50 Psychology Classics (45 page)

Perls saw a clear difference between introspection and awareness. Awareness was the “spontaneous sensing of what arises in you—of what you are doing, feeling, planning.” Introspection, on the other hand, was considering the same activities in an “evaluating, correcting, controlling, interfering way.” The distinction is important, because traditionally psychology involves the assumption that we can analyze ourselves as if we are somehow separate to our brain and body. But such analysis only makes us neurotic; what brings us back to sanity and puts us in happy balance with the world is reconnection with our
senses
.

Gestalt Therapy
contains many experiments Perls used to get people to increase awareness, such as telling them to “Feel your body!” By lying still and feeling every part of your body, you find some areas feel “dead”; in other parts you may experience pain or imbalance. Just the simple act of giving attention to certain areas of muscle or joints may lead you to conclusions as to why your neck is stiff or there is pain in your stomach. Perls noted: “The neurotic personality
creates
its symptoms by
unaware manipulation of muscles
.” Often, the experiments resulted in someone having the realization that they are either “a nagger or a person nagged at.”

In another experiment, Perls asked people to tell themselves what they were seeing and doing in each moment; that is, “I am now sitting in this chair, this afternoon, looking at the table in front of me. This moment there is the sound of a car in the street and I now feel the sun on my face through the window.” He then asked them what difficulties they were experiencing while they were doing this. They invariably answered, “What difficulties?” The discovery was that as long as you are fully in the present, noticing and feeling the environment around you, you are trouble free. Abstract worries and anxieties reenter only when you “leave” your environment. Some people found the experience to cause impatience, boredom, or anxiety, which according to Perls indicated how much their normal consciousness lacked “actuality.”

The goal of Gestalt is to stop living life as if you are on automatic. Many people find that they truly live in actuality only a small amount of the time; when they consciously do it more, this can be a breakthrough. Full awareness and attention resolves an issue, Perls taught, not rationalizing about it.

Most of us find that the parts of ourselves we try to throttle into nonexistence always come back. Yet purposeful reduction of awareness, or repression, means that we can never change or resolve the issue. If something terrible happened in the past, Perls taught that we have to bring it fully into the present, even act it out again, in order to “own” it. Trying to ignore it only gives it more energy.

Perls believed that healthy adults should not throw out completely the ways of children. Spontaneity, imagination, curiosity, and wonder are things we should keep—as all great artists and scientists do—and we should not be deadened by “responsibility” and always having to make sense.

Children are superior to adults in their earnestness, even when they are involved in play. They may leave an activity on a whim, but when they are doing it nothing else matters. Gifted people retain this very direct awareness, but the average adult is usually not interested enough in what they are doing.

Perls points out that what we think of as being “responsible” a lot of the time is simply closing ourselves off to living life intensely. As he put it: “habitual deliberateness, factuality, non-commitment, and excessive responsibility, traits of most adults, are neurotic; whereas spontaneity, imagination, earnestness and playfulness, and direct expression of feeling, traits of children, are healthy.”

Perls's philosophy of doing what you feel instead of doing what you ought to do ensured his place in many hearts and minds. His famous “Gestalt Prayer” summed up the spirit of the 1960s:

“I do my thing, and you do your thing
.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

And you are not in this world to live up to mine
.

You are you and I am I,

And if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful
.

If not, it can't be helped.”

Sometimes the last line was left off the posters, as it didn't seem to gel with the flower-power ethos. But then, Perls often made fun of the seekers of “joy,” “ecstasy,” and “highs,” and made a point of noting the hard work involved in
his therapy. It was frequently unpleasant and raw and could reduce people to tears. No one wanted to have their privacy invaded and be told about the holes in their personality. Yet Perls pointed out that we can only move on after we admit we are stuck.

Like Milton Erickson, Perls was a master at reading body language. In group sessions, he was often less interested in what someone said than in the tone of their voice and how they were sitting. People were not allowed to discuss anyone not in the room, reinforcing the “here and now” intensity of Gestalt therapy. He considered himself a good “shit detector” in people, a skill vital in life that was a long way from the hazy “love and peace” mantra of the times.

Perls also liked to talk about aggression. He believed that holding in anger denied that humans are essentially animals. We stifle tiredness or boredom, but we should be like cats, yawning and stretching to put ourselves back into action again. What the body wants we should give it, in order to stay in equilibrium. Is there a part of yourself that you have cut off because it was antisocial or not worthy of a nice person? To come alive again, reclaim it.

