Enchantment and Gestalt Therapy

Partners in Exploring Life

Erving Polster

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000264791
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Psychotherapie

Enchantment and Gestalt Therapy is a personal exploration of Erving Polster's remarkable career, the value of the Gestalt approach, and the power of enchantment in psychotherapy.

Polster points ahead to a vision of a psychotherapythat includes the population as a whole rather than focusing on individuals, highlights common aspects of living, andfocuses on creating an ethos for a shared understanding. The book outlines the six Gestalt therapy concepts that have formed the basis of Polster's work and describes Life Focus Groups, with an emphasis on the communal relationship between tellers and listeners. Polster also describes the phenomenon of enchantment in psychotherapy in detail, with reference to his own experiences.

This unique workis essential reading for Gestalt therapists, other professionals interested in Gestalt approaches, and readers looking for a deeper insight into community and connection.

In the below link, Erving Polster speaks to Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, the series editor of The Gestalt Therpay Book Series, about En chantment and Gestalt Therapy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PVG9JgpTQQ&feature=youtu.be

Chapter 1

My beginnings

Stolen by gypsies

When I was four, my mother, who was transplanted from Czechoslovakia, used to tell me stories about gypsies¹ who steal children. Standing head-high to her ironing board in unblinking absorption, I heard about children with fairy names, such as Jobbela-Bobbela. They were always transcendentally dear to their parents. The gypsies stole these children just because they loved them and had no inhibitions about stealing. They reared them as princes. The children, nevertheless, always longed to find their lost homes where their primal familiarity would be restored. Mother got to me, filling my psyche with her homing message. Even now, I still weave in and out in the struggle between a love for what is familiar and a search for the novel, as will become evident in this integration of Gestalt therapy.

What I am calling primal familiarity is a feeling I would, even now, have difficulty defining. One of its characteristics is that it is raw, an unschooled sense of life as it is. It says, “Yes, yes, yes.” We may feel it when our child enters the room, when a breeze blows across our faces, when a beloved friend calls us on the phone, or when we glance at the azaleas in front of our house in the springtime. This feeling can happen every day with hardly a notice, or it may be the cause of celebration. In any case, it’s a resting place for happenings, a contrast and companion to novelty. It is dependable, a support that fertilizes future unknowns. I received this message while listening to my mother without even knowing it, except now in retrospect.

Such a feeling of the simple rightness of experience is enabling, serving as the foundation for accommodating life’s unfoldings. It is this constancy that helps me feel the same agelessness at 97 as I did at nine. I am recurrently mystified by the fact that my age keeps changing, and yet I remain the same in my native awareness, not counting the aches and pains. It’s true that I experience myself differently now, but not so much in my primal quality as in the content of what I do day to day, like listening to novels instead of reading them—and I surely would not have been typing these words when I was nine. I would have been throwing a ball at the point of our front steps, trying to catch the rebound and counting how many times I could do it in a row. The inner striving, attentiveness, and even adventure is quite the same, though. The details of what I’m doing are important only because I can no longer get that old sensation of throwing a ball against the steps, except perhaps in a moment of nostalgia.

As an adult, I’ve recognized a huge range of experiences that give me this basic sense of familiarity, and paradoxically the more novel the experience is, the more likely it is that a primal familiarity will be part of it. I may feel this while it’s happening, but often I feel it in retrospect, fleshing out the pleasure of experience with the sense of being at home with life. I may get it with a stranger on an airplane. It may appear in awesome physical settings, such as the place where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Alps. It happened when I broke into second wind while swimming. I felt it when I was making butter in kindergarten, on the roller coaster, and in the ball yard, during a holiday in the synagogue, when I first touched a girl’s breast, meeting my brother in Little Rock, seeing my sister married, driving to the hospital knowing my mother had just died, seeing my wife rolled out of the delivery room or even just seeing her as I walked into the house, the birth of our two children and the death at birth of another, coming down from altitude after a bombing mission, a beer after sweating, a surprise meeting with an old friend, an ice cream cone. Then, of course, there are the experiences that happen every day, like sitting with my feet under me, smiling at a light word, or remembering something that builds on another person’s story.

