Laura Perls: An Overview
By Shea Stevens
Laura Perls was a co-founder of gestalt therapy. She lived from 1905-1990. Though her contributions to gestalt therapy were at times underestimated, her importance has become more widely recognized.
“[I]t is slowly coming to general consciousness within the field of psychotherapy that much of what was considered Gestalt therapy— that is, the “Fritz” style of working with the “empty chair” and the like— is but one particular form and that the other two codevelopers of Gestalt therapy, Laura Perls and Paul Goodman, made equally substantial although far different contributions to its formulation, application, and dissemination.” -Serlin and Shane, 1999.
Early Life
Laura Perls was born Lore Posner in Pforzheim, Germany on August 15, 1905 to an upper middle class, Jewish family. They were a supportive family to Laura and encouraged her artistically— she learned piano and dance, a love for which she carried forward in her theoretical work informing her concepts of body, movement and support. She studied modern dance, eurhythmics, expressionistic dance theories of Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman.
Laura attended a classical gymnasium where she was the only girl enrolled. There she became fluent in Greek, Latin, and French. She enjoyed studying classical and modern literature and German literature, and she began writing poetry and fiction. She intended to study law, inspired by her sense of social and political awareness, and pictured herself working with juveniles in the German court system (Humphrey, 1986). But she was drawn to psychology when she started classes at the University of Frankfurt.
University of Frankfurt
Laura Perls took classes taught by Adhemar Gelb, Kurt Goldstein and Max Wertheimer. In a seminar ran by Goldstein and Gelb in 1926 she met Fritz Perls, then a medical student who was interested in theater and psychoanalysis (Gaines, 1979). When they met, Fritz was an assistant to Kurt Goldstein in his clinic for brain-injured soldiers, but Laura was more deeply knowledgeable of Gestalt psychology, having studied under Gelb, Wertheimer and Goldstein. Fritz came primarily from the psychoanalytic school before he was briefly mentored by Goldstein for a year. Laura wrote her dissertation on visual perception of color contrasts (Posner, 1932). There she also studied Soren Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Max Scheler. She was a student of Martin Buber and Paul Tillich for two years.
"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.” -Laura Perls, 1977 Interview
“[The Gestalt psychological approach] was expanded through the work of Kurt Goldstein into a whole organismic approach. Fritz had worked with Goldstein and so had I. Fritz was an assistant of his for a few months and I was his student for a number of years. I did a lot of experimental work at the Institute for Brain-Injured Veterans.” -Laura Perls, 1977
"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, 1977
“Tillich and Buber were much more than what one usually thinks of as theologians. They were really psychologists… They were interested in people, they were not talking about subjects. Listening to Buber and Tillich, you felt they were talking directly to you and not just about some thing. The kind of contact they made was essential in their theories. (Perls, L. 1992, pp. 21-22)
Laura studied psychoanalysis as well at the university, going through analysis for two and a half years, as part of her clinical training at the same time that she was still learning gestalt psychology (Perls, L. 1977 Interview). Laura received her doctorate in 1932.
Early Marriage
Laura and Fritz were married in 1930. In 1932 she, having just received her doctorate, and her husband emigrated from Germany to Holland after noting the political climate in their homeland. They were approached by Ernest Jones (American psychoanalyst) to establish a psychoanalytic institute in South Africa. They accepted and lived in South Africa for 14 years. During that time they began drifting away from orthodox Freudian theory (Perls, L. 1992; Wysong & Rosenfeld, 1982). Laura had in the first few years there given birth to two children, and her experience of nursing and weaning her children prompted her to write and discuss notes with her husband, beginning an interest in the oral “instinct.” These notes were transformed into Fritz Perls’ lecture given at the 1936 International Psychoanalytic Conference at Marienbad, “The Oral Resistances.” Met with criticism at the conference, Perls returned home to South Africa and kept writing.
