AN ORAL HISTORY OF GESTALT THERAPY PART THREE:

A CONVERSATION WITH ERVING AND MIRIAM POLSTER

Joe Wysong

Active in the Cleveland Institute for almost 20 years, the Polsters left Cleveland and moved to California where they established The Gestalt Training Center-San Diego. In addition to their programs in San Diego, Erv and Miriam travel, both separately and together, throughout the country conducting training workshops and seminars for other institutions.

Last fall, Erv and Miriam Polster were conducting a five day training workshop on Cape Cod. What follows is condensed from a conversation that began after lunch, was interrupted by an afternoon training session, and then continued until early evening and dinner.

Erv and I began the interview alone, and were joined at a later point (indicated in the text) by Miriam. Our conversation took place on October 19, 1978 in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Erving Polster in a pensive moment during The Gestalt Journal's 12th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Gestalt Therapy -- Boston, 1990.

JW: What were you doing professionally when you first heard of Fritz Perls and Gestalt Therapy?

EP: I had gotten my Ph.D. from Western Reserve three years earlier in 1950. 1 already had two years on the faculty of the University of Iowa, half teaching and half clinical work. I came back to Cleveland in '51 and started a private practice and was also doing some supervisory work at the University. I was Director of Psychotherapy in the Psychology Department at Cleveland State Hospital, where I did some early group therapy work. In 1953 Marjorie Creelman called me about a workshop that Fritz was doing in Cleveland. They'd already had one, and this was the second one. I went. I just was very aroused and re-oriented. Not re-oriented, but more fully oriented about what I was doing and thinking. Everything seemed to come together more clearly, seeing what Fritz was doing and saying. I also needed further training. I'd been out of graduate school for four years. I'd gone about as far as I felt I could go on what I had learned in graduate school and to get some new inspiration and new training was very important to me. There was not much that was available because in those days we didn't have the same kind of diverse training that exists today outside graduate schools.

JW: Is there anything from that first workshop with Fritz that's particularly vivid to you?

EP: I don't remember any specific content, but I do remember the power of seeing someone have a profound personal experience in a group of people who had not previously been intimate. That was a revelation to me. It wasn't done much then. Nowadays it's taken for granted, but then to see somebody say something that was so powerful they would cry, right there among fifteen people from the community who were not related to them, who were not necessarily even their friends; was a revelatory experience.

JW: Did the group only meet when Perls came to Cleveland?

EP: No. We met leaderless weekly. We did a lot of exploration that was novel for us in those days. Explorations of how we walked, how we talked, how we saw, how we used our language and much more. That lasted a year and a half. We also had workshops with Fritz about four times a year. We also had many workshops with Paul Weisz, and some with Laura. The first workshop was with Fritz and Paul Weisz -- they came jointly. After a while, Paul got tired of being seen as a couple with Fritz, and wanted to be invited on his own, so we invited him separately. Soon, Paul Goodman came in. We had a lot of trouble getting Paul in through Fritz. He felt like Paul would be too much for us, or he thought Paul would be an enfant terrible -- but we wanted to meet with Paul, because we knew of him as co-authoring the book, Gestalt Therapy. We did, finally, meet with Paul. We met with him quite a lot.

JW: At what point did Isadore start his visits to Cleveland?

EP: Isadore came to one of the early workshops that Fritz and Paul did together, around 1955. Soon Isadore began working with us individually. We knew we needed more than we could get from workshops. We wanted somebody from New York to come in to work with us individually. Isadore was. available. First he came in twice a month and he'd stay for a few days each time, so that each one of us could get a couple of sessions with him twice a month. We didn't know him very well before we started to work with him, but we came to know him very intimately. He came in for about four years on a once a month basis, then he went off to live in Europe for a couple of years. When he came back to this country he came back to Cleveland again for a couple of years.

JW: I'd enjoy some brief impressions of Perls, Paul Goodman, Paul Weisz and Laura Perls as they were at the time.

EP: It's very difficult. I can't do it without a disclaimer about my facility about my doing it right. From Fritz I got the realization that a person could have incredible range in characteristics. I could experience Fritz as the most cutting and the most tender of all people. I loved that contrast.

JW: You saw this both in his work and in him as an individual?

EP: I'm talking about his work. Outside of his work there was a very different quality between us. In his work I felt his power of creating tension to be greater than any I've ever seen. A tension that was lively -- at any moment the world would change. He got across that kind of vibrancy of life. And he would get across a sense of courage to be able to go into any undercurrent trip. It was as though one were to go on an LSD trip (LSD was not known in those days) and he would always be there. There was no way that he wouldn't know what to do on that trip. I was incredibly supported and inspired to be able to take some of the trips that I took with him. He was a man of vast power to assimilate what somebody was saying to him, no matter how large it was. You would say something large to him, and he'd be just as large. You could say something small and he could stoop to hear it. He had this great range -- and he had an X-ray quality. I suddenly discovered that a person could actually know another person for the moment without knowing them wholly. He seemed a genius to me. I'd never known a genius first hand. I'd read about them. Now I felt like I'd met a genius before the critics got to him. I was able to feel that without anybody having said it to me about him. I really loved having the opportunity to know my own mind about that without having heard a lot of stories about him . . . I could get it fresh. I was so entranced with the way he functioned that I used to imitate his way of smoking. I would even find myself saying yes as though I had some remote contact with being German. It was very strange, I could hardly believe myself when I did it. I got over that, but I was entranced. He was a man who could cast spells.

