Richard "Dick" Price
his life and practice

Copyright © 2014, 2020 by John Francis Callahan for The Gestalt Legacy Project.
All rights reserved. For private use only.
This material may be reproduced for personal, non-commercial purposes if all copyright notations are retained without alteration. Not to be reproduced for profitable use or distribution.
Do not publish or sell in any form, by itself or as part of another work, without express written permission. 

Dedication

“Contact is the appreciation of difference…” Fritz Perls

“…and the recognition of similarity.” Dick Price

This text is a biographical study of the life of Richard Price. Dick was a co-founder of Esalen Institute, a student of Fritz Perls, and the creator of Gestalt Practice in the 1970s and early 1980s. The goal of this biography is to identify and enlarge upon the patterns, themes and motives that organized Dick’s life and work, and to shape this portrait into an intelligible whole that can inform the Gestalt Practice community. This biography addresses the concerns and organizing principles that influenced Richard Price’s subjective world, and how those factors were implicated in the development of what has become his Gestalt Practice legacy.

In the late 1960s, Dick Price was one of the primary students of Gestalt therapy’s founder Fritz Perls at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, Dick developed his own form of Gestalt work, which he called Gestalt Practice.

In his life, Dick Price transformed himself from a person who had profoundly suffered from the effects of various primitive psychotherapeutic methods (including massive doses of neuroleptic drugs, with numerous insulin shock and electro-convulsive treatments) into a person who ameliorated the suffering of countless people by utilizing techniques which had nothing to do with the damaging, demeaning and coercive elements of psychiatry.

Dick was killed on November 25, 1985, by a falling boulder, while hiking in Hot Springs Canyon in Big Sur. As Dick’s friend and fellow practitioner, Janet Lederman, said, “His work was more important than his ego and therefore he left no body of written material.” This biography will serve to fill in the gap created by Dick’s premature death, by providing an understanding of his life and work.

There are two good reasons for writing a biography of Richard Price. First, he played a significant role in the important and interesting events of his era. Second, he was instrumental in developing new techniques for the practice of psychology. Each reason merits further attention.

Dick Price participated in some of the most important events of his time. Dick and his Stanford University classmate, Michael Murphy, co-founded Esalen Institute in 1962. The first series of programs were offered in that same year, under the heading “The Human Potentiality,” a term Price and Murphy had taken from the writings of a supporter of their new project, Aldous Huxley. With the help of people like Alan Watts, Huxley, Gregory Bateson, and psychologists Abraham Maslow and Joe K. Adams, over the course of the next year Price and Murphy launched a series of seminars that would lay the foundation for what would become known as the “human potential movement.” As the former Look Magazine journalist, writer, and later human potential theorist, George Leonard, observed, during the first five years at Esalen you might have spent time with any of the following luminaries: historian Arnold Toynbee, theologians Paul Tillich and Harvey Cox, chemist Linus Pauling, bishops John Robinson and James A. Pike, semanticist and later Senator S. I. Hayakawa, writers Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, Ken Kesey and Aldous Huxley, futurist Buckminster Fuller, and psychologists Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, Carl Rogers, B. F. Skinner, and Rollo May.

Esalen became identified with the emergence of humanistic psychology in the 1960s, especially in the public mind. Many of the intellectual leaders of humanistic psychology, including Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and James Bugenthal, were enthusiastic in their support of Esalen and gave public seminars there in the early 1960s. Abraham Maslow was shepherd of the “third force” – a loose collection of groups in psychology (Jungians, Adlerians, Gestalt therapists, existentialists, and neo-Freudians) with the shared interest of challenging the hegemony that the Freudian and behaviorists schools held over the field. Maslow helped to establish Esalen’s credibility in the 1960s. Known as the co-founder of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and the American Association for Humanistic Psychology, and later the President of the American Psychological Association, Maslow frequented Esalen, both as an advisor and as a seminar leader, recommending Esalen’s workshops and seminars to a growing list of like-minded colleagues.

As the co-founder of Esalen, Dick Price has been regarded as a major force in the creation of the human potential movement, as well as humanistic psychology. He was in a position to offer Esalen’s support to those who could make contributions to the stated purpose of the Institute: “To explore those trends in religion, philosophy, and the behavioral sciences which emphasize the potentialities of human existence.” Price also served as an excellent evaluator of those who taught at Esalen, because he personally sampled Esalen’s offerings in his efforts to heal himself from the residual effects of the rough treatment he had suffered in psychiatric hospitals. Price figured prominently in Esalen’s ability, at the time, to put together and showcase various disciplines that had formerly existed in obscurity, helping to move them into the national spotlight. Those disciplines included (among many others) what would later become Esalen’s main workshop and seminar staples: encounter, Gestalt therapy, and bodywork (massage, Rolfing, and sensory awareness). Although his main role, as Big Sur Director, was to keep Esalen operating day to day – leaving most of the responsibility for programming to Michael Murphy – Price began to put his energy and focus on, in his own words, “How you operate the type of counseling and psychological work that goes on here.”

A turning point occurred for Dick in January 1966, when Jeannie McGowan, a woman he had been living with, left him. In pain, Dick dropped into one of Fritz Perls’ workshops and did some important work with Fritz. He discovered a very different Fritz Perls from the person he had come to know in his capacity as Big Sur Director. Dick had not been impressed with Fritz when he first came to Esalen in 1963, and at first never worked with him. In business dealings with Fritz, Dick had found Fritz to be thoroughly difficult, arrogant, and often belligerent. When Dick realized, however, that Fritz’s style of therapy really had something to offer, Price became one of Fritz’s primary students. As Fritz’s apprentice and eventual successor in terms of leading Gestalt groups and trainings at Esalen, Dick played an important role in making Esalen a major center for Gestalt group work in the United States. Dick went on to soften some of the harder edges of the Gestalt work he inherited from Perls, eventually calling his work “Gestalt Practice.”

After Fritz’s death in 1970, Dick became the person who most consistently led Gestalt groups and Gestalt training at Esalen. Moreover, as the co-founder who actually lived at Esalen (Mike Murphy lived in the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in the late 1960s), Dick had the most influence with Esalen’s long-term staff, many of whom became his clients and students, as well as those who would become the next generation of Esalen program leaders. It was in this very supportive climate that Dick Price, with the help and support of his wife, Christine Stewart Price, developed the distinctive style of Gestalt that he called Gestalt Practice.

In his work at Esalen, Dick profoundly impacted the lives of many people he worked with and trained. Through the 1970s, and until his death in 1985, Dick could be seen doing his “open seat” drop-in Gestalt groups for anyone who came through Esalen. Despite his profound impact upon his contemporaries, Dick left no written body of knowledge documenting his particular approach. One of the reasons for composing this biography is to fill that void.

As a psychological study, the life of Richard Price itself merits a biography for reasons that will become self-evident. Dick was someone who experienced and recovered from some of the most coercive, demeaning, and destructive forms of psychiatric treatment one can experience. In 1956, Dick was involuntarily hospitalized for almost a year at the Institute of Living, a private psychiatric hospital, after being incorrectly given the psychiatric label of paranoid schizophrenia. During his hospitalization he received, as treatment, 59 insulin shock treatments, 10 electro-convulsive shock treatments, and massive doses of phenothiazines (specifically, chlorpromazine or thorazine). Dick felt that his “treatment,” which he experienced as a deep assault on his mind and body, was little more than punishment for being crazy, and/or an attempt to suppress, negate, and blot out valuable personal experiences.

Dick was not only able to physically and mentally recover from the coercive and painful “treatment” he received, but he also went on to lead a healthy and fulfilling life. Eventually, he was even able to utilize those very experiences in developing his own form of Gestalt Practice, which embodied the rejection of coercive and demeaning elements. Dick became a champion of the rights of mental health patients, and extended himself to anyone in the greater Esalen community in acute psychological distress, often having them stay at his home until they got better. Dick actively supported an emerging, alternative view of severe mental illness that was beginning to gain foothold in the United States in the 1960s. This view, perhaps most eloquently articulated by British psychiatrist R. D. Laing, professed that: “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.” (Laing, The Politics of Experience [1967], p.133)

Dick exerted his influence to ensure that Esalen, as an institution, actively supported, via public workshops, seminars, and symposia, the work of those who held this emerging alternative view, including: Joe K, Adams, Gregory Bateson, Irving Goffman, Laing, John Weir Perry, and Thomas Szasz, among many others. Dick was also instrumental in developing the plans for an Esalen-associated project in which psychiatric patients in the United States would be treated along the lines of R. D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall in London. Those plans came to fruition in 1969 when Esalen and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) joined in sponsoring a three year research project at Agnews State Hospital near San Jose, California. Headed by Dick’s close friend, Julian Silverman, the “Agnews Project” treated young male patients with the diagnosis of schizophrenia. In the double-blind study, patients were treated in a humane atmosphere, and a control group was treated without any psychotropic medication (specifically, the phenothiazines). The results of the study supported humane treatment without the use of chlorpromazine (with more long-term clinical improvement, better functioning in the community after discharge, and lower hospitalization rates for those in the non-drug group).

All these reasons clearly establish the merit of a psychological study of Richard Price, realized as the biography which will follow these introductory remarks. This biography will seek to demonstrate how Dick Price’s subjective, experiential world was deeply embedded in the development of his own form of Gestalt, which he called “Gestalt Practice.” It will employ the theoretical perspective of intersubjective theory developed in Stolorow and Atwood’s book, Faces in a Cloud. In that work, George Atwood and Robert Stolorow sought to demonstrate that the subjective concerns of psychological practitioners are deeply embedded in the theories they create. Using that perspective, this study will investigate how Dick’s conception of Gestalt Practice can be viewed as a psychological product arising out of his unique life history and personal phenomenology.

The following analysis will be divided into three parts. In the first part, Dick Price’s early life experiences will be discussed with a view toward reconstructing the critical formative influences on the development of his personality. The second part will formulate a description of Dick Price’s subjective world, and will then go on to investigate and describe the developmental origins of Dick Price’s subjective concerns and their overall significance as unconscious organizing principles. The third part will present an analysis of Dick Price’s life work in the light of the concerns and principles which thematically dominated his subjective experience. Specifically, there will be an attempt to demonstrate how the subjective concerns that dominated his personal world were involved in his vision for and founding of Esalen Institute, and in the development of his methodology for Gestalt Practice.

There are three central hypotheses that serve as a foundation for this psychological biography of Richard Price. These hypotheses represent a preliminary attempt to conceptualize issues of importance that appear as repetitive themes in the organization of Dick’s personal, subjective world. The three hypotheses function as initial frames of reference in this biography for eliciting the concerns that served to organize Dick’s subjective experience throughout his life. The first hypothesis is that the seminal crisis in Dick’s life was his hospitalization at the Institute of Living, a private psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. The second hypothesis, a corollary of the first, is that Dick’s hospitalization was a concretization of ongoing problematic experiences with his parents dating from childhood. A third and final hypothesis is that Dick’s often repeated maxim for Esalen Institute – “maximum availability, minimum coercion” – was a concept that served defensive and reparative self-functions and encapsulated attempts to restore and consolidate the validity of his personal, subjective experience. These three hypotheses will be revisited at the close of this study in order to appraise their validity. For now, this biography will begin with the family background of Richard Price.

Early Life Experience

Dick Price, named Richard Price at birth, was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 12, 1930. His birth, and that of his twin brother Bobby, was by Caesarean section. His immediate family circle consisted of his parents, Herman and Audrey Price, and a sister, Joan, who had been born almost two years earlier.

Family Background – Herman Price

Dick Price’s father, Herman Price, was born in Lithuania (then part of Russia) on Yom Kippur in 1895. The original family surname was Preis or Preuss. Herman’s given name at the time of his birth was Hymie. Herman’s parents were orthodox Jews, and they maintained a strict, kosher household. The family owned and operated a bakery, buying wheat from local farmers and baking bread. Herman’s father, Leon Preis, died when Herman’s brother Louis was 10 years old.

Herman would have been about 12 at the time of his father’s death. When Herman was 15 his mother, Mary (her maiden had been Tuvim), single-handedly moved the entire family (four sons and three daughters) out of Russia. Mary is described as being a “strong” and “courageous” woman who “was jealous and possessive, especially of her sons.” Mary had a powerful motive for moving her family out of Russia. Jewish boys were in high demand as conscripts for the Imperial Army, and all too frequently they were immediately sent to the front lines, never to be heard from again.

When the Preis family left Lithuania they traveled by train through Europe and then by ship to the United States. They arrived at Ellis Island, New York, shortly before World War I (circa 1911). At Ellis Island, the family name (Preis or Preuss) was changed to Price and Hymie changed his name to Herman. The Price family’s first home in the United States was in New York City. The Price family stayed in New York for about two years. When Herman was 17, the whole family moved to Chicago, Illinois.

Not long after the move to Chicago, Herman joined the Coast Guard (the First World War had just broken out in Europe). When the United States entered the war, Herman transferred to the Navy where he was assigned to a troop carrier, and he made more than 20 crossings of the Atlantic. After the war, Herman began working in the Chicago area where he was employed by several firms in the 1920s, including The Davis Store (a popular Chicago department store). He began working for Sears & Roebuck in about 1930, and within a few years became Merchandise Manager at Sears for major appliances. Herman’s circle of friends at the time included Raymond Loewy, the internationally renowned industrial designer who was an award winning designer for the Sears brand Coldspot, and also Walter Seager, the president of Whirlpool, the company that manufactured Kenmore washing machines for Sears.

During World War II, Sears loaned Herman’s managerial skills to Douglas Aircraft where he helped organize the expansion of Douglas in order to meet the demands of the war effort. After the war, Herman went back to Sears where he eventually attained the position of Executive Vice-President. According to Dick, his father’s “role transformation” from teenage Lithuanian immigrant to “top level executive at Sears & Roebuck” was so complete that when meeting him, it was impossible to tell he had not been born and raised in the United States.

Family Background — Audrey Price

Dick’s mother, Audrey Price (formerly Miss Audrey Myers), was born in Linton, Indiana on April 19, 1895. Audrey’s ancestors were of Dutch, English, and Irish heritage. Audrey grew up in Auburn, Illinois where her father owned a general store. She left home at the age of 17 and moved to Chicago in order to escape the small town, farm belt life in which she had been raised. During World War I, Audrey worked for the Army at Rockford, Illinois. After the war, she went to work as a bookkeeper for a local restaurant chain in Chicago. She met her future husband, Herman, in Chicago, and they were married in a civil ceremony in New York in 1926. Audrey was “extremely superstitious,” and she was a “devout believer in astrology.” Audrey became an avid investor in the stock market, investing money that Herman put in her name.

According to her daughter Joan, “the confidence that she derived from the stars made her far more successful in the stock market than Dad was.” Whereas their stockbroker would often convince Herman to sell his stock, he “would argue in vain with Mother. It was her stock and the stars told her not to sell.”

Eventually, her investments made the value of her estate far outstrip that of her husband’s. Dick Price described his mother as being an ambitious, talented woman who made her own fortune and was considerably ahead of her time.

Early Family Life

Herman and Audrey’s first child, Joan, was born on January 9, 1929. Joan was born one month premature and was delivered via an emergency Caesarean section. Joan weighed only 4 pounds at birth and was, at first, thought to have been stillborn but was revived by a senior nurse. Joan would have ongoing health problems, some quite serious, throughout her childhood. Almost two years later, on October 12, 1930, Audrey gave birth to twins, Dick and Bobby. At the time of the twins’ birth, both Herman and Audrey were 35 years old.

The twins were also Caesarean section births but in contrast to their sister, they were healthy babies. The Price family lived in Rogers Park, on the far north side of Chicago when the twins were born. As the twins grew older, according to their sister Joan, “Bobby was always the leader in our playing – he took charge of the toys – and Dick and I were the followers.” The young Price family was “on affectionate terms with each other for the most part.” However, as 1933 began, a major family crisis loomed on the horizon that would profoundly affect the young Price family.

1933: A Traumatic Year for the Price Family

Joan Price describes 1933 as being “a truly horrible year for the family.” In January Joan contracted ethmoiditis – a sinus infection. Joan had to undergo surgery and she came very close to dying. Her illness lingered and Joan needed another surgical procedure later that year. Then, in the fall, Bobby suddenly fell very seriously ill. The family pediatrician, Dr. Peacock, was out of town at the time. Bobby’s sudden illness, actually an acute appendicitis, was misdiagnosed by the doctor covering Dr. Peacock’s practice. By the time Bobby’s illness was correctly diagnosed, his appendix had burst, causing an acute onset of peritonitis. An emergency operation was unsuccessful, and Bobby died.

Bobby’s death was the final traumatic event of a very difficult year for the Price family. As Joan Price said, “I believe the traumas of that year affected not only Dick, but also served to emphasize the differences in my parents’ characters.” What was the difference in the characters of her parents that Joan felt were exacerbated by Bobby’s death? A general, though somewhat limited picture of the respective characters of Audrey and Herman as parents emerges from descriptions given by members of the Price family and from observations about his parents that Dick offered to people he knew over the years.

Herman emerges from the reports of those who knew him as a charismatic figure who was universally liked in the greater Price family, and by his associates in the business world. Herman retained close ties with his brothers who also lived and worked in the Chicago area, especially with his brother Louis, with whom Herman had been closest in childhood. Louis Price established a large, successful architectural sign company in Chicago that was called “Price Brothers.” Like his brothers, Herman abandoned his mother’s orthodox adherence to Judaism and did not attend religious services. Orthodox Judaism simply did not make sense to the Price brothers in the context of their new circumstances. Only one of the four brothers, actually Louis, went on to marry within the Jewish faith.

Herman was a strikingly handsome, warm, intelligent, and highly focused man who possessed a tremendous work ethic. Those qualities enabled him to rise from being a poor, non-English speaking immigrant, to a position at the top echelon of American business. Herman spent a considerable amount of his time pursuing business interests and he maintained an active, personal social life aligned with those interests. Herman was a member of two prominent Chicago clubs, the Bryn Mawr Country Club and the Standard Club of Chicago. At those clubs he socialized with many of Chicago’s business leaders, a group that included his brothers, Louis and Jim.

Joan Price described her father as “a man of peace, a truly gentle man.” He was the product of “a strong, domineering mother and married a woman who became a strong, domineering wife and mother in turn.” Joan Price observed that Herman was often unable to withstand his wife Audrey’s insistence on the absolute rightness of her point of view and preferred to give in to her, rather than to fight with her. It is not hard to imagine that confrontation, first with his mother and later with his wife, was not something Herman would have actively sought out or provoked.

His brother Louis’ daughter, Marjorie, felt that the Price brothers generally tried to avoid confrontation, especially in their personal relationships. At the beginning of a family history composed by Herman’s daughter Joan, she writes: “The recurring pattern of strong woman–passive man is obvious in what follows.”

Audrey, in contrast to her husband Herman, emerged as a figure that was universally disliked in the greater Price family. She is described with adjectives such as strong, hard, strict, rigid, cold, superstitious, over-protective, possessive, jealous, crazy, domineering, and controlling. Her daughter Joan remembered a maternal cousin telling her: “Audrey is a tyrant, just like Grandmother.” Audrey did not get along well with her in-laws. She and her mother-in-law were said to have “truly hated” each other. Audrey was very concerned with outward appearances and insisted that her family associate with what she considered to be the “right people.” One gets the impression that the last thing Audrey wanted was an orthodox mother-in-law. Dick’s wife, Chris Price, commented that from what she learned about the Price family from Dick over the years, the Prices were “a family in which the mother was the dominant force – period.”

Audrey kept an immaculate household. She was very “house-proud” and got more so as the years passed, when the family became more affluent. Dick’s cousin, Marjorie, commented that the Price home looked “like a museum – unlived in.” Dick’s son, David, recalled Dick telling him that Audrey kept their house in such an immaculate condition that when leaving to go outside, he would have to back out of the kitchen with rags on his feet so that he would leave no footprints.

Two fears, according to Joan, served to “exacerbate my mother’s self-indulgent tendencies to dramatics and to provide her with an excuse for her over-protectiveness.” The first fear was the “ever-present fear of losing a child.” In the 1930s there were no antibiotics, and today’s common, treatable illnesses like ear infections often proved to be fatal. Diseases such as tuberculosis, smallpox, pneumonia, and polio were greatly feared and took many lives. Joan had several health problems that could have caused her death: premature birth, ethmoiditis, and pneumonia. The second fear was the rise of fascism in pre-war Europe and the threat it represented: “a genuine fear of our safety if the Fascists succeeded.” The Prices were Jewish and having already experienced considerable persecution in Russia, the vocal and politically powerful German-American bund movement did not escape the family’s wary attention.

Impact of the Death of Dick Price’s Twin Brother: “Bobby”

It is hard to overestimate the impact of the death of an infant on a young family. Not only was Bobby’s death the embodiment of a long held, ever-present fear, especially for his mother Audrey, but it also happened very quickly, without warning. One week Bobby was a perfectly healthy child, and the next week he was gone. Dick Price’s wife, Chris, with whom he did Gestalt work in his later life (work that included his childhood years and the impact of his twin’s death), was left with the impression that Bobby’s death caused Herman to withdraw from the family into his business life. Chris felt that Bobby’s death was something the family was never able to fully acknowledge, process, or recover from. Joan Price remembered that even in his later years, her father “could never bear to hear Bobby’s name spoken” and recalled wishing her mother wouldn’t talk about Bobby with her father present.

For Audrey, Bobby’s death represented the fulfillment of one of her most potent fears. Chris Price wondered whether something may have “snapped” in Audrey when Bobby died. Contributing factors to this possibility would have been her husband’s response of withdrawal, along with her own predisposition to control as a character issue, and the “absolute non-processing” of Bobby’s death. To Chris, Bobby’s death was a crucial event for the entire family in ways that can never be fully known and “may have put them down a slippery slope and polarized them.” One outcome of the polarization to which Chris referred was the creation of a division in parental alignment in regard to their children. Dick came to be identified as being more under Audrey’s parental influence and control while Joan became more aligned with Herman. According to Joan, Audrey became “much more possessive with regard to Dick than to me, because she had turned Dick in her own mind into a kind of mirror image of herself and her views.” To Chris, perhaps the ultimate impact of Bobby’s death was, “Whatever they could have had as a circle stopped.”

Dick felt that he was left very alone, as a child, in handling the impact of his twin brother’s death. At the time of Bobby’s death, Joan was old enough to understand that Bobby was never coming back. Dick, however, was only 3, and was too young to understand the finality of Bobby’s death. Joan remembered that for months Dick kept looking for Bobby whenever they went to places where the boys had played together. When asked if she thought that the Price family made any sense out of the event to Dick, Chris Price’s answer was, “None, as if it basically didn’t happen except for the fact that everything contracted that much more. There was no acknowledgement, there was no communication.” In Dick’s Gestalt work with Chris, she recalled how “he literally made space for Bobby inside himself and he lived that, in a certain way, at least for a while.” Bobby’s death was the beginning point of what Dick would later describe, to many people, as an extremely lonely childhood. 

Childhood and Adolescence

In 1936, when Dick was 5, the family moved to 707 Junior Terrace, a high-rise apartment building then visible from Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. The family occupied the penthouse apartment that took up the top two floors of the 13-story building. The top floor had a family room and an open terrace where the Price children, according to Joan, were “provided a place to play and keep our toys, and one that kept us from ‘messing up’ the rest of the apartment.” In his adult years, Dick commented that the Chicago apartment was a very lonely and confining place for him. He could look down at other kids playing from the top floor and feel as though he was cooped up in a tower, unable to go out and play like other kids his age. Dick told his wife Chris that he spent a lot of time looking out the window as a child and that the penthouse felt like a prison to him. For an extremely restless child, as Joan described Dick, feeling cooped up must have been very trying and anxiety producing for him.

While living at 707 Junior Terrace, both Joan and Dick attended a small private school – the Stickney School. Stickney had been recommended by Dr. Peacock, the family pediatrician, whose daughter also attended the school. Joan shared Dick’s classroom at the small school, where three grades utilized one large classroom. Joan remembers that Dick was an extremely restless child who found it very difficult to sit still. At Stickney, Dick was allowed to stand at his desk to do his work rather than having to stay seated. He was also allowed to leave his desk during study periods and walk around the room without asking for permission.

In 1941, when Dick was 10, the family moved to 138 Winnetka Avenue in Kenilworth, a very affluent suburb of Chicago. Kenilworth’s New Trier High School had been receiving a lot of attention as one of the best high schools in the country, and the family needed to decide upon the high school that Joan and Dick would attend. The immediate cause for the move, however, was the death of a child in their building caused by a failure of the elevator’s safety system. Joan remembered that Audrey reacted by “going into hysterics and demanded that we move – she didn’t want to risk her children.”

The Price’s new home was a very short walk to New Trier High School. Audrey purchased the house because Kenilworth was a town that did not allow the selling of property to Jewish families. Audrey instructed her children not to tell anyone in Kenilworth that the family was Jewish. In Kenilworth, Joan started high school at New Trier while Dick attended junior high at the Joseph Sears School. Dick had difficulty adjusting to his new school. He was not allowed to roam about as freely as he had at the Stickney School. However, he soon made friends and became an active member of the Boy Scouts. In Kenilworth, Audrey wanted the family to join the Episcopalian church. Dick and his sister Joan were both baptized as Episcopalians and began attending Sunday school classes. Joan recalled that she “avoided this religious training as much as I could, but Dick attended regularly, carried the flag at services, and took confirmation classes.” Joan is not sure how much Dick’s participation reflected any genuine personal beliefs. His attendance may simply have been a reflection of his accommodation to his mother’s wishes. Joan commented that Audrey was “doing a bit of social climbing” and wanted the family to fit into the anti-Semitic neighborhood in which they now lived.

In the suburban environment of Kenilworth, Dick began to experience much more personal freedom. He could get on his bicycle and escape the confines of his home – something he had not been able to do at the family’s high-rise apartment in Chicago. He soon began spending as much time away from home as possible. At school he started participating in athletics, going out for the football and wrestling teams. Dick was not very big as a kid, but he was very tough and very scrappy. Chris Price remembered Dick saying that his football coach once told him: “Pound for pound I get more out of you than anyone, Price.” Sports became an avenue that supported Dick’s need to establish an identity for himself outside the confines of his family. Later Dick told a student, Leonard Bearne, that though he did not fully realize it at the time, he was very, very angry when he was young and that in wrestling he discovered an outlet in which he could fully express his anger, using absolutely all his physical and mental resources. Wrestling became a real passion for Dick. He was a dominant high school wrestler and he hardly ever lost a match as he got older. He went on to place second in his weight class at the Illinois State Wrestling Championships.

As he got older, Dick learned to contain, to wait, and to bide his time around his home, but he told Chris: “Outside of the house there was a fair bit of movement … there was a certain level of fearlessness.” Dick was known as a very tough young man. He was known to fight if provoked and there were many more “almost” fights. Dick was so physically fast and had so much intensity that people usually backed down from physical encounters with him. He was intolerant of perceived injustice and quick to stand up for people or things he thought might need his protection. Dick was also a legendary poker player, a skill that combined his high intelligence, his fearlessness, his determination, and an impenetrability, if he did not want to be read.

Dick Price graduated from New Trier High School in 1948. His life was opening into new realms of personal freedom. His graduation present was a new Raymond Loewy designed maroon Studebaker sedan. His father used his personal influence with Raymond Loewy to obtain the car, because there were long waiting lists for new vehicles in the immediate post-war years. Although there was considerable peer pressure at the extremely status conscious New Trier High School for good students to attend either Harvard or Yale, Dick chose Stanford University. Stanford’s relative informality appealed to him, and, as he told Walter Truett Anderson, “I probably wanted to get as far away from my family as possible.”

Toward a Provisional Description of Dick Price’s Subjective World

What were Dick Price’s seminal childhood experiences, which can provide evidence for reconstructing the critical formative influences on the development of his personality? Although a detailed history of his childhood is not known in its entirety, several events from Dick’s childhood serve as concretizations of the most problematic areas of Dick’s subjective experience, and thus provide a basis for a provisional characterization of his subjective world. In the process of concretization, organizations of experience are encapsulated in concrete symbols. Often, concretizations symbolize psychological dilemmas or catastrophes emerging from problematic relational configurations in the child’s early surround.

Impact of the Death of Bobby Price

The first and perhaps the most important concretizing event was the death of Dick’s twin brother Bobby. At the age of 3, Dick was hardly in a position to make sense out of Bobby’s death. Indeed, his entire family seemed unable to effectively do this. But what meaning did Bobby’s death come to serve, over time, in the organization of Dick’s subjective world? The death of Bobby served to encapsulate and lend concrete substance to a felt sense of the toxicity of his early relational surround, most centrally by the felt sense of the negative influence of his mother. This sense of toxicity underpins experiences of psychological usurpation and pathological accommodation that would come, over time, to thematically structure Dick’s subjective world.

Psychological usurpation is a term meant to convey the experience of having to substitute someone else’s personal reality (here that of Dick’s mother) for one’s own. The term is also meant to convey the lack of choice a child has in accommodating to an alien parental agenda that defines who one is or who one can be – an agenda that can never be felt to be authentically one’s own. What is the evidence that lends support to such a view? The primary evidence comes from Gestalt sessions that Dick did with his wife, Chris, during his adult years.

In his Gestalt work with Chris Price, it was clear that “at some place in him, he held his mom, both of them [his parents], but more his mom, responsible for Bobby’s death.” Though Chris does not know Dick’s actual childhood thoughts about Bobby’s death, when working on the impact of his twin’s death as an adult, he came to the following sentence that was repeated in his work, many times and in various contexts: “I won’t forgive you [for the death of] my brother.” Dick held his parents responsible for Bobby’s death – his mother in particular. As Chris observed, “He thought the appendix was about toxicity; there was just too much toxicity.”

In his work with Chris, Dick revealed his overall sense of Bobby’s lightness and delicateness in comparison to himself. This was something both Chris Price and David Price felt was also revealed in family pictures of the twins. Those pictures revealed a qualitative sense of Bobby being lighter in both physical presence (he was more delicate and slight of build) and in coloring (he had lighter hair and skin). The photographs of the twins also suggested a difference in temperament. In the photos, Bobby consistently looked lighter in temperament; he smiled brightly; and he seemed to possess a kind of delicacy. Dick, in contrast, appeared heavier, more somber, and perhaps even brooding. Joan observed that Bobby was also the more gregarious of the two and liked to “take charge” in their activities. Of the pair, Bobby would have to be considered the dominant twin. And although it was never made explicit, David Price has expressed the impression that Bobby was the parental favorite as well.

Donald Winnicott, the object relations psychologist, once remarked that: “There is no such thing as an infant.” By this statement, Winnicott was attempting to convey that the infant and the maternal caregiver form an indivisible unit, a psychological whole that is not separable. If this is true of a mother and an infant, then a similar and even more powerful sense of non-separateness may be said to exist for twins. For a twin, the most intimate, constant, and steady human presence is the co-twin. Twins’ relationships with other family members, even with the mother, are essentially triadic. The intimate, dyadic relationship between twins is evidenced by the intense mutual comprehension of each other’s body language, and the frequent development of a shared private language, conveying shorthand messages to their co-twin, expressing their joint experience of the world. The loss of a twin is at least as profound as the loss of any other life partner, and the effect of the loss on the survivor is greater when the twin who died was the “leader” of the pair.

Chris Price commented that, following his twin brother’s death, Dick had the sense of giving to Bobby’s spirit the left side of his own body to inhabit. The giving-up of the left side of himself, in which his brother could live, could be seen as an attempt to symbolically undo and/or repair the terrible trauma of his twin brother’s death and to protect and maintain a felt sense of connection to him.

The belief that a lost twin survives in spirit, and therefore can continue to be available to the survivor, is frequently encountered in surviving twins, and thereby compensates for feelings of intense loneliness. In his adult years at Esalen, two of Dick’s close associates, Penny Vieregge and Bette Dingman, were also surviving twins. With both Penny and Bette, Dick was able to share the ongoing sense of incompleteness he felt as a result of Bobby’s death. Dick told both Penny and Bette that he had an ongoing sense of missing some important part of himself that he would never find and would forever feel as a void.

Feeling incomplete in the absence of a co-twin is a commonly described phenomenon in studies of twins. In the psychological literature about twins, the concept of a “twinning-bond” is utilized to explain feelings of non-separateness. This twinship bond is perhaps best defined as a psychological thread between twins. (Schave & Ciriello, Identity and Intimacy in Twins [1983], p.11) The bond is thought to arise from experiencing oneself as literally being a part of another person. For twins, the sense of self is shared or distributed between the individuals of the pair.

Dick Price’s felt sense of having been left terribly alone with the loss of Bobby was probably most acute in relation to his experience of his mother. With Bobby being the leader of the pair, Dick could be more in the background in relationship to his mother and the force of her personality. Indeed, the need to avoid feeling like he was in the spotlight would become a consistent thematic issue throughout Dick Price’s adult life. Leonard Bearne, who briefly studied with Dick’s in the 1980s, felt that as a result of Dick’s experiences with his mother Dick developed certain psychological “triggers.” One of the most prominent triggers was the feeling of being “trapped.” Dick, in his adult life, sought to avoid situations that would evoke feelings of entrapment. In his adult life, Dick was famous for wanting to work and/or exert his influence behind the scenes, avoiding situations that would put him “on stage” or “in the spotlight.”

With the loss of Bobby, Dick lost a buffer between himself and the powerful, dominant force of his mother’s personality, amplifying a felt sense of endangerment and anxiety. He also lost a powerful ally, a potential alter ego who could have been there with him, confirming and validating his experience and allowing him to feel less like an alone and alien being.

Joan Price commented that Bobby’s death had a polarizing impact on the Price family dynamics, exacerbating Herman and Audrey’s personality differences. Herman’s response to Bobby’s death was one of withdrawal, whereas Audrey exercised greater control over her environment as a means of managing the increased level of fear and anxiety that Bobby’s death caused. In addition, a polarity seems to have developed in terms of parent-child alliances. Joan became more strongly allied with Herman while Dick seems to have literally become Audrey’s. This division made Dick the more frequent target of her over protectiveness and control, expressed by Dick’s sister Joan as the need for Audrey to turn her son into a “mirror image of herself and her views.”

It would appear that Bobby’s death crystallized a developmental conflict that would come to lie at the heart of Dick Price’s subjective world. That conflict was between the requirement that his developmental course conform and accommodate to the emotional needs of his mother, on the one hand, and the inner imperative that development be rooted in an individualized, vitalizing affective core that could authentically be felt to be his own, on the other. This conflict was symbolically represented in Dick Price’s subjective world by his belief that Bobby, in his lightness and delicateness, was not able to survive the toxicity of his mother’s ongoing influence. In Dick’s subjective world, Bobby died as a result of a poisoning, caused by a toxicity originating within his own body that could no longer be contained. For Dick Price, Bobby’s death was a powerful symbol concretizing the terrible power of his mother’s toxic influence.

Maternal Influence: Accommodation

A second, closely related event that concretized problematic subjective experience was the dismissal of a woman who worked as maid or nurse, soon after Bobby’s death. The Price family employed live-in domestic help and daily workers, who provided childcare and assisted in the running of the household. When Dick and Bobby were infants, Audrey employed a full-time nurse to take care of them.

When the twins were older, Audrey hired a nursemaid, Bernice, to help with the care of all three children. When the family moved to their penthouse apartment after Bobby’s death, Audrey hired a German maid, Ema, to help care for Dick and Joan. Ema was followed by several other maids as the years went by. Joan Price insisted that both the live-in and daily workers “were in no sense security figures, and that we suffered no distress when they left. Our security figures were our parents, and we were always frightened when Mother threatened to leave Dad and take us with her.” However, according to Chris Price, Dick had a somewhat different view:

The nurse that had taken care of him and Bobby and had basically been the maternal warmth for them, stayed for a short time and then the mother dismissed her. So, that was a very big blow because, I don’t know, I think the name was Ema, I don’t know what Ema said to him particularly, but I know she would, from his recall of her presence, have provided the vibrational acknowledgement of impact. So whatever he did have through this outer family person, meaning someone who is not part of the system, was dismissed by the mother within the first year, maybe within the first ½ year. I remember him knowing that was another blow and that he knew, he had a very direct sense, that the mother did it.

Although confusion exists concerning the actual name of the nurse who was dismissed (Chris thought that the nurse was named Ema, while Joan remembered her as Bernice), Chris was clear about the impact of the nurse’s dismissal on Dick: “With Ema gone, I think it felt like a personal affront, an attack, like you’re really determined to tear this up, every way you can.” The dismissal of the nurse symbolically concretized the expectation of toxic invasiveness by Audrey with a foreboding expectation of its continuance. This “tearing up” of his inner world was the result of having to accommodate to a rigid, inflexible reality imposed from the outside with little regard for his traumatic feelings of loss and aloneness – now recapitulated by his nurse’s dismissal. In the Gestalt work Dick did with others during his later life, he possessed an almost messianic insistence upon, in his own words, “contact with one’s own experience not defined by anyone else from outside.” This insistence represented an attempt to symbolically repair the damage of having to accommodate to his mother’s reality that was imposed upon him “from the outside” throughout his childhood.

