I would like to discuss the impasse's philosophical and experiential connection with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Jaspers and the process of traversing the impasse with my client - and by myself if possible. I brought the subject up before, on these lists, but it seems that the interest was scant. Perhaps, this is a better time. Practice is as interesting to me as theory. Paul Shane has written something on it in the latest Australian Gestalt Journal.

Bob: Thanks for bringing the impasse back up. As Kathy said, why don't you get the ball rolling by saying a couple of things about Kierk's, Niet's, Jasp's, and/or Bruno's views?

I often become very aware of the arising of tension between opposites within my own consciousness. I am learning to notice it and be with it and be it. I feel tight, tense, conflicted, confused, physically tense, immobilized, despairing. I label this "impasse" and imagine a similarity between it and what Fritz and Bruno are calling "impasse," because the descriptions are similar.

In Zen (Rinzai Zen), they talk about arousing the Great Doubt, usually via the koan. The point of Zen training is to get the mind into the state in which all alternatives to action and thought are blocked, and the intellect is not "allowed" to comment. This leads to a climax which is referred to as being like "a mosquito trying to bite an iron bull," or like someone who has swallowed a ball of red-hot iron which she can neither spit up nor gulp down. Staying aware in the midst of this impasse is said to lead to a liberated state of awareness, free of self-doubt and contradiction (satori or kensho). Alan Watts' "Psychotherapy East and West" contains a wonderful elucidation of this and the parallels to psychotherapy, esp. in the chapter called "The Counter-Game."

Of course, Fritz may well have been influenced by Zen philosophy in his formulation of the impasse. The parallels between Zen and existentialism are well-known.

All of this is, of course, hopelessly outdated in the current postmodern era, which has gone beyond existentialism into the anarchic fray of text-only meaning systems. But not really.

Bruno: The impasse is what Fritz Perls called anti-existence, nothingness, emptiness; “the feeling of being stuck and lost. The impasse is marked by a phobic attitude – avoidance.” (He, also, said that we a-void the void). “We are spoiled, and we don’t want to go through the hellgates of suffering: we stay immature, we go on manipulating the world, rather than to suffer the pains of growing up” (Perls 1969). Staemmler (1988) says that at this point there is an awareness of the implosive layer – he calls it contraction: the next layer beyond the ‘impasse’, the death layer – with which we are familiar as the penultimate of Perls’ ‘Five Layers’ of neurosis.

Paul Shane, in his most recent paper, (Australian Gestalt Journal, Vol.2, No.1, June 1998), delineates the philosopher Jasper’s concept of the Grenzsituation, “defined as the condition or situation through which a person can neither escape nor transcend (Jaspers 1970, Walraff 1970).” He describes it as a cul-de-sac where the person can neither go forward nor backward forcing the person back on his/her own resources so that s/he experiences existential Existenz. It “is not by planning and calculating to overcome them, but by the very different activity of becoming the Existenz we potentially are; we become ourselves by entering with open eyes into the boundary situations ... To experience a Grenzsituation is the same as Existenz (Jaspers 1970).” This is the central concern of Gestalt Therapy, he says, adding that Goodman originally framed this aim as the ‘safe emergency.’ This is not the 'impasse'. Shane declares that the primary concern of Gestalt Therapy is how the person arrives at Existenz through the Grenzsituation – which he prefers to call the ‘limit situation’. (Grenz is German for “boundary”). Philippson (1997), too, has already stated that his therapy is impasse work, and that neurosis is the avoidance of the anxiety involved in “embracing authenticity and spontaneity.” I think that these terms have their origins with the first existentialists, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and have been developed by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969).

In the History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, you will find neither Kierkegaard nor Jaspers. Nietzsche is mentioned as one of the philosophers who do not pretend to use rational argument. This is because Gestalt Therapy, though alive and well in English-speaking countries, is at odds with the prevailing logical-positivist milieu, the “scientific” approach of academic psychology and of its Behaviorist, Neo-Behaviorist and Cognitive-Behaviorist supports. Passmore (1957) writes, that Existentialism “has been quite without influence on the main trends in contemporary British philosophy … from a British point of view, existentialism itself, in many of its forms, is anti-philosophical …”

Scientific objectivity is refuted, at least where human beings are concerned. Kierkegaard argued that Existenz precedes ‘essence’, because for there to be the abstractions of personal thinking there has to be a person. The existent subject “who is prior to science, cannot himself be converted into a scientific object” (Passmore 1957).

