Sketches

An Anthology of Essays

Joseph C. Zinker

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135061401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

To all of those familiar with the Gestalt model and its many creative extensions and applications, the name Joseph Zinker needs no introduction. A master Gestalt therapist and a cofounder of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, Joseph trained with Fritz Perls in the 1960's and has been influential in the growth and development of Gestalt theory and methodology for over three decades.

His groundbreaking 1976 book, Creative Process in Gestalt Therapy, remains a best-seller and classic. It eloquently presents his unique contributions to the Gestalt method including dreamwork as theater, the choreography of expressive movement, experiment, and application of the arts to psychotherapy. In his most recent book, In Search of Good Form: Gestalt Therapy with Couples and Families, (Analytic Press, 1998) Joseph inspires a return to Gestalt therapy with couples and families, Joseph inspires a return to Gestalt therapy's roots in humanism, holism, and faith in the creative power of growth and integration that resides in each of us.

Aside from his books, he has published many articles on psychotherapy, the arts, and the phenomenology of love. In recent years his focus has been on the development of couple and family therapy. He now leads workshops around the world and is well know as an engaging teacher, helping and inspiring therapists and lay people alike. Joseph has experienced drama and struggle in his rich life, resulting in a deep compassion for his fellow man. He is seen as lively and creative, at times funny, at others deeply moving as he lovingly reaches out to workshop participants.

1

Apperceptive Mass: My Grounding

Spring 1980

Psychotherapy does not take place in a vacuum. It is not “layed on” another person. Rather, it is a dynamic interaction between at least two people. One person is the specialist, the therapist, the counselor; the other is the client, a person in need, a fellow traveler. The creative process emerges from the interaction between the inner lives of these two people.

As therapists, we pay a great deal of attention to where the client comes from, but little to where we come from. Many reduce this question to a discussion of the relative merits of medical training versus training in pastoral counseling, clinical psychology, or psychiatric social work. A number of my colleagues have written elegant articles on educational methods, supervision, and theoretical and practical requirements of advanced training programs for therapists.

But a discussion of training provides only a partial view of a therapist’s background. Some years ago, while working in Curacao, I asked a group of professionals to evaluate their formal education. A bright and sensitive Englishman pointed out that, although he had received adequate training, his education was abominable. He explained this discrepancy by describing training as the learning of basic tools for acquiring knowledge--the mechanics of mathematics, reading, writing. The goal of education, as he described it, is an appreciation of our own lives and the lives of others, and a sensitivity to and understanding of the events around us. It is a subtle process through which we create a rich tapestry of our lives.

This distinction between training and education is a significant one. A therapist cannot be defined merely by the school in which s/he received professional training or by the degree earned. No seasoned therapist uses a particular methodology as a repetitive formula. S/he takes ownership of some parts and rejects those that don’t fit his/her experience; s/he experiments with a technique, modifying it to his/her style. The methodology is molded by the therapist’s unique working characteristics: depth or shallowness, discipline or looseness, awareness or dullness, liveliness or cautiousness, spontaneity or conservatism, expansiveness or stinginess, creativity or constriction.

The therapist is, first and foremost, a person involved in lives. My concern here is with the therapist as a person. I address this issue by using myself as a subject to tell “where I come from” in the broadest sense of that expression. Against this personal ground, the reader may get a clearer figure, a sharper image of the origin and development of my work and the experiences I see as central to my perception of others.

When I was very young, my father, a dentist, had an office in our home. I was there with him since I could walk, always watching and listening. When he talked to people, he was animated and excited. I remember how warmly he related to people. My image is of a soft, personable man, as well as an excellent craftsman. My father cared for his patients. He loved repairing their ailing teeth or creating new ones for them. Most of all, he enjoyed the presence of people in his life; that was gravy, for him.

My father happened to make his livelihood as a mender of teeth. What I witnessed in his presence was a teacher who gave of his own experience, his presence to others: “Mrs. Matz,” he would say, “if I remove the bumps from your denture, you will have no pain but the plate will fall out of your mouth. You must learn to stay with discomfort to make that denture part of your body. Sometimes there are rewards growing out of discomfort.” If Mrs. Matz continued complaining, he would tell her a joke or a story to make his point stronger, relieving her pain with laughter.

As Sheldon Kopp (1971) put it: “So too with the psychotherapist, the significant part of what is therapeutic is not just the knowledge, strategies, or reinforcement schedules that he brings to the hour but the way in which he can be with the patient. When the therapist is himself and acts on what he feels, he is therapeutic… it is willingness to surrender to the compelling qualities of his experience of the patient” (p. 40). My father gave with abandon everything he valued in himself.

