Gestalt Therapy Verbatim.

I would like to star out with very simple ideas which, as always, are difficult to grasp because they are so simple. I would like to start out with the question of control. There are two kinds of control: One is the control that comes from outside ―I am being controlled by others, by orders, by the environment, and so on― and the other is the control that is built in, in every organism―my own nature.

What is an organism? We call an organism any living being, any living being that has organs, has an organization, that is self-regulating within itself. An organism is not independent from its environment. Every organism needs an environment to exchange essential substances, and so on. We need the physical environment to exchange air, food, etc.; we need the social environment to exchange friendship, love, anger. But within the organism there is a system of unbelievable subtlety ―every cell of the millions of cells which we are, has built-in messages that it sends to the total organism, and the total organism then takes care of the needs of the cells and whatever must be done for different parts of the organism.

Now what is first to be considered is that the organism always works as a whole. We have not a liver or a heart. We are liver and heart and brain and so on, and even this is wrong. We are not a "summation" of parts, but a "coordination" ―a very subtle coordination of all these different bits that go into the making of the organism.

The old philosophy always thought that the world consisted of the sum of particles. You know yourself it’s no true. We consist originally out of one cell. This cell differentiates into several cells, and they differentiate into other organs that have special functions which are diversified and yet needed for each other.

So, we come to the definition of health. Health is an appropriate balance of the coordination of all what we are. You notice that I emphasized a few times the word ‘are’, because the very moment we say we have an organism or we have the body, we introduce a split ―as if there’s an I that is in possession of the body or the organism. We are a body, we are somebody― “I am somebody”, “I am nobody”. So it’s the question of being rather than having. This is why we call our approach the existential approach: we exist as an organism ―as an organism like a clam, like an animal, and so on, and we relate to the external world just like any other organism of nature. Kurt Goldstein first introduced the concept of the organism as a whole, and broke with the tradition in medicine that we have a liver, that we have a this/that, that all these organs can be studied separately. He got pretty close to the actuality, but the actuality is what is called the ecological aspect. You cannot even separate the organism and the environment. A plant taken out of its environment can’t survive, and neither can an human being if you take him out of his environment, deprive him of oxygen and food, and so on. So we have to consider always the segment of the world in which we live as part of ourselves. Wherever we go, we take a kind of world with us.

Now if this is so, then we begin slowly to understand that people and organisms can communicate with each other, and we call it the Mitwelt ―the common world which you have and the other person has. You speak a certain language, you attitudes, certain behaviour, and the two worlds somewhere overlap. And in this overlapping area, communication is possible. You notice if people meet, they begin the gambit of meeting― one says, “How are you?” “It’s nice weather.” And the other answer something else. So they go into the search for the common interest, or the common world, where they have a possible interest, communication, and togetherness, where we get suddenly from the I and You to the We. So there is a new phenomenon coming, the We which is different from the I and You. The We doesn’t exist, but consists out of I and You, is an ever-changing boundary where two people meet. And when we meet there, then I change and you change, through the process of encountering each other, except ―and we have to talk a lot about this―except if the two people have character. Once you have a character, you have developed a rigid system. Your behaviour becomes petrified, predictable, and you lose your ability to cope freely with the world with all your resources. Your are predetermined just to cope with events in one way, namely, as your character prescribes it to be. So it seems a paradox when I say that the richest person, the most productive, creative person, is a person who has no character. In our society, we demand a person to have a character, and especially a good character, because then you are predictable, and you can be pigeon-holed, and so on.

Now, let’s talk a bit more about the relationship of the organism to its environment, and here we introduce the notion of the ego boundary. A boundary defines a thing. Now a thing has its boundaries, is defined by its boundaries in relation to the environment. In itself a thing occupies a certain amount of space. Maybe not much. Maybe it wants to be bigger, or wants to be smaller― maybe it’s not satisfied with its size. We introduce now a new concept again, the wish to change based upon the phenomenon of dissatisfaction. Every time you want to change yourself, or you want to change the environment, the basis always is dissatisfaction.

The boundary between organism and environment is more or less experienced by us as what is inside the skin and what is outside the skin, but this is very very loosely defined. For instance, the very moment we breathe, is the air that comes in still part of the outside world, or is it already our own?. If we eat food, we ingest it, but can still vomit it up, so where is the place where the self begins, and the otherness of the environment ends? So the ego boundary is not a fixed thing. If it is fixed, then it again becomes character, or an armour, like in the turtle. The turtle has a very fixed boundary in this respect. Our skin is somewhat less fixed, and breathes, touches, and so on. The ego boundary is of great, great importance. The phenomenon of the ego boundary is very peculiar. Basically, we call the ego boundary the differentiation between the self and the otherness, and in Gestalt Therapy we write the self with a lower case ‘s’. I know that many psychologists like to write the self with a capital ‘S’, as if the self would be something precious, something extraordinarily valuable. They go at the discovery of the self like a treasure-digging. The self means nothing but this thing as it is defined by otherness. “I do it myself” means that nobody else is doing it, it’s this organism that does it.

Now the two phenomena of the ego boundary are identification and alienation. I identify with my movement: I say that I move my arm. When I see you sit there in a certain posture, I don’t say, “I sit there”, I say, “You sit there”. I differentiate between the experience here and the experience there, and this identification experience has several aspects. The I seems to be more precious than the otherness. If I identify with, let’s say, my profession, then this identification may become so strong that if my profession is the taken away, I feel I don’t exist any more, so I might just as well commit suicide. In 1929, you remember how many people committed suicide because they were so identified with their money that life wasn’t worth living any more when they lost it.

We are easily identified with our families. If a member of our family is slighted, then we feel the same is done to us. You identify with your friends. The members of the 146th infantry regiment feel themselves to be better than the members of the 147th regiment, and the members of the 147th regiment feel themselves superior to the members of the 146th. So inside the ego boundary, there is generally cohesion, love, cooperation; outside the ego boundary there is suspicion, strangeness, unfamiliarity.

Now this boundary can be very fluid, like nowadays in battles ―the boundary stretches as far, let’s say, as your air power goes. This is how far the security, familiarity, wholeness, extends. And there is the strangeness, the enemy who is outside the boundary, and whenever there is a boundary question, there is a conflict going on. If we take likeness for granted, then we wouldn't be aware of the existence of the boundary. If we take the unlikeness very much for granted, then we come to the problem of hostility, of rejection―pushing away. “Keep out of my boundaries”, “Keep out of my house”, “Keep out of my family”, “Keep out of my thoughts”. So you see already the polarity of attraction and rejection―of appetite and disgust. There is always a polarity going on, and inside the boundary we have the feeling of familiarity, of right; outside is strangeness, and wrong. Inside is good, outside is bad. The own God is the right God. The other God is the strange God. My political conviction is sacred, is mine; the other political conviction is bad. If a state is at war, its own soldiers are angels, and the enemy are all devils. Our own soldiers take care of the poor families; the enemy rapes them. So the whole idea of good and bad, right and wrong, is always a matter of boundary, of which side of the fence I am on.

So I want to give you a couple of minutes now for time to digest, and to make comments, and see how far we have come. You have to let me in a bit into your private world, or you have to come out of you private world into that environment which includes this platform.

Q: When a person’s in love, his own boundary expands to include the you, or the other, that was previously outside himself.

F: Yah. The ego boundary becomes an ‘us’ boundary: I and you are separate against the whole world and, in a moment of ecstasy of love, the world disappears.

Q: If two people are in love, do they accept ―would they accept each other so completely that their ego boundaries would expand to include other persons completely, or would it just include the person they had contact with?

F: Well, this is a very interesting, relevant question. And the misunderstanding of this leads to many tragedies and catastrophes. We don’t usually love a person. That’s is very very rare. We love a certain property in that person, which is identical with our behaviour or supplementing our behaviour, usually something thateee is a supplement to us. We think we are in love with the total person, and actually we are disgusted with other aspects of this person. So when the other contacts come up, when this person behaves in a way that creates disgust in us, then again we don’t say, “This of you is disgusting, though this other part is lovable”. We say, “You are disgusting ―get out of my life.”

Q: But Fritz, doesn’t this apply to an individual also? Do we include all of ourselves in our ego boundaries? Aren’t there things in us that we refuse to include in our ego boundaries?

F: Well, we are going to talk about that when we come to the inner split, the fragmentation of personality. The very moment you say, “I accept something in myself”, you split yourself up into ‘I’ and ‘myself’”. Right now, I am talking about more less the total encounter of an organism, and I am not talking about pathology. Basically there are very few among us that are whole persons.

Q: How about the reverse situation, hate or intense anger? Does that then have a tendency to shrink ego boundaries so that a person’s hate toward another person can absorb their whole life?

F: No. Hate is a function of kicking somebody out of the boundary for something. The term we use in existential psychiatry is alienation, disowning. We disown a person, and if this person’s existence constitutes a threat to us, we want to annihilate this person. But it is definitely an exclusion from our boundary, from ourselves.

Q: Well, I understand that. What I’m trying to understand is what that kind of intense situation ―intense involvement in that kind of situation―does in terms of ego boundaries. Does it tend to make them smaller, or make them more rigid?

F: Well, definitely, it does make them more rigid. Let me postpone these questions until we come to talk about projections. This is a special case in pathology, the fact that in the last instance we only love ourselves and hate ourselves. Whether we find this loved or hated thing in ourselves or outside has to go with breaks in the boundary.

Q: Fritz, you mentioned the polarity of attraction and disgust, yet it’s possible to feel both of these things toward the same person which, as far as I can understand it, creates a conflict.

F: This is exactly what I am talking about. You are not attracted to a person; you are not disgusted with a person. If you look closer, you are attracted to a certain behaviour or part of that person, and disgusted with a certain other behaviour or part of that person, and if you find, by chance, both the beloved and the hated thing ―we call it a thing, of course― in the same person, you’re in a quandary. It is much easier to be disgusted with one person and to love another. At one time you find you hate this person and another time you love the person, but if both love and hate come together, then you get confused. This has a lot to do with the basic law that the gestalt is always do formed that only one figure, one item, can become foreground―that we can think, basically, of only one thing at a time, and as soon as two opposites or two different figures want to take charge of this organism, we get confused, we get split and fragmented.

I can already see where the whole trend of the question goes. You are already coming to the point where you begin to understand what happens in pathology. If some of ours thoughts, feelings, are unacceptable to us, we want to disown them. Me wanting to kill you? So we disown the killing thought and say, “That’s is not me ―that’s a compulsion”, or we remove the killing, or we repress and become blind to that. There are many of these kinds of ways to remain intact, but always only at the cost of disowning many, many valuable parts of ourselves. The fact that we live only on such a small percentage of our potential is due to the fact that we’re not willing ―or society or whatever you want to call it is not willing―to accept myself, yourself, as the organism which you are by birth, constitution, and so on. You do not allow yourself ―or you are not allowed―to be totally yourself. So your ego boundary shrinks more and more. Your power, your energy, becomes smaller and smaller. Your ability to cope with the world becomes less and less ―and more and more rigid, more and more allowed only to cope as your character, as your preconceived pattern, prescribes it.

Q: Is there some kind of fluctuation in this ego boundary that might be determined by a cyclic rhythm? The way that a flower will open and close ―open― close―.

F: Yah. Very much.

Q: Does the word “uptight” mean shrink?

F: No. This mean compression.

Q: What about the opposite in the drug experience, where the ego boundary― F: Where you lose your ego boundary. Would this be an explosion in terms of your theory?

F: Expansion, not explosion. Explosion is quite different. The ego boundary is completely natural phenomenon. Now I give you some examples about the ego boundary, something we are more or less all concerned with. This boundary, this identification/alienation boundary, which I rather call the ego boundary, applies to every situation in life. Now let’s assume you are in favor of the freedom movement, of acceptance of the Negro as a human being like yourself. So you identify with him. So where is the boundary? The boundary disappears between you and the Negro. But immediately a new boundary is created― now the enemy is not the Negro, but the non-freedom fighter; they are the bastards, the bad guys.

So you create a new boundary, and I believe there is no chance of ever living without a boundary ―there is always, “I am on the right side of the fence, and you are on the wrong side”, or we are, if you have the clique formation. You notice any society or any community will quickly form its own boundaries, cliques ―the Millers are always better than the Meyers, and the Meyers are better than the Millers. And the closer the boundary defences, the greater the chance of wars or hostility. You find wars always start on the boundary―boundary clashes. The Indians and the Chinese have a much greater chance of fighting each other than the Indians and the Finns. Because there is no boundary between the Indians and the Finns, except if now a new kind of boundary is created― let’s say an ideological boundary. We are all Communists, we are right. We are all Free Enterprisers, we are right. So you are the bad guys―no, you are the bad guys. So we seldom look for the common denominator, what we have in common, but we look for where we are different, so that we can hate and kill each other.

Q: Do you think that it is possible to become so integrated that a person could become objective, and not become involved in anything?

F: I personally believe that objectivity does not exist. The objectivity of science is also just a matter of mutual agreement. A certain number of persons observe the same phenomena and they speak about an objective criterion. Yet it was from the scientific side where the first proof of subjectivity came. This was from Einstein. Einstein realized that all the phenomena in the universe cannot possibly be objective, because the observer and the speed within its nervous system has to be included in the calculation of that phenomenon outside. If you have perspective, and can see a larger outlook, you seem to be more fair, objective, balanced. But even there, it’s you as the subject who sees it. We have not much idea what the universe looks like. We have only a certain amount of organs―eyes, ears, touch, and the elongation of these organs― the telescope and electrical computers. But what do we know about other organisms, what kind of organs they have, what kind of world they have? We take for granted the elegance of the human being, that our world ―how we see the universe― is the only right one.

