by Gordon Wheeler

A version of this article has appeared in On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture, Edited by Jeffrey J. Kripal and Glenn W. Shuck, Indiana University Press, 2005

Western Culture at Mid-Century—Context and Crisis

The dawn of the twentieth century, as has often been observed, brought the high-water mark of something we may call, particularly in its Anglo/American inflection, the “High Victorian Synthesis.”  This was that optimistic and fiercely self-confident worldview that held that Western European civilization was the vanguard of a new departure in human history, a permanent if sometimes bumpy upward arc of progress marked by the enormous advances of the past few centuries in science and technology, which were themselves now nearly complete.  Along with this came the growth and spread of individual rights and expression.  All of these features together were both the vehicles and the finest flowers of the culture.  This arc, which was now of some five hundred years’ duration in Europe (some said a thousand), was already well on the way to completion of the liberal reform of Western society, itself without the need of any deep disturbance to the present structure of that world.  A hundred years without a major war in Europe meant that war itself was becoming a thing of the past.  Poverty and disease would soon follow.  History was progress.  “The West” was its harbinger and vehicle.  And both the new historicism of the nineteenth century and science itself (including the new current of Darwinism) confirmed these obvious truths.

This world was pluralistic, of course, like all worlds.  Doubters and dissent existed, from Marxists/Socialists to Freud to the Suffragettes, and in retrospect now we may see some of the more easily caricatured features of the age as uneasy accommodations to the rapid pace of change of the past two hundred years and the disquieting intercultural contacts of European imperialism.  Still, to a great extent, even these reformers and revolutionaries drank deeply at the same well of cultural superiority and self-confidence, offering only a different program for the realization of the inevitable progress to come (Freud, for example, liked to picture himself as a conquistador in the dark continent of the Unconscious, and Kipling, who cautioned against hubris, was himself one of the Empire’s greatest champions).  Meanwhile, through the engine of enlightened imperialism, the institutions, attitudes, and prosperity of Europe and its cultural offspring, the United States (often pictured as Rome to Europe’s Greece) would naturally, inevitably spread over the rest of the globe.

By 1950, of course, all of this ebullient, complacent edifice was shattered, a casualty like so many others of the nightmares and waking horrors of the past few decades.  In its place was a cultural landscape of deep psychic contradictions and experiential rifts: on the one hand, an upbeat official optimism, the “return to normalcy” yet again, this time with a new consumerist vengeance; and, on the other, in the shadows a dark foreboding, civil defense exercises all the more alarming for their manifest naiveté, amid dream imagery of mushroom clouds.  Church attendance was up against a steady under-beat of mid-century Existentialist despair.  It was the “Age of Conformity” and the birth of the Beat generation.  The body was denied, while Playboy was the publishing sensation of the decade.  The demise of the Left and the end of class warfare were proclaimed, while the search was on for the “enemy within” and the Cold War only seemed to grow hotter from day to day.

And so it went.  There seemed literally to be no end to the sharp polarizations and “false dichotomies” of the day (to use Gestalt writer Paul Goodman’s term[i]), which now were offered, as deep cultural polarities always are, as the basic and stable categories of existence itself:  masculine/feminine, black/white, American/un-American (a telling neologism), normal/abnormal, straight/gay (these last terms themselves, of course, were not yet in use, the times being far from any such relaxed colloquialisms on so destabilizing a subject).  And then along with these came all the older, even more entrenched categories of the cultural tradition: mind/body, body/soul, intellect/emotion (both were distrusted now, as being equally disturbing to the status quo), civilized/primitive (a Victorian favorite, but dating back at least to the Greeks, and containing the deeper polarity of us/them), together with newer (or newly-inflected) ones like facts/values, science/art, science/religion, progress/tradition, East/West, self/society (a particularly tricky opposition, in a culture both fiercely individualistic and deeply conformist), and, of course, now conscious/unconscious.  All the perennial Christian themes still obtained as well:  good/evil, damned/saved, religious/infidel, here/hereafter, and so on.  To this familiar catalog Goodman now also appended, even more subversively, those of adult/child, work/play, poetry/prose, man/animal, disciplined/lazy, spontaneous/deliberate, and, most tellingly of all, desire/despair.[ii]

This was also a world easily (and often) caricatured, then and since, but in the main these landscape features and background contours were amply confirmed at the time (and since) by numerous contemporary observers, ranging from novelists like J. D. Salinger and Philip Roth to scholars and social critics like David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd) and, again, Paul Goodman, whose 1961 indictment of “the organized system,” Growing Up Absurd, was to become a bible of the next generation, in the quite different landscape of the 1960’s.[iii]  To be sure, this world too was pluralistic, yet it seemed that dissent itself had a different status now from its place in the eras immediately before and after.  Whereas social and political outliers (at least high-status ones) in an earlier, more self-assured age, such as Oscar Wilde or even the revolutionary Prince Peter Kropotkin in tsarist Russia (a strong influence on Goodman’s social anarchism), sometimes seemed to have to go well out of their way to get themselves persecuted, dissidents now seemed to face no such difficulty, as victims of the time like Alan Turing, Wilhelm Reich, Ethel Rosenberg, or the many targets of McCarthyism and the House Unamerican Activities Committee could attest.

It is surely no accident either that so many of these cultural features are themselves the hallmarks and clinical criteria of what is now known, both clinically and popularly, as PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), the reaction, now seemingly on a mass level, to inassimilable psychic assault and trauma.[iv]  These included repression and dissociation themselves, chronic fear of the body (especially the sexual body), desensitization and denial, a generalized dulling of affect and intolerance of strong passion, compulsive activity, conformism and mistrust of difference, fear of conflict, discomfort with both stillness and excitement, and a consequent generalized simplification of thought, especially around charged themes or situations, together with a nagging vulnerability to depression and despair.  In the extreme, this fear of difference and destabilization can amount to paranoid ideation and behavior, the frantic detection of impurities and enemies everywhere, with the projection of evil designs onto presumed enemies, who in the extreme case must be preemptively destroyed.  If the definition of trauma is stress that cannot be integrated, then the reaction, individually and socially, may be a kind of vicious circle, as the chronic avoidance of new stress only leads to steadily less tolerance for difference, challenge, or stress itself.  The self, or by analogy here the social body, moves to protect itself from overwhelm and dissolution by trying to limit experience itself, both internally and externally.  The result is the kind of “as-if” life remarked by Sartre and others, with a compromise in capacity for creativity, flexibility, passion, and any real satisfaction in living.

Indeed, the stresses and traumas of the previous half century did seem to defy integration.  This tragic litany is now sadly familiar: the pointless sacrifice of a generation in the trenches of the First War, followed immediately by the revolutions and civil wars of Europe, worldwide depression, the rise of Nazism and other fascisms, the terrible disillusionment (to the Left) of the Soviet gulag, and then renewed war itself, truly on a world level this time with its mass civilian fire-bombings, the advent of atomic weapons (and their prompt use as well on civilian populations), and then finally, shatteringly to the Western psyche and self-concept, the revelation at the end of the War of the full horrors of the Camps.

