Fritz Perls's name is inextricably linked with Gestalt therapy and the movement it inspired during the 1960s. In a moment of uncharacteristic modesty, Perls once maintained that he was not so much the founder of the movement as the “finder.” Indeed, Perls was somewhat of a theoretical magpie, borrowing from whatever he needed at the time and whatever suited him to inform this new therapy. Later he was to suggest, in a more characteristically brash manner that he might just be the “creator of a ‘new’ method of treatment and the exponent of a viable philosophy which could do something for mankind” (Shepard, p. 1, 1975). This modesty/immodesty split was but one of the many splits that typified Perls's world and his writings and that got imported into the theory and practice.

Gestalt therapy, as it was articulated over time, rested on strands of philosophy and psychology from phenomenology, Zen Buddhism, depth psychology, psychodrama, holism, existentialism, and a theory of perception articulated by a small circle of German psychologists in the opening decades of the twentieth century, which was known as Gestalt psychology. Despite its hybrid nature, Perls' Gestalt therapy is most closely associated in many people's minds with German Gestalt theory, though this notion was thoroughly repudiated by the Gestalt psychologist and historian Mary Henle (1978) in an excoriating piece on the distinctions between the two bodies of thought.

The Affective Connection

Knowledge of emotional processes can give a person a sense of second sight or even magic. Years ago a young man was being introduced to his new professional colleagues in the department of psychology; among them was Silvan Tomkins. As the young man elaborated on his many interests, views, and intellectual dilemmas, he quite exceeded the time that other speakers had taken. Silvan turned to a colleague, lowered his voice, and said, “That young man lost his beloved mother at an early age.” In fact, he had. But when Silvan was queried about his acquaintanceship with the young man, he replied, strangely enough, that he had never even met him.

This story is emblematic of the Silvan mystery. Tomkins seemed endowed with a supernatural knowledge of the human mind and its longings. He always seemed to know more about people than was discernable from the observable facts. Indeed, at the memorial service held for Silvan in 1991, not only did renowned psychiatrists single out his uncanny ability to fathom the essential elements of people in a way that few could, but even his garbage man described him as a “yoda” – a wise man.

Sometimes Silvan would explain his inductive process, and one could follow it, but it took a long time to absorb and understand just what was taking place.

In undertaking this work, we have immersed ourselves in the splendid, unfolding, and confounding detail of three men's lives. Each man's life, his loves, his ambitions, his accomplishments, and his defeats have become not only a part of our work, of how we view emotion, but also of ourselves. The paths of their lives have altered the paths of our lives. Of course, in a mundane sense, it is always true that what you work on becomes you, means become ends, as we have said before. Because of that, we are even more thankful that these three lives are easy to respect, that the men are easy to be charmed by and attracted to, and that the ideas they leave behind are so compelling and still sometimes refreshing.

At the beginning of this psychological examination of three individuals' personal and work lives, we were fixed largely on adding information about emotion to the major developmental theories of our time – we were fixed on filling in the emotion gap. We began our project thinking about emotion almost as a distinct part of the human being. To be a genius at emotion, we thought, was to have mastered that compartment of life. One would detect emotion, understand emotion, manage emotion, and manipulate one's own and other's emotions efficiently. However, the emotional data from just three lives speaks of and tells us far more than we expected. The management of emotion, while still interesting, is almost incidental.

The wealth of material available to us from the three cases of practicing clinicians – through the various ideographic venues – afforded an excavation of a depth seldom available to the developmental researcher, although it is more common in clinical practice. To the clinician's rich access, we add insights from affect theory and attachment theory, quantitative and qualitative analysis of emotional and intellectual process over time, and contextualization within a dynamic systems framework. In so doing, we have arrived at deeper understandings about developmental process and several interesting discoveries involving attachment relationships, affects as dynamic systems, the transformation of affects into values, and continuity and change. Those new understandings are summarized and elaborated upon in this chapter as we bring the observations of the three lives together and consider what we have learned about different spheres of development.