The differences between my parents and me were givens, hardly worth noticing even though the split was a crucial one. For one thing, my parents knew next to nothing about most of the events of my life. Though this seemed okay, like breathing, it unconsciously accented the novelty of the world out there. Whereas we all grow up spellbound by new experiences, for me these were transformed into new worlds, accentuating not only the spell, as new experiences naturally would, but also emphasizing my own awkwardness and nonbelonging. When I first saw Santa Claus, and later when I first played basketball in a Christian church, or hitchhiked, or heard stories about marijuana, or talked to kids who had been to reform school, I was not only growing up, I was entering new worlds. When I would occasionally over the years relate “American” experiences to my parents or guests at home, they would smile at the incongruity or sometimes laugh hilariously, tickled by the ludicrous unreality, as though the stuff of movies had entered right into the house. Consequently, although I didn’t verbalize it, even to myself, I always knew that I was on my own. This was underlined by the fact that I got my bachelor’s degree, spent three years fighting in World War II, and was already in my second year in graduate school when my father talked to me for the first time about my future. He asked me what this psychology thing was about and whether I was going to be able to make a living at it. I reassured him that it was going to be all right, and he was satisfied, blessed with a strange faith in my own self-regulation. I wish I’d had as much faith as he did.

He was a self-possessed man who struggled to support us all and tightened every muscle to keep his body and soul together during the depression. He asked for no help, guidance, or sympathy from anyone, and he never gave me any either. There was a story about him, possibly apocryphal but probably literally true, that he was sent to a Polish regiment in World War l. While living in the trenches, he would pull out his Jewish prayer phylacteries daily, binding them liturgically around himself, and pray. The fact that he did this among people, of whom some required only small arousal to slit the throat of a Jewish person, didn’t prevent him from doing what was a simple indispensability to him. Life was as simple as that. He was never a greedy man. He worked hard, doing what he could, but never lusted for the world beyond, as I have. Even the most cunning gypsies could never tempt him.

My mother never had to venture into “America” as he did, nor did she ever try. She was at home in our familial home, in our extended family, and in our neighborhood. In the 34 years she lived in this country, she never went outside the neighborhood alone. Not that she felt deprived, because all she seemed to want existed within her familiar environment and she was not about to be shown new possibilities by any of us. At home, she cooked familiar foods; laughed like music; screamed from a transparent mind in panic, rage, or exasperation; and told stories in her soft, accented voice. She projected her inner nature reflexively and would sometimes rue the fact that, as she put it, what was on her lung was on her tongue. And all she ever had to do was say my name, and I could feel her love. But she never was at home in “America,” right up to the day she died when she refused to accept the hospital’s oxygen mask.

Somewhere along the borders of my awareness, I frequently felt a gnawing responsibility for my mother, and for my sister, too. My father wasn’t around because he worked all the time. My little brother was a simple pleasure, always luminous. He would join in the games of us older boys. I would teach him athletics and just play with him. But I never needed to “do” anything for him. My mother and sister, though, wanted something from me, which I could never identify. I was impacted by my own feeling that women had a lousy fate in this world, and I felt sorry for them. They seemed hemmed in. But I copped out and went my own way. Later on, as an adult, I had some of my warmest conversations ever with my sister. But in those days there was always a lingering undertone that I should be more helpful, that I was defecting from an obligation. Maybe this was the psychotherapist budding in a corner of my life, waiting for its chance to be put into action. But what could I do then?

Grade school was my first other-world experience. During my years in grade school, I could not understand the contrast between my school behavior, on the one hand, and my behavior in my neighborhood or at home, on the other. At school I was quiet, daydreamed about saving girls from burning schools and similar exploits, and watched the clock interminably. (I own a clock like that now, and it hangs beautifully in my kitchen.) School was boring. In our neighborhood and at home, there was always a lot of action, and I was organically involved, more quiet than most but fully absorbed and strangely serene. I excelled at nothing, yet because of some odd combination of incongruities in me, whenever there was a continuing grouping of people, like a ball team or a social club, I would find I was central, often elected captain or president. At school I was always a spot in the background, unnoticed and noncontributing, while in my home territory I would be in the clear foreground. Only in writing this now do I realize that I was making sure the gypsies couldn’t catch me.

