind sie und schon dem Leben zu schlecht.” 163) “In ihrem gewöhnlichen Dasein verwechseln sie beständig das Außerordentliche mit dem Verbotenen, so daß die Erwartung des Wunderbaren, die sie sich nun gestatten, als ein grober, ausschweifender Ausdruck in ihre Gesichter tritt. Was ihnen zu Hause nur momentan in Konzerten passiert oder wenn sie mit einem Roman allein sind, das tragen sie unter diesen schmeichelnden Verhältnissen als berechtigten Zustand zur Schau. Wie sie, ganz unvorbereitet, keine Gefahr begreifend, von den fast tödlichen Geständnissen der Musik sich anreizen lassen wie von körperlichen Indiskretionen, so überliefern sie sich, ohne die Existenz Venedigs im geringsten zu bewältigen, der lohnenden Ohnmacht der Gondeln.” 171) “. . . konnte ihr wahrhaftiges Herz sich darüber täuschen, daß Gott nur eine Richtung der Liebe ist, kein Liebesgegenstand? Wußte sie nicht, daß keine Gegenliebe von ihm zu fürchten war?” 173) “Geschichte des verlorenen Sohnes: die Legende dessen, der nicht geliebt werden wollte. 176) “Und den Rest tat das Haus. Man mußte nur eintreten in seinen vollen Geruch, schon war das Meiste entschieden. Kleinigkeiten konnten

103

Omission. Eduard Friedrich Mörike, born in 1804 and died in 1875, was a German poet and Protestant pastor.

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sich noch ändern; im ganzen war man schon der, für den sie einen hier hielten.” 186) “Er war jetzt furchtbar schwer zu lieben, und er fühlte, daß nur Einer dazu imstande sei. Der aber wollte noch nicht.” *** Julian Green: Memories of Happy Days105 14): “I have often made rigorous efforts to recall the first sentence out of the Bible which I was able to understand, but all in vain. Yet I still hope that, as I grow older and my memory goes back further, I shall find it gleaming in the dark.” 23): “It is sad to reflect that the noise of city streets, annoying as it may be to some, dies down in time and stops for ever, leaving no memory in anyone’s mind. We can only very vaguely imagine what the main street of Athens sounded like under the government of Pericles, or the Forum when Tiberius reigned, or the Place de Grève in medieval Paris. Sometimes a song brings me an echo of what was heard, a few lines by Villon or some street cry which has been preserved by tradition, and that is all. I hope the means at our disposal in the present time will inspire someone with the desire to record the voice of Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, in order that future generations may form a distinct idea of what we heard in our day.” ***

105

Julian Green, born in 1900 to American parents in Paris, died 1998 in Paris, was an American writer who wrote in English and French. Laura Perls’s quotes are from p. 14 and p. 23 of Julian Green, Memories of Happy Days (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1942).

CHAPTER III MAGIC MIRROR, POEM, DATED 1946 Magic Mirror (In Memory of Hanns L. Katz) And when the voices are silent and the faces gone, The mirror remains: Placed at multiple angles, Incredibly curved to frame the radiant reflection Of incandescent quintessence in the frailest Transparent purity of glass-balls, the glaring Majestic wantonness of tulips, the tacit Righteousness of tables; gathering In focal embrace the mortal contradictions In final, irrefutable reconciliation. But a man is pure as glass—and frail; wanton And vain as tulips—and fading; righteous As wood—and brittle; and the eternal divider Scorns and destroys from within the delicate interpolations. Under the weight of guilt and incompatible insight A man breaks. Under the mounting burden of images The mirror bends. And though the voice is silent And the hands cold, the magic image endures. Laura Perls, 1946

CHAPTER IV HAVING A BATH, SHORT STORY, DATED 1947

From the shower above the bath a cold drop slapped him on the shoulder and made him shudder. He huddled deeper into the warm water, his arms and legs floating away from him like sea-weed from a wreck—shapeless bloated tentacles melting into the luminous greasy foam of the soapy bathwater. Plop! Down dripped another drop, this time piercing the soapy surface between his legs, sending little dirt-edged ripples against his knees and up his stomach. He did not feel it on his skin; he looked down his water-distorted body with far-away eyes, as if from outside himself. He was standing, a hard-legged skinny schoolboy, on the shore of the lake. The dark wood-covered mountains on both sides of the water sloped away out of view, forming between them a steep rocky gorge from which a scanty waterfall gushed out into the lake. If there was no rain for a longish period, there was no waterfall; if there was a cloud-burst, torrential cataracts cascaded down the rocks, transforming the cool quiet mountainpool into a roaring cauldron. But just now there was only a steady trickle that did not disturb the smooth green surface. Impatient and expectant, the boy picked up a flat stone and hurled it across the placid plane of water. Plop! Where the stone had broken the shimmering mirror, there was a little whirlpool. Tense with excitement, the boy watched the rings of pine needle-edged ripples spread over the lake, and when the rollers had flattened out before they could reach the mossy banks, he gave a sigh of strange relief. Heavy with the burden of the adamantine millstone he returned, a round-shouldered man, to the green-shored lake. After years of dissipation and disappointment, re-visiting the witnesses of former forgiveness, he was sure to find salvation. He would drop the stone into the water, where it was deepest, and the sympathy of the lake would absolve him. Hopefully he looked around for familiar features in the landscape. Yes, there still were the same tall trees and thorny undergrowth climbing up the steep incline of the mountain; the same grotesque rock-formations still blocking

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the narrow entrance to the gorge. But the beautiful clear pool, the core of the landscape of the past, had shrunk to a shallow weed-infested puddle, and the waterfall, the lullaby of the forest, was silent; before reaching the gorge, the stream had been dammed up and diverted to serve some obscure industrial purpose. Now and again a little moisture oozed out between the deserted stones, gathered into an unintentional drop and fell plop! into the murky pool below, stirring up the mud and dirtying what was left of the lake. Wearily lugging his load, the man dragged himself around the dry crumbling banks of the pond, and in final exhaustion and despair he dumped his burden at the foot of the former waterfall, alongside all the other abandoned ballast erratically discarded by anyone at any time, leaving another stumbling block on the path of another wanderer swaying under the intolerable weigh of another millstone. When at last he turned to go, his eyes were arrested by a wooden signboard that was nailed against a tree-trunk, so deeply in the shade of the glade that he could not see it before. With an effort he deciphered the rainwashed letters on the withered wood: “To work the waterfall, pull the chain.” Unbelieving and bewildered, he looked up and discovered above the board, protected by a wooden encasement, a short chain to the one end of which a china-handle was attached, to the other—through a hole in the enclosure—a long rope that led along an iron railing up the gorge. On top of the plateau it set in motion some kind of sluice-contraption, releasing from the dammed-up original stream a few buckets-full of water, which spilled with a feeble splash plop! plop! over the moss-covered rocks and jerked up the mud in the puddle into an unimpressive mess. So the authorities, perturbed apparently by the diminished attractiveness of the famous beauty-spot, had taken steps to make amends for their hasty utilitarian decision. But the perfunctory performance of the waterfall-act did not improve matters at all; if anything, the rope-trick proved its own absurdity. The magnificent scene was permanently set, but apart from the short moments when there was an audience that—despite the obvious resistance of circumstances—dared to pull the chain, the stage was empty and unjustified. Somebody had raised the curtain or forgotten to close it. The stage was set, the props in place, the backcloth taut under the painted mountainscenery; but there was no music, no audience, no performance. The puppets were hanging in the cupboard, meaningless pieces of painted wood and tatters, entangled in the nerve-net of un-manipulated dangling strings. The theatre was bankrupt, the puppeteer had disappeared. The puppeteer had joined the army. He wore a uniform but found no comrades. He went into battle but met no enemy. He carried arms but hit

Having a Bath, short story, dated 1947

39

no target. He marched without aim, ate without hunger, slept without being tired. He played a powerless part in a play that had yet to be written; he was strangled by invisible strings pulled by unfeeling fingers. He got exhausted in the rehearsal for a performance that would never take place. Suffering from unrelievable stage-fright, he was rotting with all the other puppets in the cupboard of time, while the eternal drama remained unwritten, un-played, un-seen. Chilled to the bone, he started, almost against his own will, to stand up. He pulled the plug to let the water out. When another drop dripped down from the shower and hit him plop! in the back, it did not even shock him; it was hardly colder than the bath-water. Shivering, he looked at his shriveled hands, his goose-fleshy body, the dirty water swirling around his feet. His legs felt stiff, the bottom of the bath was slippery, and while he was stretching for the rough grayish-white towel, he had to hold on to the edge of the bath. But still, with strange reassurance, he felt that these were his own hands and feet, his own stiffness, his own uncertainty, his own poverty. Clutching the rickety back of a chair, he lifted his blue-veined leg over the bath and put a diffident foot onto the creaking floor. Laura Perls, January 1947

CHAPTER V NOTEBOOK NUMBER 2, DATED 1954–1956; 315 CENTRAL PARK WEST, N.Y., N.Y. 10025

Laura Perls1 315 Central Park West New York 25 2/27/54 My dear Paul,2 I could not go to sleep for a long time after Wednesday night’s session. Not sharing anybody’s pet hostility, I felt more and more embarrassed and too unsupported to take any stand against that avalanche of misunderstanding. However, things have become a little more clarified in the meantime. The difficulty arises from the indiscriminate use of the term “leap.” You use the term as if there was only one type of leap, as if the artistic leap and the social, or more specifically, the therapeutic leap, were of exactly the same structure. I think you make the same mistake there that Schneider made in his equation of the therapeutic and the artistic process, which I pointed out in my review of “The Psychoanalyst and the Artist.”3 ***

1

On the first page Laura Perls noted her name and her address at Central Park West in Manhattan. 2 It is unclear if Laura Perls is referring to Paul Goodman or to Paul Weisz in this letter. 3 Daniel E. Schneider, The Psychoanalyst and the Artist (New York: Farrar Straus, 1950). Laura Perls reviewed this book in her essay: Laura Perls, “The Psychoanalyst and the Critic,” Complex 2 (1950): 41–47.

Chapter V

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3/11/54 B-Minor Mass “Are you playing that again.” “Yes, I want to know it, I want to know every note and every word of it.” “But you are not listening; you were asleep just now.” “Yes. I want to know it in my sleep. I was asleep to everything, but I was awake to the music; there was only the hearing of the music and it. I want to know it in my death. Then I might actually become the music, and somebody might hear me and listen.” *** 7/15/544 It was obvious that the patient was challenging and taunting me. She was making demands, telling me how to handle her, trying to dominate and control the situation. Of course, from her family history it became quite evident that she identified with her bullying father and tried to manipulate me into the role of the submissive, hard-working, despised mother. But during the first few minutes of the first interview I did not have this information and I did not need it. I had only to consult my own reaction to the patient’s behavior, my awareness of being belittled and imposed upon, the feeling of hostility that she provoked in me, to realize the specific pattern that the patient was acting out in this meeting as well as in any other contact situation. For her it was a contest in which she had to get the better, a question of victory or defeat, nearly of life and death. When she is unable to control the situation, she gets confused and anxious and has to withdraw.5 In his first interview the patient stumbled into the room not looking right or left, as if he was wearing blinkers. He sat down at the edge of a chair, literally 4

What would have followed here are Laura Perls’s notes for the original publication. They are nearly identical to the published version. The entire entry in the notebook comprises thirty-six pages, but not all pages are paginated and when they are, the pagination does not follow successively. The actual names of the patients discussed in this entry would not have been revealed had publication permission from The Gestalt Journal Press been granted. These two case examples are such multifaceted and fascinating reflections of psychotherapeutic encounters that I will include a brief quote from each. The entire published version can be found in Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy or in Living at the Boundary. 5 Perls, “Two Instances of Gestalt Therapy,” in Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy, ed. Paul David Pursglove (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper Colophon Books, 1971), 48.

Notebook Number 2

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“on edge,” squirming, saying nothing for several minutes. To my question, “What brings you here?” he clasped his arms tightly, shrugged his shoulders, finally mumbled diffidently, with a faint undertone of irritation and nagging, “I don’t know what I am coming for . . . My wife thinks I should . . . I don’t think it is of any use . . . I don’t know what to say . . . My wife says . . .” etc., etc. (shrug, collapse). I felt somewhat squashed, too, and a little bored. The patient had, at least for the moment, achieved his neurotic aim, he put me off, he bored me with his monotonous wail and his repetitiousness; in fact, he did his best to discourage me from becoming interested. Obviously he regarded the whole situation as a nuisance and wanted to be left alone. But in presenting this entirely negative front, he also exposed in detail the techniques which supported his withdrawal pattern and thus, quite unintentionally, provided me with exactly what he so desperately tried to withhold: the very “handle” by which he could be reached. Again, as in the case of Claudia, it was pointed out to the patient that his way of asking for assistance was not too well designed for actually obtaining it, and that if anything, it watered down whatever interest one might develop in doing anything for him.6

*** Provincetown Problem7 Am I alone, then, inarticulate? Gulls have their cry, their fall-forecasting flight, Sea—its returning roar, while desperate, Pen-poised among the pebbles, I cannot write! *** 8/20 I have taken only this paper to the beach, for—as long as I have anything to read—I will not write. At one o’clock last night—after about one hour’s sleep—I woke up and had the clearest idea about “Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac.” This morning it is all forgotten, like a dream. I have been mulling around this for the last three weeks, ever since I started Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” and realized—with a shock— that I had solved what S. K. calls the “insoluble paradox of Abraham” just

6 7

Ibid., 56–57. Above this poem on the same page, a rough draft was deleted.

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in two sentences on the Sacrifice in my essay on “Give and Take.”8 I then had no idea of what I was letting myself in for, and Paul,9 who should have known, did not realize it either. *** Fire Escape10 [. . .] a tight embrace, where to the accompaniment of the radio the lodger was reading the last pages of a crime story and the dentist—hand over the definitely last extension of last year’s income tax report—was precisely and articulately mumbling to himself, where Mrs. Kowalski was bitchily sulking and Mr. Kowalski trumpeting the last triumphant sounds of his victory song. 11 The smoke gradually pervaded the whole house. Mrs. Anderson, exhausted from shivering with disappointment and loneliness, was coughing weakly beyond caring whether she choked with misery or smoke.12 But—as a hanged man in his final agony explodes in a desperate orgasm—so Mrs. Anderson in her last terrible distress13 drew comfort and blissful pleasure from her very suffering.14 It was the lot of the exalted to die alone. The assassins were lurking in every corner. They kept coming at her in the dark, silently, inaudibly closer, closer. There! She gasped for air. This was the first stab. And there came another one, and another one, right through the heart. Mrs. Anderson succumbed happily, reconciled to the glorious infamy of dying. It was the fitting death of a queen. Her lodger, Mr. McIntosh, still entangled in the nearly resolved intricacies of his crime story, dimly perceived an additional clue, which did not tie in with the rest and left him disagreeably at a loose end. Only after a prolonged fit of coughing could he discriminate that the acrid smell was filling his own 8

Laura Perls, “Notes on the Psychology of Give and Take,” Complex 9 (1953): 24–30, reprinted in Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy, ed. Paul David Pursglove, (New York: Harper Colophon, 1968) 118–128. 9 Paul Goodman or Paul Weisz? 10 In order to put the following short story, titled “Fire Escape,” into proper form, I followed Laura Perls’s Roman numerals I.–III. and entered the inserts marked 1. and 2. that I found several pages after the ending, judging from the context and flow of the narrative. The first paragraph of “Fire Escape” begins mid-sentence and may be a fragment. Laura Perls’s pagination of this entry is pp. 37–47. 11 Deleted: They all started coughing about the same time. 12 Deleted: Nobody else cared, either. 13 Corrected from: suffering. 14 Corrected from: loneliness and pain.

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room and not part of the story. On the second floor there was no move, no sound, no thought. Only the deep dreamless soft-breathing sleep of weary children and spent lovers. Sleep make deeper and sweeter by the bitter smell of smoke that gradually filled the rooms. Downstairs the dentist, tense with the strain of his calculations, was clearing his throat. “This business is choking me,” he thought jocularly, chuckling and coughing, more impressed by his own sense of humor than incommodated by the smoke. In their own room, the girls were quarreling pedantically, insinuatingly, cruelly, the older one shyly 15 abusive, the little one sarcastically disparaging. They sputtered their utter disgust with each other at each other, righteously supported by the smoky odor in their mutual condemnation of their hygienic habits. “You don’t wash!” hissed the Madonna-face; “You make me sick! Ugh!” She coughed and pretended to puke. “You make me sick!” the younger one mimicked, 16 precisely, articulately sneering, clandestinely clearing her throat. Gingerly she sniffed around her sister’s hair lotion and nail polish bottles. The smell of acetone mixed with the whiffs of smoke made her choke. “You think you are clean?” she suddenly barked, unable any longer to control her cough and with it her temper. “This stuff makes me sick. No, thank you! (cough, cough) I’ll have my original stink.” She pushed the bottle away. It fell on the floor, splintering into a thousand pieces. The room stank infernally. Coughing violently, the girls whacked and kicked each other. The neighbor injured his bare feet on glass splinters and screamed. Mrs. Kowalski, awakened from her radio-rêverie by the rumpus upstairs, vaguely but immediately associated the acrid stench that pervaded the room with the girls’ reprehensible activities. Incensed, she got up from her rocking chair, took a long broom handle and started hitting the ceiling at the same time as the dentist, spluttering distress and disapproval, burst into the girls’ room and Mr. McIntosh—finally convinced of the reality of the smoke-filled atmosphere by his own fits of coughing—crossed the hallway and opened Mrs. Anderson’s door without even knocking.17 “Mrs. A.! Mrs. A.!” No answer. He groped his way to the bed, gripped her thin arms in the vain effort to shake her awake. But Mrs. Anderson had missed this lucky opportunity to experience herself18 as the sleepy beauty being awakened by her prince charming.19 Reality is a relentless killer,—and it was not the small reality of the smoke, either. 15

Corrected from: hysterically. Several words deleted. 17 In left margin several nearly illegible sentences follow. 18 Deletion. 19 Deletion. 16

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Around the silent center of the second floor, the house was in uproar. Waves of noise and smoke were spilling over into the street. The neighbors were hanging out of their windows, waiting hopefully, greedily,20 for the imminent disaster, gleefully contributing to the turmoil their own noisy confusion. The contented [?]21 gent was talking rapidly back into the crowd waving his pudgy hands; he felt festively excited, like at a county fair. His lean chess partner called the fire department. One could hear already the whine of the sirens as the first fire truck rumbled out of the station several blocks away. The boy on the street woke up from his trance. He had been watching, smelling, listening as if the house was a stage, the events: an incomprehensible, mystical play, the noise: a dead foreign language, the smell: of brimstone and hellfire across centuries of unbelief. Shocked into actuality by the first siren sound, he discovered immediately that there was neither light nor sound behind the windows of the second floor. For an instant his heart nearly stopped beating, legs felt weak, hands clammy, teeth chattering. He started to breathe deliberately, like a swimmer before taking a high dive. He ran in long strides across the street and bawling “Mama! Nina!” plunged into the smoke-filled staircase. He bumped into Mr. McIntosh who came stumbling downstairs shaking and choking with smoke and fright.22 “Get the old lady!” the boy barked, pushing past him. “No use,” croaked Mr. McIntosh, nearly voiceless, “she is dead.” The boy was half-way upstairs before he grasped23 what he had heard. Choking and sweating, he took the last four steps in one frantic leap and, breathlessly, staggered into the children’s room. The children were still asleep, but restless now, moaning and coughing. “Get up, you!” the boy hollered. “Do you hear me? Get up!”24 He rattled the door handle. The room was locked from inside. Outside in the street the sirens were shrieking. The boy banged the brittle wood and cork and threw his whole weight against the door. The ramshackle lock gave way easily and he fell into the room, colliding with the window wiper who, unsmilingly now and sleepily swearing, was struggling into his pants. Unseeing, unfeeling, the boy walked through [. . .]25 making straight for the bed where his mother was still half-asleep, spitefully resisting 20

Corrected from: gleefully. Illegible word, possibly: contented. 22 Corrected from: shock. 23 Corrected from: realized. 24 Several illegible words. 25 Illegible word. 21

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attempts to waken her. “Ma, wake up!” They clutched her arm and shook her. The man grabbed her from the other side and yanked her upright. She struggled, swore and coughed. The man threw a coat over her shoulders. “Let’s get out of here. I get the kids. Shut up.” He was already out. The boy followed, pulling the dazed woman after him. In their room the kids were crying. Nina was standing in the door, rubbing her eyes, howling and choking. The woman suddenly came awake. “You take her,” she said, roughly pushing him towards the little girl. Quickly and carefully she went around the room, picking up pieces of clothing and blankets for the children. Outside the window, on the fire escape, she found the boy waiting for her. Without a word, he took the blankets26 and helped her climb over the sill. She stood still for an instant, catching her breath. The night air was cool and sharp in her nostrils. She sniffed. The smell of smoke outside was only faint. “Where is the fire?” Fire? What fire?! The boy scoffed, “You call that a fire?” pointing downward, where the firemen had just laid a long hose into the basement and were running about with hooks and axes. “Did you . . .?” She looked at him insinuating, suspiciously.27 He shook his head28 and she sighed with relief, basking in his innocence while a regretful grin spread over his face. On the lower floor, they found the younger children being held by the Paladino girls who, leaning against each other, were sitting on the steps of the fire escape. The dentist and the window wiper were working together, silently, efficiently, lowering the ladder down to street level. The boy bypassed the huddled forms on the steps, swinging himself over the banister right onto the first floor platform to help the men with the ladder. The girls took no notice of him; their eyes were on the turmoil in the street, their ears full of shouting, clanking, water-gushing, child-crying noises. The boy took his little sister from the arms of the Madonna, unrecognizing, hastily, business-like. When they reached the street, they were immediately taken in by the old people of the third floor opposite, who were shocked into this particular charitableness by the news of Mrs. Anderson’s death. There the ambulance came screaming around the corner, slushing to the wet street coming to a bell-clanging halt in front of the house. Mr. McIntosh, feeling indispensable and important, reported to the police, directed the attendants to the third floor. While the rest of the tenants were having coffee and 26

Deleted: from her. Deleted: reproachfully. 28 Deleted: emphatically. 27

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doughnuts across the street, the regal remains of Mrs. Anderson descended in lonely splendor down the front steps of her castle, carried by two uniformed footmen, with Mr. McIntosh as master of ceremonies under the protection of a special police guard who held back the crowds in the street. After the ambulance had left, the firemen went through the whole building, opening doors and windows. They pulled their long hose in, climbed on their wagons and clanked away. They had not had much work. When they had arrived, Mrs. Kowalski, furiously competent as usual, had already thrown a few buckets of water over the burning rubbish (dousing her husband in the process), leaving to the firemen only the minor task to make sure that everything was under control. There was no doubt that they had done their duty. The cellar was flooded, the coal drenched, the wood soaked. Mr. Kowalski, wet and shivering, sober and heavy-headed,29 stood in front of the damp furnace staring furiously, helplessly, dull-eyed into the black hole. It was all over. There was no fire now and there was no escape. *** The Importance of Being Flippant (Or the Ways of the World, by Mr. Congreve.)30 ȋĮȡĮįİ Charity. Grace under stress = courage (Hemingway). Grössenwahn.31 Museum story? Frick? Wall: Pope, Holbein? Jae? Going to the opera? Contrapuntal story to:32 Tristan? or Pelléas? Fidelio? Music—deafness (Beethoven). Young lovers—lonely old man. The old man, having sat through the opera and his alleged memories, wakes up—a young musician prisoner about to be executed for murder of his sweetheart’s suitor. Lost past = trumpets of Leonore III 33 (or Hirtenknabe?), musical motions entwined with “memories.” Grace under stress. 29

Corrected from: muddle-. Several lines deleted. 31 German for: delusions of grandeur. 32 Deleted: Tales of Hoffman? Rosenkavalier? Meistersinger? 33 Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3. 30

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*** 12/27/54 Sitting with a pencil in my hand, “pen poised,” listening to a late Beethoven quartet move then to my own voices. The fire escape is finished, there is no fire now, and there is no escape. Since weeks I feel on the verge of writing, without any definite plot, intention or form in mind. Things don’t crystallize; as soon as I get near the possibility of writing, I get paralyzed. I feel like David Anderson, dawdling in a state of suspended animation. I have a visual image of a dairy restaurant in PieterMaritzburg,34 where we went to eat when we were driving through on our way to Durban. This happens frequently that I have a sudden, apparently quite unconnected image of landscape or interior of long ago. I realize that I am accounting for and explaining the image rather than have it and develop it. I have another image now of the St. Lucia river, with the little English editor of the Express (Donning??) sitting next to me in the back and trying to make love. The dairy restaurant is a tame place where one takes the children when one is travelling with the family. The jungle is the wilderness of animals and human relations. But do I want to write a Victorian story of comfort and sacrifice? *** 12/28 I wrote the foregoing only last night, and already I cannot read any more, much less understand, the last sentence. Now I have an image of Tilly and Max Cahn35 at the Mozart Festival in Würzburg. Of course I don’t have to write the dairy-jungle story. I am living it, every day of my life. It isn’t always that neatly separated, either. ***

34 35

Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Tilly Cahn, née Schulze, 1892–1980; Max Ludwig Cahn, 1889–1967.

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12/29 Max and Tilly, the Musterehepaar.36 All the good husbands of my somewhat older and respected women friends tried to make love to me. I can’t imagine now why I was usually (with the exception of Max St.) so completely horrified. They were all nice guys. I must have been an awful prig. Now I am quite horrified at that. *** 12/30 There is a poem hidden here somewhere. I feel so much at a loss, cannot make head or tail out of all these images, memories, associations unless it is revealed somehow in and through a poem. Now I have another memory of Bruno F., the only husband of an older woman friend who did not attempt anything with me but, believing to have caught me in the act with someone else (it was not true that time, either!), kicked me out of his house. Long before this, however, I hated and despised him, without realizing why. Toward Hugh, on the other hand, who certainly tried, I felt affectionate and amused. Of course, then I was older and realized that one cannot deprive anyone else of love, only oneself. I feel rather underprivileged nowadays, but I don’t know how I am depriving myself. Perhaps by not recognizing it sufficiently where it really is: in the children, and particularly in the little ones. When Alison37 says “Ma, I love you so much, nobody loves you that much!” I know it is true. Yet she does not love me, she loves my love. The loves I loved and didn’t love. The lines I wrote and didn’t write. The life I lived and didn’t live:38 Now it is not, but is. What was, is not, what wasn’t, is. Past pleasure, unused, is present void. Past pleasure, found, is present loss. What is was not, but was. What was is not, but is. What wasn’t is, what was is not. 36

German for: ideal couple. Laura Perls’s grandchild, i.e. Renate Perls’s older daughter. 38 Deleted: It is and is not, now. 37

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Past anguish leaves the broken heart. Non-anguish leaves an empty heart. *** Dirge39 Who love me now, I do not love, Who once I loved, don’t love me now. The life I lived, the loves I loved40 Nor love nor life are now. What was is not, what wasn’t is: Past pleasure, missed, is present void. Past pleasure, found, is present loss. What is was not, but was. What wasn’t is, what was is not: Past anguish leaves a broken heart. Non-anguish leaves an empty heart. What was is not, but is. But the loves I loved and didn’t love, The lines I wrote and didn’t write, The life I lived and didn’t live: *** 1/2/5541 Now it is, but is no more. ***

39 The following poem, “Dirge,” seems to be the finished version of the draft on the previous page of Notebook Number 2. 40 Deleted: Are living, not alive, They will not live nor die. 41 The corner of this page is torn off. Only 2/55 is legible, but since 1/8/55 follows on the next page, I assume that the date is 1/2/55, i.e. January 2, 1955.

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1/8/55 Miami Beach This is nearly a nonsense poem, and reading it over again, I find it very moving and imagine Paul42 reading it and breaking into tears. Why Paul? Isn’t it enough that it makes me cry? My grandmother was dark and beautiful [and] laughed a measured laugh, without a smile: “ha—ha—ha.” My grandfather looked like a pig, small and stocky, with light pink, revolting skin. He stuffed himself with delicatessen, 43 which he bought and partly prepared himself (there was always a set of condiments and salad oils on the dinner table), and when the girl tried to change his plate for the next course, he said: “Don’t rush me!”44 and pushed her leg under the table. *** 1/31/55 The first toilet in the ladies lounge was closed and apparently out of order. I was in rather a hurry, quickly pushed on the next door, one which opened easily.45 The woman was sitting on the toilet seat fully dressed, apparently not using it for its more customary purpose,46 but as a kind of retreat. She may have been drunk, but I could not be sure, talking to herself and not taking any notice of me. I hastily closed the door again, mumbled “Pardon me,” and waited in the washroom for one of the cubicles to become empty. After a few moments the woman came shambling out. She looked at me, half belligerently, half apologetically. “I was just thinking,” she said, “nothing wrong with that, is there?” She thrust her chin out in a weak challenge. “I was only thinking.” ***

42

Most likely Paul Goodman. Deleted: excellent food. 44 Corrected from: What are you hurrying me for? 45 Writing in the margin illegible. 46 Corrected from: obvious destination. 43

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2/24 This incident happened about three weeks ago and it is still with me. It feels like the beginning of a story; but what story? Or rather the end of it; but what is the beginning? I think of a childhood experience of G.’s, that she told with great emotion and crying yesterday morning, something that she has never mentioned in more than five years.47 She kept a diary in a secret code that nobody could decipher. One summer an aunt and young boy cousin were visiting them; she became very pally with the boy and finally showed him two pages of her diary in which she had described (in code) some sex play that they had had together. The next day she missed the two pages from her diary and was sure that the boy had taken it. She searched the suitcase under his bed in the guestroom and, sure enough, found the two pages there. At dinner time the boy accused her in front of the whole family that she had taken something from his suitcase. G. felt outraged. To make it worse, the boy’s mother said: “Billy never tells lies; if he says something, you can be sure it’s true.” She was completely bewildered; her mother did not stand up for her, as Billy’s mother did, but joined in the accusations. Her friend had betrayed her (possibly to save his own skin, but she was not aware of his motives). Nobody would believe her, and anyhow she could not tell them the whole story without incriminating herself in some other way. For a while she took it all silently, but finally she stood up and locked herself in the bathroom,48 yelling and screaming. “I am a liar and a thief, a liar and a thief, a liar and a thief!!!” Is this the beginning of the story?? *** 3/5/55 I remember lots of experiences connected with the john.49 The earliest, I think, is the nursery situation, where all three of us were placed together in the toilet at the same time, I on the “throne,” Lisel50 and Bubi51 on the potty.

47

Deleted: a few days ago. Deleted: exploded. 49 American colloquial: toilet. 50 Laura’s sister, Liselotte, nicknamed Lisel. 51 Laura’s brother, Robert. 48

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I remember pinching plums, from a basket in the passage and eating them in the john; but as I was afraid that the toilet would get stuffed up if I threw the stones52 in the bowl, I hid them behind a water pipe, where they were promptly discovered and I was bawled out. (There seems to be a parallel to the “liar and thief” story; I can’t quite see it yet.) I had a phantasy at the age of eleven or twelve that I would give birth to a child on the toilet, a kind of parthenogenesis, with all the mystical and miraculous aspect about it. I remember when I was a student going to the bathroom together with Emmy (it was in Berlin, we were visiting friends of my father’s called Nasch), and discovering that she was embarrassed and did not like going together. It was also Emmy who always forgot to go to the bathroom before going out and then felt like going and got absolutely frantic when there was no opportunity or she would have to ask. Of course, she was like that all together: pretending to be very free and unconventional, but always losing courage when it came down to brass tacks. I remember the john in the first school I went to, with lots of things written on the walls, but I don’t remember what was written, only faintly some scandal with Frl.53 Bigeleben, the headmistress, about the writing on the wall. I was not involved. I think of my entrance examinations for the “Gymnasium”; 54 I met Prof. Badenheimer in the hallway and he asked me: “How is it going?” But I was so upset and confused, that I understood “Where are you going?” and answered: “Just upstairs, to the bathroom.” I just remember the night when I got scarlet fever. I suddenly had to go to the john, and ran out of my room down a long corridor. I fainted in the hallway and messed myself up. When I came to and found out, I was mortified, but to my surprise nobody was offended or annoyed; they were all very concerned. I don’t know what all these memories have in common, except the locality. “Hocus pocus, malus locus, bonus jocus”: the witch’s spell in “Hänsel and Gretel.” There seems to be something uncanny about all the “locus” memories. They are all not the ordinary everyday experience, which is taken for granted and forgotten, but they all have something unexpected, 52

Plum pits. Frl. is the abbreviation for Fräulein, German for: Miss. 54 Gymnasium is German for: a secondary school for students of higher academic ability. 53

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embarrassment, fright, shame, mistakes, confusion, disappointment (Emmy). Hocus pocus, malus locus, bonus focus for all the insoluble paradoxes. *** 3/14/55 Another toilet memory: My cousin Hertha Janis locked her little threeyear-old son in the bathroom “until he decided to be good.” At first he stamped and bawled, but then became quiet and remained so for a long time, so that she finally became anxious and opened the door.55 She found him in deep concentration leaning over the toilet bowl, having a flotilla of little toilet-paper boats swimming in the water. Another one: A little boy screaming: “I’ll throw you in the john and pull you down!” I always pride myself on going to the john in a jiffy, only when I have to and out after two minutes flat. But what is there to be proud about? Perhaps I should sit there and just think or float little paper boats in the piss. *** Lord, have mercy on us. ȀȖȡȚİ ȑȜİȓıȠȞ Miserere nobis.56 *** 3/19/55 My darling Fritz,— I am writing this while you are in Cleveland. I am not writing a letter, and I am not writing to you. I am writing this for myself mainly, or perhaps only for myself. I don’t know where I stand, or rather where we stand,—if there is still a “we.” There is hardly any evidence of it, now. The tears are already streaming down my face,—I don’t seem to do anything else but cry nowadays, when I am by myself. 55 56

Deleted: to find out what happened to him. Followed by a sketch of a tree.

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I am always by myself, even when I am in the same room with you. Or rather, you are by yourself, and you don’t seem to be aware that I am there. I feel like a cat purring around your feet, but you don’t even pet me as you certainly would with a cat. What has happened to us? I can’t even ask you directly. I cannot ask you anything. I can’t talk to you any more, not for a long time. *** In the vast waste57 Off down-filled hills58 And sagging valleys On creaking springs59 Lonely in a desert bed. A60 merciless light bulb Illuminates the middle aged Bulges and creases In the sulky bulwark Of my worried face. My ship, my body, Dancer over the deep, Conqueror of continents, Oh my Mayflower! The passionate pilgrimage Is ended. A tired freighter arrived At the final Impasse. The anchor is rattling down. Let’s save the pieces. Let’s wait for the final tide. ***

57 Draft of poem on left-hand page; the final version follows on the right-hand page, dated 4/2/55. Corrected from: wasteland. 58 Corrected from: mountains. 59 Deleted: I’m sadly stranded. 60 Corrected from: Under a merciless light bulb.

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4/2/55 In the vast waste61 Of down-filled hills And sagging valleys62 I’m63 stranded64 On a desert couch. A merciless light bulb Illuminates the middle aged Bulges in the sulky Bulkhead of my work-worn65 face. My body, my ship, Dancer over the deep, Conqueror of continents, Oh my Mayflower! Oh my passionate pilgrimage!66 A tired freighter Arrived at the final Impasse. There will not be67 Another tide. Let’s save the pieces.68 *** 4/16/55 I cannot show these last couple of poems to anyone. I feel embarrassed and anticipate in any reader the same kind of shock that my mother must have felt when she discovered my first attempts at writing a novel. These things break out of me like boils: when they open after terrific tension and pain it is a great relief, but they are so bad and ugly and so embarrassing (like farting in public: another childhood memory, about the same period—eight years old—as the novel). Usually, I have such a good skin!

