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Forty years later we learn the truth and discover what we should never do as helpers.
Although we were graduate students pursuing a degree in counseling, I am quite certain that emotionally, we more closely resembled a bunch of young kids in a candy store. Today was the day we were waiting for.
After months of burning the midnight oil studying, reading, listening to lectures, and talking about counseling theories, we were finally getting a sneak peek at real live counselors practicing their craft. Make no mistake — these helpers weren’t merely a group of counselors from a private practice or the agency down the street but, rather, the three greatest therapists that walked the face of the planet. At last, we were going to witness what transpired behind the closed doors of an actual counseling session. Like thousands of counselors who came before us and thousands who would follow in our footsteps, we would be privy to the words and actions of these living legends. For better or for worse, it would leave an indelible mark on our psyches.
Our epiphany was courtesy of one Everett L. Shostrom, PhD (1921-1992), a trailblazer and pioneer, who should be commended for his use of audio and video media for clinical training. Shostrom’s claim to fame is that he lifted the shroud of secrecy that had permeated professional psychotherapeutic helping.
Shostrom’s media work began in 1950 when he returned to the University of Chicago to train with the late, great Carl Ransom Rogers, at the University of Chicago. Before the days of magnetic recording tape (e.g., cassettes, reel to reel or eight tracks), primitive recordings could be made on steel wire. Shostrom was able to secure a landmark wire recording of Rogers with a client, only to have the recording wiped out when the head of the religion department accidentally recorded his own presentation of Adam and Eve on the wire recorder!
Shostrom sorely missed the recording of Rogers. Furthermore, he was convinced that his students and those in other therapy training programs could benefit from demonstrations that would showcase the work of psychotherapeutic masters. The dream became a reality when in 1965 he produced and directed the black and white film Three Approaches to Psychotherapy (Shostom, 1965), with the actual filming and editing courtesy of Ron Yould.
The film, shot in California, featured an all-star psychotherapist line-up. The dream team included, Carl Rogers, the father of nondirective client-centered counseling (today known as person-centered counseling); Frederick (Fritz) Perls, who created gestalt therapy; and Albert Ellis, who pioneered RET or rational emotive therapy (abbreviated RT at the time of the movie and recently renamed rational emotive behavior therapy or REBT).
Previously, Shostrom created a 1963 film called Introduction to Psychotherapy, using an actress pretending to be a client. Shostrom was disappointed with her acting, as well as the results and, therefore, a real client, Gloria, was cast in the current film. Within a short period of time, the film gained tremendous popularity, and both students and professors alike colloquially began referring to Three Approaches to Psychotherapy as “the Gloria film.” The movie became a major source of training for a whole generation of counselors and therapists.
Lights, cameras, and a little more action than we counted on!
I could feel the excitement in the room building and my pulse rate escalated as my professor dimmed the lights and the pizza size reels began turning on the 16mm projector. Each therapist would have approximately 30 minutes to cure Gloria of what ailed her.
It should be noted that prior to the filming, Gloria had never met Rogers, Perls, or Ellis. She had merely heard remarks from others, which led her to believe that these were prominent figures in the world of psychology. She was told that the film was for educational purposes and that she should just be herself (Dolliver, Williams & Gold, 1980).
First on deck was the maestro — none other than good old Carl R. Rogers — armed with an ample supple of accurate empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard. Simply put, he was a living, breathing advertisement for everything the textbooks had said about him. An academy award actor and actress could not have done justice to the actual interview. The interview reaches its zenith during the final stretch when Gloria declares, “Gee, I’d like you for my father.” Rogers responds with, “You look to me like a pretty nice daughter.” (Note: Weinrach (1990) suggested that 249 words were missing from the dialogue after the camera stopped rolling, and the additional exchange suggests that Rogers did not adequately deal with the transference/ countertransference issues, however, this is a debatable interpretation that is not relevant to the discussion at hand.)
To say that the therapy session was moving would be an understatement, at best. As I glanced around the room at my fellow students they were either crying or seemingly holding back their own tears. All in all, it was a positive, touching experience, which was unlikely to be forgotten. Our experience as students was seemingly commensurate with that of Rogers’. When asked on the historic film to reflect on the session immediately after it ended, he confidently remarks, “All in all I feel good about this interview.”
As students, we were convinced this was therapy at its best. But all of that was about to change.
