David Forrest: Gestaltuk
Author
Laura Perls
Laura (Lore) Posner Perls was born in Pforzheim, Germany, in 1905. She earned her D.Sc. in Psychology in 1932 at Frankfurt/Main. From 1928 to 1933 she received psychoanalytic training at the Frankfurt, Berlin, and Amsterdam Psychoanalytic Institutes. She was in private practice in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 1933 to 1947 and in New York City from 1947 to 1973. A Co-developer of Gestalt therapy and Co-founder of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, she remained active as a trainer of mental health professionals in the United States, Canada and Europe until her death in the town of her birth in 1990.
On her passing, Erving and Miriam Polster, co-directors of The Gestalt Training Center — San Diego and authors of Gestalt Therapy Integrated, wrote:
"Bachelard says that memories are housed; that they do not occur so much in our schemes of when something happened but rather in our sense of where.
The last time we saw Laura was at dinner in Cologne, only a few miles from her birthplace — and the last visual image we had was of her walking, not as briskly as we were used to, but with an air of easiness, along streets that felt familiar to her. Laura Perls’ death carries with it the sense of a life completed by its geography. She died where she had been born — the ends of a circle joined. But what a circle. Interrupted and displaced by a force of evil that the world still recoils from, Laura lived in many places. Not only lived there, but contributed to and influenced many lives that were enriched because of her presence."
1905 born Lore Posner in Pforzheim, Germany (near Frankfurt and the Black Forest) "I started to play the piano when I was five. My mother was a good pianist...It was something I grew up with. I know the whole classical literature, all the symphonies, which I had played four hands with my mother, long before I heard an orchestra...I went to a classical gymnasium. There were no girls gymnasiums. The first year I was the only girl. Later on another girl came in, with whom I have remained friends...
...I was very good in languages, in Greek and Latin and French. English is the only language I never studied. I read all the modern literature...
I did modern dance since I was eight. I started with Deikraus,...When I was thirteen, fourteen I started with the Lowelin system, which was connected with Rudolph Steiner....I found out later that what they actually did to a great extent were Yoga and Zen techniques. I have kept this interest all my life. Actually in South Africa, there was one of the Lowelin people, and we worked in my garden twice a week." (Voices Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 82-29-31)
1926 "In the fall of 1926 I was a student in Frankfurt University. My professor Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein were given a joint seminar on the research they were doing the Gestalt psychology, which was then a new field. I was bored. As I turned my attention from the speakers I saw this man sitting there whom I had never seen before. I didn't know who he was. I had the feeling: "There he is! Fritz was thirty-three when I met him and I was twenty-one. I was very young, naive and inexperienced...yah, he was very impressive." (Jack Gaines, Fritz Perls, Here and Now, Celestial Arts, Millbrae, Calif., 1979, p. 7)
1930 married Fritz Perls in Berlin, Germany.
"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. I sometimes said I felt like Pavlov's double conditioned dog who fell asleep in the middle of the experiment."..."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." (Voices p. 8)
1931 daughter Renate born "The concept of resistance was always understood in psychoanalysis as an anal feature. Then Fritz wrote a paper for a psychoanalytical conference in 1936 titled Oral Resistances. That paper was originally based on some research I had done earlier in Berlin when my child was born: the methods of feeding and weaning infants. I was mainly interested in the methods of feeding and weaning because my experience right from the hospital and what I had read about the feeding of children were very unsatisfactory to me. The way things are stuffed into little kids. The feeding is...it leads to introjection. They are not allowed enough time to chew. Weaning is often done very early or very late; and the food that the children get first is completely mashed and meally. Mothers are very impatient. Children drink the food instead of learning to chew. Chewing takes time and patience and awareness. I pay a lot of attention to the way people eat. I concentrate on the detailed activities of doing something; chewing as well as studying, putting on one's clothes, having a bath, or walking in the street. Minute work." (Voices p. 22)
1933 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." (Gaines p. 13)
"We had over a thousand volumes in our library and we sold it for next to nothing. It was just too awful. We lost everything our library everything...ACH! I can't even talk about it anymore." (Gaines p. 16).
"We tried to get work permits in Amsterdam but we couldn't because there were too many refugees already. Actually it was good luck that we didn't get them, because the ones who stayed all perished. My sister, her family who lived in Holland, all died." (Gaines p. 17)
1934-46 Johannesburg, South Africa
"We were terribly in love with each other and the baby those were very good years. He acknowledged then that I was his wife, his lover and the mother of his child. At first he was crazy after Renate. For the first three or four years of her life she hung on his neck all day long and he loved it." (Gaines, p. 19)
1935 Steven was born. "We had our first really serious disagreement when I was pregnant with my second child. It was very early during our first year in South Africa when we were building the practice and a house too. He was afraid another child would be too much of a burden." (Gaines p. 23)
1946 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 anymore." (Gaines p. 31)
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." (Gaines p. 29)
1970 Fritz Perls dies in Chicago.
"Bob took us to a place called the Brown Derby. Odetta was singing and just before she came on, at nine o'clock, I tried to phone Fritz' room to see how he was. They said they were busy now in his room and to call back later. About 9:30 Odetta sang something and I said, "Fritz would have liked to have heard that," and it struck me that I had said it as if he was already dead. And at that moment he died." (Gaines p. 412)
"I am not a bitter woman. I have gotten over the mourning...through the years when he came and went...and came and went, it was always another separation and another period of mourning and resentment. Now it is final. I have lived through it and I think I am over it. I am also more creative...and I am enjoying my life again, much more than for many years before." (p. 420)
Easter 1986 "Contact orientation and manipulation is only as good as the support which is available. Upright posture is the main support. Anything acquired, really learned, is support. Anything stuffed in is not. The most important concepts are boundary, contact and support. Support is the most urgent one."
"Improve your awareness in the smallest things!" (Cleveland workshop, Leibig notes)
...Voluntary commitment demands sacrifices, the giving up of interests and involvements of value for the dedication to a greater value. This is the most difficult aspect of commitment. ...there are choices. The temptations are all around, even in the desert of one's own chosen dedication. There are periodically doubts and regrets, as I have experienced in my own life. But looking around here today at several generations of clients and students and co-workers and friends, I see the desert in bloom and I feel richly rewarded.
Source: https://gestalt.org/laura.htm?ya_src=serp300
Useful bio:
https://www.gestalttherapyblog.com/blog/laura-perls
