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This book is an important and interesting contribution to the history of the psychoanalytic movement and the definition, history, and literature of Gestalt therapy by a prominent German Gestalt therapist with Polish roots currently living in Italy who has made a number of excellent contributions to the historical relations between psychoanalysis and gestalt therapy. Bocian's book is also a fascinating glimpse into the history of leftist innovators and pioneers in psychoanalysis, such as Wilhelm Reich, as well as the counterculture movement in the Weimar Republic, such as expressionism, as well as the important role played by the anarchist and psychoanalyst Otto Gross in Berlin's Bohème circles.
Perls’ participation in these avant-garde milieu and collaboration with the Dadaist movement became an inspiration for his counterculture activities in the USA and his teaming up with Paul Goodman, the Greenwich Village guru and leader of the youth protests of the 1960s and 70s. It also illuminates German-Jewish relations in the Second Reich, the Wilhelmine German Empire between 1871 and 1933, the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933, and the infamous Nazi Third Reich, from 1933 to 1945, that resulted in the forced mass emigration of Jewish intellectuals and psychoanalysts (see the 2003 special issue of International Forum of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich, edited by Zvi Lothane).
The holistic concept of Gestalt, the German word for whole structure and form, was launched in Germany in 1912 by Max Wertheimer and his two younger co-workers, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, with further elaborations by Kurt Lewin and Kurt Goldstein. It was a reaction to academic atomism, the latter grounded in associationism and organicism in psychology. This psychological revolution took root in the 1920s and spread to many American universities. Psychoanalysis did not readily embrace Gestalt psychology, and Fritz Perls, who studied with Goldstein, thus became a remarkable ex