The intersubjective theorist, Bernard Brandchaft, has observed that in systems of pathological accommodation, aspects of the child’s development are recruited into enmeshing programming, based upon a reality alien to the child’s own innermost experiences, and the child is compelled to buy into the program. Brandchaft uses “compelled” in the following sense: “Attachment observation yields conclusive evidence that there is no reason why attachments need to be positive. Infants who have become attached to maltreating figures are no less attached. Indeed, they are likely to remain more rigidly attached by reason of the insecurity of their attachments.” (Brandchaft, The Self in Developmental Trauma [1998], p.6)

Seymour Carter, who facilitated Gestalt sessions with Dick Price in the late 1960s and early 1970s, remembered from those sessions that Dick’s mother Audrey was a “coercive,” “intrusive,” and “overbearing mother” who could, at times, even be “sadistic and tormenting.” In those sessions, Dick often worked on his mother, and “over and over again, dozens of times, when Dick would go into deep process … he would always come to the same thing … he would go into a tension and hold it … he would curl up like this [in the fetal position] … and it wouldn’t go anywhere.” According to Seymour, “I felt it was a stuck place because he kept going back there, over and over again.” In fact, many of the sessions Dick did with Seymour dealt with the sense of “anguish” Dick felt in relationship to his mother. From what Seymour described, one can get a glimpse into the dilemma of a child’s attempts to develop in the relational climate of accommodation, a dilemma that Brandchaft described in the following terms: “Development now revolves around a set of strategies for coping with lasting effects of trauma, past and continuing, and the foreboding expectation of trauma hangs like a shroud over the future.” (Brandchaft, supra [1998], p.4)

A final childhood memory, which concretized Dick’s problematic childhood experience with his mother, involved his father bringing home two Dalmatian puppies. According to Chris, this incident “came up because he was working on what it was like to be so lonely, and to be so isolated in the middle of a city … and the house/home scene feeling so lifeless in a particular way.” Audrey did not like the puppies and so they were very shortly removed from the household. This event encapsulated, in a model scene, the power his mother had in his personal and relational world. A model scene like this epitomized significant past problematic lived experience, and served to highlight experiences representative of salient conscious and unconscious motivational themes. In Dick’s subjective world, it was only what Audrey wanted that truly mattered, and his only option was to accommodatively surrender. According to Brandchaft, with this kind of surrender, development is diverted from more emancipating phase-appropriate tasks, in order to serve the central function of enabling caregivers to regulate a range of feelings about themselves.

Paternal Influence: Longing for a Validating Protective Figure

Audrey was the central, dominant figure in the formation of Dick’s personal subjective world. His father, Herman, was a more peripheral figure, although Dick often wished that Herman would take a more active role in his life. After Bobby’s death, while Dick was still a child, his father brought home a beautifully tooled western saddle. The saddle was kept in a closet and Dick could open the door and look at it. The saddle became an important childhood symbol for Dick. Walter Seager, a friend and business associate of Herman’s, had a ranch in Arizona and the Price family had been winter guests there. Chris Price remembered that, “The saddle got mentioned frequently in our work and just what it was to have that saddle, there in Chicago.” The saddle became a symbol of rescue and represented the possibility of freedom from his mother’s toxic influence. As Chris said, “He [Dick] told me he used to have fantasies of wishing his dad would take him off, take him away to Arizona … and they would go live in the Southwest.” The image of the saddle symbolically concretized Dick’s developmental longing for his father to play a pervasively felt, much needed role in his life – someone to be an advocate on his behalf, to be a reliable protective figure.

However, the picture that actually emerged from interviews with Dick’s relatives and associates was that of an absent, uninterested, and uncaring father; at least as seen from the point of view of how Herman was organized in his son’s subjective world. An event that can best be described as a “model scene” – coming this time from Dick’s adolescence – concretized Herman’s lack of involvement in his son’s life.

The event in question involved Dick’s real passion at that time in his life, for wrestling. As previously mentioned, Dick was a champion wrestler in high school. After what was one of his most important victories, having taken second place in his weight class in the Illinois State Championships, Dick returned home and tried to share his sense of pride and accomplishment with his father. As Dick’s son David recalled the story: “He [Dick] won, came home, told it to his father, and it was basically just a shrug. There was no acknowledgement … more than ignoring, it was invalidating. I don’t remember what the comment was, but he reduced it to: yeah, yeah fine, would you take out the trash. … He could not get his father’s approval for his own accomplishments.”

This particular model scene encapsulated Dick’s developmental longing for his father to take an active interest in and to validate the sense of pride Dick had in his accomplishments. The scene also concretized repetitive experiences of developmental failure, confirming the expectation that his father would never be truly available to him and would never be willing to acknowledge and validate his triumphs. The developmental longing that his father would be more than a peripheral figure in his life was inextricably intertwined with his mother’s dominating influence on the entire family. As Dick’s sister Joan observed: “I know that in later years Dick made much of Dad’s indifference to him – Dad didn’t attend Dick’s wrestling matches. Dick apparently forgot to take into account Mother’s possessiveness and jealousy.”

A Provisional Characterization of Dick Price’s Subjective World

The first phase of this biographical study has been the attempt to provide a descriptive characterization of Dick Price’s early subjective world. This has been done with a view towards formulating the unique dimensions upon which his early experiences were organized, the central concerns and dilemmas that emerged from subjectively salient, recurring intersubjective transactions in his early surround. Due to the paucity of detailed information about Dick’s childhood, there has been reliance upon events that symbolically concretized or encapsulated problematic organizations of experience. The events used were sufficiently salient for Dick Price to have communicated them to others, or in a few specific cases, were events witnessed and remembered as being salient by family members. Dick Price, as nearly everyone has confirmed, was very protective of his inner, subjective world. His reticence makes the events he did describe to others even more salient. As Dick’s friend, John Heider, said, “Dick did not talk about his life much.” Dick learned to be very protective of his inner world quite early in his development. Concealing his subjective experience was a means of protecting essential aspects of himself from his mother’s invasive intrusion.

The most powerful thematic configuration of self and other, which emerged from the various accounts of Dick’s childhood, was Dick’s perception of the negative influence of his mother, symbolically rendered in terms of toxicity. A central aspect of his mother’s toxicity was her invasive intrusion and Dick’s felt need for protection from it. From what little he knew of Dick’s childhood, Leonard Bearne surmised that Dick’s mother’s intrusion most often took the following form: “…wanting to known his thoughts, wanting to tell him what to think, wanting to punish him for thinking certain things… That’s my guess as to how the intrusiveness took place, invalidating his subjective experience and wanting to know what it was at the same time. The more that she knows it, the more that she will invalidate it, so you’re in a horrible bind … and I suspect that’s something like what Dick’s bind was…”

Dick’s mother’s intrusiveness and toxic influence gave rise to two interrelated concerns that would come, over time, to play very prominent roles in the organization of his subjective world. The first was a felt need to preserve and protect the autonomy of his personal subjective experience. The second was the need to have the validity of his subjective experience upheld and affirmed.

The predominant affect state associated with his mother’s negative and toxic influence would have been one of anxiety. Dick was a very nervous, anxious child. Dick’s mother was of very little help to him in learning how to tolerate, contain, modulate, or integrate affective states of anxiety because, as the very person most responsible for causing those states, she was not in a position to acknowledge or respond adequately to them. Her response would have been to blame him for his emotional reactivity, for his display of what she likely viewed as his emotional weakness. The danger, for Dick, would have been feeling that his own emotional reactivity (fear and anxiety) was responsible for arousing his mother’s anger, rage, or intrusion, and therefore it needed to be defensively sequestered to preserve his necessary tie to her. Dick felt that the predominant “ambience” of his early surround, as he described it, was one of his mother’s “immense rage.” An intersubjective ambience of rage, or the ever-present potential for it, would have induced tremendous feelings of fear and anxiety in Dick as a young child and, as he grew older, feelings of frustration and anger in response.

The traumatic death of his twin, Bobby, followed by his mother’s dismissal of one of his caretakers, left Dick feeling terribly alone, estranged, and isolated. Both events symbolically concretized the power of his mother’s toxic influence on Dick’s interpersonal and subjective world, cementing a foreboding expectation of continuing trauma. An inner conflict between the requirement that Dick’s developmental course conform to the emotional needs of his mother, on the one hand, while simultaneously becoming more firmly rooted in an individualized affective core felt to be authentically his own, on the other, was a central dimension organizing his experience. Stated succinctly, the central formative lesson of Dick’s childhood was the necessity of accommodating to the needs of his mother, literally for his own good. Moves toward developing or maintaining an independent sense of self in such a climate would need to be sequestered, because they embodied a threat to his mother’s need for compliance and control. As Dick grew older, Chris Price observed, “he learned to contain … he learned to wait, I’d say Dick learned to bide his time.” He, in effect, learned how to sequester what he felt to be the most essential parts of himself from his mother’s intrusive purview.

As a child, Dick longed for a protective figure, someone who would intercede and be an advocate on his behalf. Contained in that wish was the hope that his father would be more than a peripheral figure in his life and would take a more active, interest in him. As a child, Dick had fantasies that his father would be that protective figure and rescue him from his mother’s influence. The saddle symbolically concretized those fantasies. As Dick grew older, the expectation that his father would never really acknowledge him, or validate the experiences that were most important to him, was pervasively confirmed.

The lack of a validating other was symbolically concretized by his father’s failure to acknowledge his wrestling accomplishments. In addition to the desire for a protective figure, Dick also had lingering longings for a companion, someone who could be there with him to share, witness, and validate his perceptions and experiences. As a young child, this longing was symbolically manifested in Dick’s making room in the left side of his body for his twin brother Bobby.

In summary, three central, thematic configurations of self and other pervaded Dick’s subjective world in childhood. First, there was the felt sense of the toxic invasiveness of his mother and his need to try to protect himself from her. Second, there was his need to accommodatively surrender to his mother’s views of who and what he should or could be, while at the same time trying to protect and preserve some semblance of an individualized inner sense of autonomy from her intrusion. Third, there was Dick’s longing for certain experiences that were pervasively missing or insufficient in his early relational surround – longings that were counterbalanced by expectations of continuing painful disappointment at their absence.

One such longing was for his father to be an advocate on his behalf, a protective figure in relationship to his mother. At the same time, Dick expected that his ongoing experience of his father’s unwillingness or inability to perform those needed roles would be repetitively confirmed. A second longing was for someone, like his twin, who could be there with him, who could witness, share, and validate his subjective world and make him feel less like a strange and alien being. This longing was counterbalanced by the foreboding expectation that he would continue to be very alone, in a surround in which no one seemed to be genuinely interested in his interior experience or in affirming what he felt to be personally vitalizing.

Early Adulthood

Dick Price graduated from New Trier High School in 1948. Dick chose Stanford University in California to pursue his undergraduate college education. His choice to attend Stanford was a conscious move on his part to create some distance from the powerful influence of his family. Dick, in telling me about his childhood difficulties with his family, said he chose Stanford because “it was a good school and it was as far away from Chicago and my parents as I could get.”

Undergraduate Years at Stanford University

In the fall of 1948, Dick moved to California and started attending classes. At Stanford, Dick pledged Chi Psi fraternity, attended football games, socialized at fraternity house dances, and enjoyed the new sense of personal and social freedom that college life afforded him. His family may not have given him the kind of emotional support he had wanted and needed, but his parents had always been very generous materially and financially. Dick started college with his new Studebaker and a bank account that was tied to his father’s account, automatically replenishing to 1,000 dollars irrespective of Dick’s expenditures. In 1948, 1,000 dollars was a very substantial amount of money!

When he went to Stanford, Dick’s expected life trajectory was to complete college, serve some time in the military, and go on to pursue a career in business. Dick knew that his family’s expectations of him were very, very high. As Dick commented to Walter Anderson, “My father had grown from an immigrant to a top executive. So, in some way, a little Oedipal perhaps, O.K., my role in life was to beat what he was doing. So I had some image growing up, that to consider myself a success I would have to be something like the President of U.S. Steel, right, or President of General Motors.” Indeed, one of Dick’s high school friend’s fathers was the President of U. S. Steel. Another friend’s father was the President of American Airlines. “So,” to Dick, “the example was all around.”

Dick went to Stanford assuming that he would major in business. Although Stanford had a graduate business school, they did not offer an undergraduate business major. Dick started his college career studying economics, the closest thing to business Stanford offered. Economics did not sustain any lasting interest for Dick but he took a beginning psychology course that sparked his interest, and he changed his major to psychology. As his interest in psychology solidified, he became a more serious student and began to lose interest in his fraternity house’s social life. Dick maintained a 4.0 grade point average in psychology at Stanford. He also developed a new career plan, one he hoped could extricate himself from the “status hierarchy” type of life he associated with his parents and was expected to follow. His new plan was to go to graduate school in psychology, become a psychologist, and eventually work as a professor or be trained as an analyst.

Dick was most drawn to studying how different cultures dealt with mental illness, a mixture of psychological and anthropological knowledge and research. Dick Price obtained his B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1952 and he applied to Harvard University’s newly created graduate program in social relations. He was accepted and began Harvard that fall. As Dick described his interests at the time, “I wasn’t interested in being an experimental psychologist. I was interested in, you know, if I had to label it in any way, in being a kind of anthropologist in mental health and illness … and it seemed to be a department where this might be possible to pursue.”

Graduate School: Harvard University

Harvard proved to be a huge disappointment for Dick. He had the naïve hope that the people in the department of social relations would be more socially enlightened and less hierarchical than he had found Stanford’s psychology department, with its experimental focus on “rats and questionnaires.” Instead, his initial course of study was focused on experimental psychology, which held little interest for him. He also found the department to be hierarchical, authoritarian, and filled with academic bickering. Toward the end of his first year at Harvard, Dick wrote an examination that used the material he was learning in order to criticize what the department was doing. As a result: “They gave me a C which was effectively a failing grade.” Dick had never before received any grade less than an A in psychology in his entire college career. Exacerbating the whole experience was the fact that, “I knew this was the best examination I’d ever written.” The personologist, Henry Murray, was the only one in the department who showed any interest in helping and supporting Dick. He feared he had made lasting enemies out of Richard Soloman and Jerome Bruner, two very powerful professors in the department. However, he was still officially enrolled – he had not been kicked out, but he was unsure about a future at Harvard. Dick’s disillusionment must have been due, in large part, to the disappointing event’s confirmation of past experiences with the danger from challenging external authority. At Harvard, where he had worked so hard and had dared to hope for something different, his first challenge had cost him dearly. The message was all too familiar – what he thought or felt must be surrendered to the agenda of the ruling external authority.

In the summer of 1953, thoroughly disillusioned with his Harvard experience, Dick decided to leave the school. “By that time,” according to Dick, “I wasn’t in really good shape, mentally myself.” He had been studying very hard at Harvard and had been ignoring the physical exercise regime that had been so important to him in high school and at Stanford. He had also become very isolated, socially. Dick was discovering that he simply could not live on a diet of academic discipline alone. When he left Harvard he traveled to Chicago to visit his parents. In his own words, “I touched back in at Kenilworth and that wasn’t right, that felt just terrible to me.” He told his parents he was going to transfer to either Stanford or CAL (The University of California at Berkeley) and left Chicago for California.

When Dick arrived in California, he stayed at Stanford for a few months at his old fraternity house, enjoying the peace and quiet afforded by the summer break in classes. Later that summer, according to Dick, “I fell in love for the first time; I met a girl at a resort in Boulder Creek – that just added more confusion into my system.” In the fall, Dick registered for some courses at CAL including a course taught by a visiting professor from the University of Chicago, Carl Rogers. Dick had read all of Rogers’ books, and they had struck a very positive chord in him. The course, however, left him unimpressed with Rogers’ actual work. Rogers’ counseling work with a graduate student in the class was “busier,” in terms of actual input to the person, than Dick had imagined it would be.

Military Service: Air Force Years

The Korean War was still underway in 1953 and Dick decided to apply for an Army commission. He was on a list of approved officer candidates. His college background qualified him for a position as a psychological tester. He was biding time in California, waiting for his commission to come through but it never did. By the fall of 1953, the Korean War was finally winding down. Dick then decided to join the Air Force. He heard from an acquaintance at CAL, who was in the Air Force, that there were real opportunities for psychologists at the Air Force’s Human Resources Research Institute. Dick’s enlistment was a commitment to 4 years of active duty. He did his basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in the summer of 1954. Dick felt good about his basic training experience. He enjoyed the discipline and the routine of military life at a time in his life when, looking back, he considered himself to be “unbalanced in a lot of ways, both socially and emotionally very immature with a great overload of intellectual content.” As he described his entry into the Air Force to Walter Anderson, “In a way it was really a good experience, I was so cluttered in my head, I didn’t know what I was doing, really. I no longer seemed to have the ability, the strength, a certain type of strength, to kind of put emotion and everything else aside and really concentrate on books, which seemed to be what the academic life was about.”

Looking back on the time period, Dick wondered why no one gave him any encouragement. He did not take the initiative himself, to go to work at a place like Agnews State Hospital, a mental hospital near Stanford, which would have been more directly related to his actual interests at the time.

After basic training, Dick obtained a position at the Human Resources Research Institute, located at Lowry Field in Denver, Colorado. When he started his actual duty, however, he found himself doing obsolete gunnery research, running a type of adding machine. Dick had hoped to be able to do some research in social or clinical psychology. To Dick it was, “A little like Harvard, I didn’t get along too well with the people who were running it.” Disappointed with the Institute, Dick elected to put in for a transfer. He was accepted for a position as a teacher of recruits in basic training and was transferred to Parks Air Force Base in Pleasanton, California. He enjoyed the intellectual camaraderie with his fellow teachers at Parks who, unlike those in academia, “were off the treadmill.” It was good duty. In addition, Parks was only about a half hour’s drive from San Francisco, as well as the Stanford and CAL campuses. Even better, Dick’s schedule was two days on (night duty for 12 to 14 hours) followed by two days off. This meant he could go back to school at Stanford or CAL, if he wanted to.

Events Leading to Dick Price’s Seminal Life Crisis

In the spring of 1955, Dick started taking some courses at Stanford. One of the courses was taught by Frederic Spiegelberg, a popular, highly regarded professor at Stanford who was teaching a course on the Bhagavad Gîta. Dick, who was completely uninterested in religion, found something meaningful in the class: “For the first time, I began thinking there was something in religion, it was more than a system of deceit and enforcement of social rules.” In his lectures, Spiegelberg suggested that his students go to the Vedanta Society and hear a lecture by Swami Shokananda. Dick went to the lecture and he was very impressed. Spiegelberg also suggested Alan Watts’ lectures to his students. Dick went to see Alan and he was “immensely impressed, it was like nothing I’d ever touched into.”

Dick found “a life and vitality” in Alan Watts that profoundly affected him and he began taking courses at the Academy of Asian Studies where Watts was the principal teacher. Dick took a room at the Academy and began to spend time in San Francisco studying Buddhism, meditating, and observing the burgeoning “Beat Scene,” to which Alan Watts was inextricably linked. Dick found that Beat Scene luminaries like Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti all attended Alan Watts’ lectures.

Dick also began to hang out at The Place, an unknown and uncrowded North Beach nightspot where he could get a pitcher of beer or wine and usually find someone interesting to talk to. At the time, Dick had passing acquaintances with both Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. His life now consisted of his Air Force duty, the Asian Academy, and hanging out at The Place in North Beach. At The Place, which was progressively becoming more crowded, he watched the transformation of the Beat Scene as it burst into the spotlight and onto the national stage. Looking back, the emergence of the beat scene seemed to coincide with his own personal growth. Dick was aware of a growing sense of excitement, vitality, and expansion in himself that he found somehow mirrored in what he witnessed going on around him. This sense stood in direct contrast to longstanding subjective senses of contraction and restriction.

Part of Dick’s sense of expansion was coming from experiences he was having in his new meditation practice. At the Asian Academy he had been studying the writing of Nyanaponika Thera, a Buddhist Vipassana Meditation teacher, and started incorporating what he was learning in his burgeoning meditation practice. According to his wife, Chris, Dick began having some spiritual experiences, some of which excited him and some that were more disconcerting. As Dick told Chris, “I just started doing the practice and all this stuff started to happen.” Dick sensed he needed some guidance so he went to his teachers at the Asian Academy and asked them what he should do. Unfortunately, the knowledge of his teachers at the Academy was much more intellectual than experiential – they simply could not help him. What Dick found, according to Chris, “was like this absence of guidance about the fact that states are opening up when you start to do a practice.” According to Chris, Dick felt that the only people who could really relate to him or help him, on the level of his actual experiences, were people who were involved in the Beat Scene, people like Gary Snyder.

In December 1955, a friend, Gia-fu Feng, came by the Academy to have dinner with Dick and introduced him to a woman. Her name was Bonnie. She was a dancer who had studied at London’s Academy of Dramatic Art. Like Dick, she had grown up Chicago. She was very attractive and Dick felt drawn to her. At the time, Dick was toying with the idea of becoming a Buddhist monk. Thoughts of a long-term relationship or marriage were a very long way from his mind. There had not been much of an example for his valuing marriage, or as he put it, “not seeing anything that was outside of this role playing, status seeking type of life,” that he associated with the marriage of his parents and the marriages in the circle of friends he grew up with in Kenilworth. As a result, he recognized that he had “a tremendous approach/avoidance thing with women.”

As he was eating dinner with Gia-fu and Bonnie, he heard a commanding voice that said, “There is your wife.” Dick remembered looking up to see if anyone else in the room had heard the voice, which he described to Walter Anderson as an “auditory hallucination.” Dick even remembered arguing sub-vocally with the voice at the time saying something like the following: “Don’t be ridiculous, I’m happy with the way my life is now.” However, within a few months, Dick would marry Bonnie.

Things were beginning to go very fast for Dick during this time period. He was experiencing an upwelling of energy that he felt he was barely able to contain. He was not having any problems at the air base, largely due to the fact that his sergeant, a close friend, was covering for him. Dick only had to show up once every two weeks to pick up his paycheck. As Dick described his state of mind, “At the time, especially with almost Bonnie catalyzing this, I started to go crazier and crazier. But in a way for me it was just this immense expansion and excitement which I was having trouble containing.”

At the Asian Academy, no one seemed to notice or bother about the state he was in. Elsewhere, he began to feel some paranoia because he was sometimes unsure if he could contain himself sufficiently to ensure that he did not draw undue attention to himself. It was especially difficult for him to contain his energy when he went to the air base to get the necessary paperwork signed for his marriage.

Dick invited his parents out to San Francisco for the wedding. He was married at the Soto Zen Temple in San Francisco in a ceremony performed by the Reverend Tobasi in February, 1956. The ceremony was conducted in Japanese with an English translator. The bridesmaid was African-American, the best man Japanese, and the guests were ethnically and culturally quite mixed. “To me,” according to Dick Price, “it was one of the deepest aesthetic experiences I’d ever had … opening up to sound and music and the scene of all the mixture of Whites and Blacks and Orientals.” What made all this even more meaningful, for Dick, was when he compared his wedding to what he felt had been the sterility of his sister’s marriage, which had been celebrated at the small Episcopal Church back home in Kenilworth.

Dick’s parents, to say the very least, did not share his view of the wedding. His wedding guests certainly were not what his mother considered to be the “right people,” but then again, Dick knew his father, being Jewish, was not one of them either. Dick was later able to admit that part of him was deliberately shocking his parents: “I’m sure part of me was really doing a trip on them, and I was – I was.” Dick’s parents did not want him to get married and, in hindsight, he thought they may have been, at least partially, right. However, Dick was determined to marry in spite of his parents’ objections. Part of the reason, no doubt, was to symbolically and emphatically state his independence from his parents’ views and values, with a kind of euphoric belief, buoyed by his current energetic state, that he might actually be able to be free from them for the first time in his life. Dick recalled that it was particularly hard to contain his energy around his parents at the time of his wedding. As Dick described his experience at the wedding, “My experience was very much like, hey, you know there’s another me, that’s somehow vaster and greater, that I can’t quite trust, that’s running the conscious Dick, and there is the conscious Dick up at the altar being married by Reverend Tobasi….”

After his parents left for Chicago, Dick and Bonnie embarked on their honeymoon. They drove down the coast to Ensenada, Mexico and then north into the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. Dick was barely able to contain his energetic state on the long drive. When they got back to San Francisco, Dick and Bonnie moved into an apartment together. Dick now split his time between Bonnie and their life together, his job at the Air Force base, the Asian Academy, and North Beach where he was still spending a lot of time. His high energetic state made all these activities possible – he was getting by on two hours of sleep a night.

Dick was riding a tremendous state of internal energy that he was feeling less able to contain or control. During one of his visits to North Beach, his efforts were not enough. As Esalen chronicler Walter Truett Anderson described it: “Finally, one night in a bar in North Beach, all the energy came to a head. He felt a tremendous opening-up inside himself, like a glorious dawn. The place he was in had a fireplace, and he thought it would be appropriate for them to light a fire there, in celebration of this great and mysterious event. Light the fire, he kept saying. Light the fire.” (Anderson, Upstart Spring [1983], p.39)

Dick’s actual experience at the time was that something was being born within him, something on the left side of his body. He remembered that, “The feeling was, hey I’m newborn, I should be celebrated.” Instead of lighting a celebratory fire, the bartender called the police and six very large San Francisco policemen wrestled Dick Price into a van and handcuffed him. “What had been excitement turned into this immense anxiety.” Dick remembered being in so much physical pain that his only alternative was to “go into the pain and blackout completely.”

Dick was taken to Letterman’s Army Hospital in San Francisco. Dick described feeling “O.K.” at Letterman’s, and the state he was in was “opening up all sorts of kind of suppressed possibilities for me.” He remembered being able to play the piano, something he had not done since he was 11 years old. He also played volleyball and remembered having a heightened ability in terms of his physical reactions. If drugs were being used to treat him at Letterman’s, his energy state was so high that the drugs had no noticeable effect.

After a few days at Letterman’s, he was transferred to a hospital at Parks Air Force Base. Dick thought he was simply going to be released. When he realized he was not, he started to fight with a very large aide, but realized that what was happening was not the aide’s fault, so he stopped. Dick was to spend the next three months at the Parks Air Force Hospital. At Parks, they gave him a few electroshock treatments and an occasional dose of thorazine. He appreciated the way he was treated by the Air Force aides who worked at the hospital. Dick described the aides as being a “wonderful group of people who really helped me a lot.” He also was attempting to sort through the powerful upwelling of unconscious material that kept coming through him. As Dick described it, “For three months I was going through all sorts of experiences, some of which I remember, some of which I don’t.” One important experience was a “whole regression through history” in which Dick felt like, “I was leaping through all sorts of past lives.” Dick had previously considered the belief in past lives to be a superstition, although it had been treated seriously in his studies at the Asian Academy. Of particular importance to him was when he experienced the procession of lives came to a stop, “coming to a life that was some type of monk” – a monk who spent his time in meditation.

Other experiences in the hospital he labeled as “more characteristically schizophrenic – experiences like feeling a kind of an early shut-up in my genitals.” Dick recognized that some of what he was going through was “trying to come to terms with my early psychosexual development” in which there had been a “lot of restrictions about touching my genitals.” Dick recounted to Walter Anderson that the first time he ever masturbated was when he was 22 years old, due largely to the fact that “the prohibition against touching my genitals probably as a little baby was so strong.” Dick felt that his life energy as a child had been very restricted and continually had to be pulled in and suppressed. He felt the experiences he was having were an attempt to restore some of that life energy in a way that would allow it to flow freely, rather than having to remain bottled up and restricted. Dick’s childhood memories of having to contain a lot of fear and rage at unmet needs, which he was never allowed to express, were vividly awakened. He described to Anderson that the ambience of his early surround, with his mother, had been one filled with her rage, and it engendered an immense sense of fear and anxiety in him: “The ambience was always this immense rage, do anything wrong and ‘vroom’ [gesturing], like that.”

Dick acted out his rage while hospitalized at Parks. He later told his wife Chris that when he was in the padded isolation room he could throw himself against the wall as hard as he possibly could, and, because of an “energy field” that seemed to float around him, his actions didn’t injure him or even leave him with any residual soreness. Dick recalled arousing the curiosity of the psychiatrists at Parks by the intensity of acting out his feelings of rage. He remembered the staff watching him through the inspection window of the padded room he was in. Dick told Walter Anderson: “People are so afraid of the rage, that’s part of it, but having wrestled, I knew I wasn’t going to hurt anybody. But there is that element of just organic rage. If a basic need is unmet then rage is the appropriate organic kind of response. The Christian overlay, you shouldn’t be angry, you should only need love. But the energy in this was just immense.”

To Dick, the experiences he was going through were a possible means of coming to terms with his bottled up energy and excitement, allowing a needed expansion that he felt as being organismically correct. He viewed the drug treatments and electroshock as working in the opposite direction, forcing a contraction and a “pulling in” of his energy and excitement.

Dick also had indicators signaling he could trust that something very positive was happening, despite the fact that he had sufficient psychological sophistication to know that he was, in fact, going through a type of psychosis. A very important signal was the spontaneous healing of a very serious back injury. Shortly before joining the Air Force, Dick had been working out with the CAL wrestling team, and he sustained a serious back injury. The injury was serious enough to keep him out of the Air Force. Dick hid the injury because, at the time, he wanted to go into the service. As Dick described it, “Anyway this injury, in the process of this energy flow, just completely cleared up. So I recognized I was having some type of experience that was in some way healing, because I was into my life and vitality in a way that I organically recognized as correct. I felt fully alive for the first time in my memory.”

Dick was able to establish a therapeutic relationship with one of the psychiatrists at the hospital. This psychiatrist was, as Dick told his wife Chris, “interested in my experience rather than in diagnosing me,” and treated him with respect and engaged with him in a genuine dialogue. The psychiatrist helped Dick do some important work with his family of origin issues. Dick was nearing the end of his stay in the hospital. He had been through what he felt was at times a very painful, but growth-producing experience.

Dick told many people in his later years that there had been a strong element of “spiritual emergence” in what had gone on for him, although he probably would not have used those particular words at the time. What he always referred to as “experiences” or “states” had really begun after he read Nyanaponika Thera’s book and started incorporating that material into his meditation practice. While in the hospital he had what could be termed, from a Buddhist perspective, a “mini satori” or small enlightenment experience. Chris Price remembers Dick telling her that, “He’d had a little enlightenment experience as part of all of this – he had a lot of psychological stuff too, and he knew that it was mixed.”

After about three months, there was a major shift in his experience at the hospital. As Dick remembered it, he was “going though one experience and coming out, almost blacking out again, as I recall, and coming out and feeling clear and out of the space and in a balanced, fine energetic space, and I remember my feeling was one of gratitude … to the nature of things and to my own nature … I was still a little volatile but I was no longer in the super excited state but in kind of a balanced state, in a state that in some way I felt washed clean.”

Dick felt he had now come through an experience that he would later use the term “transitional psychosis” to describe, and he was ready to get back to his life and his marriage. The Air Force was planning to release Dick from the hospital and give him an honorable discharge despite the fact that he had another year and a half of his enlistment to serve. Dick’s preference, at the time, was to “get out as soon as I could and my discharge was forthcoming and this would have been in September of 1956. I wanted to stay on the Coast, I didn’t want to go back into the family situation.” Dick, with the help of his old Stanford professor, Gregory Bateson, was searching for someone to go into therapy with. Gregory had suggested Steven Schoen, a young psychiatrist Dick had known in North Beach who was Allen Ginsberg’s therapist, and who worked at the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Clinic in San Francisco.

Seminal Crisis: Dick Price’s Hospitalization at the Institute of Living

Dick’s discharge from the hospital at Parks Air Force Base never came through. Instead, Dick was notified he was being transferred to another hospital. His parents were extending a very long reach to take charge of their son’s perceived mental illness. Dick’s father, exerting his political influence through a “high-level contact in Washington” had secured Dick’s transfer to an Air Force hospital in Illinois, about 15 miles from the family home in Kenilworth.

Although Dick had not wanted to go back to Illinois, his experience there, at first, was tolerable. He was put on an open ward. He had library privileges, he was allowed to exercise, and he could go jogging on the grounds. He could also sign out of the hospital for weekend visits with his wife, Bonnie. Bonnie had come to Chicago to be close to her husband. Initially, Bonnie stayed with her mother, but she eventually was convinced to move into the Price residence. Dick was able to overcome some of his resistance to being back with his family in Kenilworth because of the psychological state of openness and trust that his hospital experience at Parks had engendered. As Chris remembered, “He was in this state, as he told me, of openness and trust. He’d been through something that basically healed his body from wrestling injuries, an enormous spontaneous healing. He had a little enlightenment experience. He was at a place where he thought maybe there was [the possibility of] a fresh start.”

From the open hearted place Dick was in, as Chris describes it, “He had a sense, that even there [with his parents], there was new possibility. So when they came and said, ‘Trust us,’ from that place [he thought] ‘I could forgive and we could start fresh,’ and then it happened.”  The “it” that Chris Price referred to was, from Dick’s perspective, a whole series of duplicitous events, perpetrated by his parents, that ultimately led to his involuntary commitment at the Institute of Living, a very expensive private psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut.

The series of events leading to his commitment began when his wife Bonnie moved into the Price home in Kenilworth. Things did not go well between Bonnie and her mother-in-law. One weekend, when Dick came home on a pass, Dick’s mother told him that she went into Bonnie’s room and found some of her letters. She had read those letters and had discovered material that convinced her Bonnie was unfit to be his wife. In answer to what must have been a maddening repetition of many childhood experiences of his mother’s toxic invasiveness, Dick “blew up.” For the first time in his life, Dick openly expressed his anger and rage against his mother’s intrusiveness. He had allowed himself to be open and vulnerable, and he had been met with a terrible betrayal. This episode, as Dick’s student Leonard Bearne observed, is perhaps a “model scene” in the sense that it represents “a reenactment of probably what the tone of his childhood was like.” Leonard said, “If she [Dick’s mother] felt free to read his wife’s mail – an adult woman’s mail, who is not even in the family – then one can assume she must have felt free to do all kinds of things [during Dick’s childhood].”

Dick reacted to his mother’s pronouncement by immediately moving Bonnie out of the Price household and back to her mother’s home. Dick reported back to the hospital and made inquiries about getting his discharge. He knew it was time to get out of Chicago and out from under his family’s influence. He wanted to go back to California. Dick could have simply left with Bonnie, but he knew if he did so, before the Air Force officially discharged him, he would be considered to be AWOL (absent without leave) and subject to military discipline. What he did not know was the fact that he had already been discharged and was, in actuality, free to leave.

After Bonnie moved out of the Price household, Dick’s father came to visit the hospital and took Dick out for an expensive lunch. During lunch Herman told Dick about a private hospital on the East Coast, the Institute of Living, which came with the highest of recommendations. Dick’s father said that he wanted Dick to go to the Institute of Living for a few months. According to Walter Anderson, “As he talked about what a good place it was supposed to be, the words wrapped around Price like a net.” Dick’s response to Herman, according to Anderson, was this:

“What if I don’t want to go?” he asked. The question was a challenge, an expression of barely contained anger, and his father knew it. The conflict was out in the open, and the older man was ready for it. “If you don’t want to go,” he said harshly, “then, I’ll commit you.” It was kind of ironic in a way: Price’s father had never taken that much interest in him, never showed much emotion, even anger. Price had always regretted that and wished he had a real father. Now, at last, he had one. (Anderson, Upstart Spring [1983], p. 41)

Dick extricated himself from the argument by agreeing to a compromise. He would go to the Institute of Living, on a voluntary basis, for three months. What Dick did not tell Walter Anderson, or did not know, or perhaps was not able to acknowledge, was the fact that Herman was really acting at the insistence of Dick’s mother. As Dick’s sister, Joan, remembered the circumstances surrounding the event:

Her habit of seizing on an idea and her insistence on having her own way explained the decision about the Institute. It had received a great deal of publicity and she kept demanding that Dick go there. Both my parents were devastated by Dick’s condition; both behaved as they had for their entire marriage. Mother saw only her point of view, was convinced she was absolutely right, and Dad was unable to withstand her.

Within the greater Price family, it was generally understood that Dick’s mother was the driving force behind his being hospitalized at the Institute of Living. Dick entered the Institute for Living on December 7, 1956, a day of infamy in Dick Price’s life, to say the least. The Institute was a very, very expensive place. His fellow patients included actress Gene Tierney, a member of the Du Pont family, and many other members of powerful and influential families. Dick, even though he was a voluntary patient, was put on a locked ward. He spent the first month trying to convince the psychiatrists to give him permission to use the exercise room. His efforts proved to be of no avail. Nominally under the care of some of the best psychiatrists in the country, Dick was given no treatment, except drugs that were designed to keep him quiet and manageable. No individual or group therapy was offered to him. He spent his boring days in locked, smoke filled, crowded rooms wondering what the future might hold. As a voluntary patient, he could, at least theoretically, sign himself out, and following a 10-day waiting period, be released. When he signed himself out, the Institute notified his father, and Herman immediately had him legally committed. Dick’s diagnosis at the time of his commitment was paranoid schizophrenia.

Now that he was committed, the Institute finally had an interest in “treating” him. His psychiatrist informed him he was to undergo a series of 60 insulin-shock treatments. Dick, of course, did not want the shock treatments, but all too familiarly, what he wanted did not matter.

Making a terrible situation even worse, as soon as he was legally committed, his parents had his marriage to Bonnie annulled. Though he would later cast much of the blame for both his hospitalization and the annulment of his marriage on his father, it was Audrey’s hand that guided this second insult to his personhood. As Joan Price described Audrey’s involvement: “My mother would have deeply resented anyone Dick married; my father, if left to himself, would have accepted Dick’s choice. Unfortunately, Dick’s illness made him vulnerable to mother’s spite and gave her the opportunity to destroy the marriage.” As for Bonnie, Audrey offered her a considerable sum of money (reported to be between $10,000 and $25,000) if she would simply disappear. Since she did, in fact, disappear, it was easy for members of the family to conclude that she had taken Audrey up on her offer.

Dick’s life was being defined, controlled, and determined, by others “from outside” without regard for his subjective reality, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. His only viable course of action was to accommodate, or in Anderson’s words, “…to be a very good boy, take whatever they handed him, and hope that sooner or later they would let him out.” Over the next nine months, Dick was subjected to 59 insulin-shock treatments (insulin coma therapy), about 10 electroshock treatments (electroconvulsive therapy or ECT), and frequent, large doses of phenothiazines (specifically chlorpromazine or thorazine).

