“’Oh, well, he’s in no condition to make the decision.’
“’Let’s find out,’ I suggested.
“And sure enough, he came back as lucid as you are. At that time, he was very uncomfortable because they were feeding him medicines in one intravenous and fluids in another. They very carefully explained that ‘it was very possible to die during the operation and that you don’t ordinarily operate. What we really should do is fight for the next two weeks to get your strength and lower your temperature. On the other hand, you’re going downhill. If we ever operate and don’t turn the tide, medically, you’re never going to have as much strength as you’re going to have right now.’
“He didn’t hesitate a minute. He said, ‘We go tomorrow.’
“Tomorrow came. It was a long operation. The two biopsies they took during the operation both came back as negative.1 Among other things, he actually had stones in his gall bladder. They took him up at about eight o’clock in the morning and he came down about two o’clock. They also arranged—instead of sending him to intensive care—to make an intensive care unit in his room and thus preserve his privacy.
1 An autopsy disclosed that Fritz did, indeed have cancer of the pancreas, in a most advanced stage.
“He had a tube in his nostrils and they opened his throat and he had a tube there and a glass tube up his ass, and he was confined at that time by these two boards under his arms with all sorts of intravenous fluids running into him. He finally came awake and he said, ‘I’m nutin but a pincushion, and I don’t vant to be here.’
“’Fritz,’ I said, ‘you know they’re doing all this because they’re trying to help you.’
“’Nah,’ he answered and then drifted back off.
“His language was not easy to understand if you knew him, and the nurses had a terrible time understanding him. On Saturday morning, about ten o’clock, he said ‘I vant a bedpan. At that time, they had the senior nurse of intensive care taking care of him. The girl leaned over and asked, ‘What did you say?’
“’I vant a bedpan.’
“She apparently didn’t hear or understand him. If you knew Fritz, you knew that he never, but never repeated. His basic principle was ‘People do hear,’ and that they hear even without the words if it’s significant. So he lay there for about two minutes, then he kind of half sat up, and shouted: ‘I vant to shit!’
“And she said, ‘Oh . . . just a minute.’
“We really cracked up. There was a lot of that going on. The day before, Laura, when they decided to operate, said: ‘Fritz. If they operate, you should tell them about when you were in Miami and they gave you that anesthesia, and you had a very bad reaction. And they shouldn’t give you that type of anesthesia.’
“And again, he came back into full bloom and he said, ‘Laura. If . . . It . . . Should! Mind-fucking. Won’t you ever learn? Stop this self-torture,’ and then he lapsed.
“Anyway, at three o’clock that afternoon he fired another nurse. He said to me, ‘I don’t vant her.’ So, we switched nurses once more.
“At about nine o’clock that evening, he kind of half got up with all this paraphernalia attached. The nurse said, ‘Dr. Perls. You’ll have to lie down.’ He sort of went back down and then almost sat up and swung his legs out a bit. Again she said, ‘You must lie down.’
“He looked her right in the eye and he said, ‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ fell back, and died.
“I’m sure that he decided to leave his body, and he did. Very peacefully.”
If Fritz died as he lived—teaching, joking, irritating, risk-taking—so did those who survived him continue, true to their interrelationship with him.
For Paul Frey, it was with love and mysticism.
On Saturday night, March 14, Paul, who hardly ever wrote letters, experienced the most uncanny, “far out thing in my whole life.” He didn’t know that Fritz was sick, let alone in Chicago, yet felt overwhelmingly compelled to write to him. “I was obsessed . . . forced to do it,” and with a green felt-tipped pen he began:
Leibster [Dearest] Fritz,
Thank you for the fond eriturum [remembrance] in your book. I remember the times you used to visit . . .
He reminisced about the hours they had shared and closed by reminding Fritz about the time you said “I’m just another Jew charlatan” and I said, “Yes But you disarmed me with your cigarette smoke and your German accent and the fact that you come out of my soul, somehow.”