Q: Fritz, let me go back to the ego boundary again because when you are experiencing yourself, when you’re experiencing an expanded state, then the feeling of separation seems to disintegrate or melt. And at that point it seems that you are totally absorbed in the process of what’s going on. At that point, it seems there are no ego boundaries at all, except a reflection of the process of what’s going on. Now I don’t understand that in relation to your concept of ego boundary.

F: Yah. This is more or less the next theme I wanted to come to. There is a kind of integration ―I know that’s not quite correctly formulated― of the subjective and the objectivity. That is the word awareness. Awareness is always the subjective experience. I cannot possibly be aware of what you are aware of. The Zen idea of absolute awareness, in my opinion is nonsense. Absolute awareness cannot possibly exist because as far as I know, awareness always has content. One is always aware of something. If I say I feel nothing, I’m at least aware of the nothingness, which if you examine it still further has a very positive character like numbness, or coldness, or a gap, and when you speak about the psychedelic experience, there is an awareness, but there is also the awareness of something.

So, let’s now go a step further and look at the relationship of the world and the self. What makes us interested in the world? What is our need to realize that there is a world? How come I cannot function, cannot live just a kind of autistic organism, completely self-contained? Now, a thing, like this ashtray, is not a type of relating organism. This ashtray needs very little to exist. First, temperature. If you put this ashtray in a temperature of 4000º, this is not an environment in which it will retain its identity. It needs a certain amount of gravity. If it would be subjected to a pressure of, let’s say, 40,000 pounds, it would break into pieces. But we can, for practical purposes, say that this thing is self-contained. It doesn’t need any exchange with the environment. It exists to be used by us as a receptacle of cigarettes, to be cleaned, to be sold, to be thrown away, to be used as a missile if you want to hurt somebody, and so on. But in itself it is not a living organism.

A living organism is an organism which consists of thousands and thousands of processes that require interchange with other media outside the boundary of the organism. There are processes here in the ashtray, too. There are electronic processes, atomic processes, but for our purpose, these processes are not visible, not relevant, to its existence for us here. But in a living organism, the ego boundary has to be negotiated by us because there is something outside that is needed. There is food outside: I want this food; I want to make it mine, like me. So, I have to like this food. If I don’t like it, if it is un-like me, I wouldn’t touch it, I leave it outside the boundary. So something has to happen to get through the boundary and this is what we call contact. We touch, we get in contact, we stretch our boundary out to the thing in question. If we are rigid and can’t move, then it remains there. When we live, we spend energies to maintain this machine. This process of exchange is called the metabolism. Both the metabolism of the exchange of our organism whit the environment, and the metabolism within our organism, is going on continually, day and night.

Now what are the laws of this metabolism? They very strict laws. Let’s assume that I walk through the desert, and it’s very hot. I lose, let’s say, eight ounces of fluid. Now how do I know that I lost this? First, through self-awareness of the phenomenon, in this case called “thirst”. Second, suddenly in this undifferentiated general world something emerges as a gestalt, as a foreground, namely, let’s say, a well with water, or a pump ―or anything that would have plus eight ounces. This minus eight ounces of our organism and the plus eight ounces in the world can balance each other. The very moment this eight ounces goes into the system, we get a plus/minus water which brings balance. We come to rest as the situation is finished, the gestalt is closed. The urge that drives us to do something, to walk so and so, many miles to get to that place, which means our life is basically practically nothing but an infinite number of unfinished situations―incomplete gestalts. No sooner have we finished one situation than another comes up. I have often been called the founder of Gestalt Therapy. That’s crap. If you call me the finder or re-finder of Gestalt Therapy, okeh. Gestalt is as ancient and old as the world itself. The world, and especially every organism, maintains itself, and the only law which is constant is the forming of gestalts―wholes, completeness.

A gestalt is an organic function. A gestalt is an ultimate experiential unit. As soon as you break up a gestalt, it is not a gestalt any more. Take an example from chemistry. You know that water has a certain property. It consists of H2O. So if you disturb the gestalt of water, split it up into two H’s and one O, it’s no water any more. It’s oxygen and hydrogen, and if you are thirsty you can breathe as much hydrogen and as much oxygen as you want, it won’t quench your thirst. So the gestalt is the experienced phenomenon. If you analyse, if you cut it further up, it becomes something else. You might call it a unit, like, say, volts in electricity, or ergs in mechanics and so on. Gestalt Therapy is the one of the ―I think right now it is one of the three types of existential therapy: Frankl’s Logo-Therapy, the Daseins Therapy of Binswanger, and Gestalt Therapy. What is important is that Gestalt Therapy is the first existential philosophy that stands on its own feet. I distinguish three types of philosophy. One is the “about-ism”. We talk about it and talk about it, and nothing is accomplished. In scientific explanation, you usually go around and around and never touch the heart of the matter. The second philosophy I would call the “should-ism”. Moralism. You should be this, you should change yourself, you should not do this―a hundred thousand commands, but no consideration is given to what degree the person who “should” do this can actually comply. And furthermore, most people expect that the magic formula, just to use the sounds, “You should do this”, might have an actual effect upon reality.

The third philosophy I call existentialism. Existentialism wants to do away with concepts, and to work on the awareness principle, on phenomenology. The setback with the present existentialist philosophies is that they need their support from somewhere else. If you look at the existentialists, they say that they are non-conceptual, but if you look ate the people, they all borrow concepts from other sources. Buber from Judaism, Tillich from Protestantism, Sartre from Socialism, Heidegger from language, Binswanger from psychoanalysis, and so on. Gestalt Therapy has its support in its own formation because the gestalt formation, the emergence of the needs, is a primary biological phenomenon.

So, we are doing away with the whole instinct theory and simply consider the organism as a system that is in balance and that has to function properly. Any imbalance is experienced as a need to correct this imbalance. Now, practically, we have hundreds of unfinished situations in us. How come that we are not completely confused and want to go out in all directions? And that’s another law which I have discovered, that from the survival point of view, the most urgent situation becomes the controller, the director, and takes over. The most urgent situation emerges, and in any case of emergency, you realize that this has to take precedent over any other activity. If there would be suddenly a fire here, the fire would be more important than our talks. If you rush and rush, and run from the fire, suddenly you will be out of breath, your oxygen supply is more important than the fire. You stop and take a breath because this is now the most important thing.

So, we come now to the most important, interesting phenomenon in all pathology: self-regulation versus external regulation. The anarchy which is usually feared by the controllers is not an anarchy which is without meaning. On the contrary, it means the organism is left alone to take care of itself, without being meddled with from outside. And I believe that this is the great thing to understand: that awareness per se―by and of itself― can be curative. Because with full awareness you become aware of this organismic self-regulation, you can let the organism take over without interfering, without interrupting; we can rely on the wisdom of the organism. And the contrast to this is the whole pathology of self-manipulation, environmental control, and so on, that interferences with this subtle organismic self-control.

Our manipulation of ourselves is usually dignified by the word “conscience”. In ancient times, conscience was thought to be a God-made institution. Even Immanuel Kant thought that the conscience was equivalent to the eternal star, as one of the two absolutes. Then Freud came and he showed that the conscience is nothing but a fantasy, an introjection, a continuation of what he believed was the parents. I believe it’s a projection onto the parents, but never mind. Some think it is an introjection, an institution called the superego, that wants to take over control. Now if this were so, then how the analysis of the superego is not successful? How come that this program does not work? “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is verified again and again. Any intention toward change will achieve the opposite. You all know this. The New Year’s resolutions, the desperation of trying to be different, the attempt to control yourself. All this always comes to nought, or in extreme cases the person is apparently successful, up to the point where the nervous breakdown occurs. The final way out.

Now if we are willing to stay in the center of our world, and not have the center either in our computer or somewhere else, but really in the center, then we are ambidextrous― then we see the two poles of every event. We see that light cannot exist without non-light. If there is sameness, you can’t be aware any more. If there is always light, you don’t experience light any more. You have to have the rhythm of light and darkness. Right doesn’t exist without left. If I lose my right arm, my center shifts to the left. If there is a superego, there must also be an infraego. Again, Freud did half the job. He saw the topdog, the superego, but he left out the underdog which is just as much a personality as the topdog. And if we go one step farther and examine the two clowns, as I call them, that perform the self-torture game on the stage of our fantasy, then we usually find the two characters like this:

The topdog usually is righteous and authoritarian; he knows best. He is sometimes right, but always righteous. The topdog is a bully, and works with “You should” and “You should not”. The topdog manipulates with demands and threats of catastrophe, such as, “If you don’t, then―you won’t be loved, you won’t get to heaven, you will die,” and so on.

The underdog manipulates with being defensive, apologetic, wheedling, playing the cry-baby, and such. The underdog has no power. The underdog is the Mickey Mouse. The topdog is the Super Mouse. And the underdog works like this: “Mañana”. “I try my best”. “Look, I try again and again; I can’t help it if I fail.” “I can’t help it if I forgot your birthday”. “I have such good intentions”. So you see the underdog is cunning, and usually gets the better of the topdog because the underdog is not as primitive as the topdog. So the topdog and the underdog strive for control. Like every parent and child, they strive with each other control. The person is fragmented into controller and controlled. This inner conflict, the struggle between the topdog and the underdog, is never complete, because topdog as well as underdog fight for their lives.

This is the basis for the famous self-torture game. We usually take for granted that the topdog is right, and in many cases the topdog makes impossible perfectionistic demands. So if you are cursed with perfectionism, then you are absolutely sunk. This ideal is a yardstick which always gives you the opportunity to browbeat yourself, to berate yourself and others. Since this ideal is an impossibility, you can never live up to it. The perfectionist is not in love with his wife. He is in love with his ideal, and he demands from his wife that she should fit in this Procrustes bed of his expectations, and he blames her if she does not fit. What this ideal exactly is, he would not reveal. Now and then there might be some stated characteristics, but the essence of the ideal is that it is impossible, unobtainable, just a good opportunity to control, to swing the whip. The other day I had a talk with a friend of mine and I told her, “Please get this into your nut: mistakes are no sins”, and she wasn’t half as relieved as I thought she would be. Then I realized, if mistakes are not a sin any more, how can she castigate others who make mistakes? So it always works both ways; if you carry this ideal, this perfectionistic ideal around with yourself, you have a wonderful tool to play the beloved game of the neurotic, the self-torture game. There is no end to the self-torture, to the self-nagging, self-castigating. It hides under the mask of “self-improvement”. It never works.

If the person tries to meet the topdog’s demands of perfectionism, the result is a “nervous breakdown”, or flight into insanity. This is one of the tools of the underdog. Once we recognize the structure of our behaviour, which in the case of self-improvement is the split between the topdog and the underdog, and if we understand how, by listening, we can bring about a reconciliation of these two fighting clowns, then we realize that we cannot deliberately bring about changes in ourselves or in others. This is a very decisive point: Many people dedicate their lives to actualize a concept of what they should be like, rather than to actualize themselves. This difference between self-actualizing and self-image actualizing is very important. Most people only live for their image. Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are so busy projecting themselves as this or that. This is again the curse of the ideal. The curse that you should not be what you are.

Every external control, even internalized external control ―“you should”― interferes with the healthy working of the organism. There is only one thing that should control: the situation. If you understand the situation which you are in, and let the situation which you are in control your actions, then you learn how to cope with life. Now you know this from certain situations, like driving a car. You don’t drive a car according to a program, like “I want to drive 65 miles per hour”. You drive according to the situation. You drive a different speed at night, you drive a different speed when there is traffic there, you drive differently when you are tired. You listen to the situation. The less confident we are in ourselves, the less we are in touch with ourselves and the world, the more we want to control.

Q: I’ve been wondering about Joe Kamiya’s brain wave test and the question of self-control. If he puts himself in a calm state when he experiences irritation, would this be avoidance?

F: Avoidance of what?

Q: The cause of the irritation, that he is leaving by putting himself in a calm state of mind. I suppose it depends on what causes the irritation that is alleviated.

F: Well, I partly don’t follow you, partly don’t know if your report is correct, and I don’t know enough of it from the title I have understood. It seems that the alpha waves are identical with organismic self-regulation, the organism taking over and acting spontaneously instead of acting on control. I think he describes that as long as he tries to control something, the alpha waves are not there. But I don’t like to talk about it because I have no experiences with this set-up yet. I hope to get to see it. I think it is for once a gadget that seems to be very interesting and possibly productive.

Q: I can see how, on the level of organismic functions, such a thing as this water loss and the need to fill this loss— this process of allowing the organism to function by itself will work. But then when you get to the level of relationships, what happens? Then it seems as if there is necessity for discrimination in what’s foreground and what’s not.

F: Can you give us an example?

Q: Say I’m in a situation in which there are four or five emergences occurring, what I consider to be emergencies, in which I should be taking some part and doing something. Then comes what I call discrimination, in that one or the other of these is more important than the rest of them. And it’s just that it’s not as easy for me to see how the organism makes a decision like that, as how it makes a decision that it needs water.

F: Yah. The organism does not make decisions. Decision is a man-made institution. The organism works always on the basis of preference.

Q: I thought you said it was the feeling of need.

F: Well, the need is the primary thing. If you had no needs, you wouldn’t do a thing. If you had no need for oxygen, you wouldn’t breathe.

Q: Well, I guess I ―what mean is, the most pressing need is the one that you go to.

F: Yah. The most pressing need. And if you talk about five emergencies, I would say none of them are emergencies, because if one was really an emergency, it would emerge, and there would be no decision or computing done. This emergency would take over. Our relationship to this emergency, to the world, is the same as, for instance, in painting. You’ve got a white figure. Then you make certain blots on this canvas, and then suddenly the canvas makes demands, and you become the servant. It is as if you said, “What does this thing want?” “Where does it want to have some red?” “Where does it want to be balanced?” Except you don’t ask questions, you just respond.

