Deconstructing Individualism
An Interview with Gordon Wheeler, Ph.D.
by Morgan Goodlander, M.A.
conducted at the Esalen Institute,
Big Sur, California
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Chronological Order
MG: I thought we could start with a little of your background so the readership has some idea of the life experience (ground) out of which your ideas have come.
GW:Sure, well, I came out of college in '67 at the height of the protest movements and wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I was drawn to work with children and I was also interested in studying about the holocaust. I went to Germany and studied there for a year and ended doing a lot of writing and work in post holocaust studies. I seemed to be drawn to questions of human nature and that overlapped in some way with my interest in children. When I came back to the States in '68, I started studying early childhood and worked at a school for a few years. These were the days when there was a renewal of progressive education that had died out since Dewey's time. All this led me to a political view of education and to the writings of Paul Goodman - not the therapeutic writings; I wasn't thinking that way then. Later on when I was exposed to gestalt therapy it took me awhile to realize that the co-author of Gestalt Therapy was the same Paul Goodman who wrote Growing Up Absurd, which was really a shibboleth of my generation. Goodman also was influential in the anti-war movement. He was a sort of liberationist figure who was very prominent. So, working with kids drew me into clinical work and going back to school. It was as I began to do more and more clinical work that I began to be more and more dissatisfied. This was during the period of the great debate between the Freudians and the Behaviorists. Neither one of them seemed to be dealing with people; they both seemed to be rival, objectifies camps looking at people from the outside and pronouncing what they were like. Skinner, just as much as the Freudians, was dismissing the importance of the reality of subjective experience. To Freud that is an illusion, for he thinks he knows what is really driving your feelings and behavior. You don't know, you're just in the grips of a defensive illusion. To Skinner its what's going on inside the black box of your head. For him emotion was the result of behavior but never part of the organization of behavior. Yet, when you work with people, you're working with the organization of intentionality, which is something Freud can't account for, because to him it is all a retrospective reactive system. Skinner can't account for such organization except in talking about past reinforcement programs. The idea that you would want to go somewhere you haven't gone before and had not been specifically rewarded for going and that intentionality was not just the sublimation of some hidden drive. We began to find in people like Maslow, who by the way was very influenced by Perls and Kurt Goldstein, and even in people like Eric Berne who Perls always resented as a total rip off. Of course Perls ripped a few people off too, like Jacob Moreno, whom he didn't give credit. Perls was himself a kind of living exponent of Nietzsche. Like Freud, Perls denied having read Nietzsche, both of them were profoundly marked by his philosophy. Perls did mention Friedlander and Smuts, but never would remark that Friedlander was the foremost interpreter of Nietzsche in his days in Germany as Perls was growing up.
MG:S. Friedlander was a painter as I remember
GW:Friedlander was actually a satirical novelist. He did a lot of weird things and was an intellectual figure in Berlin during the teens and twenties and enjoyed a certain vogue for these satiric Gothic novels. He never got much of anywhere with his philosophy of creative indifference, but he did write a lot of main stream stuff interpreting and popularizing Nietzsche, whom Perls was very much an exponent of but didn't want to acknowledge.
MG:Yes, Fritz was ever the original.
GW:Right. If Fritz wrote about anyone influencing him, it was always someone so obscure the genius was more on his part to recognize their contribution than on their part to originate anything.
MG:You were speaking about Maslow.
GW:Right, those were the days of the third wave in psychology, of humanism, human potential, human growth. One thing we didn't realize, none of us outside of social psychology, was how much we were all influenced by Kurt Lewin, who founded NTL, which invented the T group, which gave rise to the encounter group movement, by which Perls was influenced and, in turn, Gestalt therapy.
MG:Lewin is still an obscure figure.
GW:Yes, he was somewhat neglected in Gestalt Therapy. However, Lewin is not an obscure figure in organizational dynamics. He is commonly recognized as the founder of the field. And in gestalt psychology you'll find Lewin as one of the four or five most influential theorists.
MG:I believe it is the 50th anniversary of NTL.
GW:Yes, NTL started I think in 1947. If fact one of my thesis readers was a graduate student of Lewin and present at the creation of NTL.
MG:Was Lewin at MIT at that time? The Sloan school?