61

Corrected from: wasteland. Deleted: On creaking springs. 63 Deleted: sadly. 64 Deleted: Lonely. 65 Corrected from: worried. 66 Deleted: is ended. 67 Deleted: (the) anchor is rattling down. 68 Deleted: Let’s wait for the final tide. 62

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At the same time where I feel embarrassed and ashamed, I am also aware that there is no female poet who has written anything valid out of and about growing old. On the masculine side there is of course Yeats: “An aging man is but a paltry thing.”69 —An aging woman seems to be quite unspeakable! I want to write: “Unless I lend her my voice,” which sounds unbearably arrogant. Seit wann sind die Kräuter der Liebe Auf den Wunden der Leidenschaft.70 1. For the death of life the growth of passion is wholesome. 2. For the cancer of passion the knife of reason is wholesome. 3. For the wounds of reason the herbs of love are wholesome.71 *** 4/17/55 Tossed on the childish sea of uncharted chances. To make the journey worthwhile, we don’t need to discover America or the Cape of Good Hope, if we learn to build a boat, to heave a sail, to read the sun and stars. Everything has become too easy. Right now I am listening to an extraordinary recoding of Figaro’s Wedding,72 this afternoon I heard a live performance of the Ninth Symphony.73 In my childhood these would have been outstanding and rare events, to be cherished and remembered74 for weeks and months afterwards, even for years, even for a lifetime. Now we take so much for granted, we hardly listen. At this moment it is more important for me to write about this than to listen to the Count Almaviva75 that it could be said of me that Mozart is wasted on me! Shame! We are overfed (fed-up) with everything and the whole world could be fed on what we are throwing away. I was very much aware of this waste, mainly 69

“Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats: “An aged man is but a paltry thing.” 70 German for: “Since when are the herbs of love on the wounds of passion.” Three lines follow, numbered 1, 2, 3, written in reverse order. 71 Deleted: For the death of life the herbs of love are wholesome. 72 Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro. 73 Probably Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. 74 Corrected from: talked about. 75 Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro.

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with regard to food, when we first arrived in America, and for a long time I felt genuinely and rigorously indignant. Now I feel phonily and guiltily resigned. I shall never be a good American! So I might as well listen to Figaro now. *** 4/30 I am listening to The Rite of Spring,76 unwillingly, but compulsively. It is a beautiful performance, quite inescapable, and I find myself writing about it instead of writing—what? I feel the whole last week that I am nearly ready for something, but still have not the slightest idea, for what. I hear again the beat of the drums from the rite, but now it is only background, I am already involved in writing. I am thinking of a South African story, the atmosphere of Magoebaskloof.77 The hotel with the drunken landlady; getting stuck in the swamp; being frightened in the forest and running from a native who was only bird-watching; the bulls, the cows and the revelation: the “farmer in the dell”; the waterfall and the drowning child. The bus stop at the saw mill and the john with buzzing flies. The “stone castles.”78

76

Le Sacre du printemps, a ballet and orchestral work composed by Igor Stravinsky. 77 Magoebaskloof, also called “The Land of the Silver Mist,” is a forested area in northern Drakensberg, South Africa. 78 Renate Perls added the following note to this entry: “Interesting, Ma says ‘the waterfall and the drowning child’—Did she remember it was I who slipped and fell under the waterfall and banged my head so badly on the rocks that I could only just lift my head and cry, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ before I passed out and fell back on the rocks. Somehow, Laura and the others managed to drag me out of the river and lay me on the rocks. Ooh! My poor head. It was a four mile walk back to the hotel in Magoebaskloof. Three of our group went back to get a car to drive me back. My mother and one of the others (who?? Can’t remember—it was sixty-five years ago) stayed with me. Eventually we decided to start walking and were half way back to the hotel when the car finally met us on the road. Obviously I’d had a concussion and wound up with a big ‘egg’ on my head. We needed to get back to Johannesburg (nearly 400 miles away) but had just missed the bus and had to wait two more days for the next one. Magoebaskloof. Beautiful countryside. Voortrekkers [Afrikaans and Dutch for: pioneers] still to be seen. I was glad to get back home.” Renate’s note ends with the word “stroke” in pencil and an arrow toward Laura’s next entry.

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*** 5/9 Now I know what I was ready for: I was ready to burst a blood vessel. I still can’t believe that that is me, having what I believed to be a heart attack. As it appears it was a sudden drastic evidence of high blood pressure (210 after the actual attack as against my normal 130) caused probably by the onset of the Wechseljahre79 plus the hangover of the flu. I was as near the end as I’ll ever be without actually crossing over; and while the preliminary phases and the aftermath were very anxious and uncomfortable and I was very conscious of my responsibility of having to keep alive, for about ten minutes or so I simply didn’t care, I just wanted it to be over, or actually it was over—and somehow I came back. At least I was finally forced to see a doctor, or rather the doctor had to see me. I am under heavy medication (hormones, snake root, sleeping pills) and feel partly very much better, and for stretches still very sick and miserable. The doctor assures me that I am responding very well and should be able to work tomorrow, but I don’t very much feel like working. I am not afraid anymore, but still anxious and rather weak. The realization that I am “unjung und nicht mehr ganz gesund”80 is rather a shock. I am watching the news on television. This afternoon the new Coliseum 81 building collapsed and buried a so far unknown number of workers. I feel sad, but not very upset. I would be more upset certainly if I had not been so close to disaster myself. I nearly feel “so what,” but also guilty that I cannot muster more sympathy. *** 5/14 Getting used to being ill. Work in between. Very little noticeable to my patients. I feel most of the time still very uncomfortable, in spite of very heavy medication. I never had to take any medicine and cannot accept that this walking drugstore is me.

79

German for: menopause. German for: not young and no longer completely healthy. 81 Corrected from Collosseum to Coliseum. The New York Coliseum was a convention center in Manhattan located on Columbus Circle from 1956–2000. During construction in 1955, exhibition space collapsed. The accident killed one construction worker and injured dozens. 80

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Reading a notebook of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 82 His sky is all cockeyed. Golden sequins or bees! He probably never saw an African savanna of locusts. The milky way is a golden swarm of locusts, ready to descend on and devour the living land beneath. Blasphemy is the ultimate praise of God. *** 7/15 Reading Gottfried Benn’s “Artists and Old Age.” He differentiates the two types: the “frühvollendete”83 (Mozart, Schubert, Shelley, Schiller, etc.) as against the wise old men (Goethe, Titian, Leonardo, Matisse, etc.), the more “wholesome” the person, the less urge to create wholeness in the projection into some artistic medium. The tuberculous or very deprived artist (Mozart, Schubert) has his most creative artistic period early, the healthy, whole person, if he is an artist at all, produces his best work late, when he is getting physically weaker or breaking up. The early Beethoven does not go much beyond Mozart and Hayden and develops his very own profundity in his later years. If Goethe had died at forty, he would have been remembered as a gifted, but only minor poet. West-östlicher Divan and Faust II are late works in a very long life. A healthy peasant like Grandma Moses84 starts painting only at the age of seventy-eight. I know of my own creativeness that I want to write only when I don’t feel very well. So I wrote nothing up to the age of forty, and only very little in the last ten years. “The fire escape” I wrote during the last year, when I did not feel very strong and rather harassed. And now, when I have been really very ill and still don’t feel too good, I feel very much like writing; because of the physical imbalance and weakness I could not actually write, but I have never thought that consistently and deeply ever before. I only wish I could get it all out on paper. ***

82

English poet, 1844–1899. German for: early accomplished. 84 Anna Mary Robertson Moses, who was born in 1860 and died in 1961, was a popular American folk artist. 83

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Woodstock Summer 1955 Aug. 5 À propos sitting on the front steps of my cottage, looking into the trees swaying in the wind, hearing the hum of flies and bees and the occasional twitter of a bird: the a-verbal experience is perfectly fine (and I am as happy at the moment as I have not been for a very long time) as far as it goes. But we (e.g. the Gestalt therapists, e.g. Fritz) seem to be in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath by overemphasizing the validity of the a-verbal experience against everything else (verbiage, bullshit, etc.). Culture-snobs in reverse, a bunch of Lady Chatterleys that would make even D. H. Lawrence85 sick. How beastly . . .! *** 8/11 Die Wahrnehmung der größeren Bezüge . . . freundliche Gewalt . . . Die Überzahl der Andersartigen . . .86 *** I had a horrible night, weak and breathless, not fit to live, unready to die. What resistance the body puts up against involution and decay! In spite and with all this easy exhaustibility I am nearly continually sexually excited, frantically looking for (and finding) any kind of satisfaction, however short-lived. The German phrases drifted into my mind when I was overwhelmed by my unreadiness to die. I felt like Mrs. Anderson or Dr. Paladino in “The Fire Escape,” reasoning quite illogically and stubbornly, as if it mattered in the least! This last half sentence seems to show my readiness, while the first half reflects my unreadiness. And so it goes on: mortality = readiness. “Mitten in dem Leben sind wir vom Tod umfangen.”87 But the quest for immortality equals unreadiness; at the same time, it seems to be the 85

D. H. Lawrence, who was born in 1885 and died in 1930, was an English writer. His novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was first published in 1928. 86 German for: The perception of larger frames of reference . . . friendly violence . . . The abundance of diversity . . .

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only way to get ready to die. On top of it all, I am reading George Barker’s88 poems; he says it so much better and more convincingly, so he makes me at once more ready and more unready. I don’t seem to be able to devise my own little immortality. The German phrases sound again very Rilke-ish. I also had a long dream yesterday morning, but can’t remember now at all, except something about horses. I see how the house next door, where the people have moved out this week and the stable (the newest establishment on the property) is empty. Pegasus has gone for good, only a little horsy smell remains, a few hungry bugs, and the possessive voices of some potential buyers who will tear down the stable or make a garage out of it. I have an image of a circus rider on a white horse (Circuskinder, by Tony Schumacher,89 one of my favorite books when I was eight or nine): the girl is young and slim and quick, the horse is old and fat and slow. Now we are in reverse; the rider is old and fat and slow, the horse is forever young and sinewy and fast, forever elusive. A horse, a horse, a kingdom for a horse!90 *** Spanned to the plough or tethered to the chariot91 If victory, the wildly cheering crowds Or sparrows quarreling over droppings in the furrow Nor balm nor qualm are to the thigh-whipped horse, 1) By man’s ambition or his appetite 2) Driven along the avenue of wrath. Oh, Pegasus is a mule! ***

87

German for: in the middle of life we are surrounded by death. George Granville Barker, who was born in 1913 and died in 1991, was an English poet and author. 89 Née Antonie Louise Christiane Marie Sophie von Baur-Breitenfeld, Toni Schumacher, who was born in 1848 and died in 1932, was a German author of children’s books; Cirkuskinder was published in 1907. 90 One line deleted. 91 Preceding this line, Laura deleted: Trotting along the avenues of wrath. 88

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8/26 As I shall not be there to miss myself, Nobody’ll really miss me when I’m gone. *** 8/28 I seem to write the same thing over and over again in different images. Why is it so facetious and superficial? I can’t get hold of a really valid, central image that would be obscure enough to myself that I would have to stay with it and work it out or burst (like f. i.92 the fire escape). *** 8/27 À propos Marcuse’s essay on “Freudian Revisionism” (Dissent):93 purpose of therapy “adjustment to” or “explosion of accepted social structure” two sides of the same coin; as against “marginal living,” “boundary existence,” “lunatic fringe” = “silver lining,” “conformity” c/ 94 “alienation” = 95 confluence96 c/ isolation; boundary97 living = contact.98 p. 23599 Identification of responsibility and guilt. p. 237 Death instinct = aspect of confluence. De-struction = one way of coping with the resistant. p. 238 biological = /cultural = false dichotomy. ***

92

Abbreviation for: for instance. Herbert Marcuse, “The Social Implications of Freudian ‘Revisionism,’” Dissent, June 1955, pp. 221–240. 94 “C/” seems to be used as an abbreviation for “contra” or “versus.” 95 Deleted: c/contact. 96 Deleted: contact. 97 Deleted “marginal.” 98 In the left margin: to make the razor’s edge the platform. 99 Page number of Marcuse’s essay. 93

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8/28 For the last two days I have been waking up every morning with an elaborate dream. I remember now very little, only that the language is always German and that the people100 are of my childhood and youth. One of the key figures in both 101 dreams—why do I want to make it three dreams?—there were only two—is Tante102 Erna. As I remember her, she was of formidable appearance— 103 fat, 104 elegant, very capable as a hostess as well as a business woman, a tremendously concerned, pampering mother and grandmother, but of very little direct influence on me, or so I thought. I disliked her; she was domineering and disparaging and condescending. She had no Bildung105 (as against my mother who was well read and played the piano beautifully), but only practical abilities (business, Bohemian cooking, Handarbeiten.) 106 She had a “bad” reputation, which I found out in my adolescence, of coquetterie and adultery. She meddled and gossiped. If I come to think of it, she did not really have so little influence on my development, in spite of my rejection—or rather, that is probably why I rejected her. But I also introjected her, and if I read over the list I made of her formidable qualities, it reads nearly like a description of myself. I also realize that I had no real respect for my mother, in spite of her artistic and literary interests 107 but felt a lot of contempt for her Weltfremdheit 108 and withdrawal. I always thought that my aunt would have made a much better wife for my father (with whom she had had a liaison in earlier years and I always suspected that Hertha was really his daughter, he was so very concerned about her, and she certainly looked like him). He wanted someone to share and support his worldly, social, and business ambitions. He had for my mother only a kind of abstract respect (for her “Reinheit”109 and “Bildung”) but actually showed more condescension and contemptuous impatience, which I was inclined to share. I associate Tante Erna with some of my most traumatic childhood and adolescent 100

Corrected from: figures. Deleted: all. 102 German for: aunt. 103 Deleted: very. 104 Deleted: very. 105 German for: education, cultivation. 106 German for: handicrafts. 107 Corrected from: gifts. 108 German for: unworldliness. 109 German for: chasteness, purity. 101

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experiences, as well as with some others which would indicate that she must have rather admired or even envied me, and that her usual disparaging attitude may have been a reaction formation to that envy. However, at the time I allowed myself to be affected more by her condescension and meddling than by her admiration. *** 8/29 She used to tell me and everybody who wanted to hear it that, when I was a baby and sat on the pot, I was sliding on it through the long corridor, showing myself off to everybody in every room. She told it with great glee at a time (I was about eight) when I felt so embarrassed about it that I could have sunk into the ground. About the same time I started Dalcroze lessons110 at school and was every enthusiastic and excited about it. One day I came home and told them: “Mr. Burger said, one must not irritate the teacher or anyone else, but one must feel the movement of one’s own body. Tante Erna burst out laughing: “Listen to the little one, how she is talking! One must feeel it, one must feeeeel it! Ha ha ha ha!!!” A couple of years later, her prospective son-in-law Walter R. was killed in the war. We all went over to their apartment; Hertha was invisible, under a nurse’s care; Uncle William sat on a chair in the library, the tears rolling down his face. It was the first time in my life that I saw a man crying and it upset me more than the actual death.111 I flung myself over the desk, howling like a dog. And Tante Erna: “Look at the little one, how she is crying! Lorle, Lorle!” She threw her arms around me and we cried together. When I was about thirteen or fourteen and had—as usual—a very good report for the school term, Tante Erna gave me ten marks,112 apparently as an expression of admiration. But I threw it back at her: “If I need money, I ask my father.” I was very offended and saw only the money (of which I got enough at that time!) and not the recognition.

110

Dalcroze eurhythmics, developed by Swiss composer and music educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, 1865–1950, is a method that teaches musical concepts through movement. 111 Several words deleted. 112 Mark was the German currency at the time.

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A little later, she113 reported to my mother by phone that I was standing for an hour at a street corner talking with Robert Weill, and I was received at home with long tirades about my waning reputation. I thought at the time that she was possibly retaliating, but think now rather that she was trying to take it out on my mother whom she had a lot of (I nearly said “healthy”) contempt for. I was also told by my mother (that was when I was expecting my first child) that she herself was so innocent (read: immature and ignorant) that she had no idea, when she herself was pregnant, where114 the child would come out. She finally asked Tante Erna, who answered bluntly: “Where it gets in.” It seems that the old bawd Tante Erna is re-appearing just in time to save me from becoming as withdrawn and unworldly as my poor mother, whose talents I respected, but whose insipid personality I despised, but with whom I have felt a growing similarity lately. Perhaps Tante Erna saved me before, and I only could not admit it because consciously I shared the feeling of moral and cultural superiority and contempt that my mother (and also my father) had for her. I attributed my own competence, adequacy, and also my sensuality more to the identification with my father. But if I look more closely, I find that he was really split in his sensuality, e.g. very conventional and respectable, at least on the surface, while Tante Erna was quite straightforwardly and delightfully disreputable, but also very respected for her immense practicality and competence. In fact, amongst all the women in the family, she was the only character. Why did it take me fifty years to recognize that? I think it is because I identified (even if I suffered from and rebelled against) so completely with my mother’s (and my father’s apparent) standards. The Dalcroze incident was around the same time when I wrote the “novel” which my mother confiscated, thereby efficiently ending my just budding writing career. My aunt’s “one must feel it!” I interpreted in the same way as an interference in and deprecation of my most cherished emotions and activities. Nor I am rather inclined to see it as a superior and derisive attitude towards my mother and all the “refined” and acceptable techniques of regaining and developing a body feeling that she herself never had lost at all. Tante Erna, I salute you. Ave atque vale.115 *** 113

Deleted: possibly retaliated by. Deleted: and how. 115 Latin for: Hail and farewell. 114

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9/1116 My dear Fritz,— I find I can continue now the letter I started to you a few months ago. After the conversation this morning I realize that I am only bothering you. *** 10/31 Have ideas about writing a play, or rather hardly any idea, but a strong phantasy stimulated by some recent theatre experiences, which seem to be so much more relevant and moving than most other experiences lately. I thought of Biblical material, mainly the story of Noah, on which I started a poem many years ago, with the feeling that nobody yet has treated the Noah theme adequately (comp. Peter Viereck!).117 Have really no idea at all, how to proceed from here. 1) Sintflut118//progressive dissociation 2) Ark//Gestalt119 Take with you all that is worth surviving; take it out of its respective confluential past, into the newly integrating environment of the ark. The ark is kept afloat and directed by what it contains, something of everything. Thus the ark need not land anywhere, but becomes Ararat. Holy number: Forty for the renewal, forty days in the desert walked Moses and the Israelites to the promised land. *** Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, The ark went upon the face of the waters. Christ walked upon the face of the waters. Sending forth the dove//Holy Ghost. *** 116

The entry on this day has been deleted, but is legible and has been included. Peter Viereck was born in 1916 in New York and died in 2006 in Massachusetts. He was an American Pulitzer Prize winner for both poetry and history, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, and a political thinker. 118 German for: the Noachian flood. 119 Deleted: movement. 117

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11/4 Ararat is reached when the ark is perfectly balanced on the water. Complete Gestalt: perfect figure/background formation: Christ walking on the face of the water. God (spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters) = creative indifference. Processes of destruction of the old inadequate Gestalten and renewal and reintegration (redemption). Ejection from Paradise and Deluge 120— Ark. Slavery in Egypt = March through the desert into the Promised Land (forty days); Moses parting the waters. *** And the spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters. Moses-child floating in a basket on the water. And Moses split the waters with his wand. My faltering feet cut unusual ships,121 Shuffle through seas of fallen leaves. Red-squirrel eyes scan the skeletal eaves For scant translucence in the skies. Under the rainbow Noah sailed his ark. *** Where ebb and flood are possibilities Of one vast swell of pregnant chaos, there The cradle rocks. The sea of grass, Vernal wave of wheat. ***

120 121

Deleted: becoming human. Deleted: (ark?)

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2/9/56 I am so completely swamped by ideas and dreams that I cannot decide on anything that I could or wanted to work out. There is still the Noah-MosesChrist business, which I cannot decide whether to go on working into the essay on Myth and Interpretation (where it first came into my head) or to make a poem from it. Then there are hosts of dreams, most of which I have forgotten by now, except the last one, which is dim now in detail, but was clearly a birth dream. I wanted to write it down immediately after waking up, but had no time. Now I feel a strong resistance; I have thought so much about it already and the feeling that it was a wonderful dream has nearly completely vanished, leaving me with a vague apprehension and dread; I don’t want to touch it. I am aware that I write like my schizzy patient B. S., who starts off a sentence very articulately, giving the impression that she knows exactly what she is going to say, but then stops the sentence in the middle, before she has actually said anything that makes sense. Lots of unfinished subjects looking for the abortive predicate. 122 This sounds like a Morgenstern poem: 123 “Ein Glockenton fliegt über Land . . .”—“das macht: er fliegt in falscher Richtung”????124 I don’t know what the right direction is. I think of the elusive Pimpernel.125 *** 3/12 The meaning of life is the glory of God. Why don’t I know what I know?126 *** 122

Predicate. Christian Morgenstern, German author and poet, was born in 1871 in Munich and died of tuberculosis in 1914 in South Tyrol, which was then part of the AustroHungarian Empire. 124 German for: “The sound of a bell flies overland . . .”—“that means: it flies in the wrong direction.” 125 The Scarlet Pimpernel, a novel by Baroness Emma Orczy, Hungarian-born British novelist, who was born in 1865 and died in 1947, is set during the Reign of Terror in France. 126 Deleted: Unfinished. How to write a Symphony. He put down the baton. His hand. 123

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4/29/56 Just finished Tillich’s Love, Power, and Justice.127 It is a very complete elaboration of the ideas I put down in “Notes on the Psychology of Give and Take.”128 *** 7/1/56 As usual, I am obsessed (possessed) by the undifferentiated desire to “write.” I don’t know why I have to make such a to-do about 129 it; it inevitably leads to talking myself out of it. If I could just write!! I am desperately looking for a peg to hang my hat on. Immediately I think of a story around a hat. I remember that we had to wear hats at the “Institute,” the private school I went to as a little girl. It also strikes me that the “fire escape” was partly about a hat, Mrs. Anderson’s, which finally was not worn. If I think of a “peg to hang my hat on,” it is of course a man’s hat and the story would have to be about a man. It also would not be about the usual “Verwechslungen,”130 exchanges (intentional or unintentional), etc. The hat one can’t get rid of . . . A square peg in a round hole . . . Mit dem Hute in der Hand kommt man durch das ganze Land . . .131 Hat = protection against rain, snow. = indication of propriety, one does not arouse suspicion when one goes about with a hat. But what if one keeps the hat on inside? Kästner’s132 “feiner Mann”133 comes to mind. I think of Tilly Cahn’s remark about my “restlessness.”134 Do the Jews keep their caps on to be ever-ready for the next move? In the presence of God one does not have to be “fein”! 127 Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analysis and Ethical Applications (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1954). 128 “Notes on the Psychology of Give and Take” first appeared in Complex 9 (1953): 24–30, reprinted in Recognitions in Gestalt Therapy, ed. Paul David Pursglove (New York: Harper Colophon, 1968), 118–128. 129 Corrected from: out of. 130 German for: mistaken identity. 131 German aphorism, translates roughly to: “If you remember to take off your hat, you can go anywhere,” i.e. “If you remember to be polite, you’ll get places,” reminding children to be polite at all times. 132 Erich Kästner, born in 1899 and died in 1974, was a German author and screenwriter. He was especially famous for his children’s books and poetry. 133 German for: fine man, gentleman. 134 Corrected from: Wurzellosigkeit, German for: rootlessness.

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Hood = protection. Hood(lum) = what one has to protect against. The “man” is a figure like Hoexter135 in the “Romanisches Café”136 in Berlin, or like Max Bodenheim. 137 Degenerate artist, gifted and proud, dope addict or alcoholic. I also think of Jim Agee 138 with his cap, but (luckily) he died before the worst happened to him. And if I think of the kind of story that Jim would have made out of this, I want to give up right here and now. *** 7/3 To wear a hat = to need protection in the presence of man = to be alive. To leave the hat off = to be dead = to be in the permanent presence of God. Now I think of building the story around a peg stand in the Café. Covered with lots of hats, it leaves no peg for another one. The man comes in, keeps his hat on his head, etc. etc. *** 7/7 “No peg to hang my hat on” would be a good title for a story (novel?) about the wandering Jew. Again I have bitten off more than I can chew. Hat (crown) = symbol of Power. King’s hat is always on his head, nobody can wear a hat in the presence of the King; Beggar’s hat is always off, in his hand or on the ground.

135

John Höxter, who was born in1884 in Hannover and died in November 1938 in Berlin, was a German Expressionist and Dadaist writer and artist. He was famous for his literary portraits of Berlin’s bohemian circles. Höxter, who was addicted to morphine, frequented the popular Café des Westens and then the Romanisches Café (Romanesque Café). He committed suicide after the November pogroms. 136 A café bar in the Charlottenburg section of Berlin, built at the end of the 19th century; a popular meeting place for the intelligentsia. 137 Maxwell Bodenheim, who was born in 1892 and died in 1954, was an American novelist and poet, dubbed “King of Greenwich Village Bohemians.” 138 Renate noted that Laura refers to James Agee here. Agee, born in 1909 and died in 1955, was an American author, screenwriter, poet, and film critic.

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Hat = container of Magic; rabbits out of a hat! Last trick: to conjure out of the hat a peg to hang the hat on! Lacht sich einen Ast und setzt sich drauf!139 Looks like a hero’s grave with the steel helmet on the cross.140 No peg to hang my hat on = no time to die. *** 7/18141 Isaac Rosenfeld has hung up his hat. It was a wonderful hat, a “creation” by Monsieur Isaac, its base a blatantly visible yarmulke,142 its brim full of143 pointed feathers and colorful flowers and a fairy veil fluttering in the wake of his bicycle. It looked strong and durable, good to be unfashionable enough for many more years of wear. Was the hat too heavy, was the ride too hectic? Now the hat has worn out its wearer. There it hangs.144 Why is the imagination so wearying? Its brim flopping, the flowers drooping, the feathers broken and blunted, the black velvet skull dull and bare on the peg. Here we stand, equals at last, draped in the shawl of our sorrow, dull black unweighted skull caps on our heads: Yisgadal, ve yiskadash.145 Frosch (Fledermaus)146 tries to hang the hat on the wall without a peg and expects it to stay hung. Why is that always so funny? Yisgadal v'yiskadash shmai raba.147 Gepriesen sei Dein großer Name ewiglich.148

139

The previous sentence, written in left margin, is German for: “Laughs himself a branch and sits on it!” It is a nonsensical saying that implies the impossibility of a situation. 140 In the left margin there is a drawing of a hat on a cross. 141 This is the first draft of the story about Isaac Rosenfeld. 142 Skull cap worn by Jewish men, particularly during prayers. 143 Delete: with. 144 Deleted: waiting. 145 The beginning of Mourner’s Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead, transcribed by Laura Perls. 146 Fledermaus, German for: bat. Die Fledermaus is an operetta written by the composer Johann Strauss; one of the roles in this operetta, Frosch, German for: frog, is that of a jailer. 147 Another version of Laura’s phonetics of the beginning lines of Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. Deleted: So sei du gepriesen und geheiligt dein großer Name in aller Welt. 148 The German translation of the beginning lines of Kaddish: “May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified.” Two words scribbled below this line follow,

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*** A Peg To Hang My Hat On (Requiem for Isaac Rosenfeld) I am looking, looking, looking for a peg to hang my hat on. It is desperately urgent, this time really so, that I find one right away, you understand, immediately, this very moment. Where I am going—I am expected, I hope (or am I afraid?)—I cannot possibly keep this washed-out contraption on my head. I would be taken as part of it and judged accordingly. For all I or anyone knows about me, that might be quite just. It certainly is true. But as I am now due for admission here, you understand, here, at any moment, I’ll make a last attempt to get rid of it. I feel cold. My teeth are chattering, but sweat is dripping down my face, over my eyes. I can barely see. The rim of the hat is sticking to my skin, front and back. I haven’t got much hair left. The sweatband has grown hard with the dirt of the years. It hurts. Where was I? Oh yes. My hat. Or rather, my hats. Life is just one damn hat after another. Large ones, small ones, bold ones, tame ones. Some too big for my head, falling over my ears: The precocious look, precious mask of innocence. Some grown too tight, sitting precariously to one side: the retarded look. The child must have water in his head! Convenient cover-up for resentment and spite. Real beauties, some. Real monstrosities, too. Some like everybody else’s hats. Some only worn by me, for special occasions, admired, envied, ridiculed, pitied, torn to pieces. How original! Magnificent! I would give my last dollar for it! I’ll make one for only ninety-five cents. I would not be seen dead in that! Aaahhhh . . . Oooohhhh . . . Heeheeheeee . . . Ughhh . . .! Baby bonnets, school hats, skull caps, sailor hats, business hats, steel helmets, riding caps, top hats. Straw hats, felt hats, silk hats. Rain hats, sun hats, snow caps. All mine. All me. Where am I? What am I doing here? I am all on edge. So is everybody. Guy on my left, girl on my right. Am I keeping them apart? Let’s remove ourselves. They are getting up, too. Look, they are hanging up their hats. They are easy to hang: his full of holes, hers full of loops. But how did they find a peg in a place that is all hats? Now they have vanished altogether. Their hats, too. But where is the peg?

possibly “amen, amen,” which is the proper response of the congregation to the first line of Kaddish.

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The place looks familiar. Have I been here before? I don’t recognize anybody around. They all look alike. In fact they look very much like me, self-conscious, furtively trying to get rid of their headgear. That should make us kin and comfortable. Less individually shabby, kind of fellow conspirators. We, the compassionate paupers. The gang is all here. But what is the crime? Or the revolution? Looking for a peg to hang one’s hat on. The final pretense, committed in solitary confinement. The atmosphere is competitive, hostile, hedgehoggy, hypocritical. Nobody belongs. I am in their way, they are in mine. We, the have-nots, and ne’er-do-wells, the also-rans, second raters, Johnny-come-latelies, boat-missers, beachcombers, hitchhikers; we, the hare-lip, club-foot and palsy set, have got nothing in common but what we haven’t got or what we want to get rid of. The identical idiotic predicament. But oh, the diversity of cover-ups! What is going on over there? They are crowding around something I cannot see. Everybody tries to look as if they weren’t looking. Just happening to be there, not part of the mob. Just waiting, just passing time. All furtively pushing, necks taut, elbows painfully held in, straining with their whole bodies, limbs shackled. Their hats are floating little boats at anchor on the sea of their innocent, unconcerned faces. Occasionally there is a collision. They cannot help bumping into one another. I am doing it, too. Pardon me, right. Pardon me, left. To hell with you all. The air is vibrating with unscreamed curses, unasked questions, unshoved, unkicked, unstruck motion. I am catching the breeze under my hat, riding on the current—high tension—at a near stand-still. How long will I be able to stand it? I am making progress slowly, gradually getting close. Why do I always lose interest when I get near enough? There wasn’t anything going on, anyhow. Nothing worth putting on one’s hat for. Or taking it off, for that matter. Or even forgetting it. No parade. No accident. No fight. No funeral, either. And no miracle. I would have heard about it by now. People don’t keep that kind of thing under their hat. I am still straining, nearly imperceptibly now, just from habit. Making myself thin, trying to squeeze thru. I am so bored, I am not even looking anymore. What did I come here for, anyway? Oh, yes, my . . . Ouuuch!!! I nearly knocked my hat off. My head is spinning. My nose hurts. I hope it is not bleeding. I have no handkerchief. What did I crash into? It feels like a solid wall, hard, smooth, cold. But I cannot see anything that wasn’t there before. They are still all around me, crowds and crowds of people. But there is a little opening about me now. Small,

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insignificant, not opening on anything. But I am separate. Up against a blank wall, with a bleeding nose. I am putting my hand up to my face. The fellow opposite me puts his hand up, too. I am straightening my hat. The other one does the same. I am wiping the blood off. His face comes clean. His mouth is twitching, I can feel it in my dry lips, up my left cheek. When I pulled faces as a kid, my grandmother used to say: When you hear the clock strike, your face is going to stay like that forever. There she is standing, right next to him, with her prim pretty face that could not smile (the clock must have struck at an awkward moment, pressing her forever into the juvenile pretense of adult seriousness). Her piercing stare, (I am only looking at you!) is fiercely fixed on his now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t half-smile. My mouth is still twitching. Grandma, one does not stare in public! My nose has stopped bleeding. I do not even have a soiled handkerchief to put away. No bruise no scar, nothing to testify even to my failure. Now there is nothing to do but wait for the clock to strike, to fix forever my empty face. I am pulling the hat down over my eyes, so I shall not have to see them looking at me, pitying me, mocking me. Let them laugh at my hat, instead. It is really not such a bad hat, at least compared with most of the old hats I can see and smell all around me. It must have cost a fortune when my father bought it. Nothing is too good for my child! It is still wearable, still stylish, quite dashing in fact, showing its former expensiveness and elegance even through its present shabbiness. Flabby and shiny, worn through in places, it still looks respectable. Nobody is laughing. Oh God, why don’t they? The clock has struck again. The hat is fixed on my head. If I cannot find a peg to hang it up, why don’t I just drop it on the ground? Something always happens at the drop of a hat. Get lost, you! Blow! Aaahhhh! But how can I throw away, lose, waste what is still usable! It feels like throwing out food that could still be eaten. The sin of it! Wasting God’s gift! I am not saying anything, I am only looking at you! Above the bobbling old hats all around me, the feather-sailed frigate of grandma’s toque towers frighteningly, impressively, like the flagship of a conquering armada above a fleet of native canoes. Yes! That is how a hat should be worn. As an intimidating armor, an emblem of grandeur and power, like a crown which is always—even invisibly—on the king’s head, so that all the others have to bare their brows and bend their backs. A hat must be worn haughtily, magnificently or taken off with true humility. After you, Madame! I beg your pardon. Thank you, Sir. From the depths, oh Lord, I implore Thee. Abide with me. If I had courage I would not need a hat.

Notebook Number 2

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But over there, under the Star of David, the bearded ones, swaying in prayer. They are keeping their hats on their heads. As if they had no time to take them off, ever ready for the next journey. Into another exile? Into the promised land? What serpent whispered what temptation into the ear of the prophet? The chosen people, indeed! Anyhow, they are wearing their caps as if they were grown into their scalps, like a second skin. Of course, they are all wearing the same plain skull cap. And of course, I am chosen, too. Only, nobody can whisper into my ear. You see, my hat is different. Through its dust-encrusted floppy brim the message comes broken, like sunlight through a prism. A rainbow of sound, deafening in its disharmony. Everything at once, like the compounded mechanical music of a carnival. I had to invent my own code to decipher it and I am still busy figuring it out. When you have missed the moment of grace, revelation remains elusive, even if you keep listening to the voices for the rest of your days. Lord, can you hear me talking through my hat? I am very tired. I could take off my hat, just for a little while, and rest, leaning against the wall. A downtrodden old creature is sitting next to me. We are leaning against each other, propping each other up. He is holding his soiled hat open to the hand-outs from the high-hatted passers-by. I am fingering the last few coins in my pocket. Let’s be generous, drop the old beggar a dime! Bingggggg! It must have fallen through a hole in his hat. I bend down to look for it on the ground. No luck; it is gone. Painfully I straighten out and knock my head against the beggar’s. Pardon me! He smiles apologetically. Don’t worry, I’ll find you another one. I put my hand into my pocket. The beggar does the same. I pull my past penny out. The beggar looks wistfully at the coin in his own hand, at me, at his hand, at me. I force a smile, he smiles back. I drop the coin into his hat. He drops something, too. Bingggggg! There is only one sound. And no coin. My pockets are empty. I look at the hole in my hat, at my empty hand, my empty hat. Is this what I have been doing all my life? I am still carrying my hat. Tell me, what is there left to do with it? What is everybody else trying to do that I have not yet failed in? Maybe I can still learn something from someone, even at this late hour. Anybody here who would teach me? Would you? Or maybe you? Hi, you there at the carnival entrance! Hold it a moment! How do you do it? Show me. All my life I have wanted to be able to balance my hat on the tip of my nose. Do it again. Aaaahhh! Once more, please. I see. I shall not even try. Obviously, for the fancy tricks one can use only a pretty ordinary hat, tough, shallow, straight. My hat with its undulating flimsy brim and high crown—stiffened only by the dirt of time and the sweat of

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no performance—could never achieve this easy balance. It is complicated enough just to keep it on my head. Didn’t I say I wanted to get rid of it? Well, it would be a different matter if, instead of a soft-brimmed hat, I had a stiff-wired umbrella. Like the fiery red one this man is holding, whom I can see over there dancing gracefully above the grey arena of all the humdrum hats. But the expanse of my hat would not be generous enough to hold me up on a tight-rope. I am anyhow at the end of my rope, and you and you and you will give me just enough to hang myself. I must be crazy to be craving for acrobatics here and now, at this extreme moment, in this tight corner. The intersection of memory and mirrored image, that is so crowded that I could not put my hat back on my head even if I wanted to. What am I to do? I am exhausted, but there is no room to sit down. The hats are all around me. I could try to exchange mine for another one. But who would be interested in swapping hats with me? I have tried it before. They are afraid of looking ridiculous in my hat, and I would look pathetic in most of theirs. At least the ones that anyone would part with. Whatever hat I would like to have is never obtainable. It is one with its wearer, sticking to its head like the prayer-cap to the Jew. Ah, there is one hanging, a beautiful one! Surely that must have been left there by mistake. Who would want voluntarily, prematurely part with such a precious possession? (Italics, double-spaced)149 Isaac Rosenfeld has hung up his hat. It was a beautiful hat, a remarkable hat, an original creation by Mr. Isaac. Its base a blatantly visible yarmulke, its broad brim full of sharp-pointed feathers and gayly colored flowers, its fairy veil fluttering in the uphill wake of his legendary bicycle. Sturdy and durable it looked, unfashionable enough to be stylish for many more years of uphill pedaling. Was the hat too heavy? Was the ride too hectic? Why is the imagination so wearying? As the hat stuck so tightly to his head, Isaac himself, of course, could not recognize its magnificence. Mirrored in the admiration and affection of his friends, he paraded it with pride, wit, and splendor. But all by himself, acutely conscious of its unrelenting pressure, he seemed to be filled with deep distrust in its fabulous fabric and lovely plumage. He was forever on the look-out for gadgets and devices to improve his powers of reasoning and phantasy, to support what could stand stubbornly enough on its own feet and flutter so amusingly, soar so amazingly on its 149

Laura Perls’s instructions in her original, typed manuscript.

