Frederick "fritz" Perls

Frederick "Fritz" Perls

Perls was born in 1893 in Berlin, Germany. He earned his medical degree in 1926, and then worked at the Institute for Brain Damaged Soldiers in Frankfurt. He was influenced by Gestalt psychologists, and existential philosophers. Gestalt psychology says that human beings perceive instinctively in wholes or patterns rather than building up their percepts in bits and pieces. Perls was also influenced by Karen Horney and Wilhelm Reich, and eventually became a psychoanalyst himself.

Fritz and and his wife Laura, who were Jewish, realized early on that Germany was becoming rapidly infected by Nazism and more and more dangerous for Jews. They left Germany in 1933, first going to the Netherlands, later to South Africa, where they set up a psychoanalytic institute. But they gradually became dissatisfied with Freudian analysis, believing it to be too intellectual and ineffective, not dealing with the whole person and not understanding the importance of oral aggression in human development. They began to revise Freudian theory, based on gestalt psychological principles and existential philosophy. There he wrote his book: Ego, Hunger, and Aggression: A Revision of Freud's Theory and Method .

In the late 1940's, they moved to New York City, where they joined a community of artists that were into philosophy, psychology, medicine, and education. Several years of collaboration with members of this group resulted in the training of the first generation of Gestalt therapists, a comprehensive formulation of the theory, methodology, and practice of Gestalt Therapy and the book Gestalt Therapy: Excitement