JW: I think it's important that you're talking about 1952 or 1953 because now we hear a lot about immediacy and presence, but in that context, at that time. . . .

EP: Yes. I used to watch him work with people. One time he worked with a person who came in for a demonstration, who was not in our group. Every step of the way he went I could think of things I would say that would carry the process further . . . from interpretation . . . to general knowing of the person . . . but he didn't. He got into that person each moment. That was enough for him. And of course that accumulated into a very large experience.

JW: And Paul Weisz?

EP: Paul Weisz came at the same time as Fritz. Sometimes he came with Fritz, sometimes he came separately. Paul Weisz was a very different man. He was, first of all, a man of finer steps. He would take small steps in therapy. He could move with a person from one sensation to the next where Fritz wouldn't do that. And you had a feeling with Paul of almost Zen knowing when he would have difficulty verbalizing. He was not as simple in his verbalizations as Fritz. Fritz could describe what he wanted to describe as long as he didn't have to talk longer than a paragraph. He could talk with exquisite clarity, using figures of speech and very simple language. He could talk to you as though he was telling a story to a child. With great resonance in his voice and with profound content. Paul was much more abstract in his talking. It was a little harder for us to get the words from him, but he was incredibly sensitive about whatever was happening and he had the deepest respect for a person's creative process. I had a feeling that I could go anywhere with Paul. He wasn't the inspirational force that Fritz was. When you were done with Fritz, you might have been Svengalied into what you got in to. But Paul Weisz was not a Svengali man. He was a very human, brave, responsible man. He was the kind of person who could love something you'd done even though it wasn't obvious that everybody would love it, or even if it was trite -- he saw the beauty in it. He could respond in a way that would get to the beauty instead of the triteness. He was physically more vigorous than Fritz, though not as graceful. He was younger. He introduced a Zen experience into our situation. I remember being silent with him for hours. It was the first time I'd ever experienced the power of a silent experience. Paul wasn't invoking silence. He was not a man to invoke things. I remember doing an experiment which was very eye-opening. He brought a pail of water. The idea was to immerse our heads in it. And breathe. I don't remember the experience exactly . . . it's been so long. But I remember feeling the power of how I could, through self-experimentation, change that which was simply a pail of water into a microcosm of life. He had a way of doing that. I remember putting my head into that water and remembering the moment of the expansion of all my sensations and anxiety into excitement at the prospect of drowning. As though I could have drowned right there in that little pail of water. I was taking that chance, in life. I came out of it alive, having a sense for the microcosmic quality. It was that sort of thing that Paul Weisz introduced me to.

JW: And he wasn't getting it from books.

EP: No. In fact, Isadore had introduced me to a book called Zen and the Art of Archery. There wasn't much Zen around. Obviously there were philosophers who knew a lot about Zen, but when I say not much Zen around, I mean it was through Paul and somewhat through Fritz that we could get a sense of how the Eastern systems and the Western systems were merging. Meeting, if not merging.

JW: What about Isadore?

EP: Isadore was a very different person. At first we were all in individual therapy with him. Then, we had theory meeting with him in small groups. The way we did theory with Isadore was to read Gestalt Therapy together. Each of us would take a turn reading it. We would stop the reader at a time when we wanted to ask a question. I can remember some of the questions that I was concerned with, that I needed further explanation for, and would disagree about, and that Isadore would explain. It was a new idea that happiness might not be the major goal in life. I would argue that point with Isadore. I probably still might argue that point. But whether I would agree or disagree is not as important to me as what he further accentuated for me. I said, all we care about is to feel good. His position was that to feel as you feel is more what life is about, irrespective of whether one was happy or not happy -- irrespective of your feeling. Function came across as transcending questions of feeling good or feeling happy. There were many discussions of that sort. They were pretty intellectual discussions, which has not always been harmonious with the Gestalt view. Still isn't. I think that's changing. One of the important things for me in my later development was deciding to go back to the concepts. That's when I started the first course I did in Cleveland on the concepts of Gestalt therapy where I wanted to deal with the concepts of the method rather than the experience of the method. That was a blast for me. What I have come to develop as my perspectives on Gestalt therapy are a result of that first course. I newly organized the concepts to present them to the people in Cleveland. An interesting thing happened during the time I was doing the lecturing. It was just totally lecture and discussion. One day Fritz came to town and said, "What are you doing these days?" And I said, "Well, I'm teaching a course in Gestalt therapy from the standpoint of concepts. I'm also doing experiential things, but I want this to be just concepts." And he said, "That's fantastic, I'm interested in that too, and I'm starting to write and I would like to come and present something to your class." So I said to him, "Well, I would love you to do that Fritz, if you'll do that -- not to be experiential." He said, "Yes, Yes, yes, yes, yes. That's just what I want to do. I want to do it, and I want a place to do it, and this is the place." So he came and gave a lecture for about five minutes. You could see his mind beginning to falter in the lecture form. Not falter, that isn't the right way to put it, but -- as though he would not be able to elaborate fully and felt compelled to show how to do what he was talking about. So he started working with somebody and the rest of the session was a magnificent experience. No more concepts. Because Fritz was a man of aphorism, wry sayings; not a man of extended conceptualizations, of dealing with the obvious contradictions and the obvious implications, the obvious additions to what he might be saying.