Born in 1893 in Berlin, Frederick Salomon Perls gained his medical degree in 1926. On graduating he worked at the Institute for Brain Damaged Soldiers in Frankfurt, where he was influenced by Gestalt psychologists, existential philosophy, and the neo-Freudians Karen Horney and Wilhelm Reich
.

In the early 1930s, with Germany becoming unsafe for Jews, Perls and his wife Laura moved to the Netherlands and then South Africa. There they established their own psychoanalytic practices and the South African Institute for Psychoanalysis. But they became critical of Freudian concepts, and slowly developed the Gestalt method of practice, articulated in
Ego, Hunger and Aggression: A Revision of Freud's Theory and Method
(1947). In 1946 the couple moved to New York, setting up an Institute of Gestalt Therapy in 1952. After separating, Fritz moved to California and Laura stayed in New York with their children. He went to Esalen in 1964
.

The year before he died, Perls published
Gestalt Therapy Verbatim
(1969), which chronicles sessions held at Esalen, and his autobiography,
In and Out of the Garbage Pail.

“Child logic is a subject of infinite complexity, bristling with problems at every point—problems of functional and structural psychology, problems of logic and even of epistemology. It is no easy matter to hold fast to the thread of consistency throughout this labyrinth, and to achieve a systematic exclusion of all problems not connected with psychology.”

“The child… seems to talk far more than the adult. Almost everything he does is to the tune of remarks such as ‘I'm drawing a hat,' ‘I'm doing it better than you,' etc. Child thought, therefore, seems more social, less capable of sustained and solitary research. This is true only in appearance. The child has less verbal continence simply because he does not know what it is to keep a thing to himself. Although he talks almost incessantly to his neighbours, he rarely places himself at their point of view.”

In a nutshell

Children are not simply little adults, thinking less efficiently—they think differently.

In a similar vein
Edward de Bono
Lateral Thinking
(p 38)
Alfred Kinsey
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(p 174)
Stephen Pinker
The Blank Slate
(p 228)

In the same way that Alfred Kinsey spent years collecting specimens of and writing about the gall wasp before he launched himself on the study of human sexuality, Jean Piaget was a master of natural-world observation before he turned his mind to human matters. As a child and teenager he wandered the hills, streams, and mountains of western Switzerland collecting snails, and later wrote his doctoral thesis on the mollusks of the Valais mountains.

What he learnt in these years—to observe first and classify later—set him up well for examining the subject of child thought, which had attracted plenty of theories but not a great deal of solid scientific observation of actual children. Entering the field, Piaget's main wish was that his conclusions be drawn from the facts, however difficult or paradoxical they seemed. Added to his methodical skills was—for a scientist—an unusually good grasp of philosophy. Child psychology was a tangle of epistemological questions, yet he decided to focus on very down-to-earth issues such as: “Why does a child talk, and who is she talking to?” and “Why does she ask so many questions?”

If there were answers, he knew they could benefit teachers greatly, and it was for educators mainly that he wrote
The Language and Thought of the Child
. Most explorers of the child mind had focused on the quantitative nature of child psychology—children were thought to be how they are because they have fewer mental abilities than adults and commit more errors. But Piaget believed that it was not a matter of children having less or more of something, they are fundamentally
different
in the way they think. Communication problems exist between adults and children not because of gaps in information, but due to the quite different ways they have of seeing themselves within their worlds.

In the opening pages, Piaget asked what he admitted was a strange question: “What are the needs which a child tends to satisfy when he talks?” Any sane person would say that the purpose of language is to communicate with others, but if this were the case, he wondered why children talk when there is no one around, and why even adults talk to themselves, whether internally or
muttering aloud. It was clear that language could not be reduced to the one function of simply communicating thought.

Piaget conducted his research at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva, opened in 1912 for the study of the child and teacher training. There he observed children of four and six, taking down everything they said while they worked and played, and the book includes transcripts of their “conversations.”

What Piaget quickly discovered—and what every parent can confirm—is that when children speak, a lot of the time they are not talking to anyone in particular. They are thinking aloud. He identified two types of speech, egocentric and socialized. Within the egocentric type were three patterns:

Repetition—speech not directed to people, saying words for the simple pleasure of it.

Monologue—whole commentaries that follow the child's actions or play.

Collective monologue—when children are talking apparently together, yet are not really taking account of what the others are saying. (A room of 10 children seated at different tables may be noisy with talk, but in fact are all really talking to themselves.)