Now the next thing that I want to talk about is the differentiation between end-gain and means-whereby. Let’s say that I have to send a message to New York. That is the thing that is fixed, the end-gain. The means-whereby to send the message, the medium, is of secondary importance― whether you send it by wire, by mouth, by letter, by telepathy if you believe in it. So in spite of McLuhan’s thesis “The medium is the message,” I still say that the end-gain is the primary thing. Now, for instance, in sex, the end-gain is the orgasm. The means-whereby can be a hundred different possibilities and as a matter of fact, the recognition of this by Medard Boss, the Swiss psychiatrist, is how he cured homosexuality. By having the patient fully accept homosexuality as one of the means to get to the organismic satisfaction, the end-gain, in this case the orgasm, he then had the possibility of changing the means-whereby. All perversions are variations of the means-whereby, and the same applies to any of the basis needs. If you want to eat, the end-gain is to get enough calories into your system. The means-whereby differ from very primitive eating some popcorn or whatever, to the discriminating experience of the gourmet. The more you realize this, the more you begin to select the means, come to select all the social needs, which are the means to the organismic ends.

This type of organismic self-regulations is very important in therapy, because the emergent, unfinished situations will come to the surface. We don’t have to dig: it’s all there. And you might look upon this like this: that from within, some figure emerges, comes to the surface, and then goes into the outside world, reaches out for what we want, and comes back, assimilates and receives. Something else comes out, and again the same process repeats itself.

The most peculiar things happen. Let’s say, you suddenly see a woman licking calcium from the wall―licking the plaster from the wall. It’s a crazy thing. Then it turns out that she is pregnant and needs calcium for the bones of her baby, but she doesn’t know that. Or she sleeps through the noises of the Beatles, and then her child just whimpers a little bit and suddenly she wakes up, because this is the emergency. This is what she is geared for. So she can withdraw from the loudest noise, because this is not gestalt-motivated. But the whimper is there, so the whimper emerges and becomes the attraction. This is again the wisdom of the organism. The organism knows all. We know very little.

Q: You said the organism knows all, and we know very little. How is it possible to get the two together? I guess there aren’t two of them.

F: They are often split up. They can be together. If you have these two together, you would be at least a genius, because then you might have perspective, sensitivity, and the ability to fit things together at the same time.

Q: Would you then class experiences that are sometimes called “instinctive” or “intuitive” as integrated experiences?

F: Yah. Intuition is the intelligence of the organism. Intelligence is the whole, and intellect is the whore of intelligence― the computer, the fitting game: If this is so, then this is so ―all this figuring out by which many people replace seeing and hearing what’s going on. Because if you are busy with your computer, your energy goes into your thinking, and you don’t see and hear any more.

Q: This is a contradictory question because I am asking you to use words. Could you explain the difference between words and experiences? (Fritz leaves podium, goes to the woman who asked the question, puts his hands on her shoulders, kisses her. Laughter) OK! That’ll do it!

F: I experience a dismissing pat from you. (Fritz pats himself lightly on the shoulder as he returns to the podium)

Q: You were talking about self-control or inner control, versus external control. I’m not sure that I understood you. I feel sometimes that external control is fantasy ―that you are actually doing it yourself.

F: Yeah, that’s true. That’s what I call self-manipulation or self-torture. Now this organismic self-regulation I’m talking about is not a matter of fantasy, except if the object in question is not there. Then you have a fantasy, which so to say guides you until the real object appears, and then the fantasy of the object and the real object melt together. Then you don’t need the fantasy any more.

I am not yet talking about the fantasy life as such, as rehearsal and so on. This is quite a different story. I am talking about the ability of the organism to take care of itself without external interference ―without momma telling us, “It’s good for your health,” “I know what’s the best for you,” and all that.

Q: I have a question. You talked about control. If what you said is so, that the organism can take of itself once the integration is complete and self-regulation is available for the total organism, then control not longer becomes a factor ―externally or internally; it’s something that is, and is in operation.

F: That’s right, and then the essence of control is that you begin to control the means-whereby to get satisfaction. The usual procedure is that you don’t get satisfaction, you merely get exhaustion.

Q: I can recognize that what you say is true, that if I keep on computing, I’ll stop seeing and hearing. And yet the problem comes with me all the time how, when I have many many things to accomplish in the day―

F: Wait a moment. We have to distinguish ―do you have to accomplish them as an organismic need or as part of the social role you play?

Q: As part of the social role.

F: That’s a different story. I am talking about the organism per se. I am not talking about ourselves as social beings. I don’t talk about the pseudo-existence, but of the basic natural existence, the foundation of our being. What you are talking about is the role-playing which might be a means-whereby to earn a living, which is a means-whereby to get your basic needs satisfied ―give you food, etc.

Q: And yet ―I know there’s something sick about this― at the beginning of each day, computing, thinking, planning, scheduling my day, planning that at this hour I’m going to do this and at another hour, that. And I do this all during the day. And I know that it cuts out just seeing and hearing, and yet if I go around just staying with the seeing and the hearing, then certain other things don’t get done and I get completely confused.

F: That’s right. This is the experience that comes out of the clash between our social existence and our biological existence―confusion.

Q: Well, you’re leaving me in that confusion, then.

F: Yah. That’s what I’m talking about. Awareness per se. If you become aware each time that you are entering a state of confusion, this is the therapeutic thing. And again, natures takes over. If you understand this, and stay with confusion, confusion will sort itself out by itself. If you try to sort it out, compute how to do it, if you ask me for a prescription how to do it, you only add more confusion to your productions.

I want to talk now about maturation. And in order to understand maturation, we have to talk about learning. To me learning is discovery. I learn something from this experience. There is another idea of learning which is the drill, the routine, the repetition, which is an artifact produced in the person which makes a person an automaton ―until he discovers the meaning of the drill. For instance, you learn to play the piano. First you start with the drill. And then comes a closure, then comes the discovery: Ah-ah! I got it! This is it!. Then you have to learn how to use this technique.

There is another kind of learning which is the feeding information into your computer, so you accumulate knowledge, and as you know, knowledge begets more knowledge until you want to fly to the moon. This knowledge, this secondary information, might be useful whenever you have lost your senses. As long as you have your senses, as long as you can see and hear, and realize what’s going on, then you understand. If you learn concepts, if you work for information, then you don’t understand. You only explain. And is is not easy to understand the difference between explanatoriness and understanding, just as often it is not easy to understand the difference between the heart and the brain, between feeling and thinking.

Most people take explaining as being identical with understanding. There is a great difference. Like now, I can explain a lot to you. I can give you a lot of sentences that help you to build an intellectual model of how we function. Maybe some of you feel the coincidence of these sentences and explanations with your real life, and this would mean understanding. Right now I can only hypnotize you, persuade you, make you believe that I’m right. You don’t know. I’m just preaching something. You wouldn’t learn from my words. Learning is discovery. There is no other means of effective learning. You can tell the child a thousand times, discover it for himself. And I hope I can assist you in learning, in discovering something about yourself.

Now what are you supposed to learn here? We have a very specific aim in Gestalt Therapy, and this is the same that exist at least verbally in other forms of therapy, in other forms of discovering life. The aim is to mature, to grow up. I would like some audience participation already about maturation. What is you opinion? What is a mature person? How would you define a mature person? Can we start here?

A: I know the answer already, Fritz.

F: Yah. You know the printer answer, according to the gospel of St. Gestalt. What is your definition of the mature person?

A: Well, I have had some introduction to Gestalt and maybe this influences me, but I think the mature person is the person who is―

F: Well, if you want to give my formulation, I don’t want it, because this would be again only information, and no understanding.

A: I was going to say the integrated person is the person who is aware of his various component parts and has put them together into a unified functional whole.

F: And this would be a mature person?

A: He has a minimum of parts of himself of which he is completely unconscious or unaware. There is always a residual ―we never get completely aware, or completely conscious.

F: In other words, for you the mature person is the complete person.

A: Yes.

F: (to another person) Could I have your definition, please?

B: I was thinking of a person who knows himself and accepts himself ―all the things he likes about himself and the things he doesn’t like about himself― who is aware of his many potentialities and seeks to develop them as much as possible ―knows what he wants.

F: You certainly have described some important characteristics of the mature person, but this might also apply to a child, wouldn't you say?

B: To me ―sometimes children in my opinion are often more mature than adults.

F: Thank you! Often children are more mature than adults. You notice here we have a different equation, or rather a different formulation. We have not the equation: adults equals a mature person. As a matter of fact, the adult is very seldom a mature person. An adult is in my opinion a person who plays a role of an adult, and the more he plays the role, the more immature he often is. (to another person) What would be your formulation?

C: The first thought that came to me was that the mature person is someone who wonders from time to time what a mature person is, and who every once in a while has an experience which makes him feel: “Oh! So this could be part of maturity! I never realized that before”.

F: What would be your formulation?

D: A person who is aware of himself and others, and also aware that he is incomplete and and has some ―an awareness of where he is incomplete.

F: Well, I would rather formulate this as the maturing person. He is aware of his incompleteness. So: so far we would say, from these remarks, that we want to do is to facilitate the completion of our personality. Is this acceptable to everybody?

Q: What do you mean by completion? ―or incomplete?

F: Yah. These terms were brought out here. Could you answer this, please? What do you mean by complete or incomplete?

A: I used to begin with, and I feel this is a goal to strive for that is never achieved. No one ever achieves it. It is always a becoming, a growing. But relatively, the complete person is the one who is most aware of his component parts, most accepting of them, and has achieved an integration ―a continuing integrating process.

F: Now the idea of the incomplete person was first brought about by Nietzsche, and very soon afterwards by Freud. Freud’s formulation is a little bit different. He says a certain part of one’s personality is repressed, is in the unconscious. But when he speaks about the unconscious, he just means that not all of our potential is available. His idea is that there is a barrier between the person and the unconscious, the unavailable potential, and if we lift the barrier we can again be totally ourselves. The idea is basically correct, and every type of psychotherapy is more or less interested in enriching the personality, in liberating what is usually called the repressed and inhibited parts of the personality.

E: Fritz, I have the thought that “maturity” in Spanish is maduro which means “ripe”. I wanted to make this contribution.

F: Thank you. This is exactly what I also want to completely agree with. In any plant, any animal, ripening and maturing is identical. You don’t find any animal ―except the domesticated animal who is already infected by mankind― no natural animal and no plant exists that will prevent its own growing. So the question is, how do we prevent ourselves from maturing? What prevents us from ripening? The word “neurosis” is very bad. I use it, too but actually it should be called growth disorder. So in other words, the whole neurosis question shifts more and more from the medical to the educational field. I see more and more the so-called “neurosis” as a disturbance in development. Freud assumed there is such a thing as “maturity”, which means a state from which you don’t develop any further, you can only regress. We ask the question, what prevents —or how do you prevent yourself from growing, from going further ahead?

So let’s look upon maturing once more. My formulation is that maturing is the transcendence from environmental support to self-support. Look upon the unborn baby. It gets all its support from the mother ―oxygen, food, warmth, everything. As soon as the baby is born, it has already to do its own breathing. And then we find often the first of symptom of what plays a very decisive in Gestalt Therapy. We find the impasse. Please note the word. The impasse is the crucial point in therapy, the crucial point in growth. The impasse is called by Russians “the sick point”, a point which the Russians never managed to lick and which other types of psychotherapy so far have not succeed in licking. The impasse is the position where environmental support or obsolete inner support is not forthcoming any more, and authentic self-support has not yet been achieved. The baby cannot breathe by itself. It doesn’t get the oxygen supply through the placenta any more. We can’t say that the baby has a choice, because there is no deliberate attempt of thinking out what to do, but the baby either has to die or to learn to breathe. There might be some environmental support forthcoming ―being in slapped, or oxygen might be supplied. The “blue baby” is the prototype of the impasse which we find in every neurosis.

Now, the baby begins to grow up. It still has to be carried. After awhile it learns to give some kind of communication ―first crying, then it learns to speak, learn to crawl, to walk, and so, step by step, it mobilizes more and more of its potential, its inner resources. He discovers ―or learns― more and more to make use of his muscles, his senses, his wits, and so on. So, from this I make the definition that the process of maturation is the transformation from depend upon others, but to make the patient discover from the very first moment that he can do many things, much more than he thinks he can do.

The average person of our time, believe it or not, lives only 5% to 15% of his potential ate the highest. A person who has even 25% of his potential available is already considered to be a genius. So 85% to 95% of our potential is lost, is unused, is not at our disposal. Sounds tragic, doesn’t it? And the reason for this is very simple: we live in clichés. We live in patterned behaviour. We are playing the same roles over and over again. So if you find out how you prevent yourself from growing, from using your potential, you have a way of increasing this, making lige richer, making you more and more capable of mobilizing yourself. And our potential is based upon a very peculiar attitude: to live and review every second afresh.

The “trouble” with people who are capable of reviewing every second what the situation is like, is that we are not predictable. The role of the good citizen requires that he be predictable, because our hankering for security, for not taking risks, our fear to authentic, our fear to stand on our own feet, especially on our own intelligence —this fear is just horrifying. So what do we do? We adjust, and in most kinds of therapy you find that adjustment to society is high goal. If you don’t adjust, you are either a criminal, or psychopath, or loony, or beatnik, or something like that. Anyhow, you are undesirable and have to be thrown out of the boundary of that society.