Dick described his experience at the Institute of Living to fellow psychiatric survivor, Wade Hudson, in the following terms:

Well, very much of my own experience, as you know from your own experience, was quite brutalizing. Rather than seeing someone through a particular type of experience, it was an effort to suppress and negate in every possible way what I was going through. There was a fundamental mistake being made and that mistake was supposing that the healing process was the disease, rather than the process whereby the disease is healed. The disease, if any, was the state previous to the “psychosis.” The so-called “psychosis” was an attempt toward spontaneous healing, and it was a movement toward health, not a movement toward disease.

When Hudson pressed Dick concerning the subjective experiences he had while hospitalized, and he answered:

It’s a little difficult to talk about. …Certainly a range of experience. In some categories it would be called mystical, really a re-owning and discovery of parts of myself where I set myself in relation to a larger cosmos. But don’t try to talk to a psychiatrist in these terms; to them, this is simply a symptom of ‘very deep lying illness.’

Dick came to regard the Institute of Living as having been little more than a “private prison” in which he was “effectively tortured.” The different “treatments” he received were experienced as deep assaults on his body and mind that were mostly explained by Dick to himself as “merely different kinds of punishments for having been crazy.” Dick described the electroshock treatments as like being hit really hard in boxing or football, and being knocked out.

In electroshock therapy or ECT, electricity was applied to the head and passed through the brain in order to induce a seizure or generalized convulsion. The specific mode of the “therapeutic action” of ECT still remains unknown, although many theories have been postulated. ECT was originally used for treating schizophrenia because of a theorized “biological antagonism” between seizures and schizophrenia. ECT largely replaced the older “heroic” or “somatic” therapies for treating psychiatric inpatients, which included freezing, anoxia by breathing nitrogen, and insulin coma therapy. Seizures, whether spontaneous (as in epilepsy) or artificially induced (ECT or insulin shock), actually do cause an acute organic brain syndrome with residual amnesia and some cognitive impairment. What is known for certain about ECT is that it tends to make intractable psychiatric patients quieter and more manageable. As far as Dick Price was concerned, ECT was brutalizing, debilitating, and took a long time to recover from; but Dick felt that he would eventually fully recover. An autopsy performed on Dick Price at the time of his death, however, revealed residual organic brain damage, presumably caused by ECT.

Dick experienced the insulin shock treatments as deeper assaults on the mind and body. They left him feeling as if he had been filled with cement. For insulin coma therapy, a large dose of insulin was injected in order to induce a hypoglycemic coma. The effects of insulin shock included impaired consciousness and weight gain. In psychiatric patients, insulin was used as a sedative, and was considered to be an important means of treating patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1940s. Complications from insulin coma therapy included spontaneous seizures, prolonged coma, and death. Due to its unpredictable efficacy and the risk of complications, most insulin coma therapy units were closed down by 1960.

As far as Dick Price was concerned “insulin shock was the complete debilitator.” When Dick would wake up from his insulin induced comas, he was given sugared orange juice. The only thing he could do, to get some kind of physical relief from the agony induced by insulin shock, was to stay up, walk continuously, and drink copious amounts of water. Dick began to seriously doubt that he would ever be able to recover from the insulin injections. For those who knew Dick Price later on, one of the most telling indicators of how horrific his experiences with insulin must have been was the fact that he gained about 70 pounds while he was at the Institute. In contrast, throughout the rest of his adult life, Dick Price actually had very little body fat. He maintained a remarkable state of cardiovascular conditioning and possessed uncanny, wiry physical strength that was incredible for a man who, at about 5’ 10,” weighed only about 145 pounds.

Dick was also given large doses of thorazine and other medications at the Institute of Living. In terms of Dick’s actual experience, the drugs he was given had one thing in common – they all felt deadening to him. Dick said that the thorazine did not really change the content of anything that was actually going on inside him, it “just made everything slow down; it made me feel like I was trying to move in a pool of molasses.” Dick told his friend Steve Harper “more than once” that when they gave him insulin shock or electroshock treatments, he suspected they were also giving him thorazine while he was unconscious. He believed this because he would wake up into a kind of thick “haze” that was extremely unpleasant. That “haze” would overlay whatever “state” or “experience” he was actually going through at the time. As he told Steve Harper, “between the two [the state or experience, and the haze], he felt completely trapped.”

Dick tried to convince his psychiatrists that he would get better if they just would not drug him, especially after the shock treatments. He told them, “Look, just stop giving me drugs and I can get myself better.” The psychiatrists denied they used drugs on him while he was unconscious, and took his statement as a sign of his resistance to “treatment.” They, of course, did nothing to change the way he was being medicated. Much later in life, Dick had his friend, Jack Downing, who was a psychiatrist, get a copy of his medical records from the Institute of Living. Those records confirmed Dick’s suspicions that he had been drugged while he was unconscious, after his insulin shock treatments. Dick would later go on to use psychedelic drugs throughout his adult life. But as a result of his negative experiences with the medications given to him at the Institute of Living, Steve Harper remembered that Dick “had no interest in anything (i.e. drugs, legal or otherwise) that at all deadened him.”

Ironically, it was the particular time period during which Dick was hospitalized that caused him to be subjected to the three “treatment” modalities he found to be the most repulsive and demeaning: namely, insulin coma therapy, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and phenothiazines. Insulin coma therapy, though dangerous, was considered to be an important treatment for schizophrenia in the 1940s. Because of the relative ease of administering ECT compared to insulin shock, and because ECT caused fewer life threatening complications, insulin shock therapy was largely abandoned by the late 1950s. In addition, with the advent of psychotropic medications in the l960s (e. g. phenothiazines) ECT also fell out of favor (although it would later be reintroduced as disappointment mounted with psychotropic medications and their side effects). As Dr. Peter Breggin has noted, psychiatric inpatients were 20 times more likely to receive ECT in private, profit-making hospitals, compared to publicly funded institutions.

Unfortunately, Dick Price was hospitalized in a private for-profit hospital at the time when insulin shock was still being used, when ECT was a rapidly expanding modality, and when phenothiazines were gaining acceptance but had not yet replaced ECT as the treatment of choice for psychiatric inpatients. As a result, Dick received all three. The cumulative effect of all the so-called “treatment,” bad food, and the lack of exercise, was a downhill slide in Dick’s mental and physical health that he knew was becoming more and more dangerous. As Dick’s friend, Steve Harper, commented, “The turning point was when he realized he was going to die, if he didn’t get himself better, despite what they were doing to him.”

Dick had long since figured out how he could break out of the hospital. However, in his bloated, debilitated physical condition, he knew he was incapable of climbing the wall he needed to negotiate in order to escape. He knew that he needed to get himself into a little better physical shape if he was to succeed. By this time, Dick had learned to “palm” or “cheek” his medications, pretending to swallow them. Not taking the medications helped him lose some weight and regain some of his physical mobility.

Dick was growing desperate. Feeling that he no longer had much to lose, he climbed over the wall and escaped from the hospital. Out on the street in Hartford, however, Dick found that he was in no condition to care for himself. As Dick later told his wife Chris, “A bum gave me a dime for a phone call.” The implication was that, “The bum had more at the moment than I did.” With the dime, he made a phone call to his father. He asked Herman to intercede for him at the hospital and get him off the locked ward so he could start to exercise, and just maybe, regain his health. Chris Price remembered how Dick told her that when he called his dad with that dime, he said to his dad, “They’ve made me so ill, I literally have to recover my health. I’m not well enough to come out into a job or anything … I’m not even asking for you to get me out, now … I can’t stay out, I may have escaped but I can’t just go out there. I’m sick, now. I’m going to go back but I want you to get me on an open ward so I can regain my health. I’m literally debilitated.” Dick returned to the hospital and was placed on the open ward, as a result of his father’s intercession. He could now begin his long road to recovery. About three months later, Dick got out of the hospital.

Dick was released from the Institute of Living on Thanksgiving Day, 1957. He came home to the family house in Kenìlworth feeling broken and defeated. He had paid a very high price for deviating from the acceptable path of behavior that had been established for him by the values of his parents – enforced by their very long and authoritative reach. The lesson was exceedingly simple: Conform or be punished! Dick took his only option – he conformed. He moved back in with his parents and took a job at Price Brothers, working for his uncle Louis as an assistant purchasing agent. The firm made illuminated beer signs for the onsite beer sales market. His uncle’s signs were in very high demand in the United States in the late 1950s. Beer was big business in post-war America.

For Dick, this was a dull, unsatisfying life. However, it was a temporizing move that allowed him to bide time. As Dick put it, “I planned to save up, both financially and emotionally.” He was leading a life in which he could demonstrate his sanity to his parents, something he needed to do if he was going to avoid their long reach in the future. After three long years, he learned that Gia-fu Feng and some old friends were starting a cooperative in San Francisco. It was called the East-West House. Dick decided it was time to go back to California and restart a life that could be more fully his own. His parents did not try to stop him. In May 1960, Dick got on a plane in Chicago that was bound for California. For Dick, things had to start getting better.

When Dick Price arrived in San Francisco in 1960, he moved into the East-West House. Dick’s friends started the East-West House cooperative after leaving the Academy of Asian Studies. They had become disillusioned with the Academy, and its internal politics, when Alan Watts, the Academy’s most popular teacher, left in 1957. In the fall of that year, Dick met Michael Murphy for the first time in San Francisco. Dick had attended a lecture given by Dr. Haridas Chauduri, a follower of Sri Aurobindo, at his meditation center on Fulton Street. Mike was then living at the Fulton Street address, an old brick mansion located on the fringes of Golden Gate Park. Dick recognized Mike at the lecture and introduced himself. Although Dick and Mike had been classmates in the same department at Stanford, they had not really known each other. However, Stanford was a small enough place in the 1950s that they had been aware of each other as fellow students, so they recognized each other immediately.

The two Stanford psychology graduates soon became friends. They had their shared Stanford background – they were both dropouts from graduate school, and they were both practicing meditation and studying Oriental philosophy. According to Mike, he and Dick had a “strong affinity of interests” that immediately cemented their friendship. Mike invited Dick to move into the Fulton Street address, and Dick moved into the room next door to Mike’s. Shortly thereafter, as Mike recalled, he asked Dick, “Why don’t you come with me to Big Sur?”…and the adventures began. The Murphy family owned a large piece of property in Big Sur, which was then known as Big Sur Hot Springs. A large house located on the property, which had been built as a clinic by Mike’s grandfather, Dr. John Murphy, was currently unoccupied. Mike and Dick moved into the house in 1961. The two friends would become co-founders of Esalen Institute, on the Murphy family property, the following year.

Having completed an outline of Dick’s life through his early adult years, the narrative will shift to a discussion of the concerns that structured the subjective experience of Dick’s life, up to the seminal crisis of his hospitalization at the Institute of Living. This will include a discussion of the developmental origins of these concerns and their significance as organizing principles in Dick’s experience from an intersubjective perspective. The intention here will be to lay the groundwork for understanding the later biographical events in Dick’s life.

Dick Price’s Essential Concerns: Developmental Origins and Significance

Dick Price’s essential concerns stemmed from the three central thematic configurations of self and other that pervaded his personal subjective and relational world during childhood: namely – his mother’s overpowering influence – the accommodation of his subjective reality to the ruling power of his mother’s authority – and his developmental longings for an advocate and for a validating, confirming companion. The first two configurations involved experiences that were crushingly present in Dick’s self-experience, while the third involved experiences that were missing or absent. These three central configurations of self and other should not be regarded as discrete or separate, but as being interrelated and interdependent in Dick’s subjective experience. Part of his mother’s toxic influence was the necessity that Dick accommodate his own subjective reality to hers. Dick’s developmental longing for an advocate and/or protective figure was a direct response to his mother’s overpowering influence. His longing for a companion who could see, understand, and ultimately confirm his subjective reality stood in direct relationship to externally determined definitions of who he was or who he could aspire to be. This tripartite division of thematic configurations (toxic influence, accommodation, and developmental longings) served as the developmental origins of Dick Price’s essential concerns and provided overall significance as organizing themes of his subjective experience. In the following discussion, the primary focus will be on how Dick Price’s concerns were expressed in his early adult years. However, initial reference will necessarily be made to the developmental origins of those concerns in order to place them in a broader context of his later life.

The most powerful thematic configuration of self and other in Dick’s childhood was his mother’s overpowering influence, symbolically cast in terms of her toxicity. Dick characterized his childhood surround as being filled with the ambience of his mother’s rage which, in turn, created in his own words “so much fear” in his experiential world. Dick’s sister, Joan, compared her mother’s “self-indulgent tendencies to dramatics” to “living near a volcano – there were long periods of tranquility with only a few minor puffs of smoke between eruptions.” Affect states associated with the negative influence of Dick’s mother were predominated by fear and anxiety. Dick was a very nervous, anxious child who “had difficulty sitting still for any length of time.” Regarding Dick’s constant fidgeting, restlessness, and anxiousness his sister Joan speculated that, “Today, of course, this behavior would lead to a diagnosis and probably some kind of therapy.” There was no adequate emotional home for anxiousness and fear in his childhood, or for the trauma associated with the death of his twin brother, Bobby. Pervading concerns which had at least partial origin in the perceived toxic influence of his mother included: a childhood fear or foreboding of continuing trauma, a susceptibility to feelings of entrapment, a heightened vulnerability to feelings of betrayal, and a growing preoccupation with the need for independence and freedom counterbalanced by dependence on his family and his need to preserve ties to them.

Another powerful configuration of self and other that pervaded Dick’s childhood was psychological usurpation – literally the demand that he substitute his mother’s psychological reality in the place of his own. The reference point for the psychologically real became the needs and feelings of his mother, to which he was forced to accommodate – not his own. In this configuration of self and other, a personal inner-referenced psychological reality was surrendered because it represented a challenge to the caretaker. The mistaking of compliance for growth, inherent in accommodation, resulted in a child imprisoned by a feeling of responsibility for the state of mind of its mother, and unable to use its own volition. The developing sense of self, in this climate, relied upon a borrowed cohesion that was vulnerable, because an authentic, voluntary center of initiative was weak or absent.

Affect states that accompany psychological usurpation include – on the one hand, anxiety associated with the possible loss of the emotionally needed other, if the other’s needs are not adequately attended to – and on the other, fear of being unable to maintain some semblance of an independent identity and sense of self. Underneath Dick’s anxiety and fear, especially as he got older, was a growing sense of frustration, anger, and even rage towards his mother, which had to be sequestered from her purview, for his own self-protection. With his father playing a more peripheral role in regard to his psychological development after Bobby’s death, Dick’s mother literally became the only game in town, in a psychological sense, in Dick’s life. This made his mother an even more imposing figure and much too dangerous to openly challenge or confront. Pervading concerns that emerged from the climate of accommodation included an attraction for experiences that were felt to be expansive in nature, and a loathing for states that involved his perceived need to contract in the face of his mother’s usurpation of his agency and subjectivity. Feelings of expansiveness signaled possible freedom, while feelings of constriction signaled continuing subservience.

A second pervading concern, which had more of its basis in the functional significance of accommodation as an organizing theme, was the tenuous and vulnerable sense of self that resulted from the relational context in which Dick was torn between inner aspirations and outer relationships that seemed irreconcilably opposed. In the absence of validating responses to a child’s own perceptions and emotional reactions, the child’s belief in his own subjective reality will remain unsteady, and vulnerable to dissolution – a structural weakness that is regularly found as a predisposition to psychotic states in later life. (Stolorow et al., Psychoanalytic treatment, an intersubjective approach [1987], p.133) Central concerns that stem from this developmental dilemma, for Dick, were the need to preserve a sense of autonomy, and the need for confirmation and validation of his subjective reality.

A third powerful configuration of self and other in Dick Price’s psychological development was his longing for a protective figure and, in addition, a longing for a confirming, validating companion. The first longing (for a protective figure) centered on the hope that his father would become an active advocate on his behalf, in effect rescuing Dick from his mother’s influence. His father, however, had two reasons for remaining in the background of his son’s life. First, Herman’s unwillingness to be confrontational in relation to Audrey probably served to protect and preserve their relationship; and second, an increase in the level of his involvement with Dick could rekindle painful feelings about Bobby. Herman took a much more active role in relationship to his daughter Joan, while remaining content to be very peripheral in relation to Dick. This probably stemmed from the painful feelings he associated with the death of Bobby. Bobby’s death was something Herman never got over. He could not bear to have Bobby’s name mentioned and often “would leave the room nearly in tears” when Audrey talked about him. Dick longed for a confirming, validating companion, a longing that was crystallized by the death of his twin. Dick felt he was profoundly alone after Bobby’s death and symbolically preserved their relationship by creating a space in the left side of his body in which Bobby could live.

Essential Concerns: Early Adulthood

Dick Price’s early adult life began when left home to attend Stanford University. Dick specifically chose Stanford in order to create some distance from family influence, providing himself a greater personal sense of autonomy. Initially, Dick’s path as a student conformed to the high expectations of his parents and the values they had instilled in him. Economics became his major and business his prescribed path because, as Dick put it: “I didn’t give myself any alternative.” As time passed, however, he began to pursue a path that held the promise of possible freedom from parental expectations and the sterile, status conscious life he associated with those expectations: namely, psychology. Dick’s graduation from Stanford in 1952, and subsequent matriculation at Harvard University that fall, consolidated moves toward an autonomous life trajectory based on his personally validating interest in psychology.

Dick’s interest in mental health was in all likelihood a self-reparative pursuit designed to help him reclaim his psychological well-being. Dick felt that his sister Joan “had withdrawn into intellectual pursuits as an avoidance of the family situation,” whereas he entered into his academic pursuits as a way of attempting, however obliquely, to confront the psychologically destabilizing experiences of his childhood.

At Harvard, however, Dick’s hopes for personal autonomy and psychological self-reparation soon met with bitter disappointment. Dick’s criticism of the department angered some of the most powerful members of it. Their negative response to his vitalizing self-generative work probably reminded Dick of the very things he had hoped to escape by pursuing psychology in the first place! Dick began to feel very much like he had in his family – trapped in a sterile, non-nurturing environment. Dick’s subsequent protest to departmental censure would represent a significant departure from the accommodative stricture he was subjected to growing up. However, his protest did not work, no doubt confirming old expectations concerning the consequences of going against external authority. Harvard’s rebuke left Dick feeling vulnerable, alone, and fragmented psychologically. He recognized that he “wasn’t in really good shape, mentally.” Harvard in all likelihood was a symbolic concretization of everything that Dick’s mother represented for him: status, respectability, and cleanliness. His rebellion at Harvard was an attempt to rebel against those aspects of maternal acceptance that he both longed for and despised. Adrift, he left Harvard again attempting to place distance between himself and a harshly critical external authority, and so he eventually returned to the State that most symbolically represented freedom in his psychological world: California.

Dick’s California love affair in the summer of 1953, which probably represented Dick’s longings for a relationship with a benevolent female (as opposed to the mother-son subjugation he suffered as a child) did not work out well. Additionally, his longing for a protective figure that was concretized in his subsequent seeking out of Carl Rogers proved, not surprisingly, to be a disappointment. His childhood search for paternal protection after rebukes from an invasive establishment-centric maternal figure was being replayed. Dick’s search for direction, found a temporary solution when he enlisted in the Air Force. His experience, however, quickly became very similar to what had happened to him at Harvard. – He wasn’t doing anything that interested him, he didn’t get along too well with those in charge, and he felt trapped.

Dick managed to obtain a transfer echoing his earlier longings for escape and he managed to find a position at Parks Air Force Base where he was given light duty and abundant free time. Dick began taking classes again at Stanford and discovered an exciting new direction – Eastern religion. Dick started attending lectures by various spiritual teachers. Frederic Spiegelberg, Alan Watts, and Nayanaponika Thera all spoke to Dick’s longings for freedom and as Dick began to practice Buddhist meditation, he started having “experiences” which he later described almost exclusively in terms of expansiveness.

Dick’s longing for freedom was profoundly aroused by his Buddhist studies. Nyanaponika Thera’s writings emphasized liberation and freedom from suffering based upon bare attention and right mindfulness, defined as a non-coercive approach to living “with full awareness in the Here and Now.” Nyanaponika Thera’s writings represented something that was of immense appeal to Dick, given his background of accommodation, namely the possibility achieving true freedom through one’s personal experience in the absence of external authority. The “experiences” and “states” Dick was experiencing via meditation were both exciting and troubling. He knew he needed some guidance, but those who lectured to him about Eastern religion and meditation were not equipped to help him with the experiential material meditation gave rise to.

Dick’s expansive experiences were gaining momentum, and he was having more and more trouble containing them. Dick’s essential concerns regarding freedom and autonomy were bubbling to the surface at an increasingly heightened rate. His headlong rush into marriage, his meditation practice, the excitement and vitality of the beat scene unfolding around him in North Beach, and most importantly, the progressive delineation of an independent life agenda completely outside of his parents experience and control, all spoke to his continual attempts, conscious or not, to reorient his unconscious organization of experience around accommodation and control. Concretizing that progressive self-delineation was Dick’s decision to marry Bonnie in a public ceremony at the Soto Zen Temple in San Francisco – a clear statement of independence from authority.

One way to understand Dick’s “immense expansion and excitement” during this period is what Bernard Brandchaft called, an experience of “liberating exuberance.” Brandchaft said that when someone with an intersubjective developmental context of accommodation begins to shed the enslaving tie of externally derived self-definitions, “Each step toward the realization of a demarcated and authentic personality, each appearance of an emerging sense of personal agency, is initially but fleetingly accompanied by a vitalizing and transcendent sense of self.” (Brandchaft, To Free the Spirit from its Cell, in The Intersubjective Perspective [1993], p.70) However, such vitalizing transcendence is usually quite fragile because it is a liberation into an experience of freedom without an enduring or stable psychological organization that would be capable of sustaining, consolidating, or integrating it. Indeed, the result of developmental patterns involving psychological usurpation and accommodation is a very fragile and vulnerable sense of self.

Dick’s “liberating exuberance” came to a head in a North Beach bar shortly after his marriage to Bonnie. Dick said about it that, “I felt this huge expansion, kind of like a birth, like someone apart from the Dick with all the social roles and his good grades, etc., etc.” It was as if something was being born within Dick, something he described as originating on the left side of his body. Although Dick apparently never talked about the personal meaning of the left-sided expansion and birth, it is hard not to connect it, at least symbolically, to his twin brother Bobby. Dick had given the left side of his body to Bobby, after his twin’s death. Dick blamed Bobby’s death on the toxicity of his early surround. There was something deeply symbolic about an expansion and birth originating on the left side of Dick’s body that left him feeling newborn, as if he had finally broken free from what had been terminally toxic for his brother.

Symbolically, Bobby’s death was the result of his inability to cope with the toxicity, while Dick, who had been able to cope, could never truly live without being reborn into a sphere where he could be free from it. When Dick insisted that a fire be lit in celebration of his rebirth, instead, according to Dick, “The next thing I knew, six big San Francisco policemen were on top of me.” Subsequent events that were to unfold as a result of this incident created a psychological crisis that would forever alter his life course.

First Psychological Crisis: A Manic Protest?

How, from an intersubjective perspective, could one attempt to understand the events that occurred in the North Beach bar that led to Dick’s hospitalization? If Dick Price were hospitalized today for that incident, he probably would be given the diagnosis of Bipolar I Disorder, Manic with Psychotic Features. Dick, himself, was aware that excessive, barely containable mental and physical energy had both preceded and had been the major precipitating factor in his hospitalization. He had been experiencing what was essentially a manic state of mind.

Manic states have been traditionally defined as departures in mood, thinking, and behavior from pre-established standards of normality. Diagnostic signs of mania include euphoric mood, unceasing and indiscriminate enthusiasm, inflated self-esteem, racing thoughts, extravagant or grandiose plans, extreme irritability, insensitivity to the needs and feelings of others, and delusions. However, a diagnosis of mania that only utilizes externally derived notions of normality obstructs attempts to understand mania from a perspective that is inclusive of the person’s own world of experience. In addition, the traditional diagnosis of mania relies heavily on intrapsychic rather than interpersonal mechanisms, obscuring the relational context in which manic states are embedded. From an intersubjective perspective, two features are of primary importance in trying to understand manic states of mind – first, the important features of mania from the viewpoint of how the state is actually experienced; and second, the configurations of intersubjective transactions that give rise to or are associated with the occurrence of mania.

Bernard Brandchaft has provided seminal insights into the experience of manic-depressive syndrome. Affective states associated with mania, according to Brandchaft, emerge “from the experience of transient shedding of an enslaving tie to a self-annihilating self-object” while the opposed experiential pole, associated with depressive affect, involves the “the reestablishment of that tie and, consequently, to the loss of a vital part of the self.” (Brandcraft, supra [1993], p.72) Incorporating Brandchaft’s insights, Robert Stolorow and George Atwood expressed the following observations about the experience of mania:

A pervasively important meaning of mania is that it may express a kind of protest against annihilating accommodation to agendas and roles that are not authentically the person’s own. It thus provides a transitory restoration of a sense of agency and authenticity, by disrupting the “borrowed cohesion” (Brandchaft) of an identity based in compliance with others’ agenda. The reason this restoration can only be transitory, and is always so destructive, is that the manic protest is a bursting of familiar patterns, but in the absence of any psychological organization that can constitute an alternative. The classic diagnostic signs defining the manic state can thus be understood as manifestations of this active breaking out of a surrendered life into chaotic freedom. (Atwood et al., Shattered Worlds / Psychotic States [2001], p.17)

Dick’s description of his subjective experience as essentially an expansion outside of the bounds of the external determinations of his identity was very much in line with intersubjective insights concerning manic states. The experience of mania, from an intersubjective perspective, is indicative of the attempt to be free from, break out of, or break away from, external determinations of one’s identity and/or life direction. The very idea that Dick “could be free” and have a life that was outside the bounds of external determinations could, itself, shatter organizing principles of limitation.

The second important question about manic states, from an intersubjective perspective, concerns the configuration of intersubjective fields that give rise to manic states. Intersubjective transactions associated with manic states involve relentless experiences of invalidation, accommodation, and psychological usurpation. Fields so configured, generate experientially incompatible oscillations between two poles – accommodative surrender to external authority, and a position of self-expression and attempted self-liberation. A central feature of mania, thus construed, is that it represents a protest against external determinations of one’s identity and life direction.

Dick’s developmental surround, dominated by his mother’s need for control, represented a system of accommodation and psychological usurpation enforced by an ambient, ever present, threat of rage. The experiential aspects of Dick’s experiences while hospitalized at Parks Air Force Base lend support to this view. Dick talked about three essential dimensions of his experience while hospitalized at Parks. The first consisted of experiences that had a spiritual or mystical dimension to them. These experiences included a regression through history and a recall of past lives, spiritual experiences of liberation and freedom, and more physically based experiences such as heightened physical responses and the spontaneous healing of physical injuries. The second dimension was coming to terms with his early psychosexual development, experiences centering around “a kind of early shut up in my genitals” resulting from strong prohibitions that had been instilled in him by his mother and his perceived organismic contraction in response. The third dimension of his experience involved the physical expression of tremendous feelings of rage towards his mother, previously unexpressed. The last two dimensions (psychosexual issues and feelings of rage) were directly linked to the pervasive intersubjective climate of accommodation that characterized Dick’s childhood. The first dimension (spiritual experience) had a connection, though less direct. Spiritual or mystical experience represented an avenue through which autonomous liberating personal experience, which was completely outside the bounds of accommodation and usurpation, could occur.

Towards the end of his hospitalization at Parks Air Force Base, Dick came to a particular “state” or “experience,” after which the formerly uncontainable sense of internal energy had been transformed. He immediately felt clear, balanced, grateful, and full of hope for his life. In his own words: “I felt washed clean.” His post-manic equanimity would not, however, be long lasting. His awaited release would never come. The long reach of his parents would soon catch him in a net that would take him almost four years to escape.

Seminal Life Crisis: Hospitalization at the Institute of Living

In September 1956, Dick Price, instead of being released from the Parks Air Force Base hospital, was notified that he was being transferred to another hospital – this one very near his family home in Kenilworth, Illinois. In spite of Dick’s misgivings, he eventually acceded to the parentally initiated transfer, blind in his newfound state of openness to his parents’ ongoing pattern of manipulation and deceit. At his parents’ request, his wife Bonnie moved into the Price family home. Dick’s hopes for novel patterns of familial interrelationship would plummet. Dick’s mother, in what must have felt like a prototypical repetition of her invasiveness, read some of Bonnie’s letters and used the material to confront Dick about how unfit Bonnie was to be his wife. Dick had never openly expressed anger towards his mother before, but he crossed this psychological Rubicon with his mother now, leading to a predictably dire consequence. Dick’s mother interpreted his novel non-compliance as evidence of pathology, and with the help of his father, maneuvered Dick into the Institute of Living, the infamous private psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, voluntarily at first but eventually against his will. His parents then had his marriage – the one thing that most concretely represented Dick’s statement of personal freedom – annulled. Dick’s wife presumably was bought off by Audrey, and as far as anyone knows, Dick was never to have any major contact with his first wife again.

Dick’s trust, from his perspective, could hardly have been betrayed more thoroughly or with more duplicity. There was duplicity involved in his transfer to the Chicago area hospital, in his mother’s actions with respect to Bonnie, in his father convincing him (under threat) to be voluntarily admitted to the Institute of Living, in his being subsequently legally committed, and in the annulment of his marriage. Although Dick later laid much of the blame for his hospitalization on his father, Dick knew his mother was really behind most of what had happened. All the duplicity served to confirm his longstanding view of his mother as “the bitch” or “the witch” – terms he had been using to refer to her since he was a teenager. The door on a new start had been slammed shut, his trust had been met with betrayal, and his hopes for the future were turning into a growing, foreboding, and deepening depression.

Two of Dick’s friends, Steve Harper and John Heider, have pointed out that the institutionalization of young men and women from wealthy families, who were deemed to be living outside the bounds of their parents’ ability to control them, was not too unusual in the U.S. during the 1950s. Both Steve and John knew of people, other than Dick, who suffered similar experiences in psychiatric hospitals for similar reasons. In this sense Dick’s story is, unfortunately, not unusual or unique. Stories of people who were psychiatrically hospitalized during that time period bear this out. (Examples of such stories were compiled by Jeanine Grobe in Beyond Bedlam.) These stories speak to the profound suffering of those who have come to call themselves “psychiatric survivors.” According to his friend, John Heider, Dick’s hospitalization was really about “his falling in love with the wrong girl.” Dick’s hospitalization and the subsequent annulment of his marriage were about the re-establishment of control over his life and the demonstration of “the extent to which they [Dick’s parents] were willing to exert economic and social pressure to achieve control.” Dick – now legally committed and placed on a locked ward – described his ensuing year-long experience at the Institute of Living to his friend Steve Harper as being an “absolute hell.” The psychological usurpation he had been subjected to as a child by his mother was replaying itself with a vengeance at age 26. His so-called “treatments” – electroshock therapy, insulin shock therapy, and large doses of phenothiazines – were psychologically invasive and personally debilitating. Compliance seemed to be the only way out, but psychological accommodation came at great cost. By the time Dick was finally released from the Institute of Living he felt broken and defeated and, of necessity, willing to be subservient to his parent’s wishes. He had paid dearly for deviating from their standards of acceptable thinking and behavior. Dick was, no doubt, very concerned about proving his ‘sanity’ to his parents in a manner that would prevent them from extending their very long reach in the future. His willingness to endure the entrapment he must have felt, while working for his uncle and staying in Kenilworth, may have been indicative of the state of psychological fragmentation he was experiencing after his release from the Institute of Living. His experiences there had been a challenge to his belief in the validity of his subjective experience, and had compromised his sense of personal autonomy. Dick’s whole experience at the Institute of Living and its long aftermath seems to prove the legitimacy of a comment by Stolorow and Atwood: “The dark alternative to mania … is continuing subjection to the ruling power of others’ invasive definitions of who one is or how one must live.” In May of 1960, when Dick left for California, his parents did not try to stop him. He would spend very little time with members of his family during the remainder of his life, and he would never forgive them for what had happened to him at the Institute of Living.

When asked what they thought were the seminal events in Dick Price’s life, his friends and associates all mentioned Dick’s hospitalization experiences. Most of his friends and associates felt his hospitalization at the Institute of Living was Dick’s most critical life experience. This supports the conclusion  that Dick’s hospitalization at the Institute of living was his seminal life crisis, not because of the trauma and suffering he endured, but more important was the fact that his hospitalization at the Institute of Living symbolically concretized the most problematic organizing configurations of his subjective world – his mother’s overpowering influence, the accommodation of his subjective reality to that of external authority, and his developmental longings for an advocate or protective figure.

From a perspective inclusive of Dick’s own frame of reference, his openness and trust had been betrayed, and he was, yet again, being subjected to the toxic influence of his mother’s overwhelming intrusion into his life. His mother was actively exerting control, defining who he was and who he would be allowed to be. Her destruction of his marriage would seem to have a deliberately castrating effect – returning her son to boyhood and destroying his greatest symbol of personal freedom – that is, his relationship with Bonnie – someone outside the toxic circle of his parents. He had, for the very first time, openly expressed his anger towards his mother and he was paying for it, confirming the validity of the longstanding fear of reprisal that had previously kept his emotional reactivity in check. Since he was “crazy,” everything that was being done to him was for his own “good.” He felt more trapped now than ever and the only way out was to, yet again, accommodate his parents – to be a very good boy and take whatever they handed him, and hope, sooner or later, they would let him out. His father, who Dick had always hoped would be his advocate, had, instead, been an instrument for implementing his mother’s overwhelming influence. His sister Joan, who Dick felt was the only person in a position to know what was actually going on for him – to know the family difficulties that were contributing to his “psychosis” – went along with their parent’s wishes – saying, in effect, “Dick, you’re sick. They are just doing what’s best for you.”

Dick’s longstanding feelings of being alone and estranged, and the expectation that he might forever feel this way, were being devastatingly confirmed. Dick’s subjective reality, and the validity of his experience, were completely discounted and deemed to be irrelevant. He was, after all, very ill. Entrapped, feeling tremendous anxiety about his future, and subjected to treatments that were, as far as he could tell, merely different kinds of punishments for having been crazy, Dick fell into a profound depression. His prior expansive sense of freedom had, due to forces of external imposition, collapsed into a coerced contraction that re-established the old bondage that if succinctly expressed would be something like the following statement from Brandchaft: “‘I must believe that I am, and must continue to be, what you, my caretakers, see me to be.” Stolorow and Atwood observed, “At this point a crushing depression often ensues, as the old identity begins to reassert itself. The newfound freedom evaporates, the dreams of a glorious personal destiny fade away, and the briefly intensified feelings of efficacy and agency are supplanted by a deadening, annihilating inertia.” (Atwood et al., supra, p.18)

Dick’s depressive affect was undoubtedly exacerbated by the psychologically traumatic shock “treatments” he endured at the Institute of Living. A sense of alienation, estrangement, and inner emptiness are common themes in the trauma literature. Robert Stolorow has observed, based upon professional and personal experience, there is a “dreadful sense of estrangement and isolation that seems to be inherent in the experience of psychological trauma.” In addition, Dick’s legacy of traumatic experiences at the hands of his mother made him extremely vulnerable to feelings of entrapment and estrangement that must have profoundly impacted and contoured his psychic reality at the Institute of Living. Those affective experiences of anxiety and helplessness also must have played prominently in Dick’s experience at the Institute – affective experiences that revisited some of the most problematic and unbearable affective experiences of his childhood.

Henry Krystal, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, has suggested that the affect states connected with traumatic experience compromise a third line of affective development, outside the dual lines of positive and negative affect. The essence of traumatic experience is unbearable affect. Developmentally, however, it is the absence of requisite attuned responsiveness that makes painful or frightening affect traumatic. Massive failures in attunement compromise the development of the ability to tolerate, contain, or modulate painful affective experience, leading to a child’s loss of affective regulatory capacity and thereby to an unbearable, overwhelmed, disintegrated, disorganized state. As previously discussed, Dick’s mother was often not in a position to offer requisite responsiveness, because she was often the cause of his painful affective experience. Developmentally, Dick was vulnerable to affective experiences of fear, anxiety, entrapment, and betrayal, all of which must have been rekindled by his experiences at the Institute of Living. Mounting vulnerability to trauma, resulting from an accumulation of prior traumatic experiences, is a documented consequence of trauma.

Krystal offered the following, phenomenological description of a traumatic state – “a paralyzed, overwhelmed state, with immobilization, withdrawal, possible depersonalization, and evidence of disorganization.” (Krystal, Integration and Self Healing [1988], p. 142) This description is consistent with how Dick described the effects of the insulin shock treatments he received at the Institute of Living. Krystal went on to discuss the possible after-effects of traumatic experiences, two of which played prominent roles in Dick’s psychological organization.

The first, Krystal called “emergency regimes,” expressed by the need for hyper-vigilance in an attempt to prevent or forestall events that could bring about a repetition of traumatic experience and/or the return of affective states associated with them. Dick’s vulnerability to feelings of entrapment entailed a kind of hyper-vigilance used to forestall situations in which he might feel trapped, in order to prevent associated affective states. As will be discussed in more detail later, Dick was also hyper-vigilant about others seeing or identifying his affective experiences of distress and/or anxiety, thereby forestalling their possible negative reactions to particular “states” he was experiencing.

A second after-effect of traumatic experience, identified by Krystal, is “the problem of aggression.” Anger, of necessity, is suppressed in traumatic situations, but it merely goes underground, reappearing once a secure, felt sense of safety is re-established. A kind of smoldering rage and the potential for aggressive behavior can be an enduring legacy of traumatic experience. Lifelong problems with either depressive or aggressive affect are very common in trauma survivors.

