In and out the garbage pail

This is a memoir by Dr. Fritz Perls, an American psychiatrist, associated with Gestalt therapy and the Esalen movement in California. It includes many hand-drawn illustrations. Fritz, born Friedrich (Frederick) Salomon Perls (July 8 1893, Berlin – March 14, 1970, Chicago), was a noted German-born psychiatrist and psychotherapist of Jewish descent.

He coined the term 'Gestalt Therapy' for the approach to therapy he developed with his wife Laura Perls from the 1940s, and he became associated with the Esalen Institute in California in 1964. His approach is related but not identical to Gestalt psychology and the Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy of Hans-Jürgen Walter.

At Gestalt Therapy's core is the promotion of awareness, the awareness of the unity of all present feelings and behaviors, and the contact between the self and its environment.

Perls has been widely evoked outside the realm of psychotherapy for a quotation often described as the "Gestalt prayer". This was especially true in the 1960s, when the version of individualism it expresses received great attention.

Frederick Perls, author of Ego, Hunger and Aggression, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, and (with Paul Goodman and Ralph Hefferline) Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, was born in Berlin in 1893. He practiced as a psychoanalyst in Germany until the ascension of the Nazis. He and his wife, Laura, moved to Johannesburg in 1934 where they both practiced psychoanalysis until they moved to New York City in 1946. There, in 1950, they established the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. Frederick Perls died in Chicago in 1970.