JW: That leaves us with Paul Goodman and Laura . . .

EP: I want to say more about Isadore. First of all, he was more intimate with us. He knew us better. Second of all, he had a certain learnedness about him that Fritz and Paul didn't bring into the picture. Paul was a learned man -- Paul Weisz I'm talking about now. But Paul Weisz didn't bring it in much. What he knew was usually brought in through his integration of it, rather than as the original. Isadore was at the borderline of the writer-artist and the therapist. I had more of the feeling of the relationship of the artist to the therapist when I was with Isadore than I did with either of the others. In fact, one of my more anxious moments in therapy with Isadore was at a point when I was doing some magnificent things in my own therapy. They felt artful, and I began to feel something of what the relationship was between the artist and the therapist. Then I suddenly realized that my art form might be to be the patient. That alarmed me to no end (laughs). But in any case, there was that with Isadore. And then, with Isadore, we had continuity. Isadore did not run a medicine man act, in the sense of the magic potion. I'm not saying that the magic potions were not valuable, because I think some of the magic potions were very revealing. I loved them, and find them very educational. They just need the substance of the continuing. Isadore gave us that substance and continuity. And in the years that we were with him we just flowered. I really should speak about myself now. I flowered. I discovered ways of existing that would not even have been fantasies for me as a graduate student. And I say that without being modest, because I was an excellent graduate student and I was seen as doing excellent work when I got out of graduate school. I came to Gestalt therapy from the position of the excellence of the profession of that day, into a new day, where there were new illuminations that the profession just didn't know about. I was also young, and ripe, and it was very timely for me to grow in that direction. I felt that Isadore's sensitivity was a very un-stereotypic sensitivity. For example, I hardly remember Isadore ever asking me to do anything that I would not be able to do. It's as though he followed my position so perfectly; so finely, that when he would ask me to do something, it was right there to do it. And I wondered for a number of years how it was that my patients wouldn't be as ready as I was with him, and I discovered from him something of how experience enters into the ju-jitsu moment when the right timing happens, when something can be said very easily that leads into eruption, it doesn't force eruption. Actually with Isadore it's more like releasing a bird. I got that from his patience with me -- his sensitivity for every step of my development -- for his letting me go my own route.

JW: And Paul Goodman?

EP: Paul came after I was already in individual therapy with Isadore. Paul was simply and beatifically outrageous. He was a combination of the beatific and the outrageous -- it was simple for him. He was an inspiration for me. He was an incredibly curious man. He was more curious about the person he was working with than interested in whether there would be a cure. I picked up a lot of that curiosity. And he enjoyed a good joke. All these people were funny people, but there was something special with Paul about a good joke. I mean, Fritz would tell a joke, but Paul would savor a joke. He would love the deliciousness of the relationship of one experience to another. And he would be bemused as well as amused. He would laugh, but he would always feel the human condition in the joke. It was not only a joke but also a poem. Paul Goodman really could not understand how anybody could do less than he could do.

JW: Was Goodman working with the book as Isadore was?

EP: No. He was more like a street philosopher than a Gestalt theoretician. The people in Cleveland, as I observed, were never as taken with Paul as a workshop leader as I was. If Paul came in for a workshop, he didn't get the same turnout. Even after he had written Growing Up Absurd. Some of us were just panting to be with him, but it didn't turn out to be as festive a thing as some of the other workshops. I never understood that. Goodman did not create the tension system that either Fritz or Paul Weisz did. He was not a man to create a tension system. He was a man of conversation. He was a man of story-telling. He was occasionally provocative. He liked hearing stories. You might have someone in the room telling a story, and the other people might be bored, but he was fascinated. And he liked to tell stories. But, I think these days, one needs to think in terms of tight sequentiality and loose sequentiality . . .

JW: What do you mean by "sequentiality?"

EP: Well, one of my simple rules of therapy is that one thing follows another. Now that's a very simple rule, but it means that you stay with something through sequences. You can do something to make that sequentiality very tight. For example, if you're doing something and I quickly said, "What are you doing now? What do you feel in your chest? How did you say that? Where's your tongue?" If I stay with you like that, I'd get a tight sequentiality, and I'd get a buildup of tension. You can also have a loose sequentiality. If we're talking to each other, and I suddenly start telling you a story about my years in graduate school, we're going to have a loosening up of our sequentiality, Sequentiality exists whether you like it or not. What you pay attention to may have a looser or tighter quality. I deliberately -- not deliberately in the sense that I strategize it -- but I knowingly will go back and forth between a tight and a loose sequentiality. People don't know quite what I'm doing. I sometimes do it with surrealism, which loosens up the tightness of the sequentiality. I do it with humor. It isn't that I do it with that purpose, it's just that I noticed that it happens when I did those things. Then you come back prepared for the new experience in a new way. Then you can go to the tight sequentiality again. It's a matter of loosening and tightening. I got the tightest sequentiality from Paul Weisz. He could also go loose, from a Zen position. Fritz had a looser sequentiality, but there was always a high tension level anyway because there was magic in the air. Paul Goodman was very willing to have a very loose sequentiality and low tension, Not that what he was doing was not exciting, because for me it was. But when I would be in a workshop with him, the personal threat was not continually as high as it was in workshops with Fritz. So that was an important difference. But you see what Paul did was to bring through his own personal function, he brought in humanity. He was a human person, even though there was a sense of awe of his range of being. There's no less awe in my mind for Paul Goodman than for Fritz Perls, but it was a very different kind of awe. It was an awe, like, if he were an uncle, or someone in my family, how could someone in my family have that broad a range of experience? Whereas, with Fritz it was a feeling like, "I've never known a magician, and now I know what a magician can do." I never experienced Paul Goodman as a magician; I experienced him as a member of the community who just was so broad in his knowledge, so learned, and so experienced, that I was awed at how he happened to get past the family strictures. The story telling, the humanity, the curiosity, the humor, the playing around with people, the relaxedness -- all of that was a part of Paul.