Most other therapies try to adjust the person to society. This was maybe not too bad in previous years, when society was relatively stable, but now with the rapid changes going on, it is getting more and more difficult to adjust to society. Also, more and more people are nor wiling to adjust to society ―they think that this society stinks, or have other objections. I consider that the basic personality in our time is a neurotic personality. This is a preconceived idea of mine, because I believe we are living in an insane society and that you only have the choice either to participate in this collective psychosis or to take risks and become healthy and perhaps also crucified.

If you are centred in yourself, then you don’t adjust any more ―then, whatever happens becomes a passing parade and you assimilate, you understand, you are related to whatever happens. In this happening, the symptom of anxiety is very very important, because the more the society changes, the more it produces anxiety. Now the psychiatrist is very afraid of anxiety. I am not. My definition of anxiety is the gap between the now and the later. Whenever you leave the sure basis of the now and become preoccupied with the future, you experience anxiety. And if the future represents a performance, then this anxiety is nothing but stage fright. You are full of catastrophic expectations of the things that will happen, or anastrophic expectations about the wonderful things that will happen. And we fill this gap the now and the later ―with insurance policies, planning, fixed jobs, and so on. In other words, we are not willing to see the fertile void, the possibility of the future ―we have no future if we fill this void, we only have sameness.

But how can you have sameness in this rapid-changing world? So of course anybody who wants to hold onto the status quo will get more and more panicky and afraid. Usually, the anxiety is not so deeply existential. It is just concerned with the role we want to play, it’s just stage fright. “Will my role come off” “Will I be called a good boy” “Will I get my approval” “Will I get applause, or will I get rotten eggs? So that’s non an existential choice, just a choice of inconvenience. But to realize that it’s just an inconvenience, that’s is not a catastrophe, but just an unpleasantness, is part of coming into your own, part of waking up.

So we come to our basic conflict and the basic conflict is this: Every individual, every plant, every animal has only one inborn goal ―to actualize itself as it is. A rose is a rose is a rose. A rose is not intent to actualize itself as a kangaroo. An elephant is not intent to actualize itself as a bird. In nature ―except for the human being― constitution, and healthiness, potential growth, is all one unified something.

The same applies to the multi-organism, or society, which consists of many people. A state, a society, consists of many thousands of cells which have to be organized either by external control or inner control, and each society tends to actualize itself as this or that specific society. The Russian society actualizes itself as what it is, the American society, the German society, the Congo tribes ―they all actualizes themselves, they change. And there is always a law in history: Any society that has outstretched itself and has lost its ability to survive, disappears. Cultures come ―and go. And when a society is in clash with the universe, once a society transgresses the laws of nature, it loses its survival value, too. So, as soon as we leave the basis of nature ―the universe and its laws ―and become artifacts either as individuals or as society, then we lose our raison d’etre. We lose the possibility of existence.

So where do we find ourselves? We find ourselves on the one hand as individuals who want to actualize themselves; we find ourselves also embedded in a society, in our case the progressive American society, and this society might make demands different from the individual demands. So there is the basic clash. Now this individual society is represented in our development by our parents, nurses, teachers, and so forth. Rather than to facilitate the development of authentic growth, they often intrude into the natural development.

They work with two tools to falsify our existence. One tool is the stick, which then is encountered again in therapy as the catastrophic expectation. The catastrophic expectation sounds like this: “If I take the risk, I will not be loved any more. I will be lonely. I’ll die.” That’s the stick. And then there is the hypnosis. Right now, I am hypnotizing you. I am hypnotizing you into believing what I say. I don’t give you the chance to digest, to assimilate, to taste what I say. You hear from my voice that I try to cast a spell on you, to slip my “wisdom” into your guts until you either assimilate it or puke, or feed it into your computer and say: “That’s an interesting concept.” Normally, as you know if you are students, you are only allowed to puke on the examination paper. You swallow all the information and you puke it up and you are free again and you have got a degree. Sometimes, though, I must say, in the process you might have learned something, either discovered something of value, or some experience about your teachers, or about your friends, but the basic dead information is not easy to assimilate.

Now let’s go back to the maturation process. In the process of growing up, there are two choices. The child either grows up and learns to overcome frustration, or it is spoiled. It might be spoiled by the parents answering all the questions, rightly or wrongly. It might be spoiled so that as soon as it wants something, it gets it ―because the child “should have everything because papa never had it” or because the parents don’t know how to frustrate children ―don’t know how to use frustration. You will probably be amazed that I am using the word frustration so positively. Without frustration there is no need, no reason to mobilize your resources, to discover that you might be able to do something on your own, and in order not to be frustrated, which is a pretty painful experience, the child learns to manipulate the environment.

Now, any time the child, in his development, is prevented from growth by the adult world, any time the child is being spoiled by not being given enough frustration, the child is stuck. So instead of using his potential to grow, he now uses his potential to control the adults, to control the world. Instead of mobilizing his own resources, he crates dependencies. He invests his energy in manipulating the environment for support. He controls the adults by starting to manipulate them, by discerning their weak spots. As the child begins to develop the means of manipulation, he acquires what is called character. The more character a person has, the less potential he has. That sounds paradoxical, but a character is a person that is predictable, that has only a number of fixed responses, or as T.S. Eliot said in The Cocktail Party, “You are nothing but a set of obsolete responses.”

Now what are the character features which the child develops? How does he control the world? How does he manipulate his environment? He demands directional support. “What shall I do?”. “Mommy, I don’t know what to do.” He plays the role of cry-baby, if he doesn’t get what he wants. For instance, there is a little girl here, about three years old. She always puts on the same performance with me. She always cries when I look at her. So today I was very careful not to look at her, and she stopped crying and then she started to look for me. Only three years, and already she is such a good ham. She knows how to torture her mother. Or, the child butters up the other person’s self-esteem, so that the other will feel good and he will give him something in return. For instance, one of the worst diagnoses is if I encounter a “good boy”. There is always a spiteful brat there, in the good boy. But by pretending to comply, at least on the surface, he bribes the adult. Or he plays stupid and demands intellectual support ―asks questions for instance, which is the typical symptom of stupidity. As Albert Einstein once said to me: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.” But what is much more widespread than the actual stupidity is the playing stupid, turning off your ear, not listening, not seeing. Also very important is playing helpless. “I can’t help myself. Poor me. You have to help me. You are so wise, yo have so many resources, I’m sure you can help me.” Each time you play helpless you create a dependency, you play a dependency game. In other words, we make ourselves slaves. Especially, if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge.

If you don’t have your loving at your disposal, and project the love, then you want to be loved, you do all kinds of things to make yourself lovable. If you disown yourself, you always become the target, you become dependent. What a dependency if you want everybody to love you! A person doesn’t mean a thing and yet suddenly you set out and want to make a good impression on this person, want them to love you. It’s always the image; you want to play the concept that you are lovable. If you feel comfortable in yourself, you don’t love yourself and you don’t hate yourself, you just live. I must admit, especially in the United States, loving for many people entails a risk. Many people look upon a person who loves as a sucker. They want to make people love them, so that they can exploit them.

If you look a bit into your existence, you will realize that the gratification of the needs of purely biological being ―hunger, sex, survival, shelter, breathing― plays only a minor part in our preoccupations, especially in a country like this where we are so spoiled. W don’t know what it means to be hungry, and anyone who wants to have sex can have sex plentifully, anyone who wants to breathe can breathe ―the air is tax free. For the rest, we play games. We play games quite extensively, openly, and to a much greater extent, privately. When we think, we mostly talk to others in fantasy. We plan for the roles we want to play. We have to organize in order to do what we want to do, for the means-whereby.

Now it might sound a bit peculiar that I disesteem thinking, making it just a part of role-playing. Sometimes, we might communicate when we talk, but most times we hypnotize. We hypnotize each other; we hypnotize ourselves that we are right. We play “Madison Avenue” to convince other people or ourselves of our value. And this takes up so much of our energy that sometimes if you are unsure about the role you are playing, you wouldn’t dare say a word, a sentence, without having rehearsed it again and again until it fits the occasion. Now if you are not sure of the role you want to play, and you are called away from your private stage to the public stage, then like every good actor, you experience stage fright. Your excitement is already mounting, you want to play a role, but you don’t quite dare, so you hold back, and restrict your breathing, so the heart pumps up more blood because the higher metabolism has to be satisfied. And then, once you are on stage and play the role, the performance would be rigid and dead.

It is the repetition of this activity which then becomes a habit, the same action that grows easier and easier ―a character, a fixed role. So you understand now, I hope, that a playing role, and manipulating the environment, are identical. This is the way we falsify, and very often you read in literature about the mask we are wearing, and about the transparent self that should be there. This manipulation of environment by playing certain roles is the characteristic of the neurotic ―is the characteristic of our remaining immature. So you must already get an idea how much of our energy goes into manipulating the world instead of using this energy creatively for our development. And especially, this applies to asking questions. You know the proverb, “One fool can ask more questions than a thousand wise men can answer.” All the answers are given. Most questions are simply inventions to torture ourselves and other people. The way to develop our own intelligence is by changing every question into a statement. If you change your question into a statement, the background out of which the question arose open up, and the possibilities are found by the questioner himself.

You see I am already running dry. Lecturing is a drag. I tell you that. Well, most professors take the way out by using a very somniferous, broken voice, so you fall asleep and don't listen, and so you don't ask embarrassing questions. Q: I have a question. Could you give some examples of how to turn questions in statements? F: You have just asked me a question. Can you turn this question into a statement? Q: It would be nice to hear some examples of how to turn a question into statement. F: “It would be nice.” But I'm not nice. Actually, what's behind all this is the only means of true communication, which is the imperative. What you really want to say is, “Fritz, tell me how one does this” ―make a demand on me. And the question mark is the hook of a demand. Every time you refuse to answer a question, you help the other person to develop his own resources. Learning is nothing but discovery that something is possible. To teach means to show a person that something is possible.

What we are after is the maturation of the person, removing the blocks that prevent a person from standing on his own feet. We try to help him make the transition from environmental support to self-support. And basically we do it by finding the impasse. The impasse occurs originally when a child cannot get the support from the environment, but cannot yet provide its own support. At that moment of impasse, the child starts to mobilize the environment by playing phony roles, playing stupid, playing helpless, playing weak, flattering, and all the roles that we use in order to manipulate our environment.

Now any therapist who wants to be helpful is doomed right from the beginning. The patient will do anything to make the therapist feel inadequate, because he has to have his compensation for needing him. So the patient asks the therapist for more and more help, he drives the therapist more and more into the corner, until he either succeeds in driving the therapist crazy ―which is another means of manipulation― or if the therapist doesn't oblige, at least to make him feel inadequate. He will suck the therapist more into his neurosis, and there will be no end to therapy.

So how do we proceed in Gestalt Therapy? We have a very simple means to get the patient to find out what his own missing potential is. Namely, the patient uses me, the therapist, as a projection screen, and he expects of me exactly what he can't mobilize in himself. And in this process, we make the peculiar discovery that no one of us is complete, that every one of us has holes in his personality. Wilson Van Dusen discovered this first in the schizophrenic, but I believe that every one of us has holes. Where something should be, there is nothing. Many people have no soul. Others have no genitals. Some have no heart; all their energy goes into computing, thinking. Others have no legs to stand on. Many people have no eyes. They project the eyes, and the eyes are to quite an extent in the outside world and they always live as if they are being looked at. A person feels that the eyes of the world are upon him. He becomes a mirror-person who always wants to know how he looks to others. He gives up his eyes and asks the world to do his seeing for him. Instead of being critical, he projects the criticism and feels criticized and feels on stage. Self-consciousness is the mildest form of paranoia. Most of us have no ears. People expect the ears to be outside and they talk and expect someone to listen. But who listens? If people would listen, we would have peace.

Now the most important missing part is a center. Without a center everything goes on in the periphery and there is not place from which to work, from which to cope with the world. Without a center, you are not alert. I don't know how many of you have seen the film The Seven Samurai― a Japanese film, in which one of the warriors is so alert that anyone approaching him, or doing anything even at a distance, he is already sensing it. He is so much centered that anything that happens is immediately registered. This achieving the center, being grounded in one's self, is about the highest state a human being can achieve.

Now these missing holes are always visible. They are always there in the patient's projection onto the therapist― that the therapist is supposed to have all the properties which are missing in this person. So, first the therapist provides the person with the opportunity to discover what he needs ―the missing parts that he has alienated and given up to the world. Then the therapist must provides the opportunity, the situation in which the person can grow. And the means is that we frustrate the patient in such a way that he is forced to develop his own potential. We apply enough skillful frustration so that the patient is forced to find his own way, discover his own possibilities, his own potential, and discover that what he expects from the therapist he can do, just as well himself.

Everything the person disowns can be recovered, and the means of this recovery is understanding, playing, becoming these disowned parts. And by letting him play and discover that he already has all this (which he thinks only others can give him) we increase his potential. We more and more put him on his own feet, give him more and more ability to experience, until he is capable of really being himself and coping with the world. He cannot learn this through teaching, conditioning, getting information or making up programs or plans. He has to discover that all this energy that goes into manipulation can be resolved and used, and that he can learn to actualize himself, his potential ―instead of trying to actualize a concept, an image of what he wants to be, thereby suppressing a lot of his potential and adding, on the other side, another piece of phony living, pretending to be something he is not. We grow up completely out of balance if the support that we get from our constitution is missing. But the person has to discover this by seeing for himself, by listening for himself, by uncovering what is there, by grasping for himself, by becoming ambidextrous instead of closed, and so on. And the main thing is the listening. To listen, to understand, to be open, is one and the same. Some of you might know Herman Hesse's book, Siddartha, where the hero finds the final solution to his life by becoming a ferryman on a river, and he learns to listen. His ears tell him so much more than the Buddha or any of the great wise men can ever teach him.

