Chairwork and Loss: Grieving Fritz
In an earlier piece (Kellogg, 2023), we looked at how Fritz Perls used Chairwork as a way of processing his grief for Freud. In this excerpt from Enlightening Gestalt: Waking Up From the Nightmare, we can see how John Enright (1980) used Chairwork to process his grief for Fritz Perls:
"When Fritz died…I did not experience a great deal. I attended our mourning ceremony and said all the right things in subdued tones, but privately wondered what kind of an unfeeling monster I was for having worked with Fritz so much and having so little feeling.
About a year later I was doing a Gestalt weekend for Esalen…in Mill Valley. ….. While I was talking about 'unfinished business' and the empty chair technique, someone asked me to be more specific.
There was a picture poster of Fritz on the wall, so I gestured toward it and said, 'Suppose I had some unfinished business with Fritz. I’d put him in the empty chair and say something like "Fritz…"'
At that point, I started sobbing and could not talk for several minutes. I had finally run into all the unexpressed gratitude, and with it, the sense of loss at his death. I had never been especially close to him, but he had touched me in several ways, and I am grateful to him for a way of being in the world I had never dreamed possible before seeing him” (pp. 6-7).
In Chairwork Psychotherapy (Kellogg & Garcia Torres, 2021), this is called a Relationships and Encounters Dialogue. Chairwork, in actual practice, has nothing to do with chairs – it is about giving voice to parts, experiencing emotions, reworking difficult or traumatic memories, and expressing feelings of love, anger, fear, and sorrow or grief to people from the past, the present, or the future. Given that, neither chairs nor any other prop is necessary; nonetheless, they can be profoundly useful. In this poignant remembrance, the poster of Fritz Perls not only served as a stimulus and a focus for John Enright, but also it provided him with an opportunity to experience and release his grief.
References
Enright, J. (1980). Enlightening Gestalt: Waking up from the nightmare. Mill Valley, CA: Pro Telos.
Kellogg, S. (2023). On Perls, Freud, Grief, and Chairwork. New York: Chairwork Psychotherapy Initiative. https://www.chairworkpsychotherapy.com/blog/perls-freud-grief-chairwork
Kellogg, S., & Garcia Torres, A. (2021). Toward a Chairwork Psychotherapy: Using the Four Dialogues for healing and transformation. Practice Innovations, 6(3), 171-180. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pri0000149