All Topics  
Fritz Perls

 
Fritz Perls

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

Fritz Perls
 
 
  Topics Fritz Perls Topic Home

Friedrich (Frederick) Salomon Perls (July 8 1893, Berlin – March 14 1970, Chicago), better known as Fritz Perls, was a noted German
Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
-born psychiatrist
Psychiatrist

A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry and is certified in treating mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy....
 and psychotherapist
Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is an intentional interpersonal relationship used by trained psychotherapists to aid a wiktionary:Client in problems of living. It aims to increase the individual's sense of health and reduce their subjective sense of discomfort....
 of Jewish descent.

He coined the term 'Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt therapy

Gestalt therapy is an existential and experiential psychotherapy that focuses on the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist-client relationship, the environmental and social contexts in which these things take place, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of the overall situation....
' for the approach to therapy he developed with his wife Laura Perls
Laura Perls

Laura Perls, born Lore Posner, 1905 in Pforzheim, Germany; died 13 July 1990 in Pforzheim, was a noted German-born psychologist and psychotherapist who helped establish the Gestalt Therapy school of psychotherapy....
 from the 1940s, and he became associated with the Esalen Institute
Esalen Institute

Esalen Institute is a center in Big Sur, California, in the United States, for humanism alternative education and a nonprofit organization devoted to multidisciplinary studies ordinarily neglected or unfavoured by traditional academia....
 in California in 1964. His approach is related but not identical to Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holism, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different from the sum of its parts....
 and the Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy
Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy

Gestalt theoretical psychotherapy is a method of psychotherapy based strictly on Gestalt psychology. It was developed by the German Gestalt psychologist and psychotherapist Hans-J?rgen Walter and his colleagues in Germany and Austria....
 of Hans-Jürgen Walter.

At Gestalt Therapy's core is the promotion of awareness, the awareness of the unity of all present feelings and behaviors, and the contact between the self and its environment.

Perls has been widely evoked outside the realm of psychotherapy
Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is an intentional interpersonal relationship used by trained psychotherapists to aid a wiktionary:Client in problems of living. It aims to increase the individual's sense of health and reduce their subjective sense of discomfort....
 for a quotation often described as the "Gestalt prayer
Gestalt prayer

The "Gestalt prayer" is a 56-word statement by psychotherapy Fritz Perls that is taken as a classic expression of Gestalt therapy as way of life model of which Dr....
".






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Fritz Perls'
Start a new discussion about 'Fritz Perls'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Friedrich (Frederick) Salomon Perls (July 8 1893, Berlin – March 14 1970, Chicago), better known as Fritz Perls, was a noted German
Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
-born psychiatrist
Psychiatrist

A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry and is certified in treating mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy....
 and psychotherapist
Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is an intentional interpersonal relationship used by trained psychotherapists to aid a wiktionary:Client in problems of living. It aims to increase the individual's sense of health and reduce their subjective sense of discomfort....
 of Jewish descent.

He coined the term 'Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt therapy

Gestalt therapy is an existential and experiential psychotherapy that focuses on the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist-client relationship, the environmental and social contexts in which these things take place, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of the overall situation....
' for the approach to therapy he developed with his wife Laura Perls
Laura Perls

Laura Perls, born Lore Posner, 1905 in Pforzheim, Germany; died 13 July 1990 in Pforzheim, was a noted German-born psychologist and psychotherapist who helped establish the Gestalt Therapy school of psychotherapy....
 from the 1940s, and he became associated with the Esalen Institute
Esalen Institute

Esalen Institute is a center in Big Sur, California, in the United States, for humanism alternative education and a nonprofit organization devoted to multidisciplinary studies ordinarily neglected or unfavoured by traditional academia....
 in California in 1964. His approach is related but not identical to Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holism, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different from the sum of its parts....
 and the Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy
Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy

Gestalt theoretical psychotherapy is a method of psychotherapy based strictly on Gestalt psychology. It was developed by the German Gestalt psychologist and psychotherapist Hans-J?rgen Walter and his colleagues in Germany and Austria....
 of Hans-Jürgen Walter.

At Gestalt Therapy's core is the promotion of awareness, the awareness of the unity of all present feelings and behaviors, and the contact between the self and its environment.

Perls has been widely evoked outside the realm of psychotherapy
Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is an intentional interpersonal relationship used by trained psychotherapists to aid a wiktionary:Client in problems of living. It aims to increase the individual's sense of health and reduce their subjective sense of discomfort....
 for a quotation often described as the "Gestalt prayer
Gestalt prayer

The "Gestalt prayer" is a 56-word statement by psychotherapy Fritz Perls that is taken as a classic expression of Gestalt therapy as way of life model of which Dr....
". This was especially true in the 1960s, when the version of individualism
Individualism

Individualism is the Morality stance, political philosophy, or social outlook that stresses independence and self-reliance. Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires, while opposing most external interference upon one's choices, whether by society, or any other group or institution....
 it expresses received great attention.

Life

Fritz Perls was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1893. He was expected to go into law like his distinguished uncle Herman Staub, but instead studied medicine. After a time spent in the German Army in the World War I trenches, he graduated as a doctor. Perls gravitated to psychiatry and the work of Freud
Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalysis of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of Psychological repression and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for curing psychopathology through dialogue...
 and the early Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian-American Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis.Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual Neurosis symptoms....
.

In 1930 he married Laura Perls (born Lore Posner), they had two children together, Renate and Stephen.