Fritz Perls: bar room brawler or world class helper!
It is hard, if not impossible to believe, that Gloria could have been prepared for what would come next. The extreme kindness and rare caring exuded via Rogers were replaced with raging venom as Fritz Perls took over as Gloria’s helper. The interview had all the casualties of a good verbal street fight. Lest the reader feel I am exaggerating, please indulge me as I quote Perls who says to Gloria near the end of the session, “Well, Gloria, can you sense one thing? We had a good fight?”
We can only assume that Dr. Perls was unaware of the fact that most clients can accomplish this quite well with a friend, a relative, or perhaps an inconsiderate clerk in a retail establishment. Thinking back on thousands of clients in both inpatient and outpatient settings, I cannot remember a single individual who told me that he or she was paying their hard-earned money or using their insurance for “a good fight.”
Certainly, in a brief article like this I cannot share every nuance of the session and the reader is urged to watch this session (as well as the other two) now available on three VHS cassettes. Nevertheless, here are just of few of Perls’ brutal interventions.
Gloria opens the session with the words, “By the way, I’m scared.”
Rogers’ double dose of empathy from Gloria’s initial session is now replaced with Perls as the merchant of venom, “You say you’re scared, but you are smiling.” Perls develops this theme a bit further a few minutes later when he remarks, “I’m aware of your smile, you don’t believe a word of it. It’s phony.”
Gloria, needless to say, takes offense to Perls calling her a phony. At one point she states, “I’d like to get mad at you.”
Perls makes fun of her quipping, “I, I, I, I,” in a very sarcastic tone.
Finally, a glimmer of psychotherapeutic hope when Perls shocks the viewer by using a somewhat tried and true therapy line, “How do you feel right now?”
Gloria says, “I don’t know.”
Here we have the rudiments of a fairly typical counseling exchange until Perls barks back with, “You’re playing stupid.” I must concede that Perls’ bizarre treatment responses are at least consistent; that is to say, mean and rotten. For example, Perls tells Gloria “that’s garbage” after she tries to express that she doesn’t feel they were making good contact in the session.
Of all the antics in Gloria’s session with Perls, the most memorable seems to occur as Gloria tells Perls she is feeling dumb and stupid and he blurts out with cigarette in hand, “What are you doing with your feet now?” — a line, incidentally, that became a integrated into a journal article title (Dolliver, Williams and Gold, 1980). The article is indeed critical of Perls’ interventions.
And just how, you may ask, did Dr. Perls feel about the interview. We know because he is asked to reflect on the session after it is completed. Perls — coming across stilted and obviously reading his speech — quips, “ . . . . quite successful and consistent with my therapeutic outlook.”
Gloria, reflecting some 13 years later, referred to the session as a “twenty-minute encounter.” She added that she felt “small, belittled, unimportant, confused and lacking wholeness. In a sense then, I felt a bit of myself destroyed in that short session. . . . How shattered my whole being felt after that session and yet more was to come, insignificant for some — not for me” (Dolliver, Williams, and Gold, 1980).
Rogers reported (Levant and Shlien, 1984) that a little over a year after the sessions were filmed, he ran into Gloria at a Western Behavioral Sciences Institute weekend conference, where he was serving as the leader. Gloria knew that the film of the three interviews was scheduled as a central part of the weekend. After the segment with Perls was shown, Gloria stood up in front of over 100 people, became flushed and remarked, “Why did I do all those things he [Perls] asked me to do? Why did I let him do that to me?” Rogers said she was furious and (his words) “She made it clear she did not like the interview at all.”
Rational approach, irrational ending
It would be difficult to find fault with the didactic session conducted by Albert Ellis. Although the session conducted via Ellis was not as melodramatic as the one by Rogers, Ellis remained true to his theory: active, directive, cognitive-oriented and didactic. In an interview I conducted with Ellis (Rosenthal, 2002), he stated that he was below his own par and tried to get too much into the 20 plus minutes, commenting that if he had focused on one or two things it would have been better.
Gloria’s take on the session with Ellis was that she couldn’t keep up with him. One would have guessed (perhaps, hoped is a better choice of words) that Gloria’s negative interaction with Perls ended after her gestalt therapy session . . . .um, I mean the encounter, or at the very least the conclusion of the film, but apparently that was hardly the case. Remember earlier when I quoted Gloria and she said, “more was yet to come”?