So what we are trying to do in therapy is step-by-step to re-own the disowned parts of the personality until the person becomes strong enough to facilitate his own growth, to learn to understand where are the holes, what are the symptoms of the holes. And the symptoms of the holes are always indicated by one word: avoidance. We become phobic, we run away. We might change therapist, we might change marriage partners, but the ability to stay with what we are avoiding is not easy, and for this you need somebody else to become aware of what you are avoiding, because you are not aware, and as matter of fact, a very interesting phenomenon occurs here. When you get close to the impasse, to the point where you just cannot believe that you might be able to survive, then the whirl starts. You get desperate, confused. Suddenly, you don't understand anything any more, and here the symptom of the neurotic becomes very clear. The neurotic is a person who does not see the obvious. You see this always in the group. Something is obvious to everybody else, but the person in question doesn't see the obvious; he doesn't see the pimples on his nose. And this is what we are again and again trying to do, to frustrate the person until he is face to face with his blocks, with his inhibitions, with his way of avoiding having eyes, having ears, having muscles, having authority, having security in himself.

So we are always trying to get to the impasse, and find the point where you believe you have no chance of survival because you don't find the means in yourself. When we find the place where the person is stuck, we come to surprising discovery that this impasse is mostly merely a matter of fantasy. It doesn't exist in reality. A person only believes he has not his resources at his disposal. He only prevents himself from using his resources by conjuring up a lot of catastrophic expectations. He expects something bad in the future. “People won't like me”. “I might do something foolish”. “If I would do this, I wouldn't be loved any more, I would die,” and so on. We have all these catastrophic fantasies by which we prevent ourselves from living, from being. We are continually projecting threatening fantasies onto the world, and these fantasies prevent us from taking the reasonable risks which are part and parcel of growing and living.

Nobody really wants to get through the impasse that will grant this development. We'd rather maintain the status quo: rather keep in the status quo of a mediocre marriage, mediocre mentality, mediocre aliveness, than to go through that impasse. Very few people go into therapy to be cured, but rather to improve their neurosis. We'd rather manipulate others for support than learn to stand on our own feet and to wipe our own ass. And in order to manipulate the others we become control-mad, power-mad ―using all kind of tricks. I gave you a few examples already― playing helpless, playing stupid, playing the tough guy, and so on. And the most interesting thing about the control-mad people is that they always end up being controlled. They build up, for instance, a time schedule that then takes over control, and they have to be at every place at a specific time from then on. So the control-mad person is the first one to lose his freedom. Instead of being in control, he has to strain and push all the time. Because of this control-madness, no bad marriages can be cured because the people do not want to get through the impasse, they do not want to realize how they are stuck. I could give you an idea how they are stuck. In the bad marriage, husband and wife are not in love with their spouse. They are in love with an image, a fantasy, with an idea of what the spouse should be like. And then, rather than taking responsibility for their own expectations, all they do is play the blaming game.“You should be different from what you are. You don't fill the bill.” So the bill is always right, but the real person is wrong. The same applies to the inner conflict, and to the relationship of therapist and patient: you change spouses, you change therapists, you change the content of your inner conflicts, but you usually maintain the status quo.

Now if we understand the impasse correctly, we wake up, we have a satori. I can't give you a prescription because everybody tries to get out of the impasse without going through it; everybody tries to tear their chains, and this is never successful. It's the awareness, the full experience, the awareness of how you are stuck, that makes you recover, and realize the whole thing is just a nightmare, not a real thing, not reality. The satori comes when you realize, for instance, that you are in love with a fantasy and you realize that you are not in communication with your spouse.

The insanity is that we take the fantasy for real. In the impasse, you have always a piece of insanity. In the impasse, nobody can convince you that what you are expecting is a fantasy. You take for real what is merely an ideal, a fantasy. The crazy person says, “I am Abraham Lincoln”, and the neurotic says, “I wish I were Abraham Lincoln,” and the healthy person says, “I am I, and you are you.”

Now let me tell you of a dilemma which is not easy to understand. It's like a koan ―those Zen questions which seem to be insoluble. The koan is: Nothing exists except the here and now. The now is the present, is the phenomenon, is what you are aware of, is that moment in which you carry your so-called memories and your so-called anticipations with you. Whether you remember or anticipate, you do it now. The past is not more. The future is not yet. When I say, “I was,” that is not now, that's the past. When I say, “I want to,” that's the future, it's not yet. Nothing can possibly exist except the now. Some people then make a program out of this. They make a demand, “You should live in the here and now.” And I say it's no possible to live in the here and now, and yet, nothing exists except the here and now.

How do we resolve this dilemma? What is buried in the word now? How come it takes years and years to understand a simple word like the word now? If I play a phonograph record, the sound of the record appears when the record and the needle touch each other, where they make contact. There is not sound of the before, there is not sound of the afterwards. If I stop the phonograph record, then the needle is still in contact with the record but there is no music, because there is the absolute now. If you would blot out the past, or the anticipation of themes three minutes from now, you could not understand listening to that record you are now playing. But if you blot out the now, nothing will come through. So again, whether we remember or we whether we anticipate, we do it here and now.

Maybe if I say the now is not the scale but the point of suspense, it's a zero point, it is a nothingness, and that is the now. The very moment I feel that I experience something and I talk about it, I pay attention to it, that moment is already gone. So what's the use of talking about the now? It has many uses, very many uses.

Let's talk first about the past. Now, I am pulling memories out of my drawer and possibly believe that these memories are identical with my history. That's never true, because a memory is an abstraction. Right now, you experience something. You experience me, you experience your thoughts, you experience your posture perhaps, but you can't experience everything. You always abstract the relevant gestalt from the total context. Now if you take these abstractions and file them away, then you call them memories. If these memories are unpleasant, specially if they are unpleasant to our self-esteem, we change them.

As Nietzsche said: “Memory and Pride were fighting. Memory said, “It was like this” and Pride said, “It couldn't have been like this” ―and Memory gives in. You all know how much are you lying. You all know much you are deceiving yourselves, how many of your memories are exaggerations and projections, how many of your memories are patched up and distorted.

The past is past. And yet ―in the now, in our being, we carry much of the past with us. But we carry much of the past with us only as far as we have unfinished situations. What happened in the past is either assimilated and has become a part of us, or we carry around an unfinished situation, an incomplete gestalt. Let me give you as an example, the most famous of the unfinished situations is the fact that we have not forgiven our parents. As you know, parents are never right. They are either too large or too small, too smart or too dumb. If they are stern, they should be soft, and so on. But when do you find parents who are all right? You can always blame the parents if you want to play the blaming game, and make the parents responsible for all your problems. Until you are willing to let go of your parents, you continue to conceive of yourself as a child. But to get closure and let go of the parents and say, “I am a big girl, now,” is a different story. This is part of therapy ―to let go of parents, and specially to forgive one's parents, which is the hardest thing for most people to do.

The great error of psychoanalysis is in assuming that the memory is reality. All the so-called traumata, which are supposed to be the root of the neurosis, are an invention of the patient to save his self-esteem. None of these traumata has ever been proved to exist. I haven't seen a single case of infantile trauma that wasn't a falsification. They are all lies to be hung onto in order to justify one's unwillingness to grow. To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness. The patient isn't responsible –no, the trauma is responsible, or the Oedipus complex is responsible, and so on. I suggest that you read a beautiful little pocketbook called I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by Hannah Green There you see a typical example, how that girl invented this childhood trauma, to have her raison d'etre, her basis to fight the world, her justification for her craziness, her illness. We have got such an idea about the importance of this invented memory, where the whole illness is supposed to be based on this memory. No wonder that all the wild goose chase of the psychoanalyst to find out why I am now like this can never come to an end, can never prove a real opening up of the person himself.

Freud devoted his whole life to prove to himself and to others that sex is not bad, and he had to prove this scientifically. In his time, the scientific approach was that of causality, that the trouble was caused by something in the past, like a billiard cue pushing a billiard ball, and the cue then is the cause of the rolling of the ball. In the meantime, our scientific attitude has changed. We don't look to the world any more in terms of cause and effect: we look upon the world as a continuous ongoing process. We are back to Heraclitus, to the pre-Socratic idea that everything is in a flux. We never step into the same river twice. In other words, we have made ―in science, but unfortunately not yet in psychiatry—the transition from linear causality to thinking of process, from the why to the how.

If you ask how, you look at the structure, you see what's going on now, a deeper understanding of the process. The how is all we need to understand how we or the world functions. The how gives us perspective, orientation. The how shows that one of the basic laws, the identity of structure and function is valid. If we change the structure the function changes. If we change the function, the structure changes.

I know you want to ask why, like every child, like every immature person asks why, to get rationalization or explanation. But the why at best leads to clever explanation, but never to an understanding. Why and because are dirty words in Gestalt Therapy. They lead only to rationalization, and belong to the second class of verbiage production. I distinguish three classes of verbiage production: chickenshit ―this is “good morning”, “how are you”, and so on; bullshit –this is “because”, rationalization, excuses; and elephantshit ―this is when you talk about philosophy, existential Gestalt Therapy, etc. ―what I am doing now. The why gives only unending enquiries into the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause. And as Freud has already observed, every event is over-determined, has many causes; all kinds of things come together in order to create the specific moment that is the now. Many factors come together to create this specific unique person which is I. Nobody can at any given moment to be different from what he is at this moment, including all the wishes and prayers that he should be different. We are what we are. These are the two legs upon which Gestalt Therapy walks: now and how. The essence of the theory of Gestalt Therapy is in the understanding of these two words. Now covers all that exists. The past is no more, the future is not yet. Now includes the balance of being here, is experiencing, involvement, phenomenon, awareness. How covers everything that is structure, behaviour, all that is actually going on ―the ongoing process. All the rest is irrelevant ―computing, apprehending, and so on.

Everything is grounded in awareness. Awareness is the only basis of knowledge, communication, and so on. In communication, you have to understand that you want to make the other person aware of something: aware of yourself, aware of what's to be noticed in the other person, etc. And in order to communicate, we have to make sure that we are senders, which means that the message which we send can be understood; and also to make sure that we are receivers ―that we are willing to listen to the message from the other person. It is very rare that people can talk and listen. Very few people can listen without talking. Most people can talk without listening. And if you're busy talking you have no time to listen. The integration of talking and listening is a really rare thing. Most people don't listen and give an honest response, but just put the other person off with a question. Instead of listening and answering, immediately comes a counter-attack, a question or something that diverts, deflects, dodges. We are going to talk a lot about blocks in sending messages, in giving yourself, in making others aware of your self, and in the same way, of being willing to be open to the other person ―to be receivers. Without communication, there cannot be contact. There will be only isolation and boredom.

So I would like to reinforce what I just said, and I would like you to pair up, and to talk to each other for five minutes about your actual present awareness of yourself now and your awareness of the other. Always underline the how―how do you behave now, how do you sit, how do you talk, all the details of what goes on now. How does he sit, how does he look…

so how about the future? We don't know anything about the future. If we all had a crystal balls, even then we wouldn't experience the future. We would experience a vision of the future. And all this is taking place here and now. We imagine, we anticipate the future because we don't want to have a future. So the most important existential saying is, we don't want to have a future, we are afraid of the future. We fill in the gap where there should be a future whit insurance policies, status quo, sameness, anything so as not to experience the possibility of openness towards the future.

We also cannot stand the nothingness, the openness, of the past. We are not willing to have the idea of eternity ―“It has always been” ―so we have to fill it in with the story of creation. Time has started somehow. People ask, “When did time begin?” The same applies to the future. It seems incredible that we could live without goals, without worrying about the future, that we could be open and ready for what might come. No; we have to make sure that we have no future, that the status quo should remain, even be a little better. But we mustn't take risks, we mustn't be open to the future. Something could happen that would be new and exciting, and contributing to our growth. It's too dangerous to take the growth risk. We would rather walk this earth as half-corpses than live dangerously, and realize that this living dangerously is much safer than this insurance-life of safety and not taking risks, which most of us decide to do. What is this funny thing, risk taking? Has anybody a definition for risk-taking? What's involved in risk-taking? A: Getting hurt B: Taking a dare. C: Going too far. D: A hazardous attempt. E: Inviting danger.

Now you notice you all see the catastrophic expectation, the negative side. You don't see the possible gain. If there was only the negative side, you just would avoid it, wouldn't you? Risk-taking is a suspense between catastrophic and anastrophic expectations. You have to see both sides of the picture. You might gain, and you might lose.

One of the most important moments in my life was after I had escaped Germany and there was position as a training analyst available in South Africa, and Ernest Jones wanted to know who wanted to go. There were four of us: three wanted guarantees. I said I take a risk. All the other three were caught by the Nazis. I took a risk and I'm still alive.

An absolutely healthy person is completely in touch with himself and with reality. The crazy person, the psychotic, is more or less completely out of touch with both, but mostly with either himself or the world. We are in between being psychotic and being healthy, and this is based upon the fact that we have two levels of existence. One is reality, the actual, realistic level, that we are in touch with whatever goes on now, in touch with our feelings, in touch with our senses. Reality is awareness of ongoing experience, actual touching, seeing, moving, doing. The other level we don't have a good word for, so I choose the Indian word maya. Maya means something like illusion, or fantasy, or philosophically speaking, the trance. Very often this fantasy, this maya, is called the mind, but if you look a bit closer, what you call “mind” is fantasy. It's the rehearsal stage. Freud once said: “Denken ist prober arbeit” ―thinking is rehearsing, trying out. Unfortunately, Freud never followed up this discovery because it would be inconsistent with his genetic approach. If he had accepted this statement of his, “Thinking is rehearsing,” he would have realized how our fantasy activity is turned toward the future, because we rehearse for the future.

