A CONVERSATION WITH ISADORE FROM

Edward Rosenfeld

ER: How did you get involved with Frederick Perls and Gestalt therapy?

IF: In 1945, I came to New York City to attend the New School for Social Research to study with Leo Strauss, the philosopher, and William Troy -- both of whom I knew about when I was in California. It became apparent after a year that I was in need of psychotherapy. Although then I think we would not have said psychotherapy -- we would have said psychoanalysis. In search of a psychoanalyst (with the handicap of having very little money), I failed to find one who would see me more than once a month with the amount of money I could pay.

ER: As you said before, a great many of these psychoanalysts were on Park Avenue.

IF: Yes, but then the rents on Park Avenue weren't that great an amount.

ER: But they were living very well.

IF: Yes, but what I remember is that I went to a number of analysts. I think Gardner Murphy had given me the names.

ER: He was at the New School?

IF: Yes. He gave a course in personality. In the course of this search I contacted a psychologist who agreed that I needed therapy -- and quickly. He mentioned a man who had recently arrived in this country who probably needed patients and sent me to him. That man was Frederick Perls, who at that time was living in the Eighties on the East Side in a coldwater flat across from Ruppert's Brewery in NYC. This was quite a different milieu from the ones I had been visiting in my search, but the place, the way he was dressed, didn't put me off at all.

ER: But the whole atmosphere was shabby and worn down?

IF: Yes, but that did not concern me. I told him about myself and my need of a therapist. Again, I don't think I would have used the term "therapist." Analyst would have been right. He told me that he couldn't take me on as he needed full-paying patients at that time. He told me I might come back later. I remember that I said, with more courage than I might have had at that moment; "I CAN'T WAIT!" He told me that I would have to wait. Then, somehow, he asked me what I was studying. Out of my bag of studies I mentioned phenomenology. Whereupon he said; "Lie down on the couch."

ER: Were you actually well grounded in phenomenology at that time?

IF: Not at all. I had had a year's course in phenomenology. I had done some reading of Husserl. There was not much of his work available at that time in English, and I could not read German well enough to read the other material that was available. I had read some of Husserl's papers, but I didn't claim to be knowledgeable about him. I did know that I knew more than Perls did about him. And so did he. It became evident to me, later, why he was interested.

ER: Why was that?

IF: Well, if what later became Gestalt therapy has any philosophical bent, it would be from Husserl and existentialism, which is somewhat derived from his work.

ER: So upon Perls' hearing the word phenomenology, the situation changed.

IF: Yes. I lay down on the couch. He told me to describe everything that I experienced but begin each sentence with the words "here and now." That's the only thing that surprised me, as the rest of it seemed like my idea of what psychoanalysis was. He sat in back of me. I did not see him while I was on the couch.

ER: Did he talk while you were speaking? Did he have responses?

IF: I remember very little. There must have been some. But aside from two episodes, I remember no words that he said to me.

ER: What were those two episodes?

IF: Well, once he asked me did I ever have sexual fantasies about him, which kind of startled me. I got up from the couch, turned around and looked at him and said, "No, you are much too old and far too ugly." And he said, "Good, good." The second was, I had been telling him what I thought would shock anybody. He said nothing. That made me angry. I gave him more shocking details, and he said nothing. Then I angrily threw an ashtray at him and missed him. And he said, "Good, good, good." I've thought about that. I think he may have said "Good" because I missed him. And that's about all I remember that he said during the therapy sessions. I do remember things later.

ER: So you were going on a regular basis?

IF: Twice a week.

ER: For how long did you see him?

IF: A year and a half.

ER: How did the therapy terminate?

IF: He referred me to Laura Perls, his wife, who, at some time close to then had come to this country. He made it clear that I would have to work with her. I didn't know ...

ER: And so you started therapy with Laura Perls.

IF: Yes, twice a week. The fee was the same as I had been paying -- indeed very small.

ER: And was her manner of conducting therapy at all different than Frederick Perls'?

IF: Yes, in that while I lay down on a narrow couch, she sat in front of me. And, more often, made references to my breathing -- which seemed unusual to me and to my friends whom I told.

ER: When you were working with Frederick Perls in the beginning you said he told you to start each sentence with the phrase "here and now."

IF: Yes.

ER: Did that continue and persist throughout your therapy with him?

IF: Yes, I think it did. I cannot actually remember it, but from what I know later in my experience with him he probably did and would have mentioned it when I got away from it.

ER: And was Laura, too, oriented toward the present?