Not until graduate school at Case Western Reserve University in 1946 did I find a scholastic métier where I experienced the primal familiarity I needed. For the first time, not only in college but also in “America,” I finally became a meaningful participant as well as an awed observer. Luck was with me. I was enrolled in a beautiful department led by Calvin Hall, the most brilliant and inclusive man I knew and the person who turned me on to psychology. My cup ranneth over when I was recognized and included in the workings of that department. I was offered a responsible and engaging assistantship, doing therapy with undergraduates, and later a fellowship. I also became part of a psychoanalytic repartee that blew my mind open as I discovered the knowability of persons. In that department, nothing was sacred, and I operated within an altogether new frame of mind, exploring the unconscious while broadening my view of life almost unassimilable. We, faculty and students alike, presumptuously applied our recognition of each other’s deep characteristics, adventurously and incisively confronting each other. We only barely escaped from hideousness by the hilarity of our humor, an abiding affection that transcended specific remarks, and our hardiness. The image of my being affected by castration anxiety or wanting to screw my mother or growing through the psychosexual stages was simultaneously ludicrous and compelling. When someone remarked about how deeply hidden my homosexuality was, I was shocked. I almost swallowed the psychoanalytic message hook, line, and sinker, a risky business but worth it to me. Even though I no longer accept the psychoanalytic perspective, I owe a lot to my willingness to be innocently fascinated with it. Learning happens best for me when, through my intuition, I am willing to temporarily set aside my interferingly critical faculties and absorb messages as given—like mother’s milk or a nursery rhyme. Discernment came later, of course, just as necessary. But my mind expanded by approaching psychoanalysis with an innocence that is native to me and by allowing my sophistication to develop organically. The new liturgy had a timely relevance and was far more exciting to me than the orthodox Jewish liturgy had been before I gave it up many years earlier.

Once at a family party, I explained to my uncle that I had been learning how we all pass through the oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages. He, unschooled and a man of great earthy exuberance, laughed with wide-eyed bawdiness at this ineffable union of the forbidden and the advanced college education. It was as though I’d become wise in ways he couldn’t understand, but which reflected upon my humanity favorably. We bridged the two-world quality, which is a major theme in my life.

The two-world notion is the natural view of a foreigner. Incongruities are not necessarily confusing, they are just difficult to hold simultaneously or to integrate. For me, this holding of incongruities was a move into the gypsy world. I naively wanted to go beyond professionalism and exercise my commentary on the world out there. I wanted my education to be relevant.

In spite of my new focus on “the world out there,” I continued to live at home throughout graduate school. I was 24 before it occurred to me to live anyplace else. For one thing, I was dead broke. For another, I had just finished a stint in the Air Force, and after the bombing missions, it was a serene pleasure to be at home, where my movements were always my own. In spite of the vastly new experience I was soaking in at school and the new camaraderie with other graduate students, my lifelong friends, and family were still the core of my community. The psychological world was becoming more and more compelling, though, and in addition, at the end of graduate school I got married. Then I left Cleveland to take a job at the University of Iowa, and though I came back to Cleveland two years later to go into private practice, my two worlds never meshed well again. One could say I grew up, but I’ve often felt more like a renegade. Nevertheless, this was a natural life development for me.

I had married Miriam, who was lovely and added new dimension and texture to my life. She sang beautiful songs, made household lovelies, smiled like sunshine, told stories, and left me trails of funny notes and other endearments. I was spellbound when I was with her. The new home with her was as primally familiar to me as the old, only far more exciting. But Miriam did not have the same investment in my family or my old friends. Besides, I was up to my ears in new “professional” activities and I didn’t have the extra energy to sustain my old life.

Gypsies

The giant step in my new direction came in 1953, two years after I began my practice. Fritz Perls gave a workshop in Gestalt therapy in Cleveland, and he was a revelation. He was an undulating mushroom of a man, with a large, transcendent head and lithe legs that wrapped themselves into the space he occupied. He was a breathing freedom, like a respirator, and he had a voice that made every word feel like the final accent with which life itself would be endowed. He had a radar sensitivity and a simple faith in the power of staying with people step by step as he worked with them. He could also be trusted in a clutch. I experienced that one day when I raged at him. He had inspired my rage with instructions that finally led to shouting and left me open to spasms of crying and a return deep inside myself to primal aloneness. In a moment, focused on the only light left, inside me, I felt his warm hand, and there he was as I opened my eyes, so tender. He said some soft words I can’t remember, and I felt damp and lubricated all through me.