GW:He was at MIT. I think the Sloan school had not yet formed then.
MG:I was just reading that Ed Nevis was also at MIT.
GW:He was at MIT for ten years. He's retired now, but that's how he and Sonia came to Boston. They were in Cleveland for many years before Edwin took the MIT job around 1980. Now they currently head the New England Gestalt community.
MG:To get back to Lewin's influence on your development and the progressive milieu of the 1960s...
GW:Well, Lewin would have been more appreciated had he not been such a renegade. You know Gestalt psychology started in the lab under in vitro conditions, not in vivo, solving little perceptual problems - at what point can you distinguish this from that, do you see two figures or one, do the dots form a triangle - things like that. This was about 1912. Even under those conditions they began to find there were motivations and Gestalt properties of the situations at work that fell under what we would call today self-organization. They discovered that you could give people these paper and pencil tests and then if you interrupted them and they had to go to the next step, for no reason at all they would cheat to go back and finish previous tasks even though they didn't count for anything other than the draw to the investment they had made.
Well, Lewin, coming along in the twenties, was much more marked by the phenomena movement. Wertheimer's quest really was to make a physics of psychology; he wanted to find THE properties of a good Gestalt. I think it would be pretty close to what we would call the properties of figure, boundedness, clarity, not so much interested in how the whole field is organized but is a living situation. You're managing a whole situation and selecting a figure, but you're always managing the situations. Even those people in the static labs were not really just in the static lab situation, as they began to demonstrate. Lewin was very influenced by Husserl, where Wertheimer was more influence by Wunt and the objectivists lab tradition.
Wertheimer resented Lewin taking his work into what he regarded as softer directions and bringing in the whole issues of motivations and value, but he did mean the same thing by it. He wasn't thinking about the self-organization of a field of experience, where Lewin's first paper was on field.
MG:Was Lewin the first person to introduce the concept of behavior being defined by the context in which it occurs?
GW:Exactly, you walk into a situation and you start, in his metaphor, mapping it - the whole situation, not just the figures. In his first paper in 1918, called "The War Landscape," he talks about people walking into a field with a hay stack but the point is not just whether they can delineate and see the outline of that hay stack and see it clearly in this figure resolution way; the point is what is the meaning, the value of that, the valence as he would say, in the field. That depends on whether they are a soldier, a spy, a civilian. To a farmer that's a different hay stack, a different map, and its the map that matters. In other words, the meaning of the figure is in it's relationship to the ground.
MG:And those relationships are somewhat co-determined
GW:Definitely, you need to have some way to deal with what is there if you're not going to drive off the cliff when the road turns. You have to turn the wheel. So there are constraints, the features of the external world that favor resolving it certain ways but not in others. I assume that there is an evolutionary structure, because people who drive off the cliff drop out of the gene pool. So you have to be evolved to deal with the work that is. Even though philosophically we can't say what that means, by evolution we can. Contrary to Heideggar, we are not just through here; this is our world, and we are in some way evolved to fit it.
MG:And in some ways we're co-creating our perceptions.
GW:Definitely, we're constructing our perceptions actively. Which is a consequent of Lewin's work, with which, in turn, Wertheimer was very uncomfortable. You see, it all seems to go in the direction of subjective constructivism. Which is what Wertheimer wanted to get away from. He was a generation older, and he came from a tradition in his youth, an associationist model in which you just had all this stimuli causing all these responses. Then, the question became, "How were they organized?" Well, they were organized by what he would call Aristotelian ghosts, like intentionality, purpose, things that sounded teleological, and mythical. To him these sounded like invented constructs, not science. He made a rigid positivist distinction between invented constructs and science, one that we might not find so valid or clear cut today in our more constructivist, post-modern world. The result was that when Lewin migrated to this country, and when he wanted to go to the New School in New York (where Goodman also taught literature and in those days politics) to take an appointment being vacated by Wertheimer, but Wertheimer blocked it. Wertheimer said Lewin was not a proper representative of the gestalt model, and Lewin ended up in Iowa.
