Anticipatory Resoluteness, or Time Stares us Down – Eulogy for Richard Kitzler,
May 9, 2009
Dan Bloom 2009
First, a personal preface from me.
Thirty some odd years ago, I crawled up the dark stairs of a walk-up apartment house on Manhattan’s West 16th Street to find my first gestalt therapist, Richard Kitzler. He looked me in the eyes, told me I must have had high fevers as a child, and we began a course of gestalt therapy that changed the trajectory of my life.
Richard died in January 2009. When he died, he hadn’t been my therapist for years. He was my mentor. Each thought I think carries the tracings of his teaching. He was my friend. I carry with me the presence of his absence, as he might say.
It has been almost a year now. Richard’s death has been a death heard around the gestalt therapy world. Memorials have been held for him at gestalt therapy meetings and conferences wherever his influence has been felt – and it has been felt everywhere. People who knew him feel his loss. People who never knew him ask now who he was. This will be a question many will ask.
This is an answer I’ve prepared:
Time stares us down
Time dared us, challenged us, to bring our memories of Richard forward for just one short afternoon.
Time stared us each of us down, forcing our words brief even though our hearts pushed hard against its boundary.
Today each of us looked at Richard from a different perspective as if through different panes of a stained glass window.
Today we assembled a work of art.
Time stared us down in our few short minutes, but as he said, we have all the time there is, to which I add, as always, “and no more.”
If you are lucky it happens more than once.
Richard was like my second father.
He was the person who helped hammer out my unfinished form, shaped my stature, but left me standing un-buttressed as I am now --now that he is dead.
Time stares me down and calls out these recollections from the past that he and I held in common.
I met Richard in 1976, 33 years ago. He was my therapist. Not for all these years – of course.
Then he became the person who taught me gestalt therapy by leading me through its text line by line.
He encouraged me to become a psychotherapist, supported me when I left the practice of law, supervised me in my clinical practice, and was my colleague at the NYIGT.
Then he became my close friend, the person I spoke to every day.
Time stared us down, unflinchingly.
He was always my teacher. Always. Socrates.
Always.
A mischievous Socrates seemingly as dedicated as much to being confusing as to being clear.
I remember his physical silhouette that I could spot blocks away, as if he were a ship floating on the sea’s high horizon – with that ramrod straight posture of his and that bright blue knit cap perched on his mast-head of a head.
I’d wave and run up to him, with a new idea, an old idea, something I had to tell him, something of his I had to challenge or something of mine I wanted him to challenge.
Or with some gossip --dish, as he called it.
Time stared us down, with its dark eyes announcing mortality. And we knew it.
Always.
Schopenhauer asked, “How do porcupines make love?”
Richard was not an easy person. He kept his distance.
Richard was not an easy person: I suspect he was not an easy person to be, either.
He was not an easy person, but I think I came to know the person who lived under those porcupine quills
As time stared us down.
I touch his shoulder and feel its boniness, a surprising skeleton more like that of a small bird than of such a tall upright man who so often projected strength and ferocity.
Time stares me down.
Who knew time better than Richard?
With that 17th century clock in his apartment?
Who was more anchored in history, or in culture?
From Plato, Shakespeare and Johnson, the philosophes, and James and Mead. Whitehead, Hartshorne, Husserl, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty.
Who among us all knew better what he called “the riches of the Indies”?
Anchored in time -- as it stared us down.
The prospect of death concentrates the mind, as Richard was fond of telling us.
There is so much more. And so little time for me now.
Choose your words carefully, time says.
Brevity is not just the soul of wit, it is all.
Times stares me down.
There were those electric conversations where I am in hot pursuit of some idea
-- And he is two steps ahead of me, I know it, and race to follow, then he hangs a sharp turn, I dive after him, jump ahead of him --by accident or guess as often as not –
“Who taught you that?” he’d ask,
“You did,” I’d say,
and he, sneering, “You slippery mother fucker,”
and then on and on….
“Where did I go?” I’d wonder. “Where did he take me?”
And I would know that he opened new worlds to me in those breathless rides of conversation.
Nevermore.
Time stares me down, now, a darker stare.
But, I say to time, this is my last chance I have to do justice to him. Just a few short minutes more now and will be done.