JW: And Laura?

EP: I had my first individual session with Laura. There was one workshop when Laura came when we were doing individual therapy as well as workshops, and I had a session with Laura. In just a very short period of time she did some things with me that were very eye-opening. As I now recognize, they were very simple things that she did, but they were very knowing. She had me be my father. I had said something about my father, and then I found for a moment what it was like to be my father. I could feel her union with me on it. I could feel her universality about it. I felt in her, as well as in the others, a grandness of experience. I thought I would be able to learn a lot from her about specific language things, specific movements. Later on when I was in a workshop with her, I saw her very finely tuned in to specific things that people were doing. She knew how to develop those things. What I noticed in her that I didn't notice in Fritz or in Paul Weisz, perhaps not in Isadore either, was a -- what shall I call it? -- a way of warming in to the person she was working with. She would physically move in closer to the person. She would smile. She would say encouraging things on the side. She was not afraid to be openly supportive through her gestures and movements,

JW: When I first went into training with Laura and wanted to work on something in group, there was a physical problem in terms of her location and my location and what astounded me was that she immediately got up and moved closer to me. I was astounded that I did not have to move into a "hot seat."

EP: Yes, Laura would do things like that. I was broadened by feeling that kind of personhood in her. I experienced her brightness and I also experienced her sexuality. In fact, that first session I had with her, the only private session I ever had with her, was in her hotel room. She and Fritz had come to town and they were staying in a hotel and that's where my session was. I had a feeling of her sexuality. She had never been seductive, she was just natural, she was just a naturally sensual woman, and I had never been with a woman on that kind of a professional-personal mixture basis. I felt the warmth of the sexuality and the inspiration of the professionality joined together. It just warmed my heart to be with her. That made it easier for me to do what I had to do in the session. So it helped to broaden my own experience.

Earlier in the conversation, Miriam Polster entered the room. She made herself comfortable, listened to the dialogue, and was asked to join us with . . .

JW: Miriam, at what point in time did you become involved in Gestalt?

MP: Somewhere around 1956 or so.

JW: How did you move into it?

MP: By going to groups, groups that Fritz would lead. And Laura, and Paul Goodman. I did not work with Paul Weisz. I worked with Isadore in individual therapy. And when Isadore came to town he would stay at our house. I went to graduate school in 1962, So I had a good five-six years' experience in Gestalt. And when I went to graduate school, all the other theories were new theories to me. It was almost a reversal of what happened to most people. For me the basic theory was Gestalt, and how did the other theories illuminate it?

JW: How did that make graduate school for you?

MP: A little crazy. It was a crazy experience. Because at that time there was the overt statement that psychologists didn't do therapy, just testing. I knew that it was radically different from that outside in the real world.

Miriam Polster with her close friend Isadore From, Dean of Gestalt Trainers.  Photo taken during a panel presentation at The Gestalt Journal's 12th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Gestalt Therapy -- Boston, 1990.

JW: And when did you start doing therapy?

MP: About '65.

JW: When did the Cleveland Institute begin to evolve into a formalized training program?

EP: I can't remember the year -- I did practicums and lecture courses for about three years, so I would imagine that the training program must have started around '63 or so. Or '62 perhaps. But what happened after that was that we began to feel ready to teach others who were not among our group. So we announced a program.

JW: In addition to you, who were the other people from Cleveland who were teaching?

EP: We did workshops for people outside of our own community before we did our training programs. So the training program had two different directions in its evolution. The workshops were not limited to professionals. We would do workshops which would be three nights and a weekend. Dick Wallen would do the conceptual part first, and then I would do the therapy for the rest of the evening. For the first three nights. Then Fritz would come in and do a weekend. The people who taught in our first training programs were, in addition to me, Elaine Kepner, Bill Warner, Rennie Fantz, Sonia Nevis, Miriam, Ed Nevis, Joseph Zinker, and Cynthia Harris. We started out with a program of a year and a half. The training group felt it wasn't enough. They wanted to make it a three-year program. So the faculty went ahead with them and also made the next group a three-year program.

JW: And then, from then on, generally speaking, the training followed that system, the three-year program?

EP: Yes. And then we introduced the intensive program. We called it intensive because it was condensed in time. You could get a full-time program over a shorter period of time. The three-year program was a weekly meeting plus a couple of workshops, plus individual therapy. The intensive program was a full-time program for a month in the summer, a week in November, a week in March, and two weeks the following summer. And that was designed for people who didn't live in Cleveland.

