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PSYCHOLOGYGestalt Therapy (1951) was written in collaboration with Fritz Perls and Robert Hefferline. The ideas are largely based on Fritz Perls’ work. This book brought Gestalt Psychology out of its academic and theoretical roots and into clinical and general practice. Goodman’s psychological writings reference Aristotle, Kant, Freud, Yeats, Federn, Gandhi, Reich, and many other acclaimed experts. Beyond their boundaries, however, Goodman insisted on the political implications of his psychological theories, which decreased support for his theories. Even his most academic of writings utilized poetry to fuse his ideas with personal revelation of feeling (Miller). All of his psychological writings returned to an anarchist community “vision of individual self-realization through love and work against the dehumanizing pressures that bureaucracy and technology were producing” (Miller). He argued that decentralized communities could create a new humanely decent reality out of the post-industrial wasteland. Gestalt Therapy looked holistically and at the parts of the ailment. Throughout his lifetime, his psychological views took in, reformed, and developed many other people’s theories, “from the Freudian unconscious to Reichian character-armor and sex-economy to the phenomenology of the contact-boundary -- recapitulate the development of Gestalt therapy itself” (Miller). He critiqued the revisionist psychoanalytic theories of Horney and Fromm, using the relationship among psychotherapy, the social order, and human instinctual life (Miller). Although Perl refused to support any of Freud’s theories because of personality differences, Goodman did not have a history of interaction with Freud and therefore felt comfortable utilizing some of his work. For instance, Goodman agreed with Freud’s biological basis to psychology, thereby opposing behaviorists, psychoanalytic revisionists, and most social psychologists (Miller). Goodman argued that human nature constrains the nature of community. Therefore, a failed society is one that does not respond to the natural needs of its people (Miller). This is what links his psychological theories to his politics. Likewise, he used this to answer back sociological Marxists who believed that nature is completely socialized and that a new social order will completely dictate a change in the nature of the populace (Miller). However, Goodman was a social psychologist, and therefore believed it necessary to study what happens between the patient and the environment. His research: that symptoms, character-formation, and growth all take place at the boundary between self and other; was crucial to the development of Gestalt therapy’s approach of working at that contact point (Miller). Additionally, Goodman agreed with Freud’s transference theory, that unfinished past situations influence present psychological behaviors. Goodman used this to argue that patients will continue to seek therapy because of the compulsion to repeat, but will try to finish up the old situation in the same ineffectual way--by having neurotic symptoms (Miller). He argued that Gestalt therapy provided the solution to this cycle. In the second volume of Gestalt Therapy, “Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality,” he wove together a comprehensive view of human nature, character development, healthy human functioning, and psychopathology. He explains the processes of personality growth and change, how they are resisted, and as such, what therapy can accomplish. Goodman adapted Reich’s philosophies to connect psychotherapy with social revolution, which contradicted much of Freud’s politics. Freud’s therapy sought liberation of instincts, but his politics supported keeping those instincts repressed, so they would only trickle out. However, Goodman did not believe a trickle was enough to change society. Reich showed that the social order had colonized the psyches of the public through family and school reinforcement of propaganda. This socialization called on students to ignore their spontaneous animal needs. Once this rejection became permanent, a rigid shell of personality forms, called character-armor, which leaves the populace passive and inhibited, thereby preventing a revolutionary mentality. Goodman and Reich believe that therapy could release these creative energies from the bad character formation, enabling a liberated mentality. However, they recognized that these liberated individuals would have to still be surrounded by institutions based on repression and aggression. As such, these individuals would seek revolutionary social change through the creation of new alternatives and a rejection of the current institutions. This caused Goodman to warn individuals from undertaking psychotherapy, which would inevitably cause its recipients to refuse to live in such a competitive, hostile world. However, he did not recognize the cure to be the goal, but experience. Goodman saw people as unfinished and capable of growing. “He saw therapy as an open-ended exercise that activates the mind, unleashes intelligence, encourages self-reliance, and creates healthy citizens able to perceive things accurately and effectively take care of life's business. Because politics impinge on life's business, a healthy citizen is, by necessity, politically active” (Jezer 1994). As such, he again linked his theories of psychology to his politics. ANARCHISMAs an anarchist, Goodman rejects all authority, coercion, control, top-down direction, and centralization. Instead he supports bottom-up, community control of all affairs. He contends that anarchism is not utopian, as anarchist mini-projects have been successful in the US historically. He believes that anarchy is always changing and not static in its solutions, like capitalism or socialist ideologies. He sought a society in which children have bright eyes, nobody is pushed around, rivers are clean, and in which there is useful work, tasty food, and “occasionally satisfying nookie” (Goodman, The Society I Live in is Mine). As an anti-structuralist, his starting point for social analysis was that “society” is a fictitious abstraction that is socially constructed and enforced through state propaganda of the media and educational system (Goodman, Crazy Hope and Finite Experiences, 1994, p.49-50). He argued that the US society was based on an over-developed centralism with a military style created to offensively wage war, an economic style