Words. Let me talk about words.
Words belonged to Richard.
He could climb inside them and fly them, maneuver them as if he were a fighter pilot, an ace, --or a carnival stunt clown.
A master of words, but he was a recluse of a writer.
The last 15 years of his life were years of his most productive innovative writing and thinking.
Richard, who was once a hard-line advocate of the strictest reading of the basic gestalt therapy text, challenged gestalt therapy to its core.
Like Jacob who wrestled with God’s angel, Richard grabbed a hold of his one-time hero, Paul Goodman, and wrestled with him through the night.
He took on gestalt therapy at its very source.
Richard refuted the premises of Gestalt psychology. Denied that it could be the basis for gestalt therapy. He excavated the foundations of gestalt therapy – and rebuilt it from the ground up, beginning with Aristotle.
But most important of all, he uncovered the pragmatism of James and Mead within gestalt therapy and proposed this as the basis for a revitalized model -- according to Richard, more solidly based and
intellectually rigorous than any other model.
This new model would link pragmatism, phenomenology, and process philosophy with gestalt therapy.
He was still working on this model.
We have a record of this work.
Years ago we decided to yank Richard out of hiding and get some of his writings published.
Richard drew the Excalibur of his writings from the Stone in which they were buried.
I edited some of his writings.
Editing Richard is pleasure the way tasting gin for the first is a pleasure. His sentences sting the tongue.
A master of words, but a riddler, a puzzler,
Daedalus, the labyrinth’s architect:
His prose clasps meaning inside it as an oyster guards its flesh closed tightly by its shell.
Yet Richard’s face when one of his first substantial essays appeared in the International Gestalt Journal was a sight to behold. He was proud, grateful, touched -- and embarrassed.
That first published essay (from this period) was followed by one in Studies in Gestalt Therapy: Dialogical Bridges, and then, we have his book, Eccentric Genius – and that is truly the record of Richard’s mind.
We can trace his thinking in those written words, dance the dance steps of reasoning, join its grace, stumble over its missteps—
Richard was not perfect.
Is it irony or was it inevitable that just as Richard becomes most disclosed to us --most published, public and available -- that he disappears into death?
Time stares me down but, time, I cannot leave unsaid –
How he would become trapped in a loop when he tried to exit a MS Word document.
How he asked, “Why can I never find what I am looking for? “ And answered himself, “If I found it, I wouldn’t be looking for it.”
How we missed the 7AM flight to an AAGT conference in Vancouver BC and spent the next 15 hours thrown together in travel, catching different flights crisscrossing our way to Vancouver;
and how I feared that I’d spend that day listening and re-listening to all of Richard’s stories;
but how surprised I was to hear new stories -- only once;
And how when we arrived in Vancouver after that day during which Richard downed uncountable Bloody Marys since 6:30 in the morning and I none so I was sober as a corn-fed Methodist;
He looked as fresh as the morning dew;
And I looked more trod upon than otherwise.
Time stares me down, only seconds allotted to me remaining -- I plead for a few more….
I cannot leave unsaid.
How he could see the sky open above Seventh Avenue and call out a Renaissance artist by name.
How he remembered everything—except peoples’ names, or the day of the week.
How he was fierce.
And gentle.
Have a said he was a magician of a psychotherapist?
His gaze-- unsurpassable empathy shined from his eyes, as I sat in therapy with him, him on a regal chair, me on some kind of couch-like contraption.
It took me what seems like years to gather the courage to sneak my fingers around under it and discover that it was a spring-supported cot, covered by numerous foam rubber cushions;
His gaze, so embracing, so holding, that with it he could touch me from across the room,
His gaze was a mixture of soulful heart -- and dare I say it? personal pain, deep anguish with which he may or may not have made his own peace.
Time stared us down.
Time now stares me down. My time is up.
Time stares me down and I stare back, seeing it seeing me.
And that is a phrase that I fancy would have brought a smile to Richard’s face.
Eccentric Genius, An Anthology of the Writings of Master Gestalt Therapist Richard Kitzler, is a collection of Richard's articles along with photos of his life, his favorite poems, and fourteen essays by friends from the gestalt community including Over 400 pages, the book was first published for the AAGT Conference, July 2008, in England, and the new Revised Second Edition of Eccentric Genius will be published March, 2009., in memoriam. .The Requiem Edition also contains several new essays from notable gestalt therapists who have written in memoriam.