JW: At what point in time did the Cleveland Institute go on into areas other than Cleveland?

EP: I went to Chicago to do a group with people in Chicago. They wanted more training after that workshop. From that evolved an alternation among us on the Cleveland faculty of going to Chicago, to provide training.

JW: Is this the group that then started the Chicago Institute?

EP: Right. The next group was in Boston. I did a workshop there. And then they wanted more training. Joseph Zinker and I came in to interview the people who applied and several others of the Cleveland faculty joined us in working with them.

JW: My last historical question. Your leaving Cleveland. What was it that took you to California? What's different for you out there?

EP: It's difficult to identify exactly, but let me give you some factors that entered into our leaving. First of all, we had been talking about the city we would like to live in that we would move to -- not in our retirement, but in a statement of some new way that we wanted to live. And our original talk was always about moving to New York. We almost did. I was doing a lot of things around the country already, and I was interested in writing. In fact, our book was already done by the time we moved. and we wanted a benign climate that would have visual beauty. Cleveland's winters were just too hard to bear. I had come to do a workshop at AGPA in New Orleans, around 1967 or '68 in February. When I was walking off that airplane, I said to myself, "I am not spending the rest of my life in Cleveland." It took about five or six years after that, before we finally moved. Another thing was that it's exciting to both of us to start all over again. And we chose a place, in fact, where that was most indispensable, because we knew nobody in San Diego from before our experience with San Diego. We had heard of people there. We took a trip west, we liked the people we met, and we decided on San Diego as the place we wanted to be, considering all the other warm-weather spots that might have visual beauty.

JW: And you have an institute now in San Diego?

EP: Well, we call it a training center. Basically Miriam and I do the work, and we find that it's very exciting from the standpoint of -- I'm saying we again.

MP: I'll correct you if I disagree.

EP: OK. We've talked about it, so I know what Miriam feels about it. But the idea of working with people all the way is a blow-out of involvement instead of taking a section here and a section there, as we did in Cleveland, And though, as I say, I was very excited with the work in Cleveland, in either the three-year program or the intensive program, it didn't have the same feeling of following through all the way as I now have. I just love that feeling. What I miss is the kind of comradeship right in the middle of our work which I did have in Cleveland, the sense of support.

MP: And collegial interaction.

JW: A question for both of you: People often talk of three styles of Gestalt; the West Coast style, the East Coast style, and the Cleveland style. I wonder if you're in harmony with that kind of division.

MP: The distinctions for me are hard to make, because they often boil down to the individual who's doing it. There might be some difference in the muscularity of one person or the cerebrality of another. But I'm reluctant to consider those East Coast, West Coast, Mid-West differences.

EP: Suppose you were to look at the people whose effect is most broad in the areas . . . and you look at New York, you see Isadore and Laura, obviously. But then you also see other segments of people. So you get a range right there. You would hardly say that Isadore and Laura would do the same therapy. Magda Denes I've never seen work. I've never seen the others work, either. I know something about them, but I think you'd find great differences among them. What would be the dominant difference? I don't even know. I would have more to say about the dominant quality of Cleveland and California than I would about New York. In Cleveland, I think the sequentiality is looser, in terms that I mentioned before. I think California is likely to have a tighter sequentiality. But California is mixed up for me. Because there is California, and there is also the fact that we are in California, and the people who come to us can't function in the same way as they would if they worked, let's say, with Joseph Zinker.

JW: In your book, Gestalt Therapy Integrated, you develop a new contact-boundary interference -- deflection. I'm interested in how that came about-how that evolved in your thinking and in your work.

EP: When I was writing the outline for the first course I taught, I included deflection and expanded it later on when I did it in the book. I think that's the sequence. I just felt like it took care of some events that weren't taken into account by the other resistances that were described in Gestalt Therapy. There were four there. I thought of resistance in terms of direction of energy. Introjection is from out to in. Projection is the arrow going from in to out. Retroflection is like this, sort of a hairpin experience. Confluence is two individual energies going like this and meeting. And it seemed to me a lot of experiences didn't really come back like retroflection, nor did they go out, like in projection, they just missed the connection. Abstractions just don't make the mark, for example, they just vaporize in air. Or, if I don't look at you, that's deflection. The visual deflection is an important event.

MP: It may also be that it's a product of the times. I think we are in a period of increasing depersonalization. And deflection is a depersonalized way of avoiding contact. Sometimes, given all the good intentions in the world, we don't even know who the target might be for a particular feeling, for a particular point of contact. And all we have left is the deflection possibility. I buy a bicycle for my child; I see it in a store, there it stands. When I get it delivered, lo and behold, I get it, unassembled, in a box that comes like this. Now who do I get mad at for that? I go to put it together. The directions say point A and point B, and fasten it with nut Z, and so on. And point A and point B don't even meet. There I am, this experience is palpable, and who do I get mad at?

JW: And so the result is to deflect.

MP: Yes, I have no choice. And I have also gotten bitter. And I think as we become an increasingly urbanized population, deflection is an increasing mode.

EP: A young cousin of mine, who had been in the Army, came over to talk to me. Apparently he wanted to talk to me about some problems. I didn't know him very well, but I knew his father quite well. He's one of my closest cousins. He sat, like you're sitting there, and there's a TV set over there. And our reflection was in the TV set. And he spoke to me looking straight at the reflection in the TV set. The TV set wasn't on, just the reflection. That's deflection!

