AN ORAL HISTORY OF GESTALT THERAPY: PART FOUR:

A CONVERSATION WITH ELLIOTT SHAPIRO

Joe Wysong

Of the small group of professionals whose weekly meetings provided the ground from which the foundations of Gestalt therapy grew and who founded The New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, the first such institute in the world, only two reached heights that would far surpass those of their colleagues -- both in fields outside the realm of psychotherapy. Those two were social critic/writer Paul Goodman and educator/ psychologist Elliott Shapiro.

Shapiro is probably best known for his activities as the advocate/principal of New York City's P.S. 119 located in Harlem which continually made the front pages of New York newspapers and was chronicled in detail in writer/critic Nat Hentoff's book, Our Children Are Dying, published in 1966. The book details the myriad of problems -- ranging from the rat infestation of the school to the indifference of the central school board -- facing the children, their parents, and the Harlem community where the school was located. Even more, it paints a moving portrait of a man dedicated to improving the conditions within the school (as a direct result of Shapiro's efforts, a new school building, now P.S. 92, was constructed and, interestingly enough, Paul Goodman's architect bother, Percival, was its designer) and who is also highly skilled in political maneuvering.

Elliott Shapiro was born in the Washington Heights section of New York City in 1911. He's a big man, over six feet tall, and in his youth engaged in the typical youthful sports, with a special emphasis on boxing and fencing. The boxing was encouraged by his father and was helpful in contending with a certain amount of anti-semitism. He began working at an early age and delivered newspapers in the morning while he attended Erasmus Hall High School. He also worked in a steam laundry and a shoe factory. His father died in 1927 and when Shapiro graduated from high school he went to work at the North American Ironworks to join with his brothers and mother to help support the family.

As the depression caused business to decline sharply at the Ironworks, Shapiro was laid off and he enrolled in day courses at the Maxwell Teachers Training College in Brooklyn while working nights and weekends at a subway newsstand. Maxwell closed two years later and Shapiro enrolled for a year at the City College of New York, acquiring enough credits for a New York City teaching license. He began his teaching career as a W.P.A. remedial reading teacher at P.S. 202 in Brooklyn in 1935. In 1936, Shapiro started to teach reading in the children's ward of the Psychiatric Division at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. In 1937 he moved to the adolescent ward in the psychiatric division of the hospital. He remained there for eleven years.

Meanwhile, Shapiro continued his education and received a B.S. from New York University in 1937 and his Master's degree from NYU in 1946. The New York University School of Education awarded him a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1959.

In 1948 Shapiro became the first principal of P.S. 612 in Brooklyn. The school was located in the Psychiatric Division of Kings County Hospital and was one of the first of the New York City "600" Schools organized for children with emotional and behavior problems. He also established a day school for children who otherwise would have been sent away to other state institutions.

In 1954 Shapiro became principal of P.S. 119 in Harlem. In Hentoff's Our Children Are Dying, Shapiro says of this appointment:

I was looking for a challenging school...because I had a fairly unusual background and felt that I was qualified to deal with children who had problems. I came to Harlem, however, with some presuppositions that I found out were wrong. I had expected that children, growing up crowded together in broken homes, would present problems similar to those manifested in neurotic children. I have discovered that, on the whole, they do not. Most of the children here are as `normal' as children in middle-class neighborhoods. But they do have overwhelming problems to deal with. It's to their credit that they maintain their courage as long as they do, especially when you consider that those of us who should be giving them support -- teachers, school principals, and social service personnel in general -- are unable to because we're so outnumbered. I found out that, for the most part, I was not working with neurotic children but with deprived children. And people like me were among those who had been depriving them. It also became clear that my work as principal had to extend into the community."

During our conversation, Shapiro and I discussed certain aspects of his work as principal of P.S. 119. After some consideration, I have deleted them from this edited version of the conversation and have limited the material included to that which relates to Shapiro's involvement with the development of Gestalt therapy. Space considerations prevent me from doing otherwise. For those interested in the details of Shapiro's career at P.S. 119, I highly recommend the Hentoff volume, Our Children Are Dying. Excellently written, it details the problems facing the Harlem community where P.S. 119 was located and chronicles the efforts Shapiro spearheaded to contend with them.

After his work at P.S. 119, Shapiro became the Director of the Center for Innovative Education in Rochester, New York. Although the Rochester Board of Education wanted him to remain there, strong community demand in New York City brought him back to serve as the District Superintendent for Manhattan's lower East and West sides.

While still principal of the 600 school at Kings County Hospital, Shapiro began the part-time private practice of psychotherapy in 1951. He taught at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy from 1952 to 1955 and again in 1959. His teaching career has included classes in psychology and education for Brooklyn College, the City College of New York, the University of California at Berkeley, and in the in-service training program of the New York City Board of Education. He also served as a Seminar Associate at Columbia University and, after his retirement from the New York City School System, he became a visiting professor in the doctoral program at Yeshiva University.

In 1939 Shapiro married Florence Fishkin, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Hunter College and an English and Latin teacher in New York City junior and senior high schools. They have two children, a son, George, and a daughter, Ellen.

Our conversation took place on June 17th, 1985, in the living room of the Shapiros' apartment located in Manhattan's Peter Cooper Village. Florence Shapiro was an interested listener, frequently contributing the correct name, place or date when Shapiro or I floundered.