Dick Price had a legendary temper, a facet of his personality described by many of his friends and associates. Dick was slow to anger and, in general, capable of tolerating much before finally losing his temper. However, as his friend John Heider described it: “When Dick got enraged, it was something to behold. It was like John Brown or something. It was a natural phenomenon. It was like a cyclone or a hurricane.”

Dick’s family had their own perspective on Dick’s psychological state and what to them was his obvious need for psychiatric treatment. As Dick’s sister, Joan, recalled, “Both my parents were devastated by Dick’s condition.” Dick’s parents, especially his mother, had been very shocked by his wedding and had serious concerns about what was going on, psychologically, with their son.

As Dick’s cousin, Marjorie, pointed out, Dick had a radically different set of values than his parents. Dick was not materialistic and he had no desire to follow in the footsteps of his family’s business accomplishments. Dick, himself, admitted that his wedding had been designed to shock his parents and to demonstrate his own unique set of values. A final blow, as far as Dick’s mother was concerned, must have been his open display of anger towards her, something she had almost never seen her son express.

A sense of shame on the part of Dick’s parents may also have developed in regard to his condition. Marjorie, who was Dick’s age and had been a fellow student of his at Stanford, was concerned about Dick, and made inquiries about what, to her, felt like Dick’s literal disappearance. No one in Dick’s immediate family would tell Marjorie where Dick was or anything about what was happening with him. An alternate explanation for the family’s silence was that Dick’s family, as was true of the extended Price family, had trouble communicating about difficult, emotion laden material (Bobby’s death, for example), often preferring to let emotionally difficult topics go unaddressed.

Dick was to become more and more estranged from his family as time passed. He would only see his parents and his sister a handful of times after he left for California, following his hospitalization at the Institute of Living. Reflecting back on Dick’s progressive separation from his family, his sister Joan made the following observations:

I can, of course, understand Dick’s bitterness at what happened. I cannot understand, however, why, later in his life, he blamed Dad so completely, while apparently at least partly exonerating Mother. Even if, as is quite possible, she told Dick every decision was taken by Dad, Dick must have known that this could not have been true. He was certainly familiar with Mother’s tyranny and Dad’s weakness. That Dad was unable to resist my mother’s destructive nature had tragic consequences for Dick, but he certainly should have been able to recognize that this was the pattern of their entire life together. My father was unable to protect Dick, but in the end he was unable to protect himself, as Dick must have recognized. Dick made it perfectly clear that he wanted no part of dealing with our parents in their last years. 

Dick’s blame of his father deserves closer attention because it reveals some of the power of his mother’s influence on the organization of his experience. Several people who were close to Dick discussed the problematic relationship Dick had with his father, in varying degrees of detail (Seymour Carter, Al Drucker, John Heider, George Leonard, Mike Murphy, David Price). Outside of Dick’s immediate family, almost no one knew, with any specificity, about Dick’s relationship with his mother. It was not something Dick talked about with friends and acquaintances. Dick’s son, David, feels that Dick had such strong feelings about his mother that he very rarely talked about her – she was a very painful subject for him. Dick’s wife, Chris, was the only person who seemed to know, with any degree of specificity, about Dick’s relationship with his mother.

A central component of Dick’s relationship with his mother was accommodation. Traumatic experience is an essential component of accommodative patterning. In an intersubjective environment of accommodation, the child blames himself or herself for the traumatic experience, because of the overarching threat of loss of the vitally needed other, and the secondary threat of retaliation and punishment. According to Krystal, the child, in attempting to organize their experience, begins to fuse perceptions of the distressing interaction into constructs like “bad-self being punished.” Constructs like bad-self being punished, ascribe blame to the child himself or herself and, in particular, to his or her emotional reactivity, in lieu of blaming the traumatic event itself and/or the caretaker. An alternative organization would be “bad mother,” but the cards are stacked against this type of organizing construct because of the overarching need for maintaining a tie to the caretaker. In this way, attachment to maltreating caretakers, though insecure and rigid, is maintained. Dick’s blame of his father, while either partially exonerating his mother or remaining silent about her contributions, has its origins in intersubjective transaction of accommodation. The perceived toxic influence of his mother, and the intense feelings of anguish Dick felt in relation to her, must also be considered. Dick’s long-standing disappointment in his father for not intervening on his behalf was much less personally and emotionally threatening.

Another prominent dimension of Dick’s psychological organization was the conflict between accommodative surrender to the needs and demands of his mother, and an inner directed need to preserve some semblance of a personalized, independent sense of self. As Dick grew older, a useful adaptation to his intersubjective constellation of accommodation was an outwardly manifested compliance to his mother’s agenda, while inwardly working to preserve a vitalizing, personal center of initiative and agency. Dick did not wholly succumb to his mother’s alien agenda, nor did he adopt a pattern of complete rebellion and defiance towards it. As a teenager in Kenilworth, Dick led a kind of double life, being compliant inside the house while pursuing independence and freedom outside the house. This adaptive compromise between submission/compliance and resistance/rebellion was an attempt to preserve (in the sense of preventing it from disintegrating) his relationship to his mother while simultaneously protecting his own inner aspirations. While at times this strategy must have filled Dick with a kind of “tormenting ambivalence,” it served him in surviving the double bind he was subjected to during his childhood and, later, at the Institute of Living, where some of the inner aspirations for his life somehow remained intact. Two essential concerns directly related to Dick’s history of accommodation, that would become very prominent in Dick’s Price’s adult life, were highlighted and crystallized by his experience at the Institute of Living. First, the need to preserve his personal autonomy, and second, the need to have the validity of his subjective reality confirmed.

Primary Organizing Principle: Dependency is Dangerous

In the intersubjective theory articulated by Robert Stolorow and George Atwood, the main components of subjectivity are organizing principles. (Stolorow & Atwood, Contexts of Being [1992]) Organizing principles usually operate automatically and somewhat rigidly, outside of awareness and conscious reflection.  They can, however, become flexible and open to reflective self-awareness. Organizing principles are comprised of the emotional inferences, conclusions, and convictions drawn in the attempt to shape a sense of self from complex relational experience. Revealed in the distinct, recurrent meanings and themes that unconsciously organize a person’s experience, organizing principles are thematically structured around the set of essential concerns that arise from the critical, formative events in a person’s life. The lasting significance of traumatic experience lies in its contribution to the formation of unconscious organizing principles that often remain beyond the influence of reflective self-awareness.

Organizing principles come to serve as frames of reference (cognitive-affective schemata) for the assimilation of subsequent experience. Dick’s essential concerns, described in terms of the single, primary organizing principle thematically structuring his subjective world, can be succinctly formulated as: dependency is dangerous.

The organizing principle, dependency is dangerous synthesizes Dick’s central developmental thematic configurations of self and other – toxic influence, accommodation, and his longings for protection and validation. As an organizing principle, dependency is dangerous is an emotional conclusion that has a dual meaning. There is danger in depending upon others or allowing others to depend on you. Both, from the perspective of Dick Price’s subjective world, leading to entrapment, to the surrender of authentic experience, and to the negative affective states that entrapment and surrender evoked: constriction, fear, and anxiety. Conversely, a felt sense of independence signaled freedom from toxic influence and entrapment, and was associated with the positively valenced affect states of expansiveness and autonomy. Entrapment is a central motif pervading Dick Price’s subjective world that renders subjective meaning to the organizing principle, dependency is dangerous. For Dick, to depend on or be depended upon, was to be subjected to the control of the other. Dependency was the harbinger of a world in which the relationship to the other was contingent upon the cancellation of his felt sense of autonomy and authentic existence. Thus, dependence gave rise to organizations of experience associated with constriction and limitation, while independence gave rise to organizations of experience associated with autonomy, liberation, and freedom.

Having identified those aspects of Dick’s experience that shaped his subjective world, this biographical portrait will now move on to the next phase of his life. The analysis will now present the life work Richard Price, in light of the principles and concerns that dominated his subjective experience. This analysis includes both the creation of Esalen Institute and the development of Dick’s unique form of Gestalt, which he called Gestalt Practice.

Richard Price’s Life Work: Esalen Institute and Gestalt Practice

The following discussion will examine Dick Price’s life work, the creation of Esalen Institute and the development of his own form of practice – Gestalt Practice, in the light of the pervading principle and recurring concerns that were found to be embedded in the history of his psychological development. Specifically, this analysis will seek to show how the organization of Dick’s subjective world – the recurrent meanings and themes and invariant concerns unconsciously organizing his experience – were revealed and made manifest in various aspects of Dick’s life work. This analysis will begin with Dick’s involvement in founding and developing Esalen Institute.

In May 1960, when Dick moved back to California, he still had not fully recovered from his hospitalization at the Institute of Living. He was still in a lot of physical discomfort, which he attributed to the insulin shock treatments. There were also deep feelings of having been betrayed by his family, and a growing sense of grief and feelings of rage over his hospitalization. Dick’s intention in moving back to California, as he expressed it, “was to find a place where people who were going through the type of experience I had could simply get better treatment and to utilize whatever I might find.” In San Francisco, Dick made a connection with his fellow Stanford classmate Mike Murphy, and the two of them ended up living next door to each other at The Cultural Integration Fellowship, Haridas Chaudhuri’s meditation center on Fulton Street. Mike quit his job when his employer wanted him to go to work full time, and he invited Dick down to his family’s property in Big Sur to see if the two of them might try living there for a while.

The two young men had a lot in common. Both were 30 years old, handsome young Stanford graduates that hailed from prosperous families. In addition, both young men were athletes, had spent time in the military, were graduate school dropouts, and had been strongly shaped by the teachings of Eastern philosophic traditions and meditation practices. Common teachers they had studied with and were influenced by included Frederic Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, and Alan Watts. Perhaps most important was the fact that they shared “breakout” experiences that occurred in 1956, leading to a rejection of the expectations placed upon them by their families and by society. For Dick, the “breakout” ultimately led to his hospitalization at the Institute of Living. For Mike, the need to escape the “straightjacket” he felt stuck in led to his leaving Stanford and going to India for a stay at Sri Aurobindo’s ashram. It is quite possible that Dick’s longing for twinship was activated and at least initially met by his recognition of psychological kinship with Mike Murphy. What Dick lost years ago with the death of his brother Bobby he may have hoped to find again in the kindred spirit of Mike Murphy.

The Creation of Esalen Institute

In the spring of 1961, Dick Price and Mike Murphy loaded their possessions in a borrowed old Jeep pick-up and drove down the coast from San Francisco to Big Sur. Their destination was Big Sur Hot Springs, a small fledgling resort-motel own by Mike Murphy’s grandmother Vinnie Murphy. Their intention was to take up residence and start some kind of conference center. They wanted to offer seminars and lectures which would synthesize Eastern and Western philosophy, ancient and modem wisdom, science and religion, scholarship and art. With nothing to their name save the Pacific Ocean site, with some admittedly enticing hot springs and the grand idealism of 20-somethings, they contacted Alan Watts, Gregory Bateson, Aldous Huxley, and Gerald Heard, all of whom, to the pair’s great surprise, showed an active interest in their ideas. Their list of contacts for potential leaders began to expand and an impressive group of writers, philosophers, psychologists, artists, and theologians offered their suggestions, support, and willingness to come to Big Sur as seminar leaders.

Dick and Mike’s project became more concrete when the Murphy family slowly began to lend their support, as well. Mike’s father John Murphy helped to persuade Vinnie Murphy to support the project by the granting a long-term lease on the property, something she had previously been unwilling to do for anyone. With the help of inspiring and enthusiastic mentors, especially Gerald Heard, the two young men began to envision new, immanent transformative possibilities for mankind and the concomitant need for new institutions which could support that transformation. They hoped Big Sur Hot Springs could be turned into one such institution.

One of Dick’s hopes for their new project was that it could eventually become the kind of place that could offer help to people who were going through difficult psychological experiences. As Dick recalled:

He [Mike Murphy] mentioned that his grandmother had this place in the country. I had been talking to a friend who was a psychiatrist who had himself been hospitalized. He had gone into psychiatry and we had talked about finding a place that would be more than the ordinary mental hospital. Michael’s interest wasn’t specifically in this area. He had spent over a year at the Aurobindo Ashram in India and his interests were more contemplative and intellectual. So we had originally talked about taking over the place as a conference center that would in some way apply itself to a range of interests: meditation, religion, particular experiences, whether religious or psychotic. (Hudson Interview)

Dick Price and Mike Murphy officially took over the property in October, 1961, then co-founded the actual business that would become Esalen Institute in early 1962, and held their first seminars that same year. They considered themselves equal partners in the venture. Mike’s family had the property, but Dick provided the needed capital. Dick had $17,000 in stock, jointly owned by his father, which could provide the security for a $10,000 dollar loan needed to capitalize their project. Dick, with some trepidation, asked his father to release his share of the stock. Dick was staking out a new territory of hope and autonomy in his life and must have been keenly aware of the catastrophic consequences of his last foray into freedom. His father agreed however, and the loan was secured. Their new venture was now ready to begin in earnest. Though it started slowly, it would progressively gain momentum through the next decade. As Dick remembered Esalen’s beginnings:

We had started with the connections we had, through people like Alan Watts, and began to set up programs. I think one of the first programs – it was probably early in 1962 – was Alan Watts. Alan did his own program from his own mailing list. At that time we tended to use people who had their own followings, their own mailing lists, their own programs, and we would just provide the place as a conference center for them. Then gradually, I think the following year, we began to get out our own catalogue and formed Esalen as a separate entity. Before that we were running Big Sur Hot Springs, Incorporated, and then we started running weekends. We gradually got a few five-day programs, and we were running it for just ‘drop-in traffic.’ Then gradually – I think by 1967 – we took the Big Sur Hot Springs sign down and put the Esalen sign up and attempted to make the whole place a conference center. The big turning points were the people who came in residence here, primarily Fritz Perls, in 1964, Virginia Satir about the same time, Will Schutz in 1967, and then other people who became what we called associates-in-residence, including Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks. (Hudson Interview)

Esalen Institute: The Early Years

A natural division of labor between the two founders emerged from the beginning of their project. Just as his twin Bobby had “always been the leader” and “taken charge of the toys,” Dick seemed also content to let Mike Murphy, who possessed the more charismatic, affable, and outgoing personality, take the more visible, entrepreneurial role, lining up the leaders and working at publicizing the seminars. Dick took charge of the administration of the place itself, a less visible but equally vital role that better suited his preference for remaining in the background and out of the spotlight; making reservations, housing and feeding the guests, bookkeeping, and paying the staff and seminar leaders. Dick, busy with the running of the place (he did not take a day off for the first 8 years), and still in recovery mode, would drop in and out of the seminars and workshops when he had free time, hoping to find something useful for himself.

Differences in temperament would take the co-founders in very different directions as Esalen developed. Mike was always restless and sometimes a little uncomfortable in Big Sur. As a child, he often felt like he had been dragged down the coast on vacations when he would have preferred playing baseball or golfing with his friends in Salinas. Mike, in his role as the institution’s principle spokesperson, gained a degree of fame as Esalen’s emissary, representative, and public persona. Murphy was in high demand as the national media began to cover the Institute’s activities in the mid-1960s. As a result, there were many reasons for Mike to often be away from Big Sur. Dick, on the other hand, felt completely at home at Esalen and almost never left Big Sur. Unlike Mike, Dick did not put himself in the public view, did not make speeches, did not go to conventions, and did not like giving interviews to the media. Though chroniclers of Esalen like Walter Anderson would later attempt to goad Dick into an admission of having jealousy or resentment in regard to his perceived lesser role at Esalen, Dick was never bothered by his and Mike’s role differences. As Dick described it, for him, there simply was “not a great deal of interest in either giving credit, or taking credit. Mostly it was appreciation that Mike was willing to do that [his role] because I had no way that I would want to do that. I think he was much better at that than I could have been.”

Indeed after the life catastrophe that followed Dick’s last openly public expressions of freedom – his marriage to Bonnie and his “public” (rather than private) expression of anger towards his mother – it is completely understandable that Dick would shy away from the public limelight. The expression of his subjective experience had cost Dick dearly in times past, and the safest way to fly was under the radar. As far as Dick was concerned, he and Mike’s relationship “worked out wonderfully.” Dick felt that one of the strongest assets that the two co-founders brought to their endeavor was the fact that “we handled our relationship so well.” As everyone on the staff knew, from the earliest days to the mid-1970s and beyond, the quickest way out of Esalen was to complain to Dick about Mike, or vice versa. Through all the difficulties of Esalen’s early years, the two founders never had a major disagreement or dispute between them. Dick’s twinship longings may have been in this manner at least partially fulfilled.

Esalen’s early years, though filled with exuberant hopes of new human possibilities, were not easy for either of the co-founders. Esalen often seemed to be on the verge of financial collapse and Dick and Mike were never sure whether their new venture was going to succeed or fail. However, they hung in there and because of their strong alliance they weathered the continual storms of financial troubles and personality conflicts, both of which were proving to be endemic to their new enterprise. Having leaders with strong personalities and large egos living on the same small, isolated property fueled an endless game of “capture the flag,” which was the short-hand term Mike and Dick used to describe the personal ego battles, competitive publicity seeking, and struggles for control of Esalen’s programming. Capture the flag was epitomized by, but certainly not limited to, the legendary battles between Fritz Perls and Will Schutz and their respective followers. The famous Esalen dictum that “No one captures the flag” was, of course, the psychological equivalent of a demand for freedom at all costs and a battle cry of non-usurpation. Unlike the invasive surround of Dick’s childhood, at Esalen, no ideology was to be forced upon anyone. No one would be required to carry the banner of accommodation under an intrusive, domineering other.

In the early 1960s, Esalen was a very small place, having a staff of only seven people. It was clear to everyone that Dick was in charge of the place. As Elizabeth Albov, one of the early staff remembered, “I had the impression he [Dick] was really shy and skittish … he was like a horse that shies.” Elizabeth remembered Dick being very protective of his personal life and for a long time, she and the other staff members did not know about Dick’s hospital experiences. This would seem congruent with the psychological principles that had embedded themselves into the organization of Dick’s subjective world: self-revelation is dangerous. Honest, vitalizing speech comes at great risk. Seymour Carter, who first visited Esalen in the early 1960s, remembers Dick as being a “very shy and self-protective person.”

Esalen had a very “bohemian” atmosphere it its early days, something many early visitors and staff members have commented upon. Dick, like many of the staff, had quite a few short term relationships which seemed to almost be a basic ethic of the place in the early days when many of the principal players (e.g., Mike Murphy, Dick Price, Fritz Perls and Will Schutz, among many others) were men who were not in stable relationships, who did not appear to want to settle down, and certainly were not celibate. One of Dick’s liaisons, with a woman named Ilene Oregon, resulted in a son, David, though by the time he was born that relationship was long over. It was not Dick’s choice to have a child and, according to David, he “wasn’t in a place where he was able to be a parent.” This, however, changed over time, especially after Dick’s second marriage to Christine Stewart Price and the birth of his daughter, Jenny. According to David, Dick “was really there when I was older,” giving “support for me to be whatever I would want.”

In 1964, Dick fell in love with a young woman named Jeanie McGowan, a former nurse who came to Esalen as a motel guest after the break-up of her first marriage. Dick lived with Jeanie in the “Roundhouse” next to the creek at Esalen for two years, and she helped him run Esalen’s day-to-day operations. As Dick commented, between the two of them: “we could make every bed in the place.” Elizabeth Albov, a friend of Jeannie’s, described her as “a terrific gal” who was “like a breath of fresh air for him [Dick] … after all he had been through.” According to Elizabeth, “I just remember so fondly the relational dynamic that I saw between Dick and Jeanie. It was the fact that Jeanie was so openhearted and expansive and inclusive and what a healing thing that must have been for Dick … a little pinprick of trust that was able to be started in him.”

Dick’s relationship with Jeanie ended in January of 1965. The break-up was painful for Dick – it was Jeanie’s choice, not his, to end the relationship. Elizabeth Albov remembered Jeanie complaining to her, at the time: “You [Dick] won’t pay attention, you won’t deal with our relationship, you won’t deal with what’s going on in our relationship.” To Elizabeth, it was regrettable that Dick and Jeanie’s relationship ended. At the time, according to Elizabeth, Jeanie simply “wanted more than he was ready to give.”

Dick recognized that the break-up had a lot to do with “my continual involvement with the place.” … “In retrospect,” according to Dick, “I would have spent a lot more time, I would have found some way to drop myself out of the day-to-day concerns of the place.” Dick said that, “If I had it to do all over again, I would have wanted that relationship [with Jeanie] to have worked out.” The relationship had, according to Dick, “opened something up for me, something I really didn’t follow up – it took me another 10 years.” That “something” was the relationship Dick would have with his second wife, Chris.

Although the break-up with Jeanie brought disappointment, it facilitated an opening for Dick, because, as he said, it “provided the transition point for me to get involved with Fritz’s work.” Dick’s pain was the catalyst for him to attend one of Fritz’s workshops, something Dick had never done, although by that time Fritz had been living at Esalen for a year and a half. After that workshop, Dick went on to train with Fritz and became one his primary students.

Self- Maintenance: Essential Practices and Tools

Through the 1960s Dick was still recovering from his stay at the Institute of Living. He was still in some lingering physical pain and he also had an intensity, a semi-constant state of restless internal energy that observers have labeled as “tiger energy” (Leonard, Murphy), or “volcanic energy” (Grof, Tarnas), or perhaps a “hypomanic state” that was, at times, very hard to manage. How much Dick suffered and how hard he worked on himself to maintain his psychological equilibrium was not fully appreciated by most of the people around him.

Dick managed the “high level of agitation that was his normal state” by “never ending work on himself.” According to his wife Chris, Dick’s three central practices throughout his lifetime were: sports, Buddhism, and Gestalt. When agitated, Dick would often turn to one or a combination of these to help modulate his psychological state of being. Strenuous physical exercise, marathon hikes on the steep trails in the Ventana Wilderness, yoga, meditation, bodywork, soaking in the baths, the use of psychedelics, and Gestalt work were the tools he used for self-regulation, and also the tools he recommended to people he supported and helped in working through their own psychological “states” or “experiences” at Esalen through the years.

Dick’s “immense physicality” was extremely important to him, as a self-reparative tool, throughout his entire life-course. Dick’s first real practice was sports – he had been a champion high school wrestler. At Esalen, he used running, rock-wall building, and hiking as “positive practices” to manage and ground his restless, internal energy. In Esalen’s early years, Dick would often use his physicality to build rock walls around the property. Dick would go for almost daily runs or hikes, in part to “extricate himself from the circus” that Esalen could so often be for him, and to “clear away all the disparate complexity.” Dick used running and hiking and the relationship with nature that they afforded him in Big Sur to gain an experience of personal freedom – antidoting feelings of entrapment. As Dick’s student, Leonard Bearne, observed: “I don’t know if he [Dick] realized that physical activity was a defense for him. When things got to be too much, he would just go running and run away from people until something was run out of himself. He used running as therapy, and it also gave him a an opportunity to disappear and sort of get himself back together before he would have to go back and re-engage.... Luckily, Dick had nature, and he knew how to use nature.”

One experience, shortly before his death, illustrated the way Dick used physicality and nature as a means of finding relief from troubling subjective experience. A particularly troublesome time at Esalen for Dick occurred in 1984. Esalen was in serious financial difficulty, and for the first time that difficulty was creating problems for Dick in terms of his relationship with co-founder Mike Murphy. Although their relationship had remained remarkably trouble-free through Esalen’s early financial and political struggles, in 1984, Mike was actually threatening to sell Esalen. In addition, Dick was feeling betrayed by Esalen’s managers over some excess expenditures that greatly troubled Mike. Those expenditures had been made despite Dick’s exacting a promise from managers not to spend a large amount of money without approval of Esalen’s Board of Directors.

During this period, Dick set out on a very long hike with his close Esalen friend and Gestalt student, Eric Erickson. On the hike Dick was consumed with Esalen’s troubles. Dick kept restlessly churning the issues that most concerned him, over and over in his mind while they hiked, occasionally stopping and asking for Eric’s opinion. As the hike progressed, Dick began to have a vague sense that he might be asking Eric the same questions for a second time. In fact, he had already asked those questions many, many times before. They decided to attempt the traverse of a difficult ridge trail, over to the Coast Ridge Road, that neither one of them was completely sure of. Finally, after hours of climbing in silence on the steep and difficult ridge line, in their attempt to reach its summit, they arrived at a wide clearing, in sight of the summit, with an extraordinary overlook – and, in total exhaustion, they both sat down to rest and drink some water. Dick turned, looking down the main coastal ridge, with its folded canyons that fell precipitously into the wide expanse of the Pacific, and he said to Eric, with a wave of his arm toward the expansive view, “Just leave your neuroses behind – just leave your neuroses behind.”

Dick’s second practice was Buddhism. From his Buddhist studies, Dick learned about the ability to be present, in the here and now – a practice Nyanaponika Thera called “bare attention.” From his meditation practice, Dick learned the importance of paying attention to breath, as a means of staying present. He often encouraged those he worked with to pay attention to their breathing whether they were hiking with him or doing Gestalt sessions, especially when someone was dealing with difficult psychological material. Dick often consciously put his attention on his own breathing, making his breath quite audible and forcing out his breath on exhalation. It was an essential part of what he labeled “basic practice,” as a means of grounding by “becoming established in body and breath.” Although Dick continued to meditate, he never fully developed meditation as a practice the way he might have wanted. Perhaps if Dick had lived longer, he would have pursued the practice of meditation more fully.

Bodywork also became a very important tool for Dick. As his friend and Rolfer, Al Drucker commented: “Over the years I did something like 150 Rolfings on him, and I think he had a total of about 600.” Dick used Rolfïng – a sometimes quite painful form of bodywork which deeply penetrates into muscle tissue – in order to externalize and metaphorically “wrestle” with internal problems. He was famous for being able to tolerate deeper work than anyone else at Esalen. Rolfing sometime induces the kind of pain that requires the recipient’s total presence, if it is to be dealt with effectively. As Al Drucker described Dick:

He loved to be rolled – he loved to be touched and massaged and done to…. He was, of course, very private, but that’s where he would welcome you in, when you were working on his body. And it was an amazing body – you could go anyplace in that body and go to bone. He just was so available. He knew how to relax his body – I could touch any layer, right down to the periostium, the covering on the bone…. I just loved working on him, there was such an availability. Most people who get rolled don’t have that – they resist.

Dick depended upon Rolfing to rid himself of some of the felt toxicity he attributed to his mother and her relentless control of him during childhood, even over his physical body. Dick told Walt Anderson, immediately after discussing the control his mother exerted over him to prevent his touching his genitals: “I’ve had probably 500 hours of Rolfing, by the way. I straightened out a lot from that.” Rolfing may have provided Dick a means of reasserting his autonomy over his body, as a felt sense of it being within his own domain and control. In addition, touch itself was very important to Dick. Touch was not something he received in his childhood, given his mother’s cold and non-nurturing nature.

Water was also very important to Dick. He used the Esalen baths frequently and spent countless hours in his own bathtub at home. Dick utilized the here and now physicality of hot followed by cold baths, to help himself in dealing with acute psychological states or experiences, and he recommended the same practice to people he helped. According to student Leonard Bearne, “He [Dick] had a birth experience in the tubs, after an acid trip. He and I talked about it because I had had a similar experience after an MDMA trip…. I wonder if being in the bathtub was an attempt to either consciously have another experience like that or at the very minimum, unconsciously, to have a good intra-uterine experience….” Dick did have a longing to re-experience a positive intra-uterine state. According to friend Penny Vieregge, Dick literally, “wanted to go back to the womb” and re-experience a vaguely remembered pleasurable state of existence with his twin Bobby.

Another tool in Dick’s self-maintenance toolbox was the use of psychedelic drugs. Dick’s use of psychedelic drugs began in San Francisco in 1960 when he used peyote while living at the East-West House. Dick used LSD for the first time in February 1961, just a few months before he and Mike Murphy left San Francisco to try living in Big Sur. He took the drug under the supervision of Steve Shoen, in the office of Jungian analyst John Weir Perry on Steiner Street in San Francisco. At the time, LSD was legal. As Dick described his experience: “It was one of the best days I’d had since I’d gone into the Institute of Living.” Dick described being under a “heavy pall and depression” since leaving the Institute of Living, and the day he took LSD “was a day when I felt that veil lifting, and I had a very good experience on it.” In retrospect, Dick felt it would have been useful for him to do a whole series of work with LSD, but at the time he was advised that LSD was a drug to be used sparingly and carefully. As Dick told Walter Anderson, psychedelics, and “LSD in particular, has a wonderful use, a therapeutic use coupled with the Gestalt mode – it’s a tragedy that it’s illegal.”

At Esalen in the early 1960s, a very positive view of the value of psychedelic drugs began to take hold. All of the leaders of Esalen’s very first seminar series on “The Human Potentiality” – Willis Harmon, Joe Adams, Gregory Bateson, Gerald Heard, Paul Kurtz, and Myron Stolaroff – had participated in LSD experiments. Included, in that first series, was a seminar on “Drug Induced Mysticism” led by the prominent LSD researchers Myron Stolaroff and psychologist Paul Kunz. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and Alan Watts’ The Joyous Cosmology were works widely circulated at Esalen, which discussed the authors’ own experiences with psychedelic drugs. It was probably inevitable that all the talk at Esalen about the potentiality of the human mind would engender a thirst for that potentiality to be experienced. Drugs held the promise of accomplishing that, instantly. Although Esalen officially discouraged drug use, Dick and Mike both knew it went on and, in reality, there was little they could do about it. Seminars on psychedelics continued to be offered and were taught by psychedelic luminaries like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Das). The so-called “Apollonian” vision for Esalen, in which the exploration of ideas would be paramount, was gradually being replaced by a more “Dionysian” one in which experience, not ideas, was what truly counted. George Leonard observed that:

The experiential format replaced the lectures at Esalen not because Aldous Huxley ran out of things to say but because people needed to try it. And when they tried it, they found that it worked. Then it became a movement. Any movement is going to attract an embarrassing, fringe element and so draw the fire of an established order. But I say it’s a small price to pay in view of what has been achieved.

The second Human Potentiality seminar series, which began in the spring of 1963, presented the first samplings of the more experiential fare that Esalen would become famous for: encounter, bodywork, and Gestalt therapy. As the 1960s progressed, due at least in part to psychedelic drugs, Esalen’s program content became increasingly experiential.

In the rare interviews Dick gave, he tended to downplay his use of psychedelic drugs. Dick told Walter Anderson, “I didn’t really use a whole lot myself.” In truth, however, Dick used psychedelics on a consistent basis throughout his adult life. His drug of choice was LSD, “a small dose of windowpane.” In Dick’s later years, MDMA (methylene-dioxy-methamphetamine) became a regular drug of choice, as well. Dick often combined the use of LSD, and later MDMA, with hiking, with bodywork, and with Gestalt. There was a feeling at Esalen in the early 1960s that drug use was a cutting edge tool for the exploration of inner space. The exploration of inner space was viewed as being complimentary to the exploration of outer space that was being pioneered by America’s astronauts. The terms “psychonauts,” “voyaging,” and “journeying” came into popularity at Esalen as euphemisms for the use of psychedelic drugs.

Dick spent a lot of time “voyaging.” He would go often go off into the Ventana Wilderness, just behind Esalen, on long day-hikes, either alone or accompanied by friends. If not alone, he might stop and do Gestalt work at some point, functioning either as initiator (his term for the client) or as reflector (his term for the facilitator). Voyaging was one of the ways to spend time with Dick, because he was always interested in exploring the “deeper resources of the mind.” Dick was led to explore altered states, in part to simply have new experiences and expand his consciousness, in part as an attempt to gain mastery over wider realms of psychic territory, and in part to learn how to navigate altered states so that if they came, unbidden, they would not be so scary and could, perhaps, be integrated. As John Heider commented that, “It is implicit in Laing, and I would say to an extent in Dick’s thinking and mine, that a large part of the problem of extreme pathology is how frightening it is. Which causes people to act bizarrely, which causes the environment to beat the shit out of them, hospitalize them, drug them, etc., which makes them be crazy. And if they were not afraid but lived in it, as process – and this is pure Laing – it would work itself out and the unbidden states would re-integrate.”

Dick developed a very supportive peer group in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with which he did his voyaging. He would often use Jan Brewer’s property, outside the bounds of Esalen – a large private property protected by locked gates adjoining Sycamore Canyon in Big Sur. Jan’s ranch house was often referred to as the “blowout center” – a place of refuge from Esalen, used for voyaging or as a supportive, protected place for people going through difficult psychological process. One of the outcomes of his peer group voyaging experiences came to be known as the “RoIf monster.” Dick and friends would spend weekends, once a month or so, in the late 1960s, participating in “Rolf monsters,” a combination of the use of psychedelic drugs (mostly LSD), Rolfing, movement, therapeutic touch, and Gestalt work. As Rolf monster participant Seymour Carter explained that, “it was a group of intimates … going through deep cathartic experiences. I think our model mostly was a cathartic model. There was something deeply inside that needed to be expressed and we would push … to an organismic kind of release.” The Rolf monster drew upon and combined the theoretical models of Alexander Lowen’s and John Pierrakos’ bioenergetics, Arthur Janov’s primal therapy, Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy, and Ida Rolf’s structural integration. Utilizing those combined methods, the Rolf monster sought to reach and access highly charged, deeply held, or repressed psychological material in order to re-experience it, come to an expression of it, and, hopefully, re-integrate the material into the personality. Experiences like those Dick gained in Rolf monsters added to his very wide experiential base, both theoretically and practically, for sitting with people in his Gestalt work.

Psychedelics provided Dick a source of highly valued experiences of expansiveness, dating from the first occasions of their use. The experience of lifting the “heavy pall and depression” that plagued Dick after his hospitalization at the Institute of Living was a direct result of his taking LSD for the first time. In providing an antidote to troubling subjective experiences and/or depressive affect, psychedelics were a means of counteracting feelings of entrapment, contraction, constriction, and limitation. Dick also believed that LSD, like some psychotic episodes, could be homeopathically curative if used properly. He believed that, “Something like LSD really encourages, really amplifies and exaggerates and centers sufficiently, [so] that if used correctly, in conjunction with a person who really knows what they are doing, it’s almost homeopathic.”

The last real practice that Dick learned, according to his wife, Chris Price, was Gestalt therapy. Dick became a student of Fritz Perls in late 1965, and worked with him consistently until Fritz’s death in March of 1970. Gestalt became Dick’s real passion in his later life, and it was something he integrated along with his Buddhist practice and his physical approach to life. Gestalt was something Dick used daily to help maintain his own psychological equilibrium and to help others do the same. Gestalt became a practice, a skill, and an art for Dick that he constantly strove to learn about and master. As Bette Dingman observed: “To me, he [Dick] was the most alive, in a meeting room, doing the work [Gestalt].” Dick’s basic three practices: sports, Buddhism, and Gestalt, and the tools he combined, adopted, and adapted from them, helped Dick maintain and sustain his equilibrium. However, these practices would not be enough to prevent a second, serious psychotic episode in 1969 that would, again, result in his being hospitalized.

Treating Mental Illness: Support for Alternative Views and Methods

Dick was always searching for and supporting alternative ways of dealing with acute mental illness and the forced hospitalizations that occurred as a result. From its very inception, Esalen began to confront the issue of mental illness and how it was being defined and treated in the United States. One of Esalen’s first seminars, in the fall of 1962, led by Gregory Bateson and Joe K. Adams was entitled “Individual and Cultural Definitions of Reality.” In that seminar, the leaders sought to both explain the causes of mental illness and to expose current deficiencies in treatment. Many more Esalen seminars addressing mental illness were to follow. By the mid-1960s, an alternative view of severe mental illness was beginning to emerge in this country and Esalen Institute was one of the main forums supporting it. Spokespersons for the alternative view included psychiatrist Thomas Szaz, who challenged the medical model view of schizophrenia as a definable “disease”; sociologist Erving Goffman, who documented the prevalence of patient abuse and mistreatment in mental hospitals; Joe K. Adams, the Esalen affiliated psychologist who had written about his own experiences in mental hospitals in the early 1960s; and the eminent thinker and Esalen seminar leader, Gregory Bateson, who developed the “double bind” theory of schizophrenia while working as the resident anthropologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California. Perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson of the alternative view was the English psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who wrote about the possible value of psychotic experience. Sometimes, according to Laing, psychosis was a “potentially natural process that we do not allow to happen.” Laing also proposed the possibility that, “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.” (Laing, supra [1967], p.133)

Both Michael Murphy and Dick Price were admirers of Laing’s work and they invited him to Esalen in the hope of exposing his ideas to a wider audience. Laing led a seminar at Esalen in 1967 that stimulated interest in creating alternative methods for treating the severely disturbed in the United States. Psychologist Julian Silverman, a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) researcher on schizophrenia, came to Esalen in 1967 to teach a workshop entitled “Shamanism, Psychedelics, and the Schizophrenias.” Dick enlisted Julian’s help in putting together a series of seminars, workshops, and symposia entitled “The Value of Psychotic Experience” in the summer of 1968 to help sustain interest in alternative treatment. Participants in the series, among many others, included psychologist Joe K. Adams, Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabroski, Alan Watts, the Jungian analyst John Weir Perry, and Fritz Perls. Dick and Julian had hoped R. D. Laing would be a major contributor, but he refused to enter the country. He was too fearful of the widely publicized civil unrest occurring throughout the United States in the summer 1968 and its possible consequences.

