Timeline of Gestalt Therapy History
(Preceding dates will be added soon, to explore the significant works and events that led to the founding of gestalt therapy)
1893 Fritz Perls was born in Berlin, Germany
1905 Laura Perls was born Lore Posner in Pforzheim, Germany
1911 Fritz Perls grew up in Berlin. “Finding my world. Fall in love. Poetry, philosophy, and mostly the theater. Max Reinhard, founder of modern theater direct with your ears: listen, listen, listen! Canvas and painted props are out. Three dimensions. Make the stage real. Turn the world into a stage. What is reality? Confusing.” -Fritz Perls (FP)
1913 “College. Uncle Herman Staub, greatest lawyer in Germany. But I hate law, don't want to follow in his footsteps. Study psychology? Nonsense. I agree. Psychology Wundt learning nonsense syllables. Confusing.
And there is Freud. Makes much sense; sees sex problem. Rather study medicine (without interest) this opens the door to philosophy, physiology. Life less confusing; see possibilities.” -FP
1914 Fritz Perls in the German Army in WWI. “The world explodes. Life in trenches agony. Desensitized. Horror of living and horror of dying. Confusing.” -FP
1918 Fritz Perls returned to medical studies specializing in neuropsychiatry. “Survived. Rebelliously involved in politics. Very confused.” -FP
1921 “M.D. Restless. Don't want to settle. Doctor uncle ridicules ideas of wanting to cure an illness by talking. But smarting souls (you-I) need guidance. Fumblingly approaching psychiatry with drugs, electro-things, hypnosis, and talking. Confusing.” -FP
1922 “Starting afresh. Most exciting. We We! I enlarge the non-family world. We: bohemians, off the beaten path. Actors, painters, writers. Creating a new world. Bauhaus, Brücke, Dadaism new matter-of-factness movement. Discover a guru: S. Friedlander (Chapter One) "Creative indifference." Discover the zero point as center nothingness stretching into opposite somethings. First time a solid bearing. Groping. And less confused.” -FP
1925 “Started seven years of useless couch life. Felt I was stupid. Finally, Wilhelm Reich, then still sane, made some sense. Also Karen Horney, whom I loved. The rest opinionated imitators, misspelling Freud's good intentions. Confusing.” -FP
1926 Fritz Perls, with his M.D. degree, went to Frankfurt-am-Main in 1926 as an assistant to Kurt Goldstein at the Institute for Brain Damaged Soldiers. Here he met his future wife, Laura and here they were exposed to leading Gestalt psychologists, existential philosophers and psychoanalysts. Fritz Perls became a psychoanalyst.
“Kurt Goldstein, Frankfurt neurologist. Genius neuro-psychiatrist. Organism-as-a-whole concept. Gestalt oriented. Makes much sense, but I, still involved and loyal to the Freudians, resist him. Confusing.” -FP
1927 Fritz Perls became a member of Wilhelm Reich's technical seminars in Vienna. Reich's concept of character analysis influenced Perls to a large extent.
1930 Reich became Fritz Perls' supervising senior analyst in Berlin.
1932 Laura Posner Perls received the D.Sc. degree from the University of Frankfurt in 1932. She was influenced by existential theologians Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. Much of the Gestalt, phenomenological and existential influences in Gestalt therapy are through her. Laura Posner met Perls when she was a psychology student in Frankfurt, and they were married in 1930.
"Remember I was a Gestalt Psychologist before I got into psychoanalysis. Fritz was an analyst before he got into Gestalt Psychology. Sometimes it set us an insoluble conflict.”…"Tillich and Martin Buber, who was another teacher of mine in Frankfurt, had more influence on me than any other psychologists or psychoanalysts. I was impressed with the way they respected people." -Laura Perls
1933 The Perls move to Amsterdam. "We left Germany in April of '33. It was just beginning then: The Reichstag fire was in February; the boycott day when they closed all the Jewish businesses and broke the windows was the first of April. We were living in Berlin at the time. Many thought that the persecution would last only a year or two (how could an idiot like Hitler last?) but when we saw this developing we thought we would leave Germany." -Laura Perls
1934-46 The Perls move to Johannesburg, South Africa. “An early refugee from the Hitler regime. Still deeply involved in orthodox analysis, I go to teach Freud's gospel in South Africa. Still confused.” -FP
1936 “Went to Marienbad for Freudian congress. First paper: "Oral resistances." Rejected. "Resistances are always anal." !!! Resentful. First break with the orthodox ones. Turmoil of confusion, but a center of sureness is born: "I know better." What? Me know better than the Gods? Yes, yes, yes! I can see; they are half-blind. Not as blind as the materialists and the spiritualists, but they too have prejudices galore. Perhaps one day I will find the truth. Yes pompous thought the truth!” -FP
1937 “Back in South Africa. Struggle to get out of the quicksand of free associations. Fall back on Goldstein's organism-as-a-whole approach. Still too narrow. Our Prime Minister, Jan Smuts, has the answer: ecology. Organism-as-a-whole-embedded-in-environment. This becomes the Unit. The objective-subjective identity is born. Freud's catharsis notion is the emerging Gestalt. Not in the Unconscious, but right on the surface. The obvious is put on the throne. The neurotic is a person who is blind to the obvious.” -FP