The last two of these nightmares, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, in particular seemed to lie outside all human capacity for integration—and all the more so if they were held up together so that each set off and underscored the horror of the other (not surprisingly, they seldom were held up together in this way).  For if we human beings now had it in our hands to wipe out all the advances and achievements of the past millennium, if not indeed life itself on the planet, it was hard to know where to look for any assurance within ourselves that we would shrink from using that power.  The chilling effect of the Holocaust on the post-War world had been to collapse what Jung called “the projective theory of evil,” that fond illusion, so characteristic of the period just prior to this one, that savagery and cruelty had finally been “cured” by the advances of Western culture and were now safely contained in some faraway, probably dark-skinned “other,” quite remote from our enlightened neighborhood, where moral constraints were firmly in place.[v]  This illusion was now obviously untenable.  On the contrary, it now seemed that there was nothing after all in our inherent human nature–and worse still, nothing in our supposedly enlightened Western civilization–to suggest that there were any limits at all to our human capacity for cruelty and wanton evil (over a million children had been killed in the Shoah, after all, and not as “collateral damage,” but as targeted, intentional murders, while the Holocaust itself had itself been a major, perhaps crippling diversion from the German military project of Continental hegemony).  Taken together in this unbearably clear way, any full reading of the facts seemed to counsel only panic or despair.

The United States of course had emerged as the only true “winner” of the Second War, not just largely unscathed but even industrially and militarily enhanced, and heir as well to both the European and Japanese empires and spheres of influence.  But what kind of world had been inherited?  If the old idea of American “exceptionalism” was much invoked now as an apology for empire, that exceptional status itself, and the whole structure of denial it was built on, began to seem dangerously fragile, everywhere beset by threats as vague as “negativism,” as pervasive as “infiltration,” or as sharp as the subversive promptings of one’s own body.

Most of this as well is now commonplace and has been much written about (and filmed), however difficult it may be to convey fully, another fifty years on, to those too young now to have known that post-War world at first hand.  Fully appreciated or not, however, the importance of setting this scene here is crucial, as it was this world, marked as it was by deep cleavages of mind and spirit and struggling to contain and deny a profound sense of cultural failure, that would be both context and occasion for the founding of two of the most remarkable, rehabilitative, and “alternative” projects of those times.  One was the founding of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur California in 1962, the brainchild of two Stanford graduate school dropouts, Michael Murphy and Richard Price, both in search in different ways of something they could not find (because it was simply unavailable) in the mainstream culture.  The other was the Gestalt model of psychotherapy, first articulated by Frederick (Fritz) Perls and Paul Goodman, growing out of the leftist intellectual and emigré circles of New York City in the early post-War period, and then spreading progressively across the country, to arrive and take root at Esalen in the person of Perls himself soon after its founding.  From that time, in addition to its wider influence in the popular and clinical culture, the Gestalt approach would continue to color (and be colored by) the development of the Institute over the next several decades.

Each of these projects, both separately and through their interaction, would go on to have profound formative effects on the mainstream culture they set out to “counter,” deconstruct and reform.  In both cases, these effects were to be out of all proportion to the seeming size of the two enterprises, or even perhaps to the expectations of their respective founders.  In the process, each affected the other profoundly as well, both creatively and expansively at first, and then for a time perhaps in a more constricting way, as each seemed to succumb to its own (and the other’s) “shadow,” both losing some part of their creative edge and direction in the 1980’s (even as each of them was also breaking new ground in this period in areas at first outside the sphere of their interaction).  When both went on to recover impetus and full creative energy in the years after that same decade, it was as leaders but also as beneficiaries of a larger cultural shift in the wider world, the “mainstream” feeding back to the “countercultural” world now, in company too with many of the allied movements and institutions that each of these two had helped to spawn directly or indirectly.

In retrospect, the two projects seem utterly fated to meet and conjoin, so similar were many of their founding assumptions, their aspirations, their deconstructive spirit, and their unexamined shadows.  Each was in its own way fundamentally and sincerely optimistic about the human condition, contrasting sharply with the forced, hollow cheer (and nagging underlying nihilism) of the day.  But at the same time, each rejected equally sharply the old, failed programs, goals, and assumptions of the previous, pre-War synthesis.  Each of them promised, on slightly different but overlapping grounds, a radically new understanding of human nature, and with it new energy and a new basis for hope about the human race, the planet, and the future of both.

Even their approaches to their specific agendas were similar:  each was founded with the idea of integrating (or reintegrating) an extensive roster of the “neurotic splits” (Goodman’s term again) and projections of the culture, both past and present.  At the same time, each project contained, in retrospect, some unexamined splits and shadows of its own.  These too were largely overlapping, and some of them were coextensive with deeper blind spots of Western culture itself.  Finally, for all their similarities of vision and shadow, each did contain a germinal idea the other needed in order to reach its own full potential.

The story of the creative interaction between these two “countercultural” projects reflects and also sheds light on some of the key cultural themes and dynamics of the past half century in the West, beginning with the post-War age of conformism characterized above, continuing into the subsequent period of protest and cultural/political reform, and moving on into the 1980’s, a time of considerable retreat and regression from the humanistic and progressivist agenda of the previous two decades.  The story of their recovery and renewal from this retreat as well serves to illuminate a profound cultural sea change in the wider culture, one still very much ongoing on in our own times.  Again, both Esalen and the Gestalt movement, in common with many other allied projects this time, are part of the leading edge of this change.  And again, the interaction between the two projects–the one having now achieved an international profile, and the other also a worldwide movement, still “alternative”–is supporting and influencing the creative development of each partner.

To understand all this–the genesis and growth of each project, the burgeoning and excitement of each in the early period, followed by the partial stasis that seemed to mark both enterprises for a time, and finally the capacity each has found in a return to its own germinal assumptions to transcend that stasis and renew growth–we need to look at both projects from the inside in terms of the founding vision and ground assumptions of each and in terms of the dynamic relation of each of these “alternative” projects to the cultural “mainstream” each has influenced so profoundly over the intervening years.  And then too, we need to understand the shadow that each of these fertile deconstructive projects failed for a time to deconstruct, and how that process as well has undergone revision and renewal and has led to renewed growth in new directions.  The examination of these last themes will bring us right up to the present and the shifts going on today, at Esalen, in the realm of Gestalt and other psychotherapy and related movements, and in the wider world.

The Gestalt Model:  Construction and Evolution

Gestalt, most succinctly stated, is the psychology of Constructivism.  That is, the model grows out of the foundational insight that our experiential world is not and cannot be given to us, all prepackaged and organized in any direct, representational or camera-like way (the old assumption known in philosophy as “representational” or “naive” realism) without need of organization or interpretation.  Rather, we construct that world–often on the fly, as it were, and in the pressures of the living moment–out of some dynamic synthesis of our own past experience and beliefs, attentional habits and capacities, expectations, present felt needs, future intentions, cultural and dispositional screens, and present conditions and stimuli (but even these are screened, selected, and pruned through our own neurological and experiential filters).  In other words, there is no “pure data.”  Perception itself is an act of interpretation, rendering “sense data” (itself selected and interpreted) into useable whole units, or “gestalts,” of imaginal pictures, narratives, and other sequences.