JW: Must have been interesting to experience.

EP: Yes. It may have been right then that I thought of deflection, I don't remember.

JW: In terms of the example you just gave, you had an opportunity for contact, to perhaps alter the deflection. What about in the situation Miriam mentioned, with the bike, is it just that one is left with . . .

EP: Well, of course there they've really removed the object. You have no power but to be patient, until you create the image of the bike because there is no visible bike. It's a very drastic illustration because it's as though the bike has vaporized, there are only pieces. Deflection would mostly deal with when there actually is somebody or something there that you turn away from either visually, or you turn off your hearing, or you say, "Yes, but," so that the person can't really get quite what you said. Or, if I ask you a question, I may discover after a while you've never answered my question. You've been clever enough to address the topic, but you've never answered my question. Those are all deflected things.

JW: I just thought of Ron Ziegler, Nixon's press agent -- his frequent statement, "Yesterday's statement is inoperative."

EP: Inoperative. Beautiful deflection.

MP: George Orwell. If you want a good example, read 1984. Double think and double speech.

EP: You know, it's interesting that you bring this question up. do you know that I've been teaching deflection for . . . well . . . the book came out in '73 -- it took us about three years to write it... and I was teaching it for some years before that . . . and I think you're the first person who's ever asked me about it. I think everyone just takes it for granted that it's part of the original Gestalt system.

JW: That could support my theory that an awful lot of people doing Gestalt have not read Gestalt Therapy. What about dreams? A lot of people seem to think that the primary purpose of Gestalt dream work is to work with the disowned parts of the personality -- that the dream always contains disowned parts of the personality, which is, I think, Otto Rank's original concept, not really Fritz's.

MP: Valid, yes. But exclusive, no. There are times when a dream is an attempt to come into contact with some aspect of the individual's existence. You say disowned. I think maybe it's also unavailable. It can be unavailable in that the contact they want to make with a person or an aspect of their life is, in some ways, not available to them. Or something they are perhaps just beginning to make contact with. Or making contact with at that moment, in a certain way that they haven't done before, so disowned means only that I've given it away. Unavailable means that there's a reality about it, and there are some aspects of it that have not been current in my life. It can either be an individual or even a quality of my life. Some quality of myself that I have not exactly given away, but haven't claimed. Now it's knocking on the door saying, "Pay attention to me."

EP: I have some trouble with that word, disowned, also. I would much prefer to say "not experienced." "Not appreciated." "Not recognized." Something about disowned, that possessive aspect of it . . . like when I'm actually working with a person, I would not be likely to say, "You have disowned your sexuality." I might say, "You're afraid of your sexuality."

JW: There have been teams -- male/male, female/female, and male/female, who work together in Gestalt therapy, although not many. Mostly it's been things like Fritz and Laura, Fritz Perls doing Fritz Perls as a therapist, Laura Perls doing Laura Perls as a therapist. People like Ed Nevis and Sonia Nevis in Cleveland. You're recognized as a team I think mostly because of the book. Erv and Miriam Polster, working as a team, and we're here in a workshop, led by Erv and Miriam Polster, and I'm interested in hearing your comments about working together, how you work together, how you don't work together. Why you do what you do, why you don't do what you don't do.

MP: Our work together as a team is only of about five years' duration. Before that, we did only a small amount of work together.

EP: We would do an occasional workshop, couples workshops . . . that's all we did together in the old days, though we did write the book together.

MP: But our working as a team is a kind of unique way of working as a team also. Because, though we're here together, and our training in San Diego also, we divide the group into two, and each of us goes off into a room with them. So our work as a team . . . we merge for some activities, and separate for others. It's an interesting experience separating and then coming together.

EP- We're together part of the day with the whole group . . . maybe a quarter of the day . . . and then we're not together . . . the rest of the time. Also we design together. Make decisions together.

JW: We're talking now primarily about training?

EP: Yes.

JW: The part of the day that you're together . . . what happens then, and what happens the part of the day that you're apart?

MP: The part of the day that we're together is usually the didactic part of the day. When we're presenting some topic, some material.

EP: Even then we tend to alternate in our presentations.

MP: As to who is primarily responsible.

EP: Yes. There's one person primarily responsible, and the other may join in, with some things that we want to say. But may not. There are other times, of course, when we're involved in the middle of just a discussion, where there's nobody primarily responsible, but we joke around together, we tease each other some together, we don't have a lot of dialogue together.

MP: Well, no, but our ideas frequently trade off. Something that Erv will say triggers off something that I will say. Something I will say triggers off something that he will say. Our ideas may play off of each other's. And also, we alternate responsibility. For example, if we have a topic for presentation, and a demonstration, one of us will do one, and the other will do the other. And we alternate that way. One day Erv will do the topic and I'll do the demonstration, and the next day I'll do the topic and he'll do the demonstration.

EP: It would have been difficult for Miriam to co-lead with me in the early days. In fact, she couldn't even be a student with me. The other students at the same time were students in my practicums, in therapy with me, and such as that, and you were not in a position that we could do that. But once Miriam got on her own legs and knew her professional competence, then it was okay.