Notebook Number 2

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own wings. He would squeeze himself into an orgone box to be irradiated by mysterious currents with intensified vitality and powers of concentration, and we could perhaps prove to him for one relaxing moment, but never convince him in the long run, that he could perform the miracle entirely on his own, without external devices, that he had it all under his hat. Then he would grow enthusiastic over an old discarded carousel horse, invest it with all his own charm and fantasy, put it in a place of honor in his house where it hung, a brittle wooden Pegasus, motionless, wingless, spiritless above his desk. The very image that embodied his vision of the imagination took the shape of an absurdly pedestrian contraption: the common bicycle, performing apparently without effort the impossible uphill ride; the ride that inevitably would have to end in the rider’s total exhaustion. Paradoxically, Isaac was keenly aware of the tightness, the skimpiness, the impliability of the hats on the heads of many of his fellow writers. As if his own predicament had equipped him with a particularly sensitive antenna, a super-gadget that made his perception nearly infallible, a diagnostic tool of penetrating precision. Thus he recognized Henry Green’s use of the sensibility as a most unimaginative device to cover the integration of novelistic material. And thus he rejected—sharply, indignantly, admirably—the illegitimate use of Simone Weill’s uneasy halo as a comfortable hood for other people’s half-religiosity. However, at this moment of remembrance, it is not very important (as Isaac himself said about George Orwell) “whether his vision was true or false, consistent or not, or even adequate to reality. . . . All that matters is the force of the passion with which the man . . . came through. This force, it will be observed, was enough to kill a man.” Now the hat has worn out the wearer. There it hangs, brim flopping, flowers drooping, feathers broken and blunted, the black velvet skull-cap dull and bare on the peg. Here we stand, draped in the shawls of our sorrow, equals at last, the dull-black skull-caps jammed on our bowed heads: Yisgadal v'yiskadash shmai raba. No use breaking my head. No use trying on the hat. It won’t fit my prominent dents and protrusions. Anybody may wear anybody’s hat on anybody’s head. The differences are trifling and get lost in the exchange. But if you are fool enough to have your own head, you have to wear your own fool’s cap. I am stuck with mine until I get the chance to hang it up, for good. There is no peg in sight yet. The hats all about me, too, are still in the same predicament. Most of them I have seen around for a long time. Of

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course they may not be the identical ones, but they look all alike, anyhow. With the exception of this bullfighter’s hat, for instance, a neat threecornered affair, small, black, reflecting in its precise shape the controlled excitement and grace of the fight. What is it doing here among the indifferent mass of undistinguished hats? It should be hanging on the sword that mercifully missed, or on the merciless horn of the bull! Make your last brave choice, toreador! Don’t ask for mercy! Do I have to teach you what to do with your hat? And this one here, the professional high hat whose slick performance on so many stages I used to admire. Miracles of magic! Valerio the Great! His emaciated hands are still pulling rabbits out of the hat, from sheer habit. Nobody is applauding. Nobody is even watching. Nobody is interested in rabbits, not even the moth-eaten magician himself. Don’t you know any better trick, Valerio? Come, I’ll show you. It is so terribly easy. How ridiculously easy I only realize now, since I have seen you fumbling your hat like the sorcerer’s apprentice his broom. You have no imagination, magician. You are drowning in rabbits. I’ll teach you something that struck me only just now, for the first time (the moment of grace?). I hope I’ll bring it off. My hat is not as impressive as yours, but it does not matter anymore, now. The true wizard will pull anything out of anything. Watch carefully, for if I succeed, I shall not be able to repeat it. You see what I am doing? No? Well, it does not matter anymore. I am going to do it, anyhow. After all, this is my affair. I nearly forgot that. I am holding the hat over my heart with both my folded hands. There is nothing now but the hat in my hands and the beating of my heart. I am all heart now. All my heart is in the hat. You see? But you cannot see me anymore. There you have my petrified projection, arms reaching out, hat askew. To you it may look like a scarecrow in your backyard, and to you like the helmet of the fallen hero hanging on a cross in no-man’s land. But while your imagination is getting fired, I am fading . . . fading . . . Laura Perls, 1955 ***

Notebook Number 2

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4/7/56 Miss Rochelle M. Wexler 1938 East 12th Street Brooklyn 29, N.Y. Dear Miss Wexler: In answer to your request, I am giving you the most significant data of my career, which reflects not incidentally: the origin and human history of Gestalt therapy. I did all my formal studying and training in Germany.150 After I went to the University of Frankfurt, where I studied law and social sciences with the intention to go into juvenile court work, I realized151 that I was interested only in the psychological aspects of the work. I got involved in Gestalt psychology, which at the time (1925–30) was most impressively represented by A. Gelb, Kurt Goldstein, and Max Wertheimer. In Goldstein’s seminar on brain injuries I met my husbandto-be, F. S. Perls, who was an assistant at the Neurological Institute, but was in turn less concerned with the application of Gestalt psychology, but infectiously enthusiastic about psychoanalysis. So, while I was supposed to do my doctoral thesis, I was actually undergoing my own training analysis with Dr. Karl Landauer and beginning my theoretical152 training at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytical Institute. During the period I was deeply impressed by the philosophical teachings of Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. I also was very active in music, writing, modern dance.153 Between all these partly overlapping, partly (at least at that time) incompatible influences, I reacted like Pavlov’s multiply-conditioned dog who goes to sleep in the middle of the experiment. I got so disoriented and practically paralysed that—instead of taking my final degree—I escaped into marriage. In Berlin I completed my psychoanalytical training and started my own practice, being supervised in the beginning by Otto Fenichel. But after the birth of my first child I returned to my thesis and took the D. Sc. (Dr. phil.) in Frankfurt in psychology (Gelb), physiology (Bethe), and philosophy (Tillich). In 1933 we emigrated from Germany, first to Holland and later (1934) to Johannesburg, South Africa. There we were in private practice until 1947, during the first few years still in close contact and affiliation with

150

Deleted: After graduating from a “Gymnasium.” Deleted: discovered very soon. 152 Deleted: psychoanalytic. 153 Deleted: eurhythmics. 151

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the154 Psychoanalytical Association, later on—forced into nearly complete professional isolation through the war years—more and more independently assimilating and integrating our own experiences and approaches. Ego, Hunger and Aggression (1942), which my husband wrote during his years as an army psychiatrist, is the first attempt at a systematic representation of our collected experiences and ideas. A more cohesive technical and theoretical presentation 155 emerged in 1950 as Gestalt Therapy. 156 Since 1947 I am practicing in New York, doing extensive group therapy157 in addition, teaching and demonstrating Gestalt therapy in workshops mainly at the N.Y. Institute for Gestalt Therapy, but also to groups in Cleveland, Miami, and Philadelphia. Published articles: “The Psychoanalyst and the Critic,” Complex 2, 1950; “Notes on the Psychology of Give and Take,” Complex 9, 1953. *** Dick158 Jan David Ernest159 Kronfeld Larry Natalie Marion Marty Bernie Pat Judy Nancy160 154

Deleted: international. Deleted: with the collaboration of Drs. Hefferline and Goodman. 156 Frederick S., Ralph F. Hefferline and Paul Goodman, Gestalt therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (New York: Julian Press, 1951). 157 Deleted: as an integral. 158 Above: Doodles of two fish were sketched at the top of the page. Below, on the left side of the page, a list of names and numbers, deleted. Possibly a list of patients and the fees they paid. Below, on the right side of the page, is a vertical list of names. There is a checkmark looking like a “v” in front of each name, except for “Natalie.” 159 Deleted, below this name: Vistrup. 160 Deleted, before this name: Sherwood. 155

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***161 Your parents neglected you precisely because they went on treating you like a baby instead of like a growing person. In other words I’m to be rejected with my deafness. The baby is not able yet to consider your deafness, and much of your impatience and irritation with him results from that. How do you feel about coming into a group therapy?162 I want to choose my husband from the world at large rather than have to marry a deaf man or never marry. Is this unreasonable? Do you feel at present that you have to marry Jack, because there is nobody else? What is better about being married than about the life you have now? Are you in competition with the baby? You are so used to being babied because of your deafness that you may resent someone else taking up all the attention. You denied the competition in words, but you got very agitated in fact. I think I wanted reassurance. I don’t grasp what you said. Reassurance comes from awareness of one’s own feelings, one’s own needs and wishes. What do you need my support for? Ad Reinhardt Rita.163 When you were a child, did you play with any other children? Either you go on resenting it, or you may get reconciled. You cannot accept it in cold blood. Freud called the “mourning labor” the effort to cope with an unalterable fact like death, war, illness, handicap, etc. ***

161

Two loose pages follow this entry, apparently a dialogue between Laura and a deaf-mute female patient, whose handwriting alternates with Laura’s. The patient’s sentences will appear in italics. 162 Deleted: Rita Gold going to Canada; unclear if this is relevant to the therapeutic dialogue. 163 Unclear if there is a connection to this patient or to the entry “Rita Gold going to Canada.”

CHAPTER VI NOTEBOOK NUMBER 3, DATED 1957–1958

10/26/571 Six Characters in Search of an Author2 Each character playing his own smug [?] 3 drama, dialog, conflict, persecution, contest, quarrel, duel, wrestling, leapfrog, love story, presenting outwardly a more or less pertinent playbill, advertisement. Theater-Page of a newspaper. Why not turn it around; take my own facets and deploy them into the characters of a play or story? The idea makes me cringe, but I am going to try it. I. Woman over fifty;4 feeling her 1) Age, climacteric blues, high blood pressure, 5 concerned with grandchildren, family, aging husband. 2) Looking ten years younger, feeling fifteen years younger. Hungry for love and sex. Living mainly phantasy life of sexual success, occasional real adventure. Concern with impression, clothes, appearance, wit. 1 This notebook begins with an entry on October 26, 1957 and ends with an entry on July 4, 1958. Renate Perls attached a note for me dated April 29, 2013: “This sounds a little like post-operative memory loss—but it’s too late for that—even for post-stroke (she had a stroke at age fifty-five). Hysterectomy before that—but I don’t remember the date. Certainly before 1953.” On a separate piece of paper, Renate Perls added: October 26, 1957, Lore: Age 52. 2 This is the name of a play written by Luigi Pirandello, first performed in 1921. The entry comprises six pages; Laura Perls paginated the first four pages. 3 The word preceding the brackets is illegible in the original manuscript and has been substituted by my best educated guess: smug. 4 Deleted: looking 10 years younger; nevertheless. 5 Deleted: grandmother.

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II. Successful professional 1) Experienced, confident, impressive, recognized but not ambitious. 2) Unsuccessful professional; diffident, feeling a fraud, feeling ignorant, afraid of “being found out.” Competitive but frightened, overmodest and arrogant (nobody knows me, nobody should notice me c/6 I am very wellknown, top of profession, etc., etc.).7 III. Good amateur musician 1) Lover and connoisseur. But amateur from Cape to Cairo. Begleiterscheinung.8 Ardent and competent chamber musician. 2) Would-be concert pianist. No memory. No Sitzfleisch.9 Resentful of missed opportunities. First promising, then “would-have-been, if . . .” IV. Writer 1) Wunderkind; gifted, precocious, over-praised, ridiculed, hurt. Cocoon. 2) Good student; 10 avid reader, writer of school papers and essays. Rational bent. Social usefulness c/ “egotistical artistic playfulness.” Second rate scholar and person. 3) Poet through suffering. Agony of writing (or not writing). Block. V. Housewife 1) Indifferent, negligent, don’t care, irregular, no routines, Schlamperei,11 no time for anything, wasteful. 2) Diligent, interior decorator, good cook, hostess, good shopper, bargains, taste, can do anything.12 VI. Aptitudes and interests: 1) Music, languages, literature, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology: humanities. 2) Inaptitudes: mathematics (?), sciences, engineering. But when I said to Arnold (Simmel) the other day: “I am not a theoretician,” he said: “You are an engineer. Not in the narrow technical sense, but I think of you as a bridge-builder. Pontifex.” I felt very good, but I hope I am not pontificating. 6

c/ is used by Laura Perls to indicate: in contrast to, versus. Deleted: (Hattie). 8 German for: accompaniment, accessory phenomenon, by-product. 9 German for: steadiness. 10 Corrected from: pupil. 11 German for: sloppiness. 12 Renate Perls noted in pencil in the left margin: “She wasn’t and couldn’t. RP.” 7

Notebook Number 3

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This will not work out. I cannot “engineer” a story or plot. I shall have to “paint” it again, dipping my pen into whatever experience is next and moving with whatever will be the next move.13 When I was Eve, the world’s first woman. Temptress, priestess, sacrifice. [. . .]14 Serpent-spoiler of God’s dream. Fake-branch and mock15 bark.16 Treason coiled around Truth.17 *** 1/24/5818 I wrote the foregoing several weeks ago, and now I have not the slightest recollection of what I wanted to do with it. I must have had a distinct image and a definite aim, but from the few lines I can’t reconstruct it and spontaneously it won’t come up. My memory is getting worse and worse; I don’t know whether to make the anti-blood-pressure drugs or old age responsible. I remember perfectly what I am continually involved in: patients, children, etc. But any fleeting events and impressions disappear completely. I cannot remember the names of patients or people I have known quite well during the last ten years. I remember their faces. The eidetic memory seems quite unimpaired, but ideas or the contents of books disappear, with the exception of a very, very few. Of course, I remember a lot of what I read, studied, and thought before the last ten years; the earlier the better, the clearer. It looks as if I am getting very old, which is not really the feeling I have of myself, even when I don’t feel too well. I think it is more that so much that was at one time or other so exciting and new, simply has become an old hat and routine, and the exciting experiences are few and far between. And, of course, I remember them perfectly! I was just looking at some pictures of Italy: Rome, Venice, Ravenna, Florence, etc. And from a few measly photographs I can walk in my memory through whole streets, churches, museums, parks. So why do I complain

13

Deleted: In the radio there is some savagely rhythmical music. Several lines deleted. 15 Deleted: -scale. 16 Outlined insert: Dayton—Columbus [. . .] Grand Rapids. 17 Deleted: Broke Fruit, broke Law, broke Man. 18 Written on January 24, 1958, this entry comprises four pages, from pp. 7–10 of Notebook Number 3. 14

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about my memory? It seems so much easier than to admit that there is simply not enough fun and excitement! The memories that come up most frequently are, peculiarly, not those of actual events and experiences, but of dreams, which I have had during the last few years. They are all concerned with geography either of the outside or inside of apartment buildings, of department stores or hotels, swimming pools, seascapes, cities. *** When tired stars are darkening into dawn,19 Before the sun, back from nightly escapade on the other hemisphere20 Has gathered enough strength to break Through the clouds and Venetian Blinds and my sleep-stuck eyes, When only the crash and clatter Of the municipal Trash trucks reverberates through the empty streets, When the thermostat remembers His built-in generosity and Causes the first steam to splutter Through the narrow pipes of the obsolete heating system.21 *** 6/4/58 Then no mirage from edges of slumberous wasteland22 My dream23—Atlantis—emerges from seas of oblivion. ***

19

This entire poem appears to be an early draft of the poem that Laura re-wrote, beginning on p. 12 of Notebook Number 3. 20 Insert marked with * in the left margin: Paris and other desirable places. 21 Several lines deleted. 22 Deleted: like fata morgana; Lines 1 and 2 marked, reversing order of sentences. 23 Corrected from: personal city.

Notebook Number 3

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When24 wintry stars like tired soldiers fade away, Before the sun—back from his nightly Escapade to Paris, Timbuktoo, and other lovely places— Has a chance to regret his return from the Champs Élysées, Burns up with wrath and pierces the cloudy blanket, Venetian blinds and the sleep-stuck slits of my eyes, Dazzles me out of bed where he spreads himself All over resplendently for the rest of the morning. Before the dawn, when only the crash and clatter Of ash cans and trash trucks echo through hollow alleys Mean automatic thermostats remember Their25 six-o’clock urge for splurging and suddenly splutter Obsessional steam through the obsolete heating system— Then—fata morgana from desert horizons of sleep-death, My dream-Atlantis emerges from seas of oblivion. *** 6/4/5826 Again I did not stick to what I started. It reminds me of my childhood, when I was supposed to make some sort of Handarbeit27 for my mother’s birthday or for Christmas,28 and I am berating myself for not finishing, just as Bertl or my mother did at the time. Why do I feel it so much as a duty? It is a genuine urge and excitement before I sit down with pen and paper. I seem to be at that point again where language is not usable for my own emotional purposes. I feel much more inclined to write a psychological book on contact and support, a series of lectures which I intend to give this fall. I also have got very involved with music again and spend nearly all 24

Insert in upper left corner of page: ML516 Stravinsky Persephone. This refers to a vinyl recording (LP, Mono) by Columbia Masterworks, ML 5196, produced in the U.S., of Stravinsky’s Persephone; the New York Philharmonic was conducted here by the composer himself. http://www.discogs.com/Stravinsky-New-YorkPhilharmonic-Igor-Stravinsky-Stravinsky-Persephone/release/3689630; February 9, 2015. 25 On pp. 12–15 of Notebook 3, the right-hand pages are drafts, the left-hand pages the corrected version of this poem. I have not transcribed the draft. 26 This entry comprises pp.16–18 of Notebook Number 3. 27 German for: handicraft, needlework. 28 Abbreviated: Xmas.

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my free time, when I am not too exhausted, at the piano. I guess I shall have to learn the use of a new language! Or perhaps return to the old one? Ich will versuchen auf Deutsch weiter zu schreiben. Unwillkürlich schreibe ich deutsche Buchstaben, welche ich nur in meinen Schulaufsätzen gebraucht habe. In meinen persönlichen Schreibereien habe ich immer lateinische Schrift benutzt. Ich habe große Schwierigkeiten, die richtige deutsche Satzkonstruktion zu finden. Die einzelnen Wörter kommen zurück, aber die Syntax ist englisch und ich muss mich zwingen umzudenken. Ich habe ein widerliches gelangweiltes Gefühl: Actually I feel disgusted and really like spitting. Ich finde die deutsche Sprache zum Kotzen! Auf jeden Fall meine eigene! Hölderlin, Goethe und Rilke nehme ich aus!29 This is not getting me anywhere. But I can’t possibly accept the possibility that I have run dry and simply have nothing to write about. Usually I don’t start with a theme or a plot or any sort of intention anyhow. *** 7/4/58 Flight to the West30 Put back the clock! Our time will never come. We’re flying westward into yesterday. Today is endless, endless, and tomorrow Will never ensnare us, never set us free. While whirling blades—Omphale’s31 spinning wheel 29 German for: I want to try to continue writing in German. Involuntarily, I write German letters the way I only used to when I wrote my school compositions. In my personal scribbling I only used Latin letters. I have huge difficulties in finding the correct German sentence construction. I can recall individual words, but the syntax is English and I must force myself to rethink (my sentences). I have a foul, bored feeling: (Actually, I feel disgusted and really like spitting.) I find the German language disgusting! At least my own! Hölderlin, Goethe, and Rilke are exceptions to the rule! [my translation] 30 This poem, stretching over twenty pages, had been revised by Laura Perls. Presented here is the final version, which she worked on from July 4 to August 1, 1958. Her pagination does not follow the order of the pages in Notebook Number 3. 31 According to Greek mythology, Omphale, daughter of Iardanus, was queen of Lydia in Asia Minor. In one myth about Omphale, Hercules was required to serve

Notebook Number 3

91

Unwinding—hold us suspended in mid-fate. Speeding through space, quadruplet motors roar “In Brudersphären Wettgesang”32 through cracks In the marshmallow mountain mass of clouds We sneak a eunuch view of the harem Earth. Dancing her daily rite to the rajah sun, Turning in slow gyrations, spreading her treasures —As was ordained eternities ago— To his hot gaze that blazed on them before A million times with hardly diminishing ardor. My fellow traveller, Sun, our rivalry Of old has taken an unexpected turn, Even if ordained. You have it over me now. Heat-blind and distance-dazzled, you overlook With ease what I have neither chance nor choice To ignore or forget. How, being human, Humbly un-know what proudly I thought I knew? “In the end is the beginning.” Quite so! When Adam, The bumbling original sinner, fell from grace, You, blindly unprejudiced, hotly impartial Continued to glare but wisely kept your distance. Labor-lightening, blunder-blessing Skin-scalding, casually prodding His plodding in the sweat of his brow, you Obediently kept in orbit according to order,

as her slave for a year and they became lovers. When Omphale and her maidens did their spinning, Hercules was required to hold a basket of wool. 32 Cf. Goethe, Faust I, “Prolog im Himmel”: “Die Sonne tönt nach alter Weise / In Brudersphären Wettgesang, / Und ihre vorgeschriebene Reise / Vollendet sie mit Donnergang.” On the website, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/FaustIProl.htm, on February 9, 2015 I found an English translation of these lines of verse from Goethe’s Faust by A.S. Kline from 2003. In “Prologue in Heaven,” Raphael begins with the following four lines of verse: “The Sun sings out, in ancient mode, / His note among his brother-spheres, / And ends his pre-determined road, / With peals of thunder for our ears.”

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Missed the meaning yet played your part as predicted. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children And the children’s children. Fortunate Adam! How little you knew of Woman, Serpent, Tree, When, Paradise-deprived, World-wealth-bewildered, You mumbly stumbled over the un-mapped earth, The Angel’s naked sword your only road-sign. To goals unfathomed. Now we’re more accomplished If less original. Blue-print planners, Problem-solvers, trouble-shooters, Experts, jugglers, practice-preachers, Atom-splitters, world-destroyers, We have the know-how. Or have we? Omnivorous craving? Devouring, devoured, burnt by the dragon’s breath. Between his yawning jaws cunningly concoct Tonics and antidotes, fashion crutches and gadgets To save our fading future. Operation successful! The doctor, however, is dying in bed with the patient. Sun, simple Sun, wise Sun, with millions of years To travel before your fiercely truculent wisdom Will eventually be corrupted, cooled to mere cunning And stifling stupidity,—Sun, enlighten us quickly. Our time is measured: “No smoking! Fasten your seatbelts!” (Last-minute mock-absolution, security-triggered, Out-tricks the terror.) Eternal traveller, Around the universe, where will the trick-trapped Traitor find safety? Which of the planets adopt The matricidal monster, have mercy on The mother-fucker? No answer. Unconcerned The Sun continues in orbit in heavenly order. According to schedule, we drop out of the contest, Starting a separate song à tempo ritardando, The motor’s roar turned into whining, Half-heard by blocked ears. Swallowing Hard, beholding heavens and clouds aglow. We bank steeply, saluting our setting Sun.

Notebook Number 3

Now it is dark. Below the black blanket Of clouds no ray of heavenly bodies, The Earth, Submissive mother, resentful slave, decked out In gaudy lights, is rushing up to meet us. We rub our gear against her, bruising her skin. She is used to abuse, but we feel shaken, Let down. The motor is muted, The diaphanous whirl jelled to a four-spoke wheel. The Goddess resumes her work—the wheel is spinning. This is the wind-up. Back to earth, Tomorrow is upon us. Poised with the scissors, The Sister awaits her chance.33 At the doorsteps The pretty stewardess smiles: “I hope you Enjoyed your flight. We’re right in time! Thank you. Good night!” ***

33

Deleted: and we our time. It is time! It is time!

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CHAPTER VII NOTEBOOK NUMBER 4, DATED 1959–1960

[“At the Fourth Annual Conference of the American Academy of Psychotherapists in New York in 1959, leading therapists of five difference orientations were asked a series of questions about their theoretical views and therapeutic approaches. Representing Gestalt therapy, Dr. Laura Perls gave the following answers.”]12 “What do you do with the reluctant patient—either poorly referred or poorly motivated?”3 “Have you ever made a home call, and why?”4 “How do you deal with a patient’s reluctance to pay for therapy?”5

1

This entry in Laura’s notebook number 4 spans pp. 1–18, according to Laura’s pagination. They are the notes for her participation in a panel discussion at the Fourth Annual Conference of the American Academy of Psychotherapists in New York in 1959 (see editor’s introduction in this volume). It was originally published in the Annals of Psychotherapy Special Combined Issue ed. J. Barron & R.A. Harper, vols. 1 and 2, 1961, then adapted and published as Laura Perls, “One Gestalt Therapist’s Approach,” in Gestalt Therapy Now: Theory, Techniques, Applications, ed. Joen Fagan and Irma Lee Shepherd (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper Colophon, 1971), 125–129. Finally it was published in Laura Perls, Living at the Boundary, ed. Joe Wysong (Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992), 115–123. The Gestalt Journal Press has the copyright to this publication and has unfortunately denied permission to use it in this volume. The questions in quotation marks are quoted from the chapter published in Fagan and Shepherd. 2 Perls, “One Gestalt Therapist’s Approach,” 125. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 126.

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“Do you assume that you unconsciously want every one of your patients to get better?”6 “Do you assume that all your awareness and feelings, if shared with the patient, have therapeutic value?”7 “Do you express your own problems or history at any time?”8 “How do you control the acting-out patient?”9 “What psychotherapeutic physical contact do you engage in with male or female patients, and is there a difference?”10 “What does your school say about the basic nature of man, and how does it affect your treatment process?”11 Dreikurs12 I. a) b) Wanting help. Moving from one agreement to the other. c) II. b) Countertransference: Enjoy it. Verbal; being dependent on situations. III. Making the acting out ineffective. IV. Limited physical contact, no couch!

6

Ibid. Ibid. 8 Ibid., 127. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 128. 11 Ibid. 12 The following fifteen pages are the notes Laura Perls took during the panel discussion with Dreikurs, Nydes, Rogers, and Whitaker. They are sketchy and incomplete, but offer insights into her perspective. 7

Notebook Number 4

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V. Patient decides for himself his actions. Appeal to: Social concept of man. Self-determination. Conscious—unconscious, no differences. Reveal to P. his intentions. Concern with values. Nydes. No typical Freudian. I. Answers dep[end]13 on nature of case. Self maintaining non-psychotic adults. a) & b) Relationship voluntary. Relationship to referrer. c) Stress realities of relationship. Paying of fee basis for the relationship, patient’s privilege to window shop. II. Awareness. Psychotherapy. III. Not always verbal sharing. Counter-transference. Using counter-transference, asking who did such and such to you. No therapeutic value. Own problems not communicable. Possible contempt of the analyst by patient. IV.14 Limitations. Punitive: no, patient already greedy for punishment. V.15 Acting out. Courtesy of analyst. Anything that does not jeopardize the treatment process.

13

All abbreviated words in this contribution have been written out, using the most logical solution, and appear in brackets. 14 Corrected from: III. 15 Incorrectly noted as IV. in manuscript.

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VI.16 Difference between an[al]y[st] and p[atient]. Rogers I. Each patient motivated in direction of self-actualization. Discovering motivation. Soliloquy. Expression of feeling relevant. Putting forward himself as a feeling person. Contacts with the referrer;17 patient makes his own choice of continuing or not. II. Group therapy. Left to patient how he wants to participate. Delinquents being paid for coming to group. Effective. III. Consciously: wish for client to realize his own potentialities. Makes clear his own feelings. Real relationship. No comm[unication] of feel[ling] or com[munication] without relevance. Also expression of negative reactions. Acting out: no control of client. Keep himself comfortable enough to be effective. Therapist not punishing. V. Same. Man basically trustworthy. More dependence—independence, impulsiveness Self-regul[ation] pattern Whitaker: All psychotics reluctant. I. Therap[ists] function differently according to case. Refer the non-patient. Help to arrive at the patient status. Recommend psychotherapy. Impersonal pointing out of usefulness of therapy to patient. Points out to patient his inadequate motivation. Home [. . .].18 Problem of family unit. Prevention by arrangement. Absolves therapist from negative involvement. Co-therapist: facing with double fee. (punishing) Little hope for window shopper.

16

Incorrectly noted as V. in manuscript. In the original manuscript: referrist. 18 Illegible word. 17

Notebook Number 4

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II. Unconsciously persuading certain patients from returning. Not always express all feelings etc. Comfort of therapist criterion for communication; agr[ees] with Rogers. Countertransference: hand[ling] dep[ends] on stage of therapy. Negative react[ion] expressed and used. Reality situation stressed. Verbalizing curbed might disrupt relationship; also further it. Comfort crit. Patient’s phantasy dominating in relationship. Ther[apist] no remarks that might disrupt relationship. Personal experiences: no sympathizing for its own sake. Latter phase of therapy, more personal feelings expected. The controlling therapist achieves no development. No direct advice. Patient lives own life, so does therapist. Assumption that all acting out is therapist-directed. No avoidance of contact. Not deliberately punitive, but gets angry. Shock treatment, no punishment. IV. Child therapy. Therapy in this area pays off: every physical contact never casual. Contact must be initiated by the patient. Socially accepted contact encouraged. Limited contact. Prof[essional] integrity gives direction. Therapist tolerates physical contact. Therapist not spontaneous, but knows what he is doing. Consultant therapist to re-evaluate the process. V. People never satis[fied] Growth towards indep[endence] & autonomy. Blind spots. Need & motiv[ation] synonymous. Dr. Rogers:19 2 themes: 1) Therapist-centered experiences? Reality- centered: 2) Therapist comfort: therapist must be the more real: Therapist’s comfort. “Comfort of patient means everything.” Perls: Anxiety to experience anything else but intellectual verbal experience. Whitaker: Circus side show: Ethical problems prompted by less mechanical approach. 19

Deleted before “Dr. Rogers”: Commitment.

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Symbolic relationship with patient. “Unconscious communication”? Awareness communication. No interpretation: Happier rel[ationship], id & ego: ongoing Gestalt format Nydes: Discussion Group. Giving information. No couch. Appropriate to his role as therapist. Perls: Difference between Freudian and Gestalt. Gestalt: Breaking through facade. Counter-transference. Self-analysis crucial for dealing with counter-transference. Discussion on fee questions, secrecy of therapist. Acting out: treat the whole person, not the symptom. Main difference: Real Relationship. Dreikurs: Democracy, Directness, Discipline, Dreikurs. Counter-transference not acceptable. Permissive. Physical aggression: retaliate, if strong enough. No give in to “ramblings” of schiz[ophrenic]. No advice, no criticism? Faith in “human nature.” Philosophy like Rogers. Methods different. Giving information and counseling. Dreikurs: Value system. Testing? Sureness of comfort as Prof. Whitaker right? Length of therapy: number of hours. Psychopaths: Advantages or disadvantages of system. Termination: Specifically objectionable to each Panel Member. P. Psychopaths, impatience. Therapy style. Advantages—disadvantages. Gestalt therapy breaking [. . .].20

20

Illegible word.

Notebook Number 4

*** Song of the Good People, 1960 1. The good people you recognize in the fact that they get better When you recognize them. The good people Invite you to improve them, for How do you get wiser? Through listening And having something said to you. 2. At the same time They improve who beholds them and whom They behold. Not in assisting you To find food or clarity, but they are much more Useful to us in our knowing that They are alive and changing the world. 3. Whenever you go to see them, they are there. They still remember their own old Face they wore at the last meeting. Whatever way they may have changed— For they particularly are changing— They have become only more recognizable. 4. They are like a house that we have helped to build. They do not force us to dwell in it. Sometimes they even forbid it. We may come to them any time at our lowest level, but What we are bringing with us, we have got to select. 5. For what they offer they give very good reasons. Finding it thrown away they only laugh. But they also can be depended on that we Leaving ourselves, are Leaving them, too.

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6. When they make mistakes, we laugh: For, when they put a stone in the wrong place, we, Watching them, are able to See the right one. Every day they deserve our interest, just as They earn their living every day. Their interest is centered in something That lies beyond them. 7. The good people keep us busy. Alone they don’t seem to be able to get through Anything. All their solutions still hold questions. On sinking ships at the dangerous moments. We suddenly see their eyes gravely fastened on us. Although we are not right for them as we are, They still are in agreement with us. *** The21 dark stream of shoppers swirling around the lighted counters of the Christmas 22 gift-pregnant department store swept me against a bargain table covered with women’s gloves. At only two hours before closing time, the display: conscientiously built up, moving into separate columns according to size and color, had disintegrated into a flaccid muddle of many hues, mixed up sizes, several singles and mismatched pairs. I watched the steadily spreading chaos with fascination and a curiosity of marvel [?], 23 growing more and more confused as I continued watching women’s hands determinedly diving like hungry gulls, into the seething heap; hastily coming up with a colored octopus, impatiently dropping the unwanted ones back into the mess, thrusting their beaked fingers greedily into the limply waiting deerskin tentacles, screeching in triumph or frustration, flapping, fluttering, hovering, pushing. And above the turmoil, the24 voice, screeching. I could see and hear it all. I was one of them. 21

This entry is an untitled short story paginated 1 to 16 by Laura Perls on pp. 41– 57 of Notebook Number 4, whereby page 56 was skipped over and used for a different text, which follows. I have kept the original pagination. 22 Abbreviated: Xmas. 23 Illegible word, possibly: marvel. 24 Deleted: woman’s.