I always harbor the fantasy that had Lewin been in New York, he would have met Goodman, and probably Perls, and there would have been more direct influence of this whole subjective constructivism that Goodman was open to, but was very missing in Perls' Freudian heritage. Goodman said the only thing wrong with Freud was that he had an inadequate theory of awareness. This is kind of a long tangent but my point is that Gestalt Therapy was not fully gestalt for many years because of Perls' Freudian background and Lewin's work taking a number of years for Gestaltists to fully appreciate.
MG:Was it at NTL that you first encountered Gestalt Therapy?
GW:Yes, ultimately I encountered Gestalt Therapy at NTL in a presentation done by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, who is now at the White House, and Bill Warner, who has since died. I was so taken with their work, and them personally, that I ended up going to the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland to study. I felt like that was what I was looking for.
We were looking around a lot in those days, and as a method of being with people and working with people that would be congruent with your experience of yourself, with how you wanted to live with your understanding of other people and with your notion of what influencing other people is about - all of those things were very problematic for us in the received models. For a lot of reasons they didn't seem to fit well with experience.
These were the anti-war days where any kind of authority was regarded with heartfelt suspicion. You felt, that is, you said, "These are the rules of the class room." You were raising people to be capable of napalming babies. It was like the Nazi issues were present again very vividly for us in the 60s. Because, unlike the people in Germany, we knew what we were doing in Vietnam; it was on the nightly news! We were very excercised to bring that war to a halt, which, remarkably enough did happen - arguably the first time in history that a war ended by the stronger party in mid-course, by the protest of that country's civilian population. That's largely forgotten now as the sixties are trivialized by charicatures of the flower children and the superficial trappings of the time.
MG:In some ways the ending of the Vietnam war by the social protests of the stronger side's civilian population is akin in historical significance to Yeltsin standing down the tanks in Red Square and the Soviet Union having a bloodless revolution.
GW:Yes, I would agree. Both governments possessed the political desire and military ability for further bloodshed but avoided it largely due to the action of an uncooperative and united civilian population.
MG:So it seems as if NTL and Gestalt Therapy were, in your life, closely wrapped up with the milieu of the sixties struggle for social freedom and humanistic change.
GW:Yes. We were, as a whole culture, looking for a new way of being. It was a Zeitgeist then of looking for something new, wanting to make a difference in the world, but having deep concern about the myriad ways that we might, without knowing it, slip back into the old system.
In those days you didn't have the number of Gestalt training programs that we have now. People flocked to Cleveland. I was extremely drawn to the people there, but even more than that was the way they seemed to be with their own power and authority. I remember thinking that Bill Warren had a different way of being a man that was extremely impactful and extremely quiet and respectful. I had never seen such a combination before. I seen it since in that many of the Cleveland faculty just embody those qualities.
When I got to Cleveland I found the most remarkable group of people. I had been to Harvard, to graduate school, studied in Europe, and I had never had teaching like that, much less from people who really embodied what they were practicing, in such an integrated and holistic way.
There were about a dozen of them who founded that institute, and they were the best and the brightest of the community of New York immigrants in Cleveland in the fifties who were importing Perls and Goodman and going back and forth. They were very much a distant suburb of New York intellectually.
MG:Were most of the founders of the Cleveland Institute members of the original New York Institute founded by Fritz and Laura?
GW:No, none of them were with the New York Institute, but many of them had New York roots. Most of them were New York Jews like Paul Goodman. Goodman was a little older than they were, but Goodman would only be the age of Ronald Reagan if he were alive today. So, he would be say ten years older than Erv Polster and younger than Mari Grilman one of the senior founders of the Cleveland Institute.
This was a group who were dissatisfied with the traditional training at Case Institute and Western Reserve University and the big centers of the mid-west, who were producing, at that time, Carl Rogers and others who had there own radical tendencies. The Cleveland group discovered Perls in the fifties, and in 1953 they started bringing in Perls to a study group in Cleveland that by 1960 was giving public programs.
MG:Who would you say was the main force behind the formation of the institute?
GW: The development of the institute over the years was very influenced by Edwin Nevis. Most of the group were therapists, but Edwin and another member who died young, were organizational consultants and social psychologists with a great interest in therapy. They brought the social, the structural, and the political. Well, that's not entirely true. Erv Polster was doing community gestalt as social interventions in 1960 I think.