We live on two levels ―the public level which is our doing, which is observable, verifiable; and the private stage, the thinking stage, the rehearsing stage, on which we prepare for the future roles we want to play. Thinking is a private stage, where you try out. You talk to some person unknown, you talk to yourself, you prepare for an important event, you talk to the beloved before your appointment or disappointment, whatever you expect it to be. For instance, if I were to ask, “Who wants to come up here to work?” you probably would quickly start to rehearse. “What shall I do there?” and so on. And of course probably you will get stage fright, because you leave the secure reality of the now and jump into the future. Psychiatry makes a big fuss out of the symptom anxiety, and we live in an age of anxiety, but anxiety is nothing but the tension from the now to the then. There are few people who can stand this tension, so they have to fill the gap with rehearsing, planning, “making sure,” making sure that they don't have future. They try to hold onto the sameness, and this of course will prevent any possibility of growth or spontaneity.

Q: Of course the past sets up anxiety too, doesn't it? F: No. The past sets up―or let's say is still present with unfinished situations, regrets and things like this. If you feel anxiety about what you have done, it's not anxiety about what you have done, but anxiety about what will be the punishment to come in the future.

Freud once said the person who is free from anxiety and guilt is healthy. I spoke about anxiety already. I didn't speak about guilt. Now, in the Freudian system the guilt is very complicated. In Gestalt Therapy, the guilt thing is much simpler. We see guilt as projected resentment. Whenever you feel guilty, find out what you resent, and the guilt will vanish and you will try to make the other person feel guilty.

Anything unexpressed which wants to be expressed can make you feel uncomfortable. And one of the most common unexpressed experiences is the resentment. This is the unfinished situation par excellence. If you are resentful, you are stuck; you neither can move forward and have it out, express your anger, change the world so that you'll get satisfaction, nor can you let go and forget whatever disturbs you. Resentment is the psychological equivalent of the hanging-on bite― the tight jaw. The hanging-on bite can neither let go, nor bite through and chew up ―whichever is required. In resentment you can neither let go and forget, and let this incident or person recede in the background, nor can you actively tackle it. The expression of resentment is one of the most important ways to help you to make your life a little bit more easy. Now I want you all to do the following collective experiment:

I want each one of you to do this. First you evoke a person like father or husband, call the person by name―whoever it is―and just say briefly, “Clara, I resent―” Try to get the person to hear you, as if there was really communication and you felt this. So try to speak to the person, and stablish in these communication that this person should listen to you. Just become aware of how difficult it is to mobilize your fantasy. Express your resentment―kind of present it right into his or her face. Try to realize at the same time that you don't dare, really, to express your anger, nor would you be generous enough to let go, to be forgiving. Okeh, go ahead…

There is another great advantage to using resentment in therapy, in growth. Behind every resentment there are demands. So now I want all of you to talk directly to the same person as before, and express the demands behind the resentments. The demand is the only real form of communication. Get your demands into the open. Do this also as self-expression: formulate your demands in the same form of an imperative, a command. I guess you know enough of English grammar to know what an imperative is. The imperative is like “Shut up!” “Go to hell!” “Do this!”…

Now go back to the resentments you expressed toward the person. Remember exactly what you resented. Scratch out the word resent and say appreciate. Appreciate what you resented before. Then go on to tell this person what else you appreciate in them. Again try to get the feeling that you actually communicate with them…

You see, if there were no appreciations, you wouldn't be stuck with this person and you could just forget him. There is always the other side. For instance, my appreciation of Hitler: If Hitler had not come to power, I probably would have been dead by now as a good psychoanalyst who lives on eight patients for the rest of his life.

If you have any difficulties in communication with somebody, look for your resentments. Resentments are among the worst possible unfinished situations―unfinished gestalts. If you resent, you can neither let go nor have it out. Resentment is an emotion of central importance. The resentment is the most important expression of an impasse―of being stuck. If you feel resentment, be able to express your resentment. A resentment unexpressed often is experienced as, or changes into, feelings of guilt. Whenever you feel guilty, find out what you are resenting and express it and make your demands explicit. This alone will help a lot.

Awareness covers, so to speak, three layers or three zones: awareness of the self, awareness of the world, and awareness of what's between ―the intermediate zone of fantasy that prevents a person from being in touch with either himself or the world. This is Freud's great discovery ―that there is something between you and the world. There are so many processes going on in one's fantasies. A complex is what he calls it, or a prejudice. If you have prejudices, then your relationship to the world is very much disturbed and destroyed. If you want to approach a person with a prejudice, you can't get to the person. You always will contact only the prejudice, the fixed idea. So Freud's idea that the intermediate zone, the DMZ, this no-man's land between you and the world should be eliminated, emptied out, brainwashed or whatever you want to call it, was perfectly right. The only trouble is that Freud stayed in that zone and analysed this intermediate thing. He didn't consider the self-awareness or world-awareness; he didn't consider what we can do to be in touch again.

This loss of contact with our authentic self, and loss of contact with the world is due to this intermediate zone, the big area of maya that we carry with us. That is, there is a big area of fantasy activity that takes up so much of our excitement, of our energy, of our life force, that there is very little energy left to be in touch with reality. Now, if we want to make a person whole, we have first to understand what is merely fantasy and irrationality, and we have to discover where one is in touch, and with what.

And very often if we work, and we empty out this middle zone of fantasy, this maya, then there is the experience of satori, of waking up. Suddenly the world is there. You wake up from a trance like you wake up from a dream. You're all there again. And the aim in therapy, the growth aim, is to lose more and more of your “mind” and come more to your senses. To be more and more in touch, to be in touch with yourself and in touch with the world, instead of only in touch with the fantasies, prejudices, apprehensions, and so on.

If a person confuses maya and reality, if he takes fantasy for reality, then he is neurotic or even psychotic. I give you an extreme case of psychosis, the schizophrenic who imagines the doctor is after him, so he decides to beat him to the punch and shoot the doctor, without checking up on reality. On the other hand, there is another possibility. Instead of being divided between maya and reality, we can integrate these two, and if maya and reality are integrated, we call it art. Great art is real, and great art is at the same time an illusion.

Fantasy can be creative, but it's creative only if you have the fantasy, whatever it is, in the now. In the now, you use what is available, and you are bound to be creative. Just watch children in their play. What's available is usable and then something happens, something comes out of the being in touch with what is here and now.

There is only one way to bring about this state of healthy spontaneity, to save the genuineness of the human being. Or, to talk in trite religious terms, there is only one way to regain our soul, or in American terms, to revive the American corpse and bring him back to life. The paradox is that in order to get this spontaneity, we need, like in Zen, an utmost discipline. The discipline is simply to understand the words now and how, and to bracket off and put aside anything that is not contained in the words now and how.

Now what's the technique we are using in Gestalt Therapy? The technique is to establish a continuum of awareness. This continuum of awareness is required so that the organism can work on the healthy gestalt principle: that the most unfinished situation will always emerge and can be dealt with. If we prevent ourselves from achieving this gestalt formation, we function badly and we carry hundreds and thousands of unfinished situations with us, that always demand completion.

This continuum of awareness seems to be very simple, just to be aware from second to second what's going on. Unless we are asleep, we are always aware of something. However, as soon as this awareness becomes unpleasant, most people will interrupt it. Then suddenly they start intellectualizing, bullshitting, the flight into the past, the flight into expectations, good intentions, or schizophrenically using free associations, jumping like a grasshopper from experience to experience, and none of these experiences are ever experienced, but just a kind of a flash, which leaves all the available material unassimilated and unused.

Now how do we proceed in Gestalt Therapy? What is nowadays quite fashionable was very much pooh-poohed when I started this idea of everything is awareness. The purely verbal approach, the Freudian approach in which I was brought up, barks up the wrong tree. Freud's idea was that by a certain procedure called free-association¹, you can liberate the disowned part of the personality and put it at the disposal of the person and then the person will develop what he called a strong ego. What Freud called association, I call dissociation, schizophrenic dissociation to avoid the experience. It's a computer game, which is exactly an avoidance of the experience of what is. You can talk 'til doomsday, you can chase your childhood memories to doomsday, but nothing will change. You can associate ―or dissociate― a hundred things to one event, but you can only experience one reality.

So, in contrast to Freud who placed the greatest emphasis on resistances, I have placed the greatest emphasis on phobic attitude, avoidance, flight from. Maybe some of you know that Freud's illness was that he suffered from an immense number of phobias, and as he had this illness, of course he had to avoid coping with avoidance. His phobic attitude was tremendous. He couldn't look at a patient ―couldn't face having an encounter with the patient― so he had him lie on a couch, and Freud's symptom became the trademark of psychoanalysis. He couldn't go into the open to be photographed, and so on. But usually, if you come to think of it, most of us would rather avoid unpleasant situations and we mobilize all the armour, masks, and so on, a procedure which is usually known as the “repression”. So, I try to find out from the patient what he avoids.

The enemy of development is this pain phobia―the unwillingness to do a tiny bit of suffering. You see, pain is a signal of nature. The painful leg, the painful feeling, cries out, “Pay attention to me―if you don't pay attention to me things will get worse.” The broken leg cries, “Don't walk so much. Keep still.” We use this fact in Gestalt Therapy by understanding that the awareness continuum is being interrupted ―that you become phobic―as soon as you begin to feel something unpleasant. When you begin to feel uncomfortable, you take away your attention.

So the therapeutic agent, the means of development, is to integrate attention and awareness. Often psychology doesn't differentiate between awareness ans attention. Attention is a deliberate way of listening to emerging foreground figure, which in this case is something unpleasant. So what I do as therapist is to work as catalyst both ways: provide situations in which a person can experience this being stuck―the unpleasantness― and I frustrate his avoidances still further, until he is willing to mobilize his own resources.

Authenticity, maturity, responsibility for one's actions and life, response-ability, and living in the now, having the creativeness of the now available, is all one and the same thing. Only in the now, are you in touch with what's going on. If the now becomes painful, most people are ready to throw the now overboard and avoid the painful situation. Most people can't even suffer themselves. So in therapy the person might simply become phobic and run away or he might play games which will lead our effort ad absurdum―like making a fool out of the situation or playing the bear-trapper game. You probably know the bear-trappers. The bear-trappers suck you in and give you the come-on, and when you're sucked in, down comes the hatchet and you stand there with a bloody nose, head, or whatever. And if you are fool enough to ram your head against the wall until you begin to bleed and be exasperated, then the bear-trapper enjoys himself and enjoys the control he has over you, to render you inadequate, impotent, and he enjoys his victorious self which does a lot for his feeble self-esteem. Or you have the Mona Lisa smiler. They smile and smile, and all the time think, “You're such a fool.” And nothing penetrates. Or you have the drive-us-crazy, whose only interest in life is to drive themselves or their spouse or their environment crazy and then fish in troubled waters.

But with these exceptions, anyone who has a little bit of goodwill will benefit from the Gestalt approach because the simplicity of the Gestalt approach is that we pay attention to the obvious, to the utmost surface. We don't delve into a region which we don't know anything about, into the so-called “unconscious”. I don't believe in repressions. The whole theory of repression is a fallacy. We can't repress a need. We have only repressed certain expressions of these needs. We have blocked one side, and then the self-expression comes out somewhere else, in our movements, I our posture, and most of all in our voice. A good therapist doesn't listen to the content of the bullshit the patient produces, but to the sound, to the music, to the hesitations. Verbal communication is beyond words. There is a very good book available, The Voice of Neurosis, by Paul Moses, a psychologist from San Francisco who died recently. He could give you a diagnosis from the voice that is better than the Rorschach test.

So don't listen to the words, just listen to what the voice tells you, what the movements tell you, what the posture tells you, what the image tells you. If you have ears, then you know all about the other person. You don't have to listen to what the person says: listen to the sounds. Per sona― “through sound.” The sounds tell you everything. Everything a person wants to express is all there―not in words. What we say is mostly either lies or bullshit. But the voice is there, the gesture, the facial expression, the psychosomatic language. It's all there if you learn to more or less let the content of the sentences play the second violin only. And if you don't make the mistake of mixing up sentences and reality, and if you use your eyes and ears, then you see that everyone expresses himself in one way or another. If you have eyes and ears, the world is open. Nobody can have any secrets because the neurotic only fools himself, nobody else―except for awhile, maybe, if he is a good actor.

In most psychiatry, the sound of the voice is not noticed, only the verbal contact is abstracted from the total personality. Movements like―you see how much this young man here express in his leaning forward― the total personality as it expresses itself with movements, with posture, with sound, with pictures― there is so much invaluable material here, that we don't have to do anything else except get to the obvious, to the outermost surface, and feed this back, so as to bring this into the patient's awareness. Feedback was Carl Rogers' introduction into psychiatry. Again, he only mostly feeds back the sentences, but there is so much more to be fed back ―something you might not be aware of, and here the attention and awareness of the therapist might be useful. So we have it rather easy compared with the psychoanalysts, because we see the whole being of a person right in front of us, and this is because Gestalt Therapy uses eyes and ears and the therapist stays absolutely in the now. He avoids interpretation, verbiage production, and all other types of mind-fucking. But mind-fucking is mind-fucking. It is also a symptom which might cover something else. But what is there is there. Gestalt Therapy is being in touch with the obvious.

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Now let me tell you something about how I see the structure of a neurosis. Of course I don't know what theory will be next because I'm always developing and simplifying what I'm doing more and more. I now see the neurosis as consisting of five layers.

