“Life Focus Communities: Heirs to Religion?” by Erving Polster (2024)

On a chilly March morning, I drive to my favorite neighborhood park. My plan is to organize the many thoughts and reactions I had upon reading Erving Polster’s most recent article (2024). I do not have much occasion to use this word, but I am truly “honored” to be invited to write this commentary.I have only had a few crossings with Erving Polster. He and Miriam Polster left Cleveland a few years before I began my training at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland in 1976. The first was in 1981 at a Gestalt Journal Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. However, my late and dear friend and colleague Stephen Zahm was one of Erv’s most ardent students and admirers. Steve, Eva Gold, and I sponsored a public lecture by Erv in the 1990s in Vancouver, Washington. I still tell this story in my training groups. Erv did a demonstration piece with a volunteer. Afterward, an audience member queried him: “Dr. Polster your ‘patient’ spoke to you about struggling throughout her life constrained by very rigid ‘shoulds.’ At one point you told her very directly what you thought she should do. You gave her another ‘should.’” Not missing a beat, Erv, with a characteristic twinkle in his eye and wry smile, responded: “Yes I did, but mine was a much healthier one!”Back at the park, I find my usual bench next to a community garden and begin to take one more pass through the article. I enjoy coming to this park because there is also a playground where I have taken my grandson, Simon. Suddenly, I am captured by the sight and sounds of two little girls, probably about two or three years old. They are running in circles, dancing together and apart and singing in and giggling in sheer delight. I recall Erv’s words from his 2023 article published as “Primal Familiarity”: “The most primal experience is the one we are born with, the feeling of being alive. I call it élan vital, excitement, libido, prana, electricity, or spirit. This is fundamental and energizes existence” (3, emphasis in original).No doubt, there is some ordinary familiarity in the short lives of these little girls. At this age, however, so little is ordinary and so much is yet to be discovered, primal and novel. Expanding my view, I observe the moms and a few dads in small groups trying to stay warm and exhibiting “enhanced attention” as they keep an eye on their little ones while laughing and engaging in animated conversation. I think this is a type of congregation, a Life Focus Community. These parents do not live together but regularly gather at this playground, knowing each other or just meeting, appreciating a group space or haven where they can share stories, worries, and the joy of community.And I think about these children at the beginning of their lives and Erv near the end of his. As they age, life will become more ordinary and routine. There will come a time when dancing freely and singing off-key may recede in the shadow of self-consciousness and embarrassment. I imagine Erv sitting next to me on the park bench watching these girls in their unbounded delight, and he leans over and whispers, “Jon, when these little girls grow up and one day realize that they have stopped dancing, Life Focus Communities will be a path back to the spirit we just observed.”Erv was intrigued by, experimented with, and wrote about what he has termed “communal awakening” and the limitations of psychotherapy for many years. In Gestalt Therapy Integrated Contours of Theory and Practice (1973), he wrote about large group designs and commented on the need to explore the relationship between religion and psychotherapy. To pick up a fresher trail, I briefly reviewed his Beyond Therapy: Igniting Life Focus Communities (2015), Enchantment and Gestalt Therapy: Partners in Exploring Life (2021), and “Primal Familiarity” (2023). Along the trail, I noted signposts like “communal awakening,” “congregation,” “enhanced attention,” “enlightenment,” “experience of merger,” and “primal familiarity.”Before I begin my commentary, I will summarize Polster’s basic thesis. Psychotherapy should not be bounded by the goal of curing people or improving individual lives. Congregations, a term typically associated with religion, are groupings of people that have continuity over time and where individuals can explore common psychological concerns. Psychotherapy to date lacks an equivalent. In general, religious groups are more likely to tell us exactly how to live our lives because of their superstitions and inflexible morality. A basic human need is to examine how we live our lives. Life Focus Communities have the advantage of congregation without the doctrine. There is a natural outcome when we move from individual to group therapy to communal awakening. Through Life Focus Communities and processes, ordinary familiarity can be transformed to primal, mundane experiences to the sacred.Polster’s promotion of Life Focus Communities prompted me to reflect on my own experience with “congregation.” I was raised Catholic, was an altar boy (I still remember some of the Latin), but fled the Catholic church as a teenager, never to look back. Basketball was a huge part of my life, and I would venture to say that both organized and pick-up games brought like-minded people together. At times, when there was