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An elbow kept persistently pressing into my side. I pretended not to notice, to keep my place at the table, where I discovered a white [?]25 glove of my size and was frisking for its match. But the woman finally managed to push in beside me. “This is the one you are looking for,” she said briskly, waving the matching glove before my eyes. I had a good look at her. She was young, small, with a thin undistinguished face of slender build, but now about five months pregnant, decently but somewhat shabbily dressed, obviously in great need of finding real bargains for this most demanding season of the year. I thanked her and in turn helped her to find what she was trying to find while we were frisking [?]26 and talking, waiting for the salesgirl to wrap our gloves and take our money. Her quick, efficient movement and provoking dark eyes contrasted oddly with her sweet, rather embarrassed smile and the veiled complaint in her low, soft voice. There was a girl with a purpose, with a desperate ambition,27 but who was essentially shy and resented the complete relentless effort of having to put herself out for others in order to prove something to herself. She looked harassed and exhausted, blatantly seeking for shortcuts in her self-imposed ordeal, but actually increasing the strain with every shortcut.28 I felt bewildered, a little annoyed and at the same time strangely touched, yet very much aware that, in spite of or with her apparent helpfulness, she was using me for some ulterior purpose that her refined, gay, lady-like chatter was just another shortcut, a concentrated effort, which in some way would have to pay off. I suddenly got very irritated. Why did I of all people have to fall for whatever scheme she was hatching? There were three more days before Christmas; I had more important things to do. Luckily the saleswoman just came back with my change and my parcel, so I could cast loose from the glove table and float away into the humming, jostling stream of Christmascrazy shoppers. I looked back over my shoulder. The pregnant girl stood motionless, staring after me, like after an apparition from another world. I waved “Merry Christmas” 29 to her, smiled “Good luck” at her swollen belly, and floated away, feeling very much like the good fairy, who does not really have to do anything at all, just has to be seen in order to change a life. The next moment I had forgotten the girl. The Christmas current carried me from counter to counter, up and down the ever-creeping escalators 25

Illegible word, possibly: white. Illegible word, possibly: frisking. 27 Deleted: to get above, wanted to get somewhere. 28 Deleted: She seemed to be doing just that. 29 Abbreviated: Xmas. 26

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where it is impossible to change direction once one was on, but equally impossible to stumble or fall, being so securely screwed to one’s step, wedged among the denseness of the crowd, caught in the same safe predicament on the steps above and below. I found it more and more difficult to concentrate on what I had thought of buying as last minute Christmas surprises. The displays, in spite of their variety and attractiveness, were not particularly suggestive or exciting. Whatever interest I might have felt was superseded by the hypnotic quality of the one-way traffic. In a daze I drifted around the store, listlessly picking up a few last-minute presents, which could be given to anybody regardless of personal needs or preferences, a couple of batik silk scarves, toiletries, hand woven ties, foreign candies, educational toys. I was exhausted from the unceasing rush and increasing weight of parcels. I dropped my wallet, still half in my hand, into my handbag. Leaning against a toy counter to catch my breath, I looked aimlessly at a collection of stuffed woolly animals from Germany. Gradually I got intrigued: they were small but very life-like and at the same time weirdly unimaginable. I looked at prices and flirted with a gracefully ambling giraffe, a pretentious-looking, improbably purple bullfrog, a mischievous little monkey and a soulful, sad-faced, all-understanding puppy dog of uncertain breed. For a moment I closed my eyes. While I was trying to make up my mind, 30 deciding on a different animal every two seconds, I vaguely felt the stream of shoppers flowing past behind my back, but was not particularly bothered by it. Occasionally somebody brushed against me, but even when I was faintly aware of a slight pull on my arm, I did not take notice, for now I was impatiently watching the sales help who was still busy with another indecisive customer. When she finally came over to me, I had had enough time and fun to find the most excellent reason for buying all four animal toys. This definitely was to be my last purchase. It was nearly closing time. I had somewhat recovered from the previous strain and made a few joking remarks to the salesgirl about the joy of ending a heavy working day on both sides of the counter. She 31 wrapped my little menagerie in starcovered32 gift paper. While she was making out the sales slip, I reached into my handbag for my wallet. The wallet was gone. Immediately I knew who had taken it. I remembered the little tug on my arm a few minutes earlier. I remembered the harassed, calculating look

30

Several lines deleted. Corrected from: The girl. 32 Corrected from: glistening. 31

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of the girl at the glove table. Quickly I looked around, but the girl, of course, had disappeared. I had some difficulty in putting on a suitable show of surprise and outrage. In spite of the lost sixty-seven dollars, my house and car keys, driver’s license and credit card, I was not in the least angry. The last thing I wanted was for the girl to be apprehended. Somehow I had known that with all her indecisiveness and embarrassment she was going to take advantage of me; and I with my own indecisiveness, unease, had made it inevitable.33 I felt like a conspirator, very protective of the girl against my own or anyone else’s suspicion, only concerned with covering up her escape. I delayed as long as possible to tell the sales girl definitely that my wallet had been stolen. At first I pretended that I had left it at another counter on a lower floor where I had bought something before.34 I even went down two floors, ostensibly to make sure, wasted about ten minutes, sliding up and down escalators, making inquiries, appearing very concerned and put out, taking good care not to look around for fear that I might discover the girl somewhere buying things with my money or my credit card. When I returned to the toy counter, I was pretty sure that the girl had gotten away.35 It took the sales woman another five minutes to find the floor detective.36 I reported the theft, I knew nothing of the thief and could give details only about the contents of my wallet. The detective took me up to the office, where I had to repeat the recital to the credit manager. Enumerating all the missing possessions, I felt suddenly very angry, at first mainly about having to go through this ridiculous performance again, but gradually more and more about the actual trouble of having to change the lock of my house door, to invalidate my credit card, to apply for a new driver’s license, even to borrow money from the store for a taxi to get myself and my Christmas37 packages back home. I left the office in a thoroughly adequate-looking stew. Yet, I was not angry with the thief, but still pleased with having suppressed my indication of suspicion, still in sympathy with her bristle and pathetic toughness. A few days later I was notified by the department store that my wallet had been turned in as “found.” It still contained my driver’s license and my keys; only the money and the credit card were missing. But when I got

33

Deleted: put myself out for it. Deleted: I got interested in the toy animals. 35 Deleted: made good her escape. I reported the theft. The sales girl called the floor. 36 Corrected from: manager. 37 Abbreviated: Xmas. 34

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my monthly bill from the store, I found to my relief that the card had not been used by anyone else. During the following two weeks I had not much time to think of my wallet. I forgot the woman and the whole incident. Around Christmas38 with its usual festivities, excitement, and expenses, I still missed the stolen money and occasionally felt exasperated by the lack.39 But then I was busy with the children at home, a whole vacation week, going to the theatre and ballet, mediating family squabbles, giving a big New Year’s Eve party. And then the beginning of another year, getting the children ready for school, settling down to the usual routine of family life and work. At the end of February I found in my mail, mixed in with bills, advertisements, and professional inquiries, a letter marked “personal.” The envelope looked very ordinary, the address was written on cheap sky-blue paper in a handwriting that seemed to be either a child’s or a nearly illiterate person’s awkward effort. I expected the writer to reveal himself as a prospective pupil40 (I teach music), one of those lost souls who don’t trust anyone they know or could find out about, but who pick their teachers, their doctor, their plumber, or their next blind date from the yellow pages of the telephone directory. I frequently get letters or telephone calls of this type so I opened the letter with no particular curiosity. The first thing that fell out when I opened the envelope was my stolen credit card. The little metal plate—actually a stamp with my name and address printed in reverse in slightly elevated letters—looked rather battered, but the printing on it was still readable. The letter that came with it read: “Dear Madam: I am only eight years old. I found your charge plate today on the East River Drive. You must have dropped it from your car.41 It is annoying to lose something valuable. I hope you have not missed it too much. I am sending it back to you right away. Sincerely yours,” There was a name and address. My first impulse was to send the kid a thank-you note and a few dollars for her troubles. But when I looked at the letter a second time, I stopped short. There was something grating and 38

Abbreviated: Xmas. Deleted: of money. 40 Corrected from: patient. 41 Deleted: Somebody must have thrown it out of a car. You must have missed it very badly. 39

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insincere not only about the handwriting, the studied awkwardness and childishness of which could not conceal certain habitual quasi-elegant flourishes and convolutions, but even more in the style and tone which was pretentiously childish, but actually in spite of its insipidity, too sophisticated and calculated to pass as a child’s naïve outpourings. Would a young child be playing on a busy motor highway that had no sidewalk? Again, I was being taken for a ride! East River Drive, indeed! I must be insane to even dream of sending her another penny. As if sixty-seven dollars weren’t enough! My credulity was really incredible. I felt I had come to my senses at last, tore up the letter and threw it into the wastepaper basket. Discarding the letter, I tried to forget the girl altogether, but I was not very successful. For a long time afterwards I remembered her with a strange mixture of pity and guilt feelings, as if her fraudulence was my failure.42 Yet there is nothing more to be done.43 The letter is torn up, thrown away; the name and address of the girl are lost.44 We both shall go on living with our mutual frustration. She with her secret resentment and unfulfilled desire,45 I with secret shame and guilt. *** Obstetrics46 ward. After operation daze, waking up//infantile development! Woman in the next bed bleeding, transfusions, abortion, next door ward: maternity. ***

42

Deleted: as if by allowing her to exploit me I had let her down. Even now after so many years, from the far recesses of my mind, the dogs of conscience are still growling in their sleep. Deleted, in different ink: But this realization did not help. 43 Deleted: I shall [Corrected from: could] never be able to make up [Corrected from: fulfil] for what I now recognize as my default [Corrected from: obligation]; I have thrown away the letter and with it the name and address of the girl. 44 This entry continues on p. 16, according to the original pagination. 45 Corrected from: yearning. 46 Deleted: When I woke up. The sparrows are twittering in the gutter. Children screaming in the street after school, . . . sparrows twittering in the gutter . . . workers laying down their tools at the day’s end . . . the doctors put away their scalpels and remove their masks.

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Camus:47 The plague, p. 278. p. 278:48 To state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise. None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. p. 101: And in his corner Rambert savored that bitter sense of freedom, which comes of total deprivation. p. 107: At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. . . . It’s in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth—in other words, to silence. p. 114: Officialdom can never cope with something really catastrophic. p. 120: The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness. p. 164: . . . the habit of despair is worse than despair itself. p. 168: . . . its truest, mournfullest expression to the blind endurance that had ousted love from all our hearts. p. 189: . . . a man can’t cure and know at the same time. So let’s cure as quickly as we can. That’s the more urgent job. p. 217: . . . those they love have forgotten them49 because all their energies are devoted to making schemes and taking steps to get them out of the camp. And by dint of always thinking about these schemes and steps they have ceased thinking about those whose release they are trying to secure. And that, too, is natural enough. In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to

47

Notebook Number 4 continues by turning it upside down and opening the back cover. This entry comprises nine pages of quotations from Albert Camus’s novel, The Plague. The page numbers refer to the pages in the novel. Laura Perls did not indicate which edition of the book she was using. 48 Deleted: . . . the record of what had to be done, 49 Deleted: because they have other things to think about.

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think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything— . . . p. 219: Poor Mr. Othon! . . . One would like to do something to help him. But how can you help a judge? p. 222: I had the plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here. Which is tantamount to saying I’m like everybody else. p. 229: . . . each of us has the plague within him. No one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest, in a careless moment, we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. . . . . . . health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. . . . It’s a wearying business to be plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world truly looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death. . . . on this earth, there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. p. 230: If, by making that statement, I, too, become a carrier of the plaguegerm, at least I don’t do it willfully. I try, in short, to be an innocent murderer . . . . . . we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. . . . “What interests me is learning how to become a saint.” . . . “I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me. . . . What interests me is being a man.” “Yes, we are both after the same thing, but I’m less ambitious.” . . . Really, it’s too damn silly living only in and for the plague. Of course, a man should fight for the victims, but if he ceases caring for anything outside that, what’s the use of his fighting? p. 237: . . . a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart. p. 248: Perhaps . . . we can reach only approximations of sainthood. In which case we must make shift with a mild, benevolent diabolism.

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pp. 262–63: So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarron, perhaps, would have called that winning the match. . . . But if that was what it meant, . . . how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for! . . . There can be no peace without hope . . . Tarron had lived a life riddled with contradictions and had never known hope’s solace. Did that explain his aspiration toward saintliness, his quest for peace by service in the cause of others? . . . Knowing meant that: a living warmth, and a picture of death. p. 265: Happiness was bearing down on him full speed, the event outrunning expectation. p. 271: They know now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for and sometimes attain, it is human love. . . . it was only right that those whose desires are limited to man and his humble yet formidable love should enter, if only now and then, into their reward. p. 276: Perhaps it was more painful to think of a guilty man than of a dead man. “All those folks are saying: ‘It was plague. We’ve had the plague here.’ You’d almost think they expected to be given medals for it. But what does it mean—‘Plague’? Just life, no more than that.” Do your inhalations regularly. “Don’t worry about me, doctor! There’s lots of life in me yet. . . . I know how to live.” ***

CHAPTER VIII NOTEBOOK NUMBER 5, TH UNDATED; 7 WEST 96 STREET, N.Y., N.Y. 10025

I dedicate this chapter1 to the treasured memory of two people who, as our only peers during the crucial years of developing our own psychotherapeutic approach, were in continuous intellectual and emotional contact with us and our work and whose continued interest, insights, and criticisms were our strongest support2 during our first few years in South Africa:3 Hanns Katz and Karl Wilker, whose work has been destroyed and forgotten and whose names today have meaning only to a very few survivors of the Holocaust. Like Paul Geheeb—whose Odenwaldschule was a private institution accessible only to a few children of the very affluent—and A. S. Neill, who had the great good luck to be English, Karl Wilker 4 was an educational innovator and reformer and tried to experiment within the public education and penal systems in pre-Nazi Germany.5 He was the director of the Wickersdorf6 boys’ reformatory near Berlin, advocating and applying entirely non-punitive and non-coercive methods, which—at the time to the great surprise of the educational and penal authorities—were eminently successful. He had become widely known, his methods were studied and imitated, he had been offered and had just accepted the chair of Education at the University of Frankfurt on Main, when he was forced by the Hitler regime to give up his position, not 1

Corrected from: book. This entry comprises the first eight pages of Notebook Number 4 and was paginated by Laura Perls. 2 Deleted: particularly. 3 Although Laura Perls used the abbreviated form, in this text S.A. will be written out as South Africa. 4 Wilker was born in 1885 in Osnabrück and died in 1980 in Bad Camberg. He was a pioneer in reform education. 5 Several lines deleted. 6 Wilker was the director of Der Lindenhof; see Editor’s Introduction.

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because he was Jewish (he was a Quaker) but because his theories and practices were “subversive” to the New Order. He emigrated to South Africa where—being by that time over fifty—he could not even be employed as a regular school teacher. For some years he led a vacation camp for children on the farm property of a wealthy fellow immigrant and did some part-time or substitute teaching at the primary school in Rustenburg, Transvaal. Finally, through the mediation of American Quakers, he became a teacher of science and math at an American-led normal college (teacher training institute) for natives in Amanzimtoti, Natal. Being also an accomplished artist and craftsman, he taught arts and crafts, too. At South Africa’s entry into World War II at the side of the Allies, Karl Wilker, being too old for the army and not being a Jew either, would have been interned as an enemy alien: but through the influence of his Quaker friends he was only kept under house arrest, e.g. he could not leave the college grounds except for presenting himself every day to the local police station. We visited him a couple of times during our vacations on the Natal coast and were deeply moved by his joy and relief at the unexpected interruption of his enforced isolation, which was finally revoked when his son volunteered for the army. Karl Wilker must have had a considerable influence on native education in South Africa, but with the Nationalist Party coming to power in 1948, this of course must have been effectively shunted off from entering the mainstream of educational theory and practice. I have never heard anything, either directly or indirectly, from or about Karl Wilker again. Hanns Katz 7 I had met when I was a student in Frankfurt in the twenties. At that time (in his thirties) he was already a well-known artist whose expressionist paintings hung in the Städel Museum and in the Munich New Pinakothek. Politically an anarchist, deeply concerned and erudite also in philosophy, musicology, and problems of language and semantics, he was a recognized leader in an avant-garde group of artists and intellectuals of which I remember now only his first wife, the pianist Fränze8 Ehrenreich, Ernst Toller, and Paul Hindemith. We met Hanns Katz again in 1935 in Johannesburg. He had brought some of his paintings into the emigration and he painted incessantly, but could not find any recognition as an artist, the artistic taste of museum 7

Hanns Ludwig Katz was born 1892 in Karlsruhe, Germany, and died in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1940; he was a German expressionist painter and graphic artist. 8 Franziska.

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directors and public still being entirely dominated by French impressionism. His paintings were rejected even by the yearly exhibitions of the South African Academy and he was forced to make a living as a house painter. For a while he also gave some courses in the history of culture, which—as being politically suspect—he had to stop at the outbreak of the war. He9 escaped being interned by becoming very ill of cancer and died in 1940 in the utmost poverty. Three of his paintings are still in my possession. Some others were sold in South Africa in later years, but there is no record of them. The paintings already hanging in German museums were destroyed as “entartete Kunst (degenerate art).” *** Many10 years ago, I had a dream that is present with me whenever I am asked to write a paper or to speak ex cathedra as an ‘authority’ on the theory and practice of Gestalt therapy. The night before the dream I read a poem by John Crowe Ransom11 called ‘The Equilibrists,’ which closes with the line: ‘Let them lie perilous and beautiful.’12 9

Deleted: too, was in danger of. Notebook Number 5 continues by turning the notebook upside down and opening the back cover. The sections of this entry are marked by scattered Roman numerals, which I follow to transcribe the text. The entry comprises fourteen pages and has been paginated by Laura Perls, including pages 3a, 3b and two pages marked 10. Laura Perls used the abbreviated form, G. T., for Gestalt therapy in this entry. This text appears to be a final draft for the publication of Laura Perls, “Some Aspects of Gestalt Therapy” in Laura Perls, Living at the Boundary, ed. Joe Wysong (Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 1992), 129–135. This text was presented as a paper at the 1972 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Group Therapy Association, which met in Washington, D.C. It was published in German in 1979 in the Gestalt-Bulletin. The copyright belongs to Gestalt Journal Press, which has regrettably denied publication permission. Laura Perls’s handwritten draft, a part of Notebook Number 5, underwent minor editorial revisions (punctuation, vocabulary, order of words, etc.) before publication in Living at the Boundary. It is a touching text, which I highly recommend, and have quoted the first two sentences and a passage about contact and support from the published version. 11 John Crowe Ransom was born in 1888 and died in 1974. He was an American poet and critic, part of the “Fugitive group,” later known as the Southern Agrarians. 12 Perls, “Some Aspects of Gestalt Therapy,” 129. 10

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Contact is possible only to the extent that support for it is available. Support is the total background against which the present experience stands out (exists) and forms a meaningful gestalt. For this is what meaning is: the relation of a figure to its ground. Support is everything that facilitates the ongoing assimilation and integration of experience for a person, a relationship, or a society: primary physiology, upright posture and coordination, sensitivity and mobility, language, habits and customs, social manners and relationships, and everything else we have learned and acquired during our lifetime. In short, everything we usually take for granted and rely on, even and particularly our hang-ups and resistances, the fixed ideas, ideals, and behavior patterns that become second nature precisely because they were supportive at the time of their formation.13

13

Ibid., 132–133.

CHAPTER IX NOTEBOOK NUMBER 6, TH DATED 1972; 7 WEST 96 STREET, N.Y., N.Y. 10025

Dr. Laura Perls 7 West 96th Street New York 25, N.Y. UNiversity 5-4338 October 22, 1972 Exactly twenty years ago as we—e.g. Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Elliot Shapiro, Paul Weisz, and I—started the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. Paul Goodman, the New Yorker, introduced Fritz and me, the newcomers, to a group of people who were mostly his friends or our patients. At that time it took either a high degree of ignorance or a lot of guts to get affiliated either with Paul or with us. For many years we were outsiders, regarded variously as amateurs, troublemakers, or quacks. Paul had written more than twenty books, we had practiced here for fifteen years before we were taken seriously by the professions or the publishers. We found courage in each other. I think today that without Paul’s example of persistence, integrity, and unimpaired creativity I might not have been able to hold my own in New York. In fact, Paul was a source of courage for several generations of young people, many of whose already middle-aged faces I see here in this room. I am convinced that Paul was the greatest single facilitator for the ongoing creative development in education, socio-politics, and humanistic psychology—on a truly immense scale a Gestalt therapist. Exactly twenty years ago I wrote—for a playbill of the Living Theatre—a portrait sketch of Paul Goodman, a word collage composed

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nearly entirely of quotations from his Parents’ 1 Day and The Dead of Spring.2 Since then, his vision may have become clearer, more austere, and less hopeful, his utopias more practical, but the essential Gestalt—the intensity of his existential involvement—was always there. Let me read it to you: Dec. 1952 Portrait Sketch of Paul Goodmann By Laura Perls “But she was trapped in awareness and could not withdraw further.” This is a shocking statement. It is the end of the description of a new kid at school in Paul Goodman’s Parents’ Day. 3 With its paradoxical reevaluation of values and the ensuing paralysis, it seems to be a statement of absolute finality. Yet we may use it as a beginning, a key to the understanding of the impact 4 of a literary approach and a therapeutic attitude. To be trapped in awareness! This is a truly shocking state to be in, a short circuit in the expanding life cycle. The seemingly achieved freedom from the bondage of ignorance and insensitivity5 absurdly turns into the prison bars of loneliness and misunderstanding. The Archangel points his sword and Adam stands again outside the closed doors of Paradise. “When I speak as a poet, I speak primarily; I assume that I speak universally, relevantly for you also. I assume that the words are understood. (It is not so important to me that they be approved.) But between my acts and yours I do not assume such a continuity. Therefore the words seem abstract. Therefore they are perhaps not understood after all.”6 1 Laura Perls wrote “Parent’s Day” in her text, and “Parents Day” in her references, but Goodman’s title was Parents’ Day. 2 The playbill is from the program Faustina by Paul Goodman at the Living Theatre: Living Theatre records, 1945–1991. *T-MSS 1988-005 (b. 60, f. 1) Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Many thanks to Ms. Sharon Rork from the Billy Rose Theatre Division, who assisted me in determining the exact citation. 3 In Laura Perls’s “Portrait Sketch of Paul Goodman,” there is a footnote at this place referring to Paul Goodman, Parents’ Day (Saugatuck, Connecticut: The 5 x 8 Press, 1951), 4, as the origin of this quotation. 4 Adapted from the original playbill: “understanding of the impact” replaced “a key to the interpretation.” 5 Adapted from the original playbill: “insensitivity” replaced “insensitiveness.” 6 A footnote here refers to quote from Parents’ Day, 162.

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What does one do if he cannot withdraw any further? Like the child that has been punished, he starts to act out what he has been subjected to. To apply to others the shock that one has suffered, to trap them into an inescapable awareness, becomes a personal and poetic style 7 of reestablishing the broken continuity of human communion. “Yet the courageous little fellow did not, after all, stop talking! I will not stop. To break down the barrier between true speech and immediate acts. To include you also in the series of immediate acts.”8 This approach could be—as indeed it frequently has been—called spiteful, vindictive, self-pitying. Yet, as far as it is self-curative, it leads to a true compassion that is the basis for all successful therapy. “It is the realization that the other has suffered the same disaster as oneself (perhaps I myself inflicted it), and one gives him aid, to make whole at least him.”9 In fact, this technique is applicable only where the need for help is apparent (not necessarily to the needy one himself): “here, whatever else he was to me, was a youth who needed help, and he could be helped, he accepted help, and I could help him, and did offer the help and was going to offer it; and therefore (whatever else) it was impossible for me not to love Davy Drood; because this is what love is.”10 This is what opens the trap. Denial and betrayal of need close it. And this indeed would be final, if not the poet’s magic, turning his heart-break into a social act, would once more release it: then he11 looked directly into the faces of these water gorgons, and his heart turned to heavy stone within him. He faltered. “What’s the matter, are you ill?” they cried solicitously. “It’s nothing. This—” He took out his heart from his breast, a small handful of stone. “A cornerstone for building a good city.”12 ***

7

Adapted from the original playbill: “style” replaced “technique.” A footnote here refers to a quote from Parents’ Day, 162. 9 A footnote here refers to a quote from Parents’ Day, 92. 10 Two footnotes here in the original text both refer to quotes from Parents’ Day, 92. 11 Adapted from the original playbill: “he” replaced “Duyck.” 12 A footnote here refers to a quote from Paul Goodman, Dead of Spring (New Jersey: Libertarian Press, 1950), 42. 8

CHAPTER X ENDCASE: A PSYCHODELICATHOOLIGANISM, POEM, UNDATED

The experiessence of this exasperiment is rather suspectacular. I upstarted it quite unpremedicated, so to speakeasy without adulterior motivagina. Premartyrially, sentimentation is not exacutely my dishwater. In myoptical illusorority, wetnursing is a postparticular occupathology, an impropositional aphrodismalaproprism, enforcefederalizing orifiscallegiance and indisretinism. Resultimately, the irrevenereal diseasygoing virginallurigidity reciprovokes the imprestigma of the bibulophilistine. The climaxioms of bibulography implicathegorize reciprecocity and concupiscatorial discrimindigestation. As is to be or not to be expectorated, this obfuscatology will eventricularly have to be eliminasculated by and by the ways of all excrematerial. Burn, Baby, bury the garruloving postmortician; there is nothing more moronic at stake but dodecacophony wordliness.

CHAPTER XI LETTER TO HANS WONGTSCHOWSKI, TH DATED 1985; 7 WEST 96 STREET, N.Y., N. Y. 10025

Laura Perls 7 West 96th Street New York, N. Y. 10025 UNiversity 5-4338 10/10/85 Dear Hans Wong, I remember you from forty years back at the mornings of the “Kulturverein.” I am just back from three months in Europe and could not answer your letter any earlier. I am sending you photos and slides not only of the Lady in Yellow Dress (Hanns Katz’s first wife, Fränze Ehrenreich, who was a very fine concert pianist), but also an early self-portrait that I saw already in Frankfurt in the late 20s; and a little South African landscape. On my first trip to Germany (1957) I inquired at the Städel Museum about pictures of Hanns Katz (they were already before Hitler in the Städel and the Neue Pinakothek) but neither the director (Dr. Schwarzschild) nor the Gräfin Lankerouske [?] (who was importantly involved in art and politics and a neighbor of H. K.) knew what had happened to them and thought they were destroyed as “entartete Kunst.” So I am lucky to have these three pictures, which Ruth gave us in recognition of our support of Hanns during his last illness. I also worked […] 1 help him to come to terms with and accept his dying. In South Africa Hanns became not only for me, but a small clique [?] of artists and intellectuals, the most interesting and important person. But 1

Bottom line illegible.

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he was rejected artistically even by the young academy exhibitions. German Expressionism wasn’t “in” yet! I am enclosing the photos, because I think they show the colors of the originals more accurately than the slides. The slide of the little watercolor landscape is mounted the wrong way round; you see the correct position in the photo. The measurements of the paintings are Self portrait, 40Ǝ x 27Ǝ, oil; Lady in Yellow Dress, 28Ǝ x 20Ǝ, pastel; Landscape, 19Ǝ x 23Ǝ, aquarelle. I also enclose a poem that I wrote in 1946 à propos a large painting by H. K. that was bought by Vincent and Lillian Swart and is probably still in her possession. There were also pictures in possession of Dr. Karl Landauer in Frankfurt and of Siegfried Krakauer, whose wife, I believe, was a sister of Fränze. But Landauer died in the Holocaust and Krakauer died many years ago in New York, and I have lost track of their respective families. I am happy that H. K.’s work won’t be entirely forgotten. Best wishes! Laura Perls

1. Lore, one year old, © Renate Perls

2. Family Tree (Perls-Rund-Posner-Eber), © Renate Perls

3. Lore (8), Liselotte (6), Robert (4) Posner, Pforzheim, 1913, © Renate Perls

4. Lore Posner, 1919, © Renate Perls

5. Toni Posner, Lore’s mother, © Renate Perls

6. Liselotte Lisser (Lore’s sister) and her daughter, Ruth, Toni Posner and her mother, Eva Eber, © Renate Perls

7. Self-Portrait of Hanns Ludwig Katz (Selbstbildnis mit Papierhut), 1926, private collection, Vienna

8. Lore Perls’s driver’s license, Pforzheim, 1930, © Renate Perls

9. Rudolf Posner, Lore’s father, with walking stick, © Renate Perls

10. Rudolf Posner, 1930, © Renate Perls

11. Postcard to Lore and Fritz from Rudolf Posner in Baden-Baden, 1930, © Renate Perls

12. Lore Perls’s doctoral dissertation: title page, examiners, 1932, © Renate Perls

13. Lore Perls’s doctoral dissertation: table of contents, first page of dissertation, 1932, © Renate Perls

14. Fritz and Lore’s wedding, August 23, 1930, © Renate Perls

15. Amstelkade 61, Amsterdam, where the Perls Family lived, © Nancy AmendtLyon

16. Johannesburg, house on Raymond Street, Bellevue, © Renate Perls

17. Johannesburg, house in Lower Houghton, © Renate Perls

18. Renate and Lore Perls, Johannesburg, ca 1934–5, © Renate Perls

19. Lore and Renate, Johannesburg, ca 1934–1935, © Renate Perls

20. Lore and Fritz Perls at home, Johannesburg, 1937, © Renate Perls

21. Fritz and Lore, Hluhluwe Wildpark, 1937, © Renate Perls

22 Lore with Renate and Stephen, Johannesburg, ca 1938, © Renate Perls

23. Fritz Perls in his South African Army uniform, Johannesburg, WWII, © Renate Perls

24. Renate, Stephen, and Lore, Johannesburg, 1941, © Renate Perls

25. Perls Family, Johannesburg, 1946, © Renate Perls

26. Perls Family, Provincetown, Rhode Island, 1948, © Renate Perls

27. Renate with her daughters, Alison and Leslie, 1953, © Renate Perls

28. Laura Perls’s passport photo, 1957, © Renate Perls

29. Paul Goodman, © Daisy Goodman

y, undated, 30. Application for “Who’s Who of American Women,” duplicate copy © Renate Perrls

31. Laura, Leslie Gold, and Renate Perls, Englewood, N.J., 1958, © Renate Perls

32. Laura and Fritz Perls, Englewood, N.J., 1958, © Renate Perls

33. Laura at AAP Conference, N.Y.C, October 1959, © Renate Perls

34. Portrait photo of Laura Perls, © Renate Perls

35. Laura in a workshop, © Renate Perls

36. Laura in her office chair, N.Y.C., © Renate Perls

37. Laura in her office, standing, N.Y.C., © Renate Perls

38. 7 West 96th Street, N.Y.C., © Nancy Amendt-Lyon

39. Laura in Austria, © Renate Perls

40. Letter from Laura to N. Amendt-Lyon, 1982, page 1, © Nancy Amendt-Lyon

41. Letter from Laura to N. Amendt-Lyon, 1982, page 2, © Nancy Amendt-Lyon

yon, Laura, andd Karl-Heinz Ladenhauf, L 42. N. Amenndt-Lyon, Rosaa and David Ly Graz, Sept. 19982, © Nancy Amendt-Lyon A

1 © Nancy Amendt-Lyon 43. Laura Perrls, Graz, Sept 1982,

44. Anja Römer-Hahn, © Renate Perls

45. Anja Römer-Hahn and Laura, Germany, © Renate Perls

46. Laura with Leslie Gold, Steve, and Renate Perls, 1984, © Renate Perls

47. Laura in Pforzheim, 1985, © Renate Perls

48. Laura with Leslie Gold, Central Park, N.Y.C., May 1988, © Renate Perls

49. Laura in Central Park, N.Y.C., May 1988, © Renate Perls

50. Eulogy foor Laura by Annja Römer-Hah hn, Pforzheimerr Zeitung, July 26, 1990, text © Hans Peter Dittler for f the heirs of o Anja Römerr-Hahn, photo © Margot Elsässer

51. Gravestone of the Posner Family, Pforzheim, © Ulf Rathje

52. Footstone for Laura and Fritz Perls, Pforzheim, © Ulf Rathje

53. Photo of Stone of Remembrance for Toni Posner, Friedenstr. 80, Pforzheim, © Ulf Rathje

54. Nancy Amendt-Lyon and Renate Perls, 50th anniversary of the NYIGT, 2003, © Nancy Amendt-Lyon

Organizers of Centennial C 55. N. Amendt-Lyon, P. Schulthess, S. Ahlbrecht, O Conference foor Laura in Munnich, 2005, © Nancy N Amendt--Lyon

56. Notebook Number 1: handwritten page 41 from the short story “Awakening”

57. Notebook Number 1: profile sketch page 74

58. Notebook Number 2: handwritten page 129 from the short story “A Peg to Hang One’s Hat On”

59. Notebook Number 4: sketches on page 35

60. Notebook Number 5: handwritten draft of “Some Aspects of Gestalt Therapy” on page 13

CHAPTER XII LAURA PERLS INTERVIEWED BY DANIEL ROSENBLATT, DATED 1972

First interview: Early years (first conversation, March 4, 1972) Laura Perls’s family background LP: What do you want me to tell you—where I come from? DR: Yes. LP: Well, I’m a small town girl, and come from an upper middle class background that was Jewish, reformed Jewish, which means that we were socially rather secluded and the people we went around with were very carefully chosen. DR: What do you mean, socially secluded? LP: If you have seen the film, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, then you probably know what I mean . . . that one didn’t make any splash outside. We were well dressed, we had everything, but it had to be inconspicuous. For instance, my father, who had a big business and factory, and was a self-made man, got very wealthy. Never owned his own car, but only the business had a car, and as he got older the business car fetched him and brought him home. My brother later had a car. DR: How much contact was there with non-Jews? LP: We, in school, of course. Then in business my father had contact with non-Jews and was quite friendly with numbers of them, particularly the ones with whom he had business deals. But I don’t remember when I was a young child anybody visiting my parents, for instance on Sundays or so, who was not Jewish. And it was the upper class Jews—“Our Crowd” as you would call it here.

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DR: And what about your mother—where was her family from? LP: My mother came from Hamburg, also from the upper-middle class and was quite a wealthy girl when she married. My father comes from a lowermiddle class background, and he said that his father was a teacher, but as his parents lived for a number of years in England, and I don’t think an ordinary school teacher would have gone to England—no German Jewish school teacher would have lived in England—, my suspicion is, and I have more than one reason for this, he was a rabbi, which my father did not mention. The Jewish thing was always kind of tuned down. DR: What kinds of interests were there in the family? LP: My mother was very well educated, had been to finishing school in Brussels and spoke English and French quite fluently. She translated books; she was a very good musician. Actually, my musical talent comes through her. From the cradle on I was next to the piano. I heard her play, and when I was five I started to play. DR: Do you have early memories of playing the piano? LP: Yes, I know that I wanted to play, and I plagued my mother until she started teaching me, and I remember I was five, six years old playing fourhands with her, little piano pieces. I also remember the elation I experienced when I first discovered that I could play more than one note at one time and really make chords on the piano and I still have the feeling of it, of that kind of surprise and elation. And by the time I was ten, twelve, I was a pretty accomplished pianist. By the time I was fourteen, fifteen, I had played myself through the whole classical literature, whether I could technically do it or not. But of course I had then very good teachers. Also my mother taught me until I was about seven or so, but then she couldn’t really. DR: Do you remember studying with her, what it was like? LP: The peculiar thing is that in spite of having the same interests and inclinations as my mother—she read a lot, she wrote poetry, and painted a little bit, and she was an accomplished musician—I had a lot of disdain for her or nearly contempt. I think it had to do with her withdrawing attitude, and her not standing up for herself, and not really making anything out of her gifts. But somehow, being very second-fiddle, or not even secondfiddle, to my father, whom I adored, who was a self-made man, not very well educated but quite well read in the subjects that interested him, which were mainly economic and politics. He was actually in the first war an

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advisor to the government and he was very active later on in labor arbitration. DR: What is the first memory you have, the first thing you can remember? LP: The first memory I have is one that I wrote a story about afterwards, many years later in South Africa. It was the first story I ever wrote.1 It’s about this early memory. It’s a memory—it’s actually more a kinesthetic memory—namely being crossed by my mother who was lying in bed and I think after the birth of my younger sister and she was sorry, 2 and she dropped a thimble. She wanted me to pick it up and I didn’t want to pick it up, I was running around there. She took my hand and made me pick it up. And as soon as she let go, I tore loose and I hit her. I don’t remember any consequences of that. I was then about two years old. But the memory is very clear that I wouldn’t be forced to do anything. DR: And as you describe it you put your own hand on your forearm and held it . . . kinesthetic . . . LP: Yah. DR: Do you remember striking her? LP: I remember just the movement of hitting or pushing, but that’s all I remember. DR: You talked about your mother very much withdrawing and playing second fiddle to your father, and I guess one of the questions I wanted to ask you was when in your childhood did you first become aware of what we call psychology: differences in people, style . . . LP: Differences in people I became aware of very early, and I was always interested in people who had different lifestyles from the one I was brought up in, which led later on to a lot of conflict with my father, whom up till the age of fourteen or so I adored and admired. But then I got involved in a Jewish youth group. It was a group that was actually started from the B’nai B’rith originally, but there were some people in it who were more Zionist oriented and there were a number of people in the youth group who were from lower-middle class or middle-middle class backgrounds, and some people who, for instance, were studying to become

1 This is the short story titled “Awakening” (1946), which is published for the first time in Notebook Number 1 in this volume. 2 Deleted: sorry; an illegible word is written above it.

