In memoria

Harm Siemens

(1932-2010)

“If you were to love a cloud...

you would know that the cloud is impermanent.

But if you forget about impermanence and

are attached to the cloud, when the time comes

for the cloud to be transformed into rain

you will cry, ‘Oh dear, my cloud is no longer

there’...

The rain is smiling, singing, falling down,

full of life, full of beauty.

Yet because of your forgetfulness, you are caught

in grief...

Meanwhile the rain is calling you, “Darling,

darling, I am here, recognize me!’”

Thich Nhat Hanh, NO DEATH, NO FEAR

Our beloved Harm... ...our soft and gentle cloud, you are not here anymore. But your fruitful, comforting,

rain is around us. Your warm smile in our memories, your accurate and precise sight in our work, your inspirational teaching through your writings – You taught us that “to be present is a present, a gift”. Thank you Harm from the bottom of our hearts, for your gifted presence in our lives. You brought us light, humor, warmth, wisdom, knowledge, but mostly a unique touch of humanity.

Bas, when you asked me to write a “memoriam” for Harm Siemens, I felt deeply touched and, at the same time, very responsible. What is there left to say for a man... “stable as a rock moving as a sea, sweet as a wind, father as the sky...” ... as Eleni Chatzigeorgiou, a colleague from Greece, says about him.

Therefore, I have decided to share not just my thoughts with you, but also some quotations by all those people who talked about him at his funeral. I feel this is a collaborative work and “Harm, without dismissing his own pain and efforts, or those of others, used his generosity and compassion to enable him to get on with most people, and to be a connecting factor at the same time”, as Michiel van den Heuvel said and continued with... “Harm and Gestalt go hand in hand”.

I think that everyone who had the fortune and the opportunity to meet Harm is able to recognize that. For all of you, who did not have the chance to knowing him, and for all of us who did, I will provide you with some information about Harm’s life, as Dick Lompa, his companion in life and in work, shared with us at the funeral.

Harm Siemens was born in a small town, Oude Pekela in The Netherlands on 1 July 1932. The Second World War had an enormous impact on him during his younger years. The disappearance of school friends (many of them Jewish) and many shops in his town awakened a concern and a compassion for the “other”. He decided to study nursing as a profession and a way of helping the other. He graduated as a nurse and practiced his profession in various hospitals in the Netherlands. In 1958 he joined the Deakonen, a religious institution that was dedicated to helping and caring for the sick and the less fortunate.

He continued to work as a nurse in other countries; France, England and the United States. After this, he worked for two years for the Dutch Volunteers in a psychiatric hospital in Nairobi, Kenya.

Upon returning to the Netherlands, he entered the training program in the Higher School for Nursing Science in Leusden. After graduating from the course, he was given a position in the school as a member of the teaching staff . In the early 70’s, Harm wanted to continue his development and he applied to the Netherlands Gestalt Instituut for a three year intensive Gestalt psychotherapy training. This was a very new training program in The Netherlands at that time. In the same period, Harm continued his study and was awarded a Master Degree from the University of Mexico.

Harm was the founder of the Nederlands Stichting Gestalt and has continued to work there as an inspiration, a visionary, a teacher and a supervisor until he became ill. He had also become involved in many Gestalt training programs around the world; Greece, Russia, Macedonia, Italy, Spain, India, Israel and Latvia. For this work, especially his work in India sponsored by HIVOS for the prevention and care of AIDS victims

there, he was honored in the year 2000 with a medal and title from her Majesty Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands.

“Harm was a great inspiration”, as Ella Mulders mentioned, and “he will remain in our memories as a teacher, a colleague, and, especially, as a friend” as Marjan Wiegman pointed out. I close this memoriam with a quotation from a letter by apostle Paulus to the Christians in Philippi (chapter 1, verse 6) that Eva Fischer recited at his funeral by his own wish ... “I am convinced, that He who started a good work in you, will complete it till the end, till the day of Jesus Christ (own translation).”

With respect and gratefulness... ... one of those “befriended” by your presence...

Katia Hatzilakou

(http://www.eagt.org/downloads.htm#newsletter – n°16)

Richard Kitzler

(1927 – 2008)

Psychotherapist, trainer of therapists, supervisor, philosopher of psychotherapy, and writer, was a figure who spanned the length of gestalt therapy’s history.

He first encountered gestalt therapy when he reclined on a couch in the New York City office of a psychiatrist then known as Dr. Frederick Perls.