My mother still has presence. When she enters a room full of people, she communicates a regal stateliness. People turn and look. She is able to support herself silently. I feel that a therapist often communicates a profound message out of presence, what s/he radiates to others just by being in the world. The most important people in my life spoke to me with their silences.

I can see each of these strands in me now: the charm and drama of my mother, the way with people that my father has, and some of my brother’s clever manipulativeness which I trimmed down to a size just right for my conscience.

But I was also different: the skinny kid, the quiet one. I was not pushed to become accomplished as my older brother was. When my parents and brother fought, I sat in the comer crying. The intensity of my feelings overwhelmed me and I began to find some comfort in solitude. Later in life, I found the need to study in solitude. Emerging out of such aloneness made me feel present for others. Looking back, I realize that in those early days of childhood I taught myself a form of meditation and self-support.

Aside from my immediate family, Wolf Klimburd was an important person in my early life. He was a physician friend of the family who saved my life during the war. He was another model of what it is to be a caring healer. Wolf took me into the labs of his hospital and showed me what a microscope looked like and how to identify blood cells. Wolf was a kind and gentle teacher. He attended to me; he cared for me.

No matter where we lived or what horrendous circumstances we lived through, I experienced caring, loyalty and love from those important people around me. I particularly recall one event in which we were on a highway in a truck transporting refugees. German planes were flying directly overhead and machine-gunning us at close range. My father grabbed hold of me and threw himself off the truck, rolling down the embankment with me in his arms. I heard him praying out loud as we were rolling down the hill, and I remember feeling enveloped by his power.

I don’t know if there is a philosophical statement here other than I felt it was better to have been through the nightmare of the war knowing the love and courage of my parents than to have been isolated from the war and separated from the passion for life, which my parents taught me. This powerful attitude toward life is not unlike the more condensed process of creativity: it takes passion and courage to explode the ordinary situation and put it together in a brand new configuration.

Born and raised in Poland, the war became my life between the ages of seven and eleven. Then we were sent to refugee camps in Austria and Germany. I remember drawing in camp, taking an ORT course in electromechanics. I learned how to wire an electric motor; there were hundreds of bombed-out buildings and one could rewire the whole place for practice. ORT, a school organized by Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, was still operating to help refugees in camps after the war. Here I learned to speak and write Yiddish; I also learned some German. I loved to write and draw and I remember writing fairly fluent compositions in Russian and Yiddish. I thought I would become an electrical engineer; then, when I started studying the mathematical and mechanical subjects, I knew it was not for me. That was my training. Here is some of my education.

Image: I am visiting Wolf at the hospital. Looking through a window, I watch a woman in labor. I can see her separated legs and the head of an infant emerging from her body, just the beginning of the head coming out of her. It is a powerful, crisp image as I stand looking up, watching another life begin. Then a nurse notices me and chases me away.

The image of birth, of metamorphosis, is still very strong in me. I feel that all of us are in some ways helping or hindering each other’s process of becoming, of coming more fully into the world.

Image: We are in a church basement. Our homes are being bombed. A woman with wild, staring eyes is screaming, “They are coming, here they are, they are coming…” over and over again.

At the age of six I began to wonder about justice and fairness, about our inhumanity to each other. And I was frightened. I realized then how human beings torture each other, how we drive each other crazy. The image and the thought still weigh me down.

Image: I am in a train full of refugees. We are stopped at a depot, surrounded by other trains. We are all very hungry. We sit, our legs handing out of the openings of the large open doors of cattle cars, staring out of tiredness and fright. Suddenly a nurse emerges from a military hospital train, and she is carrying a large tray of food. All the children run toward her. At closer range, I realize that the “goodies” on the tray are half-eaten chunks of moldy bread. We grab and eat. Our parents weep.

I learned compassion with my body--from the pains in a child’s stomach.

Image: We enter Maidanek, a concentration camp in Poland. The Germans have just departed. The ovens are filled with ashes and bones. I see a small mound of baby shoes. Falling on my knees, I cry.

Image: We have paid the communist guards to let us cross the border from Poland to Czechoslovakia. It is night. A shot rings out, and a boy my own age falls dead next to me. We drag him to a nearby shack. I spend the night next to his body.

Image: While on an errand to buy ice cream, I see two Russian soldiers standing near a movie marquee in post-war Poland. I overhear one saying to the other that they don’t have enough money to see the show. I use the ice cream money to buy two tickets. I approach them, hand them the tickets and walk away.