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engineers and working in iron-mongers workshops or things like that, and I made friends with people who were more of the working class type. DR: Did you have a maid in the house? LP: Oh, yes. We always had a cook and a chambermaid and a Fräulein—a governess. DR: What did you make of those differences when you were small? LP: I remember them nearly all from age four on, the maids as well as the Fräuleins. And most of the Fräuleins were quite nice except one who was so stupid and couldn’t do anything with us, she couldn’t exercise any authority, she cried when anybody resisted her, and she was there only very shortly. But then we had one, after this one, who stayed with us for eight years, and she became a great friend. DR: Can you remember what you made of the fact that they were there, and working in the house, but not part of the family? LP: The Fräulein was eating with us at the table and was in some way part of the family. The maids, of course, were in the kitchen, and I had at that point no thoughts about it. That was just how it was right from the beginning. Later on I had more thoughts about it. For instance, when I was later married myself I had a maid, and for a while a kind of a part-time nurse when I started working, to look after the baby, after Ren. They were communist-oriented, as we were at the time ourselves, and I treated them in the same way as any of my friends or acquaintances. DR: And even later in South Africa? LP: Well, in South Africa, of course, one had black servants. And one of my mother’s maids later came out and was a nurse for the kids. She was half-Jewish and wanted out. DR: Were you thinking of something then? LP: No, I was just thinking, where do we start again? DR: Well, I asked you about differences, if you were aware of them, and we talked about social class differences, but I also wanted to know if you were aware of differences in people, in personalities. LP: Well, for instance, we were not allowed to go at certain times on the streets, and that was when the workers came out of the factories. Pforzheim is a manufacturing town, and everybody manufactures jewelry of some sort, mostly costume jewelry, but also more valuable jewelry. And

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when the workers leave or come to their work, or when they go to the station to take their trains into the little villages around, most come from the country and are still part agrarian. For instance, during the first war they brought in produce from their farms and so we always had some extra eggs or butter or something that most people couldn’t get. DR: Do you have any memories of that first war? LP: Oh, certainly. I remember when it first broke out, that we kids in school—I was about eight or nine—we were kind of laughing about something and having fun and one of the teachers came out of the staff room very upset and said, “Keep quiet. How can you laugh? There is a war on.” As if the kids could stop living. DR: It reminds me of the early memory of your mother taking your hand and forcing you. Here the teacher was forcing this attitude. Well, can you remember when you first became aware that there were real differences between your father and your mother, that it wasn’t just . . .? LP: Oh, I was very much aware of that, that my father was actually an outgoing person and very demonstrative in affection and also in anger. I was probably afraid of him in spite of never having really experienced his anger directly towards me.

Bookworm and young writer DR: How about the people who were interesting to you when you were reading? LP: I read everything that I could get hold of. The books I had were kids’ books, and also whatever I could find around—newspapers, magazines, my mother’s books and there were books I wasn’t supposed to read and of course I read them all. And I started to write as soon as I could write. I wrote little poems that they teased me with, and then I started to write what I called a novel. And it was a love story like the magazine stories I read somewhere. DR: Do you remember any of it? LP: I don’t remember details of the story but I remember that I showed it to the chambermaid, and I made her promise not to show it to my mother because she probably wouldn’t approve of that kind of stuff. But the maid was so impressed that she did show it to my mother, and my mother blew her top. And this was one of the few times where she actively interfered, and in a very drastic way. She took it away. She said she can’t imagine

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how I get hold of stuff like that and I break my head about things like that, and it’s nothing for little kids, and I don’t understand a thing about it. And she took the whole thing. And she took more away than just what I had written, because from there on I couldn’t write in German anymore at all in an emotional way, in an emotionally involved, but only in a kind of very rational, sensible school-way. I was mortified. At age nine or ten we were asked in school to write a story, as an essay, that a girl, for whom I had no respect really and who I thought was stupid and no scholar at all, wrote a lovely, imaginative story about animals and things like that, and I wrote a very stodgy description of Christmas. The comparison with that other story was just nothing, and I was really terribly hurt and unhappy. I did recover my imagination when I really learned to function in a new language. When I spoke English in South Africa for about eight or ten years, and really not only that I could use it but that I had read myself through the whole English literature, I started to write again. DR: In your analysis did you work at all on that? LP: Yah, but analysis was very rational, too, and in a way it emphasized my rationality. DR: Did you ever write a poem in German after that? LP: Not in German. I have translated some English into German. But when I write poetry, I write spontaneously in English. I can express myself much more affectionately and directly in English than I ever could in German. I could probably do it now in German, too, but I really have no one to whom that would apply. I could hardly ever say in German “Ich liebe dich.” I can quite easily say “I love you.” DR: How about with Fritz in the early days? LP: In the early days we were very affectionate, but not very much in words. He had kind of a block there, too. But he carried it right over into English. DR: Can you remember when you were reading, say before ten, which characters meant the most to you? LP: It’s difficult to say. I remember starting to write a tale and it was taken from the Niobe story. Well actually, what first got me most was really Greek mythology. DR: Do you remember which heroes meant the most to you?

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LP: Heroes, I don’t know. Somehow the whole sequence. Well, Athena, springing full grown out of the head of Zeus. That is of course that artistic work that comes out. DR: But she’s also the wise, and the precious . . . LP: Yah, and then in the Niobe story, what is really the essence of the story is that Niobe, who had fourteen children, makes fun of Latona, who has only two, and so Latona puts a kind of curse on her and all her children die or are killed, and Latona’s children are Apollo and Diana. DR: And you identified with . . .? LP: Both. DR: All three. LP: And then, of course, I read a lot of German poetry very early. I really was steeped in it. DR: Do you remember which ones meant a lot? LP: The ones that meant a lot to me were the 17th century mystics, and later Hölderlin, Rilke, Goethe, Lessing, Schiller less so, but also at a certain period Schiller is very important, at a kind of pre-adolescent and adolescent period.

Schooldays in Pforzheim DR: And how about during your adolescence? LP: Adolescence was difficult. I started school in primary school, which was at a private girls’ school. And when I was about eleven the headmistress called my father in and said “This girl must go to the Gymnasium. She is too gifted for the ordinary girls’ school.” So that was it. But there was no girls’ Gymnasium in the small town where we lived, in Pforzheim, and so I went to the boys’ Gymnasium. And I was for a while the only girl in the class of twenty-six or twenty-seven boys. And later on there were two other girls, one of whom dropped out again—she couldn’t take it—and the other one went through and she is now a psychiatrist, still in Berlin. I met her later again in Berlin where she was working in the Bonhöffer Clinic [inaudible] and met her again through Dr. Quadfasel whom I originally met in the Goldstein Neurological set-up and through whom I met Fritz. DR: What was it like being the only girl with twenty-six boys?

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LP: Socially I didn’t belong, but scholastically I was always near the top. I took great care not to be the first. Actually, when I started it I was prepared by somebody for about three months, and I made up for the three years which I didn’t have of Latin and all kinds of other things in three months, and then I flunked my entrance exam and they didn’t want to take me for the class I had prepared for. And then they took me on probation for six weeks and I was OK then. And by Christmas, it was three months later, I was the third among twenty-seven. DR: Can you remember how you felt about your [success?]? [inaudible] LP: Well, I felt it was really my due and I had fantasies about that long before. Actually, I had fantasies then of being a kind of leader of men— not of women, of men. And it was kind of linked up, of course, with the war which was on at the time, from the age I was nine to thirteen. DR: A Joan of Arc? LP: Something like that, yah.

Adolescent crisis DR: You said adolescence was difficult. LP: Adolescence then was difficult because I wasn’t looked at then by the boys in school as a girl. I was one of the boys. And also I had geared myself to that in my behavior, probably, so I was not flirtatious or anything. And actually, I became interested not in boys, but in men, and my first friend who was a friend for many years, who just died a few years ago, also in America, was a young lawyer who was about twelve years older than I was, and who was a leader of the youth group that I got into. We were very close but always very formal. It was all very above board and very proper. He always brought me home at night from the meetings of the youth group. And then it was busted up by the family because I was so involved and he behaved impeccably but they were threatening him and he withdrew and I didn’t know what happened to me and I just felt overwhelmed and I had some kind of a breakdown at the time. And they put it down to overwork, but it was just because I was completely desperate. I had lost confidence in my father and I had no respect for my mother and I couldn’t meet my friend, and I was for a few months then in Dr. Bauer’s sanitarium in Freudenstadt, and he was an Adlerian. And there I made my first contact with psychoanalysis, actually; I was fifteen– sixteen at the time. I remember reading The Psychopathology of Everyday

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Life, and the dream interpretation. And I also met somebody there, a young man, who was a medical student, who had also had some kind of a slight breakdown. He was actually interested in an older girl whom he was studying with, but he was supposed to study medicine and he had to go through [exams?]; his father was a lawyer, very coercive. But this guy was interested mainly in Baroque music and instruments and he had a viola da gamba and a viola d’amore. We rented a piano for a few hours every day and we made music, in that little place. And that helped more than anything else to come together again. When he had to emigrate he could not be a doctor in London. He is Carl Haas, the conductor of the London Baroque Orchestra. There are lots of recordings of his in the last thirty years. DR: What kind of treatment did you get when you were in the sanitarium? LP: Well, it was mostly just talking out my troubles. But there was also something else. There was a lot of sexual curiosity and this doctor was a youngish man in his middle or late thirties and his house was somewhere else and he had six children, I think, and we had all, this boy Carl, and I, and a young nurse who was probably lesbian, we had all kinds of overblown sexual fantasies and we projected all these fantasies on the doctor and his wife. We were watching them and fantasizing what they had been doing together. But that was in a way very good, this kind of shared daydreams, and it was very relieving because I’d never had anything like that. I had remained friends with one or two of the girls from the girls’ school, but what we shared was mainly not the interest in men so much. They had much more involvement with boys and with men than I had. I started it really only when I was a student in college. But in high school, until I was eighteen, I had hardly any, certainly not intimate, contact with any boys—not even petting or anything like that. That started only in college. DR: Did you have personal kinds of fantasies after that? LP: Oh, yes. I had fantasies about men, and particularly about this one I was talking about, and sometimes about a teacher in school, who was my Greek teacher for a number of years and not really physically very attractive, but I was fascinated by the work and he was fascinated by the way I was working. Actually, I was always only in love with people with whom I shared a lot of interests apart from sexual attraction. I never felt sexual attraction for somebody with whom I couldn’t share something. Just by looking at them did not turn me on. That came much later—that I could look at a man just as a beautiful specimen of manhood.

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DR: Can you remember how you felt when you first read Freud? LP: Oh, I was very intrigued and of course got into the kind of phase where I had to interpret it and understand everything, to learn it. DR: What did you make of what you called your breakdown at that time? How did you understand it? LP: Well, I knew that I got so tense that I got a writer’s cramp and I couldn’t do my school work, and I had a kind of nervous tic, shrugging my shoulders. But I realized that I could actually produce it and stop it. I think it was a way of frightening them, the family, and getting out for a while. I was actually out of school for seven months, and I nearly didn’t make it back. And when I got back I got back into the same class, and it was all right, but I never was that brilliant again. DR: What do you mean that you nearly didn’t make it back? LP: Because I . . . something had gone out of me, in the way of being interested in learning at the time, and I was more involved then emotionally in other kinds of problems, and also I started to get involved politically and socially in all kinds of interests. That was the time of 1917, 1918, 1919, the post-war years, and revolutionary years, and we all got involved in socialism. And so I couldn’t think of becoming a musician; it always was expected that I would be a concert player, and I thought so for many years myself. But I thought it wasn’t really a valuable thing socially, which I don’t think any more now, of course, and not for a long time. But at the time one had to do something that was more socially involved, and at first I thought of studying medicine. When I was fourteen–fifteen I thought I would become a doctor and then I thought that I would probably marry before I was finished and it takes about ten years; at the sanitarium in Freudenstadt I met an elderly couple. He was the former Director of the Karlsruher Stadttheater, and a brother of Albert Bassermann, the actor. And she was very interested in what we now call Women’s Liberation, and she thought that a good thing would be to study law and become a woman lawyer and do juvenile court work. It was something very new then—juvenile courts being established apart from the ordinary courts. And I went to law school after I graduated from the Gymnasium, until I found out that I was really interested only in the psychological aspects of it and then I was already taking psychology courses, and then I switched after two years. DR: When you said you had a writer’s cramp, did that extend to your playing the piano?

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LP: No, I didn’t have it when I played the piano. I shut it off. DR: When did you actually first become interested in psychology? LP: Well, when I was in law school and when I took some psychology courses with Gelb, which were Gestalt courses, and I also took a course in forensic medicine, which was with a psychiatrist. DR: When you were in the sanitarium did you ever have any fantasies about being a psychiatrist? LP: Not at that time. No, I was more involved with social questions and with music still.

University studies in Frankfurt DR: At what point can you remember making a decision to become a psychologist—when you were studying law? LP: Yah, during the last year in school. The second year didn’t go into the third year because I would have had to do exams, and I hadn’t done any work and I would never have gotten through. Then I made a decision. First, actually, I got more into education and philosophy. I had gotten more interested in working with juveniles, probably as a result of my own juvenile problems, and I thought first when I went into analysis that I would become a child analyst. But when I was through with my analysis I didn’t want to work exclusively with children any more. DR: You mentioned Prof. Gelb and Gestalt courses. What did you mean? LP: Well, it was Gestalt psychology. It was awareness psychology, mainly visual, a lot of experimental things. Well, if you read any of the visual awareness papers of David Katz, Ademar Gelb, and Kurt Goldstein. They used my doctoral thesis too for their own publications, or if you read Wertheimer, who was also then one of my teachers, on productive thinking. DR: When you were in law school did you have Wertheimer? LP: No, Wertheimer was later. He was at that time still in Berlin. I was in Frankfurt. DR: When did you start studying psychology?

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LP: In ’25. In Frankfurt. And it was mainly because of Goldstein and Wertheimer. And I also had as secondary subjects philosophy and physiology. Physiology with Bethe3 and philosophy with Paul Tillich. And also studied courses with Buber, at the University and at the Jewish “Lehrhaus” [House of Studies]. [inaudible] I think that Buber and Tillich were of much greater influence on me in the long run than analysis and Gestalt psychology, because it was a direct and existential approach to life. DR: Can you remember the first time you went to hear Tillich? LP: I still have notes of his lectures, and they are the only ones I kept. And a lot of it I didn’t understand at first hearing. But it’s what you don’t understand or fully understand that germinates something. If you are fascinated enough. You know the story of the rabbi, the young rabbi, who goes to see an old Zaddik, or somebody like that, and reports: “The first day the rabbi spoke, and I understood every word of it; the second day the rabbi spoke, and he understood what he was saying, but I didn’t understand very much, but it was beautiful, a great experience. The third day the rabbi spoke, and he didn’t understand what he was saying and I didn’t understand what he was saying, and it was the greatest experience of my life.” DR: Did you have days when you felt Tillich didn’t understand himself, too? LP: Yah, but at the same time the feeling that he was so much in the center of it that he4 didn’t even have to understand it, and he understood it. DR: How about Buber? LP: Buber was in some ways earthier than Tillich. He was sturdy, like a peasant. I saw Buber last at his eightieth birthday celebration in 35th Street at the Unitarian Church, and Erich Fromm was giving the address. And in the course of the address Fromm was speaking about power and he said power is what makes animals out of human beings. And I was kind of incensed; and I had the intention afterwards, when there was supposed to be a kind of a general discussion, that I would say something to the effect that Fromm didn’t do justice to himself and to what he was doing. Power 3

Albrecht Bethe was a professor of physiology at the University of Frankfurt from 1915 to 1937, when the National Socialists forced him out of his position. 4 In Bernd Bocian’s copy of the interview, “I” is handwritten into the text, whereas in my copy, the word “he” is handwritten into the text.

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is also something else. But then in his reply, Buber said, “I don’t quite agree with you, Dr. Fromm. Power is not only this (thumbs down), power is also this (thumbs up). So he said it and I didn’t have to say anything. [inaudible few minutes]

First interview continued: Early years (second conversation, March 10, 1972) Revisiting life in Pforzheim DR: The last time we talked, we spoke about a lot of your early memories up until you were working at the University doing graduate work. And I wonder if after we talked, some others came back. We began by talking about what it was like to live in a small town in Germany. LP: I didn’t like it and I promised myself that I would never live in a small town again. I would either live in a big city or I would live out in the country. DR: What was it you didn’t like about living in a small town? LP: The tightness of control, everybody knows everybody, everybody gossips about everybody, you can’t move. I met that friend I was talking about the last time in the city, and stood with him on a street corner, ten minutes of talk, and when I came home, my mother knew already that my aunt had seen me, and I got a sermon. And the atmosphere was like that. DR: What about the workers that were there? You had a certain term— Arbeiter.5 Did you have any other memories about that? LP: Well, of course my father had always a very good relationship with his workers, and I am just reading now an article on the pre-war in Weimar Germany and how there was never really ground there for democracy. But in the South there was. There was still a certain tradition in the South of Germany, stemming from the 1848 revolution, which in the end was abortive, but it was really the North and the Northeast of Germany that was Prussian and Protestant. And they were illiberal and tight and militaristic and imperialist and the South was much more gemütlich6 and democratic and we called the North Germans the “Saupreußen.”7

5

German for: worker. German for: comfortable, jovial. 7 German for: Prussian swine. 6

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DR: How did your father get on with these workers? LP: He was a father to them and I see it now in my brother who is carrying it over to Providence and is very upset that a lot of the young workers are trained for a specific type of work in the factory. He wanted to train them in all kinds of different techniques so that they wouldn’t have seasonally to be laid off for a while. This is costume jewelry that they are making and there are certain seasons that they have no work. But these people would rather go on unemployment in the meantime and they won’t learn anything different. They have no pride any more in the work. It’s just to make money with. DR: How did your father get on with the union? LP: My father was very active in mediation. He was actually an arbitrator in labor fights. DR: Did he have any fights with his own workers at all? LP: No, not with his own. And he was kind of very liberal and very acknowledged by both sides, the manufacturers on the one hand and the workers on the other. And he somehow managed to get more than along with both. DR: When we last talked, I remember that you talked about your father and how you saw him, but I didn’t get too much sense of how the two of you got along, how he saw you and what your relationship was like. LP: He adored me. And I adored him for a long time—up to fourteen or so, fourteen or fifteen. Then I started to get interested in men and I can see now that he simply was insanely jealous. And whoever it was, it didn’t really matter. Unless he selected them. But he had really no judgment. He and a friend of his in Berlin—a business friend—got together and somehow intended to marry their children to each other. They invited me when I was seventeen to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of the daughter of this guy, and I had never seen these people before, and I was kind of a guest of honor, and the son of the house was sitting next to me, and he was so boring and [unresponsive?], as we would say now, he was really so sick, and the year after he committed suicide. And my God, they wanted me to marry that. When I met Fritz my family was very much against. When they got to know him I was already going out with him for more than three years, and they couldn’t do very much. DR: How did your relationship change after you were fourteen?

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LP: I felt very hostile toward my father then, very [superior?]. I just rejected them all. My mother was then in some ways more understanding, and the only fight I ever overheard between my parents was about me, in the room in the house just under me and I could hear them. My father shouted: “I’ll break all his bones.” And my mother tried to pacify him and she said “The kid is in love and there’s not much you can do.” But they interrupted it, and I had a kind of breakdown. DR: Did you ever get back with your father? LP: Never really to any kind of intimacy. When he saw that he couldn’t break off my relationship with Fritz he was then very good, actually, and very generous. DR: You’ve mentioned your brother but I don’t think we’ve actually talked very much about him. LP: My brother was at that time still very young, and he tried very actively to interfere in the relationship with Fritz, even to the point that he sent private detectives after him to find out what kind of a past life he had, and to their disappointment they found out that he came from a respectable family, particularly his mother. They were academics, and his mother was a first cousin to a man by the name of Staub, who was a very famous German jurist. The Staubsche Kommentar was a commentary on the civil rights code, and it was an absolutely must text book in all German law schools. This was the family his mother came from. And his mother, in spite of being married to a man who made money but spent it mostly on himself, and was very ungenerous to the family, in spite of the kind of subpoverty they lived in, she always found means and ways to go on the free days with the kids to the museum, or concerts, so that they acquired quite a cultural background but kind of haphazard. Fritz did not like really going to school and was very unhappy and rebellious at the Gymnasium at first, those years where they were pretty anti-Semitic, and not very good teachers, and he got stuck in the same class three times, with an I.Q., I don’t know how high; we didn’t have them at the time. And they put him into business. And then he decided himself that he wanted to go back to school, but he went back to a Gymnasium that he chose, and there he graduated with honors and was freed from the oral examination because his written work was so absolutely brilliant. DR: You talked last time about starting school and then going into the boys’ school. Did you have any more feelings about that?

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LP: Well, as I said, I was one of the boys, but actually of course I wasn’t one of the boys. But we let each other alone, and I was pretty isolated. But I still continued some friendship with one or two girls that I was friends with from before, and then with the daughter of our rabbi who was five years older than me. She was a very good violinist and we did a lot of music together for many years. She became a concert violinist in London. DR: How about the period in the sanitarium? Did you have any other memories of that after we spoke? LP: Hardly, though mainly of the young nurse who apparently was lesbian and who made some passes at me, but I rejected them completely. I have always been, apparently, exposed or attractive to lesbians, I don’t know why, because I have no strong feelings that way. I may have a certain homo-erotic feeling in the sense that I find certain types of girls very attractive just to look at aesthetically, but no sexual feelings whatsoever. I was strictly always a man’s woman. DR: Did you understand what she was doing or was she very subtle? LP: She was subtle but I understood somehow; I felt kind of appalled and withdrawn.

Revisiting Laura’s university days in Frankfurt DR: What about the early collegiate days? Did you have any other memories of those? LP: Well, I went to Frankfurt because there was my mother’s youngest sister who was only eight years older than I was; she was married and she had an interesting circle around her—intellectual, artistic. And I went first to law school there, in Frankfurt, and also became friends and very intimate with a boy who then later wanted to marry me. He was from Würzburg, a very gifted but also very neurotic boy. And I’m very glad that in the end I didn’t marry him. We did everything but sleep together and he accepted it. At the time there was still kind of a divided morality, and I somehow felt that he wouldn’t stay in Frankfurt; and he was later in Würzburg and Erlangen at the university and only visiting me occasionally. I felt I didn’t want an intimate relationship over the distance. And so it was mainly by letter and visiting. DR: Do you want to talk about your first sexual experience? LP: My first sexual experience was Fritz. Before that it was mainly everything but. And it was mostly with this one boy with whom I was

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friends for three years. He was about two years older than I was. Very sensual, very bright, very lively, but also very shaky. He lost his mother at birth, I think, and was brought up by stepmothers, and stepbrothers, and stepsisters, and he was kind of an outsider in his family. DR: Can you think of anything else? LP: What is interesting is that the interest that is now so prevalent in the States among young people in Eastern philosophy, and Eastern dance, and movement, and yoga, and all kinds of methods of concentration and meditation, we were into all that when we were kids. DR: Who was leading it then? LP: There was a dance movement based on yoga exercises to a great extent and there were dancers from Java who actually trained some people in Berlin like Hania [Rose?], for instance, who actually studied with Rabindranath Tagore. He was a brilliant Javanese dancer who had a great influence in Germany. Rabindranath Tagore was giving lectures and we read all his stuff in German, in good translations. DR: And Hesse of course. LP: But then of course he was young and we read all his novels just when they came out, all the things that are being translated or have been translated only comparatively lately like Demian and like Magister Ludi and today I am not very much affected by Hesse at all, I think he is very much overestimated as a writer. Siddhartha is not a great book. And I think that, for instance, Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, is much more interesting. [rest inaudible]

Second interview: Berlin (April 14, 1972) When Laura met Fritz LP: I met Fritz first in the fall of ’26, and I met him through one of his colleagues at Goldstein’s Neurological Clinic, through Dr. Quadfasel, who at the time was the “Wunderkind” of the institute. He was twenty-three years old and had an M.D. already. He remained a good friend and still is. He is now in America for many years. He was incarcerated by the Hitler regime for a while in ’34, I think, and then went to London and then came to America. He was in the Veterans’ Administration and he was Director of Neurological Services in Framingham and in Boston and then in

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Washington, I think on a national scale. Now he is retired. I still see him occasionally. DR: What was Fritz like in 1926? LP: Fritz was, in 1926, a desperate cynic. He had been through the first war, in the trenches he had been gassed, he had pneumonia [inaudible section] when I met him. And that may have later on contributed to his emphysema, his heart difficulties. But it was also mainly smoking, which he also took up in the trenches when they didn’t have enough food. DR: What was your first impression of him, can you remember? LP: My first impression was: “There he is.” DR: You knew immediately what was there? LP: What was there was a type I liked, an intelligence and a brightness, and originality in little things. At that time he wasn’t creative in any kind of a focused way at all. He was creative in talking. He was in analysis at the time, and so was Dr. Quadfasel. And I got into analysis at that time because they had a kind of a jargon between them that I was excluded from, and a kind of experience that I didn’t have. I went originally into analysis in order to be “in.” At the same time, of course, I was studying Gestalt psychology, and I was much more a Gestaltist than Fritz was. He said only a few years ago, “I wish I had understood Gestalt more when I was with Goldstein.” And a lot of that escaped him. DR: Fritz was with Goldstein? LP: Fritz was a volunteer at the time, which was an unpaid assistant. People simply went there to study with Goldstein, and he was there for six months and later on again for six months or a year. But then he came back mainly to be with me. DR: You called Fritz a desperate cynic when you met. But you said: “There he is.” LP: He had a kind of a gallows humor and was very nihilistic. He also had no contact with what I had most contact with, with nature. I had grown up in the Black Forest. I went out as much as I could, out of the city. And that was something new and strange to him. I think he knew nature only from the trenches, you know, and from being in a very disagreeable way in the open. DR: Since it was ’26 and the war had been over for really eight years, how was he still so desperate?

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LP: He had no feeling of belonging anywhere. He belonged vaguely to a kind of a half-intellectual circle and he had kind of superficial contact with all kind of poets, actors, with theatre mainly, and with writers. But he had no really intimate contact with anybody. He had girlfriends, of course, and lots of them, but not very long-lasting relationships. There was one that was convenient, because she was living in his mother’s apartment building where he also lived, but he had no further attachment at all. DR: Those were problems he had for the rest of his life. Not belonging. LP: He had always, but in some ways he changed very much during the time we were together, on and off, and we were intimate from January ’27 to forever after. DR: And you mentioned cynic. In what ways a cynic? LP: Not really wanting to take anything or anyone really seriously. Getting involved on the one hand, and denying it on the other hand. Making fun of, yah, being cynical. Doubting, more than skeptical. Rather nihilistic, I would say. DR: Do you think his analysis at that time was helpful to him? LP: Somewhat, not very much. I went to the same analyst then, who was Mrs. Clara Happel, who later on was also in the States, in Detroit, and who died of a brain tumor pretty young, in her forties, I think. She was in her mid- or late thirties while I was her analysand. Bright woman, but as I see now, not a very effective analyst. She went from Frankfurt later to Hamburg, and I went to another analyst, Dr. Karl Landauer, who was one of the great analysts, I would say. He started together with Clara, I mean Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Carl Meng, who later was and still is in Basel, in Switzerland. They started the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute. And Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was my first teacher. Clara Thompson came much later. And we were never friendly. She was friendly with Fritz. She liked only men, I think. I think I said Clara as Frieda FrommReichmann appears as Clara Fried in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which is about her and the institute she worked at in Maryland, Chestnut Hill.

The course of their relationship DR: What happened to Fritz’s cynicism over the next forty years? LP: Well, he mellowed somewhat, but it was always, you know, I was never sure of him, and of course, one never could be. And I never

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expected him to marry me, but I fell absolutely in love with him. No, actually, at the very first, when I met him, when he started making passes at me, I remember I didn’t like his smell. DR: Was it cigars? LP: Yah, and a certain body odor which later on I liked, but I think it was defensiveness on my part, just not wanting to get into it, but I got into it. DR: When you remember the relationship, and since you knew . . . L: In the beginning it was very tentative. He was very easily hurt and actually at that point a little paranoid. I remember I met him once in the street and was very delighted meeting him, and it was very lousy weather, it had been raining, and the sun just same out, and I took my little rubber covers off my shoes, and I was kind of snapping them in my hand, and some mud came on him and he apparently felt that I was kind of slinging mud on him or something like that, and turned around and left! And for days I didn’t know what was what and I was very unhappy. [inaudible] The first time we had dinner together, in the Mensa,8 at the University, he was eating frankfurters and taking some mustard and he dropped it on my sleeve. And then thought it was a declaration of love, if he does it. Funny, I hadn’t thought of it for a long time and in that kind of connection. If he throws it, it’s love, and if I throw it . . . and he did it more or less nearly intentionally. He was immediately aware of it. But I wasn’t at all, you know. I was swinging my boots around. DR: You were excited, obviously. LP: Yah, yes. DR: How long before your relationship really developed? LP: Oh, it developed very quickly. And I took him hiking, and I remember some long hikes we had in the Taunus and the Spessart, and he learned to walk, which he never did before. DR: Had he largely been a city boy until that point? LP: He was a Berlin city boy. And when he got out, he got out on a motor bike. When we got married, he wanted to get a motor bike again, but I dissuaded him and we got a little car.

8

German for: cafeteria.

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DR: Can you remember much about those early hikes, or taking him to the country? LP: Well, at one point, I think it was on our first hike, along the Rhine, he was very resistant to everything and to me. And I got suddenly terribly afraid and also paranoid, somehow the feeling that he was kind of disputing and rejecting anything I said, and I felt, “If I say one word more he’ll throw me in the Rhine.” Or just push me somehow, or something. But he didn’t. And I told him later, as he didn’t throw me in the Rhine then, I was never afraid of him again. DR: Were you both in analysis then? LP: Yah. DR: And were you both seeing the same therapist?9 LP: Yah. Well, later on I saw Dr. Landauer, and he10 was in Berlin then first, and then in Vienna, and we met in between, in little medieval places. DR: Was Fritz through with his medical school when you met him? LP: Oh, yes. Quite a while already. Fritz was thirty-three when I met him. DR: He was your first affair? LP: Yah, my first complete one. DR: Did you sense the desperation at that time? LP: Yah, I did. DR: And you took it on anyway? LP: Yah. I felt that I could do it and I could. DR: It would have been a little frightening in some way in someone who was that much older and so unhappy. LP: He was unhappy, but the unhappiness was somehow disguised by the cynicism. It didn’t come out as unhappiness, it came out as scorn, and as superiority. DR: And disdain. How clear was he about his career at that time? LP: Well, he wanted to get into analysis. He wanted to be an analyst at that time. And he was really doing his analysis as a training analysis. But it 9

Clara Happel. Fritz.

10

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took him a very long time to be accepted, because first he was with Clara Happel and in Berlin, for a little while, no . . . I think before that, with Karen Horney a little while, who later on guaranteed for us here and gave us an affidavit so that we could get into the States. And then he was with Harnik, which was very unfortunate because Harnik was an obsessional and later on paranoid himself. He died, I think, in a hospital. Harnik also was of the opinion that he shouldn’t get married at the time when he wanted to, because he said I wouldn’t do my doctorate then and he would interfere with my career. But we married and I had a child, and then I went back and finished my doctorate. And Harnik apologized later. But then Fritz got to Reich in the end, in the last year before we left. The last two years.

Early marital years DR: When you met you were in Frankfurt? LP: We met in Frankfurt, and Fritz was in between in Vienna and Berlin and came back to Frankfurt and then went back to Berlin. And I stayed in Frankfurt and finished there. DR: Were you in the relationship all that time? LP: For me he was the only one, and he had all kinds of other affairs in between, I think, but they were not important for him. He always came back. And he visited me and I visited him and we met in between every few weeks. And somehow we drifted into marriage. And when he says I was pressing for marriage, then that simply wasn’t true. If anything, he pressed for it in the end, because he had to prove that he could have a child, too. And that he could get married. He was thirty-seven, nearly thirty-eight when we got married. We married in ’30 and we met in ’26. We married in August ’30. And Ren was born in July, the next year. DR: So he was really wandering then as he did later, during that period? LP: Yah. But he became more focused then on therapy and psychoanalysis. But when we started in Berlin he started still as a psychiatrist and neurologist, and he did also quite a bit of physical therapy and recreational therapy. Diathermy and massage. DR: Can you give me some specific dates, like “we met in ’26” and then when did he go off to where, etc.? LP: I’m not quite sure when he was in Vienna either. I think from ’27 to ’28. He was in the Wagner-Jauregg Clinic and with Paul Schilder

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specifically. And then he came back to Frankfurt again in ’28, ’29, and then he went to Berlin and started his practice. And we married in ’30. DR: When was he with Clara Thompson?11 LP: Well, that was when he came here first alone. That was, I think, before he met me. And only short because Clara Happel 12 went early to the States. Not through Hitler or Nazism. She was invited here, I think, to the institute here, and then started teaching here. But I’m not quite sure at what time. DR: It’s interesting, you mentioned his cynicism. That’s the kind of thing that would have led him to question Freud and all his other therapists in a way, kind of probing, picking. LP: Yah, but he could use the psychoanalytic technique just to do that. DR: Well, a lot of his work naturally grows out of psychoanalytic technique. LP: Continually interpreting. DR: Yes. And he did that till the end, no matter what he says. He said he was against interpretation, but he did it. LP: I remember one of the people who also worked with my analyst, Karl Landauer, called him a “Geistscheißer.”13 DR: It sounds, as you say, that you drifted into marriage because you lasted on and off . . . LP: That’s right, on and off, and he could have that kind of relationship with me, where he could be there, or off if he felt like it. DR: And that it wouldn’t be so threatening. LP: Exactly. I was always there. At that time, of course, I was absolutely hooked on him. I worked through that to quite an extent in my analysis with Karl Landauer. And I actually said to Landauer that I felt now I can take him or leave him.

11

Should be Clara Happel. Clara Happel did indeed flee from National Socialist persecution in Germany, first to Palestine, then to the United States. Happel was born in Berlin in 1899, and committed suicide in Detroit, Michigan in 1945. 13 German in the original; “Geistscheißer” translates roughly as “smart alec.” 12

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DR: But during that period he was the only man in your life even though he wasn’t always there at the moment. LP: Well, there were men around who would have like to have something with me, but I didn’t. I had a lot of men friends, but no intimate relationships with anyone else. DR: Did Fritz know that, was that important to him? LP: I think it was. He even admitted that lately, just before he died, a year before, that I was different somehow. That I was the only virgin in all the relationships he ever had. He usually took it much more conveniently, you know, with girls who were experienced. And I wasn’t. DR: So not only were you the only virgin, but you were the only one who remained faithful without any ties. And if he wondered, could he be a husband and a father, then here at least was a traditional background for him. LP: Yah. And I would be a mother. And he knew that. DR: And a faithful wife. So it sounds like underneath the cynicism was . . . LP: A real need, which he never could admit. And denied later on. [inaudible] He always had to deny it. DR: Well, it was convenient. LP: It was more than convenient; it was a lifeline for him. DR: Yes, but if you maintain the cynicism, you have to deny it and count on it at the same time. LP: That’s right. DR: How did you actually decide to get married? LP: I don’t know that we decided. We just somehow arrived at that point that we felt—well, mainly when it was a question of having children. Because I was, by then, nearly twenty-five. But I can’t even remember how it came up. And we never really discussed anything very much. We just did things. So it was at one point somehow taken for granted. DR: That’s interesting in terms of Gestalt formation, how, without discussing it, it could become foreground and emerge. LP: Yah. It simply emerged as something that was quite inevitable and it came out in the fall of ’29, I would say. We informed then my parents. Or he wanted to meet my parents.