• “Jaspers officially defined existentialism as a ‘philosophy which does not cognize objects’ but ‘elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker” (Passmore 1957).
• "Existence precedes essence, as “the act of being is primary, and any classification of the person in terms of any classifications is secondary” (Philippson 1996).
• “Humanistic existentialism” came from Sartre. “Existence takes priority over essence.” Man has no essential nature to fall back on. He has to create himself.

Kierkegaard writes that “our deep feelings of despair” are our guide, and that to know oneself one has to face one’s despair and its implications. This is what, Fritz Perls informed us, the Russians call the sick point. He boasted that his therapy went beyond that which the Russians and all others skirted around. Whether it is over and done with quickly is debatable. Patricia Baumgardner in Gifts from Lake Cowichan does not seem to think that it so easy to get through the ‘impasse’ and that there is a “major” ‘impasse’ beyond the minor ‘impasses.’ (Somewhat like kensho and satori in zen). Because there is no easy way beyond the ‘impasse’, (“To die one’s death and to be reborn is not easy” – Fritz Perls), it is apposite to include Kierkegaard’s emphasis not on to what we commit ourselves, but how: with what levels of energy, earnestness and feeling.

The death layer is “the abandonment depression” and it is “central in Gestalt therapy, not as an end point … but as a doorway to authenticity” (Philippson).

Bob: Many thanks to Bruno for sketching in some of the ideas associated with the impasse and existentialist Grenzsituation. I turn to the practical question of, how can clients be profitably turned to the realization of the impasse in therapy?

Fritz's method is obvious: in-session, real-time frustration of all attempts of the client to manipulate the environment (esp. the therapist herself) for support, coupled with encouraging the client to stay aware of her present experiencing. The client is encouraged to stay with his experience of boredom, despair, dread, etc. and keep his senses open until he can see that the impasse is largely a matter of fantasy (catastrophic expectation), and not his actual, existential situation.

But what about other theories of therapy, which typically do not conceptualize the impasse in terms similar to the ones Bruno has used? Self-psychology, for example, is a good example of a deficit model, viz. one which posits deficits in parenting, which lead to structural deficits in the client's "self," as the problem which therapy addresses. Self-psychology is an explicitly non-frustrating method of therapy (and is intended to address, typically, more severe kinds of pathology, i.e. naricissistic and borderline personality disorders). The clients' needs for the mirroring and soothing and idealization of the therapist are intentionally gratified, thus breaking Freud's rule of abstinence, which was aimed at not "spoiling" the patient. According to self-psychology,(very!) gradually the client's narcissistic deficits will be made up for, and at that point the client will spontaneously give up dependency on the therapist. Until the client moves to give up the narcissistic supplies offered by the empathic interpretation of the therapist (and thereby make a move from environmental support towards self-support), the therapist is urged to give the client what he needs. What is the analogue of the impasse in this theory? Perhaps it is the "working through" of the narcissistic pain and injury endured at the hands of the parents, towards and through which every self-psychological therapy will lead. This pain involves the contradiction between what a good-enough parent "should" provide for the child and the reality of abuse; that's how it is phenomenologically experienced by the client. The therapist will be more supportive in helping the client move through this than Fritz was, certainly, but ultimately the client has to stay with her pain and not avoid it.

Let's shift briefly to another model of the world, Christianity? Where does the impasse, the situation in which one can neither escape nor transcend, show up in the Christian mythos? Perhaps it is in the pericope of the Agony in the Garden, where Jesus sweats blood and pleads with God to have his ordeal taken away from him, but in the end surrenders to his Father's will. The story goes on to speak of crucifixion (an extension of the impasse? Jung spoke of the "crucifixion between the opposites" as the crux (sic) of his therapeutic method) and ultimately resurrection (the resolution of the impasse).

In Zen training, the student is also led into a soul-wrenching situation, as I described in my last post, which, if handled correctly, will lead to satori. The student is led to this impasse by means of a therapeutic double-bind, involving an attempt to focus awareness on the source of awareness. (See Watts, Psychotherapy East and West, for a full treatment of this pattern.)