dominated by profit instead of use and work-processes, and a style of industry based around steam prime-movers, cash-cropping, and enclosures. “These have produced over-capitalized and often inappropriate technology, an inflexible and insecure tightly interlocking economy, ignorant mass-consumption with a complicated standard of living of inferior quality, the development of sprawling urban areas rather than towns and cities, brain-washing mass communications, mass-democracy without real content, and mass-education that is both wasteful and regimenting.” (Goodman, “Notes on Decentralization,” 1996) The society that has been constructed is under the illusion that no other method of organization could be better or is possible. The possibilities around decentralization are ignored. Instead, problems with the system are handled by establishing new or different levels of control based on the same administrative style, not by examining the system itself (Goodman, “Notes on Decentralization,” 1996). Luckily, society is not unmovable, but an integrated network capable of changing (Jezer 1994). Goodman’s politics filter through a psychological lens when he argues that the problem is “anomie,” the helplessness of individuals resulting in a “loss of citizenry.” He states that the government’s means of solving “anomie” will never be successful because it entails encouragement of the illusion of “participation,” in that it doesn’t involve any true community control (Goodman, “Notes on Decentralization,” 1996). Goodman supported "good conservatism," meaning the willingness to give up everything to conserve community bonds; whereas, “phony conservatives” are those concerned with vested interests over that of the community. As such, he supported Edmunde Burke who acted to preserve the American community and Coleridge who argued that the property expropriated by Henry VIII should have been consigned to other moral and cultural institutions, and because he argued that villages which did not take part in national trade were still important. Other good conservatives included Lord Acton, George Washington and the other chief leaders of the American Revolution, and Danton and other early pre-Jacobin leaders of the French Revolution (Goodman 1970, p. 192-193, 195). Goodman’s anarchism is often said to be more of an attitude than an ideology (Jezer 1994). As such, Goodman’s solution is a more pragmatic option of a “mixed economy” of big and small capitalism, producers’ cooperatives, consumers’ cooperatives, independent farming, municipal socialism, and pure communism for poverty (Goodman, New Reformation, 1970, p. 149). This ran counter to many of the solutions of the anarchists whose direct action methods toward revolution he agreed with, such as Kropotkin, Malatesta, Bakunin, Ferrer, William Morris, and Thoreau (Goodman, New Reformation, 1970, p. 145). For Goodman, the focus is on "a more elementary humanity, wider, less structured, more variegated. The thing is to have a National Liberation Front that does not end up in a Nation State, but abolishes the boundaries. This was what Gandhi and Buber wanted, but they were shelved ... Some boundaries, of course, are just the limits of our interests ... But as soon as we begin to notice a boundary between us and others, we project our own unacceptable traits on those across the boundary, and they are foreigners, heretics, untouchables, persons exploited as things. By their very existence, they threaten or tempt us, and we must squelch them, or with missionary zeal make them shape up" (Goodman 1970, p. 194). Goodman’s focus was on what people could do next, not in planning the revolution or life post-revolution. His vision is more in line with the writings of Murray Bookchin (although Bookchin critiques Goodman for his individualism), whose reformist anarchism supports municipal libertarianism in which communities control themselves through direct democracy and vote for representatives who meet with the representatives of other communities. This method supposedly prevents top-down government hierarchy, because the people are in control of the candidates and the “leaders” are constantly being replaced. This solution offers a pre-revolutionary goal for anarchistic living, as communities can begin to control themselves immediately, although the state may prevent communities from having too much power. For Bookchin, the refusal of the government to recognize community control is what may spur revolution through public sentiment. Through community control in the interim, both Bookchin and Goodman believe the revolution can be non-violent and just requires the public to decide to withdraw its support of the state and its control, thereby remaking “society.” As far as tactics toward revolution, Goodman understands why guerilla fighting is a classical anarchist technique, but he regards himself as a non-violent activist. He contends that violence is a reproduction of power relations and therefore is inherently anti-anarchistic (Goodman, Black Flag of Anarchism). He called himself apolitical. He argued that since he is an artist, he first has to imagine “a simpler and more artistic way to do it, neater, making use of available and cheap materials, less senseless, less wasteful;” whereas, a political person acts to make a difference. (Goodman, “Politics Within Limits,” 1972). His “art” is said to have drawn attention to the connection between his radicalism and to the humanistic tradition, particularly notable when doing so to an audience of student activists, preparing them to be tear gassed at the barricades. "I have found it delicious," he announced, "When I was being most outrageous, to be quoting Aristotle or Spinoza and feeling that I was most orthodoxly innocent." (Miller) As far as social resistance as a tactic, Goodman supported piecemeal attacks, with citizens working together, not as a mass. He argued that seeking small gains are best, because it risks only small errors, not ruinous consequences (Goodman, “The New Reformation,”). “The aim is not utopia but a tolerable society with an active citizenry able to make further gains” (Jezer 1994). For instance, he agreed with the cultural ecologist Robert Netting, who stated that, "freehold farming ... kept open the possibility of anarchy ... a farmer ... can ... withdraw from the market, eat his own crops, and prudently stay out of debt" (Goodman, Crazy Hope and Finite Experiences, 1994, p.66-67). 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