He was at the formation of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, attended Paul Goodman’s, and Fritz and Laura Perls’ seminars, and the “professional group” of the 1950’s whose members were some of the students of gestalt therapy. His colleagues included Paul Weisz, Eliot Shapiro, Magda Denes, Patrick Kelley, and Karen Humphrey.

Fritz Perls referred Richard his first patient in 1953.

Richard stood tall and strong as a stable, earnest, timber in the NYIGT structure, helping us maintain our highest standards of teaching and developing gestalt therapy according to our understanding of the foundational model --grounded on the original text, Gestalt Therapy, Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality by Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman (1951).

He was one of our teachers who led us students through a close line-by-line hermeneutic reading of this text – understanding was an emergent, contactful process of interaction of the reader and the text. This became the NYIGT’s teaching/learning model.

An NYIGT fellow, his commitment to the egalitarian values of inclusion and organizational citizenship where each person in the institute has a critical voice became a dominant value, which continues to guide us as a community. This model is one of the basic models of gestalt group therapy today.

Richard was an outspoken presence at gestalt therapy conferences in the United States, Canada, and Europe. His personality and intelligence made it impossible for him to utter a simple sentence or present an uncontroversial idea. His influence on those around him is immeasurable. For example, he was a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy in the early 1990’s. He was important in the development of process groups, which became an identifying characteristic of AAGT’s conferences. As significant as these influences continue to be, perhaps the most lasting of Richard’s influences in gestalt therapy will be the product of his remarkable genius. Richard was one of the most, inspired, original, and simultaneously disciplined and undisciplined thinkers in the world of gestalt therapy. The more he taught gestalt therapy, the wider his net and the more he included in its catch: social psychology, Gestalt psychology, intellectual history, anthropology, and philosophy. Ultimately, Richard settled on the pragmatism of George Herbert Mead as the soundest foundation to rest his own version of gestalt therapy.

Truly eccentric, then, Richard’s contribution follows no straight line, nor even a consistent curve; his thoughts leap and lurch, dip and weave, fly and dazzle.

True to this eccentricity, much of his contribution was in the oral tradition for which very little is preserved. We, his students, carry his ideas as deep foundations for our own understanding. We, his students, carry the process of his thinking that he tried to teach us, as a model for our own thinking – a method of embracing an idea, swerving around it, above it, behind it, and trying to surprise it in order to ignite a new understanding in the dry wood of a stale concept. Sometimes, on a good day, we are able to accomplish this, in our teacher’s absence.

But all is not lost. As Richard’s ideas matured, and as the NYIGT challenged him to write, Richard began to write more and more. In his last decade he developed a serious corpus of works. In the last year of his life, Anne Teachworth, his dear friend, became his editor and compiled a collection of his writings, Eccentric Genius, now available http://www.gestaltinstitute.com/gestaltinstitutepress.html#eccentricgenius.

Richard’s intellectual progression followed a trajectory. Part One marks his time with Frederick and Laura Perls and, of course, Paul Goodman. This was also his time with the other members of the “professional group” who from the 195o’s through the 1960’s were the originators of the foundational model of gestalt therapy. During this time the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy was founded. Part Two is marked by his teaching of Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman as the basic and sole text for the understanding of gestalt therapy. This period is also the time of his most active development of gestalt therapy group process. It was the high water mark of Richard’s advocacy of the foundational model of gestalt therapy. Parts One and Two are a single through line of intellectual development, with Richard’s mature understanding of gestalt therapy group theory developing from his understanding of gestalt therapy’s theory of self functioning.

Part Three contains crises. It began with his exploration of the bases of gestalt therapy and continued to his death. As he described it, one day he asked himself “how do we know what we say we know,” and he began an excursion back to Aristotle and then forward, almost century by century, to the present. He stumbled over a cross-reference to American pragmatism one day that led him to question “contact.” The question became a loose thread in the fabric of foundational gestalt therapy, or at least in the “solid” garment of the Goodman model he had taught so loyally for years. He started to gently tug at it; and then not so gently tug. The whole fabric unraveled in his hands.

These three parts of the Kitzler intellectual landscape, then, are Kitzler the Standard Bearer of the Perls-Goodman Model, Kitzler the Innovator of Gestalt Therapy Group Theory, and at last, the Kitzler Iconoclast who shattered the statues of his mentors, Perls and Goodman, to raise up a new standard-- Kitzler the Advocate of the American Pragmatism of William James and George Herbert Mead, and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

This trajectory was the arc of Richard’s teaching and we offer a summary of it here, as part of our memorial to him.

Dan Bloom, New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy

(http://www.eagt.org/downloads.htm#newsletter – n°14)