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Richard was always a supportive friendly teacher. I am soaked in sorrow.
Joe Aliaga
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I am very touched with the sad news. I respected him and held him in high esteem. I loved Richard!
The Gestalt community losses an important reference.
Thank you, Susan, for sharing with us this irreparable loss.
Carmen Vazquez Bandin
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Dear Everyone,
I am slowly taking in the news and I know I will miss Richard.
I feel lucky to have had many years of his presence, sharp humor, critical mind and vulnerable, untouchable core in the midst of us. I will remember the many times, him quoting Schiller, Goethe, or whoever of the big German writers and often hearing them for the first time, being seen by his curiosity of, will she know and caught by my projected disappointment of me not being more well-read in the German Literature! What I appreciated most in him was his real life experience, street smart and funny.
With warm affection and appreciation,
Mona Banzer
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Richard Kitzler (b. 1927) died last Friday, January 2, 2009, in New York City, the city of his home.
Richard was a titan in gestalt therapy.
He was among the early patients of Fritz Perls. He later studied with him and then was part of the “Professional Group” in New York in the 1950’s.
Richard was a there more or less at the beginning of gestalt therapy.
He was a fellow of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy and a steady part of its bulwark literally until his death.
He was integral to the formation of AAGT.
Many of us were his students, and carry his imprint in our understanding of gestalt therapy, the style of our thinking, and in the structure of language as we speak and write.
He was brilliant, wise, concrete, and sometimes eccentrically abstract. His ideas did acrobatic somersaults that often left us breathless—or puzzled.
Many of us knew him to be able to balance a remarkable – paradoxical – a combination of unstinting support and love, with a biting “edge.”
We are fortunate that in the past few years, at last, his own writings have begun to be published in the International Gestalt Journal, Studies in Gestalt Therapy: Dialogical Bridges, and in a collection of his essays, Eccentric Genius.
Richard was a kind man—gentle—and a fierce advocate for his ideas and for his students.
He has my mentor and friend. I am sad. He is irreplaceable and I will miss him.
He was a substantial part of my foundation. Such a foundation changes with his death, but cannot wholly disappear.
Dan Bloom
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I have had too many words for the moment...and as some of you will remember, it would be Richard who I could always thank for reminding me of this tendency in me. That above all was his mastery to me. When he wasn't just dazzling us with his word wizzardry, he could stun us with his observations and his ability to just cut to the chase--clear, simple yet, brilliant. I want to echo so much of what's already been said here in these emails. So while the echo of Richard's voice is still in my head, I think I'll just return to my private reflections and give a nod this mentor of ours.
Frank Bosco
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I can add my voice this morning. But what can I add, really? I have never met anyone who had such an impact in my life through so little actual contact. I was not seeking that from him. I sought his friendship. At first because he was a giant. Then because he was a man I adored. The twinkle in his eye was that of a little boy and I could stay there with him and not be intimidated by what I did not know.
So I will share only one encounter now for which I will be forever grateful. It was at one of the AAGT Conferences, I think in Florida. I had been slowly gaining weight and secretly (so I thought) felt out of control. Fatness isn't something I could easily hide and I was perpetually denying my shame and declining health. Generally people are polite and trite about it. Not Richard. He had made remarks in the past that, while harsh, were true. I have in my life fancied myself in that same light and I appreciated his brusk candor. But this time was different. We always hugged when we first met after long absences. We met in a lobby or a bar or wherever it was, and he kept a distance of a few feet looking me over top-to-bottom. We hadn't seen each other for over a year and I had gained a lot of weight. "Charlie," he said with obvious surprise, "You look so full of yourself!" I was utterly stunned. I could only respond, "I am."
