Tag: Fritz Perls

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Perls’s Gestalt Prayer and a Hasidic Parallel

The “Gestalt Prayer”

“I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.”

The saying of one of the Hasidic masters, Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk, is written from a slightly different point of view:

“If I am I because you are you,

and you are you because I am I,

then you are not you, and I am not I.

But if I am I because I am I,

and you are you because you are you,

then I am I, and you are you, and we can talk. 

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Fritz Perls on Ritual

Fritz Peris, psychiatrist and founder of Gestalt therapy, gives us an insight into what should take place during worship:

;,When the individual feels no boundary at all between himself and his environment, when he feels that he and it are one, he is in confluence with it. Ritual demands this sense of confluence, in which boundaries disappear, and the individual feels most himself because he is so closely identified with the group. Part of the reason ritual produces a sense of exaltation and heightened experience is that normally we feel the self-other boundary quite sharply, and its temporary dissolution is consequently felt as a tremendously impactful thing.15

The Gestalt Approach, page 38

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