In Chapter 2, we introduced several concepts from dynamic systems. One concept was that personality works as a system that originally arises from chaos and becomes self-organizing. Such dynamic systems are thought to be characteristic both of nonliving systems such as tornadoes and of living systems with concepts of “self” and identity. In human life, we have proposed, emotions are the energy forces and the primary organizers of experience. Emotion saturates experience with vitality or dread, hope or despair, feelings of omnipotence or weakness – which are powerful motivational forces. Emotion provides direction and force.

In his professional life, Rogers was devoted to helping others release their potential for growth and discovery. Individuals whom he treated in psychotherapy found the capacity to achieve growth in the context of the warm, supportive environment that he created. What is less readily recognized is that this same medium satisfied certain longings that Rogers had as well, and that the specifics of client-centered therapy, as an ideology and as a practice, were integrally related to the specifics of his affective organization. One of the more consistent themes in his life revolved around finding and elaborating emotional communion with others, as indicated in the opening quotation. This longing for communication, and the experience of communion that it promises, had very early roots.

Before we begin with the detailed chronology of his life, we should consider the historical context in which he came of age professionally, for it raises a basic enigma about his life and personality.

Overview

When Carl Rogers began to develop what would eventually become client-centered psychotherapy, the only other existing clinical model of therapy was that of psychoanalysis, and its practitioners were almost exclusively medical doctors – psychiatrists.

As we began in the previous section on Rogers with a single paragraph, we can begin with a single paragraph to orient ourselves to Ellis's ideoaffective positions in his theoretical work as well. A little appreciated facet of personality is that people express their personality in everything they do. The way a person moves his face or body, the words he or she chooses, the context in which the expressions occur – these are all aspects of personality. Therefore, even a single statement can reveal essential features of a person.

Historically, developmental theory has been captivated by two central romances – the notion of “early experience” (pedogenesis) and the doctrine of “continuity.” Like most romances, both theories attempt to simplify lives and to make them a mythical whole, sometimes a heroic myth. And like most romances, there is a certain truth to them, but also a loss of complexity and depth that can border on untruth or at least limit the romance to a special case. To prepare the reader for our approach of examining lives with a new look at their complexity and depth, we need to present a short history of these compelling romances and then open the field of possibilities. This exercise will involve considering theories of complexity and chaos or dynamic systems and will require that the reader have some familiarity with the new vocabulary. Our analysis does not rely upon the mathematical intricacies of these new approaches; it, however, often relies on the hypotheses and explanations that are generated.

Both psychoanalytic models of development as well as contemporary attachment theory follow the early experience and continuity theories. In classic psychoanalytic theory, early experience and continuity through repetition are paramount. Personality is largely formed by the age of five, and early conflicts are played out successively in later relationships, with the individual in thrall to an unconscious but headstrong repetition compulsion. In attachment theory, continuity and early experience are required. Infants form highly specific, qualitatively differentiated attachments to primary caregivers.

Autobiographies

Affect

Each of the three autobiographies was coded for affective content in terms of discrete emotions and more undifferentiated or ambiguous terms. The coding scheme for the discrete affect terms was based on the theoretical framework of Izard's (1971, 1977) differential emotions theory. According to the theory, there are ten basic or primary emotions, designated as discrete emotions. Each of the ten basic emotions can vary in intensity or magnitude. The ten emotions, which are listed here, are expressed as continua from the weaker to the stronger form of emotion. The coding of these terms included, but was not limited to, the examples listed here; cognates and synonyms were also included. Additionally, affect was coded even when it was being denied or minimized (e.g., “I was disinterested” or “not mad”). The more global, undifferentiated, nondiscrete emotional terms were also coded.

1. Discrete Emotions

2. Interest–Excitement: interested, stimulated, curious, excited, fascinated, eager

3. Anger–Rage: anger, irritated, mad, annoyed, frustrated, hostile, hate, rage, enraged.

4. Contempt–Scorn: contempt, put-down, disapprove, belittle, scorn.

5. Fear–Terror: fear, tense, tension, anxiety, afraid, scared, terror, horror, terrified, panic.

6. Distress–Anguish: sadness, blue, feeling low, sorrow, unhappy, anguish, suffering, depressed, distressed, hopeless feeling, agony.

