In contrast to the usual type of group meeting, I carry the load (the session, by either doing
individual therapy or conducting mass experiments. I often interfere if the group plays opinion and
interpretation games or has similar purely verbal encounters. In the Gestalt workshop, anyone who
feels the urge can work with me. I am available, but never pushing. A dyad is temporarily developed
between myself and the patient; but the rest of the group is fully involved, though seldom as active
participants. Mostly they act as an audience which is stimulated to do quite a bit of silent selftherapy
(Perls, 1967, p. 309).
However, although Perls expressed his preference for individual therapy in a group setting, in that same
paper he said that he considered individual therapy to be out of date, and that it should be replaced by group
workshops. Through his many years of experience he had discovered the power of a group in the process
of individual change, but he did not, or could not, exploit this learning. For Perls, the participants in a
workshop were a collection of individuals. He used them as an audience, regarding them as an important
presence or social environment that could be used in the service of the needs of the individual; the
participants were discouraged from becoming a group.
This particular model of one-to-one therapy had another raison d'etre, beyond that of personal preference.
The original and explicitly understood goal of Gestalt workshops in the 1950s and early '60s was to train
mental health professionals in the theory and methods of Gestalt as it applied to individual therapy. Fritz and
Laura Perls invented this strategy of experiential learning, believing that a method which stressed the
phenomenology of the "here and now" needed to be experienced in the here-and-now. This turned out to be
a very creative strategy for communicating and teaching Gestalt as a new theory and method of practice,
especially in view of the professional scene that Laura and Fritz Perls stepped into when they arrived in
New York City in 1947 to establish their practice.