JW: How did you know?

MP: How did I know I was professionally competent?

JW: Yes.

MP: Well, I suspected I was. (laughs) And had enough independent experience.

EP: In fact, one of the great things in California is that there's no way that Miriam in California is "my wife." There are as many people who are oriented toward her offerings as mine. And it comes as an independent thing, because they know her. But in Cleveland it was different.

MP: The way I dealt with it then was to have a whole series of experiences independent of Erv and the Institute. I did a lot of teaching outside of the Institute. At that time, I didn't travel a lot; I do travel a lot more now, independently, without Erv. We do also travel a good bit together, and some without each other.

EP: We haven't done as much separately as together.

JW: One of the things I was struck with in re-reading your book in the last couple of weeks was that there was no attempt to separate the "I" in terms of the narrator.

EP: I think that's very interesting . . . because we had some quarrels about how to handle that, and finally wound up with that way.

MP: It felt so labored doing it, that we took the easy way out to get the fluidity. With the "I." There are very distinct differences, though, in the way we work.

EP: Oh, Yeah!

JW: What are the differences?

MP: Erv is crazier. When we work together, Erv is crazier than I am. I have this thing where if Erv is crazy, I feel like somebody has to not be crazy. And it's me. When I work by myself, I'm more likely to be crazy. To claim that part of me that I don't use as much when we work together.

JW: What's being crazy?

MP: What looks like irrelevant. I could describe his style of working, and he could describe mine, that might be interesting.

JW: Yes, let's do that.

MP: Erv has a kind of -- Erv has a way of being very concrete -- just taking experience for its own sake with the kind of simplicity that is obvious only the minute after he's commented on its obviousness. Until then it has not been obvious. Erv is masterful at that quality of experience and at the free association kind of leap -- when you're putting together, in a way that's Sherlock Holmesian. Erv will frequently make a marvelous leap into putting something together with consistency . . . simple perceptions -- that are simple only after he says it. He has this quality of perceptive simplicity. That's the way Erv works. And there's also a kind of contagious excitement -- you're really interested in the person you're looking at.

JW: How do you see Miriam?

EP: She offers a very attentive staying-with a person wherever they're going. Until the special moment comes for what turns out to be a beautiful experience. There's a preparatory period, a preparation for that moment, and her experiment comes, and then through that experiment the person will take off and discover some new aspects. She's more compatible than I am, that is, the person working with her is not as likely to be afraid as with me. They trust her. And they experience what they want. She has a selectivity of language that is clarifying. And a kind of warmth that is supportive. People are freer, I think, to go in directions altogether of their own choice than they would be with me. And Miriam has a respect for the person's direction that is not clouded by her own needs, as much as mine are.

JW: About women's roles in our society. It seems to me that women have been looking lately for role models . . . and having talked and dined with some people from your group last night, it was obvious that some of the women were using you in a very positive way as a role model. I was wondering if you find that a burden, a joy, a confusion, or none of the above?

MP: All of the above. The burdensome part of it is -- and this would hold true for men or women, whoever is perceived as a role model -- when I'm perceived as a role model what I am as a person gets obliterated or destroyed or twisted around to fit somebody's needs as a role model. It does get burdensome.

JW: What do you do when they don't see you clearly?

MP: Talk louder. I make myself a hell of a lot clearer.

JW: Gestalt has been in existence now for roughly twenty-five years. What do you see happening for you in terms of the directions you'd like to move in, and what are some new things that you're excited about?

MP: One of the things that amuses me, as I think about the future, is that Gestalt therapy and Gestalt therapists have to watch out. There are dangers of respectability, which are beginning to accrue. How to remain vital although respectable is important to me.

EP: It's very hard for me to get a sense for the future, but I would like to see a few different things. One is a sense of returning to the conservative. Conservative in the sense of Gestalt therapy being captured out of the alligator mouths of the opportunistic with their quick sell, easy understood ideas about Gestalt therapy. I would like us to be less narrow in the general imagery about Gestalt therapy. The recognition of what is an abuse of the quality of exchange rather than obliterating it. For example, I would like there to be a recognition of the uses to which words like "should," "why," and so on can be put, rather than writing them out. I'd like to be able to get a broadening within Gestalt. I think there's a recognition that Gestalt therapy went too far into the manufactured language, or the manufactured non-language. That's one side of it. Another side of it points in the direction of how can Gestalt therapy carry us into the things that are interesting to people in the future? Can we, for example, be oriented with the principles of Gestalt therapy and still explore clairvoyance, extra-sensory perception . . . ?

MP: Or what Joan Fagen was fascinated by when she wrote about the fact that some principles of Gestalt therapy may be compatible with what we're now finding out about left-brain, right-brain. That's a really intriguing possibility.

EP: Yes. That kind of thing. I think one of the problems of psychoanalysis was that they were not willing to assimilate new discoveries in such a way as to alter their system. I think our principles lead into some of the things we're talking about, in such a way as to be relevant to those. I would not have to give up what I see as very orienting to me in Gestalt therapy. I would not have to give that up in order to explore extrasensory perception. I feel like I could fit that in. Now if I couldn't then I'd have to find some other system. But I feel that for Gestalt therapy to be fully realized it has to go beyond the insights of the originators and the kind of things they had to deal with. And it's exciting to me to see whether it can encompass another generation of innovation.

