La psicoterapia pianificata (White Institute New York, 1947)

Abstract

This is the text of a paper delivered by Fritz Perls at the White Institute in New York. That institute was founded by H.S. Sullivan as an interpersonal psychoanalytic institute, an alterna-tive to mainstream Freudian institutes. It was still relatively conservative at that time. Today it is one of the centers of relational psychoanalysis. Before founding Gestalt therapy with his wife and Paul Goodman, Perls hoped to find at the White Institute a group of psychoanalysts with whom he could be welcomed and feel at home. For example, he already knew Erich Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, members of the White Institute. Perls’s approach shared with interpersonal psychoanalysis its focus on relation, on the present moment, and on the integration of the personal and social field perspectives. The principal differences were in Perls’s radical idea of creative adjustment and his concrete and very creative way of integrating spontaneity, awareneness, sensation, and reason. In the clinical cases he presents, you can also see Perls at work, following a dialogic and relational method that he used in his later years.