IF: It seemed so. But less concretely. I remember her as being very much more supportive and in direct contact with me. Which at that time was a great help to me.

ER: How did the therapy with Laura terminate?

IF: I was feeling much better than when I started and I decided to terminate therapy. The only way that I knew how to at that time was to go to Europe, where I'd always wanted to go. In spite of still not having much money, I told Laura that I was going to go to Europe -- which delighted her. And that ended my therapy. I went to Europe for a year and a half.

ER: And once you returned, did you have any contact with them after that?

IF: As I recall -- my first actual social contact with them -- it was a Thanksgiving dinner.

ER: This is after you came back from Europe?

IF: Yes. And Perls told me that he had been to California and had looked up my twin brother, who was living then and living out there. This was certainly not typical of one's therapist and maybe not ethical -- to look up a patient's family. My twin brother had introduced him to a group of young psychologists in Los Angeles. And, after talking with them, he decided to move to California. He had already set up a small practice there of people who were interested in being his patients. Then the subject came up of what I was going to do -- which was always a topic of my therapy, unresolved. And I said, "I don't know." As I remember, they both said, "What else can you do?" And Frederick Perls informed me that obviously I had to be a therapist and he had two patients for me from California and I would go with him.

ER: Until this point you hadn't thought of yourself as a psychotherapist or psychoanalyst or anything like that?

IF: No. Like any well-read person of the time, I would have read most of Freud, Reich certainly, somewhat less Jung. But I knew the vocabulary. It had not occurred to me that I wanted to be, or could be, a psychotherapist.

ER: But you accepted his offer.

IF: It seemed to me that I had no choice. Of course I did. But, it's true, what else could I do? He went out and I followed shortly thereafter. We shared offices in his apartment, close to Hollywood Boulevard.

ER: How long were you in California?

IF: I was there approximately two years. Perls failed to be the success he thought he was going to be. And, though he certainly had an adequate practice, he left California after about a year. I took on all -- most -- of his patients and stayed for another year. This was during the period when Gestalt Therapy was about to be published. I remember the manuscript being sent to California, and I looked over particularly what became the first part, by Hefferline, and was quite unhappy with it. It seemed to me evangelical and not always interesting. As you know, Ed, the first part originally had been intended as the second part, but by editing (or so-called editing) the most it did was bring out some of the wonderful results his experiments had had. And I suggested, could we have some results that weren't so wonderful? Again, when that was sent back to Hefferline, he refused to make my changes. So it was published pretty much as he wrote it.

ER: You hadn't at this point seen the theoretical part?

IF: Yes, I saw that too. I had no quarrel with that at all. I also knew that Paul Goodman had written it.

ER: Did you know Paul Goodman?

IF: Yes, I knew Paul Goodman before I knew Perls -- We had friends in common from the late thirties. I had met him once at Chicago University -- I think in the late thirties. I met him through a friend, David Sachs, who was from Chicago and now teaches philosophy at Johns Hopkins. So, I had known him from the first time I had moved here to New York in 1945.

ER: When you were in Europe, or when you first returned from Europe, were you aware that Goodman was working on a theoretical part for this proposed book?

IF: Oh, yes, I knew that all along. I knew that Perls had had a somewhat sloppy manuscript, not very long (I vaguely remember reading it), and was looking for someone to put it into readable English This happened frequently with manuscripts of his. I cannot exactly remember how Paul Goodman got involved. I do know Paul was desperately poor, as he was most of his life. Whether Perls asked him, or not, I don't know. But somehow he did take over the manuscript and in the course of writing it realized it needed much more body and wrote what became the second part. I remember his fee for that was $500.00.

ER: And that was all he ever got out of it?

IF: He was given a certain percentage of the royalties -- the amount I cannot remember. At that time, there were so few sales -- almost to his death there was very little more than that. Since then, due to the big sale of Gestalt Therapy, he, somewhat, and his estate have gotten much more. But all he expected to get, at that time, was the fee for writing the book.

ER: What do you think accounted for Goodman's really precise understanding of what has come to be the underlying theoretical structure of Gestalt therapy? There's not a lot in Ego, Hunger and Aggression that points to the really extensive development that he made of the whole metaphor of Gestalt and certainly the contact boundary disturbances as they are described and discussed in the second half of Gestalt Therapy. How did he come to that?

