Living at the Boundary

Living at the Boundary: The Collected Works of Laura Perls

Laura (Lore) Posner Perls was born in Pforzheim, Germany, in 1905. She earned her D.Sc. in Psychology in 1932 at Frankfurt/Main. From 1928 to 1933 she received psychoanalytic training at the Frankfurt, Berlin, and Amsterdam Psychoanalytic Institutes. She was in private practice in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 1933 to 1947 and in New York City from 1947 to 1973. A Co-developer of Gestalt therapy and Co-founder of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, she remained active as a trainer of mental health professionals in the United States, Canada and Europe until her death in the town of her birth in 1990.

On her passing, Erving and Miriam Polster, co-directors of The Gestalt Training Center — San Diego and authors of Gestalt Therapy Integrated, wrote:

Bachelard says that memories are housed; that they do not occur so much in our schemes of when something happened but rather in our sense of where.

The last time we saw Laura was at dinner in Cologne, only a few miles from her birthplace — and the last visual image we had was of her walking, not as briskly as we were used to, but with an air of easiness, along streets that felt familiar to her. Laura Perls’ death carries with it the sense of a life completed by its geography. She died where she had been born — the ends of a circle joined. But what a circle. Interrupted and displaced by a force of evil that the world still recoils from, Laura lived in many places. Not only lived there, but contributed to and influenced many lives that were enriched because of her presence.