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DR: He hadn’t until that time? LP: No. They had some kind of an idea, and my father and my brother were very hostile to the whole thing at first, particularly my brother, who actually sent detectives on Fritz to find out what kind of antecedents he had and what kind of family he came from. And it was all very respectable. Either they were respectable business or respectable professional people. His father was eccentric in a similar way that he was. Not a family man. DR: That’s interesting, because my brother had that happen to him, and at the time he thought it was rather bizarre, detectives and investigations. LP: So then we went for Christmas, for the first time he came to my home town and visiting my parents. And they gave him as a Christmas present ski equipment, and we went with my brother-in-law and my sister—they were married then for about a year or so—we went skiing. DR: When you married, he already had a practice in Berlin? LP: Yah. DR: And you had finished your graduate work, but not your Ph.D.? LP: But not my thesis. Everything was finished but my thesis. And the exams. DR: I was thinking about his practice . . . something else you mentioned, massage and one other technique. LP: Diathermy and things like that. Well, he was neurologically trained and treated people with local difficulties, and he learned actually here in America, where he was for a year, from ’23 to ’24. In the German inflation time, he went to America, but he went back to Berlin. DR: He had been here? LP: He had been here for a year, yah, and he was working, studying with Dr. Rosen [Rosenstock?], or something like that. He did what was called nerve point massage, which I think has some linking up with the Rolfing thing. The pressure points.

Modern dance and movement DR: Well, that was what I was going to ask you, whether even then he was focused in a sense on the body?

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LP: Yah, but he was focused on manipulation, while I came from modern dance and was focused on movement and I had started it very early, age eight, and really seriously from age fourteen, fifteen on, and then without stopping at all. I had a kind of developed body awareness and education and used it in therapy long before Bioenergetics developed here. In Berlin then, when we were married and particularly after we had had a child, I went to some eurhythmic things again with Gindler, and Gindler is really the school that Charlotte Selver and the whole sensitivity training developed from. But I developed it then on my own in connection with what I had before, which was more Loheland’s system that was based on mainly yoga, and Eastern exercises, or starting from that and developing from there. DR: I think it is interesting to trace the antecedents, so can you go back and remember your own early work with dance, and dance movement, and with Gindler, and talk about your own awareness of it as a . . . LP: Well, the very first contact with dance I had when I was about eight and we had a course in Dalcroze in the private girls’ school I went to. And there was a ballet master from Stuttgart who was a Dalcroze man and who came once a week or twice a week, and I was terribly impressed immediately because he said one shouldn’t imitate anybody, either him or anybody who stands in front or works in front of us, but one must feel the way one is moving in one’s own body. And I was very excited about it and I came home and there was my big fat aunt sitting with my mother at tea, and I said: “Mr. Burger said one mustn’t imitate anyone, one must feel it.” And my aunt was very amused and she said kind of “Ah, listen to the little one how she’s talking . . . one must feel it, one must feel it.”14 And I was very offended. But it stuck with me, that, all my life really. And when I was about thirteen, during the war, we couldn’t have any lessons. He was drafted and I think he was an instructor for the army. And after the war, when I was about thirteen, fourteen, there was a woman coming regularly for Loheland lessons, which was a eurhythmic system based mainly on Eastern exercises, I think to a great extent yoga. And a kind of space orientation that perhaps tai chi has. But they had actually, in their school, which was in the Rhoen mountains, they had a big circular barn and the whole thing was always taking place in a circle. Well, I think the concepts of centering and grounding were developed there.

14

Laura Perls described this very experience with her mother and Aunt Erna in an entry to her Notebook Number 2 on August 29, 1955, which has been published in this volume.

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DR: Did they lecture at all on it or was it all . . .? LP: It was all really more . . . I felt a little bit theoretical and I could link it up later on with what I got to know of yoga, and actually lately of tai chi, the kind of continuity and fluidity in motion, and the basic stance, and use of breathing in movement. It’s very similar. DR: And then, what did you do with eurhythmics? When did that come in? LP: Well, that was actually then. We didn’t call it dance yet, we called it eurhythmics, rhythmische Gymnastik, rhythmic gymnastics. It was partly with music but sometimes without, or with a gong or so. DR: Was there any attempt to tie it up with the Greeks and all? LP: Well, the Dalcroze method was much more tied up with that still. Isadora Duncan tied it up with the Greeks. But we didn’t. I think it was for us, in this particular school, much more tied up with the East. And later, when I was a student in Frankfurt, I went to instructors of the same school. That was Lotte Stern,15 who had a big school and I worked up really to being the most advanced student in the school of about 180 students. DR: What kinds of things were you doing then? LP: We were doing a lot of group work, motion going through small groups and a lot of sensitivity things actually. And also a lot of exercises with wooden balls, spheres, and handing it over, and throwing it, or letting it glide rather from one hand to the other or from one student to the other. DR: [inaudible] can’t see what you’re doing with your hands. LP: That’s right, and I can’t describe it in words, you see actually taking up, throwing a ball, which was pretty heavyish, and somehow identifying already with the movement of it when it came, so that when it touched your hand you could immediately swing it through, and give it over again, and turn around with it possibly, and then swing it around a few times, and then swing it over again. We invented things on the spur of the moment. It was very beautiful and very skillful, very sensitive. I couldn’t do it now. I haven’t done anything like it in ages. DR: When did you connect it in your own mind consciously with therapeutic value? LP: Already when I was in analysis with Karl Landauer in Frankfurt and at the same time having eurhythmic lessons at least twice a week. I grew 15

Rest of last name illegible.

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about two inches or so, and my analyst was very surprised and he thought it was through the analysis that I somehow got an impetus in growing but I think at this time, and I have thought for a long time, that it was simply through the better alignment and posture. I slouched when I was a young girl and always had my head forward and my eyes on the ground, and somehow, after doing eurhythmics for that many years, I really straightened out and I still have it. DR: Yes, you do. And you still have the movement. LP: Yah. There is a lot that I can’t do anymore, but a lot I still can do at any time. DR: It sounds like inadvertently you managed to have movement therapy at the same time as psychoanalysis. LP: That’s right. And I don’t think that I would have come out as well with either the one or the other. And I became very early aware of the together of it, in the early years in South Africa, when I first practiced. I had started practicing in Berlin, but only under supervision. And then I really practiced seriously in South Africa. DR: What was Fritz’s response to the whole area of movement and dance back in that early period? LP: Well, you know at that time I wanted to get him into it, particularly in South Africa, where we had a very big garden and we could do exercises on the lawn outside and it was beautiful. There was also a Loheland teacher whom I had met already in Frankfurt. Her husband was a gold- and silversmith and a very fine artist. And she taught, she came twice a week working with me, and I wanted Fritz to get with it, but he felt it was kind of girl’s stuff and he was bored by it. Fritz did other things. He swam, he was a very good swimmer, and until the last it was the only thing he could still do, swim. As a young boy he did roller skating, and was actually a roller skating champion in his youth. And in South Africa he took up iceskating and became very proficient. He even got a bronze medal for dancing. Later he took up flying. He took up things, which were somehow daring and rather skillful in some way, techniques. But his actual walk always was bad and his posture was bad. He was heavy on his feet. DR: He was sort of a lumpy in a way. He shuffled. It was like he mobilized himself for a specific technique, to show he could do it, and then when he’d demonstrated he could do it . . .

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LP: Then he would go on to something else. When he could do the icedancing, 16 he learned to fly, or the other way around. I don’t know anymore. DR: But also those are sort of not as free in a way as the eurhythmics. LP: Well, the eurhythmics goes into the whole support system. And actually, that is what we developed it for . . . how one carries something, for instance, or picks something up from the floor. DR: It’s interesting how you can’t talk about it without using your hands. LP: It’s impossible. It’s actually, you see, being aware of the center of gravity and keeping that under you all the time, so that you are supported from the pelvis. DR: When did Fritz connect with this? LP: Only very lately, and through Esalen, I think. And he said, a few years ago, “You never taught me anything.” And I said, “Remember, you never wanted to learn anything.” DR: It may have been that he picked it up but couldn’t use it until it was there and it was OK then. LP: Yah, and it was used by others and apparently linked up with Gestalt and all kinds of other things, and they say Gestalt therapy and body therapy or Gestalt therapy and sensitivity training—nonsense. It’s all part of Gestalt. Actually, anything can be integrated into Gestalt methods and with the Gestalt approach, teaching. DR: What about Zen? So much of what you’re saying now and so many of the ways of doing some of it relate to Zen. Were you and Fritz aware of it back then? LP: We were not aware of Zen then. That we became more aware of here. DR: Well, what about, say, Husserl, or phenomenology? LP: Yes, always. That, of course, we were very much aware of. Scheler was already in Frankfurt my teacher, or he was supposed to be. He only gave a few rehearsal lectures. In the next term, he was engaged as professor of philosophy. He came from Cologne, I think, and he died very early. Then Tillich came to Frankfurt. And he was my teacher in

16

Figure-skating.

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philosophy. And he was of course existentially oriented. He was a Protestant minister and he was Kierkegaard-oriented.

Becoming a psychoanalyst DR: When Fritz began to practice, you say it was more as a neurologist. Then did he become more psychoanalytic? LP: Oh, yes. He did both at the time. Partly this, and he had some psychoanalytical patients and they needed nearly only psychoanalysis. In Johannesburg we did only psychoanalysis. DR: Who supervised you? LP: In Berlin, Otto Fenichel. Otto Fenichel was a walking encyclopedia, as you can see in his books, a fantastic theoretician, but I didn’t learn a thing from him. He didn’t say anything ever. DR: How did he handle his supervisory sessions? LP: I sat there and read my notes and reported my case and he walked up and down in the room like a caged tiger. It was a small room, too, it was awful. And he didn’t say anything except “Oh, really?” I remember I had a patient whose wife weighed 350 pounds or such, and then he even was amazed and this is the only remark I can remember he ever made. But he didn’t teach me anything. He never said anything illuminating or constructive, in a way. Later on, in South Africa, Hans van Ophuijsen was there, the Dutch analyst, for a year before he came to New York. He supervised me there for a while. And he made some criticism and could teach me a little bit, something, but I must say, if I compare it with the kind of supervision I have done and do, with my trainees, it was really awful. It was a waste of time and money. I wasn’t taught anything. I learned from experience. First from being in analysis and later doing it. But I became in South Africa, during the first years already, very much aware of the breathing difficulties that people have, and their stance and posture, and actually I think from in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, I started having people first lying opposite me and then sitting opposite me and also doing some body awareness things with them. I developed then a bit of the theory of breathing and neurotic types, and I felt that probably a certain neurotic type could always be associated with a certain body type and a certain type of breathing. That was in the early ’40s. And I expressed that to some people I met, some people I met from the University of Pieter

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Maritzburg,17 some psychologists at the house of a friend of ours who was a writer, and they were absolutely horrified and they said it was proven that that wasn’t so and I don’t know who proved it; but I am more convinced than ever that it is just now simply an experiential thing. DR: Did you ever write any of that up at the time? LP: I started to, and it was for a while kind of a pet theory, but I didn’t really pursue it. I was applying it all the time. DR: Were you using the couch at that time? LP: Well, at the time, first I used the couch and first I sat behind them and then I sat more on their side so I could see them and they could see me, and finally I had them lying opposite me and I was directly confronting them and also having them sit more and more. DR: Do you remember making any kind of decision about the sitting versus the lying down? LP: Well, I felt that it was so limited, the lying down, and that certain issues simply were never confronted that way. Just the immediate contact was never confronted. It never came out. And people were talking about things. That’s really how things developed into a different technique and to apply Gestalt theory to that, that came really later. It developed simply as a kind of extension of, or a revision of, psychoanalysis. Actually, Ego, Hunger and Aggression was first called A Revision of Freudian Analysis.

The influence of Wilhelm Reich DR: When did Fritz first see Reich and how did he come to him? LP: I think through Horney, who recommended Reich and felt that he would be the only one who would work through with him. That was ’31, I think or ’32. The last one or two years before we left . . . we left in ’33. DR: Was Fritz himself attracted to Reich? LP: Oh, yes. I mean theoretically he was attracted, and Reich was a disciple of Ferenczi’s, and Ferenczi has started already with the muscular, mainly the anal contractions, as the seat of resistance. And Reich elaborated on that, on the muscular armor. And that, of course, linked up with my body orientation, but I had that before.

17

In South Africa.

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DR: I’m just wondering how aware Fritz was of moving in that direction deliberately? LP: I think all these movements were, in the beginning, not deliberate at all, but that was simply how things had happened and came our way and were gradually integrated into whatever we did. At first I was very confused in Frankfurt between Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis there. Traditional Aristotelian philosophy and existentialism. DR: So you did experience confusion. LP: Oh, terribly. I felt for a long time like Pavlov’s conditioned dogs, which go to sleep in the middle of the experiment, and I had a period where I couldn’t produce anything. I think that was just when I gave up finishing my doctorate at the time and got married, and it was also much more important then, and then later I went back and finished. DR: I’m reminded of when you stopped being able to write, much earlier, when you were an adolescent—you might have needed those points to take time out. LP: Yah. I’m doing the same thing right now! Also coming back to the piano. I play much better now than I did for a long time. DR: Don’t know much about Reich’s history and whether he was political at that time. LP: Well, of course we were politically involved, and not through Reich. Most of the analysts were left-wing, with the exception of a few—the gentile ones, actually. Most of them were Jewish. DR: Well, like Freud himself who was really fairly apolitical. LP: Yah. And a lot of them were apolitical, but of course with the developing of Nazism one became conscious of political issues. DR: When was Reich doing his sex-counseling clinics, say? LP: Oh, that came later. That was later. He started it, I think, in Copenhagen or Sweden.18 18

As Bernd Bocian points out, Reich had no sex-counselling clinics in Berlin or in his countries of exile, but rather, beginning in 1928, in Vienna. Together with psychoanalytic colleagues and socialist physicians, he founded the “Socialist Society for Sex-Counseling and Sex-Research.” This society began to open “socialist sex-counseling centers” in the poor, working class districts of the city, in which counseling was offered to working class youths, most of whom were girls,

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DR: But he was doing that as part of the German Communist Party. He had his sex clinics for the workers. LP: Oh, I see. Well, I didn’t know anything about it then. DR: And it must have been before Hitler came. LP: Yah, he was just starting then. He had written some things already. The book on the orgasm was written, I think, about that time. I’m not exactly sure. You know you can look that up in a biography of Reich. DR: I’m just wondering how much of that Fritz was aware of when he went to see Reich and whether that had meaning or whether that was just background, in terms of what he went to Reich for. LP: I think it was background. He went to Reich mainly to get through with his own analysis and to be accepted by the Institute as a member. DR: So those things might have come along with Reich, but they weren’t mainly what he was seeking him out for. LP: Well, when he first went to Reich, he knew very little of him except what he had written before, which was still very analytical.19 DR: What about Character Analysis? Was that written before? LP: Character Analysis was then in the making and it came out just then. Actually, we took Character Analysis with us to Johannesburg and Fritz started with Sylvia Behrman, who was later Sylvia Conrad here, to translate it, but then somebody else there translated it. Sylvia’s translation was never published. DR: When Fritz was in analysis with Reich, was it traditional psychoanalysis or was Reich doing some of his character analysis? LP: I don’t really know details. Fritz talked very little about it and that was really one of the psychoanalytical ground rules—not to talk about one’s therapy outside. So I know very little in detail what went on. Once I visited Reich—he wanted to see me. It was when Fritz had had a very free of charge. Information was offered about sexuality, contraception, abortion, and other topics. 19 During his year in Vienna from 1927–28, Fritz had been in Reich’s seminar on technique for about six months. Reich’s book, Character Analysis, which came out in 1933, was then the most modern form of the developing psychoanalytical egopsychology. See the chapters on Perls in Vienna with Reich and Perls in Berlin with Reich, in Bocian Fritz Perls in Berlin, 173–180; 208–215.

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fleeting episode of impotence and I made a little fun of him or something. And Reich wanted to see me and he said that it wasn’t very clever. And it wasn’t, of course. But it was something so unusual. But we got on very well; we had a very good conversation. But that was the only personal meeting I had with Reich. Otherwise I didn’t meet him at all. DR: Was Fritz excited about it? LP: Yah. But this was a very good period in our life altogether.

Third interview: South Africa (April 15, 1972) Back to life in Berlin DR: You said that was a very good period of your life, those years in Berlin. LP: Yah. That was the beginning of our marriage. I was pregnant then and had a very easy, very good pregnancy. I liked being pregnant. We had a child. The first year, the first three years of the child’s life were very good. Fritz was very much involved with us. DR: How did you handle your practice at that time? LP: Well, Fritz was practicing and I started to do a couple of cases under supervision. But I was also again then working for my doctorate, you know, to finish up, preparing the comprehensives. DR: Did you talk with one another much about your practices at that point? LP: Well, I didn’t have much to talk about yet, and we didn’t talk much. He talked a bit about his patients—they were interesting. He had a patient with severe asthma who got much better. Actually, one or two of his patients followed him to Holland later, and they were not Jews. DR: You mentioned that he was very involved with you and Ren at that time. Do you think that some of that was because of his own analysis with Reich and his ability to get closer? LP: I don’t think that had a lot to do with it. I didn’t even think about that, you know. It was for me so obvious that we were together, and for Fritz at this point, too. DR: What was the period when you were closest?

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LP: That was probably the closest, the first years of our marriage. But also already the last years of our affair before that. DR: You had spoken about his desire to be a father. How did he express that? LP: He had some doubts, actually, about his potency or about his fertility. That was more than satisfactory, actually to a point that I got continually pregnant afterwards, and had several abortions, because we didn’t dare to have that many children and he didn’t want any more. I had an abortion in Holland. That was the first. And then I got pregnant immediately again in South Africa. And we had a child in the second year and he wanted me to have another abortion and I refused. That was our first serious disagreement and we were somewhat cool for a while, but then it was a boy and he was such a lovely child, so the coolness didn’t last very long. But he didn’t get involved with the children then. He was already much more in his own work, and then there was the war and he was in that, and he was most of the time not there. He was a weekend husband. It was rather nice, you know. It was an affair again. DR: The kids might have seen it differently. LP: Of course. They didn’t get much of him. He would take them to the circus once in a while, or the ice rink, but that was it. DR: Back, say, in the ’31 period, did you have some kind of picture of your own future? LP: Well, at that time we were still in Berlin and starting. I was in the end of my training and Fritz was practicing already—we saw ourselves as psychoanalysts. And if we had stayed there we would have been psychoanalysts of the Reichian version,20 probably, and might have come there, or not have come, to splits, you know, later from the psychoanalytic movement. But that we didn’t foresee. At that point we wanted to be members of the Psychoanalytical Association. DR: And when you say we were psychoanalysts of the Reichian version, how was your own connection with that? Was it via Fritz? Or through reading Reich, or what? LP: It was both, I think. It fitted with our whole orientations. DR: And, I guess, with your politics at that point.

20

This refers to the practice of character analysis.

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LP: We were involved with anti-Fascist groups, and actually we had applied for membership in the Party, 21 but we were rejected as intellectuals, whom they didn’t want so many of and at that time they didn’t accept any. It was just as well that we were never really members. It would have become a great hindrance in everything else that we did later. And anyhow, I think we were very misguided at the time. Or rather inexperienced, and we really didn’t know what it implied, that it was just somehow a reverse Fascism, but in many ways similar, as it turned out in Russia. There were some young people that I knew later in South Africa, some architects actually. They had gone to Russia to rebuild, and they came out barely with their lives. They had gone with great hopes and they came back completely anti-Communist. Actually, through that to a great extent we got out of the Communist group. DR: What was your experience with Fascism? LP: Well, there was something latent, of course, always in Germany in the way of anti-Semitism. But the first contact with Fascism we actually had was through Italy, and there it was taken to a great extent at first in a positive way, the Mussolini type of Fascism, because it meant really takeover. It was more National Socialist and for the first time, I think, in Italian history the trains went on schedule, and were clean, and a lot of graft had been taken out. And in Germany it started at first like that, too, but it started in a more militaristic way immediately, which was in the German tradition. They linked up to some extent later on with the […] or with the Stahlhelm. 22 The Stahlhelm was a veteran’s organization originally, but a conservative one. DR: I guess my history’s a little vague. I know Hitler started in Munich. LP: Yah, in ’23, and there he was defeated. And he was actually incarcerated for about five years, I think. Festungshaft,23 which is a kind of honorable detention for political things. DR: How strong was he in Berlin? LP: He had to go to Berlin in order to become strong, because there is the Prussian military tradition. And there were also the conservative 21

Communist Party. For further information on activities around the German Communist Party and the Perlses’ anti-fascist activities, see Bocian, Fritz Perls in Berlin, 229f. 22 The “Steel Helmet, League of Front Soldiers,” came into being after WWI. 23 German in original; the literal translation is: confinement in a fortress, imprisonment.

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businessmen who were most afraid of Communism and therefore prepared to support anything that was anti-Communist. Yah, and he got money from America. I think that without it he wouldn’t have made it. DR: When did you begin to sense that Germany. . . LP: Things were going very bad, actually economically very bad, and we could feel it in practice, for instance. We got less patients. And we thought already of leaving in ’31, ’32. And we first thought, because we were still quite Communist-oriented at the time, of either going to Russia or to Spain. We started learning Russian. And it was just as well that we didn’t. And we left Berlin; that was at the beginning of April ’33, that was not very long after the Reichstagsbrand24 and it was just after the first antiSemitic excesses started. Fritz left for Holland and I went to the south of Germany to my hometown, to my mother’s house, because there was a much more deep-rooted democratic tradition that was never in the north. That was always more or less feudal.

Exile in Holland DR: And then what happened in Holland? I’m quite vague about that. LP: Well, Fritz was first in a Sammellager, a kind of camp for refugees. And then he met a few people with whom he then rented an apartment from a woman who had some money already out there and with whom he had started something. They rented an apartment and when I came there, there were about twelve people with us in four rooms, five rooms. It was a kind of commune, and at first it worked all very well, but that woman got very jealous, apparently, because Fritz was completely involved with me again and not with her. At first he wanted to get us together somehow, but it didn’t work out. And when I had the abortion, actually this woman recommended the doctor to go to, and I had gotten a psychiatrist’s certificate from my former analyst 25 who was there also. He was later killed by the Nazis. DR: How long were you in Holland? LP: Fritz was about ten months, I was about five. He went in April and we left at the end of December. I came in the fall. I visited him first alone and saw how he was living and then decided that I would pack up and . . . 24

This is a reference to the time when the German Parliament was set on fire, in February 1933. 25 Karl Landauer.

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The fate of the Posner and Perls Families during WWII DR: What happened to your parents? LP: My father had just died in March just before the whole thing really, or just in the beginning, and it was good luck that he died then, because we wouldn’t have made it otherwise. He would have persuaded us to stay. The business was still going, and everyone at that time believed that Hitler could last only one or two years, you know, and he would have played himself out, and everybody would be wise to him. LP: What about your mother? DR: My mother stayed and she visited us in ’36 in South Africa. She was several months there, about eight or nine months, but she went back. She still had much more money than we had. She didn’t have the house anymore; she had sold the house, but she had an apartment and she said; “When they have taken all my money,” and that was mainly the thing at the time, that they were taxing the Jews much more heavily, “When I have no money anymore, I’ll come out.” But then I couldn’t get her out when things started kind of closing in then, and they had then a quota in South Africa, because there were so many refugees. DR: And what happened? LP: We don’t know. She had to go to Hamburg, where she was born. Everybody had to go to the place where they were born, and she was deported from there. She knew before that she was going to be deported, but she was very naïve and nobody really knew and she said, “Well, I’ll be in a concentration camp and when the war is over I’ll come out.” And we don’t even know where she was deported to and what happened to her. This is really the only thing that I have guilt feelings about . . . that I didn’t keep her in South Africa when she was there. But that had also something to do with Fritz. She got on his nerves and . . . she was actually a very sweet, very nice woman, but she couldn’t be by herself. She took it somehow for granted that she was in the family all the time, and Fritz couldn’t stand it. He said to me, “Either she goes or I go.” I had her go. DR: But you noted also that she somehow wanted to and accepted going back. LP: Yah, she also felt that she should go back. DR: She must have separated herself from all that was going on there.

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LP: No, I think a lot of people, who were not directly politically involved, did not know what was going on. The Jews were being deported and treated as second-rate citizens, and had to wear a star and no one else . . . DR: But she accepted it. “I’m going to go back and when they take all my money away”—that’s so kind of fatalistic. LP: Well, she could live quite comfortably still in the way she used to live. My brother was also still living in Germany, but he had to give up the management of his company. His company was gleichgeschaltet, 26 that means it was somehow under supervision, but taken over by somebody that had worked with my father and with my brother for a long time, and now has the business still.27 And who is still a friend. DR: Were there any reparations? LP: They lived very well there. My brother came out with ten marks in his pocket. And I sent him money from South Africa. And my sister from Holland. He28 was in England for a little while, and then he came to the States and started here as a Fuller brush salesman, house to house. DR: What about your sister? LP: My sister was in Holland with her family, but she got divorced there and she supported herself by dress designing and having a school of dressmaking. She visited in England—her daughter was in a Rudolf Steiner school, but she declined because at the time she was doing very well in Holland. They all disappeared. She remarried, in the end, her husband again, because they thought it would be easier, and he was in the Judenrat, you know, the Jewish committee there and tried to keep some kind of order; they had some contact with the government, but in the end they were all deported. And they died in Auschwitz. All of them. She had a daughter who was about sixteen, a musical genius. A very talented, beautiful child. It’s so unspeakable . . . you still can’t imagine it.

26

Gleichschaltung, a German term for coordination or synchronization, was used by the Nazis to denote the successive process of totalitarian control over the entire German society and economy. 27 In an interview that Laura Perls gave when she visited her former high school in Pforzheim, the Reuchlin-Gymnasium, in August 1989, she mentioned Eugen Harer as having been the authorized representative of her father’s company and his righthand man. Harer had been working for Rudolf Posner for twenty years when the company was aryanized. 28 Laura’s brother, Robert Posner.

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DR: You never mentioned it. LP: I don’t like to talk about it. I talked to Isad29 about it and it all came up again when I saw the De Sica film, The Garden of the Finzi Continis. It was exactly like that. And I came from not quite that aristocratic, but a wealthy family who lived their lives with “our crowd” and really didn’t know what was going on outside. DR: What happened to Fritz’s parents? LP: His mother and older sister were deported. His younger sister and her husband, they made it out and went first to Spain, if I am correct, and then they went to Shanghai. They couldn’t get any visa to any other country anymore. They were ten years in Shanghai and then four years in Israel before they came here. It’s quite incredible; they lived ten years in Shanghai. They can’t speak a word of Chinese. They lived in the foreign settlement region. DR: I knew some Jews who had been in Shanghai. LP: There was a whole bunch of them and there were also people from other countries. There was a foreign settlement for a long time. They had no contact with Chinese at all. But it isn’t quite true, you know. One of their friends from Berlin actually married a Chinese and is still there. She may have died in the meantime. But not everybody there was secluded. When Grete and her husband came here, they were pretty elderly already, and we employed them for a couple of years as housekeepers, so that they could get social security. She is also getting a considerable pension from Germany. She’s gotten some compensation money altogether because her health was severely damaged. In spite of it, she has been keeping well up to now. She is eighty now. Actually, if you want to know anything specific about the early days, she might be more informative about that than I, because she always was . . . she remembers early things much more vividly, like I do, too, than the later things. Then everything is blurred together. My South African memories are much vaguer than the earlier ones. And the American ones—they all run together. DR: How did you decide to go to South Africa? LP: We didn’t decide. We couldn’t stay in Holland because we didn’t get a working permit there, which was again our good luck, just as we didn’t get into the party.30 So Fritz went over to London to see Ernest Jones, and he 29 30

Isadore From. Communist Party.

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had an inquiry from Dr. Wulf Sachs, you know, who wrote The Black Hamlet, and who had been in analysis for a short while, for nine months or so, with Theodore Reik. He was also supervised by him. He wanted a training analyst out there. And any of the more at that time already wellknown analysts, they all wanted some kind of guarantees, which they couldn’t give from South Africa. We just wanted to go somewhere where we could work. We didn’t want guarantees. We were still young enough and we immediately started practicing there. And the first year we built a house. DR: How did you feel about going to South Africa? LP: Oh, we felt great, you know. We didn’t know what it was like but we had to go somewhere. And it was a city and we were required to go there so there was a group already waiting for us who was interested in analysis and wanted to get into analysis, and practice. There was Wulf Sachs, and a Dr. […],31 and there was a psychologist of the University, Dr. McCrone, and there were two or three teachers. And we had a small training group there that had regular weekly sessions. I remember I was doing the literary side of it, reporting articles and books on analysis at the time, and I remember reporting a paper by Helmut Kaiser.32 He became a very good analyst here, whose approach I think was somewhat Reichian.33 DR: Someone told me about him that he wrote a very good book. LP: He died some years ago. He published something here. He was one of the more creative ones. I think he probably had some contact with Schilder also, who was Gestalt-oriented to a great extent.

Establishing a circle of friends in Johannesburg DR: Can you remember your feelings about setting up life in South Africa?

31

Last name illegible. See Helmut Kaiser, “Probleme der Technik,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 20 (1934): 490–522. 33 Bernd Bocian kindly reminded me that Fritz made positive mention of Kaiser in his autobiography. Fritz and Kaiser were both Reich’s students in Berlin and each carried on Reich’s character- and resistance-analysis in his own way. For further information on Kaiser and Gestalt therapy, see Edward Smith, Embodied Gestalt Practice: Selected Papers of Edward L. Smith (Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 2011), 377f. 32

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LP: We first stayed at a hotel and then in a furnished apartment and then in a furnished house that somebody rented while they were going to Europe. And there we took over also the houseboy whom they had, John, who then went with me and was for ten years with us and brought up Steve. He was much more Steve’s father, I think, than Fritz was. DR: How long were you in South Africa, about ten years? LP: Oh, more. Over thirteen years, nearly fourteen years. Fritz left a year earlier. He left in ’46 and I left in ’47 with the children. DR: Were they the first blacks you had seen? Can you remember your impression? LP: At first we were quite excited. We went by train from Capetown to Johannesburg and that took, at the time, three days and two nights. And on the stations the native children, you know, were running along, begging. Ren was very excited. I think that’s the first thing she remembers about South Africa—being on the train. Seeing black kids. Soon after our arrival, we started collecting a whole number of German and Austrian refugees and they were all very gifted intellectuals and artists. We had a whole circle there. DR: What do you mean by “collecting”? LP: Well, we met them gradually. There was a kind of an association of German refugees. And the people who came out first, that was precisely the intelligentsia—long before all the stream of the Jewish refugees came. They were mostly also Jewish but they were also politically implicated. They were journalists, and editors, and there was Hanns Katz, the painter, and Karl Wilker. Actually, I would like to talk about these two particularly. They were really our only real peers in the sense of wide and deep education and interests and they were nearly from the very beginning in continuous emotional and intellectual contact with us. And our main support in developing our approach. And we could somehow test it continually against the communication we had with them. DR: What were their backgrounds? LP: Well, at this point, first their names—the painter Hanns Katz and the educator Karl Wilker, whose work has been destroyed and forgotten and whose names today have meaning only to a very few survivors of the Holocaust. You can compare Karl Wilker with people like Paul Geheeb who founded and led for many years the Odenwaldschule, which became a kind of model school for A.S. Neill and other people. And Wilker could be

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compared with A.S. Neill, and they both had private institutions, but Neill had on top of it the great good luck to be English. But Karl Wilker was an educational innovator and experimenter within the educational and penal system. He was the director of the Wickersdorf Reformatory for Boys,34 and he advocated and applied non-coercive and non-punitive methods. And to the great surprise of the educational and penal authorities, it was eminently successful. At the time in Germany, that was before the Hitler period, he had great influence on educators all around. He was actually called to the University of Frankfurt to occupy the chair for education. When the regime changed, he, of course, was dismissed. Not because he was Jewish—he was a Quaker actually—but because he was subversive. His theories and his techniques were subversive. DR: There was someone who worked in Vienna with delinquent boys. LP: Aichhorn. He came here, I think. DR: Did you know him at all? LP: No. Oh, we read him, of course, as we read anything. DR: Or Fritz Redl, any connection? LP: I don’t think he was particularly connected with psychoanalysis. DR: John Dewey? LP: No, Dewey we didn’t even go into. Hardly. There was a whole new stream in education after the first war, which was more open and experimental. DR: In Russia they did some work with the runaway children whose homes were destroyed in the Revolution. LP: Yah, they did similar experiments with them. It was much more kind of politically oriented, the whole thing. When Wilker came to South Africa, he was already fifty, or a little over fifty, and because of the laws there he couldn’t even be full-time employed in the ordinary school system. And finally he was a kind of a substitute or assistant teacher in Rustenburg in a country school and also later director of a vacation camp on the farm of a wealthy immigrant who put the farm at his disposal. And that’s how we got to know him actually, because we sent Renate there for 34

As mentioned in the introduction, Wilker was the director of the Lindenhof, which Laura confused here with the renowned Wickersdorf Reformatory, founded by Gustav Adolf Wyneken.

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vacations. Later on, through his American Quaker friends, he became a teacher at a normal college for natives, which was a teacher training institute at Amanzimtoti, Natal. And he was also quite an accomplished artist and craftsman. He also taught that and he taught science and mathematics. When the war broke out, he was too old for the army and he wasn’t a Jew either, and so he would have been interned if his Quaker friends, his American friends, hadn’t intervened. But he had to present himself every day, or every week, I don’t know anymore, at the police station, and he was actually under house arrest. He was confined to the grounds of the school. And we visited him a few times down there. DR: What was your own situation? LP: Fritz was in the army. He was an officer in the army. But on vacations, when we were on the coast down there, in Natal, we saw Wilker in Amanzimtoti. That is near Durban. He nearly cried when we visited him, just to see somebody from the outside and somebody that he felt on the same level with. DR: How did he play a part in the development of your work? LP: Well, simply that we could talk out things with him, educationally, theoretically, and also with Hanns Katz. Actually, Wilker must have had a considerable influence on native education because he was at this teacher training institute for numbers of years. But, of course, that probably didn’t go any much further now because of the restrictive laws and the apartheid laws in South Africa. And I never heard anything from them or about them anymore. And I don’t think he’s alive anymore. He would be in his eighties now. I don’t know what happened to his children. They may have gone away again to England or something. The other one who was of even greater influence as much as a continuous sounding board for us was Hanns Katz. Hanns Katz you could compare to someone like Paul Goodman, kind of an all-round highly educated and erudite person whose pictures hung in the Städel and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. But all the pictures that hung in German museums were destroyed as degenerate art. I made a point of visiting the museum directors there when I was the first time in Germany to find out, and they didn’t know, because they were at the time also not there. I spoke with Dr. Schwartzfeld in Frankfurt, and he didn’t know. And there are only a few pictures, which he brought out to South Africa or which he painted there still. But his pictures weren’t even accepted in the museum there, not even accepted for the annual academy exhibition.

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DR: What was his status? Was he also an enemy alien? LP: Of course, even more so, because he, like Paul was here, was an anarchist and he was really the leader of a group of intellectuals and artists in Frankfurt and he had to leave there. He came out with his second wife. Actually, the picture of his first wife is “The Lady in Yellow.” She was a very fine pianist, quite well known, Fränze35 Ehrenreich. DR: What happened to him? LP: Well, when the war broke out he would also have been interned, but he was already sick with cancer at the time, so they left him alone. But he had been making his living as a housepainter. He couldn’t live on art; it was quite impossible. His wife was a commercial artist. She was actually a sculptor and an artist and she took a job. And he painted houses as long as he could. He got very ill and he died at about age fifty in the utmost poverty. Actually, this is how we came in possession of some of the pictures—the self-portrait that hangs in the dining room and his first wife’s portrait and also one of the water-colors. We got them from his second wife as a kind of recognition for the help we gave them. We helped and supported him during his last months when he couldn’t work anymore. He was involved not only in art and in politics, but he was also interested in philosophy and studied at Göttingen with Husserl and other phenomenologists, and he was also interested in musicology and was not only musical, but also really knowledgeable. He was also very interested in problems of language and semantics. Actually, we were all reading Korzybski at the time. And the last thing he wrote, I still have it somewhere, the manuscript, was about some kind of basic language, basic English. He had great difficulties learning English. That’s how he became interested in language. But he took it up always at a ground level somehow. I knew him already somewhat from Frankfurt. I had met him there. But he was of course much older than I was. Later on the age difference didn’t matter anymore. But it was in my early student days when I was eighteen, nineteen and he was thirty. And he had this circle around him of whom I remember now only his wife, the first one, and Ernst Toller, and Paul Hindemith. These are the names that are outstanding. There were many more who were quite outstanding people, too, who didn’t become that well-known. DR: How did your contact with Katz and Wilker work, in terms of, say, how did they act as a sounding board? 35

Franziska.