IF: I can't remember if I had given Paul Ego, Hunger and Aggression to read. I had given it to a number of my friends. They were not impressed with how it was written, and they had a lot of questions to ask about the way it was written and what was left out. I do remember discussions about that. A number of young and not so young intellectuals did become interested in Ego, Hunger and Aggression and realized that there was something new in it. Most of them, including Paul Goodman, would have known that Wilhelm Reich clearly influenced it. I think Goodman, more than anyone else, realized that there was a possibility of a contribution, both from Perls and the framework he had begun in Ego, Hunger and Aggression. Paul realized that there was a lack in that book as well as in the manuscript that Perls had given him. That lack was in bringing Freud and Wilhelm Reich together. There was also the work of Otto Rank, which at that point I don't think Perls had realized the importance of; but Paul was alert to this material. I think Goodman, in working with Perls' material, became very interested and decided to write a book of his own, but one that respected the material that Perls had provided him, which showed a particularly Gestalt therapy way of doing psychotherapy. I never heard Goodman say anything critical or abusive about the material that Perls had provided him. He might have said that it was not enough or that a lot of work had to be done. And $500 was a lot of money then. I know it took a lot of prodding to get the money out of Perls.

ER: How did you become a therapist? Were you given any training by Perls when you went out to California or were you just thrown into the room with a patient?

IF: Sounds odd, doesn't it?

ER: Yes -- you were just put in a room with a patient and told to begin?

IF: Told to begin. One of the patients he had for me was closely related to him. This, I thought, was evidence he had trust in me. And ... we had a group, a training group in California, which consisted largely of upper-middle-class ladies. My role in that group was that of a shill in that in asking someone what they experienced, if Perls were to ask me, I would always give it in terms of "here and now" with a skill that I think some of my students today would envy. Then Perls would beam on me and at me and most of these women would then realize that "oh, this is how you're supposed to do it." (I can remember Perls would have diagrams of how Gestalten would form.) I began to emphasize the here and now more in my practice. It was an apprenticeship with only a vague presence to be an apprentice to.

ER: When you started doing therapy were you still following the psychoanalytic mode that Perls had started with you? Were you making people lie down on the couch or facing them in the way Laura had you do?

IF: Well, they did, for the most part, lie down on the couch -- on a couch -- but I faced them. I would say my style was more influenced by Laura than by Frederick. The fee that I received was $2.00 a session. So I didn't feel that I was gypping them out of much. Even before Perls left, my practice had already grown from the two patients that I'd started with.

ER: So you began to feel more like a real psychotherapist?

IF: Yes, though I don't think I felt like a psychotherapist for approximately 15 years,

ER: There was always some level of...

IF: Unease. Anxiety. "What am I doing?"

ER: What made you leave California?

IF: Well, Perls left after a year and I carried on his practice. But that's a difficult question to answer. I did not like California. I had worked for more than two years and, again, I wanted to go to Europe. So, with the $ 1,000 or so that I had saved I went back to Europe for another year. When I was in England I looked up, at Perls' request, a psychologist and a urinogenital specialist, both of whom had read Gestalt Therapy and were interested in training in it. So I stayed in London 5 or 6 months.

ER: Training those two?

IF: Yes. It mostly was therapy.

ER: And then after being in Europe for that year, you came back to America, to New York?

IF: Yes.

ER: At that point, I imagine, the New York Institute was already set up?

IF: Laura had started the institute near the end of Perls' first stay in California. And by the time he got there, a small group of people had been meeting at Laura's. Whether or not it was actually called an institute then I don't know. I do know that when I got back from Europe, there was stationery -- New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy -- and there were six or seven fellows -- who were the so-called "original" fellows of the institute.

ER: Do you remember who they were?

IF: I'll try to. There was Paul Weisz, Paul Goodman, Elliot Shapiro, Frederick Perls, Laura Perls, myself, and perhaps Sylvester, better known as "Buck," Eastman. That would be it.

ER: So these were the people who were principally involved in the discussions that went on about what Gestalt therapy was?

IF: Yes. You know, it's difficult for me to put it that way. There were not, as I remember, discussions about what it was. They were, I think, to begin with, group meetings. Goodman was probably the most active. There were discussions, but certainly I can't remember there being a topic about "what Gestalt therapy was." There were frequent exchanges -- differences -- I wouldn't say quarrels  --  but differences. But the important thing that I would like to emphasize is  --  no one was regarded as "the Biggie." None of them. Frederick Perls, Laura Perls ...

ER: Paul Goodman?

IF: Paul Goodman, Paul Weisz, myself, anybody. I think, in a real sense, that I was less qualified. We did regard each other as peers.

ER: When did you start going out to Cleveland?

IF: That, I think, must have been about 1952.

ER: Was this upon your return from your second trip to Europe?