a rhythm and harmony among the ten of us, I experienced peaks of joy and enhanced attention that felt sacred and magical. My core group of twenty who completed the postgraduate training program at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland certainly would qualify as a Life Focus Community. While in graduate school at Kent State University, I helped organize and was a member of a men’s group. That group met regularly for two years and was a space for topics to be discussed that men did not usually talk about. In recent years, however, I tend to prefer my own company or the company of one or two close friends. The exception would be the Gestalt training groups I led, but I have a designated role in those groups. Polster’s article has me pondering what I might be missing as I enter the final chapter(s) of my life.Certainly, I was inspired by this article. Erv is 25 miles down the road. A few years ago, I began to write an article provisionally entitled “Between Elder and Ancestor: The Greying of Gestalt Therapy” (see final version in this issue). At that time, I was having serious questions about my value and relevance as a supervisor and trainer. The individuals I was meeting with were always younger, of course, but they also tended to be not white and to identify as queer or LBGTQ+. In the article, which remains unfinished, I speculated on whether the Gestalt therapists who were my trainers or their trainers confronted such dramatic demographic and cultural shifts in their lifetimes. I have since pulled back from “taking myself out of the game.” My supervision and training have expanded, and, at least for now, I am relatively confident that I am still adding value. And I think of Erv at 102, still writing, evolving his thinking, adding value, influencing countless others, and he is (was) a source of inspiration.Polster’s article left me with questions about his own participation in Life Focus Communities, particularly ones he did not form or lead. I am betting that the small group of folks who met on a weekly basis and had the audacity to invite Frederick (Fritz) Perls to Cleveland in the 1970s was an early one: “We came to those meetings as if we were coming home, absorbing the holiday quality while exploring our inner lives and the world around us” (120, this issue). His article has the quality of a well-argued and defended set of propositions. He begins with the limitations of psychotherapy, a profession whose sole purpose is to cure people and improve individual lives. He reviews the work of a number of “luminaries” beginning with Freud and including James, Adler, Moreno, and Maslow, pointing out the connection “largely unnoticed between their therapeutic innovations and their communal interests” (117, this issue). Of those theorists, Adler emphasized the importance of “belonging,” or the human need to feel a part of a larger entity. He cited Maslow’s influence on the Encounter Group Movement. Polster then moves on to the Mindfulness Movement and its recent popularity, mentioning various practitioners and scholars such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Dan Siegal. He reminds us that mindfulness practice and heightened attention to the internal and subjective world results in increased empathy, connectedness, and the desire to honor and care for others.Perhaps the most controversial and provocative thesis is in the title, Life Focus Communities as heir to religion. You will note that the article title ends with a question mark, not a period. A recent Gallop Poll provides evidence that church attendance in the United States has declined dramatically, from 76% in 1947 to 47% in 2021. Polster describes four religious groups and examples of meetings like Chavurah in Jewish faith that give “psychotherapeutic attention to self-revelation, communal convergence and the landscapes we live in” (127, this issue). He concludes that section without a question mark, asserting that the incorporation of congregation in psychotherapy or Life Focus Groups would establish it as an heir to religion.If I were able to have a conversation with Erving Polster, I would welcome a lively dialogue about a number of his points:I am confident that Erv, given his life experience and wisdom, has considered my closing points and that a lively dialogue would ensue. If I could have that conversation, I would enquire about his current living situation and participation in Life Focus Communities. I would ask for his guidance about my ambivalence about forming or joining those types of groups. I would ask if he, too, had times in his life when he questioned his relevance and value added, as the world around him grew younger and more diverse. I would let him know what an inspiration he has been to me and to countless others.Hallelujah!It turns out I will not be having that conversation with Erv. On Saturday morning, March 23, 2024, as I was working on my final draft of this document, I received a text from a Gestalt colleague informing me of Erv’s passing.I will return to that park bench next week and watch the children play. I will rewrite this line, “And I think of these children at the beginning of their lives, and Erv at the end of his.” Maybe he will join me again at the park bench. And I wonder what he will whisper this time. God speed Erv.

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