I carried that encounter with me for years. I worked on it in therapy. I shared it with my friends. Everyone, therapist(s) included, said it was mean, harsh and arrogant. I alone did not hear it that way. It was the loving truth and it shined a brilliant light upon my self that I had never seen before. When I was that fat I carried a physical sensation with me much of the time of feeling ready to pop. Richard named the obvious in one sense but in another he saw me and was brave enough to speak the truth. He saw my struggle. He saw me trapped. After I chewed on that encounter for a long time I went on a high protein, low carb diet and started seeing Richard regularly when I was in the city. He was so supportive of my weight loss, sharing with me his diet and his experience of food and exercise. Ultimately, I failed at that diet. He never commented on the failure.
Thirteen months ago I had bariatric surgery. I now weigh 195 pounds, down from almost 400. One of the last times I saw Richard this year he looked me over top-to-bottom and said, "Charlie, you look so svelte." To my credit I was able to take that in like a little boy and I beamed! There was a twinkle in both our eyes in that moment.
I am crying and I am at work. Of necessity I must stop, and I know the tears will come for a while. I welcome them in honor of my friend. It is too much for me to imagine that I won't see him again. Goodbye Richard, I hardly knew you.
Love,
Charlie Bowman
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I just want to add my voice to those who have expressed shock and sadness at the news. Even though I arrived relatively recently on the scene, I always found Richard to be very personable kind, respectful and gracious. My wife, Goldie, who sat next to him at a dinner one night, tells me she was totally captivated by his charm. My condolences to the many who had a deep and long-lasting friendship with him. His spirit will live on in the institute.
Barry Bub
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Hearing from all of you has helped me and I am grateful. This morning, shortly after hearing about Richard's passing, this came:
Unexpected
Firm warm pressure :
Pushkin's furred feline face:
cheek to cheek
nose to nose
nose to forehead
forehead to forehead
forehead stroking forehead
purring
brow to brow
Tears Welling.
Richard's Dead.
Underlying anxiety,
overlying anxiety
coming into visibility
as the air of existence,
a harrowing thought,
when invisible deadly.
Ancient atmosphere
incorporated.
The cells teach each other.
How to remediate, re-mediate?
Rendering boundaries,
cell walls, permeable
and thought walls.
Like chicken fat
offering its golden
glow to onions:
from burning eyes
to sweetened mouth.
Rendering without rending.
Dissolving like crystals into solution:
not choking, nourishing.
Cell membranes hydrated.
Cell walls permeable.
Emotional walls scaffolding
for exploration,curiosity,even play.
Richard would like that.
He showed the way.
On many a could day.
M'Lou Caring
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Dear Friends,
It meant so much to me in the early 80's for a "big and important" Gestalt therapist to take notice of me, a "little nobody" from the wilds of Wyoming. He encouraged and supported me, even sometimes expressed admiration (gulp!) for my work! And he was my dear sweet Friend! I often had little or no idea what he was saying when he was "strutting his stuff," but his wonderful humanity couldn't be contained behind that "super-intellect" persona. He was a lovely man, even a great man! I shall never forget him, and I shall always be grateful to him.
Sylvia Crocker
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What grief this news brings to us. Richard often pointed out moments
when the air was sucked out of the room. I am looking for the breath to write this to our community as a way of being with you as we try to take in this terrible loss. The loss is so large. I am thinking of Richard and his largesse, his love of scholarship, all that he taught us and all the ways that he taught us.
Thank you, Richard, for your friendship and generosity. Travel well.
Love to all,
Zelda Friedman
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Dan told me about Richard: I am very sad, I remember our last meeting in Athens: he gave me a great support (and fun). I'll mis him...
Please, let me know if there are celebrations in his honour: I would ike to be with you at least 'in ispirito'.
Gianni Francessetti
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It is hard to imagine a NY Institute without Richard. I will miss him, as well as the whole generation that he represents to me.
Elinor Greenberg
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I'm feeling very sad and stunned. What a huge loss for our community! I so much appreciated Richard's presence, and the persistent loving support and challenge he gave to all of us.
Susan Jurkowski
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Hello All. Thank you for being present at this time. We honor ourselves and Richard as honor this moment and the one's to come.