The first layer is the cliché layer. If you meet somebody you exchange clichés― “Good morning,” handshake, and all of the meaningless tokens of meeting. Now behind the clichés, you find the second layer, what I call the Eric Berne or Sigmund Freud layer― the layer where we play games and roles― the very important person, the bully, the cry-baby, the nice little girl, the good boy― whatever roles we choose to play. So those are superficial, social, as-if layers. We pretend to be better, tougher, weaker, more polite, etc., than we really feel. This is essentially where the psychoanalysts stay. They treat playing the child as a reality and call it infantilism and try to get all the details of this child-playing. Now, this synthetic layer has to be first worked through. I call it the synthetic layer because it fits nicely into the dialectical thinking. If we translate the dialectic― thesis, antithesis, synthesis― into existence, we can say: existence, anti-existence, and synthetic existence. Most of our life is a synthetic-existence, a compromise between the anti-existence and existence. For instance, today I had the luck to meet somebody who has not this phony layer, who is an honest person, and relatively direct. But most of us put on a show which we are not, for which we don't have our support, our strength, our genuine desire, our genuine talents.

Now if we work through the role-playing layer, if we take away the roles, what do we experience then?

Then we experience the anti-existence, we experience the nothingness, emptiness. This is the impasse that I talked about earlier, the feeling of being stuck and lost. The impasse is marked by a phobic attitude― avoidance. We are phobic, we avoid suffering, especially the suffering of frustration. We are spoiled, and we don't want to go through the hellgates of suffering: We stay immature, we go on manipulating the world, rather than to suffer the pains of growing up. This is the story. We rather suffer being self-conscious, being looked upon, than to realize our blindness and get our eyes again. And this is the great difficulty I see in self-therapy. There are many things one can do on one's own, do one's own therapy, but when one comes to the difficult parts, especially to the impasse, you become phobic, you get into a whirl, into a merry-go-round, and you are not willing to go through the pain of the impasse.

Behind the impasse lies a very interesting layer, the death layer or implosive layer. This fourth layer appears either as death or as fear of death. The death layer has nothing to do with Freud's death instinct. It only appears as death because of the paralysis of opposing forces. It is a kind of catatonic paralysis: we pull ourselves together, we contract and compress ourselves, we implode. Once we really get in contact with this deadness of the implosive layer, then something very interesting happens.

The implosion becomes explosion. The death layer comes to life, and this explosion is the link-up with authentic person who is capable of experiencing and expressing his emotions. There are four basic kinds of explosions from the death layer. There is the explosion of genuine grief if we work through a loss or death that has not been assimilated. There is the explosion into orgasm in sexually blocked people. There is the explosion into anger, and also the explosion into joy, laughter, joi de vivre. These explosions connect with the authentic personality, with the true self.

Now, don't be frightened by the word explosion. Many of you drive a motor car. There are hundreds of explosions per minute, in the cylinder. This is different from the violent explosion of the catatonic―that would be like an explosion in a gas tank. Also, a single explosion doesn't mean a thing. The so-called breakthroughs of the Reichian therapy, and all that, are as little useful as the insight in psychoanalysis. Things still have to work through.

As you know, most of our role-playing is designed to use up a lot of this energy for controlling just those explosions. The death layer, the fear of death, is that if we explode, then we believe we can't survive any more―then we will die, we'll be persecuted, we'll be punished, we won't be loved any more and so on. So the whole rehearsal and self-torture game continues; we hold ourselves back and control ourselves.

Let me give you an example. There was once a girl, a woman, who had lost her child not too long ago, and she couldn't quite get in touch with the world. And we worked a bit, and we found she was holding onto the coffin. She realized she did not want to let go of this coffin. Now you understand, as long as she is not willing to face this hole, this emptiness, this nothingness, she couldn't come back to life, to the others. So much love is bound up here, in this coffin, that she rather invest her life in this fantasy of having some kind of a child, even if it's a dead child. When she can face her nothingness and experience her grief, she can come back to life and get in touch with the world.

The whole philosophy of nothingness is very fascinating. In our culture “nothingness” has a different meaning than it has in the Eastern religions. When we say “nothingness”, there is a void, an emptiness, something deathlike. When the Eastern person says “nothingness,” he calls into no thingness― there are no things there. There is only process, happening. Nothingness doesn't exist for us, in the strictest sense, because nothingness is based on awareness of nothingness, so there is the awareness of nothingness, so there is something there. And we find when we accept and enter this nothingness, the void, then the desert starts to bloom. The empty void becomes alive, is being filled. The sterile void becomes the fertile void. I am getting more and more right on the point of writing quite a bit about the philosophy of nothing. I feel this way, as if I am nothing, just function. “I've got plenty of nothing.” Nothing equals real.

Q: Fritz, when I was exploding, outside, you seemed cutting down on me, with being sort of witty, by using your wit on me, and it seems to me that this is what I do ―that I explode, that I let myself go, and that you were sort of poking fun at me. F: Oh, yes. You didn't realize what I did. Yesterday we started out with your being afraid. You let out a lot of passionate energy this morning, and I put more and more obstacles in your way so you could become hotter, more convincing. Do you see what I did for you? (Fritz laughs)

Q: Well, I misinterpreted it―I― F: Of course. If you had known, it wouldn't have worked. I saw you begin to enjoy yourself so much, in your heightened colour and your saving the world. It was beautiful. Q: Where does all this energy in the implosive layer come from? F: (he makes hooks of the fingers of each hand then hooks his hands together and pulls) Did you see what I did? Did you see how much energy I spent doing nothing, just pulling myself with equal strength? Where does the energy come from? By not allowing the excitement to get to our senses and muscles. The excitement goes instead of this into our fantasy life, into the fantasy life which we take for real. You might believe, “I can't possibly do this. I am helpless. I need my wife to comfort me,” and you are not willing to wake up and see that you might be able to produce your own comfort, and even comfort other people.

Our life energy goes only into those parts of our personality with which we identify. In our time, many people identify mostly with their computer. They think. Some people talk about the greatness of the homo sapiens, the computer bit, as if our intellect has leadership over the human animal, a notion which has gone out of fashion with Freud. Today we are talking about an integration of the social being and the animal being. Without the support of our vitality, of our physical existence, the intellect remains merely mind-fucking.

Most people play two kinds of intellectual games. The one game is the comparing game, the “more than” game―my car is bigger than yours, my house is better than yours, I'm greater than you, my misery is miserabler than yours, and so on and so on. Now the other game which is of the utmost importance is the fitting game. You know the fitting game in many respects. If you want to play a certain role―let's say you want to go to a party, you want to be the belle of the ball, so you have to put on the costume for this role. You go to a first-class tailor and you play the fitting game. This costume fits me, the tailor has to make the costume to fit me, I have to get accessories that fit the costume, and so on. Now this fitting game can be played in two directions. One direction is, we look upon reality and see where does this reality fit into my theories, my hypotheses, my fantasies about what reality is like. Or you can work from the opposite direction. You have faith in a certain concept, you have faith in a certain school, either the psychological school, the Freudian school, or the conditioning school. Now you see how to fit reality into that model. It's just like Procrustes, who had to fit all people into the same sized bed. If they were too long, he cut off their legs; if they were too short, he stretched them until they fit the bed. This is the fitting game.

A theory, a concept, is an an abstraction, is an aspect of any event. If you take this desk, from this desk you can abstract the form, you can abstract the substance, you can abstract the colour, you can abstract its monetary value. You can't add the abstractions together to make a whole, because the whole exists in the first place, and the abstractions are then done by us, from whatever context we need these abstractions.

Now in regard to psychology, I like to point out some of the abstractions you can make from Gestalt Therapy. One is the behaviouristic. What we do: we observe the identity of structure and function in the people, organism, and so on, which we encounter. The great thing about the behaviourists is that they actually work in the here and now. They look, they observe what's going on. If we could deduct from the present-day American psychologists their compulsion to condition, and just keep them as observers: if they could realize that the changes which are required are not to be obtained by conditioning, that conditioning always produces artifacts, and that the real changes are occurring by themselves in a different way, then I think we could do much toward a reconciliation of the behaviourists and the experientialists.

The experientialists, the clinical psychologists, have one great advantage over behaviourists. They do not see the human organism as a mechanical something that is just functioning. They see that in the center of life is the means of communication, namely, awareness. Now you call awareness. Now you call awareness “consciousness,” or sensitivity, or just awareness of something. I believe that matter has ―besides extension, duration, etc.―also awareness. Of course we are capable yet of measuring the infinitely small quantities of awareness in, let's say, this desk here, but we know that every animal, every plant, has awareness, or you might it tropism, sensitivity, protoplasmic sensitivity or whatever you want to, but the awareness is there. Otherwise they could not react to sunlight, or to give you another example: if you have a plant, and you put some fertilizer in one place, the plant will grow roots in that direction.

So, what I want to point out is, in Gestalt Therapy we start with what is, and see which abstraction, which context, which situation is there to be found and relate the figure, the foreground experience, to the background, to the content, to the perspective, to the situation, and they together form the gestalt. Meaning is the relationship of the foreground figure to its background. If you use the word “king,” you have to have a background to understand the meaning of the word “king,” whether it's the King of England, the king of a chess game, the chicken à la king― nothing has a meaning without its context. Meaning doesn't exist. It is always created ad hoc.

We have two system with which to relate to the world. One is called the sensoric system, the other is the motoric system. Now we unfortunately the behaviourists, with their idiotic reflex-arc bit, have messed the whole thing up. The sensoric system is for orientation, the sense of touching, where we get in touch with the world. We also have the motoric system with which we cope, the system of action through we do something with the world. So a really healthy, complete person has to have both a good orientation and ability to act. Now you sometimes get the extreme missing of one side or another, as in the extreme cases of schizophrenia. The extreme cases of schizophrenia are the completely withdrawn persons who lack action, and the paranoiac types who lack sensitivity. So if there is no balance between sensing and doing, then you are out of gear.

Many people rather hang on with their attention to exhaust the situation that doesn't nourish. This hanging onto the world, this fixation, this over-extended contact, is as pathological as the complete withdrawal― the ivory tower or the catatonic stupor. In both cases, contact and withdrawal does not flow― the rhythm is interrupted.

The sickness, playing sick, which is a large part of this getting crazy, is nothing but the quest for environmental support. If you are sick in bed, somebody is coming and cares for you, brings you your food, your warmth, you don't have to go out and make a living, so there is the complete regression. But the regression is not, as Freud thought, a purely pathological phenomenon. Regression means a withdrawal to a position where you can provide your own support, where you feel secure. We are going to work quite a bite with deliberate regression here, deliberate withdrawal, to find out what is the situation in which you feel comfortable, in contrast to the situation you cannot cope with. You find out, what are you in touch with, if you cannot be in touch with the world and with your environment.

So, let's do another experiment, which might be quite helpful to you. If you're confused or bored or something stuck, try the following experiment: Shuttle between here and there. I want you all to do this now. Close your eyes and go away in your imagination, from here to any place you like…

Now the next step is to come back to the here experience, the here and now… And now compare the two situations. Most likely the there situation was preferable to the here situation… And now close your eyes again. Go away again, wherever you'd like to go. And notice any change…

Now again come back to the there and now, and again compare the two situations. Has any change taken place?… And now go away again― continue to do this on your own until you really feel comfortable in the present situation, until you come to your senses, and you begin to see and hear and be here in this world; until you really begin to exist… Is anybody willing to talk about this experience of shuttling?

P: Initially I went away to a friend's house, it was very nice. I came back. The second time I went to a river-mountain retreat that I go to, and it also was extremely nice. Then I came back. I'm here now, and I realize that working in the future for me is unnecessary. It's more important for me now to be here. The future will take care of itself.

Q: I climbed a mountain with someone with whom I was very much giving and loving and receiving this feeling, and when I came back I still wasn't satisfied because this was not complete in my life. So I will tend to look for that closure.

R: I alternated between three places that are favourite places of nature for me, and I was there alone. And each time I came back, I felt more calm.

S: Fritz, I'm struck by the fact that when I go away, I'm more alive than when I'm right here. I don't operate with as much emotion or as much vitality here― my physical body is much less in reality than when I go away.

F: You didn't manage to bring any of the vitality back to the here and now?

S: Yes. But not as much. There was still a discrepancy between them. F: There is still a reservoir left untapped.

T: I feel the same thing that I feel when I go back to my living room at home. Ah, the first time I went back I didn't feel very much, and I came back here and I felt a certain tension. And when I went back the second time, it was the same, and I came back here and I felt more tension. And I went back and I could feel the same tension in my living room as I feel here.

U: I went to a dessert island, which was something I escaped to in my dreams as a child. And I appreciated the freedom that I had there. One thing I would do was have no clothes on and be able to swim nude in very clear water. And I appreciated that but at the same time I― I realized, or I think I felt more that I needed people. I'm more aware of my need for people than I was. Ah, I think I brought back some of the ―the desire to be free when I came back here. Then the next place I went was on a hike with my husband up Mount Tamalpais― this was when we were courting. And the feelings that go along with that are that he loved me more then than he does now, and there was a great euphoria about our relationship. I brought some of that back with me too, but then I wanted to return to that, which I did. And we were again hiking up Mount Tamalpais, but then I began to appreciate the fact that I wasn't ―that he was carrying part of―part of me in the relationship and I think I bring back that awareness now too, to the present situation―both the joy and the realization that I have to carry myself along.

F: Well, I think a number of you experienced quite a bit of integration of these two opposites, there and now. If you do this with any uncomfortable situation, you can really pinpoint what's missing in this here-and-now situation. Very often the there situation gives you a cue for what's missing in the now, what's different in the now. So, whenever you get bored or tense, always withdrawal― especially the therapists among you. If you fall asleep when the patient doesn't bring any interesting thing, it saves your strength, and the patient will either wake you up or come back with some more interesting material. And if not, you at least have time for a snooze.