Which also leads me to mention G. Bateson's double-bind theory of therapy, used by family systems therapists and others, in which clients are intentionally placed in impossible, logically contradictory situations, with therapeutic intent.

The common thread appears to be an enduring of the emotional pain (esp. despair) of logical contradiction (or the demand to be two contradictory things at once), and staying with one's own resources, withdrawing all projections of authority onto others. Is this what leads to real freedom?

Anybody else have thoughts?

Oscar: Dear Bruno, Bob et al,

Thanks for your writings on this list on the impasse and grenzsituation, July 1, 2, 4, 5, 1998. Some of my thoughts and questions follow:

1. I keep reading and rereading the posted messages, digging out and rereading Alan Watts after many years, going over to Viktor Frankl's books that have been so helpful to me in the long view of my personal journey, thinking, thinking again, sitting silent at night looking over my gardens and the universe. After weeks I suddenly think: my response is my impasse. Because I can't say everything, I can't bite the whole thing, I don't say anything, I don't know where to start, I confuse myself with my (lack of) understanding. Now here are some fragments....
2. My association with Kierkegaard on despair is Viktor Frankl's insight, coming partly from his experiences as a prisoner in WWII concentration camps in Europe and his studies in psychiatry, that we need to come to personal terms with the presence of suffering and evil in the world. Our response to suffering on the personal level of daily life is our existential choice. This activity (or lack of activity) is who I am, who we are (as a community, culture). Making this choice/these choices, with awareness turns the introject into a living value, a lively boundary.
3. In more experiential terms, I am interested in the impasse as a group phenomenon, as a stuckness in a collectivity. A group is partly a collection of individuals (and their individual issues/stances) but how does this (the impasse) take place, and more specifically, where/how does the introduction of the new into the group fragment and move the process along. I note Kierkegaard seems so damn individualistic in some of his writings.
   
   I am in an impasse at work, small group with distinct layers, staff, administration, board. (Where are the clients and the community, I think immediately as I type this!!!) I notice how my personal issues get in my own road in dealing with this (grenz)situation! Here I am a member, not one of those "helpers" who is objective and intervenes! (ie group leader)
4. On August 6 I spent some time at the Hiroshima city website. I now have a picture of the bomb damage in the city; the inner one marks "total destruction and burning" which is 5 - 6 km across. A slightly larger outline marks the area of "total destruction" but not entirely burned up. I pass these along to my younger daughter (23y), saying "we must remember these things."
   
   I was pulled to go to this website. Maybe this is part of my impasse..... Today is the fifty-third anniversary of the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

NOTES

1. Re: the first point above (1) This is how impasse overlays impasse. My response locks me up. So I can't get to my larger (ie more inclusive?) response, my larger impasse, of my stance in the world, etc. Impasse is circles surrounding (besieging?) circles.
2. Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West; Viktor Frankl, Psychotherapy and Existentialism
3. Liked your inclusion and comments on approach to impasse in Christianity, Bob. Would like to hear more on "..withdrawing all projections of authority onto others.." from you, if you care to make them. Could you recommend a book by Jaspers? And Bruno, what is the reference to Passmore 1957? Hope these comments have been of some interest. Thanks again for your efforts writing about this, Bruno and Bob, it is most useful to me.

Bob: Oscar wrote, "Liked your inclusion and comments on approach to impasse in Christianity, Bob. Would like to hear more on "..withdrawing all projections of authority onto others..."

I believe it's part of the natural progression to first project major aspects of ourselves onto authority figures, then, later in our development, to withdraw the projections by acknowledging that these are indeed our own qualities. This refers to positive and negative aspects of the self. This kind of projection can be onto mythological figures such as Christ or the Devil, as well as onto therapists or other individuals in our personal experience.

In all this, I've been influenced by Jung as well as Fritz. Jung felt that the only way for an unconscious content to come into awareness was for it first to be projected. He saw this as a historical process as well as an individual one. For example, early in humankind's historical development, we projected our own qualities onto gods, e.g. the Greek pantheon. His psychology was an attempt to help people own such projections as parts of the Self, i.e. as arising from archetypes which reside deep in the Self (not the ego).

Fritz' view on this is well known. He felt that the client projects onto the therapist all those things which he could do for herself. One of the aims of his frustration of clients was to help them see that, what they expected the therapist to do for them (e.g. soothe them, guide them), they could do just as well themselves.