The “elements” of perception, that is, are not isolated “stimulus/response” units “out there” but are themselves already organized wholes, which then serve to mediate emotion, cognition, behavior and other experience alike.  We construct both experience and meaning (which are structurally the same or at least lie on a continuum of elaboration) and then use those constructed wholes of understanding predictively and evaluatively to perceive and deal with the resources and challenges of our shared world.

Exactly how we do this was studied brilliantly and extensively in lab research through the first half of the past century.  This work is only now being sweepingly confirmed by the new technologies of brain imaging.[vi]  Where James and others had already noted that selective attention had to be the key, to resolving what he called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of (potential) sense data,[vii] the early Gestalt research movement now set out to flesh out and explicate the dynamics of that attentional process itself.  So foundational and revolutionary was this body of work that there really is no psychology today that is not essentially “Gestalt” in nature and premises.[viii]  The role of expectation in perception, the emotional basis of cognition, the inseparability of mind and body, the futility of trying to consider behavior apart from intention and context, the way meaning-making controls perception and behavior, the problem-solving nature of perceptual process itself, the primacy of relationship in living process and individual development, the way brain, mind, emotion, action and belief become tightly integrated in experiential/behavioral “schemas,” which tend to unfold as whole sequences–all these things are now both taken for granted and well-grounded in research.  And all of these conclusions and more come directly out of the Gestalt lab and social research.[ix]

Fritz Perls and Paul Goodman were not the first to see the immediate applications of this work to psychotherapy,[x] but their groundbreaking 1951 text, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, gave us the first full theoretical exposition of the method.  In their hands, the model emphasized especially the articulation of self-experience, experiment, profound respect for the individual as creator of her own meanings, authentic therapeutic relationship, rejection of externally-imposed authority, and a wide reclaiming of lost parts of the self (especially body feeling, spontaneity, creativity, and strong emotion and affective expression, specifically including both aggression and sexuality), all of it grounded in a deep faith in each person’s innate striving for growth and wholeness.  All these themes are still vitally present in Gestalt work today.

It is worth noting again that all these major themes–the primacy of emotion, the grounding of experience in embodiment, the quest for meaning, the centrality of relationship, the authoritativeness of self-experience, the validation of self-expression, the key role of desire in human process, and the reclamation and celebration of erotic passion–were deeply problematic in the American culture of the times.  And more than that, each of them tended to be held in a way that was split off from everyday awareness and life to a degree and in a manner that is difficult to appreciate today.  It was not, of course, that people did not have all these feelings, register body sensations, reflect on and construct meanings, feel erotic and other passions, though, to be sure, some of these sensations and processes might actually have been muted by the fact of a non-receptive cultural surround.  Rather, it was that many of these experiences might be held apart from the rest of life and experience and thus remain less than fully explored for want of an active and articulated social discourse for that exploration.  In any case, what remained from all this splitting was the familiar identity sanctioned by the mainstream cultural voices of the times: conformist, materialist/consumerist, conservative in style and affect, risk-averse, and in general deeply distrustful of the realms of body, emotions, sex, and the passions in general.

In place of all this, the founders of the Gestalt therapy model would build their approach, theoretically and methodologically, around the reclamation of desire and aggression themselves,  the very “energies” that Freud had posed as the dangerous dark side of human nature and the irreducible antagonists of civilization and social order (this was, of course, the later, gloomier Freud, the Freud of Civilization and its Discontents who was far more pessimistic about the human prospect after the pointless spectacle of the First World War, which seemed to be an expression of destructiveness for its own sake[xi]).  Paul Goodman, the principal author and theoretician of the new model, was himself deeply versed in the Freudian model and cultural Freudianism, as were most leftist intellectuals of the times, even those, such as Sartre, of a manifestly Marxist/anti-Freudian bent.  But Goodman drew his inspiration from the earlier, sunnier Freud, who had once proclaimed the analyst to be the “ally of the Id” against a repressive culture before thinking better of such a radical subversion under the shadows of World War I, the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe, and perhaps the vehemence of some of his own early critics.[xii]  And Goodman’s own therapy had been principally with Alexander Lowen, a student of Wilhelm Reich and a founder of bioenergetic therapy, with its emphasis on embodiment and cathartic bodily release.[xiii]

Moreover, Goodman was a serious social activist and a philosophical anarchist, by which he understood chiefly the proposition that human beings left to themselves can be trusted to build spontaneously far more humane, cooperative, and life-affirming social networks and institutions than any a central authority might provide.  When not interfered with, communities, like individuals in the Gestalt perspective, have a “self-regulating” or “organismic” capacity, exactly like the capacity of the unhampered “organism” to meet its animal needs (eating, excreting and sex and the like) without external regulation.[xiv]  “Man” (sic.–not just the language but the erotic imagery of Goodman’s writing is always heavily gender-inflected) is an animal, to be sure, but above all a social animal.  This is Darwin much tempered by Kropotkin’s cooperative evolution (1908), as well as by Dewey and the American pragmatists, with their strong echoes of the great American Romantic/ individualist tradition of both Emerson and Twain.  This was individualism, to be sure, but it was an individualism based in an instinctively moral communitarianism that was far from the Social Darwinist, “survival of the strongest” individualist flavor of Nietzsche and Freud.

Central to all this and indeed the engine and the genius of Goodman’s notions of spontaneous, “organismic” self-regulation both individually and relationally/politically, is always eros or desire.  This is not the dark and Oedipal libido of Freud’s vision, rapacious and imperialistic in nature, ready at least metaphorically (or was it literally?) to murder the father so as to possess the mother with fierce and startlingly precocious genitality.  Rather, in eros Goodman, who was both bisexual himself (today he might be better called “polyamorous”) and a fierce proponent of the sexual rights of children and adolescents, saw the crux and the key to a new vision of human nature, away from the heavy authoritarian (if resolutely meliorist) systems of psychoanalysis and behaviorism, but equally far again from the old, equally conformist/imperialist synthesis of the pre-War world.  Not our human nature, but oppressive social institutions were to blame for the perilous, paralyzed state of the world of the day.  Goodman’s Gestalt, that is, was deeply political at its core in contrast, as we shall see, to the inflection of his co-author, Fritz Perls.  Where they agreed was that the way out led forward, not back, in the direction of less social control, not more.  For Goodman, this route would always pass through a radical reaffirmation of the truth and health and finally the political reliability of our fundamental social-animal nature, our inborn relational/political eros, which was not our downfall but rather our one possible path to the salvation of a dying world.