Dick convinced Julian Silverman to come to work at Esalen in order to develop plans for an Esalen associated project in which psychiatric patients would be treated along the lines of Laing’s Kingsley Hall in London. As Dick described it, “I had the idea of trying to combine what Julian was doing experimentally with what Laing was supposedly doing therapeutically.” Patients at Kingsley Hall were given support rather than drugs or shock treatments and were allowed to work through psychotic episodes at their own pace. Dick’s idea, which was eventually turned into the “Agnews Project,” became a reality in 1969. Esalen Institute, the State of California, and NIMH joined in sponsoring a three-year research program at Agnews Hospital (a state mental hospital near San Jose, California) in which young, male schizophrenic patients would be treated in a humane atmosphere without the use of psychotropic medications (specifically phenothiazines). The project was officially headed by Julian Silverman who left his job at NIMH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland to work at Agnews State Hospital. Again, it was hoped that Laing would participate, but he steadfastly refused to enter the country.

At Agnews, a special staff was selected and trained for the hospital ward that was to be given over to the project. Psychological testing was utilized for both the patients and the hospital staff who would treat them, in the hopes of discovering the personal qualities it would take to work effectively in a non-drug hospital environment and to develop protocols for selecting patients best suited for treatment in non-drug wards. Esalen staff members worked on the project as consultants, training the hospital staff in Gestalt therapy and encounter. There were 25 to 28 patients on the hospital ward at any given time. They were being treated by a mixture of hospital and Esalen staff members. Gestalt therapy and encounter sessions were being conducted with the patients and staff alike. It was a lively place, to say the very least. Julian Silverman began calling the project “ding-dong city.”

The project was conceived as a double-blind study with two groups: a non-drug group (placebo) and a group that received drugs (phenothiazines). The results of the double-blind study which included a three-year follow-up, provided evidence that schizophrenic patients who were treated humanely and without drugs showed more long-term clinical improvement, better overall functioning in the community after discharge, and lower rates of re-hospitalization than patients taking medication.

Dick’s motivation for the project had been driven by his own negative hospital experiences. He hoped to establish hospital wards where people could go through experiences like he had, without being drugged or receiving shock treatments. The Agnews project, for Dick, was clearly a self-reparative psychological effort. Although the Agnews project represented a semi-successful foray into the “straight world” of the mental health establishment, Dick was a little disappointed with the final results. For Dick, the problem with the Agnews project was that in the double-blind model, “the research project overrode the clinical model.” Dick’s hope for the project had been to utilize the emerging data to establish a protocol for selecting patients who could best benefit from a purely non-drug hospital environment. Dick hoped that by using a combination of psychological tests (Julian’s experimental work) and clinical judgment, it would be possible separate the populations who would be better served by not using drugs from those who actually might need them. Dick and Julian firmly believed in the necessity of an “individual differences” approach for implementing a Laingian treatment model. In that approach, not all psychotic episodes were viewed as having beneficial potential. The trick was learning how to differentiate the “creative psychoses” in which medications were viewed as “interference” and a process style of treatment was called for, from those that presented a “stuck place” in which medications were needed and a process style of treatment was contraindicated. Tragically, in Dick’s view, “that never happened.” Even more tragically, according to Dick, “There has never been a place really established that I know of, which will really take a non-drug, process approach.”

Dick closely followed efforts in the United States to establish alternative treatments for those experiencing acute psychological crises. He often lent personal assistance to those attempting to start alternative treatment centers, offering Esalen’s institutional support to those enterprises whenever he could. Dick actively encouraged various alternative projects by providing logistical support and/or by making connections between individuals and organizations that could help each other. One alternative treatment project in California that received a lot of support from Dick was the Aurora Project at Harbin Hot Springs, named for Dick’s dog, Aurora. Dick was a champion of the rights of former mental patients and invited groups affiliated with organizations that worked for patient’s rights to Esalen, often personally picking up the tab for their visits. Dick was also very supportive of Christina Grof’s efforts at Esalen to establish the Spiritual Emergency Network (SEN), a referral network of alternative treatment possibilities for those in acute need.

Dick’s primary motivation for creating Esalen had been the following: “My goal in doing this, was to set up a place that in some way would serve people coming to this type of experience and there would not be the drugging or the shocking – that was my main motivation” Although Esalen was never used on a consistent basis for helping people through acute psychological states, Dick supported many people going through those experiences at Esalen that “otherwise,” by his own recognition, “would have been locked up.” As Dick himself recognized, it “takes a very special situation” with the tremendous effort of many people in order to be successful. Some of those efforts succeeded, while others failed. As Julian Silverman observed, Dick “was very compassionate to people in need and he wanted something to happen to all people like that – his own kind, who had suffered the way he did.”

Dick would often extend himself, or would lend the support of Esalen as an institution, in order to help and/or protect those in need, by creating a safe place, with sitters, in a room at Esalen or by having them stay at his own home until they got better. It was self-reparative for Dick to offer this kind of help and protection – help and protection he did not receive when he had most needed it. As Dick’s friend, Steve Harper, recalled – when he sought out Dick to help someone having an acute psychotic episode, Dick got “enlivened” by the prospect of helping, and it aroused “a genuine curiosity and not curiosity from a detached placed” … “he was interested in a personal way” … “he leaned forward into it.” When Dick worked with people who were in acute distress, it was obvious how much ability and capacity he had to be a container, in the most positive sense of the word, so that the person felt safe to let their experience unfold. It was the provision of an experience of positive containment that Dick never had developmentally, but one he certainly longed for. Dick probably never thought of containment in these terms. But Dick, by necessity, had learned to contain large sectors of his affective experience when relating to his mother.

Although Dick Price’s sponsorship of the Agnews project was undertaken with the hope that it would eventually lead to an accepted, mainstream alternative for the treatment of mental illness, the actual outcome was relatively limited. There were two principal reasons for this. The first was Dick’s consuming job as Big Sur Director at Esalen. Second was the fact that Dick suffered another psychotic episode in early 1969, just as the Agnews project was getting underway.

Lingering Vulnerability: Dick’s Second Psychotic Episode

Dick Price’s life in the late 1960s was incredibly intense. He was still functioning as Esalen’s Big Sur Director. Mike Murphy had left Big Sur to live in San Francisco in 1967, leaving Dick to run the growing complexity of the operation in Big Sur by himself. Dick still had not taken a real vacation since Esalen opened. He had broken up with Jeanie McGowan, a woman he had loved, and the pain of that lingered. The Agnews project was pending, and Dick and Julian were actively making plans to carry it forward. Dick’s personal work with Fritz and his Gestalt training were ongoing. Dick’s “voyaging” and his participation in “RoIf monsters” occupied a considerable amount of his free time. The mass media had discovered Esalen and the media spotlight, gaining in intensity, demanded the time and attention of both co-founders. The hippie movement, which Esalen had actually helped create, was in full swing with people living in the hills all around Esalen, in local communes, and in various illegal encampments, especially during the summer months.

Esalen’s residential program, a year-long, all-out effort to explore new regions of human experience by resident “psychonauts” using “meditation, encounter, sensory awareness, creativity, movement, emotional expression, inner imagery, dream work, and peak-experience training,” was in full operation with Will Schutz firmly ensconced as its primary leader, and encounter as its central discipline. Dick had considered the program to be premature, ungrounded, lacking in cohesion and, more alarmingly, did not pay attention to the ongoing support necessary to the type of work being done. Dick was no fan of Will Schutz’s style of encounter, labeling it: “beat ’em up, fuck ’em at the first opportunity.” Mike Murphy, when asked why Dick did not take to Will Schutz and encounter commented, “Dick felt the assaultive and controlling quality – boy, those groups could get mean and controlling and, again, his thing about constraint and control.” Dick was deeply suspicious of the way the residential program had departed from the vision of its principle creators, Mike Murphy and Virginia Satir, both of whom were no longer at Esalen or actively assisting the project. Instead of teaching a number of disciplines by a number of group of leaders, the program, instead, “developed around the personality of the leader.”

A “wild west” frontier ethic seemed to permeate Esalen in the late 1960s and its most legendary rivalry, a “shootout” between Will Schutz’s encounter on one side, and Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy on the other, was heating up. The two strong-willed men, who both possessed very large egos, were in a semi-constant battle over who would capture Esalen’s flag, and with it, ascendancy over America’s therapeutic territory, at least as that territory was being viewed through the mass media’s lens. Dick, in his role as Big Sur Director, was placed in the role of governing a very intense, complex organization increasingly spinning out of his ability, or anyone’s, to control. A good description of the intense atmosphere at Esalen in the late 1960s, and its historical context, was offered by Dick’s friend, residential program attendee and later leader, John Heider: “The reality of Esalen’s ‘golden age’ is grounded in 1960’s America. In the 1960’s a significant minority of people, especially among the young, was in rebellion. These people divided into roughly two camps. 1. Social activists who believed that liberation would come through protests, sit-ins, voter registration, civil disobedience, etc.; and 2. Those that believed any true change begins with the self – re-owning the disowned self; self-regulation; self-determination, sanity.” Heider continued in this vein:

People drawn to Esalen fell, for the most part, into this second group. We were in pain. We were alienated. We dreamed of what we might be and become, of our human potential. Traditional medicine, psychiatry, education, and worship had asked us to adapt, conform, accept. They failed us, diminished us, in many cases betrayed, even purposefully damaged us. Tim Leary, possibly overstating the case, said he’d rather see his daughter hooked on heroin than enrolled in a public high school. We were fed up, we were hopeful. We were ready for the radical.

…In 1967 Esalen was radical, experiential, experimental, and beyond the reach of traditional institutions. At Esalen people acted. The windows had been thrown open; the creative, the insane, the magical, and the divine entered directly into our lives. Mike Murphy and George Leonard asked us to fire a shot heard ‘round the world,’ to beat the astronauts to the moon, to explore the frontiers of consciousness, of experience. At the very least, we meant to escape the repressive norms of a frightened, blocked culture.

In late 1968, amid all the intensity, Dick’s father came for one of his rare visits to Big Sur, the last visit before his death the following year. Dick and his father had an unusual exchange, one in which Herman actually told his son about his life and the violence he had witnessed as a young Jewish boy in czarist controlled Lithuania. After Herman left, Dick slowly began to go crazy. Dick knew he was drifting into a “second psychosis.” This time he took precautions. He tried to ensure that he would not be hospitalized and that his parents would not find out what was happening. Dick later described the events to his wife, Chris Price: “He [Dick] told Fritz [Perls] what was happening. He knew he was going into the state this time. He called a meeting of the people who were running the place and told them – and made them each promise they wouldn’t hospitalize him. He told me Selig [Morgenrath] was the only one who wouldn’t agree. Fritz basically said, “Come back and work with me when you’re done,”…though he told me Fritz would play with him a little bit. It was clear Dick appreciated that Fritz both had his limits and was clear and wasn’t sitting in any judgment …and he felt handled cleanly with Fritz about this.”

Through friends, Dick made arrangements to stay on a remote property near Plaskett Ridge, south of Esalen, where Patrick Cassidy, one of the so-called “Big Sur Heavies” as local outlaw marijuana growers were then called, attempted to let him work through the episode on his own, without psychiatric interference. When Dick’s psychosis did not end quickly, he was brought back to Esalen where, “I had some fun,” as Dick put it. Chris remembered how Dick “took over the baths for a while, and you could only come into the tub he was living in if you told him what animal and color you were.” Dick was too crazy to stay at Esalen in the state he was in. As Dick put it, “Here wasn’t the place for me to be. I was too involved in the working of the place.”

From Esalen, Dick was moved to Jan Brewer’s property in Sycamore Canyon, a place Dick had regularly used as a refuge, known by Dick’s intimates as the “blowout center.” Dick’s support group eventually began to tire. Dick had been psychotic for about four months and no one was sure how long the episode might actually last. Dick’s close friend, Jan Brewer who was spending a lot of time with Dick, began to grow desperate, placing calls almost daily to George Leonard at his office, telling him, “You’ve got to do something about this; you’ve got to take him out of here; I can’t handle him; I thought that I could handle him, but I can’t handle him.” There was a growing general feeling by those taking care of Dick that “he’s beyond us.” Jack Downing, a psychiatrist and a close personal friend of Dick’s, eventually took responsibility for hospitalizing him at Agnews Hospital. Dick spent 10 days at Agnews before being released. Mike Murphy, who visited Dick at Agnews, remembers that “he came down gradually.” At Agnews, Dick confessed to Mike Murphy that he had been “cheeking” thorazine, telling Mike, “I don’t swallow this stuff, I learned to do it at the Institute of Living.” Ironically, Dick was housed in a ward at the hospital that was adjacent to the one that would soon be used for the Agnews Project. Julian Silverman remembered Dick putting his feet up on a ledge while hospitalized at Agnews, and it was as if, “He was home – Moses had made the journey, he’d arrived – he looked out over the whole complex – this was his space.”

How was Dick Price’s 1969 “psychotic episode” to be understood? Dick’s second episode seemed, qualitatively, very different from his first. In Dick’s first episode there was a freeing, a breaking out, and a felt sense of liberation into new possibility. The second seemed more to be “an opening down” into unknown material, into “anxieties and psychic states of dissolution.” From the intersubjective point of view, the experience of personal annihilation lies at the very heart of psychotic experience, in direct contrast to the traditional view that the psychoses represent a departure from the real world that a normal person inhabits. The dissolution of one’s sense of selfhood in psychotic states results in the disintegration of experience in general, and the loss of the experience of a stable reality that sustains, coheres, and lends definition to the sense of self. The experience of self-fragmentation and personal annihilation that inevitably follows, reveals that: “World-disintegration and self-dissolution are thus inseparable aspects of a single process, two faces of the same psychological reality.” (Atwood et al., supra [2001], p.5)

Dick did not talk about his second psychotic episode to his friends and cohorts to the same extent that he talked about the first. Very little detail about his actual experience during his second episode is known. Dick described the precipitating factor for his second break in the following way: “Then, in the spring of 1969, I had a second psychosis, largely the effect of not being able to finish what I was experiencing thirteen years previously.”  

In the late 1960s, the alternative view of mental illness, as exemplified in the work of Laing, embraced a belief in the potential liberating benefit of psychotic experience. The alternative view was closely linked to the psychedelic movement. If a there was value in psychedelic expeditions into different states of consciousness, then an even greater value might hold for alterations in consciousness originating within the human organism, itself. The view that psychosis could be a tool to break through to higher states of functioning was widely embraced at Esalen and by Dick Price, in particular. Gregory Bateson, Dick’s friend, former teacher, eminent scholar, and originator of the “double-bind” theory of schizophrenia expressed it this way:

Once precipitated into psychosis the patient has a course to run. He is, as it were, embarked upon a voyage of discovery which is only completed by his return to the normal world, to which he comes back with insights different from those of the inhabitants who never embarked on such a voyage. Once begun, a schizophrenic episode would appear to have as definite a course as an initiation ceremony a - death and rebirth - into which the novice may have been precipitated by his family life or by adventitious circumstances, but which in its course is largely steered by endogenous processes.

In terms of this picture, spontaneous remission is no problem. This is only the final and natural outcome to the total process. What needs to be explained is the failure of many who embark upon this voyage to return from it. Do these encounter circumstances either in family life or in institutional care so grossly maladaptive that even the richest and best organized hallucinatory experience cannot save them? (Bateson, Introduction in Percival’s Narrative [1961], p.xiv)

Fritz Perls’ handwritten note in Gestalt Therapy Verbatim reflects a similar ethic in the following statement: “To suffer one’s death and to be reborn is not easy.” The experience of liberation that Dick felt had been aborted by his first institutionalization – a view seemingly confirmed by those around him whom he most respected. Thus the second psychotic experience became a possible means of liberation from problematic organizations of experience originating in his childhood. A direct experiential link to his childhood may have been triggered by the visit of his father Herman in late 1968, which immediately preceded his second psychosis.

The immediate event which actually caused Dick’s second hospitalization was an attempt on his part to help his friend Jan Brewer deal with issues stemming from Jan’s being raised by a very abusive mother. Jan had told Dick about a particular incident from his childhood in which Jan’s mother hit him from behind with a frying pan, knocking him out. According to Chris Price, “In the way Jan had told it to Dick, it had registered to Dick as being pivotal, about the crystallization of Jan’s issues with his mother – so from the state Dick was in … he had the sense that he could take Jan through it – and clear. So he hits Jan from behind to recreate the scene. Well, it definitely triggered something, because Jan called John [Lilly], and Jan called Jack [Downing], and he told them that they had to hospitalize him [Dick].”

One of the few things that is known about Dick’s experience during his second episode, beyond stories about some rather bizarre events, was that he actually believed he became several powerful historical figures. The two figures most often mentioned were Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte. Chris said Dick later told her that “he would go in and out of awareness, when he was in his state, still being completely out there, but not having any recall and having a sense of coming to. So he would tell the funny story about coming to, finding himself striding up and down the 12-foot dinner table at Jan’s, being Pontius Pilate or somebody while everybody was eating. … He said he was on a historical trajectory. … So the way I heard it, it was Alexander, Rasputin, and when he reached Napoleon, he said forget it!”  

Aside from the humorous aspect of this story about Dick’s trajectory through the past lives, there is a deeper meaning contained in becoming powerful historic figures. As in this case, Dick became Alexander, and announced that he “had more kingdoms to conquer.” Experiences of personal annihilation and self-dissolution, which lie at the experiential heart of psychotic experience can be extremely frightening, producing tremendous anxiety and giving rise to extreme reparative and restorative efforts in order to re-establish a felt sense of existing. What looks from the outside like delusions (e.g., being Alexander the Great) are better understood, from a intersubjective perspective, as concretizing efforts made to substantialize and preserve a reality that has begun to disintegrate, rather than turning away from reality. According to Stolorow and Atwood: “Sometimes the imagery of annihilation is intermixed with or even supplanted by what appear to be grandiose or highly idealized version of oneself or others. These latter images express efforts to resurrect all those parts of one’s selfhood and world that have become subject to shattering and erasure.” (Atwood et al., supra [2001], p. 6)

It is worthwhile to consider what aspects of Dick’s subjective world might have become subject to “shattering or erasure,” so that becoming a powerful, conquering figure could concretize and symbolically substantialize, preserve, or resurrect the self. Several aspects of Dick’s experience during the time immediately preceding his second psychotic episode deserve closer attention in this regard.

First was his break-up with Jeanie McGowan. Although it occurred several years earlier, the impact of the break-up on Dick’s subjective world was ongoing. Dick’s celibacy after his breakup with Jeanie was something, in hindsight, that he considered to be a contributing factor to his psychological difficulties during this period. Chris Price recalled what Dick told her about his experience prior to his second episode:

His [Dick’s] feeling was that there was something about him and Jeanie breaking up, because he really loved Jeanie – it wasn’t his choice, she left him. …Kind of how I think he knew he was starting to go into the state – he would meet a woman who he found attractive or whatever – and he said, “I would stand there and I would sort of feel the attraction and I would see the whole thing, I would see how this would happen, and this would happen and I would see it end, so I never made a move…. I would stand there and watch the whole thing play out over the next month, or months, or years.” … So that’s how he ended up celibate for all this time.

The second aspect of Dick’s subjective world deserving closer attention was his relationship with his father. Herman’s visit in late 1968 must have caused Dick to revisit the experiential familial world his father’s presence would naturally evoke. There was a basic disconnect between Herman and Dick that seemed almost unbridgeable. It became even more so over time, and became an issue noted by several people. Mike Murphy, who met Dick’s father several times, made the following observation: “There was a rough edge to his father that made me sad. My father was a tough guy, he got in fistfights. But in his regard for me, there was an essential esteem and tenderness, about me, that I did not see in Dick’s father.”

Hearing about some of the horrific events in his father’s life and their lingering effects, must have made Dick both acutely aware of, and greatly disappointed in, his father’s lack of involvement in preventing the horrific events of Dick’s own life. That kind of disappointment would have rekindled archaic needs for the reliable, protective figure that Dick wished his father could have been.

A third aspect deserving attention was the material that Dick’s work with Fritz Perls was bringing up. Fritz’s style of work encouraged powerful entering of problematic experiences – something Dick was quite willing to do. Though the specific content of their work together is not known, Fritz was opening up very vulnerable aspects of Dick’s subjective world that Fritz, due to the defensive denial of his own vulnerability, was simply not equipped to help Dick work through. The similarity in the subjective worlds of Dick and Fritz will be discussed in more detail later. In this context it is sufficient to point out that Fritz was unwilling to work with Dick when he was experiencing his second psychotic episode. In fairness to Fritz, as Chris Price has pointed out, Dick was, during this period, “wearing out” his younger friends – at a time when Fritz was in his 70s and not in the best of health. 

However, Fritz would have been in the best position, of anyone at Esalen, to understand what might actually have been going on for Dick, including the anxiety he must have felt. As Dick’s student, Leonard Bearne, pointed out, anxiety and fear were things Dick would have been left to figure out largely on his own, since there were not many people at Esalen who were likely to point it out to him. Leonard said, “I’ve held the impression about Fritz, from watching tapes, that Fritz was not good at seeing anxiety because he didn’t know it in himself. I think Fritz was very anxious and very, kind of, cut-off from that.”

Fear and anxiety were prominent experiential features of Dick’s second psychotic episode, though Dick did not talk about that aspect of his experience to many people. Dick had a reputation at Esalen for being fearless, as virtually everyone acknowledged. In fact, Dick was fearless in many aspects of his life, especially when it involved physicality, exploring realms of consciousness, or meeting aggression. However, Dick did become anxious and fearful when faced with certain demands on his personhood that evoked feelings of entrapment, feelings associated with psychological usurpation, or states of self-dissolution and personal annihilation. There weren’t people, including his mentor Fritz Perls, who Dick trusted enough to seek out and work with in his most anxious states at the time of his second episode. Moreover, the model of Gestalt work being done at the time at Esalen would not have encouraged Dick to enter those experiences as fully as he could. For these reasons, Dick was then largely left alone to sort out the “stuck place” his feelings of “anguish” repeatedly left him in, which to people he worked with like Seymour Carter, seemingly, “wouldn’t go anywhere.” A glimpse into the level of fear Dick experienced during his second psychotic episode was provided by Chris Price when she described how Dick “slept at the foot of the bed” occupied by Patrick Cassidy and his girlfriend Jeanie “when he was in fear” at their place on Plaskett Ridge. Penny Vieregge provided another glimpse by describing the “incredible fragility” she sensed in Dick at the time, “like fine, fine, porcelain … I wanted to put on kid gloves and be there in case the shattering came.”

The fourth aspect of Dick’s subjective world that deserves closer attention was his involvement with, and co-creation of, Esalen Institute. Dick’s focus in creating Esalen had always been on supporting people who were in psychological difficulty. Esalen’s political battles in the late 1960s were propelling Esalen away from the kind of work that Dick had hoped Esalen would come to stand for. Dick’s control over Esalen’s direction was often usurped by powerful leaders like Will Shutz and Fritz Perls and the factions that supported them. Dick was critical of both reigning Esalen ringmasters, Will and Fritz. As Dick told Walter Anderson:  

There were some messages of self-responsibility that didn’t, at least for me, have the balance of – hey, I can be responsible for myself but I can also be responsible for you, in one way or another. I think there was almost a vibration set up by Fritz’s messages in that way. ‘I’m not responsible for you,’ and certainly by Will’s charismatic thing of, I’ll overstate it, ‘let’s do anything to make something happen and forget the day to day kind of relational work, the supportive work.’ So I think, although they wouldn’t talk to one another [Fritz and Will], I think it was a real imbalance in the place in those days.

Adding to the power struggle problems was a level of ambiguity that seemed to characterize Dick and Mike’s management style. Neither co-founder wanted to give up control, nor did they want to be hands-on wielders of control. As Mike Murphy recognized, “That ambiguity was part of the whole problem.” Shortly before Dick died, Mike had a conversation with Dick in the midst of yet another management crisis, about their longstanding ambiguity of never fully owning and exercising their power at Esalen. Mike said, “Dick we can’t escape it, as long as we’re here we are going to be in charge of this, so let’s not pretend and let these guys do it.”

Dick explained Esalen’s basic stance in regard to its leaders to Walter Anderson when he was discussing Will Shutz with Walter. According to Dick: “The place [Esalen] operates, as much as possible, by giving people what I call realms of autonomy -- we’ll provide you the space – accept our feedback when you step beyond the space. The problem with Will – Will wasn’t always willing to accept our feedback.” The problem, however, was not quite that simple. Not only was there an ethic at Esalen, as exemplified in Ed Maupin’s often quoted axiom, “Mother Esalen gives permission,” that did not exactly encourage paying attention to feedback one did not like. Feedback also was not always very forthcoming! Dick mainly exercised his control from the background – he did not like being in the spotlight. As Dick himself said, “I wasn’t especially in love with being the scolding mama or papa.” A challenging management style that was often “sloppy” and had a “great, great lack of clarity” was even acknowledged by Dick himself. Dick’s often repeated maxim for Esalen was “maximum availability, minimum coercion.” However, his maxim was problematic when it came to managing Esalen. Dick did not like to confront people, and he tended only to do so when he got angry. Dick often “mistook clarity for coercion,” and, as a result, according to Steve Harper, “He gave people mixed messages or no messages. People he managed often had to guess what it was he wanted. He would get inwardly upset at what they were or were not doing. By the time he communicated his frustration, they felt it was the first time they heard about it and were surprised by Dick’s strong emotion. Dick, on the other hand, was sure he had previously communicated his concerns. Relative to his extraordinary skills as a reflector, Dick seemed less effective as a manager.” Esalen achieved its cultural zenith under Dick’s management, and gradually lost its way after his death. So the comparison is relative. Dick’s mastery of Gestalt served as background for his more prosaic management skills. 

Rules, clarity, and coercion were problematic for Dick. He had been so controlled in his youth that he did not like to impose control on anyone. This often led to things going on much too long without feedback and, especially in the “early days” would often end when, as Heider said, “Dick used rage … as a management tool.” This was a conflict area in Dick. How do you understand rules – how do you understand clarity – what is coercion? He never resolved those questions, so they turned up in his management style. There was no coercion at Esalen, but there was expulsion. And it could be hurtful to people when they were expelled from the grounds, because they did not see it coming.

Esalen’s internal political battles must have rekindled quite vulnerable organizations of experience associated with accommodation and usurpation for Dick. The creation of Esalen was very self-reparative and when it, too, began to be subjected to control by agendas and forces that felt alien to Dick, his frustration, anger, and rage at feeling entrapped, yet again, were understandably aroused.

Four aspects of Dick’s experience – his break-up with Jeanie and his celibacy thereafter – his father’s visit – the material his Gestalt work with Fritz Perls was bringing up – and power struggles at Esalen – provide insight into his subjective world at the time immediately preceding his second psychotic episode. All four aspects contributed, in a cumulative sense, to a breakdown of affirming, validating connections to people, experiences, and ideas that were sustaining Dick’s sense of self, leading to a shattering and fragmentation of his subjective world.

What cannot be known is what Dick’s subjective experience was during the time period preceding his second episode. What measures did Dick take to try and shore-up a subjective world that was beginning to shatter and fragment? What did he do to alleviate or antidote feelings of fear and anxiety? Dick undoubtedly went running and hiking, got Rolfed, was massaged, took baths, and did Gestalt sessions. He probably took psychedelic drugs in an attempt to somehow break through or antidote disquieting subjective experiences. All we really know is that he slipped into a psychosis that lasted for over four months. Dick, himself, may actually have had some excitement and curiosity about what might happen; he certainly believed that there was a possibility of a breakthrough that would, perhaps, complete something that he felt was aborted in his first episode some 13 years before. As he jokingly told Walter Anderson, “It’s a lot more fun to be crazy than it is to be depressed.”

While we cannot say for certain what exactly precipitated Dick’s second psychotic episode, we can say, in general, that a psychotic experience is often contextualized by “profound, ongoing issues of world formation tracing back to the vicissitudes of early life, issues touching on the person’s very capacity to experience ‘I am’.” (Atwood et al., supra [2001], p.25). For Dick, those vicissitudes were distilled into the organizing principle, dependency is dangerous – a principle synthesizing the most problematic developmental configurations of self and other – toxic influence, accommodation, and his longings for protection and validation. While the life circumstances and concrete events that give rise to experiences of personal annihilation can vary greatly, an especially pernicious configuration of self and other is the usurpation of one’s personal subjectivity that accommodation, by definition, involves. The configurations of accommodation and usurpation played a very prominent role in Dick’s life, and it is in this overall context that becoming an Alexander the Great or a Napoleon Bonaparte may, perhaps, be understood.

Viewed from the outside, Dick’s experience of becoming a powerful historical figure seems at first to confirm a delusional break from the real world. But from a perspective inclusive of Dick’s subjective world, becoming a figure like Alexander or Napoleon concretizes a symbolic conquering or retaking of the territory that was surrendered by psychological usurpation, and powerfully re-asserts a sense of personal agency and autonomy. For an Alexander announcing that, “I have more worlds to conquer,” the organizing principle of dependency is dangerous and its associated vulnerable feelings are reduced to a speck on the experiential horizon.

Dick was discharged from Agnews State Hospital in late 1969. After his discharge, he traveled to Canada with Julian Silverman to take part in Fritz Perls’ first Gestalt training session at his new center, The Gestalt Institute of Canada, on Lake Cowichan, Vancouver Island, British Colombia. It seems that Fritz, like R.D. Laing, feared the growing political unrest in the United States and had opted for Canada, purchasing an old motel for his new center. While at Lake Cowichan, Dick was able to work on the things that had precipitated his psychosis. At the end of the training, Fritz Perls pronounced that Dick was “recovered” and was ready to start leading Gestalt groups and trainings at Esalen. Dick returned to Esalen and set up his first Gestalt training program, which he was to co-lead with Fritz Perls. But Fritz died on March 14, 1970, a month before the training was to start. Dick led the training group without the help of his mentor.

Although he continued in his role as Big Sur Director, Dick increasingly put more of his energy into his Gestalt work. He led Gestalt groups, led training programs, and worked with Esalen’s staff. Dick continued to champion the rights of mental patients and continued to extend himself to anyone in the Esalen community who was in psychological difficulty. Dick had been through a great deal at this point in his life, and he had much to offer people experiencing acute psychological distress. Both because of, and in spite of, his painful experiences in mental hospitals, Dick had embarked upon a lifelong journey of personal exploration. He continued to explore many forms of psychotherapy, personal growth, and spiritual practice. What he found to be beneficial, he utilized both personally and in his burgeoning form of Gestalt therapy, “Gestalt Practice.” What he found to be coercive or demeaning, he personally, and often publicly, rejected. His maxim for Esalen became “maximum availability, minimal coercion.” This maxim was also central in the development of his form of Gestalt Practice.

In an interview with Wade Hudson a few months before his death, Dick was asked what would have been most useful to him during his episodes of psychosis. His answer was the following: “Well, a space like Esalen, where it is possible to be outside and not locked up, a place where it’s possible to get a good diet, a place where it’s possible to live through the experience rather than having it blotted out, a place where there aren’t the same negative self-definitions of someone going through this type of experience. Also, people available who are not doing what psychiatrists, or at least many of them, characteristically do.”

In a humorous acknowledgement of what Dick had been able to create at Esalen, Michael Murphy was known to say, “Esalen is Dick Price’s revenge on mental hospitals.” Over time, what began to sustain Dick’s sense of self was the psychological home he created for himself at Esalen. It was a place where he could act and behave outside of the boundaries and rules that had been set for him by his family and by society – a place where he could be affirmed, rather than punished. As he jokingly told Walter Anderson in an interview three years before his death, “I stayed out of the hospital for 15 years, so it must work.”

Maximum Availability, Minimum Coercion: A Constructive Concept

One of the hypotheses that has guided this biography was that Dick Price’s often repeated saying – maximum availability, minimum coercion – represented an objectified concept serving defensive, restorative, and reparative functions. More specifically, this hypothesis postulated that this maxim encapsulates an attempt to restore and consolidate the validity of Dick’s personal, subjective experience. As Stolorow and Atwood demonstrated in Faces in a Cloud, metapsychological reconstruction serves a function that is analogous to a character defense. Dick’s concern with coercion became a distinctive, recurrent theme in the organization of his experience. As a guiding personal philosophy, this theme was expressed in two primary ways: First, this maxim was used as a guiding precept determining how Esalen was to carry its message to the greater world. Second, it was used as a central construct in the development of Dick’s own brand of Gestalt, that he called Gestalt Practice. The first of the two themes will be examined in greater detail immediately below. The second will be discussed later, in the context of the development of Gestalt Practice.

Maximum Availability, Minimum coercion: A Personal and Public Principle

The principle “maximum availability and minimum coercion” became central to Dick’s view of how Esalen’s workshops and seminars were to be offered and conducted. In Esalen’s very early years, as Dick remembered, “The place was open to outside leaders and open to programs whether or not I liked them. Esalen was operated to allow a number of independent scenes to go on. Mike [Murphy] and I would go along with them as long as they were within reasonable bounds.” As time progressed, Michael Murphy and Dick Price began to exert more control over Esalen’s programming. Their experience with leaders like Fritz Perls and Will Schutz and their attempts to, in Michael Murphy’s words, play the “One great game at Esalen – Capture the Flag,” had tempered their view of what, in fact, was reasonable to allow.

An additional reason to exert more control was to eliminate leaders who utilized coercive or demeaning methods, something both Dick and Mike were sensitive to. Dick, throughout his tenure as Big Sur Director, gradually increased his influence over Esalen. Dick usually attended at least one session offered by any of the many leaders who came through Esalen. Those who used demeaning or coercive methods would be given feedback or would not be asked to return.

In his personal ongoing psychological and spiritual search, Dick was equally sensitive to the issue of coercion. In 1971, having given responsibility for running Esalen to Julian Silverman, Dick took his first real break from Esalen, traveling to New York to participate in Oscar Ichazo’s Arica One training. Dick was searching – as he put it: “I’d been looking in all this miscellany of various things coming into the place [Esalen] for some type of unifying thread, some practice that would in some way give a little more cohesion. I’d thought that the Arica training might be that.” As Anderson noted, Dick’s trip was “in part a declaration of independence, in part a long-overdue vacation, and in part a search for some mortar to hold together the odd assortment of therapies and practices that he had made a part of his life.”

In addition, Dick’s developmental longings for an idealized, protective figure were aroused by Oscar Ichazo’s Arica, with its guarantee of enlightenment after 90 days under the tutelage of a reportedly “perfect master.” In retrospect his friends have speculated that because Dick could see people’s flaws, he thought he needed to find a truly enlightened person. There’s a saying in Sufìsm, All the teacher must possess is everything the student needs. And that was probably true with Dick – all a teacher had to have was everything that Dick needed. What he probably believed he needed was someone to be perfect, in that way. They did have to be perfect, in fact, but they would have needed to have Dick confront that issue, without coercion.

Although Dick’s developmental longings for idealizing self-object experiences were defensively sequestered behind the need to preserve his personal autonomy, he seemed to always be searching for something – a method, a practice, a teacher, or a person. As Dick’s wife Chris said, in reference to Arica: “He was looking for a container that was big enough … he wanted playmates, he would have liked a parent, in a sense, a teacher. He would have liked to have found someone who would have felt like his teacher.” One of the appeals of Arica, for Dick, was that so many people he trusted had been through the Arica training in Chile and had recommended Oscar Ichazo. That group included both a fellow student of Fritz’s, Claudio Naranjo, who was a psychiatrist and close personal friend of Jack Downing, as well as Dick’s friend John Lilly. In fact, so many Esalen leaders and former residential program members had gone to train with Oscar Ichazo that “Arica,” Dick once said, ‘cleared our bench!”

Dick enjoyed some things about the Arica training, particularly the regimen of meditation combined with strenuous physical exercise. “I like following someone else’s orders,” Dick said, “at least for a while.” However, he was put off by many things as well. He did not like the humiliations students were subjected to in the supposed service of disarming the ego. As Dick described his experience at the Arica training to Walter Anderson, “There is something about this type of thing that goes like this: Well if you haven’t had our training which is training x,y,z, then you’re not really a person, yet. 1f you’re not really a person, you’re unconscious and I can do anything I want with you. You exist to be manipulated for your own good – and I had a very hard time with this position.”

Dick also had trouble with the mounting pressure to make additional commitments to the Arica school. The pressure included being accepted for three months additional training without Dick’s ever requesting to do so, something Dick found to be quite manipulative. As Dick put it: “I didn’t accept being accepted.”

One of the last straws for Dick at the Arica training was his protest about a spiritual exercise involving a mudra (a spiritual body position) that duplicated the Nazi salute. Participants were supposed to extend their right arm towards Oscar Ichazo. Recognizing that he and many others had Jewish heritage, Dick voiced his discomfort, only to be told that his ego-inspired objection was completely out of line. Dick left the three-month training eight days early, convinced, more than ever, that authoritarianism and coercion were antithetical to genuine spiritual or psychological practice. As Dick said, “Part of the result in me was I got to a stronger and stronger position in relation to Esalen programming. Present…make no claims, no promises, no proselytizing, especially – the idea is 100% availability and 0% coercion – this is the idea.”

In part because of Dick’s experience with Arica, and in part because of similar experiences that Michael Murphy had at the Aurobindo ashram in India, Esalen sponsored a conference in 1973 entitled, “Spiritual and Therapeutic Tyranny: The Willingness to Submit.” One of the reasons that Dick Price and Michael Murphy founded Esalen was to provide a forum for bringing knowledge of Eastern philosophy and religion to America. They hoped that they could do this without the authoritarian cast that they both knew spiritual schools were prone to. Moreover, the rise in popularity in the early 1970s of Oscar Ichazo’s Arica, Werner Erhard’s EST training, and Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, alerted both of Esalen’s founders to the fact that authoritarian self-righteousness was on the rise in the human potential movement – a movement they bore some responsibility for creating.