He mailed the letter to Cowichan, whose address he had gotten from Ralph Metzner, a mutual friend. Shortly afterward, he was to discover that the letter was penned within an hour or two of Fritz’s demise.
For myself, it was as a respected teacher.
During that final workshop Fritz gave in Concord, he had a bad case of the shivers. It was winter, the house was drafty, and Fritz thought he had the flu. I lent him my winter coat to wear indoors to keep him warm.
As the workshop drew to a close, I told him that I wished to give him a gift, a token of my esteem for what he taught. I offered him my “magic coin,” but he told me he didn’t believe in magic.
“I like your coat, though.”
“I want to give you something,” I said. “Take the coin or the coat.”
“If you mean it,” he answered, “I’ll take the coat.”
I returned to New York in my shirtsleeves.
After he died, I wanted the coat back in order to wear Fritz’s mantle and to have something of his. The possessions he took to Chicago were sent back to Laura, yet I was reluctant to speak to her about it, fearing she’d feel my act was tasteless, like a scavenger bird who can’t wait to tear the flesh from a dead carcass. I wondered what to do and I felt stuck. Then I decided to play it out Gestalt-wise. I set up an exercise in which I played myself and Fritz. First, I told “Fritz” of my dilemma. Then, as Fritz, told myself: “Do what you feel like doing. It doesn’t offend me. What do you care what Laura thinks?”
I spoke to Laura and got the coat.
For the Cowichan communitarians, it was their desire to preserve their community as well as to accept their personal motivations.
“When Fritz died,” reported Teddy Lyon, “there were all kinds of hassles at Lake Cowichan. People were willing to dip their fingers in the Fritz bank account and get what they thought they could for the institution. I very much disapproved of that and said I was going to tell if they did that. Someone said that Fritz was looking down and would approve of their using their wits to keep as much together for The Gestalt Institute of Canada as they could.
“I believe that what happened to the money would not have been foreground for Fritz. He wanted people to carry on his work and that was what he was training them for in the last year. And as far as I was concerned, being true to my own reality involves telling the truth, or at least not getting involved in that stupidity.
Laura wound up short-changed, as usual.
She did, of course, have Fritz back again, his ashes residing in a closet in her apartment. But it was a hollow homecoming.
Fritz died with over $300,000 squirreled away in dozens of banks in the United States and Canada, in sums ranging from a few hundred on up to $40,000 in each account. Earlier in their lives, while they lived together, he and Laura worked out an arrangement whereby she took care of day-to-day expenses and he was to put money aside for the future. Laura always assumed that this agreement was still in force, that when he died or they chose to work less, money would be available.
Except that Fritz stopped paying taxes in the late 1960s, refusing to support what he saw as the coming fascist state. Also, he left no will. Consequently, over 50 percent of his hoardings would be lost paying back taxes and penalties. Add to that attorney fees for dying intestate and for handling tax matters, further divisions of the estate among other claimants, and Laura was unable to look forward to the leisur
ely life she anticipated.
The New York Gestaltists continued to affirm that Fritz was not all that hot.
Laura asked her friend and confidant, Paul Goodman, to deliver the oration at funeral services held for Fritz in Manhattan. Paul repeated the comparatively belittling arguments that drove Fritz from New York in the first place. He began by indicating some measure of respect for Fritz’s contributions but went on to say that Laura and Paul Weisz were the best therapists in the New York Gestalt group, that Fritz had deficiencies. And where the lack came, he felt, was that Fritz wasn’t sufficiently intellectual. If anybody was the intellectual, it was Laura.
Many in attendance, particularly those who knew Fritz from the West Coast, were outraged and felt that his testimony was in poor taste. Laura felt that such a reaction was typical of the “Fritzers.”
Those in California who gave him appreciation in the last years of his life also gave him a most appreciative send-off.
At Esalen’s San Francisco headquarters, over a hundred people who knew him divided themselves in groups of four or five, sat on the floor, and shared their personal experiences of Fritz.