Here we see Goodman’s most radical theoretical departure from Freud, and the key as well to what he hoped to get for his purposes out of the Gestalt tradition in psychology: the reassessment and repositioning of desire, in human relationships and process.  Indeed, so seamlessly integrated was this reevaluation as the basis of a program for therapeutic and social change, that it is easy to overlook how radically it revises the mainstream Western tradition and challenges much of “the East” as well.  Not only is the entire course of Western culture (and not just Freud and his fellow “Victorians”) from Plato through the entire Christian tradition to Descartes and beyond, marked by a deep suspiciousness if not wholesale condemnation of desire, and especially of embodied desire; but “the East” as well has had puritanisms of its own that have tended to relegate desire and attachment to the status of enemies of spiritual progress or enlightenment.  Ecstatic voices and minority traditions have, of course, existed in both great cultural lineages (though even here, condemnation of sexuality and the body has often been a feature), but they have never predominated in the mainstream of either lineage, sex being inherently subversive of institutions of power, as Goodman himself liked to point out (indeed, that is what he valued about sex, among other things).[xv]

In Gestalt psychology, Goodman saw essentially three things that would serve him in this project.  First was this reclamation of desire itself.  Second was a basis for grounding this program in a coherent theory of human cognitive/emotional/ behavioral process.  Indeed, as he would retell the Gestalt narrative, eros became the key to the whole process, the “Id of the situation”[xvi] that was the elán vital driving the formation of gestalts (itself the very essence of human perception and experience). In other words, it was desire itself that was definitional of life, and not struggle, or spirit, or some other ultimate goal.  If this was Existentialism (and it was), it was Existentialism with a particular, American/communitarian flavor, both embodied and instinctively relational and without its Continental undertones of inherent alienation on the shores of an existence where we find no natural belonging.  And if it was Freudianism (and it was), it was likewise Freud without the dark side, liberated from his reductive, Social Darwinist, biomechanical pessimism about the inherent conflict between individual nature and human society.

What Gestalt was telling us, Goodman argued, was that without desire there simply was no life at all, and that that process itself, the unfolding and completion of gestalts of perception, action, and meaning, moving toward goal and “closure,” was the “life cycle” of particular desires themselves.  If a germ of this idea could be found in early Freud (and certainly in Reich[xvii]), that germ now produced more than the mere assertions that had marked Freud’s biological reductionism.  In essence, a psychological how was now added to the picture.  Freud’s fatal flaw, according to Goodman, had always been not his clinical insights but rather an “inadequate theory of awareness,” that is, an unfortunate grounding in mechanistic/Associationist psychology, as opposed to Gestalt process and cognitive psychology.

Second, Goodman looked to Gestalt as a basis for reintegrating the whole panoply of repressive splits and exaggerated polarizations of the culture.  The Gestalt model of perception and cognition was itself fundamentally holistic.  If the subject was interacting with a whole field of perceptive experience, actively and synthetically integrating wholes of understanding and meaning, then the idea of holding some parts of experience outside that process would be definitional of repression itself.  In other words, the whole idea of splitting off, say, body experience or emotions from intellect, sexual or aggressive impulse from social life, or, for that matter, politics from personal relations and the life of feelings and the body, would be reflective of dysfunction at a the deepest level of awareness process itself.  Such a person would be in no position to make sound choices and judgments in any of those areas because his/her opinions would be literally false and of no value (this of course is one of the malicious pleasures of all clinical psychology, as Goodman himself noted: one’s critics and opponents are not just wrong, but pathologically wrong[xviii]).  Freud had, of course, already pointed out much the same thing, but his argument was essentially only by clinical speculation and inference.  Here once again, Gestalt would provide a true theoretical, psychological rationale for insights Freud himself could only assert.

Moreover, if embodiment is the fundamental condition of being alive, and desire is always in essence embodied desire felt and registered in the “whole organism,” then why should not body itself be a kind of ultimate authority of whether something is “good” or not?  Man, Goodman insisted, is always a social/psychological animal, making connection and meaning out of a reality that is only perceived physically.  Again, this is what the Gestalt model is telling us.  Therefore, once more, to exclude body from the picture leaves us in no position to work, make art, or live an interpersonal or political life creatively and freely.  Rather, the person with diminished body experience would be merely a political automaton subject to programmed control by “the system,” just as one could see on all sides merely by looking at the society and the world of the times.  Again, it was not, after all, our animal nature and spontaneous impulses that were the problem, as in the later Freud; rather, the threat both to survival and to full living came from trying to split ourselves off from that nature.  In other words, in the return to embodied desire lay the key to politics, at every level from local to global, and thus the answer to the cloud hanging over the future of humanity itself.

Third, and equally radical in practical terms, in Gestalt–and particularly in this idea of the embodied basis of perception and meaning–Goodman saw the chance to articulate a psychotherapy without authority, a new attitude for the therapist freed of the heavy Freudian mortmain of the analyst as expert/judge pronouncing on what was and was not an acceptable sublimation of passion, both in degree and in object choice.  Freud’s way led only backward, to the repressions and oppressions of the past, which were replicated, not dissolved, on the couch–and thus to everything that had landed us in a world that was both deadening and deadly and poised to blow itself up (“Make love not war” would be a completely logical slogan of this program).  Rather, this therapy would consist in a dialogic engagement of equals, each of them striving to be “authentically” present, a phrase by which Goodman understood chiefly a mutually free expression of felt experience and awareness, beginning with body awareness and without any censorship of impulse, desire, passion on the part of either participant (Freud too had called  for “free association,” the relaxation of self-censorship, but in the service of revealing hidden secrets of the past and not in the exercise of real passions in the real encounter of the moment).

The therapist, to be sure, was presumed to be further along in this project of authenticity:  thus the therapy would focus on the various inhibitions, distortions, and blocks in the patient along the road from sensation to full awareness and desire, to full expression of that passionate impulse in the “here and now” (as well as either its accomplishment, right then and there, as in a full venting of anger or tears—or at least the positioning of the patient on a better, more practiced and awares basis for that accomplishment in some other setting–as with a larger life ambition, say, or sex itself[xix]).  As for accomplishment, Goodman was not beyond turning to other members in a group setting and appealing directly for an amorous assignation for the desirous patient, while for the attractive young man with libidinous curiosity an adventure of a different kind might well await with the therapist himself at some other time or even right in the next break.[xx]

In other words, the therapist would analyze only process, not content.  It was the full, clear, energized realization of “the gestalt” that was sought, not an externally-imposed judgment about the particular content of the desire, which was the individual’s own responsibility.  To guide the therapist (or the self-help client reading the book) in this “gestalt analysis,” Goodman then went on to catalog a brief nosology of “resistances” that might typically distort or block healthy “contact,” as the healthy gestalt-formation process was called.  The goal was to move “organismically” through the rise of desire to action and arrive at the goal state and the natural release of energy, which was then followed by a period of retreat and the arousal of a new awareness, need, or desire (again, the imagery is drawn from a traditionally “masculine” sexuality).  The parallels here to Freudian libido theory and defense mechanisms are strong (several terms are on both canonical lists).  But again, the difference is that in Freud, and particularly in Anna Freud’s classic The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, the therapeutic goal was to soften the harshness of the defenses just a bit, but still to use them to contain the inevitable instinct-anxiety and rechannel otherwise dangerous energies,[xxi] whereas here the idea was to confront and dissolve all inhibitions and distortions toward a full, natural expression of “organismic impulse.”[xxii]

Eros thus untrammeled, Goodman assures us, would not lead us to a Nietzschean (or Freudian) nightmare of berserker rampage or chaos unrestrained.  Those horrors were rather the consequence of not giving free reign to the natural energies of aggression and desire.  Problems and conflicts would, of course, arise, perhaps physical aggression or even murder, but none of it would reach the horrifying levels of the mechanized, impersonal destruction that we saw everywhere around us and that depended on the kind of out-of-touch, disembodied, chronically half-mobilized human being who was the product of modern statism and constituted the modern neurosis.[xxiii]  Liberation and free self-expression, not central design, would save the world.