Elliot Shapiro

JW: What was your personal and professional background up until the time that you came into contact with Laura Perls?

ES: Well, let's see. I was head of the Board of Education Psychiatric School at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. I started there in 1948 and I stayed there until 1954. For twelve years before that I was at the psychiatric division of Bellevue Hospital in New York City where I taught the youngsters who came for observation for greater or shorter lengths of time. Usually for shorter lengths because many of them were court cases who were remanded to us for observation and stayed for perhaps 30 days, but sometimes for 60 days, or 90 days. But we had some youngsters who were neurotic or psychotic aside from kids who were, let's say, socially maladjusted in the sense that they were considered juvenile delinquents and so on. The neurotics and psychotics stayed for a somewhat longer time while the hospital decided what was to be done for them and what their destination was to be. Very often, of course, they were sent off to state institutions. I say "of course" because they were poor kids who, unfortunately, were not sent to private psychotherapy. I should also include the mentally retarded and borderline adolescents who were sent to special classes, institutions, or to mainstream classes with various recommendations.

Now I should say that before that I was a W.P.A. remedial reading teacher, that I worked in P. S. 202 in Brooklyn. The principal there had a great feeling that I was going to accomplish something in education. He also felt that he should become a superintendent (as he did much later) and wanted me, I think, to be very much on his side and support him. I was very much interested in organizing a teachers' union and the principal felt betrayed that here I was helping to organize the union rather than supporting him. So that when I heard that there was an opening at Bellevue I applied and moved into Bellevue in 1936 as a remedial reading teacher and worked in the children's ward with Dr. Lauretta Bender who was, I think, one of the most innovative of all the child psychiatrists in the world. Also at Bellevue at that time was the man who later became her husband, Dr. Paul Schilder, who I think Freud considered to be the person who was going to be his successor. Tragically, he was killed crossing the street. He was a very remarkable man. In fact, they named a form of Alzheimer's Disease, Schilder's Disease after Schilder. A brilliant man. Absolutely brilliant. I got to know him, and especially Dr. Bender, rather well and we met socially once or twice and had our discussions-arguments. I should mention also that David Wechsler prepared his universally used intelligence tests during this period when he headed the Psychology Department. We were quite close, but I was especially close to Florence Halperin who developed such fine insights into Rorschach testing with disturbed children.

During my student days at Maxwell Teachers College, which closed down in the middle of my undergraduate career, and later at City College, I was interested in the theory of relativity and for whatever reason, I'm not quite sure, I won the college essay prize for an article on it. But what I was really interested in was dialectics, starting with Hegalian dialectics, of course Marxian dialectics, and Engels' Anti-Duhring which I considered more valuable for me than Marx's Capital because of the philosophical nature of the work. And maybe influenced by Duhring, I became interested in Morgan's emergent evolution and Smut's creative evolution. Both theories stressed the importance of the whole as opposed to the part and, particularly Morgan's, how one can't predict the next complete whole -- the next complete whole as an artistic verity or an artistic unity about which we've had no experience.

An example I gave very often in my own talks is that if we had never seen water boil and now here is water getting hotter and hotter and hotter and now it is 200 degrees, now 201 degrees, now 205, now 206 -- even when the water has reached 210 degrees we wouldn't know that it would start to boil at 212 degrees unless we had seen it happen before. We wouldn't have been able to predict it. And I've often thought, and discussed and maybe argued a bit with people, that there are creative happenings that are in a sense unpredictable because certainly another element enters and changes the entire gestalt to such an extent that before it occurred you would not have been be able to predict it. All of this was interesting to me at the time and is related to what might be called those creative jumps in Gestalt therapy.

JW: So long before your initial contact with Laura and Frederick Perls, you were already reading much of the theoretical material that was later basic to the development of the theory of Gestalt therapy.

ES: I was always interested in Gestalt psychology because it has a theory of closure, which in a sense is that creative jump I mentioned before -- that the mind makes a creative jump. When there are enough elements you suddenly see a whole that you wouldn't have been able to see before. But this isn't quite the creative jump of, let's say, a new entity. The closure jump occurs when the new element or elements allow you to infer or achieve a creative conclusion. The "emergent" jump occurs when you actually see it happen. It cannot be foretold.

So I guess I was almost ready made to fall into Gestalt therapy. But I didn't know about Gestalt therapy until a teacher at the school at Kings County, Carl Fenichel give me a copy of Ego, Hunger and Aggression. Carl was a wonderful teacher who later founded The League School for mentally sick children. The school is still in existence many years after his death, near Kings County, now in a separate building.

Carl had gone to see Laura and he'd come back with Ego, Hunger and Aggression which I had not found on my own. The book, of course, interested me very much and so I then went to see Laura, too. I think that was during my first year at Kings County -- or maybe the second year. I'd had a long time feeling, a philosophical feeling, for Gestalt therapy. I had studied with Wertheimer at the New School, for instance. A wonderful man. Solomon Asch was in the class as a kind of additional authority. I don't know if you know the name now, but he was really quite a famous contributor of years back in regard to Gestalt psychology. I should note, too, that about a decade earlier, Bender had devised the famous Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test, which I had helped edit and that Schilder had devoted many pages to Gestalt psychology in his seminal Mind, Perception and Thought.