IF: Shortly after. Now, as I remember it, two or three psychologists came to New York. They had heard of our so-called institute, and attended. They went back to Cleveland and gathered five or six other clinical psychologists and asked Perls to come there. That was the first of such "traveling" trips. He went there. And, I think it was the second visit, perhaps two or three months later, when they had gathered a few more people, that Paul Weisz and myself went with him. We were in small groups and with individuals. I think Paul Weisz and I went twice with Perls. And Paul and I were quite distressed at what we observed. What happened was indeed dramatic, but neither one of us could appreciate that it was therapy. It was a lot of shaking, trembling, anxiety -- which I didn't understand. And Paul Weisz, who was a physician, told me he thought "Perls was getting these dramatic results as a result of hyperventilation." This was the first I knew about hyperventilation and I've never forgotten it. Also, what I observed on the second visit was that the difficulties that had emerged on the first visit merely repeated themselves in an exaggerated form. Also, differences between people were, somehow, being encouraged by what we had been doing. And I, somewhat angrily, with Perls at lunch (Paul Weisz was also there) told him that I thought what we were doing was irresponsible and that if we were going to be teaching Gestalt therapy -- or training -- these people would need a therapist they could see regularly and not on this every-now-and-then basis. Whereupon Perls agreed with me, readily, and said that I would be coming there.

ER: So that's how it was decided that you would become the regular trainer of the Cleveland Institute?

IF: Yes. Then he informed these people that I would be coming there. That made me uneasy. First of all, most of these people were very well-trained psychologists -- all of them. Why should they take me, whose background was quite different than theirs, and take me on the orders of Perls? And they did. But I made it quite clear that this was on a trial basis. That lasted 5 years, twice a month -- and then 5 more years, once a month, and at least once or twice a year since then.

ER: A long time.

IF: In the process I learned a great deal.

ER: I know the way you conduct your training now; you have trainees work with you for at least one year going through, almost line by line, the theoretical, or second-half, Paul Goodman section of Gestalt Therapy. Were you using that as a primary text when you were first going out to Cleveland and training people there?

IF: Oh, yes. We did exactly that. There was a theory group where we met and discussed Gestalt Therapy as well as a therapy group. I was seeing each person about four times a month, in those two groups and individually. We could treat difficulties with the text with the understanding that they might also be problems in their therapy; what is stopping this person from understanding this section. I could use the text in the therapy. Not that I insisted that they take the text as holy writ, but it was interesting to assume that a difficulty of understanding, when reading the text, might be the difficulty of the reader and that might be worth working through. Then we could also criticize the text.

ER: What made you change that approach?

IF: Well, partly, many of the people I see in training now I do not see in individual therapy; I see them only in theory group or in my practicum.

ER: Why do you think no one else has ever done important theoretical work since the publication of Gestalt Therapy? Or has tried to expand on what Paul Goodman has done?

IF: You know, I'm somewhat uneasy about the word "theory." I use it a lot, too. What I think Paul Goodman did was to make articulate that which was not articulated. It was an articulation of what a Gestalt therapist does, not simply what to do. In that sense it's an explanation of what a Gestalt therapist, if he thought about it, or had reasoned it out, would say to explain to others what he does. Therefore there is not that separation of theory from practice. But the great contribution, the truly great contribution that Perls made, was in the realm of introjection. It was greater than he himself realized. Paul Goodman recognized it. That was the area of Perls' important difference with Freud. The implication for the writer of a text, and I think Goodman recognized this, was that a serious text could not be written if it risked being introjected by the reader. What we insist on calling the theoretical is a way of writing about this serious matter, Gestalt therapy, in a way that reasonably prevents introjection.

ER: What is the danger of introjecting the theory or of introjecting the description of what is done in Gestalt therapy?

IF: The dangers have been realized, to a certain extent. In the last ten years we have unknowledgeable imitators who are introjectors of, most importantly I think, Perls in his later years. They are not sufficiently critical of themselves or others. The danger is that, without being aware of it, they have abandoned one of the grounds of Gestalt therapy: that our patients are not to introject us.

ER: How does this differ from other therapies? Say, psychoanalysis?

IF: In a serious psychoanalytic therapy to introject the analyst was not undesirable. To accept the interpretations of the analyst by introjecting, uncritically, is not regarded as unhealthy. Not to accept them, or to be unable to, is regarded as a resistance. They have perfectly good theoretical and practical reasons for that. It is Perls' insight into what he thought was a mistake of Freud's about the healthy period of introjection that makes the Gestalt therapist more cautious about the possibility of introjecting practical or theoretical matters. What you've got is a serious quarrel with Freud. Freud regarded introjection as being healthy until a relatively late age. And Perls, because of his interest in teeth and how we had been ignoring them ...