Words seem so inadequate to convey the feeling of loss that weighs on me. A loss that I experience with a pulsing of my flesh alternately warm with feeling and cool in its contracting spreading numbness. My thinking is deranged as if pulled by an invisible magnetic force from its moorings, my vision dulled, veins throbbing in my temples, swelling in my eyes. A feeling of an unwelcome new reality, something important is missing and amiss. A sense of losing, time and life changing, human mortality in process, the world is not the same. Richard full of life, filled with an intellectual abundance, a supportive ground, a seeing/knowing presence - sometimes abrasive, annoying, too little, sometimes too much. Loving in his support, careful shepherding his flock, inspirational in his eccentricity. Richard said "Truth and love make for a healing relationship." This I think is useful for the healing to come. He imbued the field with a rich infusion of truthful thought and love in his support. Surely enough to foster a grieving and healing that will bear rich fruit. Words echo in my mind of an old song: "All is quiet in the jungle, the lion sleeps tonight." Richard had his own words, enough to fill many volumes. He also liked words of Wordsworth and Bryant which may enrich this moment
"And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
Wordsworth,W.
"Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey"
Also:
“So live, that, when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon; but sustain'd and sooth'd
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one that draws the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”
William Cullen Bryant. “Thanatopsis”
Love to all,
Perry Klepner
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Hi to the NYIGT group.
Richard's death empties my soul, leaves me with memories that I cherish, and keeps going the sense of the impermanence of existence. Each such passing, brings loneliness anew.
Philip Lichtenberg
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Dearest Members and Friends of the NYIGT,
With my Newyorker soul I write to you in this moment of mourning.
The news of Richard’s death has been a shock. I imagine that each of us in different ways is trying to make a new Gestalt of Richard, now that he is no longer with us, and since he has been an extremely alive figure, and provocative in gestalt therapy sense, it’s very difficult for us to “let him die.”
I’ve met him during my opening speech for the 1996 Gestalt Journal Annual Meeting, which that year was in memory of Isadore From. He went to the microphone after my speech and thanked me for the pauses I had done. This comment on the implicit part of my speech and the sideward position in the room from where he was speaking brought me to call: “Oh, an outsider!” And he soon answered: “Always!” Then Joe Lay, who was with him, introduced him to me.
Since then, our understanding has been strong, and has taken shape in various meetings, both in private and in public conferences. He has been I think the first American colleague who read the articles from my institute, full of that hermeneutic cultural spirit that he loved so much.
A deep and full thanks to this “titan”, as Dan Bloom rightly has called him, for the model of creativity, culture and courageous integrity that he has represented in the world of gestalt therapy.
It will take some time for us from the New York Community to find an harmonic form without him.
Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb
Director Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy
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this has shaken me , I'm feeling a deep loss at this moment.
Charlie Myzwinski
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I have nothing to offer but tears. Richard was part of my family for nearly 58 years and I cannot imagine life without him either in the background or the foreground regaling us with his astounding insights and memories.
With whom can I now share those special moments sitting on somebody's front steps in the summer speaking not of anything particularly intellectual, but of our childhood, of our parents, of the earlier years and the beginnings of Gestalt Therapy? "Do you remember..?" he would say, invariably telling me things I had long forgotten, or perhaps experiencing memories from his childhood which he had not thought of for years.
I will celebrate his life and honor his passing. And I most certainly will miss him.
With love to everyone,
Renate Perls
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Richard's death is a great loss to our community.
Peter Philippson
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Richard:
At first scaring the hell out of me, intimidating with his literal allusions, his piercing reactions, his strutting around with a knowledge and brilliance beyond any I knew. Then as I accepted that I just didnít know all that, I became curious by his comments, and interested in what he meant.
And at first (and still sometimes) baffled, puzzled by his strange clause creations...whoever talked like that? In endless undiagrammable sentences, with unanteceded pronouns, and with incomprehensible associative leaps? Richard did. Richard amazed.
So instead of trying to "get" it all, I just watched, listened, got what I could. And hung out. Sat at his table. Drank wine together. Laughed at his wit. Loved what he said. Became a friend who now realizes that I didn't spend enough time with him. Can't be helped now. I'm very sad.
Mary Lou Schack
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I have no words at the moment.
Well, just this thought, that I wrote to Charlie Bowman. With all the work and friendship that Richard and I had through the years he left me very strong (I don't think I am the only one but here I am just speaking for myself). I do not "need" him in the way that I once did....but I miss him terribly....terribly....already.
Eric Werthman