Well, here it is. In a disturbing incident that occurred after the camera stopped rolling, and thus neophyte young upstarts like myself missed it, Gloria relates a behavior that borders on physical abuse, perpetrated via none other than the great Fritz Perls. Certainly, at the very least it could be classified as grossly immature and passive-aggressive. So as not to distort the record, I shall use Gloria’s verbatim account of the situation:
“After a full day of filming, the weariness was apparent in all of us. The doctors, the secretary, the producer, cameraman and I were standing in the foyer saying our good-byes, thank yous, etc. Dr. Perls was standing beside me smoking a cigarette, chatting with Dr. Ellis, when I suddenly noticed Dr. Perls was scanning the room with his eyes. He then made a motion to me with his hands as if to say, “Hold out your hand in cup-like form — palm up.”
Unconsciously I followed his request — not really knowing what he meant. He flicked his cigarette ashes in my hand. Insignificant? Could be — if one wouldn’t mind being mistaken for an ashtray. Hmmm — do ashtrays kick their feet?”
40-year mystery solved
One mystery, however, has remained unsolved for over 40 years: after the sessions, Gloria is interviewed via Shostrom and pontificates about the therapist she would most likely continue therapy with. She chooses Perls. Said Gloria, “In this stage of the game, where am I right now, Dr. Perls could be the most valuable to me. So he isn’t quite as coddling, but I think I could really get a lot from him although I’d want to battle with him too . . .”
Every student in my class was dumbfounded. It just didn’t make sense. There was something irrational, eerie, a little odd, and not quite right about her choice. As mentioned earlier, she had certainly changed her position 180 degrees just a year or so later.
In our class, the students, including myself, picked Rogers as the clear winner; Ellis as the second place finisher, perhaps lecturing the client a bit much; and Perls dead last, coming across not so much like the founder of gestalt therapist, but rather a mean-spirited tough guy with an out of control sadistic streak.
A few students and experts I have spoken with have made a good case that Ellis and Rogers ran neck and neck, or perhaps that Ellis was slightly more helpful. But Perls: it just didn’t make sense.
Even Carl Rogers seemed baffled: “At the time she had been asked if she had any comments about the three therapists. She said that if she were beginning therapy she would like to work with me. She thought that in her present situation the challenging ways of Dr. Perls might be best for her. So it was somewhat surprising to find that when she relived the experience by watching the film, she was repelled by Dr. Perls’ domination of her and her acquiescence in surrendering her power” (Levant and Shlien, 1984).
The damage, however, was done. While the movie did not necessarily convince counselors to become gestalt therapists, it did indeed persuade thousands of us to become more confrontational with our clients, to be assertive if not aggressive when working with them, to take control and get up in the client’s face, if necessary. For many counselors, Gloria’s shocking admission gave them a blank check to practice mental judo on their clients. It gave the everyday helper a green light to become your agency, practice or hospital’s answer to Fritz Perls, attacking, contradicting, and using putdowns in order to verbally beat the client into shape. In my humble opinion, the impact was even greater in addiction treatment settings where counselors with minimal training were easily impressed by Perls’ melodramatic showmanship. In a field where confrontation was often considered the king, folks could not help noticing that by being hostile, demanding, sarcastic and manipulative, Perls went home with the prize as the best therapist.
Most counselors I have spoken with had an uneasy feeling about Gloria’s choice of Perls. Unless Gloria was harboring extreme self-abusive tendencies or was a full blown masochistic personality, it just didn’t make sense.
For years, I questioned scores of world- renowned experts and perused the literature without the slightest hint of an adequate answer. I thus decided to contact Dr. Albert Ellis, perhaps America’s top psychologist, one of the four APA Living Legends of Psychotherapy Award Winners, and the only therapeutic member of the Gloria treatment trio who is still alive (i.e., Perls died in 1970 and Rogers in 1987).
I e-mailed Dr. Ellis on November 15, 2004, and received an answer just one day later. Finally, Ellis began to shed some light on this longstanding enigma. To quote Dr. Ellis: “Gloria hated Perls for the rest of her life and she said that the interview she had with Everett Shostrom about me and Rogers and Perls was fake. Because at that time, Everett was a devotee of Perls. Perls was very ineffective with Gloria and that he did her no good whatsoever, while she seemed to be helped by myself and by Carl Rogers.”