Of course, there was at least one flaw in this program, even in its own terms.  By proposing such a canon of “resistances” to full “contact,” Goodman was placing the therapist in the position of authority and judge–the very thing he set out not to do.  In place of the dialogic engagement of equals he envisioned–exploring, arguing, perhaps laughing and weeping together, perhaps exchanging physical tenderness, all along the way to a fuller awareness of desire and its vicissitudes–such a therapy might, in less relational hands, easily lend itself to a reductive and authoritarian caricature, just as so much Freudian therapy had done, in which the therapist confined him/herself to safe and shaming pronouncements about the blocks and failures in the client’s process (a retreat which Erv Polster, Goodman and Perls’s student and probably the most prominent Gestalt trainer of the second generation, would much later term “reintroducing the couch”[xxiv]).  Indeed, in the view of many observers, this is just what did tend to happen for over a generation, following the lead of Fritz Perls, the cofounder of the method and the man who would bring Gestalt therapy to Esalen and from there champion and represent it to a much wider world.[xxv]

Meanwhile, Fritz Perls had taken something rather different from the Gestalt psychology model, which he likewise saw as a vehicle for the advancement of his own therapeutic agenda.  In contrast to Goodman’s grand and radical project of reevaluating and recentering desire, Perls’ aim with the Gestalt method was, at least originally, more modest.  By his own account,[xxvi] Perls was no reader, and he absorbed ideas more by osmosis than by study.[xxvii]  What he did see in Gestalt’s constructivist vision of human process as the formation and dissolution of wholes of cognition/emotion was the basis for his own program of rescuing aggression from the limbo of Freud’s later, twin-instinct theory (that is, Eros and Thanatos, sex and death, in place of just libido alone) in which aggression was equated with the “death instinct.”[xxviii]  For did it not require self-assertion, which is aggressive energy, to construct these wholes of meaning and action?  And did not every whole so constructed then eventually need to be dissolved or destructured, to make way for new growth and larger or at least fresh understanding?  Here Perls joined Goodman in drawing on Reich’s character theory, in which essentially any fixed pattern of personality tends to be seen as pathological, a rigidification in the service of containing anxiety.  The body of course carries these fixities as “body armor,” but by the same token it also betrays them.[xxix]  Thus Gestalt therapy’s emphasis on the telling or revealing gesture: the denial of anger, say, accompanied by a clinched fist; or of erotic feeling, together with an open and suggestive pelvic posture; or a closed, constricted one.  And as in Freud, the display or the denial of the affect the patient was “accused” of could serve equally as evidence that the analyst was “right.”  This was what many people found so maddening, or shaming–in any case, disempowering–about psychotherapy.  It was also what Goodman hoped to get away from yet managed to replicate in the new method.

Perls’s first (and only) theoretical work had centered around this project, of rehabilitating aggression from its bad odor in the later Freud.[xxx]  Freud was essentially right in all his theorizing, Perls wrote from exile in South Africa in the early years of the War, except that he overlooked the importance of oral aggression as an “instinct” in its own right along with libido and “Thanatos.”  This aggression, unlike the other kind, was essential and life-affirming, corresponding in development to dentation in the infant, and thus to the transition from infantile helplessness and passivity or mere sucking, to real chewing or the active destructuring of the food.  Thus “oral aggression” was associated with autonomy, self-determination, and the maturing drive to “chew” everything taken in, thereby mastering it and rendering it one’s own, as opposed to “swallowing it whole.”  Thus too there could be “oral resistances” in addition to the “anal resistances” of classic theory: all of these are various kinds of failure to attack the stuff of life aggressively and so lead to a chronic passivity and avoidance of self-responsibility.  Introjection, for example, was the classic case and prototype for all the others: the infant introjects the milk, passively.  The toothling bites (and thereby causes a rupture with the mother, predating the one the father would impose at a later age in Oedipal theory).  This may seem to reflect a fantastic unfamiliarity in a father with two small children at the time with the aggressivity of suckling infants.  Nonetheless, for Perls the image remained emblematic for the “transition from ‘other-supports’ to ‘self-supports,’” which he would equate with mature development itself.[xxxi]

In practice, this meant a therapy, in Perls’ hands, in which aggression was always celebrated as a return to embodied, energized, and “self-responsible” life.  Isadore From, an early patient who was later a prominent Gestalt trainer, tells of once hurling a heavy glass ashtray in a rage at Fritz Perls during a session.  He missed, but Perls merely murmured, “Gut, gut” (“Good, good.”).[xxxii]   Aggression was being disinhibited, that was the main thing.  Richer and more passionate living would surely be the result.

In retrospect now, the tensions between Goodman’s and Perls’ understandings of the import and potential of the Gestalt model seem both fundamental and not completely reconcilable.  In the context of the times, though–the world of the 1950’s evoked above, followed by a period of heady rejection of much of that world–it was the overlap that counted, the common agenda of challenging the iron fist of social control in art, in politics, in the bedroom, and in the therapeutic hour.  It was in this spirit that Perls brought Gestalt to Esalen in 1965, and it was the showcase provided by Esalen that catapulted Gestalt into the popular imagination in its Perlsian version, which emphasized unrestrained individual expression and autonomy over relationship, interdependence, and political engagement.  Both Gestalt and Esalen would suffer for a time from this reduction of the model to only the first “come-to-your-senses” phase of its potential, which Goodman had presented more as a preparatory or recovery stage, on the way to the rest of the agenda: “…to create a new world,” together.[xxxiii]  But this reduction was of course syntonic with the wider culture of the times and thus may be seen as the limit, for a time, of the deconstructive use of the model to reform that wider culture.  Today, in a different time, the rest of that agenda can be seen more clearly to the benefit of the fuller realization of both projects, Gestalt and Esalen alike.