Later I got my master's from N.Y.U. and quite a few years later my doctorate in clinical psychology from N.Y.U. There was almost no interest in the graduate schools in either Gestalt therapy or Gestalt psychology so I can't say that my graduate studies have contributed a great deal to my knowledge. Maybe a bit in regard to the Rorschach and various other tests: otherwise relatively little.

Somewhere along the line I should mention I was a member of the Socialist Party. Florence, my wife, was a member of the Socialist Party too. We participated in quite a few events during the Depression, including testing of civil rights against Mayor Hague in Jersey City when the Socialist Party Presidential Candidate, Norman Thomas, was beaten up. I had known he was attacked because we were there and we were all sort of attacked, but I didn't realize how badly he was beaten up until just recently when I came upon an account of the incident in a book I've been reading. And, of course, we participated in marches on Washington and that kind of thing. I think that I learned there -- or maybe I even had known it before somehow -- but somewhere along the line I recognized two things: 1) that people who are ambitious are on the whole cowardly on behalf of their ambitions; and 2) that it is important to develop somewhere some countervailing power if you are going to contend with the ambitious people who are at the top of the bureaucracy or who are trying to move towards the top of the bureaucracy. If you know both you can contend with them with a certain measure of success. I was also helped by the fact that Florence evidenced no worry about what I was up to.

JW: You need to create your own power?

ES: Yes, you have to find a way of creating your own power and the power that you create has to be the kind of power that will embarrass the people who are ambitious or who are in positions of some power, starting with the assistant principal, the principal, and so forth. Each one. And if you have the ability to embarrass one or the other, or whichever one that you are electing to embarrass, that person knows it. And he's is going to treat you very carefully.

I don't know what all this has to do with Gestalt therapy except that it has to do with the ability to dare, to take a chance, you see. And actually in Gestalt therapy, really what happens so often, is that in a relatively safe environment the patient is encouraged to take a chance in some area where he wouldn't have taken a chance before. So in a sense during all my struggle with the power structure, I was prepared to take a chance because I was pretty certain that no matter what the threats would be those threats would not be carried out.

JW: While all this was going on, at the same time you were involved in the formation of The New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. How did the Institute get formed?

ES: It didn't get formed. It was like Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin -- it just "growed." And, by the way, the Institute has a history of being like Topsy and that's all to the good. Everyone there was strongly sensitive to bureaucracy. It was interesting, out of all the people who were there, who had come from various places and various kinds of occupations, jobs, and had all kinds of different experiences, without exception all had the very strong feeling that a bureaucracy was a disease. It was a chronic disease of some kind. And we were clear that if anything was going to be developed in regard to this Institute, it must not be a bureaucratic Institute -- one that gives degrees or gives certificates. During the early years the Institute had nobody taking care of it. Even now it has almost that same flavor. In the many years since I've retired from it, they've finally gotten somebody who at least sends messages that inform you when the next meeting is going to occur and what the topic of the meeting is.

Because of its anti-bureaucratic attitude the New York Institute has lost, as it were, in competition with the other various Gestalt institutes around the country. These other institutes, including the Polsters (whom I like), have developed formal training programs of one kind or another. The New York Institute has remained remarkably true to its original feeling that we were there together. They're still there and still acting there together. They discuss or do whatever it is, but almost never do you see an "organization."

JW: Paul Goodman, Laura Perls, Frederick Perls -- they were anarchists in the most positive sense of the word.

ES: That's true -- so was I, both an anarchist and a democratic socialist -- which is not the contradiction that it appears to be. Another interesting fact that I mentioned in regard to Laura Perls when I said a few things at one of the meetings that was held in honor of her 75th birthday is that she's a very vital figure. She could easily have taken the lead of the institute. She has charismatic qualities of one kind or another. Even though she's been very busy with Gestalt all the time and spreads the message here, there, and everywhere she never, almost like it's an act of will, played the kind of leadership role that you would expect. One which would have developed an organization which would have become powerful, clear-cut in its statement in regard to Gestalt principles with various levels of not only membership but classes, a sort of school -- the kind of thing the Polsters have done. She refrained from it. And it's to her credit that she was able to refrain from it because there's no doubt she had all the qualities to take charge. But she didn't take charge.

JW: She was, however, ever consistent in her efforts to keep the New York Institute alive and vital.

ES: Yes. She was always true to the Institute. She was always there. And when you ask her what she's doing, she says "I'm keeping my nose to the grindstone."

JW: So in those days in the beginning there was you, Paul Goodman, Paul Weisz...?

ES: The people who were there originally were Paul Weisz, Paul Goodman, Isadore From, Allison Montague, a fellow named Peter who had produced a small movie that was a very big critical success. I don't recall what the movie was about, but it was a critical success. I can't remember his last name. Then there was of course Buck Eastman, Jim Simkin, Paul Oliver, and Paul Weisz's wife Lottie.

JW: I'm surprised. In all the reading I've done, in all the conversations I've had with other early pioneers in Gestalt therapy, and even during the other interviews we've done for the Oral History of Gestalt Therapy, this is the first time I've ever heard Allison Montague's name. Can you tell me something about him?