Mike and Dick hoped that the conference would alert the potential followers of the human potential movement to the inherent dangers of authoritarianism in psychological or spiritual development. They also hoped to inspire some needed self-examination among the group leaders and teachers currently working under the human potential umbrella. The roster of speakers included some of the very leaders whose methods had inspired the conference (e.g. Werner Erhard); some outspoken critics of authoritarianism in both the spiritual and therapeutic realms (e.g. psychologist Joe K. Adams and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz); and a wide assortment of contemporary notable figures such as Jerry Rubin (Berkeley Free Speech leader), Paul Krassner (editor of the Realist), Will Schutz, Claudio Naranjo (Arica affiliated Gestalt therapist), and John Vasconcellos (California assemblyman). Writer Sam Keen gave the keynote address entitled, The Tyranny Game, or, How to Play Follow the Leader. Attendees included a wide variety of those affiliated, in some way, with the human potential movement.

The conference was much less successful than Esalen’s co-founders had hoped. It actually turned into a very angry meeting. It showed, however, that Esalen had a conscience and was capable of airing, within the human potential movement itself, the very issues that its most severe critics had been raising. The conference also served to validate the wisdom that both Dick and Mike had held from the very beginning of their new project – that Esalen’s offerings would consist of a very wide array of “those trends in religion, philosophy, and the behavioral sciences which emphasize the potentialities of human existence,” without letting any one person or any one philosophy “capture the flag.” The conference was also an expression and validation of Dick’s precept for Esalen: maximum availability, minimum coercion.

Before Dick’s sojourn to the Arica training, he had put Julian Silverman in charge of the day to day operation of Esalen – the first time the place had been supervised by someone other than Dick or Mike. When Dick returned from Arica, Julian continued running Esalen, leaving Dick more freedom to pursue personal interests. Dick started focusing more of his time and attention on Gestalt. He did trainings, community Gestalt groups, work with individuals, and developed his own form of Gestalt work, eventually called Gestalt Practice. As Mike remembers, “He [Dick] came into his own gradually in the 1970s.”

In February 1971, in a Gestalt and Rolfing workshop Dick co-led with Hector Prestera and John O. Stevens, Dick met the woman who would become his second wife, Christine Stewart. Chris, who had just graduated from high school, had come out to the West Coast to visit her sister, Gail, who lived in Berkeley. Chris came to Esalen specifically to take Dick’s group. She had read Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy Verbatim and had been very impressed. Chris, although only 17 at the time, had already been in quite a few groups, including some encounter groups. She had experienced both the positive and the negative potential of group experience. When she watched Dick work for the first time she was struck by the fact that, “Everything I had ever valued about group was present, and everything I was suspicious about, wasn’t. … The way this human being was showing up was completely trustworthy, and I’d never seen anybody be that clear and clean in the way they sat with somebody. …The absence of judgment – spaciousness of what was being allowed to happen, but also a lot of engagement.”

Chris went back to her home in College Park, Maryland after the workshop, but when she came out to Esalen again in the following fall of 1971, she and Dick became romantically involved. Chris went back to Maryland briefly in the spring of 1972, and then in October of 1972 she came to Esalen permanently. The couple married in February of 1974 and had a daughter, named Jennifer, late that same year.

Dick’s marriage to Chris and the birth of his daughter, Jenny, had a very profound, positive impact on Dick’s life, something everyone was in agreement about. As Dick’s friend John Heider commented: “Really when Chris came into his life, it was transformative.” Seymour Carter, another of Dick’s friends, was even more emphatic:

He was so deeply scarred, it was clear to me he needed a love, and then Chris came into his life. Chris turned out to be a gift from heaven in the sense that she was a very beautiful woman, loved Dick unrestrainedly, was a nurturing mother, a warm person – all those things that if I were analyzing the things and ingredients he needed in his life…. I felt the friendships he established, the peer group, and then bonding with Chris took him out of his incredibly encapsulated isolation. I would say that Chris was the ingredient he needed – everything else was preliminary. Well, I mean in a way, he worked so hard to provide so much for so many people, I was so grateful to Chris that she came into his life.

As Walter Anderson commented, “By the mid-1970s, many people had come to regard Richard Price as a spiritual and psychological leader of stature and maturity.” It seemed to everyone at Esalen that Dick, who had gotten there the hard way, had finally settled down into a comfortable, fulfilling life. His wife Chris, a beautiful woman he obviously loved, was co-leading Gestalt groups with him and was clearly coming into her own as a Gestalt practitioner. Their daughter, Jennifer, to whom Dick was obviously devoted, was now a bright, inquisitive, and very charming 3-year old.

However, as his 1969 psychotic episode had revealed, Dick still bore some deep, untreated psychological wounds and more vulnerability than he generally allowed to be seen. He still had lingering physical pain that he attributed to his insulin shock treatments and had deep feelings of having been betrayed by his family. Maintaining his psychological equilibrium was something Dick continually worked very hard at. He was always on the lookout for something new, something that might help him settle an ongoing, and sometimes quite palpable, sense of internal restlessness.

In the late 1970s, Baghwan Shree Rajneesh was looming large on the human potential horizon. His followers, who called themselves “sannyasins,” were seen frequently at Esalen and could be readily identified by their orange attire and by the picture of Rajneesh they wore around their necks, in a necklace called a “mala.” Dick had read Rajneesh’s books and had listened to some of his lectures on tape and he was favorably impressed. Like Oscar Ichazo’s Arica, Rajneesh offered a wide array of spiritual, psychological, and physical practices. Moreover, he was the first Eastern spiritual leader to incorporate Western psychological techniques, like encounter and Gestalt therapy. To Dick, the combination of meditation, group psychological work, emotional catharsis, and physical exercise exerted a strong appeal. Surprising almost everyone at Esalen, Dick announced that he was going off to Poona, India to study at Rajneesh’s ashram. He had even been given a sannyasin name by Rajneesh himself, Geet Govind.

Dick’s pilgrimage was widely followed, both in Esalen circles and in the press. A Time Magazine article documenting Rajneesh’s popularity titled, ‘God Sir’ at Esalen East, duly noted that “the guru is instructing his best-connected disciple yet: Richard Price, co-founder of the Esalen Institute, the very fount of the encounter craze. Price will return to the Big Sur, Calif. center in mid-January to apply the teachings of his new master.” All went well at Poona until Dick graduated from the ashram’s so called “meditation camp” and went into an encounter group. The group was led by a man named Teertha, an English psychotherapist who had participated in encounter groups in London led by the Esalen group leader most identified with encounter, psychologist Will Schutz. Teertha’s techniques went beyond anything Dick had seen at Esalen. In Dick’s first group, a woman got into a fight and broke her arm. A few days later, in a group Dick wasn’t in, a woman’s leg was broken. In addition to the violence, there was also forced sexual contact in Dick’s group.

Repulsed and outraged at what he had seen, Dick soon left the ashram. In an unpublished letter to Time Magazine, Dick attempted to let the world know what he had found at Poona and vehemently disavowed any Esalen-Poona connection:

Rajneesh is well worth reading…. He can speak brilliantly of the transformative possibility of human life. His “meditations” I find worth practicing. However, the ashram “encounter” group is an abomination – authoritarian, intimidating, violent – used to enforce conformity to an emerging orange new order rather than to facilitate growth. Broken bones are common, bruises and abrasions beyond counting. As such it owes more to the S.S. than to Esalen. Until the compassion Rajneesh speaks about with such eloquence is reflected in his groups, I am content to be known as “Richard Price” rather than as “Geet Govind.”

Again, Dick’s search had ended in disillusionment and disappointment. Instead of finding something for himself, someone he might idealize or who could become his teacher, he found profound human suffering at the hands of demeaning, coercive, and dangerous forms of spiritual and psychological practice. Dick, originally outspoken in his praise of Rajneesh, was very eager to share his distaste at what he had seen. As George Leonard commented, “you could use the old fashioned word debunk – and he was very convincing.” There were more than a few people at Esalen who were relieved at Dick’s rejection of Rajneesh. Those people, including co-founder Mike Murphy, had been afraid that with Dick’s pilgrimage to Poona, Rajneesh might actually capture Esalen’s flag. Looking back, Mike Murphy felt that: “With Rajneesh – that was in the late 70s – it was almost his [Dick’s] last hurrah as a seeker, before he became his own teacher, his own authority.”

Dick’s wife Chris seems to echo Mike’s sentiments in the following reflection on Dick’s experience with Rajneesh:

I think Rajneesh was a very good immunization. I think he made some peace with something through that mess in that place you are talking about. He stopped looking for something bigger than him. He had the Nine [a group of “channeled” non-human entities from the star Sirius] and that was fun, that was on that edge, the whole Rajneesh thing was on that edge. It was something in those last couple of years where I don’t think he had that feeling any more of, “I’m looking for what is bigger than me so I can feel the holding and the expanding into it.” I think he came to another kind of understanding of how that could happen. And it could happen – part of it was that our relationship was at a place where it served some of it – his understanding of his own inner practice was at a place where it could serve some of it – the collective could serve some of it, including all the limitations of the collective. He’d come to a certain maturity where I don’t think he was looking for a place anymore.

Both Oscar Ichazo and Rajneesh held out a promise Dick found subjectively appealing. They both claimed to be enlightened. They both offered a combination of psychological, spiritual, and physical practices that Dick had, for years, been attempting to synthesize, himself. They both engaged Dick’s idealizing self-object longings, at least for a while. They both tried to use Dick and his position as co-founder of Esalen for their own proselytizing purposes. In the end, what Dick found most troubling with both Arica and Rajneesh was that: “Everything you do that is at variance with the company line, is an ego. So you’re already categorized, there is no way to come back at it – the only way to come back at it is quit. Which I did, both at the Arica training, and with Rajneesh.”

In the language of intersubjectivity, both Arica and Rajneesh had delegitimized and pathologized the experiential truth of what Dick had been witness to. His strong reaction had arisen, not in Dick’s isolated mind, but in intersubjective fields that denied the authoritarian dimensions of what was being done. Thus, both systems produced intersubjective fields that lent themselves to very old and powerful subjective dangers for Dick – a repetition of the denial of his subjective reality and the attempted replacement by an external authority through coercive means.

Although Dick’s idealizing self-object needs had been aroused by both Oscar Ichazo and Rajneesh, in the long run it was not easy for Dick to idealize someone. Dick was very astute in seeing people’s flaws and shortcomings. Idealization implies that you overlook someone’s shortcomings, foregrounding aspects of the other person that match or lend themselves to your self-object needs and backgrounding the parts of them that do not. Dick’s need to see people in their full depth and texture eventually superseded his idealizing needs. Dick’s legendary deep respect for the alterity of the other person, a respect for the person’s fundamental otherness in the fullest dimensions of who they were, ultimately made idealization quite difficult for him. Dick truly did long for an idealized figure, with whom he could feel contained in the most positive sense, feeling safe to unfold his experience and have his self-object longings met. However, finding someone whose horizons of experience were significantly wider than his own, which for him idealizing would imply, would not be easy.

Heinz Kohut distinguished between archaic and mature “selfobject” needs. (Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure [1984]) A “selfobject” is a person experienced in a way that repairs, maintains, consolidates, restores, or positively affects the sense of self. (Stolotow, et al., supra [1987]) The hallmarks of mature self-object needs are flexibility and the lack of specificity, while archaic needs are very fragile, very specific and easily spoiled. Even with Oscar Ichazo and Rajneesh, both of whom Dick decried to many people, an appreciation and respect could still be found on his part for their writings, aspects of teaching, and some of their practices. Dick could separate the work from the person – the message from the messenger. He could take what was of value and leave the rest, something he so often encouraged his students to do with his teachings. Hence his precept: maximum availability, minimum coercion.

As Dick matured, his self-object needs were increasingly met through a broad range of experiences. With the ending of Dick’s searches outside of Esalen, he turned toward his own practice, which more and more began to center on his own form of Gestalt work – namely, Gestalt  Practice. As Dick told Walter Anderson in 1982: “Mike [Murphy] talks about, himself, how convinced he was that we were bringing in a new age. I don’t think I was ever quite as sold, as some people seem to be, on that point of view. I felt that there was value in something more modest…. How do you upgrade the type of counseling and psychological work that goes on? That was more my focus than bringing in the millennium. If the millennium happens in the process, that’s fine too. But I would say that my ambitions were a lot more modest.” With this perspective in mind, it is time to examine Dick’s involvement with counseling and psychological work and, more specifically, Gestalt therapy.

Gestalt Therapy: Perls’ Gestalt Therapy Model and its Subjective Appeal

Dick’s personal philosophy, highlighting availability and minimizing coercion, was also a central underlying concept in the development of his own brand of Gestalt therapy, which he called Gestalt Practice. However, before discussing how Dick changed and transformed the Gestalt therapy model that he inherited from his mentor Fritz Perls, it will be helpful to provide some background and a brief synopsis of Perlsian Gestalt therapy. This will serve as the groundwork for a discussion of what Dick found personally and subjectively appealing in Fritz’s model, reflecting important aspects of Dick’s personal phenomenology.

According to Dick, “Fritz [Perls] first came here [Esalen] Christmas of 1963 through an old student of his named Gene Sagan. He liked it here and decided to settle in April of 1964. It was very much on his own initiative and not ours.” Dick and Mike acquiesced to Fritz’s wish to take up residence at Esalen, and a house on the cliff above the baths, called “Fritz’s,” was built for him using $10,000 of his own funds. Initially, in his role as Big Sur Director, Dick was put off by Fritz. According to Dick, “At first I was negatively impressed by him, thinking him bitter and not a nice old man. Watching him work was very unpleasant: he seemed unnecessarily cruel. In the early days here he would sit by himself and whoever came and sat with him generally felt repelled. He didn’t feel to me like someone I could trust and I just didn’t want to expose myself to him.” Actually, Fritz was very sick when he first arrived at Esalen. As Dick observed, “So he was difficult. Personally, I didn’t care if he stayed or left. He felt he was dying of a heart condition. He only became easier to live with as his health improved through his work with Ida Rolf, and as a result of a more settled and generally healthy life here.”

In 1966 after his break-up with Jeanie McGowan, Dick entered one of Fritz’s workshops, then worked with him, and encountered a very different man from the one Dick thought he knew. As Dick described the experience... “But as I said, at first I didn’t trust him. I saw him putting people down and having very little patience. If someone was obviously disturbed and came to see him and Fritz wasn’t interested, I’d see him just turn away. It was almost brutal. But in the context of the group I saw him as loving and patient and sensitive. It was just like a coin turned around. All the things I thought he was utterly without, in the course of the group he had with a richer degree than anyone I had ever witnessed.”

From the very first session in the workshop, Dick remembered feeling that, “Oh, so this is what psychotherapy is supposed to be…. And what are all the other things I’ve been doing?” As Dick told Walt Anderson, he did not have a big therapeutic breakthrough. Instead Dick said, “I think it was a product of the whole week. From the beginning exercises Fritz’s simple: What is your experience like? O.K. Is this all? – Not is this all, in the sense that this is it. This is an approach. I don’t think anyone had ever asked me… Hey Dick, what is your experience? …It seemed so simple and so right. For me, what Fritz gave me was some tools.”

After the workshop, Dick became one of Fritz’s primary students and remained so until Fritz’s death in 1970. In order to set the stage for examining Dick’s personal form of Gestalt work – namely, Gestalt Practice – it will be useful to provide a brief synopsis of the Gestalt therapy model Dick inherited from his mentor.

Perls’ Gestalt Therapy Model: A Brief Synopsis

The theoretical foundations of Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy emanated from multiple perspectives. In addition to Gestalt psychology, lines of influence included psychoanalysis and a derivative of the psychoanalytic movement led by Wilhelm Reich, as well as phenomenology, existential thought, Eastern philosophy (most notably Zen), and general semantics. One concept that united these various influences, and that provided a rationale for the techniques employed in Gestalt therapy, was the concept of a need-fulfillment pattern in the individual, as a process of Gestalt formation and destruction. This need-fulfillment pattern was called “organismic self-regulation” by Fritz Perls, and described a homeostatic process by which the organism fulfills its needs by interacting with the environment. According to Perls: “Formulating this principle in terms of Gestalt psychology, we can say that the dominant need of the organism, at any time, becomes the foreground figure, and the other needs recede, at least temporarily, into the background. The foreground is that need which presses most sharply for satisfaction, whether the need is, as in our example to preserve life itself, or whether it is related to less physically vital areas – whether it is physiological or psychological.” (Perls, The Gestalt Approach… [1973], p.8)

In the Gestalt therapy model, human experience was primarily construed in terms of two interrelated principles: the figure/ground relationship (inherited from Gestalt psychology) and the principle of organismic self-regulation. To Perls, the individual’s experience was organized by “need cycles” in both psychological and physiological realms. Need cycles organize/energize behavior on both the subjective-perceptual level and on the objective-motor level. Need cycles are homeostatic and organize themselves hierarchically, in terms of clarity and prominence, in accord with Gestalt formation principles of figure and ground. The organizing “figure” is the current dominant need of the organism placed in the context of its “ground,” which is the organism/environmental field. This “natural” process, Perls termed “organismic self-regulation.” The organism meets its current, dominant need by contacting the environment via sensory-motor behavior. When a need is met, the Gestalt it formed becomes complete and Gestalt formation cycles to Gestalt destruction. The organism is then free to form new Gestalts, the highest priority need emerging at the interface of the organism/environmental field in a continuous process of Gestalt formation/destruction.

Healthy Gestalt formation/destruction was characterized as a procession of one clear figure after another against the ground of the organism/environmental field. Pathology in the Perlsian model was conceptualized in terms of breakdowns in the Gestalt formation/destruction process by various forms of interference. Three basic interferences, conceptualized as limits and/or controls on awareness, were theorized: first, poor perceptual contact with the external world and/or the body; second, blocked expression of needs; and third, repression of Gestalt formation.

In the Perlsian model, the aim of psychotherapy was the prevention of interruptions or fixations in the Gestalt formation/destruction process. The principal technique utilized to overcome interruptions and fixations, was the facilitation of awareness. Standing in the way of developing awareness and finishing incomplete Gestalten were the client’s particularized avoidance responses that limited or controlled awareness. In the Gestalt therapy model, human beings developed habitual or standardized patterns of feeling, perceiving, thinking, acting, and avoiding in relation to emerging needs. In therapy, these habitual patterns were broken into sub-units, allowing a more focused awareness to be brought to bear. Through focusing awareness, a reorganization of the Gestalt formation process occurred, allowing the self-regulating capacity of the organism to re-establish itself. Framed in terms of figure/ground, this meant the breaking up of poorly organized person/environment fields by heightening or emphasizing the emerging figure and allowing it to form the strongest coherence possible. This process of Gestalt formation and destruction provided an autonomous criterion for adjustment.

If one could sum up Fritz Perls’ message in a single phrase, it would be: through awareness comes choice, and without awareness, choice is quite limited. The means whereby in Gestalt therapy, and the end gained, were precisely the same thing – awareness. Fritz said, “And I believe that this is the great thing to understand; that awareness per se – by and of itself – can be curative. Because with full awareness you become aware of this organismic self-regulation, you can let the organism take over without interfering, without interrupting; we can rely on the wisdom of the organism.” (Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim [1969], p.17)

According to Perls the goal of psychotherapy was not a cure, but a fostering of development or growth evidenced in the ability of the personality to form ever more complex Gestalts. As Perls said: “The ultimate goal of the treatment can be formulated thus: We have to achieve that amount of integration which facilitates its own development.” Perls conceived development in term of progressive movements away from relying on the external environment for support: “Maturing is the transcendence from environmental support to self-support.”

The Subjective Appeal of Perls’ Gestalt Therapy: Four Conjunctions

Four areas of conjunction between Dick Price’s subjective world and the metapsychological presuppositions of Perls’ Gestalt therapy enhanced the subjective appeal of Gestalt therapy for Dick. All four provided avenues by which Dick’s subjective world could be validated and/or consolidated. First, by realizing personal autonomy, Gestalt therapy served as a means of affirming Dick’s central organizing principle, dependency is dangerous. Second, with its emphasis on the physical body as the “ground” against which any particular behavior, as “figure,” was to be organized and understood, Gestalt therapy validated one of the primary ways Dick dealt with problematic subjective experience – physicality. Third, Gestalt therapy, with its emphasis on emotional expression (implying discharge and/or riddance), validated Dick’s felt need to rid himself of an inner toxicity he attributed to his mother’s influence. Fourth, and finally, the primacy of awareness as both means and end in Gestalt therapy served to support and confirm Dick’s long-standing personal identification with Buddhist spirituality and meditation practice. These four areas of conjunction will be discussed in greater detail.

Gestalt Therapy: The Realization of Personal Autonomy.

A basic constituent of Perls’ Gestalt model and its central principle – organismic self-regulation – was based upon an autonomous criterion for adjustment, a criterion located safely within the individual and away from external authority. All one needed to do, therapeutically speaking, was to remove the social or neurotic strictures (cast as avoidances to awareness), and then the creative, spontaneous “organismic self-regulation” would take over. Moreover, for Perls, the social and neurotic strictures often turned out to be synonymous. However, Perls preoccupation with personal autonomy and self-sufficiency was deeply linked to a central, repetitive developmental theme in Perls’ own life.

According to Perls’ biographer, Martin Shepard, Fritz had a very painful childhood. His parents bore little affection for each other and they often argued, which sometimes led to bitter fighting and the physical abuse of Fritz’s mother. Fritz’s father, Nathan, was “stern, autocratic, and most uncaring – a man who frequently referred to his young son Frederich as a stuck scheisse – a piece of shit. (Shepard, Fritz: An Intimate Portrait [1975], p.19) So Perls hated his father and even came to doubt his paternity. His mother, Amelia, physically punished Fritz’s growing rebelliousness with whips and carpet beaters. Both parents came to believe their son was “bad.” Fritz’s attempts to find affirmation outside his family were also problematic. He was expelled from school for failing grades, was dismissed from an apprenticeship because of his unruliness, and his first sexual experience (with a prostitute at age of 13) ended in rejection and humiliation. According to Shepard, the legacy of Fritz’s painful childhood was a “constant hunger for affirmation.” (Shepard, supra [1975], p.23)

This personal developmental theme, about the need for affirmation and its association with repetitive experiences of rejection, led Perls to defensively disavow the inherent vulnerability associated with that need. This personal, developmental theme was incorporated as the human condition in Perls’ psychological theory, when he defined psychological health in terms of becoming a self-sufficient, autonomous individual. To Perls, the criterion for maturity was transcending environmental support and achieving self-support. Perls’ lifelong struggle with profound feelings of rejection found a powerful antidote in his reactive, rigid preoccupation with leading a completely independent, autonomous existence. Perls’ autobiography barely mentions his wife Laura (to whom he actually owed a great deal in terms of the development of Gestalt therapy), totally ignores the fact that he had two children, and displays a conspicuous lack of involvement with, or commitment to, his clients, personal friends, philosophical values, social causes, or political beliefs. The need to disavow vulnerability by the realization of personal autonomy is a centrally significant, recurring pattern in Perls’ life. It demonstrates – to put the matter in figure/ground terms – the power of ongoing restrictions of ground, out of which any figure, including the tenets of a psychological theory, must emerge. It also highlights the difficulty, for a theorist, of stepping outside his or her own subjective organization of experience in order to gain an objective standpoint from which to build a psychological theory.

To understand the Gestalt model’s preoccupation with autonomy, it is also important to consider the socio-historical context that formed the backdrop for its development. The historical period in which Gestalt therapy emerged was marked by the end of World War I and the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, followed by Soviet Communism and the McCarthy era in the United States. It was a period that was over-socialized and over-controlled, not just sexually and materially, but politically, socially, and militarily as well. There were unending wars, civil wars, colonial wars, depression, fascism and finally an Orwellian state of militarization under nuclear threat.

If external authority, which proved itself to be destructive in the eyes of Gestalt therapy’s originators, had lost its legitimacy, then other sources of authority had to be found. For Perls and his activist co-author, Paul Goodman, that other source was the process of Gestalt formation and the derivative principle of organismic self-regulation. That process was accessible to awareness, which was located safely within the individual – away from the corrupting influence of social and political authority. It was also a process that served to legitimize personal autonomy.

Perls’ defensive solution to the problem of rejection had strong echoes in Dick Price’s life. Dick, like Fritz, had suffered at the hands of external authority, both parental and social. Dick and Fritz had both been raised by an often absent and, at best, indifferent fathers. Dick, like Fritz, had suffered at the hands of external authority (Dick via his hospitalizations and Fritz as a Jew in Nazi Germany). However, Dick had the added vulnerability of a more brittle and precarious sense of self. For this reason, Gestalt therapy’s faith in the creative power of the individual had considerable appeal to Dick Price. By locating the criterion for adjustment firmly within the individual – away from external authority, and by having that criterion accessible to the individual through personal awareness, the Gestalt model served two important reparative functions for Dick. First, the model affirmed the validity of Dick’s subjective experience; and second, it limited the legitimacy of external authority and control. Of considerable appeal to Dick was Fritz’s belief that self-regulation meant that the organism could be relied upon to take care of itself, without being meddled with from outside.

Gestalt Therapy: Emphasis on the Physical Body.

When Perls spoke of the organism and “organismic,” or even holism and a “holistic approach,” he really meant “the body.” Perls was influenced by Wilhelm Reich and the conception of permanent muscular tension manifested as “character armor,” and the related notion of “character analysis.” Perls was analyzed by Reich in the 1930s. Reich’s influence can be seen in many aspects of Gestalt therapy – most explicitly in the emphasis on the physical body.

Perls originally called his approach “concentration therapy,” a term he took directly from Reich. Perls’ proposed revision of “psycho-analysis” included replacing free association with “concentration” as a form of focused attention that would later be cast in terms of awareness. Perls’ central metaphor in his revision of psychoanalysis was dental aggression, the need to chew thoroughly (mentally as well as physically), rather than swallowing things whole (introjection). For Perls, avoidance was the main characteristic of neurosis, and concentration provided its corrective opposite: “By concentration on the symptom we remain in the field (though on the periphery) of the repressed Gestalt. By persevering with such concentration work we work towards the center of the field or ‘complex’; during this process we encounter and reorganize the specific avoidances, e.g. resistances.” (Perls, Ego, Hunger and Aggression [1947], p.189)

Perls, following Reich’s model of character armor, with its emphasis on bodily attitude, posture, and gesture, concluded that neurosis was to be encountered in the body. If neurosis was in the body, then bodily interventions were called for. Perls did precisely this when he advocated concentration on bodily expressions of neurotic muscular tension, blocks, or inhibitions as a therapeutic intervention. Perls also advocated developing the ability to concentrate on the physical activity of chewing – a body-based metaphor for mental assimilation. Developing the ability to concentrate on bodily feelings and sensations was of primary importance to Perls because “the external figure-background formation follows primarily the internal urges, and once the internal concentration is achieved, the external will follow suit.” (Perls, supra [1947], p.231) Late in life, Perls went so far as to express the view that anything not experienced as felt sensation, in the body, was therapeutically speaking, a waste of time.

Perls’ emphasis on the physical body established the body, itself, as the “ground” against which any particular behavior, as “figure,” had to be organized and understood. By so doing, Gestalt therapy validated one of the primary ways Dick dealt with problematic subjective experience, by grounding that experience in the here and now reality of physical experience. Dick used physicality as a means of antidoting problematic subjective experience. Grounding problematic subjective experience in the body gave Dick a sense of the real when his subjective reality was beginning to crumble or fragment.

Gestalt Therapy: The Ethic of Expression.

Expression was central in Perls’ Gestalt therapy. Working with past influences on the personality, such as “toxic introjects,” was accomplished by re-experiencing the past in the present – what Naranjo called presentifïcation: “an inward attempt to identify with or relive past events, or most often, a re-enacting of the scenes with gestural and postural participation as well as verbal exchanges as in psychodrama.” According to Perls, “It is insufficient to merely recall a past incident, one has to psychodramatically return to it.” (Perls, supra [1973], p.65).

The aim of re-experiencing was the “transformation of emotion to action, into self-expression and integration.” Using language that would have appealed to Dick, Edward Smith described the process of how one might deal with a “toxic introject” in Gestalt therapy through expression:

Organismic growth is through emotional expression where once it was not allowed. The toxic introject becomes irrelevant when the contact/withdrawal rhythm is re-established and the organism flows with life energy. Awareness is the guide, and emotional expression (action>interaction>satisfaction) is proof of the growth. On the psychophysiological level, growth is the giving up of anxious contraction against expansion. It is finding and allowing the natural rhythm between expansion and relaxed contraction. (Smith, The Body in Psychotherapy [1985], p.56)

Given Dick’s history of toxic influence, the push in Gestalt towards expression, towards getting in touch with deeply held “introjected” material, and being able to rid oneself of its influence by means of a cathartic, expansive release, was of immense subjective appeal. There was a strong Reichian tone to the discharge in Gestalt, the release of dammed-up energy and the possibility of freedom associated with that release. As has been noted, Perls was a psychoanalytic patient of Reich’s and was deeply influenced by his work.

Dick became an avid supporter of cathartic methods. At Esalen, he supported practitioners of Reichian work, Bioenergetics, and practitioners of other “neo-Reichian” work. Dick personally sponsored conferences for practitioners of Reichian-related disciplines, and supported their work by enabling them to offer workshops at Esalen. Dick, according to Seymour Carter, embraced a “container/contained model” in his Gestalt work that “pushed for catharsis.” Seymour  often hiked with Dick and worked with him in the late 1960s. Seymour remembered Dick’s “stuck place” in relation to his mother, which Dick often returned to in their work. Seymour said, “I wasn’t adept and seasoned enough or had the relationship with him to challenge him on that. He would repeat and go back to the same place, a stuck episode with him curling up. I’m realizing now that maybe he was looking for the cathartic model to get him through that, instead of examining his restlessness or what was the manic-ness, why he was disturbed in a manic way.”

Dick longed to be free from his mother’s toxic influence and the residual effects of her early definition of who he was and who he would be allowed to be. The Gestalt solution to the problem of “toxic introjects” was very appealing. Gestalt’s recognition of the need for the emotional expression of toxicity in order to discharge it, validated Dick’s experience of toxicity and his felt need to be free from it. The idea of a toxic introject as an explanatory metaphor concretized Dick’s experience of toxic invasiveness into a psychological entity that became part of the structure of his mind. In intersubjective theory, such felt toxicity would be regarded as a vestige of intersubjective transactions of relatedness between Dick and his mother, in which Dick experienced her as being a toxic invasion into the very core of who he was.

The toxicity Dick felt was the result of an experiential sense of invasiveness that was perceived as being toxic and contaminating. This sense of contamination helped give rise to the organizing principle, dependency is dangerous. Dependency was dangerous for Dick – it threatened the integrity of an individualized, authentic sense of selfhood. In phenomenological terms, Dick’s belief in the importance of expelling affect, in expressing things and getting them outside himself, was a concretization of the experience of invasiveness and usurpation by a toxic agent. The subjective appeal of Gestalt’s ethic of expression validated Dick’s experience of having been invaded and controlled and the felt need to somehow rid himself of the influence of those experiences. Gestalt’s ethic of expression as a means of transforming past, emotional unfinished business via self-expression represented a conjunction between Dick’s subjective world and the metapsychology of Gestalt therapy.

However, there was a major problem with expressive or cathartic methods for Dick. They can only work if there is something that needs to be gotten rid of. They cannot work when there is something missing, when something needs to be found.  That was the whole idea of the idealizable person (Oscar Iscazo, Rahneesh) that Dick couldn’t find or couldn’t allow.

Gestalt Therapy and Buddhism: Awareness as Means and End

The compatibility of Gestalt therapy and Eastern philosophical traditions has been widely recognized. Gestalt therapy has had a strong affiliation with Taoism and Buddhism, particularly Zen and Vipassana insight meditation.  Fritz Perls studied Zen Buddhism, first, in the 1930s, following his personal disappointment with Freud and his disenchantment with psychoanalysis. Then he studied Zen for a second time, later in his life, spending two months at a Zen monastery in Kyoto, Japan. Although Fritz sometimes disparaged meditation practice – he once said, “meditation is neither shit nor get off the pot” – meditation was something Perls occasionally practiced.

According to Edward Smith, Perls infused Gestalt therapy with the essence of Taoism and Zen. He did so by stressing experiencing – a “slowing down” and a “getting in touch” with one’s natural rhythm and/or true nature (as in organismic self-regulation). (Smith, supra [1985], p.12)  Perls said, “Man transcends himself only via his true nature, not through ambition and artificial goals.” (Perls, supra [1973], p.49)  Like Taoism and Zen, Gestalt therapy embraced a paradoxical view of change. From the Gestalt perspective, change happened from discovering and living in harmony with one’s true nature. Change can only happen when someone becomes what they are, not when they try to become what they are not.

Like Taoism and Zen, Gestalt therapy valued experiencing over thinking. There was an enlightenment, a waking up, or what Perls referred to as a “mini-satori,” in the immediate and full contact with reality that occurred by seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching, not through thought alone. Hence Perls used the oft-quoted maxim: “lose more of your ‘mind’ and come more to your senses.”

In the wisdom of Gestalt therapy, as in Taoism and Zen, one can only rid oneself of unwanted thoughts and feelings by first accepting them. One must fully accept “what is” in order to let it go and move on. Like Taoism and Buddhism, Gestalt therapy valued embracing emptiness, or what Wilson Van Dusen called “the fertile void,” in order to open the “ground” for whatever needed to emerge or develop as “figure.” The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (which was Dick’s favorite text) expressed the same sentiment: “I do my utmost to attain emptiness; I hold firmly to stillness.” (TTC No. 16)

Perhaps Fritz Perls’ most important contribution was utilizing the focus of awareness as a curative intervention in psychotherapy. Perls’ emphasis on awareness as both means and end in Gestalt therapy served to support and confirm Dick Price’s long-standing personal identification with Buddhist meditation practice. Moreover, the similarity between what Dick saw Fritz doing in his Gestalt work, and the spiritual philosophy that Dick found meaningful, showed Dick that he could trust what Fritz was offering. This revelation became more dramatic because, initially, Dick did not trust Fritz. In Dick’s own words, “I just didn’t want to expose myself to him.” Later on, Dick Price talked about his initial attraction to Fritz Perls’ Gestalt work with Perls’ biographer, Martin Shepard, in terms of its compatibility with Buddhist philosophy. Dick said:

My background was one of Buddhist studies, so what I also saw, almost immediately, was the parallel between Fritz’s awareness training and The Heart of Buddhist Meditation – a text that claims to be based upon the discourse of the Buddha twenty-five centuries ago. Here was a book, apart from the lack of interpersonal possibilities, but in terms of awareness exercises, that could be used as a textbook in Gestalt. So naturally I went on to train with Fritz.

The book Dick talked about was a commentary by Nyanaponika Thera on the Sattipatthana Sutta, the guide to awareness practice for Vipassana meditation that described “bare attention,” which is an aspect of “right mindfulness.” Nyanaponika Thera said that, “Bare Attention is concerned only with the present. It teaches what so many have forgotten: to live with full awareness in the Here and Now.”

In Perls’ approach, as in Buddhist meditation practice, the client was encouraged to experience, fully, the present moment. As Perls described it, “The Gestalt technique demands of the patient that he experience as much of himself as he can, that he experience himself as fully as he can in the here and now” (Perls, supra [1973], p.63). The client must, according to Perls, develop the ability to “become truly aware at every instant of himself and his actions on whatever level – fantasy, verbal, or physical.” In Buddhist terms, this was called mindfulness practice, defined by Zen Buddhist monk Tich Nhat Hahn as “keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality.” The central technique in Perls’ approach was the “continuum of awareness” and it must have looked to Dick very much like the practice of mindfulness in Buddhist meditation: “This continuum of awareness seems to be very simple, just to be aware from second to second what’s going on. Unless we are asleep we are always aware of something. However, as soon as this awareness becomes unpleasant, most people will interrupt it.” (Perls, supra [1969], p.51)

The difference between meditation practice and the continuum of awareness in Gestalt therapy was the fact that attending to experience, moment to moment, was being verbalized in Gestalt. Stella Resnick compared Gestalt awareness and Vipassana meditation by describing “Gestalt awareness as expressed meditation.” Resnick discussed the relationship between mindfulness in Vipassana and the continuum of awareness in Gestalt therapy in the following way: “This process of mindfulness in Vipassana meditation is very similar to the practice of expressing one’s continuum of awareness in Gestalt therapy. In this exercise, the person pays attention to him- or herself and reports out loud what he or she is aware of: any thoughts, feelings, sensations, and actions.... As in the Vipassana meditation, developing the ability to be an impartial witness to one’s inner process is crucial to the Gestalt awareness.” (Resnick, Gestalt Therapy as a Meditative Practice, Gestalt Is [1975], p.225)

Gestalt: Therapeutic Model as an Encapsulation of Personal Phenomenology

Dick started to lead Gestalt groups and trainings at Esalen in 1970, at Fritz’s suggestion and with his full permission. Though their work was similar in many ways, Dick came to emphasize slightly different aspects of experience as he transformed what he had assimilated from his mentor Fritz into a style more befitting his personal phenomenology. Eventually, Dick came to call his work Gestalt Practice. Dick felt he had Fritz’s permission to give Gestalt therapy his own distinctive flavor. As Dick said:

Well, Fritz made a strong point of saying: “I do not want to train a lot of little Fritzes.” What I got from Fritz I put into my own wine bottle. There are basic similarities and there are a lot of differences too. I’m Dick and I’m not Fritz. I have a lot of appreciation for Fritz – for Fritz’s actual allowance to “take what I have and do your own thing with it.” He was very good that way. I don’t think a standardized school of Gestalt really exists. There are attempts at Gestalt institutes, but I don’t think Gestalt is something to be standardized. (Hudson Interview)

The differences in the subjective worlds of Fritz and Dick would later become recognizable as differences in their respective approaches to Gestalt. This tends to confirm the Atwood and Stolorow hypothesis that “psychological theories derive to a significant degree from the subjective concerns of their creators.” (Atwood & Stolorow, Faces in the Cloud [1993], p.176) The following discussion will briefly highlight the subjective differences that Fritz and Dick brought to their involvement with Gestalt.