Image: In post-war Germany, I manage to get out of the camp gates to explore a local Bavarian village. German children run after me, yelling, “You dirty Jew!” I turn on them. They run away.

Image: We are in camp. I am turning 13. My father encourages me to study for my bar mitzvah. I answer, “A chosen people does not celebrate bar mitzvahs in camps. I will not do it.” I still have the phylacteries my father gave me. My parents understood my dismay and respected my decision.

I have many images of sudden partings and tearful reunions. They pass through me in slow motion: I am running toward my parents with open arms. Running and running.

I was pounded by my perceptions and sensitivities and almost overwhelmed by what I saw and by the nightmares that followed. I felt frightened and alone. At the same time, I grew to understand my own humanness.

The good years came--with America, art studios, college, travel, museums, etc. Years later I came into my profession with an apperceptive mass: an accumulated grounding of information and experience that seasoned my life. I am sharing with you isolated glimpses of the critical events in my life. I am not telling you that those particular experiences are the “true” prerequisites to becoming a person; rather, I use them as examples of the sort of experience, which has enriched me. It is important to have lived a life that has tested one’s range of feeling.

As a teacher of therapists, I learned a long time ago that, although I can teach someone to acquire a sense of the history of psychotherapy, its concepts and methodology, I cannot teach someone to be a person. Even in those programs in which there is a personal psychotherapy requirement for one or more years, one may help a person resolve many unfinished situations and neurotic difficulties, but it is questionable whether one can teach the kind of fullness of being which evolves in a lifetime. Nevertheless, the depth of a therapy experience can have a profound effect on one’s work as a helper, a healer.

I had two very powerful and varied therapy experiences: weekend sessions with Fritz Perls from 1959 until he died, and six years of regular therapy with Erv Polster. I learned very different things from these two men.

I learned the value of creative aloofness from Fritz. I discovered a place inside me, which has a rocklike quality and an insulation from the other person’s presentation of self. This outlook helps me envision the person in ways s/he is unable to see for her/himself. Another, part of my aloofness is the effort, although not always successful, to focus and confront what the other person is communicating to me without swallowing his/her message whole.

I experienced Fritz as heartlessly uncompromising in his work with me. When I was on the other side of Fritz, I was frightened and felt misunderstood and shocked. I was often unaware of my learnings until much later. Yet I was moved by the sharpness of his scalpel and his piercing sensitivity. There are times when I can enter that part of myself and use my incisiveness and power.

Erv stimulated my Anima, my archetypal female, touching the other side of the polarity, which Fritz stimulated in me. And because Erv worked with me at the same time, I was able to move back and forth on that continuum from hardness to softness. My Anima is the ocean inside of me, the primordial mother. I carry her when I am with my family, friends and people in general. I feel her in the presence of animals and trees, flowers and grass. A flowing within me vibrates with nature; in those moments I am able to be quiet and reverent.

Erv saw me as a promising therapist; his vision of me reinforced my creative efforts. I felt his savoring of me. If he had an image of me hanging from a string, I was able to work with that image, relax my shoulders, be a puppet, and move into my lightness and dance. He was pleased that I was able to adventure him that way. Erv reinforced my liveliness and imagination.

Quite aside from his enormous sensitivity and understanding of me, I experienced Erv as Mother Earth. There were periods of three to four months when I didn’t do anything in therapy. Erv hung in there with me. It is clear that lie had great faith in the process of our work, and so did I. This makes me think about Fritz’s impatience. I felt as if Fritz was always rushed with me, and it is nice to have had that kind of balance between being driven on the one hand, and being able to sit back and meditate on the other.

So the Anima part of me became more conscious in my work with Erv. It is the part of me that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Frontmatter
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Forward Pieces of a Mosaic
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Apperceptive Mass: My Grounding Spring 1980
• Searching for Clarity Summer 1983
• The Therapist as Artist 1974
• Presence as Evocative Power in Therapy Summer 1987
• Notes to a Student on Making an Intervention January 1999
• Synthetic Thinking 1986
• Phenomenology of the Here & Now 1972
• On Grandparently Love Winter 1976/1977
• Polemics, Systems and the Nature of Interventions July 1993
• Rosa Lee 1963 (Published in 1966)
• Entitlement: A Meditation for the Psychotherapy Client 1985
• In Search of a Therapeutic Eclecticism 1992
• Discussions with the Masters 1990
• An Interview with Joseph C. Zinker 1996
• Lies in Intimate Systems Spring 1981
• Why Children? Spring 1984
• Marriage: The Impossible Relationship Fall 1985
• Series