ES: Allison Montague was a formally trained psychiatrist at Bellevue Psychiatric. I knew him very well during my years at Bellevue but it wasn't until the New York Institute began meeting that I discovered that he was interested in Gestalt therapy. A very tall, good looking man. Many of the women at Bellevue would eagerly have been very serious with him.

To my surprise, when I came to the group for the first time, he was there. This was the initial meeting of the group -- the first time for us all. And it was startling to me that he was there because he was a psychiatrist, absolutely formally trained in psychoanalysis at N.Y.U. and had been at Bellevue for a long time and was very highly regarded there. I was surprised to see him because I believed none of the rest of us were regarded very highly professionally anywhere. Wherever we were we were probably thought of as mavericks. I would never have thought of Montague as a maverick. Some years later he died in an accident. At the time of his death he had become the official psychiatrist at Columbia University for the students, undergraduates and graduates both. When he died, I felt it personally because I liked him very much. In our few personal contacts, here and there, we got along rather well. I think we enjoyed each other's company.

JW: The Institute met regularly at 315 Central Park West on Manhattan's Upper West Side. What kinds of things took place?

ES: Laura said, "Well, we'll have our professional group in a kind of group therapy session." Our professional group consisted of all the people I've mentioned together with Fritz, of course, and Laura. And some people I'm sure I'm leaving out.

The original group met consistently for two years. We hammered at each other, and hammered, and hammered -- every week. And it was the most vigorous hammering you can imagine. I recall a friend of the assistant principal at P. S. 119, a doctor, to me a very able, very nice man, who was interested in perhaps moving into psychotherapy on a professional level. He came to one of the meetings and when he left he spoke to our mutual friend, namely the assistant principal. He said he had never witnessed the aggressive and profound battling that went on in those groups. Nobody, virtually nobody, was safe at anytime.

If you could live through these groups and take the corrections, the insults, the remarks... All these remarks were offered in some kind of professional way, in a professional sense, but with great emotion. And often, even though they were offered in a professional sense they were picked up by the recipient as being unprofessional: that this doesn't come from your professional self, this comes from you. And then that person gets hammered after having hammered somebody else, then the next person immediately gets hammered, and so on. This happened to everybody, including Fritz, who did not appreciate it, particularly when it came from Paul Goodman.

JW: Was the criticism of Fritz primarily from Goodman?

ES: No, everybody criticized Fritz, but Paul's criticism was most sustained. Paul would often say to Fritz, "The problem with you Fritz is that you're not sufficiently verbal, that you're really not an intellectual." He would say this and almost cause the conflict of sibling rivalry. He'd say, "Laura's intellectual. You're not an intellectual." That kind of thing. But Fritz would respond in kind -- or unkind.

The interesting thing was that no matter how they hammered at each other at these meetings, after they were over many of us would go out and have coffee together. We'd all be in good spirits and forget that we'd been almost murdering each other.

JW: What was it that you were hammering out? Ideas? Personal feelings? Everything?

ES: I don't know that it was so much that we were hammering out ideas, really. We were doing, in a sense, psychotherapy on one another and we were picking up what we saw or heard or imagined we heard, whatever it was, and we picked it up very emphatically. Later on when I participated in or heard other group therapy sessions everything seemed so mild compared to this. Some people couldn't take it and quit finally.

I later read The Gestalt Therapy Handbook. I was amused to see an article by Jim Simkin who said he left New York because Paul Goodman and Elliott Shapiro were loading elephant shit on him and he didn't feel like having that much elephant shit dumped on him.

He had been working at a V.A. Hospital in New Jersey and he made, it seemed to me, rather interesting contributions to the group. Another thing the group did from time to time was to talk about what they did with their patients at a given time. Sometimes the group became a clinic conference. The patient in absentia was being described in his relationships with his therapist. And very often those relationships were being corrected by various other members of the group, especially Simkin's relationships with his patients. There was much, "Oh, you're doing this because..." directed at Simkin. It seemed to me Jim was hit pretty heavily, and again, I think, primarily by Paul Goodman. But he indicates in the article that I hit him heavily. I didn't think so. Of all the people there, I thought I was the most kindly. Anyway...

JW: A short interruption. Was Magda Denes in this group at this time?

ES: She came towards the end. That's right. I'm glad you mentioned her. She impressed us as an attractive, very bright, young person. We were all quite a bit older than she. And there's no question that she was very able. She got her doctorate relatively quickly. Those of us who were working for a living took a long time getting our doctorates. She's made a very big name for herself. As a matter of fact, I referred a patient to her recently. It's my only contact with her in the last 20 or more years.

Paul Weisz's wife, Lottie, was also there. She was also a psychiatrist at Bellevue although I didn't remember her there that clearly but I did kind of recognize her when I got to the group. Except for Fritz, the only people there who were M.D.s were Eastman, Lottie, Paul Weisz and Allison Montague. There may have been others; I don't quite remember them. I remember our talking about developing the group as a group and also as an institute. And there was always the train of thought, "Yes we ought to develop this as an institute but we have to be careful that nobody's in charge, nobody's authoritative, that we were all equals, one way or another, that we were all equals."

I think our concerns about authoritarianism and equality got in the way of the Institute in many ways, but nevertheless I respect it very highly, and I respect the fact that they've managed to keep things that way all through these years.

JW: Your activity at the Institute was before the Perls, Hefferline and Goodman book had been published?

ES: Before. Perhaps a year before.