Gestalt at Esalen

The founding notion of the Esalen Institute, in the slightly later words of longtime Esalen President George Leonard, was always the idea that “the world doesn’t have to be the way it is.”[xxxiv]  This is of course a notion shared by all revolutionaries and reformers in one way or another, but what was more unusual in the Esalen project was its open-ended agenda.  In the words of co-founder Michael Murphy, the vision was “to create a space for everything that was excluded from the academy.”[xxxv]  As a quick glance back at the above sketch of some of the “dichotomies” and shadows of the culture of the times will confirm, this was a large agenda indeed.  Embodiment and sexuality, spiritual experience, alternative psychotherapies, consciousness itself, the philosophical implications of quantum physics, shamanic studies, alternative healing traditions, “countercultural” art and music (much of it soon to become mainstream), race relations, environmental concerns (not yet known as “ecology”), cross-cultural initiatives (leading eventually to the new political form of “citizen” or “track-two diplomacy”)–all this and much, much more was “off the page” of the mainstream culture in 1962, and all of it and more would be explored, incubated, nurtured, and developed at Esalen over the next decades, leading in many cases to influential shifts and movements in that wider mainstream itself.  All this is amply documented in this volume and elsewhere and, as such, constitutes the story of Esalen as a (counter)cultural institution in its own right over the ensuing four decades and ongoingly today.

Certain features of the story, however, are set off or clarified in a new way by consideration of the mutual influences between Esalen and the Gestalt model from the beginning and down through these years, and it is these that interest us here.  This discussion begins with consideration of some principal ways Esalen and Gestalt were not alike in certain of their fundamental thrusts and concerns.  This in turn leads to what each of them had, and has, to offer to the other, and how that mutual enrichment has led, and continues to lead, to an expansion of vision of each project.  Finally, consideration of that expanded vision sheds light in turn on the central cultural assumptions that neither project was at first able to see deconstructively: the Western individualistic self-model itself, its rich gifts and its sharp limitations, all of which are crucial to the next stage of the unfolding of both these projects and indeed to the cultural transition underway today on a global level.

To begin with, Esalen itself was always fundamentally more in spirit than a smorgasbord menu of richly diverse practices, explorations, topics, and concerns.  Transcending this eclecticism, contextualizing it and to a degree unifying it, was the vision of “the integral”–simply put, the notion, so deeply shared with the Gestalt movement, that we had split off and lost whole dimensions of our “human potential” so that we either possessed limited or no access to them at all, or else these “shadow poles” of human experience and functioning were held in a way that was cut off from the rest of our experience to stultifying and even life-threatening effect.  Thus there was from the beginning at Esalen the unifying idea of a conversation (Murphy himself has often invoked the idea of Plato’s or Ficino’s Academy), an integrative space where any part of the human experience could enter into open discourse with any other part.

Naturally, these cross-disciplinary exchanges (in many cases with “disciplines” that were themselves as yet undefined, for want of this kind of conversational space) tended from the first to zero right in on the central “splits” of the culture: mind/body was an early and persistent theme, soon to be followed by the related topic mind/spirit, and then the even more subversive discourse, body/spirit, with its inherently deconstructive effects on Western and Eastern cultures alike.  This then led naturally to the opening of a space for traditional and alternative healing traditions (and new methods), which were themselves if anything even more taboo in the academic/scientific discourse of Western medicine of the day.  To continue with this one cluster, it was then very much in Murphy’s integral spirit to open these conversations to (the more open-minded members of) the mainstream medical profession as well, both in workshop explorations and in a series of invitational conferences on these topics in the 1980’s.  The well-known result was the development of what we know today as “complementary medicine,” the common experience of patients today, who are not surprised to hear their neurologist or dermatologist recommend acupuncture; or their cardiologist, meditation and stress reduction techniques; or their oncologist, all of the above plus group psychotherapy–all of them with “hard” studies to back up their recommendations (but of course, such studies themselves, in the way of mainstream science, follow on the opening of such a discourse, rather than precede it).

This is merely one example of many illustrating the pulse of the integrative spirit in action, the nature of a “countercultural” institution at its best, in relation to the mainstream culture it “counters,” and the “methodology” of Esalen’s vision of an open space for integral inquiry.  The key word here is “integral”–again, the idea that human experience is potentially unitary, that we are at an essential level unified with, not separate from, our world, and that the foliation and then reweaving of new “parts” of that experience is an evolutionary process, resulting in the generation of novelty and new forms, that is, the unfolding of “human potential.”  In all this we can see the deep influence on Murphy, in particular, of the tradition of the Indian philosopher-saint Sri Aurobindo, to whose ashram Murphy had repaired for an extended time in the early 50’s, more or less in flight from the strictures of academic philosophy (remember, this was an age in which any “spiritual” experience was deeply pathologized), and in quest of something he could not yet name, but must have in some sense intuited.

In the Cambridge-educated, intensely political Aurobindo (who had recently died, so that the two never actually met), Murphy found a figure who was himself already an apostle of “the integral” in his life as well as in his philosophy.  Part of Aurobindo’s signal contribution, as a student of both the Eastern and Western traditions, was to give a certain Darwinian flavor, at least, to the Vedantic and other Eastern traditions of the story of humanity and of the universe as the evolutionary unfolding of Spirit (Goethe, Hegel, and the rest of the German Romantic tradition of course also come to mind here, as Aurobindo himself was well aware and as Jeffrey Kripal reminds us in his own essay).[xxxvi]  Far from being hostile to Western science and philosophy, Aurobindo’s perspective offered a way of contextualizing those traditions, incorporating them into a vision that was cosmic and yet progressive, spiritual and yet activist in the world, as Aurobindo himself had been (it was Aurobindo, in anticipation of Gandhi, who had first moved the political conversation in colonial India from “home rule” to “independence” and who had been jailed for his pains).

At its best, this was a perspective the Gestalt model was prepared to join and to support with its constructivist, participatory psychological system.  In the holistic, Existentialist-inflected version of Gestalt that had been pioneered by Lewin and then articulated by Goodman, everything begins with a whole, unified field.  Awareness, the resolution of that field into figure/ground, is the assertion of a point of view in/on that field, but (and this nuance would be crucial) by a knower who is not just “in” the field but actually “of” it.  The boundary, that is, between knower and known, between “organism” and “environment” (to take Goodman’s favorite, animal-flavored terminology) is only a provisional and fluctuating dynamic phenomenon, not a real “place,” much less an “essence” of the person.  It is easy to see how such a perspective lends itself to seeing “cosmic” or “mystical” states and experiences as just one more possible inflection of that dynamic, no more and no less inherently valid, healthy, and usable than our more familiar, everyday, “Western” state of experiencing ourselves as in some way detached from our surroundings, which we are operating “in” and “on.”[xxxvii]

This was the theory, and certainly this perspective, if not its consequences for “spiritual” experience,” is articulated at times by Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy and elsewhere.  However, it was Perls, not Goodman, who brought Gestalt to Esalen, and from there to its status, for a time, as the psychotherapeutic modality of the “new age.”  And if Goodman, very much steeped himself in the deep individualism of both the American Emersonian tradition and Continental Existentialism (both of which seemed to offer a much-needed subversion of the fascisms and statisms of the day), was ambivalent about this matter of self-dissolution and loss of self-definition, Perls for his part showed no such ambivalence: he was squarely against it.  Goodman, after all, had employed the term “egotism” in his catalog of “resistances” to the full process of “contact” (egotism was defined as the inability finally to let go, to lose oneself in the act, the moment, the other, a sort of sustained orgasmic state, deeply refreshing, which he equated with full contact). Perls, in his later writings and teaching about the dangers of inhibiting the contact process, never seemed to mention the term (this, however, is not surprisingly, given his own emphasis, mentioned above, on independence and autonomy as the criteria of health).  At the same time, both of them feared and pathologized the dynamic state of “confluence,” which is likewise a kind of losing oneself in the other (Sartre’s “being-for-others” comes to mind).[xxxviii]  Both of them, moreover, generally equated “confluence” with “introjection,” the passive swallowing of authority in abrogation of the self-responsibility on which both men pinned so much hope.