In 1933, soon after the Hitler regime came into power, Fritz Perls, Laura and their eldest child Renate fled to the Netherlands, and one year later they emigrated to South Africa, where Fritz Perls wrote Ego, Hunger, and Aggression in 1941 (published 1942). His wife Laura contributed to the book, but she is usually not mentioned. In 1942 Fritz went into the South African army where he served as an army psychiatrist with rank of captain until 1946.

The Perls moved to New York in 1946, where Fritz Perls first worked briefly with Karen Horney
Karen Horney

Karen Horney , born Danielsen was a Germany psychodynamic psychologist of Norway and Netherlands descent. Her theories questioned some traditional Freudian views, particularly his theory of sexuality, as well as the instinct orientation of psychoanalysis and its genetic psychology....
, and then with Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian-American Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis.Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual Neurosis symptoms....
. Around 1947, Perls asked author Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (writer)

Paul Goodman was an American sociologist, poet, writer, and public intellectual. Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd and an activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and an inspiration to that era's student movement....
 to write up some hand-written notes, which together with contributions from Ralph Hefferline and Goodman, were published as Gestalt Therapy.

Fritz Perls moved to California in 1960, where he continued to offer his workshops as a member of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur
Big Sur

Big Sur is a sparsely populated region of the central California, United States, coast where the Santa Lucia Range rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean....
, until he left the United States to start a Gestalt community at Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, Canada, in 1969. Fritz Perls died almost a year later on 14 March 1970 in Chicago of heart failure, after surgery at the Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

Bibliography

  • Ego, Hunger and Aggression (1942) ISBN 0-939266-18-0
  • Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (1951/1977) ISBN 0-939266-24-5
  • Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (1968) ISBN 0911226028
  • The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy (1973) ISBN 0-8314-0034-X
  • In and Out the Garbage Pail (1981) ISBN 0-553-20253-7


About Fritz Perls

  • Petruska Clarkson, Jennifer Mackewn: "Fritz Perls", 1993, SAGE Publications.


See also

  • Existentialism
    Existentialism

    Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...
  • Gestalt therapy
    Gestalt therapy

    Gestalt therapy is an existential and experiential psychotherapy that focuses on the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist-client relationship, the environmental and social contexts in which these things take place, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of the overall situation....
  • Paul Goodman (writer)
    Paul Goodman (writer)

    Paul Goodman was an American sociologist, poet, writer, and public intellectual. Goodman is now mainly remembered as the author of Growing Up Absurd and an activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and an inspiration to that era's student movement....
  • Phenomenology
  • Wilhelm Reich
    Wilhelm Reich

    Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian-American Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis.Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual Neurosis symptoms....
  • Brian J. Mistler
    Brian J. Mistler

    Brian J. Mistler, B.A., B.S., M.A. , is an American born philosopher and writer. His work suggests strong influence by Ludwig Wittgenstein, William James, Fritz Perls, and Hazrat Inayat Khan....
  • Kurt Lewin
    Kurt Lewin

    Kurt Zadek Lewin , a German-born psychology, is one of the modern pioneers of social psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, and applied psychology....


Influenced by Laura and Fritz Perls (students)

  • Jack Lee Rosenberg
  • IBP Integrative Body Psychotherapy
    IBP Integrative Body Psychotherapy

    Integrative body psychotherapy was founded by Dr. Jack Lee Rosenberg, further developed with Diana Asay, a Jungian Analyst, and Dr. Marjorie Rand, and formally presented to the public as a new therapeutic approach in their book, Body, Self and Soul - Sustaining Integration ....
  • Claudio Naranjo
    Claudio Naranjo

    Claudio Naranjo is a Chilean anthropology and psychiatrist who is noted for his inter-disciplinary work with mind-altering substances as well as the Enneagram of Personality and Gestalt therapy....
  • Pat Korb
  • Gordon Wheeler
  • Richard Bandler
    Richard Bandler

    Richard Wayne Bandler is an United States author on personal development. He is best known as the co-inventor of Neuro-linguistic programming ....
     - co-founder of Neuro-Linguistic Programming
    Neuro-linguistic programming

    Neuro-linguistic programming is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "a model of interpersonal communication chiefly concerned with the relationship between successful patterns of behaviour and the subjective experiences underlying them" and "a system of alternative therapy based on this which seeks to educate people in self-awarenes...
  • John Grinder
    John Grinder

    John Grinder Ph.D. is an American linguist, author, management consultant, trainer and speaker. Grinder is credited with the co-creation with Richard Bandler of the field of Neuro-linguistic programming....
     - co-founder of Neuro-Linguistic Programming
  • Stella Resnick


External links

Biographical:
  • , by Frederick Perls
  • , by Stephen Perls
  • by National Book Award winner Ernest Becker. Delivered as a talk shortly after Perls's death in 1970.


Writings and lectures by Fritz Perls:
  • from the Unpublished Manuscripts of Fritz Perls
  • , a transcript of a talk given at the Cooper Union by Frederick Perls in 1957
  • by Frederick Perls. A talk given in the late 1940s at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, "Planned Psychotherapy" predates the articulation of Gestalt therapy by a few years. Perls discusses in detail his developing use of focusing on the "here and now."


Interview with Fritz Perls:
  • A nearly forgotten interview with Fritz Perls (the co-founder of Gestalt Therapy) by Adelaide Bry