JW: What can you tell us about its development?

ES: I spoke to Paul Goodman about the book many times. I remember very clearly saying that it was a shame that the book was published the way it was. I felt that the first part should have been the last part. Even better, I would have preferred that it not be in the book at all. It should have been a separate handbook of some kind.

I had been teaching Abnormal Psychology at Brooklyn College from 1948 to 1952 in the afternoons and evenings and had been using material from Ego, Hunger and Aggression in my classes. The students were working the exercises from it as a kind of term paper, reporting on experiences such as their internal listening -- doing all the aspects of the exercises and reporting on them. The papers got to be rather engrossing. So, in a sense, I had done about the same thing as Hefferline had done at Columbia. It was natural to do it that way once one was a Gestalt therapist. I had collected the material but never thought really to use it. Hefferline had the creative notion to at least incorporate it into something.

Hefferline seemed kind of strange to me. He started coming to the group towards the end of these sessions. He certainly wasn't there during the first couple of years. He never contributed. He was quiet and nobody picked on him that much for being quiet either. He was almost just a piece of furniture.

JW: He was able to be quiet and get away with it.

ES: Yes. And then gradually he moved away from Gestalt therapy. He got to be interested in what might be called biokinetics or something like that.

JW: Let's go back to the writing of Gestalt Therapy.

ES: Oh, yes. So, I said to Paul, "This really is your book." And Paul said, "Yes, one of the problems is that Fritz is no writer (he had said this often to Fritz so he wasn't talking behind his back). He's not gifted with words," and so on. Although I realize he did write a very good paper in 1948 which was, I think, in some ways more intellectual than Ego, Hunger and Aggression [Shapiro is speaking here of "Theory and Technique of Personality Integration" which was later reprinted in John O. Steven's Gestalt Is in 1975]. But Paul felt very, very strongly that he had written the book. He was somewhere between hurt and embittered by the fact that he was not considered the principal author of the book.

Paul had expressed the feeling that what ended up being book two should have been book one, but it was the publisher who pushed putting the "handbook" first. The publisher believed that it was an era of self-help books in regard to psychotherapy, psychology and so on. This was a reaction, I think to the large number of sessions that would go on in psychoanalysis, that people had to spend all that money and time. So the publisher, Arthur Ceppos, believed that the first section would popularize the book. As it turned out, the first section depopularized the book for people who might have read the actual book. People felt this was something too much like a self-help book and that it didn't lend credibility to the basic theory of Gestalt therapy.

JW: It would appear, though, that Ceppos was wrong as the book did not sell well at all in the early years of its publication.

ES: No, it didn't. It did not sell well at all. I feel he was really quite wrong.

Now there are other people whom I should mention in more detail. Paul Weisz. Paul Weisz was very, very smart, quite learned. He was particularly interested in eastern philosophies. He made, it seemed to me, some of the best contributions to these sessions. He was not so bitterly attacked, either. There was the respect that one has when listening to a true intellectual. And I think that he was a fine therapist. I really believe that he, Isadore From, and Laura were probably the three best therapists. Maybe Paul Weisz was the best therapist. I felt his loss keenly. It's unfortunate he didn't write because he made what seemed to me rather important contributions. And I think he was very successful, at least much more successful than most, as a therapist.

One thing that became interesting to me at these sessions was that there often would be various dramatic events in which one of the other group members became, as it were, the center of attention in which he was asked to live through experiences that he indicated were symbolic or traumatic to him. Some experience that symbolised, let's say, a relationship to the father. And it would be worked through and the person, of course, would have an intense emotional experience there. It was a true "Ah Hah!" experience with crying, or whatever, and a sudden release. And immediately you saw a big change.

But over a period of time we realized that while these big changes might be instantaneous, they lasted for only a short period of time and that you had to continue to work at it and work at it and work at it. This was an insight that most of us developed during these sessions. What bothered me was that the West Coast people never developed this understanding. Not even Fritz ever developed it.

Fritz was a kind of salesman. First he would go off and become a salesman in Cleveland. I believe, though, that Isadore From was responsible for the lasting impression in Cleveland. Then Fritz would go off and become a salesman in Florida. He suggested that I should go to Florida. He said that he would guarantee me a thousand dollars a month there and that if I didn't make the thousand he would make up the difference. And in those days a thousand dollars a month was a lot of money. I didn't take him up on it. And maybe just as well, in the sense that he was not someone whom you relied on in regard to money. But in any case it was interesting that Fritz would be able to come back and report all kinds of successes here there and everywhere, and in a sense, I think, those successes were reported accurately, historically.

What bothered me about Fritz was that as he developed these various innovative ideas, you know, the empty chair kind of thing, and so on, he seemed to depend too much on it. And what he did was develop a kind of travelling act, especially as he began to make those short movies. And they were very impressive. I was in the audience in a number of places where these were shown. I recall one time we met at the Carnegie Endowment Center opposite the United Nations. A big hall there was filled with young people, well dressed young people who were either college or graduate students, it seemed to me, at Yale, Vassar and various places like that. It really astounded me that all these well dressed people had come. I was conscious of the fact that these were well dressed people because by this time most young people weren't well dressed. And the young woman who was at the heart of this moving presentation was present and she became a movie star whom people virtually asked for autographs and that kind of thing. I saw the weakness of it, but when I was asked to be the final discussant I made only some polite remarks. I didn't say what I wanted to say.