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LP: Well, they knew psychoanalysis and they knew phenomenology. Well, they read what we wrote and there was just a kind of an atmosphere. I think without that we would have just fallen through somehow. DR: You say they provided a kind of support in the sense that you could talk to someone. LP: . . . that one could talk to somebody and, well, that generated interest also. DR: So, it isn’t so much that they were critical as . . . LP: No, they were very creative people themselves, and that is really what one needs in order to become creative oneself. When we came out there, we were strict psychoanalysts, more or less, with a little Reichian influence. There was also in Capetown the nephew or son of Husserl, but he wasn’t very interested.

Revising psychoanalysis DR: You say when you came, you were strict psychoanalysts with a little Reichian influence maybe. How did the change take place as you can reconstruct it? What was your first awareness that something different was going on? LP: Well, what we took up first were really the muscular resistances and the first paper that Fritz did in this direction was on oral resistances which he read at a conference of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad in 1936. He went for a few months back to Europe. And most people didn’t understand a thing. But the paper actually developed out of a study that I had started in Berlin already on the attitudes of feeding and weaning with infants. At the time I had a newborn baby, and became aware of the techniques in the hospital. DR: Do you remember what your own thinking was at that time, back in Berlin? LP: Well, my own feeling was strictly against this kind of regimented feeding, and also I remember that I was incensed when they started washing my breasts with alcohol every time before they put the baby on. I felt it attributed a very bad smell, which for a child to associate with a first feeding must be a really awful thing. I said I was clean enough with soap and water. DR: What was the attitude toward breast feeding at that point?

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LP: Oh, at that point it was being taken up again. Actually, my mother did not breast feed, but we had a wet nurse when we were infants, and then we also had formula. Actually, Ren I couldn’t feed very long, because the nurse that I had, and she was paid by my father and was a very welltrained person, she wanted to make formula to have something to do, because I did most of what had to be done about the baby myself. I wanted to do it. And so she didn’t help me at all to increase the milk production when my baby needed it. DR: Do you remember what kinds of thoughts you had about weaning and oral resistances back in Berlin? LP: Well, then we became aware of course of the transition from sucking to chewing. Then we started making the distinction between preparation for digestion and the swallowing whole. And Fritz worked it out more in the paper, later in the book, Ego, Hunger and Aggression. DR: Doesn’t Freud have something about dental . . . LP: Yah, but they call it cannibalism or something like that, biting the breast and things like it. DR: He had some inkling there, but didn’t really develop it. LP: No, it wasn’t developed actually. Resistances were always interpreted as belonging to the anal phase of development. DR: So that the early work was on oral resistance and within a psychoanalytic framework. LP: And then came the whole metabolism thing, of course, and then a lot of other things. Then, of course, the whole contact thing came in, and the present is more important than the interpretation of the past. DR: Where did the metabolism concept from? LP: Well, actually, partly through language and that may have also had something to do with the contact with Katz and this came in more. Of course, one also says about learning, “you have to put your teeth into it,” “you have to digest it,” “bite off more than you can chew.” DR: I wondered whether there was anything to do with Fritz’s medical background there or any kind of trying to utilize an organism concept. LP: I don’t know. It took quite a long time to integrate Gestalt with analysis, or with psychotherapy.

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DR: I always wondered where did the metabolism concept come from, and why. Like there are different ways of knowing and one is through the eyes, and one is through the hands; you did take the mouth and follow it through the whole digestive process, and I wondered why that modality . . . LP: I think as against the anal concept of resistance, the oral resistance is refusing to chew mainly, or the inability to chew, and with it then the introjection and projection concept it follows from that. The whole paranoid mechanism. DR: You mentioned contact, and the importance of the present. Where did you develop that? LP: I can’t put it down. I think it was mainly through reading Martin Buber and, before that, reading Heidegger, and with a whole greater feeling and awareness of the importance of existentialism altogether. It developed. I can’t even say that we consciously experimented or worked out theoretically, but took it more from experience. And as we had no control from anybody, there was no one who knew more about analysis than we did all alone. DR: What about Wulf Sachs? LP: Well, we started first a kind of study group which was affiliated with the British Psychoanalytic Association as a subgroup, and I think I said last time, there was Wulf Sachs, and Dr. L. […],36 who died pretty early, and Dr. McCrone, who was the psychologist at the University, and three teachers, one of whom committed suicide not very much later. He was in therapy at the time with Fritz and it was Fritz’s first suicide case. He was pretty shaky. He jumped from the ninth floor, and he wasn’t dead.37 Wulf Sachs was an interesting and very gifted person, also somewhat paranoid, I think, and he was at first very taken with us and very greedy to absorb whatever we brought with us and developed. About a couple of years later he went to an international conference in Zurich, an analytical conference, and apparently made a lot of nasty remarks about us, so that we got a letter from the British group or from the International Association that we could not teach psychoanalysis as we had not been trainers before in Germany. But actually we were sent out by Jones expressly as teachers, so officially we had to stop calling ourselves an institute, which we did. I still have some brochures somewhere. But the people who were in training with us went on with their analysis and became quite good friends, particularly 36 37

Illegible. Several blank lines in the manuscript.

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[…],38 who was a teacher with whom we were friendly until we left, and Dr. McCrone somewhat remained interested, and there was another guy by the name of Douglas Keeth, who was really kind of a genius. He wrote the first critical write-up of Ego, Hunger and Aggression when it first came out in South Africa. [inaudible]

First publication of Ego, Hunger and Aggression DR: I really know very little about the whole development of Ego, Hunger and Aggression, the period it took place in, and so on. LP: Well, chapters, for instance, like “The Dummy Complex,” I wrote completely. And one or two other chapters I nearly wrote completely, too, like the chapters on insomnia, or unfinished business. That, of course, takes off from Lewin, Lewin’s experiments with unfinished situations.39 DR: How did you work on the book, or when did you first get the idea of writing it? LP Well, Fritz was in the Army at the time, and had oodles of time. I was practicing hard. I worked ten, twelve, thirteen hours a day at that time, and seven days a week. Some people could come only on the weekend, or did some kind of war work, or they wanted to come before business time. I started work at seven o’clock in the morning, and worked till seven at night and sometimes longer. One day I came into the kitchen and said to the maid, “I’m absolutely bushed,” and she said, “Oh, what do you do? You sit and talk!” DR: So, Fritz had lots of time? What was he doing? LP: He made twice the rounds in the hospital in the morning and towards the evening, and in between he sat and drank tea, and played chess, and wrote. DR: He was doing medical work in the Army? LP: He was a psychiatrist. And he did some psychotherapy, too. It was interesting to observe there that the native soldiers in the medical corps or the soldiers in the army, that they didn’t get shell-shocked or battle38

Illegible. See the article written by Kurt Lewin’s student, Bluma Zeigarnik, on remembering finished and unfinished tasks: Bluma Zeigarnik, “Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen,” Psychologische Forschung 9 (1927): 1– 85. 39

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fatigued as you call it nowadays. But they went immediately psychotic. There was no neurotic layer in-between. They didn’t have the kind of mechanisms handy to mobilize for the kind of partial defenses. They simply went out. DR: So what moved Fritz not to drink tea and play chess? LP: Oh, he drank tea and played chess. But he had so much time, hours every day, and he came home on the weekend and we went through everything he had written. We took in a friend of ours who was a Hollander, 40 whose name was Hugo Posturnys, but he was called “Jumbo,” and was and remained a good friend of ours until we left. With him he played chess, too, but Jumbo was a writer, a journalist, an historian, and he spoke seven languages, all fluently, and he helped with organizing and putting it into better English. DR: How did Fritz write, because he had difficulty later? LP: Fritz couldn’t write in German, either. He didn’t have that close sense for language and mainly for logic and development of something. He had good ideas, but they had to be put into some kind of shape, and that, you can see, is lacking in In and Out The Garbage Pail and also in Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, which is just tapes, you know, the way he talked. That’s how he wrote. He didn’t really read that much either. Or what he read, he read more for the story value, and not for style or anything like that. He really didn’t have that feeling for language. I have that much more. DR: I have a sense that in In and Out the Garbage Pail he was trying very hard to work on that. LP: Yah, but it was kind of naïve somehow, and okay, you know, naïve people who don’t have that kind of literary developed consciousness and conscience that goes with a real education. Fritz knew actually, in German, some poetry and he knew drama, because he was mostly interested in the theatre. He did not know English literature at all. DR: Well, how did he proceed, say, when he was working on Ego, Hunger and Aggression? Did he start with some kind of idea and . . .? LP: Well, it was kind of piecemeal, as you can see still, and some of the pieces are not a little antiquated. Also I think he went somewhat overboard 40

Dutchman.

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in his hostility toward Freudian analysis, which he did even lately still and which at this point isn’t necessary. He did both actually. On the one hand he acknowledged some debt, and on the other hand he was still denigrating it. Actually, a lot can be simply translated.41 What actually happens in his last method that he used mostly, the dream, acting out is really a kind of dramatized free association. DR: Well, I think that what some of the young psychoanalysts are busy doing now is taking Gestalt therapy and translating it back into a Freudian framework so they can use it without having to leave their own psychoanalytic condition. LP: They call themselves existential analysts nowadays. DR: Some of the young Freudians are really making an attempt to incorporate Gestalt. LP: You know, I was at the congress in Vienna, the International Psychoanalytic Congress where Anna Freud was speaking. And the whole jargon is still strictly analytical and so confining, you know, as long as you work with the transference concepts and the libido concept, you don’t get any further. DR: Some of them are geared to the Sullivanian influence and are able to keep out of the transference and some are trying hard to drop the whole theory. LP: Well, I feel with the Sullivanian theory there is more lip service to the interpersonal field, but what they really do is pretty one-sided still. And very analytical. DR: [inaudible] Ego, Hunger and Aggression. How long did it take to write it? LP: It was first published in ’42. DR questions this [inaudible] LP: Fritz went into the Army in ’40 or ’41. I’m not sure. DR: That you could have written and seen it through publication by ’42 seems fast to me. LP: Or was it ’44? We have to look it up.

41

…into Gestalt therapeutic terms.

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DR: I just wondered in terms of period of time in which this process was going on. LP: Most of it was done probably within a year or so. DR: You mentioned yesterday, but I don’t think it was on the tape, that the original title was . . . LP: A Revision of Psychoanalysis. It was Ego, Hunger and Aggression, and there was a subtitle. DR: So you still considered yourselves very much psychoanalysts, or revisionists. LP: We still called ourselves psychoanalysts when we came here. It was actually only somehow with the time to get it together and making it a really existential therapy and with the writing of the manuscript for Gestalt Therapy, which then we had no name for yet. Actually, at that time we considered the title Existential Therapy and rejected it. I thought it should be called Existential Therapy. But then we settled on Gestalt Therapy because existentialism at the time was mainly associated with Sartre and a certain nihilistic approach. But then, of course, in Europe they called it Existential Analysis, Frankl and the Swiss people, Medard Boss. DR: And that still sounds quite psychoanalytic, what they’re doing. LP: They have an existential philosophy, but their methods are still psychoanalytical, and their whole techniques. DR: When it was published in South Africa, was it published in England as well? LP: Afterwards it was. After it was published in South Africa, Allen & Unwin took it up and published it in England. But they were not interested later on in publishing anymore because in England they were more Freudian than Freud. You know, the strictest Freudians like Melanie Klein, they moved to England. Of course, later on Anna Freud was there too, and some of the Reichians also. But I spoke to some of the old analysts, now, last year or two years ago when I was in England, and they read all kinds of things and they study further, but still it doesn’t make much difference in the way they are working and talking. I was working there a little but with a group at night, just for the fun of it, and they were quite surprised. They had also had a workshop in the Group Therapy Association with Ruth Cohn. And a few days ago I spoke with one of the trainers from San Francisco, Stella Resnick, and with Nadine Scott, who are doing a workshop together at the moment, and they have been all

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working in a new growth center in London. And they go back and forth there and it’s now the great new thing in London. [inaudible] DR: How did Fritz feel about having his first book published? LP: Fritz was very proud. And was then very disappointed when the war ended and he was not certified as a medical person in South Africa. Because in the Army he served for four years in the capacity of an Army psychiatrist. He didn’t become a major because he didn’t have a South African license, but he was a captain. And then they didn’t certify him. That was actually one of the reasons why he left. And then afterwards they recognized his credentials. So he could have gone back a couple of years later and practiced as a psychiatrist. DR: What about Jan Smuts and his ideas? LP: Well, he met Smuts once and Smuts was interested in the work, and we were, of course, interested in his work, and Fritz was quite influenced. Actually, for me it wasn’t such a new thing because I was so steeped in Gestalt already, you know, and in a holistic, organismic approach. But I think for Fritz it consolidated something that he had understood before. So he felt that he owed more to Smuts. He actually asked Smuts to write an introduction for the book, but then, of course, it was the war and Smuts was too busy and regretted that he couldn’t do it. They had no further contact, and then a couple of years later he died.

Immigration to the United States DR: What did Fritz do when he demobilized in ’45? LP: Well, he was still practicing at first, and waiting to get into the States, waiting for affidavits, and waiting for transport mainly. We wanted to leave already before. We always thought of South Africa really as in interim, and we had applied already for immigration before the war. But then, of course, through the war, and Fritz being in the army, that was all suspended, and Dr. Brill died in the meanwhile, who had already given an affidavit before. Then Karen Horney gave an affidavit. But then Fritz couldn’t immediately immigrate, and first he was for a few weeks in England and had some conferences with Allen & Unwin, and with Whyte, who wrote The Next Development in Man, which also was interesting for us and of some influence on us or some kind of additional support. DR: What was your own relationship with him by then?

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LP: I made more money than he did at that time. I always did take care of the house. Fritz paid the rent, and insurances, and travel, you know, the kind of big expenses. But I paid for the house and the children. Housekeeping, servants, food, telephone, everything. And at the beginning, he paid more than I did. But then it changed and it became more and more. You know, when we came here I was still doing that. I sent Steve here through private school. Fritz paid the rent, the car, the insurance. When we travelled, he paid. But children and house I took care of. He just couldn’t be bothered with the small expenses. He wrote three or four checks a month and I wrote all the other little ones: food, telephones, maids, school, clothes. That was little when the kids were small, and also little for me because there were no imports and there was very little in South Africa you could buy. Any food was comparatively cheap. We also had a joint account at the time, but I paid everything. I also had a separate account. I had also access to his account, but from that I paid only the rent, insurance, and things like that. Car expenses. He would buy me a grand piano or a car, you see, but everything else, little things, I did. DR: It sound like he delegated a lot of the responsibility for the house, the running of it. LP: He didn’t delegate it; I just had it. He didn’t even think of it, you know. And he didn’t think either that it was his business. DR: Well, I guess I was also thinking that during the war might have been a period when he got used to being away from the family. LP: You know, when he left, I still had the house. It was up for sale, but it was just a slump then, I had to sell the house and get everything ready for moving and it was a hell of a business, and I was very busy still, till the last. Most of the money anyhow went into transport. We had to transport a whole family from South Africa. We had about $6,000 left which we paid down on the house here later. On 76th Street. DR: By how much did he precede you here? LP: About eighteen months, I think. He went still on a troop ship because there was no other transport. He had to go back into uniform. He went first to England and then to Canada. And I also went to England. There was for a long time no passenger transport yet between South Africa and America. DR: Wasn’t it quite a job to take the kids? LP: Yah, it was two weeks, then, when we came out to South Africa it was three weeks still on the boat. When we went back, it was a refurnished

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troop ship, the [inaudible]. We came out on the [inaudible]. It was a smaller ship. DR: So, he was here about eighteen months before you came? LP: He was first for about six months in Montreal, before he could get an immigration visa, and he worked there at McGill with Peafield, in the Neurological Clinic, for a while. DR: What was he doing there? LP: Oh, neurology, and probably learning something still, and oh, just having some sort of job. And then he visited first when he came to the States. He was first for a few weeks at my brother’s house in Providence.42 And my brother was still struggling then very much. They had just started their own business. And they had never gotten along with Fritz before and they didn’t get along then, and they actually kicked him out after three weeks. But they also advised him badly. They had no idea of our professional status, our stature, and they thought that in New York there would be too much competition. And they advised him to start in a smaller place like New Haven,43 for instance. That’s where he went, and actually at the time the chair for psychiatry had gotten empty and everybody thought he was after it, and there was a concerted front against him, because nobody knew him and he wasn’t part of the establishment or anything. He couldn’t make a go of it at all there, and was very depressed, and he nearly came back. But he went for a visit to New York and he saw Erich Fromm. And Fromm said, “I don’t understand. I guarantee within three months you have a practice in New York.” So he came to New York. Within three weeks he had a practice. He took over a practice from Dr. Saperstein, I think, who settled on the West Coast and gave up his practice here. He took on four or five patients from him, and then he made friends with Clara Thompson and she sent a lot. They wanted him actually as a training analyst in the William Alanson White Institute at the time, but they wanted him to take his medical degree here again, and that would have meant going to school. At that point, Fritz was already in his fifties and he said, “If I go to school, then I go as a teacher and not as a student.” But still they sent patients, and mostly they sent people they had given up on, people who wanted to become members, but they didn’t feel they had gotten through with their analysis. I had two of them. DR: When did Isadore come? 42 43

Robert Posner lived with his family in Providence, Rhode Island. Connecticut.

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LP: Isadore was one of the first who came to Fritz. I don’t know how, you have to ask him that. DR: He once told me, but I forget. He said he had no money to pay Fritz, and then Fritz asked him what he was doing, and he said he was a philosophy student, and Fritz said, “Lie down!” LP: He was selling shoes at the time, and he was a student at the New School44 and he stole from the A & P.45

Fourth interview: New York (May 26, May 27, 1972) Living and working in New York DR: I’d like you to start by talking about the early days in New York. LP: The early days in New York were absolutely hectic. What I remember most is the utter confusion that I, and even more so the children, went through simply to find our way around. Fritz had been there already for a year and he wanted to show us everything and to take us around, and so he took us to Times Square and to Macy’s, and the children were absolutely terrified. And I was just dizzy. Fritz had furnished an office for me already, and I stayed with Ren in a hotel where we nearly died of gas one night and we had to move out. Steve stayed with a couple that Fritz worked with until we found a furnished apartment. We had to move out from there after a few weeks, too, because it had been sublet to us without permission of the landlord. Then we moved into our first apartment in 110th street, opposite the cathedral. DR: You told me a story many years ago, as I remember, about your first days in New York. You said you thought, “My God, I’ll never be able to make it here,” and you sat down in the little park behind the New York Public Library and a squirrel came up. LP: I don’t even remember it. DR: And you said, “Well, if there are squirrels here, it can’t be so bad!” LP: I started to work nearly immediately. Fritz was already pretty busy. I think I told you before that he was first in Canada and then in New Haven, and he was here already for about eight or nine months, and he was pretty occupied. I started immediately with some of the patients that Clara 44 45

The New School for Social Research is a university in Manhattan. Supermarket chain in the U.S.

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Thompson, at that time, mostly sent. And I had really no time to get acclimatized myself or to even bother about it. The children had such bad difficulties finding schools and Ren didn’t want to get back to school. She had been in art school already in Johannesburg and she wanted to work, so she started to work in a textile firm. Later she went back to vocational high school for textile and fashion design, but then she also met her husband and she married the same year. DR: I remember. That was the year I met you. LP: And Steve went to very good private schools, first to Downtown Community and then to New Lincoln. DR: Can you remember your first impressions of New York? LP: Very little, actually. Of course, I had known before more or less what to expect, and I had seen a lot of pictures and read a lot about New York, and Fritz had been in New York before in 1923–1924, and so I just jumped in, like diving into a pool, and had no time to do anything gradually or get used to. And people are pretty much the same anywhere. I started immediately to work with patients. DR: Was that the apartment on the upper West Side, near Columbia?46 LP: It was near Columbia. That was the office that later Rollo May took over. We then had an apartment on 110th Street when we still had the office there on 115th Street, and then we bought a house on 76th Street. Ren and her husband were downstairs, and we had the rest of the house. It was very nice actually, but it was too much. DR: Isad told me a story about Fritz: when he came to New York, there were two people he wanted to meet. LP: I told you that, I think. I wanted to meet two people. One was Paul Goodman and the other was Dwight McDonald. But Paul had in the meantime also read Fritz’s book Ego, Hunger and Aggression and wanted to meet him, too, and so we got together somehow. I don’t remember any more how.47 DR: See, the story that Isad told me is that Fritz was in a cafeteria on either 6th Avenue and 14th Street or 6th Avenue and 8th Street, because one of them is no longer there, and Fritz was sitting there eating and there were some attractive young people and somehow he went over to them and said, 46 47

Columbia University. Handwritten into the manuscript: “Paul called Fritz one evening.”

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“Do you know Paul Goodman?” and they said “Yes,” and he said, “Well, I want to meet him.” LP: That I didn’t even know. DR: You know that he was so direct with it. LP: Well, we had read some of Paul’s works in Politics, some articles mainly on psychoanalysis. DR: How did you come to Politics in South Africa? LP: Well, we were at the time very left-oriented, and we got Politics and I got Partisan Review all the years already in South Africa. There was an avant-garde bookshop and I also got Paul’s first novel, The Grand Piano, there. So I discovered him already long before we came here. DR: It seems to me so unusual that in South Africa you would be reading Politics and . . . LP: Well, you know there were a lot of people from Europe there and before even the new refugees came, there were former Russian refugees from the Russian pogroms and from the first war. DR: But you know, like I worked for Dwight when I first came to New York, and Politics sold like 4000, 6000 copies an issue, so of that 4000, 6000, one of them went to South Africa and to you . . . LP: Well, there was more than one, you know. DR: No, I know. LP: There was a whole bunch of people who read Politics and also other European left-wing publications. DR: Do you remember when you first met Paul? Or did Fritz write and tell you he had met him, or what? LP: I think he met Paul only when I was there already. I don’t think he knew Paul before I came in ’47. He knew mainly the people of the William Alanson White Institute, and then some people he met from Clara Thompson in Provincetown, some Hungarians and the Grippers and other artists. DR: Can you remember the first meeting? LP: I remember Paul sitting there, and I remember mostly the liveliness of his expression, and his interest in what we were doing, but I don’t remember any details at this point.

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DR: Can you remember before you met him, what it was that made you want to meet him? LP: Mainly that he had written on psychoanalysis from a pretty Reichian point of view which we, at the time, had also, and that’s what interested us because what we knew here of people who had gone to New York or America from Berlin or from Vienna, they were all strict Freudians, while Paul was already critical and was actually at the time in Reichian treatment.48 He had direct contact with Reich, or if not with Reich himself, at least with some of the people who had worked with him. DR: Was he using an orgone box? LP: No. The one who used the orgone box, and that was the only one I ever tried out, was Isaac Rosenfeld, the writer. We became very friendly, but we tried to, actually you know we could finally persuade him, or I thought we did, that the kind of experience one has in the orgone box, you can get though any kind of intensive concentration. Actually, we blindfolded him and he had also a little orgone box, which one could move over a leg or arm, you know, and he didn’t know when it was there and when it wasn’t. If we told him it was on his arm and he kind of concentrated on the feeling he had there, it was exactly the same as if it was off. Actually, I used it later in a story.49 You know, Isaac died quite suddenly and very early. He was only thirty-eight years old. He was in Chicago then. He died of a heart attack. He really wore himself out in a kind of frantic activity. I don’t know if you remember a story he had in Partisan Review about fantasy, you know, being like riding a bicycle uphill. DR: I remember one that was about a razor that was also in Partisan Review. LP: I really want to show you this story. I have it here. Another story Paul Goodman sent to John Ransom Crowe for Kenyon Review, and he sent me actually a very nice letter, but he sent it back and it was, of course, language-wise not good enough for Kenyon Review. He liked a lot of the details of the story and he said he would like to see some more of my work. I sent him another story, and I wrote to him that what he criticized in my language is my German accent. It comes through even in the writing

48

Paul Goodman was in psychotherapy with Alexander Lowen. This short story, “A Peg to Hang One’s Hat On: Requiem for Isaac Rosenfeld,” will be published for the first time in this volume.

49

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and he didn’t even know that. This is the story that I used the Rosenfeld thing with. DR: How did you and Paul and Fritz become closer after you first met? LP: Well, Fritz had started on a new manuscript, and we were continually discussing it. DR: But I thought Paul had also been in therapy with you? LP: With me, for quite a while. That came after they had started to work together, or at the same time more or less. But that was quite independent from each other. He worked with Fritz on the book, but he was my patient. At that time I was working with a number of people who have all made a mark somehow, in education and in American intellectual and artistic life. At the same time I worked with Elliot Shapiro, and then a little later, or at the same time, too, with Paul Weisz; and the first group that I ever had were five geniuses—Paul Weisz, Paul Goodman, Elliot Shapiro, and two artists, two filmmakers who both have a good name now in documentary and in teaching. One is teaching at Yale. Very outstanding people, all of them. And I was scared shitless. I had never worked with any group before, or been teaching, or anything like that.

First Gestalt groups DR: How did you decide to start your first group? LP: At the time I think Moreno was doing psychodrama, and some other people like Wolf50 and Slavson51 had started group therapy and it was kind of coming. I also was interested in a therapy that could possibly save time and money for a lot of people. Mainly I wanted to try myself out. I had never worked with more than one person, and I had never done any teaching or anything in public, and had great fear. And still I am very uneasy when I have to give a paper or anything like that. I haven’t the habit and the facility. But in the meantime now, at first I had the same kind of anxiety for many years with every new group I started anywhere. But lately I have done so many that it’s becoming very easy. And it’s not much strain anymore. The travelling is a strain, but working with different people is not at all. I get the contact nearly immediately.

50 51

Alexander Wolf. Samuel Slavson.

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DR: Did Fritz have a group in that period, or did you precede him in working with groups? LP: Fritz, at the time, went for a year to Los Angeles and started a group, I think, there, too, with patients he had. And Isad, that was after his therapy with me, he was also in Los Angeles; that was in 1950–51, something. And ’52, then Fritz came back. He wanted, actually, he thought we would all settle in the West. DR: The book was done, I think, by then. LP: More or less, yah. It came out in ’52, or in ’50. It was in ’50. In ’52 we started the Institute. That’s right.

The foundational text: Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality DR: I have a copy signed by him, and I think it was ’50. What about Hefferline? When did you meet him? LP: Well, Hefferline came as a patient to Fritz, and then started doing some of the experiments that Fritz did with him, tried it out with bigger groups, with his students at school, and then wrote that up. And Paul was actually, at first, only to edit the whole thing. But then he contributed so much to the second part . . . a lot of it really couldn’t have been done without him at all. He did a lot of it. So that the book then became a threeauthor book. DR: And Hefferline worked on the first part. LP: And Paul worked on the second, and Fritz had originally worked on the basic manuscript. I can’t find it; it’s not there anymore. DR: And how much did you have to do with it? LP: Well, I was always in it somehow, you know. Everything was talked over. And I have a few notes around here somewhere. There was a very fuzzy definition of self as against ego, and Paul Weisz better than anyone [...].52 DR: We talked a little about Goodman. When did you meet Dwight and how?

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LP: Dwight we met through Paul Goodman, I think. He said we should just go and see Dwight, or he gave us a little letter or something, I don’t remember. But he knew that Dwight was up in the Cape53 in the summer, and he told us that we should simply see him. DR: And that was the summer that I met you. I remember, Dwight said, “We’re going to see this couple who are from South Africa. They’ve just gotten here, and they’re very interesting,” or something, “Do you want to come along?” LP: Well at that time at Dwight’s there was really a meeting point of all the people who contributed to Politics, and it was quite fantastic: politicians, writers, and Norman Mailer, who at the time was a young, very arrogant, and very nasty little guy. He has changed a great lot. When I hear him now, occasionally he speaks somewhere, at the Theatre of Ideas or something like that, he’s really very impressive. He has mellowed quite a bit. DR: He got some therapy after he stabbed his wife? LP: He would have had to, otherwise he would have gone to jail. DR: Yes, that was one of the conditions under which he was released. LP: Oh, he must have been near psychotic at that point. DR: I was at that party where he stabbed her. He called the party because he wanted to announce his candidacy then, for Mayor of New York, which he subsequently did, like eight years later. But at that party he was trying to get Eleanor Roosevelt to come to the party, you know, he was trying to collect everybody. And his wife said, “Danny, don’t leave until I talk to you, I’ve got to talk to you.” So I tried to see her to say goodnight, but she had disappeared, actually. I couldn’t locate her. So I couldn’t say goodnight to her and I didn’t know what was on her mind, and then I wanted to say goodnight to him, and he was busy wrestling with his thumbs with somebody, and so I thought, “Well, this is a most peculiar party; I couldn’t say goodbye to the hostess who wanted to see me, I couldn’t say goodbye to the host.” But, OK. And I left, and the next morning . . . LP: It was all over the papers. DR: That’s right.

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Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

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DR: As you became settled in New York, you mentioned that in South Africa there was a group of people who were very influential and important to you, who were largely refugees from Germany. Was there an equivalent group of people who came to mean a great deal to you in New York? LP: In New York, it was to a great extent, the group around Paul Goodman: people like Harold Rosenberg and Ben Nelson. You don’t know him? Professor of history, originally. He married a psychoanalyst in his second or third marriage, Marie Coleman. And he writes a lot in the psychoanalytic journal; he’s more analytically oriented. And Harold Rosenberg, the genius. And, well, Dwight, of course. And there was Hannah Arendt, and Mrs. Tillich was there, at their parties. He54 wasn’t there, but I met him several times again. He was my teacher in Frankfurt, originally. He was young then, only about forty-five. I have lost contact to a great extent with all the people who are not directly in the profession, because I haven’t the time. In New York I find it very hard. I used to have an open house always in South Africa every Sunday night, and everybody came there, and we had a whole circle of intellectuals and artists around us. But in New York, when we had the house in 76th Street, I started it again, but after a few times I gave up, because what came was . . . were the gate-crashers. They just heard that somewhere was a party, and a lot of people whom I had never seen in my life came in there and the house was full and people just wanted to drink and have a good time, and it wasn’t in my interest having that. DR: Rosenberg is one of the people who, even though he writes about art, really has very broad interests. A very good critic. LP: Oh, yes, I meet them nowadays nearly only at Percy’s 55 Christmas party. He hasn’t written very much, but what he writes is very sensitive, very good. He’s a nice man.

Founding the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy DR: How did you decide to start the Institute? LP: Well, Fritz always had the interest, of course, to propagate his approach, and then Paul Goodman was very keen on it, and at the time there was Elliot and Paul Weisz, and actually, we five together, Fritz, and 54 55

Paul Tillich. Percival Goodman, Paul’s brother.

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I, and Elliot, and the two Pauls, we started it. Fritz didn’t start it. We started it together, and we all were teaching at the time. Actually, I had said at the time that I didn’t want to have anything to do with the Institute, because I had so much to do with practice, and we had a big house, and the children were still in great difficulties, Ren particularly. And it was really just too much for me. But then in the first seminar that Fritz had announced forty people turned up, so I took twenty and he took twenty. But it was a very motley crowd, you know, a lot of fringe people that turned up, and later on we sifted much more. Because at the time we were so un-acknowledged that really only people who were either very avantgarde or very far-out, and sometimes very sick [came to us]. DR: When did Fritz first start travelling around? LP: Fritz did not like New York. He went in 1950 to the West Coast, actually, somehow with the intention, as we had done before with New York, to go there first and see if he could get started there, and we should come afterwards, and he was out there for about eighteen months. In the summer of ‘50 I visited him for about two months. And I didn’t like it at all, and he wasn’t that happy either, and then he thought of the . . . that he might start with the Institute possibly, and he came back here. DR: Was Isadore out there? LP: Isadore was out there and stayed out longer, I think, and he took over a lot of cases from Fritz, and that’s how he started his practice. DR: Do you remember when you first met him? LP: Right in the first year I was working. He had started off with Fritz, I think. DR: Was that before you came? LP: I think so. I’m not quite sure anymore. It’s so long ago. It’s twentyfive years. And these details, when I have worked with so many people, I really can’t remember. And then he worked with me. He was at the time very shy, very depressive, very despondent, actually, somewhat suicidal, and he tested that way. He had taken some tests with Evelyn Hooker, in Los Angeles, and he tested, at the time, as a suicidal schiz.56 She tested him a year later and it had all disappeared. He was making a living as a shoe salesman, and taking courses at the New School,57 and not interested 56 57

Schizophrenic. The New School for Social Research is a university in Manhattan.

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enough in that kind of academic work to finish his Master’s or anything. I don’t think he finished it. Funny thing is now that he is so keen on people having academic qualifications . . . but I remember a shoe salesman . . . DR: And he’s also helped so many people to get degrees who have been his patients, but he never did it for himself. LP: Who can does and who can’t teaches! DR: We were talking about the formation of the Institute. Was Fritz excited by that? LP: Oh, yes. We were all excited about it. I have somewhere still some notes on when we started the Institute, but I don’t think I have them here. DR: And then what happened for him to again start his, I call it his “Johnny Appleseed”? LP: Well, actually we were in Florida, in Miami Beach, for the first time, and we had never seen it before, and I didn’t like it right from the beginning. It was nice in the sun, of course, and the water. And there we met Bill Grauman, who at the time was a commercial artist, and had read the book58 and was very enthusiastic and knew a number of people who had become interested in it, and he had been reading lots of psychology and apparently tried out all kinds of things, and then Fritz went there regularly, and then later for a while. I think for three years or so he was in Florida. But that was at a later stage, after he had been for a year in Columbus.59 He went to Columbus through Vincent O’Connell, who was a friend of Larry Bloomberg’s, who worked with me, and Vincent started a group in Columbus. DR: Was Fritz so unhappy with New York that he would go to Columbus for a year? LP: Fritz was always a kind of a gypsy, and Fritz couldn’t stay in the family, and he couldn’t be bothered, and he also at the time was interested in all kinds of other women, and things had gotten somewhat sour between us, and you know, I had had a hysterectomy and he couldn’t take me when I was sick. He couldn’t look after me or really be concerned. It was such pressure and such a burden on him. I didn’t ask anything of him, but he felt it like that, and at the same time couldn’t accept it. So he wandered wherever people were interested, and then it was Cleveland back and forth 58 59

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all the time, and I went a few times, too, and then for a while I didn’t go at all because in the house . . . the woman in whose house we always had the seminars, she was, at the time, very cold towards me and obviously interested only in Fritz. And I didn’t like the atmosphere at the time. But now I stay at her house every time I go there. She’s the one who has the two pianos, and we are very good friends now. She is divorced in the meantime, and hasn’t been that happy either. And also living alone. DR: When did the Becks come as patients?60 LP: The Becks were not patients of ours. There were patients of Paul’s, and when we met them they were already friends of Paul’s. We met them through Paul, but strictly on a social basis. I was interested in going to the theatre, but Fritz was interested in doing theatre, and he was very interested in what they were doing, and gave them quite a bit of money, too, at the beginning. I think that if they had been patients of ours, they would be in better shape today than they are. DR: When did Paul begin to practice, and how much did you sponsor him or what? LP: Well, when he was kind of finishing with me—he was with me for over a year, I think—and then it became more a kind of a mutual thing, we had a kind of inter-group thing—he was still working with the group. Also, Paul was very useful for me. Like some other people later, mostly younger people, artists, and people who were very unusual people, stimulated me into mobilizing my unusual abilities. It was first, though, also with Fritz, of course, and I have always this type of friend. In the meantime, Paul has become for me so [close] that I know how his mind works and he knows how I function, and we are not terribly interesting to each other anymore. We are still friends and there is a lot of affection, but we are not really . . . but at this point we have very little contact. You know, I experience that also to some degree with Isad. That we know each other so well, that there is just not enough going on between us. DR: Do you think that’s a confluence, or something else? LP: Well, it is, somehow. Unfortunately, we take each other too much for granted. It’s like in any marriage and in any relationship of long standing that is not interrupted for long stretches. It was interesting with Fritz, you

60 See Laura Perls’s eulogy for Paul Goodman from 1972 in Notebook Number 6 in this volume.

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know, that it was always interrupted, and so it always became somehow interesting again. DR: There’s always a chance to begin again. LP: Yeah. Well, the last few years, of course, he was getting old, and he was very set, then, in his judgments of me, and the family, and the kids, and the grandchildren—he hardly knew them. And unfortunately he poured it all into the Garbage Pail 61 and it should have stayed in the garbage. The children are outraged, of course, and very resentful. Rightly so. DR: When he gave that talk in New York, and he read from the manuscript, I couldn’t believe my ears when I was sitting there, what he was saying about people who were around and about, and even in the audience. LP: Yes. Oh, he was very miffed, actually, at the party. You know, we gave a party for his 75th birthday, and all the young people were around— Baylis Thomas, and Dave Altfeld, and Pat Kelly, and Richard Kitzler, and everybody, and a lot of younger ones whom he didn’t know at all, and they all had such a great time, and he had been flattered that we were giving a big party for him, there were about a hundred people milling around, at one time or other, but then he didn’t enjoy the party because they didn’t take enough notice of him. They hardly knew him. They knew only his name. He had been away for so long and they had seen him in films and on a public platform, but they had never met him. So, of course, they didn’t even dare to talk to him. And he was very unhappy. DR: How did you come to know Paul Weisz? LP: Lotte came as a patient to Fritz, and she came through Barbara Zambrowsky, I think. They were both working at the time at Bellevue. DR: Barbara was the one you sent me to for a Rorschach. LP: I remember. And you were diagnosed as absolutely hopeless! Well, I risked it anyhow! Barbara is retired now. She is in her seventies. And Lotte and Paul had an affair at the time. She sent Paul, and then she came for a while to me. Paul worked mostly with me. DR: Was he a psychologist?