Still, I wondered: Why did Gloria falsify her answer? What motive could she possibly have? Why lie? Was she physically or emotionally afraid of Perls? What possible allegiance could she possibly have to Everett Shostrom? Wasn’t he merely the producer and director of this movie?
I forthrightly shared these concerns with Ellis, who in an e-mail of November 18, 2004, provides what just might be the final piece to complete this 40 year-old therapeutic jigsaw puzzle. “In response to your e-mail of November 17th, Gloria, in the film that we did, had been a patient of Everett Shostrom’s for four years before we actually made the film. Carl Rogers and I didn’t know about this until later. So, she was under his influence and he got her to say that Perls helped her, when he actually didn’t.”
Certainly, I cannot prove or disprove the aforementioned revelation. Quite frankly, my own reading of Shostrom would have led me to conclude that he was a good 40 years ahead of his time and seemingly espoused an integrative model rather than a gestalt viewpoint. On the other hand, it would be difficult, if not downright impossible, to name a therapist who is more outspoken, direct, and less likely to mince words than Albert Ellis. He has an unequivocal reputation — the straightest shooter in the game.
Clearly my remarks are not intended to tarnish gestalt therapy nor the groundbreaking work of Dr. Shostrom. Accomplished gestalt practitioners have often told me that they would never use the strong-arm tactics Perls implemented in his session with Gloria. Yontef (1993) dubs Perls style as “boom-boom-boom therapy” replete with theatrics and abrasive confrontation. It is conceivable that the charismatic style helped Perls meet his own narcissistic needs rather than the needs of the client. Yontef (1999) writes about an updated version of gestalt therapy called “relational gestalt therapy” which includes kindness, compassion, and even empathy. He goes on to point out that the confrontational model of the 1960s and 1970s is not how Gestalt therapy is currently being practiced. In essence, confrontation does not need to be viewed as a harsh attack (Corey, 2005).
There is an appropriate time and place for confrontation in therapy. Nonetheless, I can safely say it doesn’t start by telling a new client she is a phony or by using the client as a human ashtray during post-session dialogue.
Both neophyte counselors, as well as seasoned professionals, can still learn a lot from this classic film that has stood the test of time. In my mind it will live forever as an important artifact of the 20th century counseling movement. Today’s counselors will watch the movie with one salient difference. They will possess a critical insight we did not have: Simply, that the end of the film was just the beginning for Gloria.
Long live the lessons from the legend of Gloria.
Howard Rosenthal, EdD, CCMHC, MAC, is a Professor and Program Coordinator of Human Services at St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley. He is the author of a number of books including the Encyclopedia of Counseling, and the Dictionary of Human Services. His newest work Therapy’s Best. Practical Advice and Gems of Wisdom From Twenty Accomplished Counselors and Therapists will be released in Summer of 2006. His website is www.counselingshop.com
References
Corey, G. (2005). Theory and practice of psychotherapy. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Dolliver, R.H., Williams, E.L. & Gold, D.C. (1980). The art of gestalt therapy or “What are you doing with your feet now?” Psychotherapy, 17, 136-142.
Levant, R.F & Shlien, J.M. (1984) Client-Centered Therapy and the Person-Centered Approach: New Directions in Theory, Research, and Practice. New York: Praeger Publishers ppp. 423-425.
Rosenthal, H. (2002). The REBT Story You Haven’t Heard: A No Holds Barred Interview With Dr. Albert Ellis. Journal of Clinical Activities, Assignments & Handouts in Psychotherapy Practice, Vol. 2(3), 49-61.
Shostrom, E.L. (Producer). (1965) Three Approaches to Psychotherapy I, II, and III [Film]. Orange, CA: Psychological Films.
Weinrach, S.G. (1990). Rogers and Gloria: The controversial film and the enduring relationship. Psychotherapy, 27, 282-290.
Yontef, G.M. (1993). Awareness, dialogue and process: Essays on Gestalt therapy. Highland, NY: Gestalt Journal Press.
Yontef, G. (1999). Awareness, dialogue and process. Preface to the 1998 German edition. The Gestalt Journal 22(1), 9-20.
This article is published in Counselor,The Magazine for Addiction Professionals, December 2005, v.6, n.6, pp.60-66.
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what happened to gloria after all this?? i am using all this text and the