Withdrawal to a situation from which you get support, and then come back with that regained strength to reality. You know Hercules is the famous symbol of self-control. You know, that obsessional character who cleaned out the Augean stables and so on. Now the most important story may be of Hercules' attempt to kill Anteos. As soon as Anteos touched the ground, he regained his strength, and that's what happens in the withdrawal. Of course the optimum withdrawal is the withdrawal into your body. Get in touch with yourself. Turn your attention to your physical existence. Mobilize your inner resources. Even if you get in touch with your fantasy of being on an island or in a warm bathtub, or to any unfinished situation, this will give you a lot of support when you return to reality.

Now normally the élan vital, the life force, energizes by sensing, by listening, by scouting, by describing the world― how is the world there. Now this life force apparently first mobilizes the center―if you have a center. And the center of the personality is what used to be called the soul: the emotions, the feelings, the spirit. Emotions are not a nuisance to be discharged. The emotions are the most important motors of our behaviour: emotion in the widest sense ―whatever you feel― the waiting, the joy, the hunger. Now these emotions, or this basic energy, this life force is apparently differentiated in the organism by what I would like to call the hormonic differentiation. This basic excitement is differentiated, let's say by the adrenal glands, into anger and fear: by the sex glands into libido. It might, in case of adjustment to a loss, be turned into grief. Then this emotional excitement mobilizes the muscles, the motoric system. Every emotion, then, expresses itself in the muscular system. You can't imagine anger without muscular movements. You can't imagine joy, which is more or less identical with dancing, without muscular movements. In grief there is sobbing and crying, and in sex there are also certain movements, as you all know. And these muscles are used to move about, to take from the world, to touch the world, to be in contact, to be in touch.

Any disturbance of this excitement metabolism will diminish your vitality. If these excitements cannot be transformed into their specific activities but are stagnated, then we have the state called anxiety, which is a tremendous excitement held up, bottled up. Angoustia is the Latin word for narrowness. You narrow the chest, to go through the narrow path; the heart speeds up in order to supply the oxygen needed for the excitement, and so on. If excitement cannot flow into activity through the motoric system, then we try to desensitize the sensoric system to reduce this excitement. So we find all kinds of desensitization: frigidity, blocking of the ears, and so on―all these holes in the personality that I talked about earlier.

So, if we are so disturbed in our metabolism, and have no center from which we can live, we have to do something, we want to do something to collect again the wellspring, the foundation of our being. Now there is not such a thing as total integration. Integration is never completed; maturation is never completed. It's an ongoing process for ever and ever. You can't say, “Now I've eaten a steak and now I am satisfied; now I'm no more hungry,” and for the rest of your life there is no more hunger. There's always something to be integrated; always something to be learned. There's always a possibility of richer maturation―of taking more and more responsibility for yourself and for your life. Of course, taking responsibility for your life and being rich in experience and ability is identical. And this is what I hope to do here in this short seminar―to make you understand how much you gain by taking responsibility for every emotion, every movement you make, every thought you have―and shed responsibility for anybody else. The world is not there for your expectation, nor do you have to live for the expectation of the world. We touch each other by honestly being what we are, not by intentionally making contact.

Responsibility, in one context, is the idea of obligation. If we take responsibility for somebody else, I feel omnipotent: I have to interfere with his life. All it means is, I have a duty― I believe I have the duty to support this person. But responsibility can also be spelled response-ability: the ability to respond, to have thoughts, reactions, emotions in a certain situation. Now, this responsibility, the ability to be what one is, is expressed through the word “I”. Many agree with Federn, a friend of Freud, who maintained that the ego is a substance, and I maintain that the ego, the I, is merely a symbol of identification. If I say that I am hungry now, and in an hour's time I say I am not hungry, this is not a contradiction. It is not a lie, because in between I have eaten lunch. I identify with my state right now, and I identify with my state afterward.

Responsibility means simply to be willing to say “I am I” and “I am what I am― I'm Popeye, the sailor man.” It's not easy to let go of the fantasy or concept of being a child in need, the child that wants to be loved, the child that is afraid to be rejected, but all those events are those for which we are no taking responsibility. Just as I said in regard to self-consciousness, we are not willing to take the responsibility that we are critical, so we project criticism onto others. We don't want to take the responsibility for being discriminating, so we project it outside an then we live in eternal demands to be accepted, or the fear of being rejected. And one of the most important responsibilities―this is a very important transition― is to take responsibility for our projections, re-identify with these projections, and become what we project.

The difference between Gestalt Therapy and most others types of psychotherapy is essentially that we do not analyse. We integrate. The old mistake of mixing up understanding and explanatoriness is what we hope to avoid. If we explain, interpret, this might be a very interesting intellectual game, but it's a dummy activity, and engage in a dummy activity is worse than doing nothing. If you do nothing, at least you know you do nothing. If you engage in a dummy activity you just invest time and energy in unproductive work and possibly get more and more conditioned to doing these futile activities―wasting your time, and if anything getting deeper and deeper into the morass of the neurosis.

It would be wonderful if we could be so wise and intelligent that our rationality could domineer our biological life. And this polarity of mind vs. body is not the only polarity. There are other things to the human being than these two instruments. This identification with the intellect, with explanation, leaves out the total organism, leaves out the body. You use your body instead of being some-body. And the more all the thinking goes into the computing, into manipulation, the less energy is left for the total self. Since you have bracketed off your body, the result is that you feel like being nobody, because you have no body. There's no body in your life. No wonder so many people, if they are out of the routine of their daily work, get their boredom and the emptiness of their lives.

Gestalt Therapy is an existential approach, which means we are not just occupied with dealing with symptoms or character structure, but with the total existence of a person. This existence, and the problems of existence, in my opinion are mostly very clearly indicated in dreams.

Freud once called the dream the Via Regia, the royal road to the unconscious. And I believe it is really the royal road to integration. I never know what the “unconscious” is, but we know that the dream definitely is the most spontaneous production we have. It comes about without our intention, will, deliberation. The dream is the most spontaneous expression of the existence of the human being. There's nothing else as spontaneous as the dream. The most absurd dream doesn't disturb us as being absurd at the time: We feel it is the real thing. Whatever you do otherwise in life, you still have some kind of control or deliberate interference. Not so with the dream. Every dream is an art work, more than a novel, a bizarre drama. Whether or not it's good art is another story, but there is always lots of movement, fights, encounters, all kinds of things in it. Now if my contention is correct, which I believe of course it is, all the different parts of the dream are fragments of our personalities. Since our aim is to make every one of us a wholesome person, which means a unified person, without conflicts, what we have to do is put the different fragments of the dream together. We have to re-own these projected, fragmented parts of our personality, and re-own the hidden potential that appears in the dream.

Because of the phobic attitude, the avoidance of awareness, much material that is our own, that is part of ourselves, has been dissociated, alienated, disowned, thrown out. The rest of our potential is not available to us. But I believe most of it is available, but as projections. I suggest we start with the impossible assumption that that whatever we believe we see in another person or in the world is nothing but a projection. Might be far out, but it's just unbelievable how much we project, and how blind and deaf we are to what is really going on. So, the re-owning of our senses and the understanding of projections will go hand in hand. The difference between reality and fantasy, between observation and imagination―this differentiation will take quite a bit of doing.

We can re-assimilate, we can take back our projection, by projecting ourselves completely into that other thing or person. What is pathological is always the part projection. Total projection is called artistic, and this total projection is an identification with that thing in question. I give you one idea, for instance. In Zen, you are not allowed to paint a single branch until you have become that branch.

So, I want to start out with a simple experiment to produce magic, to transform ourselves―metamorphose ourselves into something we are apparently not, to learn to identify with something we are not. Let's start with with something very simple. Will you all observe me. I'm going to make some faces and expressions and I want you, without words or sounds, to copy my expressions and see whether you can really feel that you become me and my expressions. Now watch this. Go along with it. The main thing is the facial expression…

Now I tell you how I did it. I imagined a situation and went into that situation, and I had the impression― I think most of you got quite a bit of the feeling of identification, not so much thinking, just simply following.

Now let's take another step. You come up here and talk to me― just say anything. (as the person speaks, Fritz imitates his words, voice inflection, and facial expressions) Pair up and do this, and again try to really get the feel of being this other person…

Now I want each one of you to transform yourself into something a little bit more different. Say, transform yourself into a road…

Now transform yourself into a motorcar… Now transform yourself into a six-month-old baby… Now transform yourself into the mother of that baby… Now transform yourself into that same baby again… Now the same mother… Now the same baby… Now be two years of age… Now transform yourself into your present age, the age you are… Can everyone perform that miracle?

Now, I want to show you how to use this identification technique with dreams. This is quite different from what the psychoanalysts do. What's usually done with a dream is to cut it to pieces, and follow up by association what it means, and interpret it. Now we might possibly get some integration by this procedure, but I don't quite believe it, because in most cases this is merely an intellectual game. Many of you may have been brainwashed by psychoanalysis, but if you want to get something real from a dream, do not interpret. Do not play intellectual insight games or associate or dissociate freely or unfreely to them.

In Gestalt Therapy we don't interpret dreams. We do something much more interesting with them. Instead of analysing and further cutting up the dream, we want to bring it back to life. And the way to bring it back to life is to re-live the dream as if it were happening now. Instead of telling the dream as if it were a story in the past, act it out in the present, so that it becomes a part of yourself, so that you are really involved.

If you understand what you can do with dreams, you can do a tremendous lot for yourself on your own. Just take any old dream or dream fragment, it doesn't matter. As long as a dream is remembered, it is still alive and available, and it still contains an unfinished, unassimilated situation. When we are working on dreams, we usually take only a small little bit from the dream, because you can get so much from even a little bit.

So if you want to work on your own, I suggest you write the dream down and make a list of all the details in the dream. Get every person, every thing, every mood, and then work on these to become each one of them. Ham it up, and really transform yourself into each of the different items. Really become that thing― whatever it is in a dream― become it. Use your magic. Turn into that ugly frog or whatever is there― the dead thing, the live thing, the demon― and stop thinking. Lose your mind and come to your senses. Every little bit is a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, which together will make up a much larger whole― a much stronger, happier, more completely real personality.

Next, take each one of these different items, characters, and parts, and let them have encounters between them. Write a script. By “write a script,” I mean have a dialogue between the two opposing parts and you will find―especially if you get the correct opposites― that they always start out fighting each other. All the different parts― any part in the dream is yourself, is a projection of yourself, and if there are inconsistent sides, contradictory sides, and you use them to fight each other, you have the eternal conflict game, the self-torture game. As the process of encounter goes on, there is a mutual learning until we come to an understanding, and an appreciation of differences, until we come to a oneness and integration of the two opposing forces. Then the civil war is finished, and your energies are ready for your struggles with the world.

Each little bit of work you do will mean a bit of assimilation of something. In principle, you can get through the whole cure― let's call it cure or maturation― if you did this with every single thing in one dream. Everything is there. In different forms the dreams change, but when you start like this, you will find more dreams will come and the existential message will become clearer and clearer. So I would like from now on to put the accent on dreamwork. We fin all we need in the dream, or in the perimeter of the dream, the environment of the dream. The existential difficulty, the missing part of the personality, they are all there. It's a kind of central attack right into the midst of your non-existence.

The dream is an excellent opportunity to find the holes in the personality. They come out as voids, as blank spaces, and when you get into the vicinity of these holes, you get confused or nervous. There is a dreadful experience, the expectation, “If I approach this, there will be catastrophe. I will be nothing.” I have already talked a bit about the philosophy of nothingness. This is the impasse, where you avoid, where you become phobic. You suddenly get sleepy or remember something very important you have to do. So if you work on dreams it is better if you do it with someone else who can point out where you avoid. Understanding the dream means realizing when you are avoiding the obvious. The only danger is that this other person might come too quickly to the rescue and tell you what is going on in you, instead of giving yourself the chance of discovering yourself.

And if you understand the meaning of each time you identify with some bit of a dream, each time you translate an it into an I, you increase in vitality and in your potential. Like a debt collector you have you money invested all over the place, so take it back. And on the other hand, begin to understand the dummy activities where you waste your energies like, let's say, when you are bored. Instead of saying, “I'm bored,” and find out what you're actually interested in, you suffer and stay with what is boring to you. You torture yourself with staying there, and at the same time, whenever you torture yourself you torture your environment. You become a gloom-caster. If you enjoy the gloom-casting, if you accept it, that's fine, because then the whole thing becomes a positive experience. Then you take responsibility for what you're doing. If you enjoy self-torture, fine. But there's always the question of accepting or not accepting, and accepting is not just tolerating. Accepting is getting a present, a gift. The balance is always greatfulness for what is. If it's too little, you feel resentful; if it's too much, you feel guilty. But if you get the balance, you grow in gratefulness. If you make a sacrifice, you feel resentful; if you give a present, you give something surplus and you feel fine. It's a closure― completion of a gestalt.

Q: We practice, in living with each other, what some people would call the amenities. Could you draw a line between taking responsibility and practising the amenities?

F: Yah. You take responsibility for playing a phony role. You play polite to keep the other person happy. Any time you use the words now and how, and become aware of this, you grow. Each time you use the question why, you diminish in stature. You bother yourself with false, unnecessary information. You only feed the computer, the intellect. And the intellect is the whore of intelligence. It's a drag on your life.

So the simple fact is that against the― excuse this expression― evil of self-alienation, self-improverishment, there's only the remedy of re-integrating, taking back what is rightfully yours. Each time you can integrate something it gives you a better platform, where again you can facilitate your development, your integration.

Don't try to make a perfectionist program out of it, that you should chew up every bit of what you're eating, that you should make a pause between the different bites so that you can complete one situation before you start the other; to change every noun and it into an I. Don't torture yourself with these demands, but realize this is the basis of our existence and discover that this is how it is. It is how it should be and it should be how it is.