1940 “I am teaching myself touch typing, slowly getting bored. Why not let thoughts flow onto sheets of paper? Doing so, I discover idea after idea. Chapter after chapter forms itself. Concepts I had assimilated, objections I had discarded. A new approach to man in his health and plight emerged. I ceased to be an analyst. I understood aggression not a mystical energy born out of Thanatos, but a tool for survival. Concepts such as reflexes (stimulus-response) and instincts as stable properties became obsolete, tumbled down, making room for a new perspective, although still in dominance today. Mechanical, causal thinking of the last century had to give way to process, structure, and function to the thinking of an electronic age. The "how" replaces the "why." Perspective and orientation supersede rationalization and guesswork. Even the "I" (and to Freud the Ego is "I", and not a concept of self) is dissolved into identification function. (Part II, Chapter 7)” -FP
1941 “The book (Ego, Hunger and Aggression) is finished. To revise and edit, or let it stand as it is? No. Let it be. It has many faults, my English is often clumsy, the examples badly chosen but it is "me." My confusion begins to lift, but still, often, I am depressed and confused until an idea emerges clearly and solidly. The theme of Ego, Hunger, and Aggression must be unacceptable to Freud, for it leads to assimilation. Foreign material becomes a part of the Self and its growth. Freud's Ego idiom is the accumulation of parts: introjections (Part II, Chapter Five and Seven). Traceable, analyzable. But assimilation is integration. Insufficiently applied aggression at the input stage (hunger) and destructuring (destroying, grinding down, preparing for making one's own) of external mental and physical food, prevents maturation and becoming "self." The idea of assimilation undermines Freud's model of the structure of man, mainly the Super-Ego Ego instinct relationship, and his lopsided view of life as the Eros-Thanatos struggle.” - FP
Perls’ Ego, Hunger and Aggression was written in 1941-1942. In its first publication in South Africa (1942) it was subtitled “A Revision of Freud’s Theory and Method.” The subtitle when it appeared in 1966 was, “The Beginning of Gestalt Therapy.”
1946 The Perls move to New York. "But we had never really intended to stay in South Africa. We had already applied for immigration to America, but the quota was filled. World War II broke out, and after the war, faced with the '48 elections we didn't want to be there (South Africa) anymore." -Laura Perls
1947 Fritz Perls meets Jacob Moreno, founder of psychodrama
1951 The term “Gestalt Therapy” was first used as the title of a book (Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality) written by Frederick Perls, Ralph Hefferline and Paul Goodman in 1951. Shortly after, the New York Institute for Gestalt therapy was organized.
“We started the institute in 1952 after the publication of Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in 1950 and it was really then when things started to jell. Up until then what we were doing didn't have any name." -Laura Perls
1950’s workshops and study groups were organized throughout the country (USA). In 1954 the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland was formed.
1960 Fritz Perls moved to the West Coast of the U.S.
1964 Perls, Walter Kempler and James Simkin offered the first Gestalt therapy training workshops at the Esalen Institute.
“During this beginning period Gestalt therapy pioneered many ideas subsequently accepted into eclectic psychotherapy practice. The excitement of direct contact between therapist and patient, the emphasis on direct experience, the use of active experimentation, the emphasis on the here-and-now, the responsibility of the patient for himself or herself, the awareness principle, the trust in organismic self-regulation, the ecological interdependence of person and environment, the principle of assimilation, and other such concepts were new, exciting and shocking to a conservative establishment. In this period the practice of psychotherapy was dichotomized between the older, traditional approach of psychoanalytic drive theory and the ideas pioneered largely by Gestalt therapy.” -Gary Yontef
1970 Fritz Perls dies in Chicago
Later developments: “As experience in doing Gestalt therapy has grown, earlier therapeutic practices have been altered. For example, earlier Gestalt therapy practice often stressed the clinical use of frustration, a confusion of self-sufficiency with self-support, and an abrasive attitude if the patient was interpreted by the therapist as manipulative. This approach tended to enhance the shame of shame-oriented patients. There has been a movement toward more softness in Gestalt therapy practice, more direct self-expression by the therapist, more of a dialogic emphasis, decreased use of stereotypic techniques, increased emphasis on description of character structure (with utilization of psychoanalytic formulations), and increased use of group process. Thus a patient is more likely to encounter, among Gestalt therapists who are involved in the newer mode, an emphasis on self-acceptance, a softer demeanor by the therapist, more trust of the patient’s phenomenology, and more explicit work with psychodynamic themes. There has also been an increase in emphasis on group process, including relation between group members, and a decrease in formal, one-to-one work in groups. There is also an increased attention to theoretical instruction, theoretical exposition, and work with cognition in general.” -Gary Yontef, in 1981.
This page was compiled by Shea Stevens. Excerpts from Gary Yontef are from his paper, “Gestalt Therapy” (1981) coauthored by James S. Simkin. Quotes from Fritz Perls are excerpts from his life chronology, which he wrote for the introduction to a 1969 edition of Ego, Hunger and Aggression. Quotes from Laura Perls taken from a tribute to her compiled by Gestalt therapist Anne Leibig.