ER: The whole vista of dental aggression ...

IF: Yes. But that one insight really opened the door -- made a new therapy necessary. So you can see why a book on Gestalt therapy that risks being introjected is a violation of Gestalt therapy.

ER: I guess what I'm getting at is that so much of what we see now that's called Gestalt therapy is really a demonstration style rather than a way of doing therapy.

IF: Yes, which is what Perls did the last years of his life -- gave demonstrations or small vignettes of Gestalt therapy. He did not do Gestalt therapy. You cannot do therapy in 15 or 20 minutes.

ER: So you think that's a primary difference then -- that he was working in this "short-time" format.

IF: He was interested in influencing large bodies of people. And, he did that successfully. Only if people will remember the context of it -- again another crucial concept of Gestalt therapy -- they might realize that you cannot do the same thing with small groups, individuals, or with certain problems. But, for the context, what Perls did might have been adequate. But those of us who use that method in another context -- we have not made the necessary changes.

ER: You mentioned earlier that you felt that some of the basis for what started in Ego, Hunger and Aggression and later became known as Gestalt therapy came from the works certainly of Freud. You also mentioned phenomenology and existentialism and the works of Reich and Rank. I think some of the influences of Reich and certainly Freud have been delineated in a variety of different works. I wonder if you would make some comments about Otto Rank's contribution?

IF: Yes. It was Paul Goodman who recognized that, either directly or indirectly, Perls had been influenced by Rank. When Perls was in Europe, Rank was not unknown. And his differences with Freud were known. I later learned that it was Otto Rank who first used the expression "here and now." He was the first to emphasize the possibility that concentrating on the present might indeed be very useful. He did not extend that to the extent that Perls did. But he certainly thought of it. Otto Rank was also, I learned later, the first to suggest what Perls rediscovered (Perls had a talent for discovering what he'd already discovered again, and again. And he was not lying -- it was always, for him, a new discovery, slightly formulated another way). It was Otto Rank who suggested that it would be useful to consider every element of the dream a projection. Which, later I think, Perls announced as a discovery of his. And again, I'm sure that's how he experienced it. The influence that Rank had on Goodman is evident in the text of Gestalt Therapy.

ER: Where he makes references to Art & Artists.

IF: Yes, and almost with as much grace as he does to The Interpretation of Dreams. Goodman had read all the available Rank, really -- there wasn't much, but he'd read with great care Art & Artists, which to this day I find it extremely difficult to get through.

ER: Me, too.

IF: But that touched Goodman a great deal and it was not irrelevant to bring that into the foreground in writing Gestalt Therapy.

ER: You have an approach to working with dreams that, from what I understand of it, differs significantly from the Freudian symbolic approach to dreams as well as from what I might call the Perlsian existential approach to dreams. I was wondering if you could summarize, at least briefly, how you work with dreams and how you look at the importance of the dream in a therapy session.

IF: You know, I get a bit uneasy with the word "existential." I would suspect that the way I use dreams is as existential as Perls' use of dreams. I wouldn't make that claim about how I use dreams. It's an uneasy- making word these days. It is not a different approach; it is "in addition to." What Perls seemed to suggest was that the best way to deal with dreams -- or perhaps the only way -- was to consider all the elements of the dream as a Projection and, in the therapy, to seek out the projections and work at assimilating them. As I recall, this is largely done by the use of the empty seat and the patient attempting to become the part of the dream that the therapist would have selected as the important projection in the dream. I have no quarrel with that. I do think it is often not sufficient. What I think I've added is: what if we consider a dream a retroflection. An unawares retroflection is, of course, one of the important disturbances at the contact boundary which have always been of interest, particularly in Gestalt therapy. Now, there's nothing particularly new about what Perls says about dreams. I'm not so sure there's anything particularly new about what I say. Otto Rank made the same suggestion about dreams many years before. It is true that it was largely neglected until Perls mentioned it. The important dreams, if you're going to consider the dream as an unawares retroflection, would be the dream the night after therapy and the dream the night before therapy. There is no way of proving this. But one can, at least, try it, which I have done -- and others have done -- and discover that it has important value in bringing out disturbances at the contact boundary of the patient and the therapist. The presumption that I'm working on is that a dream is a retroflection par excellence, because one dreams when one sleeps and all contact, except breathing, is given up. So, if you consider a dream also as an attempt to undo retroflections that may have occurred during a therapy session, you may contact material that would otherwise be neglected -- or you will contact it more economically. By that I mean you'll save time. It is a fact that a patient in therapy usually knows that if he remembers a dream he will be telling it to his therapist. Therefore I assume that fact might determine, somewhat, what that patient dreams. It isn't only a dream, it is a dream that he will be telling his therapist. So this could be his attempt to contact and undo retroflections that reflect disturbances at the contact boundary with his therapist.