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LP: No. Paul was a physician, and actually working in biochemistry and in cancer research. He was at Montefiore at the time. Actually, at first when we met him, he was a jail doctor. He couldn’t really get on his feet either, and he was then with Dr. Laslo, who was a famous cancer man who died many years ago. DR: How did Elliot Shapiro come? LP: Elliot came through Carl Fenichel. Carl Fenichel came through the William Alanson White school where he was a training candidate and they didn’t accept him yet as a member, because they felt he wasn’t getting through his own hang-ups, and they sent us a few desperate cases like him and Barbara, and I was lucky with Barbara. The first session she had with me I hit on her main hang-ups. Oh, she was so mad that she was sent to me, because she was sent to Fritz, actually, and Fritz, an ugly little dwarf you know, he wouldn’t work with her. He said he had no time. He didn’t really, but also he didn’t want to work with her. It was very interesting to work with her. She was a Russian refugee and had a very peculiar background. Very interesting. DR: I can’t remember her so well, but I remember going to Bellevue, to the wards, for a test set, and “My God, am I crazy,” because I walked in and it was really quite terrifying, because I was in “History” […]62 for the test. LP: You tested somewhat paranoid. Well, of course, a lot of her own projections came into it. I could always recognize when the tests came from her. DR: I studied the Rorschach, and I was quite good at it, and I always remember my own responses so I could go back over it that way. LP: I knew at the time already that it was all exaggerated. DR: If I was hopeless, you saved me.

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Blank in the manuscript. Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States, was founded in Manhattan in 1736. Although Bellevue is known for such progressive developments as the first children’s clinic and emergency pavilion in the nation, what lingered in the memories of Daniel Rosenblatt’s generation was the psychiatry department, which was called “the pavilion for the insane” when it was established in 1736. To many, Bellevue became synonymous with serious psychiatric illness. I assume that Daniel Rosenblatt was referring to this when he felt terrified to be in “History.”

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LP: I felt quite hopeful right from the beginning. There were some people I liked to work with right from the beginning and it has never been a disappointment. People I had kind of qualms with, they didn’t work out.

Training Gestalt therapists DR: Yesterday we were talking about the beginnings in New York [inaudible]. What kind of experience do you have with supervision? LP: Well, I don’t agree with the usual habit of promise to supervise the whole case and have reports, and the trainee has to sit and take notes all the time. Either he has to take notes or listen. A lot of time is wasted in case reports, orally as well as written. DR: How would you go about it then and how did you develop it? LP: I do go about it in the way, and for a long time already, that I take what the therapist experiences, or the therapist-in-training, his own difficulties, not the patients’. Because you don’t have to report when things go well and the patient obviously develops or loses some of his symptoms. DR: How did you come to this method? LP: Simply through experience and through impatience with the waste of time with analytical methods and reporting. DR: Did you begin at all with the traditional methods? LP: Well, I was trained that way, and I was supervised by the great Otto Fenichel, and the great Otto Fenichel didn’t teach me a thing. He was a walking encyclopedia who knew everything, and if you read his books he was a great theorist, but I don’t know how he practiced himself, and he simply let me report the whole case and said, “Yes, yes” and apparently was satisfied with what I was doing, but he didn’t comment or correct me in any way. Later on I had some supervision with Hans van Ophuijsen, the Dutch analyst, who was for a year out in Johannesburg, and once or twice he said something, but also not very much more. They just listen, as they do in their own practice, and I thought I wasted a lot of time and money. And I didn’t learn a thing through it. I learned through my own experience. DR: Can you remember the first trainee you had? LP: Well, actually, it came out of doing therapy with them, like Paul and Elliot. They became colleagues out of being patients, and they became

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friends. Actually, Paul Goodman formulated it that way one time, when someone asked him “What’s your aim? What do you want to achieve out of therapy?” DR: And he said, “To be able to turn patients into friends?” LP: Yah, he said, “I want to work with people so that they can become my friends.” And a lot of my trainees and patients have become my friends. Like you. Or Isad. Baylis or Dave. DR: Can you remember those early sessions with Paul? LP: I can’t remember details anymore. I remember of Elliot that he came, actually, just after his mother had died, and he wanted to work that through. And then nearly at the same time or very shortly afterward, his wife had breast cancer and had to have a breast amputated, and he was very worried about her. But this is now twenty years ago, and she has been keeping very well, a very lovely woman. DR: Do you have any people you’re supervising now? LP: I am not really calling it even strict supervision. I am still working with some trainees, and whenever they have some difficulties in a case it comes up and, of course, it is a difficulty they have not only with that case, but it’s a more general hang-up always. Or something that they have in common with the patient, and you see that in groups a lot, that those people who have some kind of problem in common but possibly go about it, either in avoiding it or in resolving it in some way, in different ways, that they are the most hostile to each other, and un-understanding. DR: Take the group of trainees you’re supervising now. Can you remember the last session you had with them and . . .? LP: I can’t even remember the last session. I work with people in groups and they upset each other. I find it very difficult now to remember sessions that I have had already. I worked with it then, and that’s it. I don’t feel any hangovers from them in the sense that I have to think about it still or . . . I am finished with it when the session is over, and I try to get it to that point where something is being resolved or where they can go on to the next. DR: I was just hoping for didactic purposes . . . LP: For that, you know, we would really have to have tapes or recordings from sessions, which is very difficult in my place, because there’s so much noise from outside. I can take it with one, you know, when one closes all the windows and sits close together, but in a group it’s nearly impossible

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unless I had some different contraption that would have a big microphone hanging in the middle of the room, like they have in the theatre. DR: When you worked with Elliot or Paul, in supervising them . . . LP: I wasn’t really supervising them. Actually, they both were doing already therapy at the time, and I was just working with them, and then they became my friends, and we were meeting, at that point, all the time, and they were teaching at the Institute. Elliot was doing a course for educators and Paul was doing all kinds of things—unblocking creativeness and—you know it is all twenty years ago now, and it’s hard to remember the details. DR: Well, that’s one of the reasons why we’re doing this, to see if we can recapture some of it, because it would be very interesting. LP: I can recapture details of earlier events much easier than in the last twenty years. They have gone like this. DR: Well, say if you’re working with a trainee now, do you ever see them in individual sessions? LP: Yah. Some come first into the group when they come from schools or out of their own practice already, and then they usually get into individual therapy, and with some of them they came into individual if they had already enough sense. DR: How would you distinguish for someone, say, who’s in the field and working with patients, supervision from regular therapy? LP: They have great difficulties, actually. I had trainees who were in a doctoral course at Adelphi,63 for instance, and they were during their first year of their doctoral training nearly all the time on probation, because they were somehow ahead of their training therapist all the time. They could see aspects of the case and work with it in a way in which the traditional analyst simply doesn’t work and can’t work and simply doesn’t see—much more in the present. And for the traditional analyst it’s very anxiety-producing, apparently, for most of them. I have now one in a couple whose wife came first—he sent his wife first—actually. He is an analyst and his wife was a patient at one time of his, for two years, and then he married her, and he had a lot of infantilism still, and hang-ups, and I have been working with her and now they have come together into the

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couple group and I think he will come into individual now. I hope. He really needs it. DR: Maybe that would be an interesting area to look at. I’m a little vague about your relations with traditional analytic structure in the early days, like Clara Thompson was one of the people who helped get Fritz. LP: Well, I had very little contact with people in the traditional field. Only very superficial social contact, and Clara Thompson didn’t like me, she liked Fritz, and when I turned up, she simply ignored me. And for a long time we just didn’t have anything. The last time I saw her, she was very much alone. Her friend with whom she lived with for a long time had died the year before. She had cancer at the time, and she looked very forlorn and sat alone at the concert in Provincetown, and I went up to her. It was the first time that she even recognized me and we talked a little bit. And I had met some of my old psychoanalytical friends from Germany and we have no contact anymore. They think I do crazy and irresponsible things and I think they are old fuddy-duddys, and one of them I talked to a couple of years ago had just discovered the tape recorder and that one could play it back to the patient and let the patient take care of himself.

Identifying herself as a Gestalt therapist DR: At what point did you stop thinking of yourself as a psychoanalyst and begin? LP: Well, we called ourselves kind of revisionist psychoanalysts at first, and the first book, Ego, Hunger and Aggression, is called a revision of Freud’s psychoanalysis, or something like that. And then we called it more kind of a substitution of free association by concentration, and then we thought of calling it existential therapy, because we took the present much more as a bearing than the past like Freud or the future like Adler. And we thought then of Gestalt, because that was really for us, then, or for me, the more adequate term of describing the process that takes place in Gestalt therapy or that we are after to facilitate, namely an ongoing Gestalt formation in which what is of greatest importance to the person, or the organism, or the group, or the family, comes into the foreground where it can be coped with, dealt with, so that then it can go into the background, be assimilated, or discarded as the case may be, so that then the foreground is free again for a new Gestalt. DR: You mentioned some reference, on the other side when we ran out of tape, about what Fritz said in In and Out the Garbage Pail.

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LP: Yah, we then really all agreed that existential therapy, at this point, wasn’t the term to use because of Sartrean associations and prejudices of the people against Nihilism and Communism and God knows what. DR: When you first came to New York, did you have any kind of ideas of joining the established Institutes? LP: Well, Fritz at first actually came to New York from New Haven where he couldn’t make it at the time. It was very disagreeable for him, he was very unhappy, and he nearly came back to South Africa. But he came to New York and visited Erich Fromm. And Erich Fromm said, “I guarantee, if you come here, within three months you’ll have a practice.” Within three weeks he had a practice. And then he got very intimate first with people of the William Alanson White set-up, with Clara Thompson, and several other people around her. Sullivan was still alive then, but he was very ill. He died soon after that. And they wanted him, actually, at the Institute, as a training analyst, but they wanted him to take his doctorate again at an American school,64 and Fritz was, at that point, in his early fifties, and felt if he goes to school, he’ll go as a teacher and not as a student. But they continued sending us some of their more impossible patients, and I don’t know if they wanted us to hang ourselves with them or what, but we were quite successful with a number of them. DR: Can you remember a certain point where you sort of passed, in your own mind, knowing that you were part of one of the established Institutes and that you were really on your own? LP: Well, at the time, you know, we always kept the Institute really functioning at the minimum as an Institute, because we didn’t want to get organized and hung up like most of the other training institutes. But then, of course, it became, in the long run, more difficult to handle it. Also, at first we got a lot of fringe people whom we had to sift out again and we wanted to keep it as small as possible. But it grew on its own. And of course everybody who has really been through a Gestalt therapy and group therapy, they have a kind of a background that enables them so much more to work with other people than the traditional analysts do, and they also work better in the community, because they are much more aware of what’s actually going on and don’t take it as transference, which is always a very convenient excuse for putting the responsibility somewhere else into the past and preferable on to the patient’s past. DR: Say with the concept of transference, if you’re working . . . 64

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LP: I haven’t worked with the concept of transference in the last twentyfive years, since I came here, because with the orientation to and from the present, you don’t need transference. You take what is. And take that on its own merit, whatever it happens to be. And the memories that turn up then, usually, when that is focused on, can be brought right into the present as an unfinished experience which has to be finished here and now. DR: Well, say you take the woman you’re working with who married her analyst, and you said that she’s rather infantile. LP: And he is infantile in a similar way, and simply these aspects are for him too anxious-making.65 He can’t handle it in himself and so he can’t handle it in his patients either. He is an eternal optimist who sees everything in the best possible light and can be very supportive that way, but he can’t really deal fully with the patient’s anxiety because he can’t deal with his own. DR: How would you try and work with him on that? LP: To take it right in the actual situation, how he is anxious there and continually avoiding certain issues which for the others become obvious in the group. DR: Can you give me an example of that? LP: Avoiding a confrontation with somebody, or avoiding really the other one to stay with the slight anxiety that they develop, and it’s mainly because he can’t stay with it. It makes him anxious. And that can be continually pointed out, and also how he prevents himself physically from supporting the excitement that might be in being confronted. DR: When you say pointing it out, do you mean through an interpretation? LP: Not interpretation, but description, I would rather say; describing what he is doing in detail, and making him aware of what he can become aware of right there. It doesn’t have to be a theoretical discussion then, and an interpretation which can be doubted. But this is what you are doing here and now. And how do you feel with that? And what alternative can you think of at the moment to go about it in a different way? And then making him also aware of the physical way he puts restrictions on himself. Every resistance and restriction is muscular. Ferenczi saw that already, and there the interpretation was mainly anal, and it was still kind of steeped in the analytical language. Reich went much further and talked about the 65

Anxiety-producing.

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muscular armor, which is anywhere, and it’s mainly, as I find, more and more with people who avoid anxiety and may be very competent in many ways, but simply within certain limitations, which they set themselves, and within that they are competent and become smug, and as soon as they get to the border where they might be embarrassed or uneasy, wobbly in any way, they either withdraw or they brazen it out with a kind of professed know-how and optimism. DR: Well, in a sense, what you’re saying, at the border of their confidence is where their defensiveness becomes active. LP: And actually, what we are trying to do in Gestalt therapy is to facilitate the patient’s ability to live on the boundary, not within the boundaries all the time which become fixed and become the character structure. DR: The more he can live at that boundary, the more enabled he is to . . . LP: For living on the boundary, one must have access and use of one’s excitement, and if you get anxious instead of excited, it means that you don’t allow yourself to support the development of excitement with the increase in breathing and mobility. If you pull yourself together and you control yourself usually from the middle, in the diaphragm and in the small of the back . . . I work a lot on that before I let them get any further or any more anxious. Actually, when this support develops more, I encourage people to join a dance class, or a tai chi group, or do karate, or anything that has the more Eastern physical support methods for a continuity of either movement or contemplation. Then they have sufficient support to cope with the developing interest on the boundary. DR: We got into this discussion a little bit because I was asking you about interpretation. Is there any time that you find . . . LP: Then you don’t need any interpretation. You simply take what is obvious and can be made obvious immediately to the patient. You start working from what is there, and not with what is not there. When you talk about what isn’t there or what you think is in the background somewhere, you make your own fantasies about it, and it’s your interpretation which the patient can either believe or not. And that means that he swallows again a piece of undigested material, which then either is alienated again, because he can’t do enough with it, or gets projected, which is worse. That means then with an obsessional patient, for instance, you get a full-fledged paranoia. DR: Supposing he were to chew on it?

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LP: That’s what we do in the session—chew on what comes up. Describe it more and more in detail. Really take every possible aspect that we can become aware of, he or me, in the actual session, and work through that. And sooner or later you get the “A-ha!” awareness, or what Fritz called the mini-satori, where something suddenly comes out as a different Gestalt and a different way of handling something, a different experience. DR: Well, as I hear you, you’re saying that you don’t use interpretation at all, but as I recall, working in the groups, or working with Isad . . . LP: Isad uses more, I think. I think Isad is working much more from his head still and has much less of the immediately physical awareness that I have and that a lot of my younger trainees develop. I worked with him a little bit on that after his brother died. And he was very shaky at the time, and I worked with him on the way he walked, pulling himself together, you know, and really mincing his steps, and I let him take a real stance. But it’s not a fault. He works quite differently. So does every Gestalt therapist. They use themselves with whatever they have got. That is why I am so much in favor of getting people who have a wide background and not just a smattering of something or other. This is what comes a lot now for training or the people who want to train as group leaders. They know nothing. They don’t really experience themselves as the link in certain ongoing processes. They look on tradition only as the past and not as something that is traduced—that means it goes on and continually changes and expands. You don’t even know what you are doing if you have no idea of what went on before. [inaudible] the experience of the present rather than that I interpret. I describe, and in that way, facilitate.

Unexpected interviewers arrive Q:66 And the patient. What’s his role in this? While you’re describing, he is being more aware of himself? LP: And he can describe himself to a great extent, what he is doing and what he is feeling. He doesn’t have to speculate about it and figure it out.

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Daniel Rosenblatt notes here in the manuscript: “I think what happens now is that Laura is questioned by my nieces, Leah and Naomi, who were about ten and twelve years old, and Laura was very gentle with them. Also present was my sister-in-law, Judy.” When it is unclear which niece posed which question, their questions will be marked as “Q,” otherwise their questions will be marked “N” for Naomi and “L” for Leah. Judy Rosenblatt’s questions will be marked “JR.”

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Or figure out what I am saying and either believe it or not, or feel doubtful. Q: Have you ever said anything to a patient that would make him feel doubtful? Something that he might not have found in himself, that you found? LP: Sometimes, yes. Q: What happens? LP: I try to get more into detail, and ask him, actually, “What do you feel in your face, or in your neck, or in your diaphragm? Are you aware of the way you are sitting? What’s your hand saying to you?”, for instance. Q: This is sort of the study of body movement, isn’t it? Aren’t you kind of bringing in physical movement because I heard you mention something about Eastern disciplines? LP: Body awareness. Q: Is yoga a very good discipline for this thing? LP: Yah, very good. Q: Do you strongly believe that a person’s character, or the way he’s feeling, has a lot to do with his movement? LP: Certainly. You can walk behind a person in the street and see already what kind of people they are simply by the way they walk, if you have an eye for it. See who is rigid and kind of put together and tight, up-tight. And see who is loose and swinging. Q: Once I was nervous and I found myself standing like that. Have you read Julius Fast’s Body Language? LP: I did not need to read that. You know, I did all these things long before. I’ve seen some of the publications, and there are things coming out now, you know, I have done it for thirty years. I did a lot of modern dance and eurhythmics already as a kid in Germany and I have done it all my life. Q: And this is part of Gestalt therapy? LP: It is part, certainly, of my approach, and all my trainees get some of it. And lately, I really encourage people more to get into body movement and awareness through tai chi, or through yoga, or through karate.

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Q: Do you ever play identification games with your patients—like when you name some things and you ask them what’s the first thing that comes to their minds? LP: Well, actually, we do that in connection with dreams and we try to identify them not only with the dreamer, but with every other person that appears in the dream, and with every thing, and with every action, and every happening. Q: And that’s how you analyze dreams? Or interpret? LP: We don’t analyze it, but the person identifies; not interpret it either, but experience it in detail. Like a work of art, the patient is the dreamer and he makes the dream. It comes out of his more or less awareness. Of course, what one is fully aware of, one doesn’t have to dream about. But one dreams when there is no censor working. That means when the muscular tensions that prevent a full working of the mind, if you will, when they are dissolved and the body is relaxed, and then you dream and all kinds of repressed and forgotten things come into the dream, and when you can re-identify or identify for the first time with whatever happens in the dream, you get in possession or you re-possess a lot of alienated experience. N: I bet that would be very upsetting. LP: That is also very expanding. And the dreamer never goes any further, you see. He refuses to identify more than he can feel at the time. Very often they can’t identify with something or other at all and for the time being, I leave that if there’s too much resistance. L: But could a dream also be not so much from the deep past? I could understand this dream, that I was playing with a doll one day and in my dream, I dreamt that I ate her. Couldn’t you just say that that was just because you were remembering about the doll? I mean, does that have to be from your deep subconscious? LP: Identify with the doll right now. “I am the doll.” L: I ate you because you had a wire sticking out of your hand and I hated it. LP: You are talking to the doll. Identify with the doll. Be the doll. “I am stiff; I am being eaten.” L: What can I say? I mean like I ate the doll, because it had a wire sticking out of its arm?

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LP: Be the wire. Identify with the wire that’s sticking out. L: What does that do? DR: Do it and find out. LP: Find out what it does. Be the wire and do whatever the wire does. L: It’s just standing there. DR: Maybe we’ve gone as far as the resistance will allow us—first experience with the dream. LP: The wire is a kind of thing one gets, that you get stuck on. The hangup. It’s a pun. But the dream makes a lot of puns. How do you feel about that? L: I don’t think that’s like, the wire . . . Don’t you just kind of dream when you just kind of . . . things just run through your mind? They don’t have to have any significance. Some dreams have more significance than others. LP: Yah, but particularly if you get into a dream that doesn’t seem to say anything much, you’ll be surprised what you can get out of it. N: How about dreams about death? What do you think about them? I mean, like, I’ve always had this fear of dying, so I usually dream about it. LP: You don’t like to think about it when you’re awake. L: Can I ask you another question I’ve been wondering about a long time? What about repetitive dreams? For instance, my friend told me a dream he had had at least four times in a row. LP: Those are very significant dreams, which repeat themselves all the time. It really shows that somebody is trying to come to grips with something again and again and again and somehow doesn’t make it. L: Would you mind if I told you what this dream was? LP: Well, his dream we can’t really do anything about, you see, because we make our own fantasies about it then, and it’s more useful if he would do that himself. JR: [How about if someone] doesn’t dream at all, or dreams very little? LP: My father said he didn’t dream at all and that only camels dream, but I think that people who think they don’t dream, they simply forgot about it.

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DR: I’ve had patients who come and say they don’t dream and then as they continue working, then they start to dream. Then they say they don’t dream much. LP: I find that when I wake myself with the alarm clock that my dreams immediately disappear, or when there is some external noise going on. But on some days, or sometimes on the weekends when I wake up gradually and go to sleep again and wake up again, then I can remember it more, because then one can stay in contact with it. I always dream in technicolor. I have also that kind of memory. I have a completely eidetic memory, and I walk through my past, particularly the early past, like through a color movie. N: Don’t people tend to be too Freudian, though, in analyzing dreams? LP: In analyzing, yes, but that is what we precisely don’t do. N: I mean that they sort of read sex into things. LP: Tell me what you think. You ask me questions, you know, and behind every question there is really a certain stance that you have. You ask it from a certain background. And so make a statement what you think. N: Okay. I think that if a hack analyzer was analyzing Leah’s dream about the doll, they’d say that the wire was supposed to represent a male sexual organ, and that she was [inaudible] because it doesn’t oppress women or something like that. And I’ve read these paperbacks that are becoming so popular that say if you’re not married . . . LP: That is the analyst’s fantasy, and he fantasizes from his own background. N: It’s silly though. They say, well, if you’re not married and you dream you’re pregnant, you’d better get a check-up, it’s perfectly ridiculous. JR: Why do you bother with those? NR: Because they’re so stupid. Oh, just in the health food store. L: I’ve seen one that says Sex and Health Food, or Sex and Yoga. But could you help me analyze this dream? LP: I’m not analyzing dreams. I charge $45 an hour. [much laughter] JR: We’ll get a bill! Come on, let’s go to Granville and go shopping and let the poor woman read! DR: I’m not cheap either!

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Q: What do you charge, I’m just curious? What do you charge an hour? LP: $45 an hour. I am also not taking any new private patients. I’m winding down and closing out my private practice. I work only with trainees and with training groups, mostly in the institutes. Gestalt groups all over the country. Also they are starting in Europe [inaudible] probably it was too much. But some of the people who were in the group came afterwards, you know, and they even asked to have a group of their own which then didn’t materialize. One or two people came into training, into therapy. DR: So, there’s always an opportunity. LP: Yah. And, of course, the one who instigated it in this school was somebody [inaudible] [who was in the group] for several years. He has now a Ph.D. in teaching, and who was at one time psychotic and for a year hospitalized. DR: I’ve been seeing a man who is in advertising, and he’s about fortyfive, and he has been in analysis about fourteen years. And he’s very bright, and extremely paranoid, and he talks about everything in the most narrow band of right and wrong. Once in the group I had him be Cotton Mather, 67 and he took to it like a duck to water. He liked it. And he constantly tells me that I’m terribly sinful, and that I’m going to be punished for it, and that he doesn’t dare emulate my kind of sin—the fact that I don’t work on Friday, for example, is just outrageous. And at the same time that he says all this, there’s something very warm, and friendly, and genuine that makes the terrific kind of harsh, punitive side of him seem unreal. LP: He is full of introjections, which must have come from very early, and he spouts them out. DR: But he takes them so seriously. His father is the one who used to beat him and he now beats his wife and children [inaudible]. The first time I saw him, I said, “Well, you haven’t said anything nice about yourself, and can’t you find anything [inaudible] and then at least the first six weeks he tried to get me to kick him out. Insisted that when he told me this, then I would throw him out of treatment. So, he’s really this split between the warm, human, friendly, genuine, contactful, appropriate, and then this harsh, punitive person that I’ve been struggling with. 67

Cotton Mather (1663–1728) was a New England Puritan minister who used his influence to support the Salem witch trials.

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LP: Let him struggle with it, let him make dialogues between these two sides of his personality. DR: He calls one of them the “John Wayne” personality. LP: And the other one who is being punished . . . LP: [inaudible] and I didn’t have much experience when I started with him, and I worked still completely analytically there, and of course, we didn’t get anywhere. We got deeper and deeper into his early experiences, and into the birth trauma. Even then it was quite obvious it was probably all so, but it was a continual interpretation and symbolism, and nothing changed really much in his attitude. I would work entirely differently with him now. DR: How would you work with him now? LP: I would work entirely from the present and not go into his history at all. Or only let him bring it in when it is mobilized through something that is taking place, right there. Oh, he didn’t talk about his birth trauma. There were all things that I brought up as interpretation and he accepted it. And I think this just didn’t change a thing. He understood more and more about less and less: the way a patient never really sorts himself out from you and never experiences that boundary between you and him. He just remains attacked, just like this guy had fourteen years of analysis. I would work entirely on the boundary experience. I-you, you-me, I and she, how are we alike, how are we different? And with dreams, too. DR: I don’t think he’s mentioned any dreams. LP: . . . in the identification with every part of the dream that can be repossessed, of the lost personality or undeveloped personality.

Laura’s unsensational style of working DR: I also was wondering if you could remember a particular person who you’re working with, now, say, or take the last workshop you were at, if you could describe what your contact was with one of the more interesting people there, say what happened. LP: They are nearly all interesting. When you work with what is absolutely there, even when somebody is entirely absent or really entirely sort of “blah” or bored, anything you take up right at the moment leads somewhere. What I find mostly now in workshops is that people are very surprised that I work very differently from all other Gestalt therapists.

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They are used to watching Fritz in films or in natura,68 and people who imitate him and do Gestalt therapy and think that the empty chair and the hot seat is about all that there is to it. And they always want to see something dramatic and exciting and they might get bored at first and then they are very surprised that I somehow with patience and with working on small things, on the obvious and on the minimal, that I get something that seems to be much deeper reaching and because it’s a small step at a time, and I make a lot of small steps with the same person, it seems to lead much further. It’s not the great immediate shock experience and surprise, but it’s the actual growth experience. DR: Can you think of the last . . .? LP: I can’t think of any detail right now. I do so many. I had four groups after that workshop already. DR: Well, what about the last group you had? LP: In the last group was this one young man who is a very superior guy, really so in many ways—intellectually superior, and is a student, very bright, very musical, but also very controlled and controlling, controlling himself and controlling situations, and who was, the week before, nearly suicidal. And for the first time, he called me. And was very afraid to call me and to give away that he felt so weak and so miserable. And we worked last the week before with him, and this time again for a little while, and we really got him to the point where he got in touch with that little child in him that is crying and upset and afraid. He never showed any fear. DR: Do you remember how it was that it came about? LP: A girl left him whom he had been with for several months, and he felt terribly rejected and unhappy, and also there were exams, finals, at the same time, and everything came together and he nearly cracked up. DR: Do you remember how you started working with him in the group, what was the first small step he took? LP: I can’t quite recall at the moment. Actually, I let him do a lot himself and make dialogues with his father, with the controlling forces, make dialogues between the different parts of his personality, between his weakness and his strength. DR: Were any of the other people in the group useful? 68

In real life.

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LP: Yah. They are a beautiful group now that really works very well together, and sometimes somebody new comes in and upsets it or doesn’t know what we are at. A certain shorthand develops between people who have been working together for a year or longer, and nearly all of them have been in it the whole year, and it’s very good. I prefer that very much to the one-shot things, the on-going groups. And I work in other places also only with groups that are working together otherwise, too, or who are in training, so that whatever hangs over can be taken up also by their therapist or by their groups that they are working with. In Cleveland, in Chicago, on the West Coast. They are all trainees. DR: When you get a consultation, how do you go about it? Say that somebody calls up the Institute and comes in? LP: Well, that depends whether they are old or young, whether they have had therapy experiences before or haven’t, how do they come to me? Why to me? DR: Say it’s someone in her twenties who had read Gestalt Therapy. LP: They read Gestalt Therapy. They are enthusiastic. DR: And they decide they want to have a go at it, and they really haven’t had any other therapy. LP: Well, usually I catch onto the way they present themselves right there at the moment, and most of them are embarrassed and uneasy or there are others who are very superior and give their whole case history and I usually cut that off and try to come immediately to where they are right now and why they are coming to me. And I give as an example, or I start right there here and now, what are you aware of right now at this moment? And sometimes they don’t even hear that and start going on with telling a story. And I tell them “I’m aware you are telling me a story right now. And you’re talking about the past and that’s more comfortable. You could be telling that to anybody. You are not talking to me.” DR: You sent me someone who needed a consultation about two weeks ago; I think he was one of the most hostile people I have ever seen. LP: You know, a lot of people call, and when I am not sure that I can refer them immediately to a group or so because they sound somewhat peculiar, then I give them usually two or three names where they could have an interview, before they are referred for anything, either with Magda or with you, or Isadore, or Dave Altfeld, or Baylis.

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DR: Well, he had called me twice before he came for the consultation, and I knew something was wrong already, and Isadore had somehow managed not to see him, but anyhow, I’m talking about it, because I’m trying to think, if I role-played with him, how would you handle it? LP: Well, at this point I wouldn’t take anybody for interviews if I can help it, unless it is somebody who wants to come for training. It’s just too much. DR: See, I’m really thinking about how I can get you to demonstrate your abilities and techniques on tape, because you don’t tape record. LP: Well, I think I have to do that. DR: [inaudible] consultation, or supervision, or role-paying. I haven’t hit on a way of eliciting from you . . . LP: Yah, it’s really embarrassing. I don’t know what I do. DR: Well, that’s OK, but I’m trying to find a way of eliciting it or that could be a demonstration so that you could see it yourself, like, what I was struck with this afternoon was when my nieces started asking questions, how easily you accepted them and started to work with them, and that was very nice. You took them right where they were. LP: Well, that is basically what happens in a group, when questions may be a little more sophisticated and from a different background, but I take up right where they are. DR: That was very nice, and I’m trying to think how I could capitalize on that, but I don’t think I’m doing it too well. LP: [I’m] too tired to even think of details or remember anything. You know, when I was younger, then certain cases always stood out as something special, or very new, or very interesting, but at this point I have experienced so many things and in similar ways so many times, that hardly anything hangs over even as a memory. I actually have to think about something only or do think about something when I think something may have gone wrong or hasn’t been resolved in a satisfactory way. It’s very seldom. When I feel that somebody has been left hanging, then I might think about it later on still. But that is very seldom. I try always to get things if not to a complete closure, which actually shouldn’t happen, but at least to the kind of non-anxious openness. That’s also a reason why I very often overstay my sessions, because I don’t like to break it off at just any odd point. You can do that in free association, perhaps, and okay, tomorrow it goes on just the same way. I always thought of myself as a

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writer rather than anything else. Before I really thought of myself as a musician or possibly a professional musician, I rather thought of myself as a writer or a poet, and I started writing things very early—poetry and little stories, and when I was about eight, I don’t know if I told you, I started writing what I called a novel, which my mother took away. DR: Yes, you told me. You said it had a big effect on you. LP: It had a tremendous effect, it really took away more than what I had just written, but somehow the ability to write out of fantasy or imagination altogether. [In German I] could write in a kind of essay or scientific style, a very rational language, and I recaptured some of the earlier ability only through acquiring a new language in English. DR: When you thought of yourself as a writer, who were the writers who were most precious and valuable for you? LP: Oh, that’s very difficult, you know, because I read everything, and Rilke was, I think, at one time, of German writers, at least of modern writers, the most impressive. DR: I have a patient who says she lost her virginity because a man told her he loved Rilke [inaudible]. LP: Hölderlin and Goethe, of course, more than Schiller. Schiller is more dramatic. That is what I grew up with. Then for the first ten years I was speaking English, I simply ready myself through the whole English literature, from Chaucer to Dylan Thomas. DR: Did you write while in South Africa? LP: Yah. And I really started to write at the time when I found out that my whole family had been destroyed, and then I simply had to.69 And then, for a couple of years, in ’44 and ’46, and here for the first years, too, I wrote a lot of stories, poetry. DR: You didn’t mention any of the Russians? LP: Oh, yes. They were at one time very influential. Dostoyevsky particularly. Much more than Tolstoy. I read now Tolstoy again in German, when I was last year in Austria. DR: You didn’t mention Nietzsche at all?

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See “Timeless Experience of a Total Life Crystalized” in this volume.

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LP: Yes, of course. There were many authors, really, the 17th century mystics [inaudible]. DR: Mason Cooley gave a course for some of the people in the Institute in literature. The Institute really doesn’t have too much of a program. LP: I have two English professors who will be doing something in coming terms. One probably in poetry and the other on the novel, or they might do a course together. They have been in the same group. One is still in it. The other one teaches at St. John’s and Lee Haring teaches, I think, at City or at Brooklyn.70 Very interesting people. DR: We’ve talked a little bit about the Institute. How would you like to see it set up? Say, if there were no difficulties in terms of time or money. LP: Well, I think what we should have is at least a small office and a more or less permanent secretary. And I don’t know, the other institutes seem to have no difficulty with that. They always find someone who is in training and who is willing to do the secretarial services in exchange for therapy and group and training, and, of course, in San Francisco and particularly Cleveland, they have for many years had somebody who is just a secretary. In Cleveland they have a whole office staff now. We really would have to decide whether we remain purely a training setup or whether we provide other services. They are very much asked-for, actually, and Isadore is all very much in favor, and I don’t want to do personally that much of it now, you know. In earlier years I would have liked that much better and I have encouraged people to get more into community and to work together with all kinds of other social agencies, or with churches, Head Start, or whatever. Harlem organizations. DR: Have you worked much with drug addicts? LP: I personally haven’t. I have had really only a few patients who were heavily into drugs. But I think Pat Kelley had a lot of experience. He worked for five years for the Youth Board, and he worked mainly with street gangs. He was on the street, but he also had ongoing groups with people he collected from the street and from Youth House. DR: I know someone who worked with him. I wasn’t sure what kind of groups they were. I thought they were more social work groups. [Rest illegible]

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City College; Brooklyn College.