I realized that there was quite a difference in how I thought about Gestalt therapy. Gestalt therapy did have a kind of admonition, "You're intellectualizing." When you were in therapy yourself or with other people the statement was often made, "You're intellectualizing." And there was a verity to it. But there was, I came to believe, a twilight zone and that you might go overboard and that you might, as it were, under-intellectualize. That's what happened to the West Coast people. They under-intellectualized.

There's a difference between intellectualizing and being an intellectual. I think that's one of the things that came out of California in the 1960's and 1970's -- not only that Gestalt therapy interfered with intellectualizing in terms of self-understanding, it also did not believe in being an intellectual.

After Fritz died there was a memorial service held at one of the local elementary schools and Paul Goodman gave the basic talk. In his talk Paul didn't say entirely the polite thing, for he accused Fritz of not having been an intellectual and of leading Gestalt therapy down the wrong road and that because of him Gestalt therapy was becoming anti-intellectual. Something of that nature. Similar to the things he'd said to Fritz during the early days of the Institute.

JW: Did people get angry?

ES: Oh, yes. There were people there from other cities, including some people from the West Coast. They were sitting around and they were very angry. Particularly, I think, because they weren't prepared for Goodman giving Laura the credit that had long been denied her -- credit clearly due her. This was resented very much. In a way it was a talk that wasn't in the best of taste for a memorial service!

JW: During this time period that we're talking about, in addition to attending the Institute meetings, you were spending most of your time at Kings County Hospital, then as Principal of P.S. 119, plus you had a part time private practice.

ES: Plus I was also a researcher for the Jewish Labor Committee on labor reports. I reported on what might be considered brotherhood articles in the labor and minorities press and produced a 35 page paper at the end of each month. I went through about 300 minority papers and, of course, the labor papers and wrote a monthly column for these papers. I also started taking my courses towards my doctorate.

JW: What impact did your relationship with the New York Institute have on your career as an educator and political activist?

ES: Well, as things broke one way or another a lot of things happened that appeared in the press and got other media coverage and as Fritz, Laura, and the two Pauls saw all of this I felt their support, their enjoyment, and their feeling that this was a kind of extension of the daringness that they were trying to develop in therapy and, in a sense, in their own lives. After all, Fritz was daring, going all the way through America and almost the world with his maverick point of view. Laura, too, and of course Paul Goodman lived a life without boundary. Isadore From was very active in this regard.

So at that time I felt well supported by the people at the Gestalt Therapy Institute, and I knew I could see in the expression on their faces when I came in, especially when some episode had occurred, because episodes were occurring with some frequency, that they derived great pleasure from it. Finally, while I was still at P. S. 119, Paul Goodman, greatly to my surprise, dedicated a book to me -- The Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals. I consider it a fine book that is completely ignored in a way, but some of those essays are really tremendously insightful and profound. Really remarkable essays. It's pretty hard to find peers in anybody else's writings. But not many bought the book. It finally is out again in paperback. I would say that I had that feeling of great support and when the Harlem community, the P. S. 119 home community, threw a dinner for me the Perls came, Paul Goodman came, I'm not sure who else, but we had quite a delegation from the Gestalt therapy group come to this dinner and it was very nice to see that. They had learned about it. I hadn't told them about it. I don't know how they learned about it actually, because the people in Harlem didn't know about them.

JW: I'd like to read you a statement from the book Paul Goodman co-authored with his architect brother, Percival, Communitas, and have you react to it. "In the educational community, the mores are in principle permissive and experimental and the persons form almost invariably a spectrum of radical life from highly moralistic religious pacifists, through socialists and LaFolette or T.V.A. liberals to free thinking anarchists. The close contact of such persons, the democratic and convivial intermingling of faculty and students, leads inevitably to violent dissensions, sexual rivalries, threatened families. It is at this point that the community could become a therapeutic group and try by its travails to hammer out a new ideal for all of us in these difficult areas where obviously our modern society is in transition."

ES: There's a lot to that but there's something of Summerhill in there -- too much of Summerhill in a way, because aside from what it did contribute philosophically as far as education is concerned, Summerhill did not move, as it were, in a larger society. The school has to move into the larger society and provide praxis, insights, its changes, the developments, and so on. I have a feeling that this really doesn't occur if its based that much on Summerhill. I have the feeling, the strong feeling, that first the child has to know that he lives in a world that is sufficiently secure so that he can take chances, and that he can learn this only if the grown-ups, the immediate grown-ups in his life, provide a secure world without providing a passive world or a world that allows the child to manipulate the grown-ups. A school has to provide an understanding by the children that the adults know what they're doing, that they're there sufficiently, that they're able enough, as it were, to be protective, so that they're not in danger. Since you're not in danger then you're able to experiment, to do things that you might not otherwise do.

JW: Isn't that almost identical with what you said about the therapeutic setting?

ES: That's right. That's right. I believed that for a long time, actually before I went to Gestalt therapy. I remember that I brought material that we developed at our school in the psychiatric unit of Kings County Hospital to the early meetings of the New York Institute for, basically, the two Pauls, Paul Weisz and Paul Goodman, to look over. They appreciated what we were trying to do.

