In 1970, Ernest Becker delivered a speech on the impact of Fritz Perls and Gestalt Psychology. This speech would be somewhat auspicious since Becker would pass away only four years later. He begins by saying:
I say genuinely that I’m sorry that Perls couldn’t be here tonight. I think it’s awful that we almost always commemorate people after they’ve died. I remember a French movie where a widower is going to get married to a very young girl, and he says, “The only one who will be missing, alas, will be my poor departed wife, who loved weddings so much.” Nonetheless, what I want to do tonight is give you a two-part overview of Perls and Gestalt therapy. One of them is an appreciation of Perls, a view of Gestalt therapy. The second is what I think are the shortcomings of Perls and Gestalt therapy generally — all therapy, really.
Much like what he would later write in The Denial of Death, psychotherapy paradoxically leads patients to uncovering their vital lies and yet for what purpose? If everyone must necessarily live under the illusion of certain half-truths then what good is uncovering them? Thus, the shortcoming of all therapy.
Becker in Birth and Death of Meaning goes into great depth of child psychology, how the child progressively takes on certain distortions of truth to survive.
As Perls would probably put it, mind is not the center of the person, but the center of the dishonesty that the person has about himself. In order to come of age, in order to become an adult, the child has to distort his awareness of the world and become somewhat dishonest about himself. He becomes dispossessed of his own senses; he is fragmented within himself by the mechanisms of defense; he is cut off from reality; and he doesn’t see the real world as it is because he has a certain stake in seeing it in a somewhat distorted way.
So, the child, in order to maintain and build a sense of self-worth in what is fundamentally a tyrannical world, adopts these deceits. You see, the child has no power; if he doesn’t do what you say, you will correct him for it. So he’s living in a world of Stalins, really, and anything he does wrong he’s “corrected” for. He’s living in a world of giants; when you’re a child you live in a forest of knees
The child takes on the lies that society and his guardians place upon him. The artificial rules such as don’t track mud into the kitchen as well as important guidelines such as don’t play with fire. To the child, this is all seemingly arbitrary and simply is forced to believe. This conditioning isn’t just in the head, but it’s also in the body. Our body “holds” our neuroses in our very posture and structure. Thus, for Perls, it isn’t enough to just show the mental causation for one’s problems, but you also have to work on the body.
I think people are unconsciously always rooted in external powers, what we call transference in psychiatry. Transference is the reliance on somebody else, on an outside source of power, in some way. And the interesting thing about Gestalt is that it seems to gloss over this fact. Perls actually seems to assume that people can stand on their own feet, if they’re given the possibility to do so. I think people can stand on their own feet to a much greater extent than they do, there’s no question about that. The question is, how much they ever can. And it seems to me a certain dishonesty when you tell people that they can be absolutely self-reliant when actually they cannot ever be quite self-reliant.
Sartre spoke about the “bad faith” of the individual who tries to become his own God, causa sui. This term, causa sui (self-cause), is also used by Becker often about how people try to deny their mortality by being their own cause. Of course, the truth of the matter is that we’re finite beings with only partial knowledge of the world, if even that. Becker throws a wrench into Perl’s philosophy because man cannot stand on his own two feet by himself because he is not a fully defined person. He never can be. To be human is to be undefined, incomplete. Always open, always changing.
But when you go into therapy expecting that you are going to be saved, that you’re going to be reborn, you want to have a new life of joy and plenitude, I think you’d better beware. Because the one thing that therapy does for you is to peel away the lie of your social defenses. Your smiling lie. Your bank balance lie. Your manipulative fie. Your look-at-me, I’m-so-lovely lie. All of the lies that you surround yourselves with, your social lies, your corporation lies, your look-at-me, I’ve-got-a-big-new-car lie, all of the lies of your life. What therapy does is to take that away from you. As Freud points out, “We cure the neurotic of his symptoms only to introduce him to the common misery of life.”
As we said before, theraphy can remove those layers of lies and bring the truth to consciousness. But what truth is that? As Nietzsche would say, we accept lies such as causation, material being, and so on not because they’re true necessarily but because they’re necessary to live.
In this sense, I believe there’s a great affinity between Buddhism, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Becker. All of them study the interior of man, his subjectivity and the grave problems when consciousness confronts reality as it truly is.