Fritz Perls: Self-Sufficiency Versus the Need for Affirmation.

As previously explained, a primary concern for Fritz was a constant hunger for affirmation. Later in his life, this hunger sometimes manifested itself as a grandiose need for adulation. His outrageous behavior at Esalen with Will Shutz speaks to his core need never to be upstaged by anyone. Placed in the context of Kohut’s self-object concept, Fritz’s need for affirmation might be seen as a longing for developmental experiences of receptive mirroring. The mirroring of joy, expansiveness, pride, efficacy, competitiveness, and emergent sexuality are thought to be crucial for the consolidation of self-experience, and serves a foundational function for felt senses of self-cohesion, self-esteem, and self-confident ambition. (Stolorow et al., supra [1987]) However, for Fritz to expose his needs for mirroring in adulthood, given Fritz’s painful formative history, would be to re-expose himself to a possible repetition of devastating experiences of rejection. This highlights a type of bind, often encountered in psychotherapy. Rendered in terms of Fritz’s psychological organization, the bind was something like the following: How can developmental longings for affirmation and mirroring be acknowledged, if the fear of rejection has engendered a defensive self-sufficient style of living which seems to deny needing anything from anyone? Moreover, if mirroring needs were exposed, the fear of rejection would be heightened, mobilizing further efforts toward self-sufficiency. Efforts at self-sufficiency, because they deny needs for sustaining connections to others, eventually rekindle needs for affirming mirroring. This sets up a vicious cycle of shifts between developmental longings and fears that developmental failures will be repeated.

Fritz Perls’ disavowed need for affirmation, engendered a life-long preoccupation with being self-sufficient, in order to avoid the vulnerability associated with that need. This preoccupation became realized in Perls’ psychological theory, by his requisite of personal autonomy, and his definition of maturity in terms of self-support (as previously discussed). Cast in terms of a central organizing principle, Fritz’s preoccupation with autonomy and self-sufficiency could be formulated as follows: vulnerability is dangerous.

Fritz’s unmet need for affirmation found expression in his archaic, narcissistic demand for attention. Perhaps the most famous story that illustrated Fritz’s defensive, grandiose need for attention at Esalen was an incident in which he began to crawl around the floor on his belly during one of Abraham Maslow’s lectures in an attempt to upstage Maslow. In response to Fritz’ antics, Maslow was reported to have said, “This looks suspiciously like illness to me.” Perls’ need for adulation and attention was quite extreme.

Fritz did, however, get some of what he sought by leading his Gestalt groups. He received accepting, confirming mirroring, and sometimes even outright adulation, for his persona as a therapeutic genius. Something, however, always seemed to be lacking for Fritz, despite the praise he received. Martin Shepard reported, in an excerpt from an interview he conducted with one of Fritz’s primary students, Janet Lederman, that she said: “Fritz never believed in his therapeutic genius. That’s why he hungered for the recognition of others, why he wanted support.” That archaic, unfulfilled hunger for mirroring may go a long way toward explaining Perls’ entertaining, theatrical style and his need to perform in front of large audiences. It may also partly explain his proclamation, made late in his life: “In fact I think that individual therapy is obsolete, it should be the exception rather than the rule.”

Dick Price: Preserving Autonomy Versus the Need for Validation

Dick brought different concerns to his engagement with Gestalt. Dick’s primary concerns were the need to preserve his autonomy and to have the validity of his subjective experience affirmed (thereby maintaining the integrity of his personal world). Dick’s developmental longings for an advocate, a validating other, were for idealized self-object experiences. Those experiences reflect a child’s need for a powerful, protective figure when the child’s psychological equilibrium is disturbed. Idealized experience has been described as feeling linked to the admired other, or being accepted by a powerful and protective self-object. The importance of early experiences of being linked with idealized sources of strength, protection, soothing, and calmness are crucial for the integration of affect states involving anxiety, vulnerability, and distress, which, in turn, contribute vitally to one’s anxiety tolerance and overall sense of well-being.  

Dick’s early needs for validation and idealization were repeatedly met with disappointment. Developmentally, his exposure of needs for affirmation, validation, and idealization were met with enmeshing control (by his mother) or rejection (by his father). As Dick grew older, he began to sequester his needs for validation and his idealizing longings behind efforts to preserve his personal sense of autonomy and agency. Dick’s central organizing principle, dependency is dangerous, synthesized the central formative configurations of self and other in his development – toxic influence, accommodation, and psychological usurpation. Dependency is dangerous engendered subjective meaning to Dick’s longstanding fears of invalidation, entrapment, enmeshment, and rejection. In order to preserve an authentic, individualized sense of agency and autonomy, Dick sequestered his idealizing and validating needs. Those needs, if exposed, would make him more vulnerable to enmeshment and control on one hand (by his mother), or confirm what was felt to be repetitive experiences of uncaring rejection, on the other (by his father).

Rendered in terms of his central organizing principle, dependency is dangerous, Dick’s bind was something like the following: How can you expose your needs for validation or protection to another person without feeling dependent on that person? Feeling dependent, for Dick, gave rise to heightened feelings of anxiety and vulnerability because, in his developmental history, exposing those needs resulted in either more control or more rejection. Developmentally, when Dick experienced heightened feelings of anxiety and vulnerability, he would try to preserve his sense of personal autonomy and agency by either pretending to acquiesce to external authority and/or masking his authentic subjective reality. These defensive actions became a substitute for sharing his needs with a validating, protecting other, which is the only way those need actually could have been met.

Although both Fritz and Dick concretized personal autonomy, and defensively turned to self-sufficiency for self-protection, they did so for different reasons. Fritz did, at times, depend on others (indeed he was sometimes known to be quite manipulative in getting other people to do what he wanted), but he found it extremely difficult to be vulnerable. Dick, on the other hand, could, at times, be quite vulnerable, but he did not like to feel dependent or feel that others were dependent upon him. Dick could be very supportive and very helpful, and was so to many people until his dependency issues were activated. As Dick’s student Leonard Bearne observed: “Dick was willing to be helpful until your need for help crossed over into his need for protection or to remain hidden.”

Dick’s developmental longings for idealizing self-object experiences played a role in his two sojourns outside of Esalen – first, to New York and Oscar Ichazo’s Arica training, and second, to Poona, India and the guru Rajneesh’s ashram. On both trips, Dick was searching for a method or a person that could serve idealizing self-object functions. But Fritz was not an idealizable figure for Dick. Not only was there an initial distrust of Fritz that stood in the way, but Dick also could see Fritz’s unnecessary rudeness outside of his Gestalt groups (although Dick acknowledged that Fritz was usually very kind to people in his groups, despite his reputation to the contrary). Dick did, however, view Perls’ Gestalt therapy model to be an idealizable process, closely aligned with his personal phenomenology.

Dick’s idealizing longings included a need to feel safe with someone while, at the same time, avoiding a subjective sense of dependency. Dick was able to create a very powerful sense of psychological safety for others while doing his Gestalt work and, as a result, others often idealized him. Dick, however, remained uncomfortable with being idealized. Dick preferred, and even encouraged, a kind of silent idealization on the part of the people he worked with. But Dick did not like demands on his person that would take him out of his role as “mirror” or “reflector.” For example, when someone would ask Dick, in a Gestalt session, what he actually thought about a problem, because they idealized him and/or valued his wisdom, Dick would characteristically reply in one of two ways. In the first, he would say, “How should I know?” In the second, he would employ the Gestalt “empty chair” technique and ask the person to put their version of “Dick” in the empty chair and ask him! From this it could be surmised that Dick was uncomfortable with certain transferences. Or it could be said that in Dick’s subjective world, anything “defined by anyone else from outside” bordered on being intrusive or coercive. The following statement made by Dick serves as an example of how his conception of Gestalt Practice was deeply intertwined with his issues around dependency and coercion:

What Fritz called doctor/patient, that dyad, I refer to as reflector and initiator. The initiator is the person who was formerly in the “patient” role. My function as reflector is simply to be available to reflect and clarify whatever comes up in the person’s process. So, I’m never defining how a person should be. I’m available in a particular way – a mirror is a good analogy. The initiator remains responsible for his or her own experience. This is very unlike standard psychiatry, where you’re put, if not in a jail cell, certainly in diagnostic pigeonholes. (Hudson Interview)

In addition to idealizing needs, Dick’s longing for two additional experiences were powerful organizers of his psychological world – twinship self-object experiences and self-differentiating experiences. Both will be discussed in the context of his practice.

The twinship experience is based upon the significance of a person in the child’s surround who can compensate for deficits, because their existence or actions can be a source of genuine joy. (Kohut, supra [1984], p.204) This alter ego experience can be described as the need to see and understand, and be seen and understood, by another person who is essentially like oneself. Developmentally, the twinship experience may be associated with a fantasy of the imagined other. More mature twinship experiences can make the self feel strong and cohesive as member of a group of people. The need for twinship becomes exacerbated in a society that stresses autonomy and individualism.

Dick’s developmental longing for twinship experience found expression in his lifetime longing to be reunited with his birth twin, Bobby, as previously discussed. Dick often felt very alone in childhood and there is evidence that he had a fantasy relationship with Bobby that served twinship functions. In adulthood, Dick’s developmental longings for twinship experiences were met, to some degree, by doing his Gestalt work and by his overall involvement in the greater Esalen community. Dick, in effect, “parceled-out his twinship needs” at Esalen through a variety of experiences with many different people. There were many ways to spend time with Dick including hiking, bodywork, taking psychedelics, and Gestalt. Dick tended to spend time with people who shared those particular interests. In Leonard’s view, no one person connected with Dick on all those levels to the degree that he would have liked. However, Dick enjoyed being with people as long as it did not feel strained or forced. “The trick with Dick,” as his student Leonard Bearne observed, “was to do something he liked to do … because it was compatible with you.” To get along well with Dick, you needed to give him a fair amount of space and not intrude on his privacy. As Dick’s favorite hiking partner, Gestalt student, and the closest male friend for many years, Steve Harper, pointed out:

For the most part, what I gave him was a lot of space. In the work I did with him I kept my transference to a minimum. I had watched enough open seats, intuited enough, and knew enough about Gestalt theory that I could see that transference made Dick very uncomfortable when it was directed at him. Whenever I would feel myself in transference I kept it in check and kept it as my own. As our relationship grew this changed. Dick could tolerate my transference, but early on I gave him lots of space. I learned that if I wanted a friendship with Dick I just didn’t go there unless he led.

One of the things that formed the basis for Dick and Steve’s relationship was that Steve knew that Dick “didn’t have to worry about me emotionally, or physically.” Steve never engaged Dick’s issues with dependency. Steve could take care himself (especially when hiking) and not place demands on Dick’s personhood. Steve knew, implicitly, to respect Dick’s “space.” It was not something ever discussed, it was simply understood. Steve knew that if he pressed Dick or was intrusive “it would have closed doors to further friendship.” Many of Dick’s male friends were comfortable with silence; they felt privileged to be in Dick’s company, respected Dick’s “space” and tended not to display emotions. In Bette Dingman’s estimation, like most of Dick’s male friends: “none of you guys show your emotions, none of you do!” As Steve pointed out, however, Dick did change, over time, in his levels of openness and availability in their relationship. Although some of it was due to the longevity of friendship, Steve believed that Dick’s wife, Chris, and their relationship “was the driving force in his change.”

In his Gestalt work, Dick was able to serve as a witness for the psychological states of others and have others serve that same function for him, engendering a shared experience of what it was to be a human being – a basic component of the twinship experience. Through that shared experience, a validation and consolidation of Dick’s subjective world occurred. In addition, through his Gestalt work, Dick was able to help others experience their autonomy and to attain a measure of that all-important concept in Gestalt: “self-support.” To Dick, attaining self-support was an implicit goal of Gestalt Practice. As he said: “One [goal] is moving from environmental support to self-support. You can think of this in terms of individual self-support, but you can also think of it in terms of group self-support, where there isn’t an outside dependence.” (Hudson Interview)

By living in the Esalen community, Dick could maintain his sense of independence (indeed, such independence was upheld as a primary value at Esalen) while simultaneously feeling as though he was participating in a shared experience of exploring the cutting edge of what it means to be a human being.

The other self-object experience that was very important in organizing Dick’s subjective world and practice was the significant lack in Dick’s development of adequate self-differentiating experiences. Self-differentiation describes a developmental process in which an evolving sense of being a distinct center of experience and personal agency, with individualized aims and goals, is supported by experiences which affirm, facilitate, and solidify strivings for self-delineation and self-differentiation (i.e., having unique, personalized goals and values). (Stolorow & Atwood, supra [1992], p.79) As we saw in Dick’s developmental history, derailments in self-differentiation occurred when strivings for individualized selfhood were consistently not responded to or rejected. The enduring legacy, of Dick’s developmental history of parental accommodation and usurpation, was the immense respect he displayed in his practice for the subjective reality of those he worked with.

In Dick’s Gestalt work, his deep interest in other people – in who they were – without any need to shape them to fit his world or into common sense notions of what could be “real” or “true,” engendered profound feelings of being accepted in the people he worked with. This feeling of acceptance was almost universally acknowledged in the people who had worked with Dick. It was a fundamental difference in Dick’s work, when compared to Fritz’s. As John Heider, who saw both Fritz and Dick work, commented: “Perls did not have respect for the person. Whereas for Dick, it was very important not to violate the person’s boundary in any way. …Pure process, enormous respect, just working with what emerged… Dick was radically different.”

Respecting the legitimacy of the subjective reality of those he worked with was self-reparative for Dick. The assertion that no personal reality was more true or valid than any other worked as a solution to Dick’s early experience of invalidation and psychological usurpation. At Esalen, Dick pursued a life, through his chosen vocation of Gestalt Practice, that was largely devoted to providing others with what he needed for himself – help and support in his struggle to establish and validate a vitalizing core that would come from, to use Dick’s own words, “contact with one’s own experience not defined by anyone else from outside.” (Hudson Interview)

Gestalt Transformed: Gestalt Practice

Dick came to call his distinctive style of Gestalt therapy, “Gestalt Practice.” In his practice Dick combined everything he had been exploring, experiencing, and experimenting with. As Chris Price, who was Dick’s partner in creating and evolving Gestalt Practice, observed:

I think that everything that provided ground for people to explore altered states in different ways, for Dick to explore altered states, for these approaches of combinations of Gestalt and body work, and in some cases psychotropic substances to be worked with, everything about those things, singly and then collectively, contributed to his formation of how he sat there, both theoretically, practically and from the point of view of who he was able to be. … The thing about Dick was the way he sat there. That was it. It was the way he held space and what it means to have somebody hold space who sits in trust and is basically fearless about what is going to emerge.

Two important aspects of Dick’s subjective world that were intimately involved in the development of Dick’s practice were: First, Gestalt Practice served as a vehicle for operationalizing his principle: maximum availability, minimum coercion. Second, in creating Gestalt Practice, Dick was attempting to provide for others what would have been most useful to him during his psychological difficulties. Both these aspects served self-reparative psychological functions for Dick. The following outline of Gestalt Practice, rather than being an attempt at an exhaustive, comprehensive review, is designed to give the flavor of Dick’s approach as an extension of his personal phenomenology.

Gestalt Practice and Gestalt Therapy: Similarities

As Dick acknowledged, there were basic similarities and basic differences as between Gestalt Practice and Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy. The basic similarities included: first, adopting the principle of organismic self-regulation (and the realization of personal autonomy that principle embodies); second, a commitment to awareness in the here and now as therapeutic means/end; and third, and the adoption of most of Gestalt therapy’s basic techniques. These three will be examined in turn….

First, Dick embraced and adopted the concept of organismic self-regulation. Like Fritz, Dick relied upon the autonomous “wisdom of the organism” inherent in the concept of “organismic self-regulation” that would emerge when someone was in full contact with their experience. As Dick said:

And I’m leaving it to your own experience. You could choose not to follow my direction, but if you do slow down and enter, what you find most times is with contact comes a certain type of self-regulation. … For me the three elements, the three jewels of Gestalt Practice are awareness, choice, and trust. Trust in your power of self-regulation, given the exercise of your ability to contact experience and to choose. And the more you discover that trust, the less you need a person – even like me – and certainly the less you’ll need the average psychiatrist. (Hudson Interview)

Second, like his mentor, Dick was committed to awareness, in the here and now as therapeutic means and therapeutic end. According to Dick the “root of Gestalt therapy is Fritz’s: how, now.” When he explained Gestalt Practice, Dick often referred to the following statement by Fritz:

These are the two legs upon which Gestalt Therapy walks: now and how. The essence of the theory of Gestalt Therapy is in the understanding of these two words. Now covers all that exists. The past is no more, the future is not yet. Now includes the balance of being here, is experiencing, involvement, phenomenon, awareness. How covers everything that is structure, behavior, all that is actually going on – the ongoing process. All the rest is irrelevant – computing, apprehending, and so on. (Perls, supra [1969], p.47)

In Gestalt Practice as in Gestalt therapy, “how, now” is supported through the use of the continuum of awareness: the actual “reporting of your experience, in this moment.” As Dick pointed out, the basic reporting of experience can be broken down into two questions. The first has to do with being: “What is your experience now?’ The second has to do with doing: “What are you doing now?” (What are you doing in relation to the experience you are having?) The question, “What is your experience now?” – according to Dick, could be further supported by facilitating the ability to fully contact, to be able to enter, to then allow, to fully accept, and finally to able to express that experience. The question, “What are you doing now?” – can be broken down into one further question, “How do you do this?” Dick maintained that after full and clear contact with one’s experience, and what one does in relation to that experience, other possibilities will emerge.

Third, Gestalt Practice employed most of Gestalt therapy’s basic techniques . Those techniques include the “empty chair,” the continuum of awareness, and the use of “Gestalt language” – namely: making “I” statements, talking directly to rather than about, not asking why but how, describing rather than explaining, and talking in concrete and specific terms rather than in general or abstract terms – all of these designed to bring the person working into more direct, experiential contact with themselves in the here and now.

Fritz’s five basic Gestalt questions also served as a cornerstone of Gestalt Practice: 1.“What are you experiencing?” 2.“What do you want to do?’ 3.“What do you want from me?” 4. “What are you avoiding?” and 5.“What are you actually doing?” To these basic five questions, Dick added a sixth of his own, 6.“ How should I know?” Actually, as Dick often said: “I really only say three things: What is your experience now? What are you doing now? and, How should I know?”

Gestalt Practice and Gestalt Therapy: Differences

There were also basic differences between Fritz’s Gestalt therapy and Dick’s Gestalt Practice. Dick often used the analogy of putting what he had learned from Fritz into his own bottle. Rather than imitating Fritz, Dick felt he had Fritz’s blessing to make Gestalt his own, as he often used to say, “I’m Dick, I’m not Fritz.” The main features that separated Gestalt Practice from Gestalt therapy include the following: first, an emphasis on doing Gestalt as a form of practice; second, a greater emphasis on the body; third, a blending of concepts from Buddhist meditation practice with Gestalt; and fourth, a specific emphasis on the organization of experience through an original paradigm that Dick called: message-program-filter (MPF).

Gestalt in Dick’s model was a shared lifestyle, rather than something that one occasionally did by appointment in the office of a professional therapist. So the first difference from Gestalt therapy was the ongoing communitarian nature of Gestalt Practice, no doubt facilitated by the residential nature of Esalen Institute.

The second feature that helped to differentiate Gestalt Practice was Dick’s greater emphasis on the body. Chris Price said that Dick’s practice differed from Fritz’s approach…

…by adding so much work about body and breath. As he put it, Fritz was brilliant with extremities and Dick’s work was more toward core. He really did think that Fritz was brilliant about working with hands and arms, legs, eyes, ears. Dick felt like he focused more on the physical core. So he was very clear about that difference between them. I think there were some huge differences just because of who they were…. Fritz had had three heart attacks – physically and in a lot of other ways, he was husbanding his energy…. The facts were Dick, physically and energetically, was very athletic, still a highly charged guy and his work focused on that physicality a whole lot more.

Dick was a body-based person and used his own physicality as a grounding tool in helping to manage his own problematic subjective experience. Dick would often use his physicality in doing Gestalt work. He would hold, restrain, or use his body as something a person could push against, or test their strength against, if that served a meaningful purpose. Dick was fairly fearless in this regard, though he was always very, very respectful and protective of the other person.

Dick put direct focus on the body core by focusing direct attention on the breath with a process he called “basic practice.” Dick defined basic practice as “becoming established in body and breath” which he suggested as a way to begin every session, and a place to return to, if needed, for grounding throughout the session. Dick would usually begin his Gestalt groups by asking group members to participate in a short guided meditation, which he usually introduced with a variation of the following instruction: “Can you be aware of, without having to change in any way, the inflow and outflow of your breath, the movement of your body with breath, and any sensation state in relation to breath.” In an interview with Wade Hudson, Dick said, “Basic Practice is attention to breath, to movement, to kinesthetic sensations, to sensations in the body – feeling state, emotion, thought, image. And what’s important again is a mode of present-centered contact, which doesn’t judge what is brought to that.”  

Dick usually worked with people individually, in a group setting with a more relaxed context that he called the “open seat,” in order to distinguish his practice from Fritz’s highly charged “hot seat” environment. After becoming “established in body and breath” through “basic practice,” Dick would usually start individual sessions with continuum of awareness, by having the person who was working report: “Now I am aware of… and now I am aware of… etc.”

The third feature that distinguished Gestalt Practice was Dick’s blend of Buddhist practice with Gestalt. Dick’s Gestalt work was also part of an ongoing personal, spiritual practice. According to Chris Price, although Fritz referred to Zen in his work and writings, and had some passing knowledge of Buddhism, Gestalt Practice was very spiritual because one of Dick’s committed practices was Buddhism. From his Buddhist practice came one important technique and one important concept that helped to differentiate Gestalt Practice from Gestalt therapy. First, from Buddhist meditation practice, Dick adopted the technique of focusing direct attention on the breath, as described above. Second, following the Buddhist precept of the “wisdom of equality,” Dick adopted the concept that, “It makes no difference what the figure being worked on is, but the quality of awareness you bring to the figure makes a difference.”

For Dick, an extremely important concept in Gestalt Practice was bringing the highest possible quality of awareness to whatever emerged, as figure. “If you do this,” he would often say when he taught Gestalt, “then you can’t do it wrong because you can always take one step back, and bring awareness to that. If you are resisting any figure then you can always take a step back and focus on the resistance, as figure.”

Unlike Fritz’s theatrical style, Dick’s Gestalt work was much more meditative, focusing primarily on the quality of awareness brought to moment-to-moment experience. As Dick was fond of saying: “Coming out with something is secondary to making the contact with whatever is, with clarity, and making it real and present.” In describing the difference between his approach and Fritz’s, Dick acknowledged a deeper kind of availability. As Dick told Wade Hudson, “Fritz had a background in theater and acting. I don’t, and I don’t have a whole lot of interest in theater, really. And he wouldn’t stay with a person as long in process as I would, so there was less permission. Permission is either given explicitly or implied. There was less implied permission to go deeply into an emotion. So I’m more available than Fritz at what I would call a deeper level. And I’m probably not as entertaining.” (Hudson Interview)

The fourth distinguishing characteristic of Gestalt Practice was Dick’s deep and abiding respect for the subjective reality of the person he worked with. Unlike Fritz, who was known to be quite dismissive or sometimes even brutal in his so-called “circus” demonstration sessions, Dick was very concerned about the psychological safety of the people he worked with, in keeping with his precept: “maximum availability, minimum coercion.” One of the favorite instructions, that Dick used to help teach Gestalt Practice, was the following: “As the reflector, create a safe place for the initiator so they can face unsafe places.” At other times he would say: “Your job [as reflector] is to create the space, not fill it; create the space so they can fill it.” For Dick there were “three essentials: no judgment, no coercion, and no analysis.”

Combining what he inherited from Fritz with his personal “twist” to Gestalt therapy (attention to breath and emphasis on quality of awareness), Dick created a simple rule structure from which he dependably operated in doing Gestalt Practice. Operating within that rule structure enabled Dick to successfully work with the staff at Esalen, with whom he had multiple relationships. He used to say that his “ground rules for Gestalt Practice were like a sport which could be played with a predictable rule structure, but also with a great amount of freedom.” If he ever stepped outside of the Gestalt Practice structure, which was extremely rare, he would say something like the following: “I’m now leaving my role as reflector and speaking to you as Dick Price.”

To make a further distinction between Gestalt Practice and Gestalt therapy, Dick distinguished between what he called “Acid Gestaltists” and “Soft Gestaltists.” As Dick explained: “There are what I call, conceptually, two categories of Gestaltists. One does Acid Gestalt. They tell you how you should be and they frustrate. Fritz would talk about skillful frustration. Not everyone doing the work frustrates skillfully. If I frustrate you skillfully, then you are almost forced to find another way beyond your usual neurotic defense. This works well for some people, both as initiators and reflectors – or patient and therapist. Acid Gestaltists tend to be confrontive and sarcastic. And there’s what I call Soft Gestaltists, the Aikido Gestaltists. They’re simply present with whatever happens without having to put in their own judgments or frustrate. My own attitude is that you frustrate yourself enough. I don’t have to frustrate you. All I need to do is be present and reflect your self-frustrations back and let you choose whether you want to continue to do that or want to find another way. I don’t have to be your judge.” (Hudson Interview) There are strong echoes of Dick’s precept, maximum availability, minimum coercion, in his soft Gestalt approach.

The fifth distinctive aspect of Gestalt therapy was the message-program-filter (MPF) paradigm Dick formulated as a means of looking at how experience was meaningfully organized. The MPF paradigm reflected upon enduring organizations of experience, or what contemporary Gestaltists have referred to as ongoing structures of ground – the organization of the background, in figure/ground terms, out of which figures conditionally arise. The MPF paradigm will be examined more fully in the next section.

Message-Program-Filter: An Original Gestalt Paradigm

Dick developed an elegant, simple paradigm for conceptualizing important features of the way that people he worked with organized their experience. He called this paradigm “message-program-filter” (MPF). Dick said he always kept this paradigm “in the back of my mind when I work with people.” In many ways, his MPF paradigm both prefigures and provides answers to contemporary criticisms of the Perlsian Gestalt model. Dick’s MPF paradigm was a radical departure from the Gestalt therapy he inherited from Fritz, which Dick acknowledged in the following addendum to one of his maxims: “For me there are three essentials: no judgment, no coercion, and no analysis. But I break my own rule when I lay out my paradigm of message-program-filter.”

Dick did not write about his paradigm, nor was any reference to it ever published in the Gestalt therapy literature. Dick’s MPF was based upon a very sophisticated understanding of process, couched in very simple language – so simple that it remains unappreciated to this day. It remains undiscovered in the Gestalt therapy community, although it would be important and useful for the concept to assimilated, because it might serve as a bridge between Gestalt and other kinds of work.”

When Dick was asked how he developed his MPF framework and whether he had published an account anywhere, his typical response was, “It’s nothing new, you can read about it everywhere.” Dick’s comment was certainly untrue as far as anyone in the Gestalt therapy community was concerned. MPF was an original paradigm that Dick formulated after years of doing and observing Gestalt sessions at Esalen. Dick, who never liked either giving credit or taking credit, also did not like the exposure of publicly revealing what he knew.

The MPF paradigm was a shorthand method of formulating developmental influences on the organization of experience. According to the paradigm, messages communicated to a child by primary caregivers were assimilated and transformed into powerful programs of action. Over time, such programs of action generalized to situations that extended far beyond their original context, becoming filters through which the world was viewed. Though highly useful in their original context, these recurrent patterns of perception and action caused the world to be seen, and acted upon, as if the original conditions remained as currently prevailing conditions of the interpersonal field. The object of Gestalt Practice was to bring reflective awareness to bear upon the repetitive patterns of perception and action that the MPF represented, so that creative alternatives could emerge, be supported, and become viable. The following sections walk the reader through a more detailed account of Dick’s MPF paradigm:

Message

In the MPF framework, the term message is used to conceptualize the powerful early messages communicated by primary caregivers about life, the world, how one is, and how one needs to be (how one should think, behave and act). According to Dick, the top three sources of messages are: mother, father, and the relationship between them. Messages are conveyed both consciously and unconsciously. Moreover, conscious messages can be at odds with unconscious ones (what parents say compared to what they actually do) and unconscious messages are often the more powerful of the two. Common bearers of such messages, other than primary caretakers, are relatives, friends, the culture, and powerful events.

Program

In the MPF paradigm, program is used to conceptualize how early messages are put into action. Program includes both how the messages are construed (consciously and unconsciously) and the action plan that is developed in relation to them. According to Dick, the strength of these “programs of action” is directly related to what he referred to as “the three S’s: safety, security, and survival.”

Filter

Filter, in the MPF framework, refers to how the program is actualized, over time. Programs of action tend to generalize to situations that are far beyond the original context, eventually becoming a filter through which the world is seen. The programs of action that children develop in their families of origin are extremely useful. They usually represent the best (or only) choice the child could have made, or ensure his or her safety, security, and survival. Though useful in their original context, such programs of action can be inappropriate to, or even at direct odds with, current needs and/or the current situation in which those needs could potentially be met. Filters can keep the individual from growing and maturing by causing the world to be seen, and acted in, as if the original, family of origin conditions and limitations are still in effect. As Dick often put the problem: “behaving now as if it were back then.”

Pattern

Message, program, and filter combine to form strong, recurrent patterns of perception and action. In Dick’s view, the strength of these recurring patterns is directly related to the extent to which the initially patterns created a felt sense of safety, security, and survival. The objective of therapy is to become aware of our various patterns of perceiving and acting (the filters through which we see the world). This awareness is facilitated by recognizing how the original program of action once served us (in the sense of being the best thing the child could have done in the given circumstances). Dick called this: “appreciating the power of the program.” When the power of the program is seen clearly (including seeing how the pattern may not serve us in the current, and different, situation), alternatives can emerge. As Dick was fond of saying, “all three [message, program, filter] together, become a pattern, and hopefully we can come to a fourth: the creative alternative.”

An example Dick Price often used to illustrate his MPF paradigm was that of a very young girl who, to please her father and get his approval and attention, was encouraged to perform for him in some way. The message, never actually stated by the father, was that: “if you perform for me in ways I approve, you will get my support, love, and attention.” The program of action the little girl developed to please her father then became a ritualized performance that they shared. The need to give a performance of some kind in order to get approval, began to generalize to other situations, and gradually became a filter through which the world was seen. What was once encouraged became something that the girl unconsciously thought was required of her in order to get approval, to be liked, to be loved, or to get what she wanted or needed from others. Though she did not think about it consciously, performance became an unconscious, habitual response pattern. The message, program, and filter became an entrenched pattern, which the girl brought, in varying degrees, to every interpersonal situation. [Note that if you reverse the gender of the roles (girl to boy and father to mother), this is the message-program-filter-pattern emerging from the relational context of Dick’s own development.]

In Dick’s model, this particular pattern, played out over time, would lead to a split between “being” and “doing” – “I get what I need (attention, approval, love, safety, security, or survival) by doing (i.e. performing in some way) and not for simply being who I am.” In Dick’s language, the “creative alternative” of feeling validated for being, rather than doing, needs to be supported. Through that support, both being and doing can become valid and eventually more or less equal possibilities. Dick emphasized the need to see the pattern clearly (“this is what I do”) and how it actually was useful, as a prelude to the formation of a “creative alternative.” As he often said, “You have to go all the way into the pattern for new possibilities to exist.”

For Dick, we all have many MPF patterns that we habitually exercise – many filters through which we see the world. The work of psychotherapy is to bring these patterns into conscious awareness so that creative alternatives can emerge, be supported, and become truly viable.

Gestalt Practice: The Bridge to Contemporary Gestalt

There are two critical, interrelated gaps in obsolescent forms of Gestalt therapy, which were resolved in the development of Dick Price’s Gestalt Practice model. First, the old form of Gestalt therapy lacked a coherent developmental theory. Second, Perls’ Gestalt therapy tended to ignore and devalue the importance of human relationships in both developmental and therapeutic realms. Dick Price’s MPF paradigm addressed, at least partially, both these gaps, and served as a bridge between old Gestalt therapy and contemporary Gestalt Practice. One method for redressing gaps in the old form of Gestalt therapy was accomplished by re-emphasizing Martin Buber’s contributions to Gestalt, and another by incorporating ideas about developmental phenomena from contemporary forms of psychoanalysis (specifically intersubjective theory) into Gestalt Practice.

Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship has been recognized by contemporary theorists as forming the basis for effective therapeutic encounters. By highlighting Buber’s I-Thou relationship in the context of dialogic relations between therapist and client, contemporary Gestalt theorists have attempted to establish the therapeutic relationship, itself, as the central curative factor in Gestalt Practice.  Healing occurs through meeting in genuine dialogue. According to Buber, the chief characteristic of genuine dialogue, “is that each should regard his partner as the very one he is. I become aware of him, aware that he is different, essentially different from myself, in the definite, unique way which is peculiar to him, and I accept whom I thus see, so that in full I can direct what I say to him as the person he is. (Buber, The Knowledge of Man, A Philosophy of the Interhuman [1965], p.79)

Dialogue, according to Buber, is at the center of psychological and spiritual development because: “All real living is meeting” (Buber, I and Thou [1958], p.11).  An I-Thou process, requiring an I-Thou attitude, has largely been ignored by Gestalt therapists, while the I-Thou moment – a “peak moment” of full being-to-being contact – is not ignored in Gestalt Practice. This is because dialogue is part of the invisible ground of practice, essential and always there, yet most often unnoticed. Buber’s philosophy of dialogue serves as a logical corrective to the Perlsian model’s individualistic bent and its overemphasis on personal awareness as the primary curative factor. Dick Price’s MPF paradigm facilitates an I-Thou attitude by encouraging the “reflector” to view the “initiator” from a perspective that is inclusive of their subjective world (i.e., imagining the “filter” through which they view the world, and its developmental origins). In addition, Dick’s deep and abiding respect for the validity of the subjective reality of the other person is what underpins the formation of an I-Thou attitude as the ground out of which genuine dialogue can take place. Buber’s I-Thou attitude presupposes an acceptance of the other, in their full “otherness,” which is the quintessential attitude Dick took toward those he worked with.

Dick’s MPF Gestalt Practice paradigm expands the parameters of the Perlsian Gestalt therapy model, both prefiguring and providing some answers to contemporary criticisms of Gestalt therapy. In order to utilize MPF, the Gestalt practitioner has to think very differently than the Perlsian approach. First, MPF makes the practitioner consider the structure of the ground, and not just the emerging figure. When the practitioner has to account for how the ground is structured, relational and developmental factors naturally emerge as prominent features. Second, MPF facilitates viewing the experience of the client from a perspective within, rather than outside, their own subjective world, by having to imagine the filter through which that world is seen and how that filter was created. Third, MPF provides a perspective for looking at practice over a much longer time frame than the Gestalt therapy model would suggest, or Perls would acknowledge. Fourth, MPF moves the focus of practice from emotional expression towards an exploration of the meaning of past and present emotional experience. Fifth, MPF provides a frame for identifying principles around which experience is unconsciously organized – a way of mapping the subjective world. Sixth, and finally, by encouraging the investigation of early, relational interaction patterns, the MPF paradigm also encourages an intersubjective view of development, thereby suggesting use of that perspective for Gestalt Practice.

Dick inherited an intrapsychic view of process from his mentor Fritz Perls, and Dick often described Gestalt Practice as exclusively focusing on the “intrapersonal” dimensions of experience. Trust in relationships, given Dick’s developmental history, was something that did not come easily. However, his MPF framework is suggestive of other possibilities. If relationships are the primary causal factors in creating organizations of experience in MPF terms, then by implication relationships can serve as curative, reorganizing factors as well. The most relational language utilized by Dick, in this vein, took place in an interview with Wade Hudson six months before Dick died:

You have to be able to trust. So trust is a primary value. I would say awareness, choice, and trust are all values. With trust comes openness and honesty. Trust in yourself, learning to trust the other. I may have some good reason not to be open and honest with some people. Again it comes back to choice, but in the interest of life and vitality. As relationships become more and more established, we do learn to trust.

Dick Price created something that was truly novel with the development of the message-program-filter (MPF) paradigm. It provides a way of conceptualizing how experience is subjectively organized, which logically led to possibilities that are beyond the psychological vulnerabilities and defenses of both himself and his mentor Fritz Perls. Recognizing the limitations inherent in the realization of personal autonomy and self-versus-environment support becomes an inescapable eventuality if the full implications of MPF are followed to their logical ends. Put simply, the MPF paradigm leads toward a developmental and relational view of pathogenesis and practice. In so doing, the MPF paradigm can be regarded as a bridge between obsolescent Gestalt therapy and more contemporary forms of practice which emphasize developmental and relational aspects of experience.

A final bridge between old Gestalt therapy and contemporary Gestalt Practice involves basic ideas about what is “treatable.” One way to conceptualize progress in psychotherapy has been by demarcating the limits of those who are considered to be treatable, which simultaneously marks the limits of existing psychotherapy. Dick did not consider any diagnostic category that was “untreatable.” Indeed, he doubted the veracity of diagnostic categorization itself - an assumption he shares with intersubjective theorists (Atwood, et al., supra [2001]). Something else Dick shares with intersubjective theorists is an absolute respect for the validity of the subjective experience of the other person – a respect which holds that no subjective organization of experience is more true or more valid than another (Atwood & Stolorow, supra [1993]). Dick was wide open in this regard – anything could be real, anything could be talked about that was capable of being experienced. He had absolutely no investment in having experience conform to any psychological system or to common-sense notions of reality. In fact, Chris Price said that if someone Dick worked with was experiencing something that was truly novel, something that did not fit any system he knew about, so much the better! It is precisely this attitude that extended the limits of what was considered to be treatable.