The result of this ambivalence in the model at Esalen was a complex set of interrelated paradoxes.  On the one hand, Esalen was (and is) a community, made up of some hundred or more long-term residents, another seventy-five or more extended-term interns, various other dependents and service providers, plus a rotating group of a hundred or so students or conference participants at any given time, amounting to an aggregate traffic of some 10,000 hardy souls per year.  Definitely a community, if one structured in overlapping concentric circles of progressive degrees and lengths of involvement (individuals may pass from one category to another at various times, and many of the transient students are themselves “old-timers,” who have been there before, in some cases going back years).  And yet for many years at least–and here was part of the paradox–this community itself was founded on a kind of anti-communality, which was itself a part of the Gestalt legacy at Esalen, at least as Perls had represented and shaped it.

Perls himself was actually in residence as part of this community for only a few years at the end of the 1960’s, but he left a legacy of process style and values that long permeated the Esalen culture, from the residential community to the workshops to many of the research initiatives as well.  This legacy might be summed up in two key themes, which amount to injunctions: remember the body, and take responsibility for yourself.  These are indeed valuable lessons, and, again, refreshing and revitalizing in that deadening post-War landscape in ways probably impossible to appreciate fully today for those who were not there.  What was missing in this legacy, however, was Goodman’s perspective, which was that these injunctions themselves were only intended to clear the way for the resumption of full human functioning, which would always be (spontaneously–this was the essence of Goodman’s anarchistic faith) the resumption of the natural “contact arc” of relationship, community, politics, an arc which Goodman saw as having been broken by the dehumanizing terms of modern life.  Perls was himself, of course, very much of the cultural “Left,” a product of his own youth in the ferment of Weimar Berlin, when psychoanalysis itself was still radical.  And Perls remained in many ways a classical psychoanalyst to the end, pronouncing on other people’s neuroses from a position of detached authority, for all that he turned around and faced an audience in a theatrical presentation of the work.  But his interest in community remained essentially that: as an audience.  Significantly, Perls finally left Esalen after a few years in search of a more compliant setting, unhappy with the Institute’s refusal to let him, in Murphy’s words, “capture the flag and run the show.”[xxxix]

In other words, if Gestalt seemed perfect for the 1960’s, as a call to return to the body and break the shackles of conformity, in Perls’ particular inflection it was even more so for the 70’s and early 80’s, the period sometimes called (then and now) “the ‘me’ generation,” a time when the earlier bubble of naive enthusiasm for changing the political world had burst against the sharp resistance of “the system” and many people turned inward to “work on themselves” psychologically or (increasingly) spiritually.  (“Change has to begin with yourself” went a compensatory shibboleth of the times; unfortunately, all too often it seemed to end with oneself as well).  Thus the paradoxes mounted at Esalen and elsewhere: a psychotherapeutic model based on holism and contact that showed tendencies toward relationship- and commitment-phobia in the context of an intimate community founded on anti-communitarian individualism.  Small wonder if both projects–Esalen and Gestalt itself–seemed at times stuck in those periods, torn between repeating the great moments of the 60’s and uncertain about where and how to go forward from here.  At the same time, at a deeper level, each project still had something powerful to teach the other and, in teaching it, would recover its own essence and move forward with renewed focus and energy.

Meanwhile, separately and apart from their intense local embrace, both projects were looking outward to a larger world, ploughing new ground that would yield new impetus and direction later on.  For Esalen, apart from the world of alternative psycyhotherapy, bodywork, and healing, the 1980’s were the flowering of an initiative that had begun some time before, with the Murphys’ first trip to the Soviet Union, in the 1970’s.  This initiative, which represents one of the many and most public of Esalen’s successful innovative projects (and a brilliant example of the “free space for exploration and conversation” in action), was the Esalen Soviet/American exchange project, which began with the idea of hosting an encounter between Soviet and American astronauts (in other words, with an integral image of the whole earth, seen from outer space), soon proliferated to other professional and cultural exchanges and helped spawn the new forms of “citizen diplomacy” and “track-two” or non-governmental diplomatic exchange.  These forms in turn have, to put it plainly, changed our world, from one of a monolithic (or dilithic) confrontation of superpowers, to a pluralistic (and now chaotic) world in which “NGO’s” are recognized as key to any international project of peace-making and progress.  In the process, once again, the entire project illustrates dramatically how “alternative” institutions (Esalen and, of course, many others) interact with and change their host cultures by incubating and “midwifing” explorations and new methods that initially find no reception in the institutions of the mainstream.

At the same time, the Gestalt model at other venues was going through a time of similar outreach and redefinition beyond the narrowly individualistic terms set by Perls (both Perls and Goodman had died at the beginning of the 1970’s, Goodman at only sixty, by which time he had largely left the world of psychotherapy altogether in favor of more direct political engagement in the anti-war and other movements of the times).  Gestalt itself by this time was loosely split into two overlapping yet competing “schools.”  One, “West Coast” or Perlsian Gestalt, followed the more authoritarian, analytic, and sharply confrontive pattern Perls had set at Esalen, which was widely copied by a generation of his followers, there and abroad.  The other, “East Coast Gestalt,” under the loose leadership of Goodman’s and Perls’ (and Laura Perls’) student Isadore From, was always somewhat more relational in focus and more intellectual and political in flavor.  In the middle, in Cleveland, Ohio, was the largest Gestalt training center in the U.S. and indeed in the world, the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, made up of students of all the founders, but with its own more interpersonal focus of psychotherapy as a relational encounter,[xl] whole-group dynamics (growing directly out of the “t-group” movement pioneered by Gestaltist Kurt Lewin after the War[xli]), and–a wholly new application–the use of Gestalt principles and methods in working with organizational dynamics and development at a large-systems level, also growing out of Lewin’s work.[xlii]

Thus by the end of the decade some of the most fertile new work growing out of both Esalen and the Gestalt movement was taking place outside Esalen itself in venues as distant as Moscow, Cleveland, and elsewhere.  At the same time, by 1990 large parts of the initial agenda of both projects had achieved “respectability” and passed on into the mainstream.  The result was both an enormous degree of impact and influence in the wider world (not always credited to its sources, of course), and a certain sense of a particular vein having been mined out and run its course.  Thus by the 90’s revolutions that had begun and been fostered at Esalen–such as bodywork in psychotherapy, somatics as a field of study, the powerful new cultural forms of complementary medicine and citizen diplomacy discussed above, innovative early-childhood education, experiential and lifelong education themselves, the study of the affective base of cognition, holistic approaches to health and healing, and of course the centrality of spiritual concerns in psychotherapy, among numerous others–were now well-accepted and widely available in the culture, and indeed throughout the world.  Many of these were Gestalt themes as well, of course, to which we could add the transformation in mainstream psychotherapy over the previous generation, as dominant traditional schools (particularly the Freudian, Behaviorist, and Cognitive movements, which together accounted for the vast majority of practitioners in the U.S. and worldwide) one by one “discovered” the centrality of present-centered experience and authentic present relationship to the psychotherapeutic process.