Now what was interesting there was that we got into trouble in Kings County, when we developed our school there, because it got to be recognized that the school was doing things with the kids that the psychiatrists were not doing.

JW: If I remember correctly, the hospital director tried to close the school.

ES: Yes, particularly the day school. First the hospital director tried to close it. He didn't really think psychiatry was a branch of medicine, so he didn't care much for the psychiatric program in the first place. Then the director of the psychiatric unit also tried to close the school. The director, Dr. Potter, who was also a president of the American Psychiatric Association, felt that the school was being too psychiatric and was encroaching on the grounds of the psychiatrists. They were very sensitive in regard to that because by this time the Rorschach had become popular and the psychologists had been encroaching on the psychiatrist's turf with it. The psychiatrists began to feel that psychology was going to enter into the private practice of psychotherapy and -- lo and behold! -- our school came in and was doing a kind of group psychotherapy and achieving a great deal, I must say, in the classroom, to the extent that we were able to develop a day school. So, obviously jealous of our success and concerned that we were taking over their role, they tried to close us down. In order to develop a countervailing power, we got the New York City Committee for the Children involved. It was a very prestigious group that didn't really have a large membership, but had the wealthiest people in New York on it -- one of the Rockefellers, a Gimbel, and so on. Trude Lash, the wife of writer Joseph Lash, was the chairman of the committee. Then there was Charlotte Carr who was a famous social worker. And Judge Polier, who was really a famous Family Court judge during that period.

When we were just about to be closed down, they got to the Commissioner of Hospitals of the City of New York and he overruled the directors who wanted us closed. We were to be closed down the next week so it was an overriding victory. It was received by the top doctors there in silence.

There was really a real measure of achievement. There were some youngsters who were considered hopeless. For instance, [Shapiro now points to a striking painting on the living room wall] this portrait was made by a person who was a member of the day school at that time. He was about sixteen years old. He has since become a very well known Puerto Rican painter and they're going to name a wing of the Barrio Museum on upper Fifth Avenue after him. Now, we were told absolutely conclusively by the psychiatrists that there was no hope for him. He would end his life up as a vegetable in a mental hospital. He passed away at the age of 52 after being happily married and very productive. He produced thousands of paintings. He led a real life, and here is a person who was supposed to be a vegetable in a hospital.

That's what we began to discover at the day school -- that because the children were poor their prognoses were poor. And the prognoses were poor because there were tacit assumptions that the psychiatrists made and they remained tacit, for the psychiatrists never realized that they were making them. If the kids had been a little better off, they would have had different diagnoses and different prognoses and it would have been recognized that they would benefit from therapy somewhere. But because our kids were poor nobody would do anything with them and therefore they were hopeless.

We discovered that there was a big socio-economic meaning to prognoses. When we expressed this at the hospital some of the younger psychiatrists agreed with us but on the whole it was not favorably received.

JW: As you progressed in your career you became more and more distant from the children you cared about so deeply.

ES: There's something very unfortunate in this and I've thought of it from time to time. When I'd just been appointed District Superintendent another of the superintendents for whom I had some regard said to me: "Elliott, when you become a superintendent you're going to find that you're far removed from the children. And you're going to miss it very much." And it was true, I did miss it as a superintendent. I didn't miss it as a principal that much because even in the big school, P. S. 119, which at its top had sixteen or eighteen hundred kids -- a horribly overcrowded school -- I didn't feel distant from the children whom I knew virtually all by name. It wasn't that much of a problem with me because I really remained close. Whether it was at Kings County or at P. S. 119 or P. S. 92.

The big change occurred when I went to Rochester and was director of the Center for Innovative Education. We developed a nice group, got around the city, and developed this school. As a result of our efforts, we received a lot of federal funding, you know, that kind of thing. But I was no longer part of the entire community. I was part of the adult community. I was separated from the kids then.

And I was separated from the kids, on the whole, as a superintendent, too. Although in my first office down on the Lower East Side I was in the middle of an enclave of project houses so I could get out there in the street a bit. So they knew who I was. The kids all called me "Bignose." They'd be down the block and say, "HEY, BIGNOSE!" and I would wave to them. But, when they'd come close I'd tell them to call me Mr. Bignose.

But it's true, I was more separated from the kids. More slowly in my case than, I would think, in most cases because, by and large, whatever I had been operating with, as long as it was a kind of closed enclave, we were involved with the kids even though it wasn't, let's say, as a teacher in a classroom. But this is an excellent important question that raises an issue we need to explore.

JW: What do you see for the future of Gestalt therapy?

ES: I'm glad to see that at least some Gestalt therapists are beginning to think seriously that they should be going past the age of gimmicks. And there're some very good people currently involved in Gestalt therapy. That's really very important.

We're contending with the fact that the psychiatrists now have medication and are, to some degree, using it unwisely, primarily because they have a vested interest now that they are doctors of medicine again. With medication a person comes in for five minutes, gets his prescription and leaves. And the psychiatrist charges him a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars just for giving him the prescription. The patient comes back in three months for a check-up and another prescription -- for another hundred and fifty dollars. And then again. So these days the psychiatrists are moving up on the scale of economic reward and they have this vested interest in continuing to do so. So you have a whole profession, the psychiatric profession, geared not to psychotherapy anymore, but geared primarily to medical treatment of anything from mild neurosis to deep psychosis. For the psychiatrist, it is costly to do psychotherapy. Unless he's doing psychotherapy with a very rich person and can charge a lot.