JW: Some people have said that what has to happen to Gestalt is what happened to psychoanalysis. That there has to be someone like Fritz who suddenly decides to go against it.

EP: That's true at the point when that system will no longer encompass the new.

MP: Then you must go outside in order to make changes in direction.

EP: And it is true that psychoanalysis could not encompass what Fritz was doing. I'm not saying that it should have to. But I would be interested in seeing how far our principles, our fundamentals, stretch into the future, in encompassing the explorations of the contemporary in the future. For example, how does the concept of contact boundary become relevant to clairvoyance? Can you still use the concept of the contact boundary? I can well imagine that the concept of the contact boundary would be very relevant. It would be a new way to see it. Or a new way to sense it, perhaps. If we take clairvoyance, if we take nutrition, if we take right-brain, left-brain, if we take technology, if we take all the things that are likely to be coming in on the future . . .

MP: Yes, like neural transmission, the electro-chemical neurology of behavior

EP: What ever those new forms are, you still have internal dialogues as relevant, experienced at a much more immediate level. So I would like to see how far into that future the Gestalt orientation would still be novel, still be fresh.

MP: I would like to see us developed enough to return to the respect for articulateness. We place great value on sensory awareness, and understanding and appreciating sensation. But I would like to see that made compatible with what we know about the Whorfian hypothesis of language. I can make just as many discriminations as I have categories. Like the Eskimos have 26 words or so for snow. I would like to see a return to the respect for language in Gestalt therapy as a tool whereby my awareness can be made more discriminating. I would like to see that rhythm restored. But I have some despair about it. I think our culture's language is getting poorer, rather than better. We're inundated with slogans. I would like to see a return to having my language being useful and workable enough so that I can make more subtle sensory discriminations. That's a direction we need to go.

EP: Another direction for the future that I have in mind is how to include within Gestalt therapy, or in any frame of therapy, the experiences of everyday life -- as religion does. For example, to have some way of dealing with it not only in the therapeutic situation but in the community at large. I've had these concerns for a long time and nothing has ever come of them because I've never been willing to change my life to explore them. But, for example, there's nothing within Gestalt therapy or within any therapy that deals communally with the time when somebody dies. Or when somebody reaches puberty. Or the daily kind of activity like prayer or mutual involvement, that goes beyond the position of specifically sought therapy. And I see some aspect, some permeation, of therapy generally into everyday life, where you would have community and rituals, and procedures and availabilities, that go beyond the old medical model that we're still dealing with. We're still afraid of the word religion. And we're still afraid of control by central authority. But the result is a kind of unavailability.

JW: As you speak of religion in daily life, I think of ritual gatherings around meals, prayers at a few specific times during the day -- a way of coming back to center. Are these the kinds of things you're talking about?

EP: Yes, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. But it's hard to talk about those things, because they feel very much like they support the wrong personal behaviors and conformities. And distortions of what life is actually about. I'm not talking about doing that, I'm talking about the kind of thing that will repeat the orientation so that one can stay tuned in. Keep it available so that one doesn't have to go to psychotherapy to relate on those levels.

JW: To the clergy instead?

EP: Oh, that's a possibility, too. The leadership makes a difference. But also people without leadership in a particular setting.

MP: It's very interesting, the association I have with that is that psychoanalysis has what they call lay analysts . . . and "lay" is also a religious term.

JW: Like lay preacher.

MP: Yes, and it may be that what you're talking about is establishing a laity, like a therapeutic laity. Or a therapeutic knowledge.

JW: Earlier, when you were describing the initial way you were working with Isadore in Cleveland-reading portions of the text and stopping when someone had a question -- it occurred to me that it's a classic description of a traditional Christian bible study group.

MP: It's also a classic description of a Talmudic study group.

EP: Yes, and that was a very interesting way to be together. In fact, what I didn't say before is something along these lines -- when Isadore came to town he was at the center of a communal development. There was a holiday spirit.

MP: I had that with Isadore too. As frequently as he came, there was a special quality about it.

EP: So, what I see as unlikely, but valuable, is some of the Gestalt holidays. That sounds like such a trite thing to say, and I can hardly get it out of my mouth. It doesn't have to be called Gestalt holidays, but the sense of holiday, the sense of celebration, the sense of being together during times of mouming, the sense of community, is still a matter that people have to work out in their own lives, quite independently of anything to do with therapy. So if something bad happens in my life, I have to relate to the people who are part of my life, and that's okay with me. There's a certain independent spirit that comes out of that. Although I say this would be beautiful, it would be hard for me to do it. But I could do it now, I could find a way of doing it. I think it's missing in my life, even though I've replaced it with other things. But I miss the part of my life that has that in it. And the only way that I could close to that would be, for example, to go to a temple. But, what they say there is not what interests me. And the people there don't really get a chance to relate to each other, so there's no big deal about that anyway. But nevertheless, both functions are realized in the other religions, the religions other than psychotherapy. But psychotherapy has still not taken that on itself. It's still a medical model.

JW: Any last comments?

EP: I want to say something more about the Cleveland situation. There was a sense of community among us. There was a lot of live and let five quality.

MP: The excitement was the communal and individual discovery of talent. Learning to recognize the talent that was there. That was very exciting. Supporting it and letting it move on.

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