At the same time, while the Gestalt “revolution” Perls and Goodman had jointly espoused to subvert and replace the disembodied, deeply conservative mainstream psychoanalysis of the times with something more energizing, enlivening, and permission-giving had certainly succeeded (in concert with other reform therapies of the times), the specifically political agenda of Goodman’s own vision had clearly not fared as well.  Indeed, never had the two streams, psychotherapy and political action, seemed further apart: if it was completely normative to go to a psychotherapist by the 1990’s, it seemed only increasingly aberrant to be deeply involved in politics.  The two activities seemed to belong, just as many Marxists had insisted in an earlier day, to entirely different worldviews and different conceptions of human nature and purpose.  If anything, psychotherapy (and for that matter, spiritual practice) often seemed to be now what one did instead of “getting involved.”[xliii]  Why?  What was the block in this period to trying at least to apply the manifest learnings about human organization, education, and experience to the increasingly desperate problems of political and economic organization in today’s world?

One part of the complex answer to this urgent question lay in the terms of the problem itself, terms which take us beyond the differences between Perls’s and Goodman’s versions of Gestalt to underlying cultural assumptions about human nature and process themselves.  The original terms of the Gestalt model, remember, were more radically holistic than their theatrical (and rather authoritarian) presentation by Perls, or than the diagnostic roster of “resistances” to contact (also suitable for analysis by an outside expert) offered by Goodman.  In the original terms of the model, deriving from an attempt to understand the psychological processes of perceiving and understanding themselves, the analysis starts not with an “individual self” in the isolated, monadic imagery of Western cultural tradition.  Rather, the terms give necessary primacy to a relational field out of which a sense of self (and a sense of other) arises through a process of differentiation that is awareness itself (the very process Goodman called desire).  This takes us back to the radical terms of Goodman’s analysis of desire itself, as synonymous with and definitional of existence.  “Self,” that is, does not and cannot precede or lie apart from relationship, as the Western cultural tradition has long insisted (even before the term “self” as a substantive came into general use, in the seventeenth century[xliv]).  Rather, self arises, developmentally, existentially, and experimentally, out of and as part of a relational field, which not only contextualizes but interpenetrates with the individual self.  The three terms–self, desire, and relationship–are, if not exactly synonymous, then at least coterminous.

All this follows from a radical return to the terms of the Gestalt model itself and constitutes a deconstruction of the Western self-model to a degree that lay just outside even Goodman’s grasp.  This is the discourse and the thematizing of Gestalt theory and practice today in common with some allied movements in other schools, such as the intersubjective movement in psychoanalysis[xlv] and the transition from constructivism to social constructionism in social and cultural studies.[xlvi]  But here again, what Gestalt adds to these other approaches is a much more complete psychological model, encompassing emotion/cognition, the co-construction of meaning and experience, and the world of relational/ organizational process alike.

This, then, is what contemporary Gestalt offers to Esalen, and to its wider audience as well.  The effect is to erode the old distinction between “self” and “other,” and, with it, the myth that either one can flourish without equal attention to the other.  The potential implications of such a paradigm shift for both relationship and political action seem profound and are only now beginning to be explored.[xlvii]

But if Esalen can gain from a basic shift in perspective on the nature of the self, from a monadic view to one grounded in relationship and desire, Gestalt as well has something to learn from the founding vision of Esalen, and, in particular, from its evolutionary focus and emphasis. Today, some forty years after Esalen’s founding in the spirit and context of Aurobindo’s notions about the evolution of consciousness, the topic of evolution is very much at the center of intellectual debate.  This conversation itself is of course the contemporary form for the revival of a much older, deeper theme in philosophy and cultural studies, which had been dormant in the academy, to say the least, down through much of the twentieth century: the question of human nature.  This question, long out of fashion (having been discredited and then tainted, seemingly, by its uses at the hands of the Eugenicists[xlviii] and then, of course, the Nazis), was thrust back into view with the publication of Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975 and then kept there by the steady accumulation of new findings in the areas of genetics, cognitive neuroscience, and infant development in particular in the years since.

Today, it seems clear that the model that succeeds in “capturing” the evolutionary narrative will very likely be central to our cultural vision of what is possible in human affairs and society–that is, in our “human potential”–in the period to come.  And that vision of what is possible will then set the limits, as ever, to our political, social, and economic imagination for that period.  For some years now, Esalen, in yet another of its pioneering “cross-disciplinary” conversational initiatives, has sponsored an annual research conference on this topic, bringing together exponents of the material sciences (geneticists, neuroscientists, and cosmologists, among others), chaos and complexity theorists, philosophers of society and consciousness, developmental psychologists, and students of cultural evolution, to explore this vision.  In these conversations, both projects–Esalen and Gestalt–have a particular contribution to make.  For Esalen, that particular contribution is the Aurobindonian perspective that our nature, our “human potential,” is itself evolutionary and constitutes the ongoing generation of new forms.  From Gestalt, comes the contribution of a new understanding of the self, beyond the monadic individualism of the post-Darwin period in evolutionary theory.  In this view, which is deeply in accord with current findings and thinking in evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology, our most fundamental nature, from the gene to the phenotype, is relational: either we establish a mutually supportive context, or we fail to achieve viability at every level.  In this sense, Gestalt, whose figure/ground, distributive, holistic model of cognition is being confirmed every day by research in cognitive neuroscience and brain and mind models, is emerging now as the process model of evolutionary psychology itself.[xlix]  That is, it is the Gestalt model, founded as it was in the attempt to offer a naturalistic, process description of how we go about coping with our world,[l] that offers us our best available psychological system for understanding the evolutionary processes of survival, cooperation, and growth.

Thus these two projects of an earlier “countercultural” moment find themselves once again at the center of a time of powerful cultural deconstruction and reorganization, a period of the emergence of some new world order, yet unclear, for which the ferment of the 60’s now seems only a prelude and a preparation.  As always in moments of chaotic disequilibrium, the influence of small “germ crystals” may at times be disproportionately great, as the new order takes form around the template or creode of some organizing pattern of thought.  Reenergized now by their ongoing cross-fertilization, Esalen and the Gestalt model together have a new contribution to offer to that emergent world in the form of a new self-story of who we are and what our destiny may be as a culture and as a species.  In this new story, the gains and learnings of the “human potential” movement of the past decades provide a foundation for the completion of that potential by applying those gains now to the urgent task at hand: the co-creation of a sustainable, liveable world.

References