As a result, Gestalt therapy, like all the other therapies from the other psychological schools, has to contend with the growing pressure to rely on pills. I think the pressure will continue to grow. Psychologists, therefore, have a redoubled responsibility for psychotherapy.

I'm especially interested in the ability of Gestalt therapy to get the existential message of psychotherapy out to the public. Existentialism by now is forgotten, if not unpopular. I still believe very much in what might be called the existential philosophy. I believe that there are Gestalt therapists who seem to believe in it, who in their own professional work try to extend it.

JW: You just mentioned that existentialism is now forgotten. Would you expand on that?

ES: Well, existentialism as an idea was really extremely popular in the 1960's. Not that many people knew what existentialism was, but people talked about existentialism. I tried that out in a number of classes, including a class that I taught in Berkeley one summer. I had a hundred and eight people there and I asked them to define existentialism. First I asked them how many of them had heard about it. Oh, well, they'd all heard. I then asked them to define it. Nobody could define it.

I think Gestalt therapy offers the ability to develop individuals who accept their powers, their talents, their abilities, and then to use these talents and abilities to allow them to experiment. As a matter of fact, one doesn't know one's talents and one's abilities unless one experiments with them. Because then you develop new creations of one kind or another. New art forms. New gestalts, let's say. That jump, as it were, from one stage to another. I think that there are people who are Gestalt therapists who are successful in helping to develop individuals who practice. Because the word practice is the important word, in the sense that one practices what he believes in. If there were more time for the world, there would be more and more people who could be involved in developing something that the world needs very much. And that is the development of the individual talent of each citizen into whatever is the gestalt of the social comedy at any given time. In a sense the people who participate in a successful therapy will be people who would make somewhat larger contributions. And even if it weren't successful to the whole world, the majority of the world or even more than a small piece of the world here and there and everywhere, that would be very useful and very nice and would be an asset and would help civilization make some progress.

JW: You just said, "If there were more time for the world."

ES: That's right. I have to realize that we all won't exist that long. I have argued for a long time that we're virtually all the same age in the sense that you don't count age from birthday, you count it from "death day," as it were. And it saddens me relative to my grandchild, my grand nieces, my children, and for the other people too, generally speaking. But I don't tell them about it. I mean, what's the use?

I really threw up my hands with the atomic bomb. As soon as it came out, I saw that at some point or other it could not be controlled, and it could not be controlled because gradually these things would have to be made in secret. And there would be so much secrecy, so much depending on secrecy that people who had no business -- not that anybody has business having the atomic bomb -- but people who especially have no business having atomic bombs will have them. Today they're not atomic bombs, now it's hydrogen bombs. We're absolutely unable to control the hydrogen bomb. That, I think, means we're at the end of civilization.

So I have spent my time reading a lot and thinking about it, trying to figure out some way that we could develop a non-bureaucratic -- a funny word in this context -- a non-bureaucratic way of controlling that hydrogen bomb. I haven't been able to come up with anything. In other words, I'm sorely depressed but nobody knows it. My wife knows it, but I smile as I say it, you know, that kind of thing. And I threw up my hands, because I felt, in a sense, what am I doing this for? I don't believe there's hope for humanity. So I said, "Well, I'll address myself to the lack of hope with humanity and see if I can find some way out of this." And the situation is so far that it looks like an impossibility.

I read interminably about the various disarmament plans, nuclear weapons ideas, United States versus Soviet Russia and what can be done. And my feeling is that as bad as we are in the United States, the secret society that is Russia is the great menace, the first great menace. Secrecy is disaster making. But I have no answer for that either. I think it's quite possible that in the proliferation we will have any number of menaces pretty soon. Real serious menaces. I think we have some sign of it in the terrorist activities. A few terrorists, first of all only two terrorists, were able to hamstring the United States, Israel and the rest of the civilized world in the episode now going on in regard to the airline.[The interview took place during the third day of captivity of the 29 Americans who were hijacked and held in Beruit before their eventual release two weeks later.] Just two terrorists. Now I have a feeling that there you have symbolically what will happen. A country like Libya will be able to terrorize the world -- or a country like Pakistan, may do it. They are developing, obviously, neutronium and plutonium bombs. But I don't want to go on. I don't want to depress everybody in the world.

I don't talk...you know, as I'm talking to you now... It's rare for me to do this. Some of my close friends, those I have left, know this is my point of view, but I don't talk about it much. I'm still interested in what the Mets do, the Yanks do. I follow the football games. I read and I forget very quickly now too.

I was once invited to talk at a meeting of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy and I went into this topic in some detail. I don't know how they happened to invite me. I guess it must have been some anniversary and I was the guest speaker. They had quite a crowd there and I came up with this statement that I had composed much more formally and in greater detail then I've done this afternoon with you. There was also a psychologist of some renown at the meeting. So I went into this topic in great detail -- and succeeded in depressing everyone except the famous psychologist who came over and shook my hand with great fervor -- he agreed with my position. Having depressed the New York Institute group to such an extent, they never invited me back again!

JW: That's a wonderful story. Thank you very much.

ES: It has been a real pleasure.

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