Move to America
After 14 years in South Africa, the family emigrated in light of the South African government becoming increasingly conservative and the legalization of apartheid. They were able to move to New York City, USA in 1946-1947 thanks to being sponsored by Laura’s brother and Karen Horney. The Perls established practices there quickly. The Perls made no connection with the gestalt psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York because of their differences in approaches. The gestalt psychologists had remained focused on perception while the Perls were greatly expanding and integrating gestalt psychology with Goldstein’s organismic theory, existential and psychoanalytic elements.
Fritz had been working on a manuscript for a new book and sought Paul Goodman to be editor because of his political writings about Wilhelm Reich (Stoehr, 1994.) Goodman quickly left Reichian analysis and became a trainee under Laura Perls.
“For the most part it was not ideas or intellectual gossip that passed between [Paul Goodman and Laura Perls], however much Lore knew about Gestalt psychology or Frankfurt existentialism or the first generation of Freudians. Rather Goodman came as a patient, ready to confide in her, and hoping for some relief from his sense of failure as a man and an artist.” - Stoehr, 1994, p. 53
In 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.
“First there was a manuscript that Fritz had already written, he had been working on it. I had been working on it, too, but at that point I was satisfied to leave the glory to him. He gave me credit in the first introduction to Ego, Hunger, and Aggression but that credit was removed when Random House republished it.” Laura Perls, 1977
“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
Fritz Perls soon left his family and the New York institute, partly because of his inability to withstand pressure and criticism from others (Gaines, 1979; F. Perls, 1992; Stoehr, 1994; Wysong & Rosenfeld, 1982). He mainly resided on the West Coast of the USA and established Esalen Institute. Laura Perls and her peers maintained the New York institute, and she remained there for forty years.
Influences and Values
Laura Perls had a classical education and then graduate study in clinical and gestalt psychology. She was also deeply influenced by existential and phenomenological thinkers. These influences were integral to the development of gestalt therapy theory she co-founded, and were especially relevant to her personal approach to therapy, an approach which is important to recognize, given that for years the distinct style of Fritz Perls took up the spotlight and his style remains the more stereotypical gestalt approach in many textbooks. Laura Perls was also trained in psychoanalysis.
Serlin and Shane (1999) note that the values particularly important to Laura Perls were contact and boundary, support, and style.
Quotes
“Anything that is used comes from the individual therapist. It is what hopefully he has assimilated and integrated so that it has become a part of his background, something that he can rely on; and from the ongoing awareness in the therapeutic situation. Different therapists work with very different approaches. Isadore From doesn’t use much of a body approach. He came from philosophy originally, so that’s what he moves from or what moves him.” -Laura Perls, 1977
Interviewer: “In essence the beginning of Gestalt therapy comes in terms of eating: it grew up around the whole concept of how we eat.”
Laura Perls: “How we eat, get hold of something and make it assimilable.”“Actually when we first started we wanted to call it ‘Existential therapy’, but then existentialism was so much identified with Sartre, with the nihilistic approach, that we looked for another name. I thought that with Gestalt therapy, with the word ‘Gestalt’, we could get into difficulties. But that criticism was rejected by Fritz and Paul.” -Laura Perls, 1977
“Gestalt therapy was conceived as a comprehensive, organismic approach. But later on, particularly in the West, but in the East, too, it become identified mostly with what Fritz did at the time. It become very well-known in the last five years of his life when he was predominantly using his hot-seat method. That method is fine for demonstration workshops, but you can’t carry on a whole therapy that way; yet people do. I think they are limiting themselves and doing a lot of harm.” -Laura Perls, 1977
“As a Gestalt therapist: Gestalt therapy is existential, experiential and experimental. But what techniques you use to implement that and to apply it, that depends to the greatest extent on your background, on your experiences professionally, in life, your skills and whatever. The Gestalt therapist uses himself and herself with whatever they have got and whatever seems to apply, at the time, to the actual situation: a patient, a group, a trainee, whatever.” -Laura Perls, 1977
References:
Serlin, I & Shane, P. 1999. “Laura Perls and Gestalt Therapy: Her Life and Values” in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology. Ed. Moss, D. Greenwood Press.