How Can a Void Be Fertile? Implications of Friedlaender’s Creative Indifference for Gestalt Therapy Theory and Practice

The focus in this text will be on the theoretical and methodological aspects of the fertile void: on the implications of Salomo Friedlaender’s theory of creative indifference for the contemporary practice of Gestalt therapy. I have recently been inquiring in non-German-speaking Gestalt circles if anyone is familiar with Salomo Friedlaender’s theory. The reactions ranged from shrugged shoulders to “Solomon who?” to “Well, I heard his name, but never read anything about him. Can I read something of his in English?” Therefore, the goal here is to create some familiarity with Friedlaender’s theory and its impact on Gestalt therapy.

Frederick Perls (1969) states the following in Ego, Hunger and Aggression: “For a long period of my own life I belonged to those who, though interested, could not derive any benefit from the study of academic philosophy and psychology, until I came across the writings of Sigmund Freud, who was then still completely outside academic science, and S. Friedlaender’s philosophy of ‘Creative Indifference’” (13). Perls had several reasons for finding the psychoanalytic system incomplete and faulty: first, for treating psychological facts as if they existed separately from the organism; second, for using linear association psychology as the foundation of their four-dimensional system; and third, for neglecting an important phenomenon: differentiation. To correct this third fault, Perls intends to apply differential thinking, which is based upon Friedlaender’s theory of “creative indifference” (see Friedlaender 1926).

Before delving more deeply into Friedlaender’s theory, we shall discuss various aspects of a familiar approach to creative indifference and differential thinking: experimenting. Experimenting allows us as therapists to be learners, take risks, be daring; but also to be humble, clumsy, to make mistakes and admit them and, especially, to attune ourselves to our patients while remaining in touch with our own perceptions. From this perspective, an experimental attitude is not only an antidote to narcissism, but it also prevents us from producing premature answers to complex questions; it stops us from knowing it all (see Amendt-Lyon 2001a, 2001b). This is the basis for working creatively: we take into account the patient’s experience as well as the therapist’s and then explore the situation that they create together. This makes the field more complex: patient and therapist are interacting, each with her own polarities, interests, motivations, experiences, and needs. The patient’s polarities do not exist in a vacuum, are not the object of an examination, but rather emerge within the context of the therapeutic relationship, within a joint situation. This experimental approach turns the therapeutic situation into the kind of fertile void from which the surprising and enriching interplay of polarities can emerge. This is the approach that supports novel ways of mutual meaning-making, stimulating awareness, and connecting to one another. This is the light-footed calibration and balance of all aspects of ourselves in relation to one another and to being of the field; this is not the digging-in-of our heels in stubborn persistence, isolation, and prefabricated assertions.

Part of the journey toward mutual meaning-making is experimenting with embarrassment. Embarrassment, which Laura Perls calls the “boundary state par excellence” (Kitzler, Perls, and Stern 1982, 17), is where we have one foot in the familiar and one foot in the unknown; it is a fine example of balancing and calibrating polar opposites. If we can stay with our embarrassment, our clumsiness, our awkwardness, then we can make contact with what is different, with the “other”; as we allow ourselves to stay with this experience, the boundary of what is accessible expands. If we do not acknowledge our embarrassment, but rather remain within our familiar structures, then we may have the feeling of security, but the price is costly. We will not contact the novel. We will not learn anything new. We will not grow. If patients are struggling with leaving their comfort zones and reluctant to familiarize themselves with the unknown, I will encourage them to embody their dilemma by standing up and playing around with the boundaries of the carpet in my office: with one foot on the carpet, and the other on the wooden floor, representing the familiar and the unknown. Standing up, moving around, physically embodying different stances often affords them better awareness of their inflexible polarities and entices them to try out new, more satisfying calibrations.

Let us return to Friedlaender’s theory. What are some of the fundamentals: creative indifference and differential thinking, polarities, zero-point (pre-difference), and degrees of differentiation? The Gestalt therapist Ludwig Frambach (2003) has researched for many years the impact of Friedlaender on Perls’s thinking, with reference to Felix Branger’s (1981) unpublished thesis on Friedlaender. He (Frambach) puts forth that Friedlaender’s basic concepts—creative indifference and polar differentiation—mark the beginnings of Perls’s reflections on therapy theory. Even in his autobiography, Perls (1972) still embraces the concept of creative indifference. Before continuing in this vein, let us turn to a brief background of Friedlaender’s life.

Born in 1871 in Golancz (now Poland), Friedlaender was a German-Jewish philosopher and satirist. With a good measure of dark humor, he wrote absurd and quite popular avant-garde poetry and prose under the name of Mynona, which is the German term for “anonymous,” spelled backward. It seems that Mynona was Friedlaender’s alter ego. His dissertation focused on Schopenhauer and Kant. In 1906 he moved to Berlin, where he was comfortable in expressionist, bohemian circles, among artists and intellectuals. In 1933 he fled from the rising Nazi movement to Paris, where he was seriously ill for many years and died in abject poverty in 1946. It seems that, except for The Creator and A Wearisome Wedding Night (2014), none of his writing has been translated into English.