Even with all the draw I felt toward the Cleveland Institute and Gestalt Therapy early on, I also felt that there were a number of incompletions and contradictions in the theory. I also felt strongly that the practice of gestalt therapy was well beyond what was being taught explicitly and that within the Goodman gestalt view were the seeds of something extremely important. I didn't have words to describe that feeling for a number of years; today I would say that Goodman and Lewin represented the beginnings of the deconstruction of the individualist model and that the Gestalt approach gives us the best tools for deconstructing the entire paradigm of individualism, which I see, for all its strengths, as poisoning the world now. The Gestalt approach offers a model that is field based, intersubjective, subjectivist, constructivist, and political.
MG:This sounds like material from your new writing project.
GW:Yes, I'm doing a whole book on the subject of a self model in Gestalt Therapy. By 1990 I was able to write what I hoped was a coherent critique of the figure bound model. That was as far as I could take it then.
MG:Your book Gestalt Reconsidered did a great deal to open up the worldwide gestalt community to re-thinking the participation of ground in figure formation and to formally reframing what we traditionally have called contact boundary disturbances.
GW:The book at least broached the subject. Jean Marie Robine, who is a longtime friend and debating partner of mine, in a French review of Gestalt Reconsidered, asked in a rather gracious way, "The question I'm left with is why is the most interesting topic in the book, the structure of ground, left for the end?"
MG:Well, the last two chapters.
GW:Or the last page! He asked me the same thing when we met in person. He said it in a playful way with a twinkle in his eye, and I responded playfully by asking him, "Jean Marie, doesn't the question answer itself? If I had more to say about it I would have put it in earlier!" (laughing). I wrote the book to break out of the figure-bound model and to stimulate a discussion of ground dynamics. Even those who were quite disturbed by the concept responded to the book's thesis in very creative ways. In some ways I think the book is more interesting for the dialogue and work it triggered than what it actually was.
MG:I really appreciated the level of international attention the book evoked and that it gave the gestalt community worldwide a starting place for a contemporary dialogue about gestalt theory. It seems to me one of the largest difficulties within the gestalt community is that the vast majority of our publications articulate about one third of our practice and are often as much as fifteen years behind in describing the leading edges of current gestalt practice. It seems in the last eight years this is starting to change; however, we still have a long way to go in really letting the therapeutic community at large know what we're capable of doing in this new post-modern era of constructivist thinking.
GW:The gestalt community is not a community of writers. We are an oral community and a community of people who are practitioners.
It has long pained me that Carolyn Lukensmeyer, who took Gestalt organizational consulting into politics, never wrote. In 1974, Jimmy Carter, who was an out-of-office, relatively unknown Georgia Governor, took on the thankless task of Chairman of the Democratic National Campaign Committee. Now, Carter was a modern methods and management kind of guy who wanted to bring more structure to the process, so he brought Carolyn and Lynn to train the democratic freshmen candidates from around the country who were running for the Congress and the Senate. Carolyn and Lynn trained them in gestalt group dynamics and team building. As it turned out, the Democrats had a fantastic year, and most of the people who were trained won! I'm sure that's not the only reason, but there was no doubt that their resources were allocated better than the opposition. So, when the democrats again needed a team that was going to get the job done in Washington, and since it was Carolyn that helped get them there before, they asked her back. After that, Carolyn went to be the Chief of Staff for the Governor of Ohio and then on to the Clinton White House as an organizational consultant.
MG:She gave a great address at the first AAGT international conference New Orleans, but I had know idea how rich her history has been.
GW:She's fascinating, but like many accomplished Gestaltists, she doesn't write. It's all along the lines of what you were saying about the influence of the gestalt model and how few people realize our contributions beyond a superficial understanding of Fritz Perls. The innovations of the gestalt model have always run way ahead of the theoretical press and often haven't been written up at all.
MG:Yes, there is a lot more to Gestalt Therapy than Fritz's history. Fritz was just the beginning, but there have been hundreds of Gestaltists doing interesting things all over the world. Certainly, Carolyn Lukensmeyer is one of them.