Ann Halprin was asked to dance at his West Coast funeral services. She knew that she couldn’t plan a score, because Fritz was against rehearsing. Instead, she stayed by herself for the three days preceding the funeral and thought about Fritz.
She selected a piece by Mahler, Fritz’s favorite composer. When it came time to dance, she found herself asking for a minyan—ten people who, among Jews, form a religious congregation and make a place sacred. Ann was very much in touch with Fritz’s Jewishness.
She had the minyan disorient her through a type of levitation and spinning around, following Fritz’s dictum of “lose your mind and come to your senses.” After losing control through the tumbling, she had the image of being a bird on fire and danced the burning bird. It was, at one moment, a repeat of their initial meeting where she became the burning bush and the guardian angel together, where she and Fritz became one.
Then the dance changed. Out of her trance state, now, she looked at all the people in the room and danced with each separately, picking up their rhythms and integrating each with her own, starting with the members of the minyan and extending to all the rest in attendance.
This, too, flowed from Fritz’s emphasis, in life, that balance depended upon being able to go from contact with internal states to contact with the outside world. “So the dance that I did at his funeral reflected the most important experiences that I had with Fritz.”
On March 28, two weeks after Fritz’s passing, a reluctant Abe Levitsky was drafted to give a final oration for services held at The San Francisco Gestalt Institute:
It’s customary on such occasions to wish for the departed that he have eternal peace, that he rest in peace. But, Fritz, that’s the last thing I would ever pray for you. Eternal peace, resting in peace—that is for the dead.
Let’s face it, Fritz, we all have our shortcomings, and playing dead is not your great virtue. For there was far too much life in you to be dead. So very much life, so much love, so much anger at phoniness and pretense, so much eagerness for battle, so much daring, so much shrewdness—and, above all—how can we ever thank you enough for your courage and tenacity.
Fritz, you were very definitely not a good boy, and, frankly, it’s a bit puzzling to know exactly where to send this farewell note. You could be most anywhere. I imagine that typically you are shuttling back and forth between both polarities. You wouldn’t want to get stuck in either place.
In any case, don’t rest in peace. Make trouble; stir up a fuss. Make as big a fuss as you made with us. Of course, you’ll hear a lot of squawks, but then as you yourself would say: when everyone truly does his own thing, the sparks are sure to fly. I bet you’ll see a brand of sparks that you can really respect.
Let’s see now, this is Saturday night. Is it possible that tomorrow you start a new workshop—for superprofessionals only? The gossip is that some amazing people have signed up: Sigmund and Carl and Kurt and Wilhelm and Karen. Now there’s a workshop for you. The kind no one has to lead. The kind in which it’s an honor to take your rightful place among your gifted peers and enjoy. They’ll listen with keen attention and respect to the new inventions, the new developments you bring them.
How you thirsted for your place, your chapter in history. You have it now.
We, gathered here tonight, appreciate that you were with us, that we met and touched each other. And we say to you, farewell, Fritz, and thank you for being.
Epilogue: The Work
I first met Fritz Perls in 1968, less than two years before his death, when I attended a demonstration that he gave of Gestalt Therapy in New York City. Like many others before me, I was dazzled by his clinical skills, impressed by his outspoken candor, appreciative of both his originality and his theoretical base, and intrigued by his “I don’t give a damn what you think of me” attitude. Fritz performed his psychotherapeutic magic, in those days, in either one-day demonstrations or weekend, week-long, or month-long group workshops. I attended several of these programs before he died.
By then, Fritz’s reputation for extraordinary therapeutic skills preceded him wherever he went. If you can imagine the thrill of a groupie waiting to meet Mick Jagger or a commoner the queen, of Woody Allen waking up in Sophia Loren’s bed, you might just begin to appreciate the attraction that Fritz’s hot seat had. To work with this bearded, brilliant, unpredictable, rascally old marvel offered the hope of nirvana, of cure, of coming to Lourdes on a stretcher and being able to leave by foot. It was akin to being touched by the blessed spirit.