Intersubjective theory considers the full range of human experience, including the so-called “psychoses,” to be treatable by psychotherapy, if the therapist “strives to comprehend the core of subjective truth symbolically encoded in the patient’s delusional ideas, and to communicate this understanding in a form the patient can use.” (Stolorow et al., supra [1987]) If the therapist can do this successfully, experiences of self-loss, fragmentation, and disintegration that have come to symbolically express specific forms of invalidation, accommodation and usurpation, can be made intelligible, facilitating a possible restoration and consolidation of a fragmenting subjective world. From the intersubjective perspective, it is the attempt to comprehend the person from within their own subjective world that extends the limits of what has traditionally been considered to be treatable.

Dick worked with many, many people who were “psychotic.” He did Gestalt Practice sessions with them, hiked with them, and protected them while they were going through their “states.” In his basic stance, there was always a fundamental regard and respect for the other person and the belief that there was a reaching out for some kind of needed contact beneath the manifest “craziness.” The kind of acceptance and support Dick offered to those who were suffering a so-called “psychosis” is captured by in the following statement made by a man who came to one of Dick’s Gestalt groups in 1985 and was actively working with Dick at the time of Dick’s death:

He [Dick] was the first person I’d ever met that knew what I had been going through. More than anybody in my family, more than any other doctor that I’d ever seen, more than any helper along the path. Most people close to me thought that I was a goner, that I was mentally ill and unstable and a problem. And he didn’t see that, immediately I felt hope, and I was very happy and scared. He suggested I meet him at the house…and he said he knew what I needed and that’s the first time he took me [hiking] up to the source. … He was the first man in my life who treated me with so much respect and didn’t care about the other things that people judged me by. He just took me under his wing and just said, “Lets go!” Nothing I ever said seemed to change the way he treated me…he was my anchor to deal with my psychosis…. (L. Brown Interview)

Gestalt Practice: Dick’s Personal Strengths

Over the years many, many people who worked with Dick have commented about their experiences. On balance, the qualities of Dick’s work they reported as having the most lasting value were his presence, his acceptance, his trustworthiness, and his non-judgmental attitude. These were Dick’s strengths – the personal qualities Dick brought to his work that had been forged in a crucible of the intense personal pain he had experienced in his own life. As Chris Price noted, Dick’s Gestalt work was primarily about “who he was, and the way he was when he worked with people.” Dorothy Charles, a Gestalt practitioner who worked with Dick in the early 1980s, felt that the most important part of her work with Dick had nothing to do with the techniques Dick used or what he actually said – it was much more “the degree of acceptance that I felt … more the feeling of his being.” Others described Dick’s impact on their lives in terms of Dick’s trustworthiness, “that shining trust” (Penny Vieregge) or, as another of Dick’s Gestalt students said, “I trusted him completely” (Perry Holloman). Rick Tarnas made the following observations about Dick’s overall comportment when doing Gestalt work: “The equilibrium with which he [Dick] conducted his Gestalt sessions was almost preternatural. He was so calm and compassionate, almost invisible as he helped the person and enticed out of them whatever was coming.” Al Drucker, who was a member of Esalen’s first residential program and saw virtually all the group leaders who came through Esalen in its first 20 years, made the following comment about Dick’s work: “I would say that he’s the only person, the only facilitator I’ve been around who was totally non-judgmental and non-arrogant about his knowledge.” Psychoanalyst Arnold Bernstein, one of the many psychologists and therapists who attended Dick’s Gestalt groups and practicums, made the following comments about Dick’s “comportment.”

The way he sits, the way he speaks … his detached objective attitude, his stability, his centeredness, his patience, his lack of judgment, his acceptance, his tempo, his voice, his behavior in the clinical situation.... A person who was that available and that free of what we call countertransference in the analytic sense. It was a pleasure to observe. The analog is me sitting as a physician in a surgical amphitheater and watching a virtuoso surgeon perform an operation or as a musician listening to a virtuoso musician, it was breathtaking to me to see the precision of his interventions, the rhythm – he never missed a beat. I never once, in all the time I watched him work, saw him lose his temper or say something the patient would react to negatively, and that was my experience working in the open seat. … Dick was one of the few people I trusted myself to.

However, it was not only Dick’s “comportment” that gave his work depth. There was also, as Julian Silverman said, “…his piercing insight, his intelligence was wonderful, his grasp of Eastern philosophy and ideas in general.” Dick was an extremely intelligent man, something almost everyone commented upon. And Mike Murphy said, “He [Dick] not only had a huge I.Q., he also was a super-fast perceiver of people, like Fritz was, to size up people, very quickly, very fast.” As George Leonard commented, “I also really respected his rare intelligence, I thought he was very intelligent, he had those insights, a kind of way of looking at things from a different angle.” Dick maintained an outward state of equanimity while he worked to such a degree that it betrayed the active intelligence and the depth of psychological knowledge he possessed.

Only rarely would Dick talk about what he had experienced and thought while conducting a Gestalt session. In response to an inquiry by someone in a Gestalt practicum, the entire group was taken aback by how active Dick’s mind had been during the session, and by his ability to recall what had occurred, moment by moment, throughout the entire session. Dick’s recollection of his thought process during the session also revealed that Dick thought deeply about what he was doing from a theoretical perspective, something he normally did not expose. When Dick worked, he generally stayed within the deceptively simple Gestalt paradigm that he taught in his practicums. As a result, watching Dick work, rarely would an observer wonder where one of his interventions had come from. But the experience of Dick revealing his inner thought process demonstrated that his interventions often came from a greater depth of psychological knowledge than most spectators were aware of. As Seymour Carter aptly put it: “We were confounded by his silence.”

A final strength Dick brought to his Gestalt work was his sense of humor. As Julian Silverman commented “His sense of humor was just great…. To be a great therapist, you’ve got to see the absurdity – you’ve got to be able to play.” According to Mike Murphy, Dick was “a true wit, a great wit”…which, on occasion “could be very wicked.” As Dick himself used to say, “To be a reflector, it helps to not take either yourself, or the world, too seriously.”

Gestalt Practice: Dick’s Personal Limitations

Like anyone who works with people, Dick also brought personal limitations to his Gestalt. As previously discussed, Dick was very uncomfortable with certain demands on his personhood. So it is easy to understand, at least in retrospect, that Dick had difficulty working with certain kinds of people, and he knew it.

As an example, Dick sometimes told students about working with a woman who, in today’s diagnostic terms, might be labeled as having Borderline Personality Disorder. Dick reported that the woman left him feeling angry at having been “bear-trapped” – a pejorative term he had learned from Fritz, which was used to explain the behavior of people who were difficult to work with, especially very “needy” people. One limitation that Dick had was he didn’t know what to do when the issues a person had, actually started to play out in transference with him. Dick did not like that – and he did not enjoy admitting it to himself. So when Dick said he was bear-trapped, the reason he was angry, was not that he was angry at the woman. Instead, he saw it as a limitation in himself – that he had allowed himself to fall into a trap.

Often in therapy, the only way out of such a trap with difficult clients, is to fall into it. That is to say, one must allow the transference to play out, so that it can be worked with and hopefully transformed. But Dick (and Fritz for that matter) with his “here and now,” anti-interpretive stance, had no way, theoretically speaking, to really understand the psychological organization of people who were so-called “borderlines” and to deal effectively with their extremely labile transference formations. Transference was an idea Dick did not like. Dick was jokingly known to say that transference was something that simply did not happen in Gestalt Practice. Dick thought, to use his own language, that he could literally be invisible by being a “reflector” and “get out of the way,” letting the person’s own unfettered awareness become the curative factor in his Gestalt work. If someone was fully present, in the here and now, then Dick believed the self-righting mechanism – organismic self-regulation – would take over. As one of Dick’s aphorisms for “reflectors” put it: “Support process, trust process, and get out of the way.”

One way Dick kept transference issues in the background was by working with people either in his “open seat” drop-in groups, or when they were in some type of crisis. At one point, Dick’s friend, Steve Harper, wanted to work with Dick on a regular basis – more specifically, not when he was in a crisis. The pair made an agreement to work weekly at a regular time. As Steve remembers: “Dick was completely bored with that…. He had no interest in this weekly stuff – he had no interest in it.” After six weeks, Steve gave up and went back to working when they went hiking together. Steve did not think Dick worked with many people on a regular basis, with the exception of his wife, Chris. If people were in crisis, Dick would gladly work with them on a more regular basis. Working with people in crises and in groups, however, delimits transference issues. Working with people one-on-one and on a regular basis increases those issues. With Dick, dependency was a two-way street, he did not like to depend on others, nor did he like others to depend on him.

An additional means of delimiting transference was Dick’s explicit emphasis on intrapersonal, as opposed to interpersonal modes of experience. In Gestalt Practice, as it was described in the Esalen Catalog for 25 years, “The emphasis is intrapersonal rather than interpersonal.” Dick’s three main injunctions were: What is your experience now – what are you doing now – and, how should I know? All three, both singly and in combination, directed a person to have an intrapersonal experience, and Dick tended to become frustrated and more unwilling when you wanted an interpersonal encounter.

A final limitation involved Dick’s relentless emphasis on here and now, present tense experience. Although Dick’s MPF paradigm was certainly suggestive of the possible value of a regressive focus on past experience, Dick’s Gestalt work primarily focused on “the now.” Past experience (Dick certainly did work with childhood and other past tense experience) was worked with by entering the experience and making it real and present, bringing it into “the now.” Dick was not very reflective about the exclusivity of this focus. As has been noted, most of Dick’s self-maintenance practices combined physicality with focused attention on moment-to-moment experience. As Dick’s friend, Seymour Carter, jokingly put it: “The guy was, in ways, a fundamentalist here and now’er, and in that sense missed some things.” As John Heider said, “In the work, he was extremely strict about just staying in the moment – he was very Zen-like, in that way.” According to Heider, Dick “lived in process so much” that the past was not something that he was, at least publicly, very reflective about. Rick Tarnas remembered once asking Dick, while the two were resting in the Esalen baths at the end of the day, whether Dick would not want to share something of his remarkable life story, perhaps writing a book about it. According to Rick: 

He said, “Oh, it’s just something to let go of, like water that just runs through.” At the moment, the water was draining from the large tub as we were getting ready to fill it. By temperament, I myself am drawn to want to honor and celebrate an individual’s personal life and character, especially a person of greatness. For Dick, however, I think he was drawn to a Taoist “no-self” kind of transparency because it was painful for him to think of Dick Price and the life he had led. There were too many painful things to really fully address, it wasn’t part of a larger artistic life narrative that he could take joy in – that was the sense I got.

Gestalt’s sensibility of working with the past only as it appears in the present moment, served defensive functions for Dick. A more regressive function in the examination of past experience might have served Dick and, by extension, some of the people he found it difficult to work with.

Dick’s Final Years at Esalen

In the last decade of Dick’s life, the period between 1975 and 1985, there was a growing maturity in Dick’s Gestalt work, paralleled by maturation of the Esalen community as a whole. Dick, in a conversation with Walter Anderson a few years before his death, commented that Esalen was becoming a community of “more substance” than had been true in the 1960s and early 1970s. John Heider commented that a large part of that change and the growing stability, both in Dick and in the Esalen community, came as a result of the children that were born to long-term staff members in the mid-1970s. Those children included Dick’s daughter Jennifer, whom everyone called Jenny. The inclusion of children in the Esalen community and the acknowledgment of the value of children expressed by the creation of the Gazebo Preschool (which operated on principles derived from Gestalt Practice) created a more egalitarian atmosphere in which much of the divisiveness of the 1960s era began to disappear.

A large change in Dick took place a result of his relationship with his daughter Jenny. Through their relationship, Dick was able to come to terms with his own past in ways that had not been possible before. As Dick’s wife, Chris, commented, “He [Dick] certainly had been through incredibly bitter and hard feeling periods – Seymour calls it stuck, that’s one way to say it. It was a long siege between him and the past. I don’t think he was in that state his last couple of years. A lot happened when Jenny was born, it made a difference and it kept making a difference…. Dick reworked a lot just from being a dad.”

After Jenny’s birth, a major change also took place in the relationship Dick had with his son David. What David regarded as having been more of an “obligation” for Dick before Jenny’s birth, slowly turned into a genuine relationship between father and son. As a result, Dick and David started spending much more time together. David attributed that change directly to the impact of Jenny’s birth on Dick’s life.

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s Dick continued to teach Gestalt groups and practicums offered through the Esalen Catalog. (Chris said that Dick used the word practicum because he hated the term Gestalt trainings – he thought training was something you did with dogs.)  He also offered drop-in Gestalt sessions called “open-seats” a few times a week for the larger Esalen community. During the 1980s, however, Dick, along with his wife, Chris, began to put more of their focus and energy into Gestalt practicums for the long-term staff at Esalen. An apprenticeship-based training model evolved that supported groups of both beginning and advanced trainees.

Dick’s vision for Esalen remained remarkably consistent throughout the years. As Dick told Walter Anderson three years before his death, “The main function of Esalen, as I see it, is to introduce people to a range of things so they can have the intelligence and choice to choose and evolve their own practices.”  Dick vision for Esalen was actually multi-layered, but you almost had to infer it, he did not talk about it unless you pulled it out of him. On the one hand, Dick thought of Esalen as primarily as a “seed-farm” or as he sometimes used to say, “a greenhouse, not a garden,” where people could come and take the variety of things Esalen offered. In Dick’s metaphor, people would keep those things they found to be helpful in their lives, and then take those things out into the larger world where they could sprout, take root, grow, and hopefully, bear fruit. On the other hand, Dick thought about the use of Esalen’s power, as an institution, which could help bring about changes on a larger scale. Examples of using Esalen, as an institution for creating change, included Esalen’s support of efforts to bring about more humane treatment for psychiatric patients (like the Agnews project), and perhaps more interestingly, Dick’s anarchic hope that the current psychotherapy licensing paradigm would collapse when the very best therapists, trained at institutions like Esalen, would all be unlicensed. Dick often thought about Esalen’s relationship to “other institutions, to society at large, and to the field of psychology as a whole,” but he rarely talked publicly in those terms. As time progressed, Dick tended to focus more of his time and energy on his Gestalt work and less of his energy into grand notions of Esalen’s possible impact on the larger world.

As he matured, Dick became a role model for many different people. For some in the Esalen community, Dick came to represent, in Rick Tarnas’s words, “a highly contained Nietzschean ubermensch.” Dick was someone who had gone through some of the most challenging psychological experiences it was possible to go through, and by continuing to live a life of intense psychological and spiritual exploration, Dick sanctioned others at Esalen to do the same. For many psychiatric survivors, Dick became a much needed role model for what was possible, for what one could dare hope to attain or achieve – a successful, satisfying, independent life without the use of mind numbing medications. For psychotherapists, especially Gestalt therapists, Dick became someone to watch, to learn from, and to emulate. Dick represented a real alternative to Fritz’s legendary abrasive style (as time progressed, Fritz’s former students began to see the serious negative consequences of his disposition). As psychologist and psychoanalyst Arnold Bernstein noted: “I simply thought that he had taken the sting out of PerIs’ methodology . ... He took the Gestalt model and placed it in a different philosophical context than the psychiatric one Fritz came from, he humanized it.”

Dick still maintained his scan of the spiritual/psychological horizon and was willing to embrace, at least for a while, unusual explorations “along the psychological-spiritual front.” One of his last such explorations was what he called his “research project in paranormal intelligence,” involving an English woman named Jenny O’Conner who, by automatic writing, channeled “the Nine” – a group of extraterrestrials from the star Sirius. Dick used the Nine as paranormal management consultants and adjunct Gestalt facilitators. Around Esalen, however, the Nine were much better known for performing the role of extraterrestrial hatchet men, than for giving psychic insight into how Esalen might actually improve its operations.

No one, including Esalen’s co-founder Mike Murphy, could figure out what Dick was up to with the Nine. Dick, knowing Mike hated the Nine, jokingly told Walter Anderson “He [Mike] puts up with my Eli and I put up with his KGB.” Eli referred to extraterrestrial intelligence, while KGB was a thinly veiled reference to Mike’s main interest at the time – the Esalen sponsored Russian-American Exchange Program. The only person who has provided any insight concerning Dick’s fascination with “the Nine” was Steve Harper, who himself said, “I just gave Dick that one, I couldn’t relate to the Nine at all.” According to Steve, when Dick was first getting to know Jenny O’Conner she channeled the Nine and they gave him information about his early hospitalizations that he had never told anyone, helping him make sense of out of some of his experiences. A famous, very negative article about Esalen in Mother Jones magazine entitled “Esalen Slides off the Cliff’ was, perhaps, the most famous critique of the Nine’s influence at Esalen. However, Chris said that Dick had some fun with the Nine. If nothing else, they provided him with an opportunity to express, as Mike Murphy said, “the mischievous trickster in him” – a role Dick enjoyed and was famous for.

Dick’s last few years at Esalen also included some very difficult times. He had a bicycle accident while on vacation in San Diego in the early 1980s that caused a severe concussion. After the accident, Dick’s physical energy simply was not the same. But something far more troubling, something Dick had never before had to face at Esalen, emerged in 1984 that made his life very, very difficult. For the first time, Dick and Mike Murphy were not getting along. Mike had seriously looked into selling Esalen without telling Dick about it. There were several difficult phone calls that Dick had with Mike. Although, according to Mike, only probes about selling the property had been made, the fact that Dick heard about Mike’s interest in selling the place through the Esalen grapevine made Dick feel that he had been betrayed. Dick also felt betrayed by Esalen’s managers, who had authorized expenditures far in excess of agreed upon spending limits. Mike was using those expenditures as leverage to bring in an outside person, Steve Donovan, to manage Esalen’s finances, something Dick was opposed to. Dick was angry, and as a result, a purge of Esalen’s management was in the air, which would have taken place around the first of the year (January, 1986). Dick’s friend, John Heider, who spent time with Dick during this period, recalled that, “He was not in a good space with Mike and the whole Esalen thing.” For a time, Dick even considered leaving Esalen. Chris Price remembered:

As he was facing all the ramifications he said to me, “If I want to leave, will you come with me? Of course that’s why I remember, I couldn’t fathom that he was needing to ask this question and it told me a lot – it told me a certain rawness or vulnerability in him at that moment, at that period. It was also a very tender thing for him to do with me because in the course of our relationship, for him to go from I don’t need you to I do need you, was a very huge and long transition, so there was that openness.

Dick also toyed with the idea of running a scaled-down version of Esalen. In that plan, he would use the Big House and the Little House (which were owned outright by Esalen Institute) to do more focused Gestalt groups and practicums. In Dick’s plan, whoever purchased the Murphy property (which included the hot springs) could run the business operation and Dick would run his workshops.

In October 1985, Dick and Chris decided to take a break from Esalen, and went on a trip to Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. According to Chris, during that trip Dick and Mike talked on the phone, and they were able to resolve their difficulties and renew their sense of partnership. Mike and Dick decided, to use Mike Murphy’s own words, “that we would go another lap.”

Then, on November 24, 1985, on a morning that followed a few days of intermittent rain, Dick decided to take advantage of a break in the weather and hike up Hot Springs Canyon. His destination was “the source” – the place where Esalen takes its water supply from Hot Springs Creek, about an hour’s hike up the canyon from Dick’s residence, the Little House. Dick did not plan to be gone long, since he had business meetings scheduled that afternoon. It was a hike, however, that Dick was never to return from. A large boulder, about the size of a small car broke free from the steep hillside of Hot Springs Canyon and rolled down to the source. The boulder split apart when it hit the creek bottom, and one of the pieces hit Dick in the head, breaking his neck and killing him instantly. As Mike Murphy commented to writer Alice Kahn:

“There was a one-in-billion chance of this boulder hitting him,” Murphy says. “We went up there and traced its path. A two ton-boulder exploded 10 feet below him. A 200-pound shard flew up and broke his spine. He was killed instantly. The boulder leaped 100 yards through a narrow opening in the redwoods. It partook of the occult.” (Kahn, Esalen at 25, Los Angeles Time Magazine [12/6/1987], p.40)

That evening, when Dick still had not returned from his hike, searchers were sent up the canyon to look for him. They found Dick’s body at the source, and brought him back down to the Little House. Dick’s death, coming so suddenly and unexpectedly, devastated the greater Esalen community. Everyone had a very difficult time grasping the reality and finality of Dick’s death. There was a hastily organized wake held in the Little House. It was a very, very sad day. Everyone knew Esalen would never be the same without Dick’s steadfast guiding presence.

A kind of legend quickly began to grow up around Dick’s death. The symbolism of being killed at “the source” was embellished into a story in which he was killed while he sat in meditation (the source was a place Dick often stopped to rest on his hike, where he sometimes did meditate there). Many looked at his death as a way for Dick, as an evolved spiritual being, to gain a kind of transcendent departure from the difficult times he was known to have been experiencing. The truth, however, was a littler simpler and much more consistent with the organization of Dick’s subjective world and the manner in which he actually lived his life.

Dick had an agreement with Lee Brown, a man who was having psychological difficulties that Dick was working with, to hike up to the source the morning he died, if it did not rain. There had been a devastating forest fire in the hills behind Esalen the previous summer and the hillsides were bare, having been completely burned over. Everyone knew there was a possibility of dangerous slides in the canyon during rains that winter. As a result, Dick was being more careful than usual in his hiking, waiting for a period of time after rains before venturing up the canyon. Lee Brown remembers that it rained very hard, early in the morning, on the day Dick died because he could hear the rain pounding on the corrugated tin roof of the room he was staying in at Esalen, and he assumed their scheduled hike was off. He did not bother to go to the Little House to meet Dick that morning.

Steve Beck, a member of the search party that went up the canyon to look for Dick, remembered that the only footprints that were found anywhere on the trail had been left behind by Dick and his dog Aurora. Other footprints on the trail had been totally obliterated by the recent rain. Chris Price recalled leaving for Monterey at about 9:30 in the morning the day her husband died. When she left, Dick was soaking in the bathtub. Dick was probably feeling a little confined by the early onset of the rainy season that had prevented him from taking some of his daily hikes up Hot Springs Canyon. So when there was a sudden break in the weather and the sky briefly cleared later in the morning, Dick took off for a quick hike up the canyon, by himself. Dick loved the sense of expansiveness and freedom that hiking reliably provided him. When the opportunity to get out of the house for a quick hike up the canyon presented itself, Dick naturally took advantage of it. An additional factor that probably influenced his decision was Dick’s concern about Esalen’s water supply. He had been going up the canyon regularly to check on “the source” and the waterline that ran adjacent to the trail leading there.

After the devastating fire, rocks had been moving down the steep hillside, continually breaking the water line. With the advent of the rainy season, silt began running off the hillsides, entering the creek and clogging up the catch basin, cutting off Esalen’s water supply. On that particular morning, a quick hike up the canyon could accomplish two things. First, it would leave Dick feeling relaxed and renewed for his meetings later that day, and second, it would establish the condition of Esalen’s water system, so that could be communicated to the maintenance crew. It was Dick’s love of hiking, his love of nature, and his tireless love and care for Esalen that defined the reasons he found himself up in Hot Springs Canyon on that fateful day.

The instability of the steep, bare, rain soaked hillsides of Hot Springs Canyon caused the boulder that killed Dick to slip from its perch high above him and begin what would quickly become its leaping, bounding path toward the canyon bottom. From what those who found Dick’s body could surmise, he must have been surprised by the very loud noise of the large boulder crashing downhill through the vegetation. Steve Beck reported that Dick’s body was found in a seated position in the shallow water running back towards Hot Springs Creek from the overflow channel of the catch basin everyone at Esalen called “the source.” The topmost of the three boards that formed the dam for the catch basin had been removed. That board was found under Dick’s body. The lower two boards were smashed and broken by the piece of the falling boulder that had killed Dick. Dick had undoubtedly been in the process of cleaning the silt from the catch basin when he became aware of the sound of the falling boulder as is crashed through the trees near the bottom of the canyon, ending in a loud shattering noise as it hit the creek bottom and exploded into multiple fragments. Within a split second, Dick was stuck by one of those fragments. He died instantly.

Dick was killed doing two things that he loved and were very personally meaningful to him. The first was actively caring for Esalen, the place that he had been so instrumental in creating and had literally become his “holding environment,” supporting and fostering his own healing and growth. Second was the activity that dependably made him feel so alive and free – hiking in wild nature. Both were passions he pursued on an almost daily basis for over 20 years. According to Chris Price, rather than feeling down or upset when he died, Dick was “in a great place.” Indeed, he was in a very good place at the time of his death. Dick was feeling renewed. He and Mike had healed the rift in their relationship. He was back to his full physical strength, and he was looking forward to handing some of his responsibility for running Esalen over to Steve Donovan, so Dick could put more of his focus on what truly mattered to him, his Gestalt work.

The final scene of his life was that morning with Dick’s body, lying “in state” on his bed, framed by a background of bushes in the window behind him – bushes that were bearing bright red fruit. Many of his friends were in trouble. Esalen was in trouble, and especially Dick’s wife Chris and his daughter Jenny were in trouble. But Dick was not in any trouble at all. There was a profound feeling of peace and completion in the room that morning. It was as if Dick’s lifework had been completed, and all was well in his world.

Dick’s Family Ending

In his life, Dick had difficulties with dependence, independence, and connection, stemming from early experiences with his family of origin. Later on, Dick chose to sever his connections with his family because of those difficulties. According to Joan Price, Dick’s decision caused pain to members of his family.

Dick’s father died in 1971, and Dick did not return to Chicago for his father’s funeral, something his larger family considered to be unforgivable. Dick, by his own admission, only saw his sister Joan once in the last 25 years of his life, although they did have telephone conversations. Dick made it clear to his sister that he wanted no part in dealing with his parents in their last years. Joan, whose fondness for her brother caused her to name her first child, “Richard,” would have welcomed reconciliation with Dick, but it was never forthcoming.

Dick’s son, David, thought it was regrettable that Dick, who helped so many people deal with the pain of their past, and helped them come to a place of forgiveness toward their families, never, at least publicly, came to a place of forgiveness toward his own family. According to David, it would be inaccurate to portray Dick’s life without addressing the fact that he held longstanding grievances toward his family that both he, and his family, paid a price for, emotionally. As Joan said, “Perhaps if Dick had not died when he did, he might have been able to work through his sense of betrayal and come to a more objective assessment of our family dynamics.”

When Chris Price was asked if she thought that Dick ever came to a place of forgiveness towards his family, she acknowledged that it had been a long and sometimes bitter siege between Dick and his past. But then Chris said, “Did he die not forgiving them? I don’t think there was a whole lot of venom in Dick when he died, about them.” To Chris, it was Dick’s being a father and parent to Jenny that took much of the sting out of his painful past.

It was Dick’s later life – living a life that began to provide him with a level of satisfaction – that allowed him to make the change. In Sufism, there is a seven-stage progression of spiritual and personal development, in which the fulfilled or satisfied self spiritually precedes the stage of the fulfilling or satisfying self. Something like what the Sufi system sought to illuminate happened for Dick. When he began to feel satisfied with his life, due in large part to his marriage and the relationship with his daughter Jenny, then Dick began to trust that his life had the potential to be truly satisfying. Perhaps this is what Chris points to, when saying that she does not think there was a lot of venom left in Dick.

Dick’s Spirituality and Generosity

Two remaining aspects of Dick’s life are quite important to fully understand who Dick really was – spirituality and generosity. Upon reflection it becomes apparent that Dick’s spirituality was foundational to his absolute respect for the other person’s subjective reality in Gestalt work. Dick accessed a spiritual dimension of consciousness that was grounded in the experience of the basic interconnectedness of all existence. This non-dual or universal consciousness was the medium which enabled Dick to recognize, respect, and accept other people in the widest dimensions of who they were, as non-reducible, separate, unique, and distinct others.

When confronted with the other’s absolute uniqueness or alterity, there is virtually an ethical demand not to reduce the person to sameness, and to, instead, embrace and validate their fundamental, irreducible alterity. The experience of unity or interconnectedness is one pole or dimension of spiritual experience, and the opposed pole – fundamental difference or alterity – flows out of, and is sustained by the experience of interconnectedness. In this way, the two poles – unity and difference, interconnectedness and alterity – are two sides of the same spiritual coin. From an experiential realization and recognition of the fundamental unity and interconnectedness of existence, one can fully embrace difference and uniqueness as a true other being, without feeling threatened or needing to reduce the other to something known or familiar.

In Gestalt Practice, Dick accessed a spiritual dimension of experience that was very reminiscent of deep states accessed in meditation. When Dick was doing his Gestalt work, he was also doing an ongoing spiritual practice that served him, as well as serving the people he worked with. And Dick’s spiritual-experiential depth was, at least at times, palpable in the practice room.

It was the direct experience of a spiritual dimension of consciousness that fostered and underpinned Dick’s remarkable ability to respect and accept others. In his work, because of that foundation, Dick was able to provide others the respect and acceptance that he, himself, had developmentally longed for and needed. The people who knew Dick pointed to the spiritual dimension Dick brought to his work in other ways. For Chris Price, Dick’s foundation, when he worked with people, was much more spiritually based than psychologically based. Chris cautioned that it would be very limiting to think of what Dick did only in the psychological realm. For Chris, Dick’s interests and motivations went beyond the psychological, incorporating states of experiencing that were not mapped psychologically, but might be better described in terms of altered states.

According to Chris, because of Dick’s propensity for experiencing altered states, he brought a shamanic dimension to Gestalt Practice, which was layered onto the existentialist presence and family history aspects of Gestalt that he had inherited from Fritz Perls. Steve Harper attempted to describe the spiritual dimension Dick brought to his Gestalt work in the following way:

It’s not to pretend, for a second, that Dick didn’t have a place that was really judgmental, because that wouldn’t do Dick service at all. But when he stepped into this role and he held the space, he held a bigger space of acceptance of whatever was – whatever is – in that moment – than anybody I’ve yet met. ... I’ve hung around different Indian teachers and gurus and Zen teachers and I’ve never experienced them [as being] able to hold that big a field.

Dick’s compassion and deep inner drive to help others came out of a sense of reparation for the way he had been treated, and out of a very deep spiritual and psychological base. Experientially, in its fullest possible meaning, Dick’s horizons of being were very, very wide. This state of becoming displayed another facet of his character.

Another dimension of Dick, as a person – important for seeing the complete portrait – was his immense generosity. Dick was generous with his time, with his helping skills, and with his financial resources. Helping and supporting people was part and parcel of who Dick was. He offered countless people both his personal support and the support of Esalen, as an institution.  Many people at Esalen personally benefited in significant ways from Dick’s largesse. Along with all the practice time he provided, Dick personally underwrote trainings in Gestalt and other modalities, supported people’s work by allowing them notoriety as Esalen’s faculty along with access to the Esalen Catalog, personally provided scholarships for people to take workshops at Esalen and elsewhere, made himself available to work with people at virtually any time when they were in crisis, personally funded conferences that were in areas of joint interest, and even loaned money when people were in need. The list could go on and on….

Dick was a tremendous supporter of people at Esalen, while Mike Murphy was a tremendous supporter of ideas at Esalen. Dick knew that his support of people, especially the support of people in psychological need, was self-reparative. He could, and did, offer the protection that he never had when he was most in need.

Although Dick was estranged from his family, neither parent abandoned their financial support of Dick. They did not cut him out of their wills, and Dick often used family financial resources to support people in need. Dick put much of the salary he earned at Esalen into a scholarship fund, using it to support individuals and projects that he deemed worthy.

Though Dick was very generous, he was personally quite frugal. If someone had looked into Dick’s closet, while he changed his clothes to go hiking, they would have been astonished at how few articles of clothing Dick actually possessed. As Julian Silverman remarked, “He was very good at taking care of himself, and he could do that with meager resources. He would actually prefer to do it with meager resources. He was basically a monk in poverty and he loved that.”

Summary and Conclusions

The main objective of this biography was to provide an insightful study of the life and practice of Richard Price, co-founder of Esalen Institute. One goal was to identify and illuminate the recurring patterns, themes, and motives in the subjective life of Dick Price, which connected the different parts of his subjective world into an intelligible whole – and to communicate that knowledge to the Gestalt Practice community. A closely related goal was to demonstrate how Dick Price’s subjective life experience was intimately involved in choosing, assimilating, and adapting the theoretical model of Gestalt therapy that Dick inherited from his mentor, Fritz Perls. It was intended that this study would shed some light on the subjective factors involved in Dick choosing Gestalt, as a psychological theory, and in implementing that theory as a basis for Gestalt Practice. On balance, it appears that this text has largely succeeded in meeting the objectives and goals that were established at the beginning of this study.

In the beginning of this study, three hypotheses were proposed that would serve as initial frames for guiding this examination. These hypotheses were designed to help uncover and eventually illumine the central themes and concerns that would come to organize Dick’s subjective world across his lifespan. The first working hypothesis claimed that the seminal crisis in Dick’s life was his hospitalization at the Institute of Living, a private psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. The second working hypothesis, a corollary of the first, claimed that Dick’s hospitalization was a concretization of ongoing problematic experiences with his parents dating from childhood. The third and final working hypothesis for this study claimed that Dick’s often repeated maxim for Esalen Institute – ”maximum availability, minimum coercion” – was a principle that served defensive and reparative self-functions and encapsulated attempts to restore and consolidate the validity of his personal, subjective world. All three of these initial hypotheses were confirmed and adequately demonstrated throughout the trajectory of this text.

This study began by describing Dick’s experiences in childhood and adolescence. From these sources a provisional description of his subjective world was formulated. The text went on to describe Dick’s life up to and including the seminal crisis of his life, his hospitalization at the Institute for Living. With additional information and some reflection on the interplay between his early adulthood and that crisis, the text then provided a general description of Dick’s essential concerns, their developmental origins, and their overall significance as organizing themes. This demonstrated how those concerns were discernable as pervading, recurrent thematic patterns in different sectors of Dick’s experiential world. Reflecting upon the interplay between Dick’s developmental history, his subsequent world of experience, and on the original hypotheses, the study formulated what was considered to be the central organizing principle of Dick’s subjective worldview: dependency is dangerous. As an organizing principle, that maxim was shown to synthesize the central formative configurations of self and other which emerged from Dick’s early psychological development, and repetitively confirmed in the events that surrounded his seminal life crisis. Those configurations included: toxic influence, accommodation, usurpation, and Dick’s developmental longings for protection and validation. Then the study presented an analysis of Dick Price’s life work – as expressed in his co-founding of Esalen Institute and in the development of his unique brand of Gestalt work that he called Gestalt Practice – based upon the concerns and organizing themes that came to dominate Dick’s subjective world.

Like every human being, Dick Price had to confront both painful and rewarding life experiences and carried unconscious residues from them. His particular life history was poignant and filled with some very painful events that for him proved to be ultimately redemptive. Dick suffered immensely, first at the hands of his mother’s intrusive control and later in psychiatric hospitals where he was subjected to invasive, de-humanizing “treatments.” As a result of those experiences, Dick carried a heavy burden of grievances against his family, grievances that were never completely healed and that initially interfered with his ability to form and sustain essential relationships.

Dick’s real legacy, however, was his Gestalt work. In that work, he was able to help alleviate the .suffering of countless others. Through his pain and suffering, Dick learned how to function as a powerfully validating agent in the lives of many people. In so doing, Dick literally became for others what he was never able to find someone to fully be, for himself. As Dick’s wife Chris said: “He gave what he wanted, which is like the rest of us, I think”

As several people said, it was almost as though Dick took a vow to help those who suffered the way he had and to do everything in his power to prevent others from having to go through those experiences. Dick would have preferred that Esalen had been able to function more, to use his own words, as a “blow-out center” – a place where people could be protected and allowed to go through “states” or “experiences” without being hospitalized and/or given debilitating, mind numbing medications.

Dick Price was a remarkable man. Despite his being more than a little crazy at times, Dick was one of the sanest men who lived during a particularly insane epoch of history. In a very personal way, he taught the value of accepting and working with human imperfections and limitations, rather than striving to overcome them.

Many people commented upon the example Dick set for them, as someone who did good in the world. As Dick’s student Leonard Bearne said, “But I think the meaning of Dick to me, is that he has been and always will be a symbol of what a person can do to accomplish good in a very kind of understated, low key way. And I think that Dick tried to do good on a lot of different levels and in a lot of different ways and he largely succeeded.”

In the 1960s and 1970s egocentric gurus and often tyrannical, manipulative group leaders were plentiful on the human potential scene – something Dick Price and Mike Murphy knew only too well. Dick, by personal example provided an alternative. He was someone who was extremely humble, very non-pretentious, and who above all, deeply wanted to do the right thing. This was true from the very beginnings of Esalen until the time of his death in 1985.

Dick’s longtime friend, fellow Esalen group leader and author, John Heider, remembered what Dick meant to him in the following way: “I would put him in the category of great influential men I have known, or men and women. I would say that he was one of the least corrupt of them. He was one of the most earnest, about simply being about what he was about. That is to say, he wasn’t interested in money, he wasn’t interested in fame. Maybe he was interested in enlightenment, as you’ve suggested. He was just about what he was about, that’s how I make sense out of him. Very non-corrupt.”

Dick left this world much too prematurely, unexpectedly, and suddenly. As many people expressed in various ways, so much of what Dick wanted Esalen to be and to contribute to the world has not been sustained, without his ongoing presence. It serves as a reminder of how truly fragile the things of this world are.

W. B. Yeats attempted to express these very sentiments in his poem….

Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors:

What they undertook to do

They brought to pass;

All things hang like a drop of dew

Upon a blade of grass.

--W. B. Yeats

***