GW:This is part of the reason that Edwin Nevis founded GIC Press at the end of the eighties. In 1989 he got Jim Kepler and I to take it over. Edwin is a forever founding something and then handing it on. He's done this over and over. He's a very fertile creator that has started many institutions and then handed them over to other people in the community. He doesn't want to hold on to them. He gets them up and running. He seeds them, creates the structure, brokers a few deals, and gives it to you. I wouldn't say he's never been critical, but he certainly doesn't try to control. He's infinitely supportive, and that is such a rare thing. A founder that doesn't try to control.
MG:What you're describing seems to speak to his orientation really being in the field as an organismic, self-regulating system.
GW:Exactly, and that the embodiment of the theoretical stance that I was talking about earlier that drew me to Cleveland in the first place. We've tried to make it our mission at GIC press to try to address lack of gestalt writing in books with the multiple recognition that (A) the Gestalt approach doesn't get the credit it is due and (B) that we're not out there influencing the current conversation about how to work with people.
MG:You mean as far as professional journals and other industry publications are concerned? It seems to me even when Gestaltists have written, they have been writing largely to themselves and not the field as a whole.
GW:We've had enormous influence. The Psychoanalysts have recently invented relationship!
MG:In some ways they seem to be doing a better job of articulating a relational approach.
GW:Sure, because they are writers and have a tradition of highly articulated exploration from their own point of self experience. I think we have better tools. Even brilliant writers like Christopher Boles and other neo-analytic writers in the tradition of the Winnicott, object relations school, are hobbled by the terms of their own heritage, and they would be liberated by a truly field-oriented model.
MG:It seems even very progressive analytic schools, like Self-Psychology and Intersubjectivity, are destined to step out of the psychoanalytic box from which they were born.
GW:Kohut went through this and did ultimately liberate himself from Freudian psychology, although, never from paradigmatic individualism, the assumption of the self in isolation. The closest he could come to a really relational perspective was to say that self's need for self-objects persists through life. Whereas, Freud would have said, in a different language, that relational drives are infantile, Kohut, in a radical departure, says they are not infantile and we never outgrow the need for what he calls self-object. What is a self-object? It is a person! Sometimes it refers to an internal representation, an ideal, or other subjective experience, but basically in a relational model we're talking about other people. Because of that solipsistic tradition that permeates our whole culture, when we're talking about self, we just as easily could pen the words "Vs. other's."
MG:Are you saying that we assume an oppositional relationship?
GW:What I'm saying is that no matter how important the relationship is of self and other, in most psychological models they contain an implicit limitation in that the relationship is often taken to be a zero sum. Meaning, if you express yourself more, I have to express myself less. If I express myself more, you have to express yourself less. It's you or me. The idea that your self expression would actually be part of my self-needs and regulation is not something you can make sense of in the traditional models. However, you can in a Goodman field model of self where you picture yourself differently.
MG:This brings us to the whole arena of contact, phenomenology, and constructivism - the two faced Janus that is both a whole unit with a complete contact boundary and at the same time a part of a larger whole. Something like an individual in a family is a whole that is also part of a larger organism, the family. Where and how we draw the lines of a contact boundary between people, organisms, or ecosystems seems quite subjective and dependent on the conditions of the field and has staggering implications for our individual and cultural identity.
GW:It is absolutely a shifting, subjective construction according to your investment of energy in the moment. We're wired to invest attention and to remark, assert or perceive felt differences in the field. The felt differences (that this part of the field is not like that part of the field), and in particular the felt differences that I feel invested in during a given moment, is my contact boundary. It is my organization of the field. The contact boundary is the features of that organization. Contact is my organization of the field and boundary is the features of that organization.
MG:You're sounding like Kurt Lewin.
GW:Yes, as Lewin laid the seeds for teaching us to think, the organization of the field depends on my values and overall situation in the moment. That can begin to sound like chaos if your coming out of the old positivistic, individual self is already there, Freudian model where the self precedes the relationship. Goodman gives us a tool for deconstructing that whole idea and leaves us with a language to talk in.
MG:Certainly the Buddhist concept of no-self fits nicely into what you seem to be suggesting, along with many existentialist, dialogic, and phenomenological views of self-experience. However, I think what gives the gestalt approach such an edge is our structured application-oriented understanding of the organizing principles and the continuity within self-experience. |