It is a testimonial to Fritz’s open-mindedness that so many people in other disciplines deny him his originality and see him as merely imitating them. That is simply the result of his success in incorporating so many varied approaches. In the theater, there was Max Reinhardt. In psychoanalysis, there were Freud and Reich. In philosophy, there were Smuts and Friedlander.
There was Arthur Ceppos, who taught him dianetics; J. L. Moreno, who founded psychodrama; Charlotte Selver and F. M. Alexander, who contributed to his knowledge of body awareness and body language; Lao Tse, the Chinese mystical poet whose works form the tenets of Taoism; Paul Weisz, who introduced him to Zen; Paul Goodman, who stood for honesty and the integration of one’s personal and professional life. Traditional Gestaltists claim him because of his studying classical Gestalt psychology in Frankfurt, with its appreciation of figure/ground relationships and its academic preoccupation with how things are perceived, because he married an academically trained Gestaltist, and because he called his new concentration therapy “Gestalt.” As Fritz’s Gestalt Therapy grew from a relatively unknown therapeutic school to one which now ranks second, perhaps, to the Freudian approach, and as psychoanalysts slowly begin to abandon their anonymity, even some Freudians have begun to declare Fritz in the mainstream of the psychoanalytic movement.
Fritz was willing to learn from anybody and anything. He claimed his cat, Mitzie, as one of his gurus. He learned from and adopted the technology of tape recordings and videotape, not only to record his work with others, but to play back these devices to see what he and others could learn from them.
Fritz once disrupted a lecture by the renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow by crawling on his belly, but he was there to check him out. Just as he checked out drugs, mystics, and wise men of all persuasions who crossed his path. He was psychoanalyzed, bioenergeticized, dianeticized, Alexandenzed, Rolfed, psychedelicized, and spent several months in a Japanese Zen monastery. If he came away disillusioned much of the time, this might readily be seen to be the mark of a student who has pursued and experienced most of the areas of his interest and, in the process, rid himself of the illusion that any one particular program would lead to Salvation.
Fritz learned from life as well. From the school of life he learned what it meant when a parent d
oesn’t love you and how people tend to perpetuate antagonistic relationships. He learned what it felt like to be an outsider and to be discriminated against. He learned heroism and pain in the trenches during the First World War. And how to endure loneliness and isolation. From his mother, he acquired an appreciation of art, beauty, and drama—an appreciation so strong that he perpetually strove to make living simultaneously artistic, dramatic, and exciting. If you take Fritz’s childlike curiosity, add a great capacity to synthesize and integrate the ideas and techniques of others with his intuitive sense of life, and mix thoroughly, you will have discovered the recipe for Fritz’s abilities as both a student and a teacher, for whatever he learned of value, he immediately passed on to others.
Paul Frey introduced Fritz to Hans Vaihinger. Fritz, in turn, passed on this knowledge in Garbage Pail.
Paul presented Fritz with a paper he wrote on this German philosopher, in which Paul discussed Vaihinger’s idea that the curse of self-consciousness stems from the brain’s having solved the basic problems of existence. Having little remaining biological function, it now ponders the imponderable meanings of life and the ineffable relationship between mind and matter.
“Naturally,” wrote Vaihinger, “the human mind is tormented by this insoluble contradiction. But in intuition and in experience, all of this distress fades into nothingness. Experience and intuition are higher than all human reason.
“When I see a deer feeding in the forest, when I see a child at play, when I see a man at work, but above all, when I myself am working or playing, where are all the problems with which I had been torturing myself unnecessarily? We do not understand the world when we are pondering over its problems, but when we are doing the world’s work.”
Elaine Kempner and Lois Brean wrote a paper on “Phenomenological Behaviorism” for Irma Shepherd’s book, Gestalt Therapy Now. They brought a copy of it to Fritz to read. Their argument was that internal events can also be considered behavior and that Gestalt Therapy consisted, essentially, of making the implicit (internal) behavior explicit. The next day Fritz delivered a paper in which he explained that Gestalt Therapy was actually “phenomenological behaviorism.”
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