ER: I can understand that totally in terms of the dream that occurs the night before the therapy session ...

IF: That would be the night after it also.

ER: Well, what you were saying before was that the dream is something that the patient will discuss with the therapist and I can see the patient remembering the dream from the night before the therapy session and bringing it up the next day as part of therapy. What I'm confused about is the dream the night after the therapy session when perhaps there will be a week or several days' time elapsing. I understand that it might be a retroflection, but I wonder if that dream is dreamed quite so significantly in order to tell the therapist or as something that would be told.

IF: Well, therapy usually is an ongoing process and the fact that there is a session within a few days or a week is also known to the dreamer/patient. The reason I suggest that the dream of the night after therapy might be an important one in undoing retroflections is that the retroflections would have occurred during that session. Another name for retroflections would be censoring -- withholding -- the patient's talking to himself -- saying to himself during a session things that he could not, or would not, say to the therapist. I think you will discover if you concentrate on this in working with the dream after a session that the patient will repeat something of significance somewhere in the dream -- for example, the word "foolish" might appear strongly in the dream the night after a session. The therapist might say to the patient. "How was I foolish at our last session?" Frequently enough the patient might, with some difficulty, point to something that the therapist said or did that he was unable to discuss during the session. Those disturbances often interfere with therapy if they are not said -- in this case the criticism by the patient of the therapist. In the dream he is in essence saying it again to himself. But I am presuming that the fact that he does that in the dream would suggest he is ready to undo this retroflection and would be able to openly criticize -- i.e., differ with -- his therapist within the session. He did not know, nor would the therapist have known, that there was that material. Does that answer part of it?

ER: Sure.

IF: I'm not saying only the dream of the night after or the night before. But those, I think, often prove the most valuable. I regularly, in orienting my patients, tell them I am particularly interested in the dream of the night before or the night after. Of course, telling them that places a premium on those dreams for the patient and understandably he or she is more likely to remember them. But, I emphasize, not only those dreams. Any dream the patient might tell me, I will first consider it in this way. The dream of the night before is more valuable in determining where to go next in the therapy. It is as if it were a rehearsal, which is a form of retroflecting. In the waking state the patient often plans what to talk to his or her therapist about. In the dream of the night before (particularly but not only) the patient may be doing something similar. In this case he may be considering profounder material than he would have otherwise. And it is an attempt of the patient to give instructions to the therapist about the state of the therapy, emphasizing less the problems of the contact of the patient with the therapist. Do you understand the difference?

ER: I'm wondering if you have an example that might illustrate this.

IF: At a workshop a psychiatrist (after having met me, of course -- therefore I could presume the dream would have to do with me and not what he had heard about me) dreams of a messy office. Looking at this person, it did not seem conceivable to me that he was capable of having a messy office. And, if I remember the dream correctly, he berates, very angrily, his nurse for the messy office. My first question was, "How was I messy yesterday?" With some difficulty, namely embarrassment, he was able to tell me that I dressed messily -- which was true -- and that this was disturbing to him. There was no reason why it shouldn't be. And until he could tell me that and experience that I didn't get angry myself, he could not trust me. Then we got to the anger in the dream. What we were able to contact was his conception of anger. It turned out that what anger meant to him was murderousness. I would not have known that in the brief meeting that I had with that person in a group -- a stranger -- but in the dream, having been able to pick out the episode of the anger of the figure of himself at his nurse, we could contact a problem which might have taken much longer to get to if we had not dealt with the dream in this way. In this lucky case it turned out that withholding anger had indeed been very important to him and now he knew what was behind that: that if anger meant murder, then indeed, he would have to withhold it. He did not know that's how he experienced anger. That's about as much as I could say about that. Now, of course, that's taking one dream and making it work both ways. In this case I only saw this person two times.

ER: Do you ever work with dreams in the way Perls did, at least in his demonstrations, by having people actually play out parts, persons, objects, and so forth as though they were those parts, persons, or objects?