And he was a very tough man, Fritz, as many people have observed. He was widely known as a person who was cutting and rejecting whenever the spirit happened to move him. It is not as well known that he had a vast capacity for tenderness, and indeed it was this quality as well as his unparalleled imagination and sensitivity, that made his work go. One knew that he knew and delights of life. Once during a break in a workshop, he asked me why I was so silent. I told him I was afraid. He said he knew about that, too, that up to a few years earlier, he couldn’t say a word publicly without reading from a paper, so shy did he feel. I was amazed and felt the gift he was giving me. Later, he named me “interferer” in a group, because I hadn’t wanted to say things that might interfere with whatever process was going on. He instructed me to interfere at any point I wanted to. I did it without reservation, interrupting aloud over and over. Finally, he got angry with me. Someone in the group said, “But you told him to interfere,” and Fritz said, “Yes, but I didn’t tell him I would like it.” I continued to interfere, though, and discovered that what had started out as “interference” became lively leadership, one of the more important lessons I have learned. Despite his great tenderness, though, Fritz could turn into a first-class bastard when he felt people trying to capture him or foist a sense of obligation on him. His own unwillingness to inhale environmental toxins communicated his vital message: we create our own lives.

Fritz was an eye-opener in Cleveland, as he later was throughout the country. Among us, he found the first place where he had a substantial breakthrough in teaching his method of therapy. He was counter intellectual and, as I now realize, he moved fast into primal familiarity. He described the nature of good contact and exercised it, stripped of amenities and professionalism. He showed how good contact joined with techniques for heightened awareness could provide new leverage into developing profound emotional experiences. The resulting emotionality was a rarity in those days. Even to cry in a group of 15 people was remarkable then and, in fact, quite suspect for the rest of the community, who saw his methods as dangerous and irresponsible. We got a lot of flak about what we were doing, but our new community had too much discovery and excitement in it for us to worry about being well liked.

What was new to me was entering into the experience of therapy rather than trying to understand it. This simple change in orientation seems old hat now, but at the time it presaged a core change in my professional existence. I gave up being merely professional and allowed myself to become as deeply absorbed as needed for the sense of primal familiarity. I moved from the periphery of others’ lives. I moved out from behind my desk and began to allow myself the sense of people’s native centrality. Whatever relationship developed, I no longer felt as a professional applique for a transferring patient. Rather, I was an actual person, responding with as much artistry as I could, joined in the creation of fulfilling drama. One of my first patients with whom my Gestalt flow became noticeable said to me, “It’s not so lonely here anymore.” I was teaching another patient how to bark, and I succeeded so well that the psychiatrist across the hallway teased me the next day about my patients bringing dogs to therapy. When I told him it was no dog, that it was me, he was shocked. Nothing more was said, and there is no telling what rumors followed. My patient learned more from barking than any stream of words could have taught him.

Perls was not the only eye-opener. Our Gestalt community in Cleveland was, too, as were the other teachers we invited from New York, including Paul Goodman, Paul Weisz, Laura Perls, and Isadore From. When I first saw Isadore From, he looked like a scholarly Arabian jockey—tiny, exotic, and elegant in his language and mind flow. Outside of Gestalt circles, he is hardly known because careerism was incidental to his life. He only accidentally fell off the psychotherapy tree, ripened by therapy with Fritz and Laura Perls and their wide knowledge of phenomenology. In spite of the great impact of all our teachers from New York, Isadore was the most important to us. The others came for the most fertile workshops four or five times a year, but Isadore stayed with us for six years, coming twice a month at first, then once a month. His visits were like holidays, not recreational but the kind of holiday that is a harvest of sensation that addresses itself to life’s primary forces. In my private therapy with Isadore, I talked, cried, screamed, touched, whispered, walked, saw, heard, remembered, fantasized, and laughed. He had a remarkable knack for what was organic between us, never contriving an experiment and never resorting to theoretical fiat. I became a poetic patient, respectful of my inner flow, always moving from initial confusion and verbal constipation into the most heartfelt and eloquent statements I had ever been able to make. He was exquisitely tuned in to my character, and his learnedness and wisdom were the fulcrum around which my life grew for 10 years after I met him.

Our Gestalt community had weekly leaderless meetings for two years, at which time, in 1955, we formed the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, an experiential precedent for the later encounter groups. We first set up training experiences for ourselves as a learning community, and as we grew, we took on the training of others who wanted to learn Gestalt therapy. I was central in this process, leading our first workshops, teaching our first course...