Chapter overview

In this chapter we shall argue for advantages of the ritual form hypothesis over the ritual frequency hypothesis. We shall take up a wide array of considerations bearing on the two hypotheses' merits. These considerations are of two broad sorts concerning theoretical and empirical matters. We shall address theoretical and conceptual matters first in the next section, since they will help to set the stage for a fair evaluation in the remaining sections of the hypotheses' empirical predictions.

In the first section we shall defend the greater theoretical depth of the ritual form hypothesis. The argument we make in its behalf has two parts. First, we shall take up some persistent conceptual problems with the ritual frequency hypothesis. We shall argue that precisely the kinds of theoretical distinctions that the ritual form hypothesis makes are necessary to remedy these ambiguities. Second, we will show that the ritual form hypothesis isolates a more fundamental cognitive variable than either the ritual frequency hypothesis or Whitehouse's larger theory of religious modes, since ritual form is a conspicuous factor – probably the principal factor – influencing the unexplained, independent variable of the frequency hypothesis, viz., rituals' performance frequencies.

In the remainder of the chapter we turn to the hypotheses' comparative predictive and explanatory strengths with regard to the empirical facts. On pages 139–146 we shall contend that both Whitehouse's general theory and the ritual frequency hypothesis are less well equipped than our theory of ritual competence and the ritual form hypothesis to handle the explanatory problems we mentioned in the previous chapter concerning the uniformity of Whitehouse's doctrinal and imagistic modes.

Whitehouse's ethnography

In October of 1987 Harvey Whitehouse entered the village of Dadul in the Eastern Province of New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea to begin his fieldwork among the Mali Baining. Unbeknownst to him then, his arrival was one of the catalysts for a series of events that made not only for considerable excitement in the area over the next eighteen months but also for an ethnography (Whitehouse, 1995) that is as theoretically fertile as it is dramatic. Inevitably, the short summary which follows will capture little, if any, of the drama, but it will point to some of these materials' theoretically suggestive aspects.

New Britain Island lies off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea. The Mali are one of five subgroups of the Baining people, who occupy the rural regions of the Gazelle Peninsula, which constitutes the northern half of the island's Eastern Province. A different ethnic group, the Tolai, occupies the more developed northeastern corner of the Gazelle Peninsula. A third ethnic group, the Pomio, inhabit most of the southern half of the province. Comparatively speaking, the Tolai, unlike the Baining and the Pomio, have prospered from contacts with the industrialized world.

From the late nineteenth century until the end of World War I the area was under German administration. Exclusive of the traumatic Japanese occupation during World War II, from 1919 until independence in 1975, Australia administered the region.

The cognitive foundations of cultural transmission

We shall explore insights our theory of religious ritual competence provides about aspects of religious ritual performance and their psychological foundations, addressing the complex relationships between religious ritual form, performance frequency, memory, motivation, and emotional arousal as well as the sensory pageantry in rituals that evoke it. In this chapter we focus primarily on questions of memory and its connections with performance frequency and emotional arousal.

These connections are vital to understanding the process of transmitting religious knowledge across generations. It is particularly easy to see why research on human memory may illuminate such matters when considering how non-literate societies transmit religious knowledge. The critical point here is not about the problems of transmitting religious knowledge in the absence of books and printing. It is not even about the problems of transmitting religious knowledge in circumstances in which the huge majority of participants are illiterate. The point is rather about the problems of transmitting religious knowledge when the only lasting public representations are iconic items such as skulls, skins, and sculptures, i.e., when the only lasting public representations are non-linguistic. Non-literate cultures bring these issues into high relief, but ultimately, even in literate cultures the transmission of rituals often rests not on consulting texts but on participants' memories of their ritual actions.

When non-linguistic public representations play such a central role in the transmission of cultural knowledge, questions about the faithful replication of that knowledge inevitably arise.