IF: That, as I think I said earlier, was his attempt to assimilate projections. I prefer -- I won't say never -- I rarely use the empty seat because I keep the contact of the patient and myself -- insofar as it's possible -- always in the foreground. I would have the patient talk to me about what he feels when he tries to experience himself as one of these feelings. I would merely add that I would insist that the patient be aware that he is telling me about that feeling, not becoming it. In this case not telling it to the therapist often turns it into an acting exercise.

ER: In the empty chair technique, someone is talking to empty space as though it were their parent or sibling. You, in dream work as well as in the rest of therapy, try and orient the therapy toward the contact between you and the patient rather than the patient and some imaginary figure?

IF: I would more often say, "tell this to me as if I were your parent." I think both are useful. It's clear, you see, what I'm more interested in is transferential material. And the other technique is more interested in becoming aware of and attempting to undo the projection.

ER: Do you see transferential material as playing a big part in Gestalt therapy?

IF: I hear your quizzical tone, Ed. Indeed. It is because of the transference, which Freud discovered (he did not invent), that we are able to emphasize "here and now." The transference is the equivalent of "here and now," and it is this discovery of Freud's that made Psychotherapy possible.

ER: So then transference becomes the grounds not just for Freudian psychoanalysis but for any kind of therapy in terms of the present situation.

IF: It makes it possible for unfinished situations of the past, which any therapy has to deal with, to be finished presently. Because of what Freud calls transference, the present continues to be unawares influenced by these unfinished situations of the past. How this is done is what we emphasize in Gestalt therapy.

ER: Through the contact boundary...

IF: Yes.

ER: Interruptions and disturbances...

IF: Particularly projections. We do not encourage the transference, as is reasonably done in psychoanalysis because of the method. But that we do not encourage it does not mean that we eliminate it. I am saying -- suggesting -- that it is absurd to say that we don't use transference. We would rarely use that word. We might be asking such questions as "How am I like your father?" "How am I like your mother?" Those questions, which are common enough in Gestalt therapy, are in fact questions attempting to alert our patient to transference and to undo the transference. I think the word "transference" for us might be wrong. We might say "transferring."

ER: In order to make it more process-oriented?

IF: Yes. And how that is done.

ER: Before, you mentioned, when talking about dreams, that you orient your patients toward being alert to the dream of the night before or the night after the therapy session, and that brings me to at least a few questions about beginnings and endings in therapy. Would you share some of the ways in which you orient a patient in terms of starting therapy?

IF: It's easier to tell you about beginnings than it is about endings.

ER: That's why I started at the beginning.

IF: I think orienting the patient is often neglected. I tell the person who comes to see me how I work, what I'm interested in. I might say something like "Everything you experience here in this room, with me, is relevant and important." This is the equivalent of telling the patient that what we're concentrating on is the present and the present contact with me since, in individual therapy, we will be the only two persons in the room. An important part of the way I work is that -- not that the patient is talking or saying something, not that only, but that he is saying something, telling something, to me. Then I inform him that what he remembers is also happening at this time. That is how the past is made present in therapy: it is by remembering. Whether it is remembering what he did the day before or on the way to his therapy session or twenty years before. But the remembering is the present activity and telling it to me is the next present activity. At that point I might say, "And if you remember your dream, I would ask you to tell it to me." I am not saying the patient should remember the dream, I am informing the patient that it is useful if he does. I do not ask the patient to make any special effort, because it is important to see what the patient will do about it -- about remembering. And I might say, "I am particularly interested in your dreams of the night before a session and the night after." That is not saying I'm not interested in the others.

ER: It seems, so far, that in the way you orient a patient, you bring what happens in the therapy in as the present tense of what's going on in the "here-and-now." And also you instruct a patient that what is remembered is also a present process. That the remembering is the present process. I'm wondering how, if at all, You work with the future, paranoia, fantasies, rehearsals.

IF: Concern with the future is a present activity. It is planning, anticipating, preparing. In other words, preparing, planning, anticipating, is what is going on in the present. I'm as interested in the planning, the anticipating, etc., as much as I am its content. Neither is irrelevant. I would want my patient to be aware that he or she is anticipating -- leaving the session -- going somewhere -- and telling me about his or her anticipation. The present activity is anticipating.

ER: Frederick Perls often described maturity as the transition from environmental support to self-support, and I am curious what you look for once you've been working with someone for awhile that indicates to you that some assimilation of the therapy is taking place and perhaps the end of therapy is approaching.

IF: That's a more difficult question to try to answer. And I think the reason for that, Ed, is that the beginnings of therapy are much more simple than the endings. Just as neurotic behavior is notorious for being predictable, healthy behavior is equally notorious for not being predictable; so it does make sense to say I can tell you more about the beginning than the endings because the endings for one person would be quite different than for another. I think, as Goodman put it, when you're both agreed that the patient is aware that it is he or she that walks into my room and he or she that talks to me -- which would mean an absence of projections, introjections, retroflections -- then the therapy is through.

ER: Not during this interview, but at other times we have talked about assimilation and the role of assimilation in therapy, and one of the comments you made on one occasion was that "oftentimes real assimilation, in terms of therapy, takes place, actually, outside the therapy."

IF: I would say inevitably. Now by outside the therapy I do not mean that there isn't assimilation going on during the period when therapy is going on -- but I mean outside the therapy room or the therapy meeting with the therapist. During the week -- let us say there is a week between sessions -- some assimilation ought to occur. I do not think the insight or the "ahah" is the actual assimilation. To use the example of food, the feeling, the hunger, beginning to see food in the environment, going to get it, taking it, bringing it to your mouth, chewing it, swallowing it, are awares activities. The actual assimilation of food is not awares. Similarly, intellectual assimilation is not awares, or emotional assimilation (if we can use that term). When something I have heard becomes mine, I'm aware of that. When it becomes me, I am not. The "ahah" might be the moment of awareness -- that this is mine. Now, that this becomes me is not an awares process. That's why I say that assimilation must go on between sessions and certainly after a successful therapy. That is why when I take a vacation I am not surprised that some patients do very well and, in a sense, are better with my absence than if we had continued meeting. It provides me with a vacation and them with a vacation from ongoing therapy, which might be providing time to assimilate what had been going on during the therapy. I think it's also why we have to be careful crediting ourselves with what in fact are the successes of others. A patient going from one therapy, or one school of therapy, to another -- the second therapist or school of therapy may be enjoying that which has been assimilated from the previous therapy or therapist.

ER: Do you have any speculations at all as to the absence of criticism within the Gestalt community of Gestalt therapy per se? Most of the literature that is published, in terms of books and the few papers on Gestalt therapy, seems mostly to be expository -- or in some way championing Gestalt therapy. There are very, very few, certainly in writing, criticisms I've seen of Gestalt therapy. Any speculations as to what causes that?

IF: That's extremely difficult for me to answer. It does not seem familiar to me, since I am all too aware of my own limitations and the present limitations of what I would call Gestalt therapy. So, if that's what you mean by criticism, I am critical of the limitations and that is what interests me. Whatever successes I have had in therapy, practicing Gestalt therapy, are of relatively little interest to me. What failures, or disappointments, I have had do interest me. In teaching I emphasize our limitations. I am not an evangelist, and I have never thought of Gestalt therapy as having the answer to all the problems of psychotherapy. I think we could use much more examination of ourselves and or method. I think what has caused or would seem to have caused this is too much introjection and not enough criticism. I think I could say that some of us may have been guilty of urging and enabling others to introject. I think what I'm referring to is the style of, let us say, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim -- the style encourages the reader's introjecting and minimizes criticism from the reader. The style of Gestalt Therapy by Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman does the reverse. It discourages, almost makes impossible, introjection.

ER: And yet that book at this point is 28 years old and I guess what my first question was referring to, which in part you've answered, is that very few people are willing to be public with what criticisms they have of Gestalt therapy -- what limitations they sense in Gestalt therapy. The only one that I remember, in writing, was Mary Henle, who is not a Gestalt therapist, criticizing Gestalt therapy in terms of its connections with Gestalt psychology. But I don't remember seeing much else in writing.

IF: Interestingly enough, what she criticizes is Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. And quite rightly says that Perls is presumed to have said that everything before that was obsolete. She wasn't intellectually obliged to criticize what had been acknowledged as obsolete. I think she would have had more difficulty with that if she had concentrated her criticism on Gestalt Therapy and not Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. That there isn't more criticism suggests that not enough serious people are familiar with Gestalt therapy.

ER: Do you have at the tip of your tongue a few limitations of Gestalt therapy -- things that you come up against in your own practice and your own training of people -- that are particular to Gestalt therapy?

IF: Well, I may have them at the tip of my tongue, but in trying to answer them I am tongue-tied. Yes, I have many, many questions about "what next in Gestalt therapy." I have never believed that Gestalt therapy has solved all of the problems. I think, it is often more efficient -- certainly not always -- than other therapies. I do not think it is efficient enough. Often we make it seem as if Gestalt therapy is always of short duration. And the record simply will not support it.

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