The hitman's loyalty

At a recent weekend seminar, I proposed a scene that ended up opening something that had been left unresolved, an unfinished gestalt. I tell the story here, pausing at a few points to think about it through the theory.

The brief

The scene had two characters: the boss of a mafia family and his hitman, his right-hand man. The hitman has decided to leave and work as an educator in a nursery, a dream he has had for a long time but has never mentioned out of loyalty. He has to tell his boss that very evening.

A middle-aged man and a young woman came up to do the scene, and between them they decided that he would play the hitman and she would play the boss.

They looked comfortable, and I had an intuition to switch their roles. So I did: she became the hitman who was leaving, and he became the boss.

When I switched them, I noticed discomfort in both of them. I tend to take that discomfort as a sign that someone is moving towards the pole of a polarity they keep in shadow. I think that when people choose a role automatically, they tend to stay on the side they already know, where they feel comfortable.

What I could see

She is an actress, and when the scene began, she started acting. I stopped her and asked her to try to be herself within the hitman's circumstances, without putting on a performance or creating anything artificially. This is how we enter a scene, and it comes from Stanislavski and his given circumstances, one of the foundations of Theatre Gestalt. The underlying question is his “magic if”: what would I do, with the body I have today, if I were standing in front of this boss, about to leave?

From then on, the hitman's excitement about the dream was nowhere to be seen. I had the impression that something else was happening for her. She was clearly angry; you could see it throughout her body.

I let her continue. In Gestalt, we work with what emerges, even when it does not fit the brief: describing what is there before interpreting it, which is the phenomenological attitude, and following the figure that emerges from the ground at each moment, which need not be the one the script had in mind.

Suddenly she said:

“You know what? I'm leaving.”

And she slammed the door and left the room, to the astonishment of everyone there.

“Guilty”

I brought her back in and asked how she felt. She said guilty, because of how the boss would feel. She had just slammed the door and walked out, and what she named was guilt about what the other person would feel. At that moment, I sensed there might be anger there.

I asked her who she was really seeing in front of her, and through tears she said her mother.

I think that was where something unresolved with her real mother opened up. She wanted to leave home and live her own life, and apparently her mother was not happy about it and always found objections. I read this as an unfinished gestalt: an unresolved matter that keeps calling for attention and takes any similar situation as an opportunity to return to the foreground. Gestalt took that idea from Gestalt psychology, from the observation that an interrupted task is remembered better than a completed one.

Nobody had asked her to talk about her mother. She emerged spontaneously, through the character.

The anger behind her

I asked her to choose someone from the group to represent her anger. I had two things in mind. One was her body language, which to me suggested obvious anger. The other was that guilt. I thought the anger lay in not allowing herself to break her mother's rule, in being unable to be herself because she had to respond to her mother's fear and take care of her.

In theoretical terms, I see an introject here, a rule swallowed without chewing that speaks in the voice of obligation (I can't leave, I mustn't hurt her), and something of retroflection, which means turning back on oneself what was directed towards the other: the anger I cannot express to you, I keep inside, in this case transformed into guilt. Guilt may also simply be the price of loving someone you are going to disappoint, and that need not rule out the rest.

She chose a young man. I placed him behind her, and he rested a hand on one of her shoulders, just one. His only instruction was to hold that role without doing anything else. Then, with her permission, I asked the participant playing the boss to stay in the scene, now playing her mother, and asked her to speak to her again.

Then she was able to say what she had been unable to say for some time:

“I'm fed up with having to make you happy and make sure you don't feel afraid if I leave home and live my own life. You're always controlling everything I do, and it suffocates me.”

Later, she said the presence of her anger had helped her a great deal, that she had felt steady and strong.

Perls spoke of healthy aggression, aggression as the energy that allows us to separate from the other person and say no. Laura Perls placed great emphasis on support: before we can make contact, we need something to sustain us, and when self-support is not enough, we can begin with support from outside. Here, that support was literal: a hand on a shoulder.

Returning to the scene

We returned to the scene between the boss and the hitman. This time, the farewell took place in a space that I found beautiful, with both of them connected to the present moment. The hitman asked the boss for a hug, and he gladly gave her one. It lasted almost a minute.

In the cycle of experience (sensation, awareness, mobilisation of energy, action, contact, satisfaction and withdrawal), I would say the slammed door was more of a discharge than an action that made contact. A great deal of energy had been mobilised, but she lacked the support to sustain the encounter with the other person, and the energy went out through the door. The second time, with her anger supported behind her, there was contact before withdrawal. For a facilitator, distinguishing an action that discharges from one that makes contact is very helpful.

The other side

At the end, I asked them both to say how they felt, whether they had become aware of anything, or whether there was anything else they wanted to share.

When I asked the other participant about his experience, he realised that the boss he had created had a great deal of his own father in him, his rigidity and severity. And he said:

“I felt envious seeing her follow what her heart was asking of her, even though she had previously committed to something else. Her freedom to allow herself to change, which is something I find difficult.”

In a way, his character brought him face to face with his own rigidity. This can be read as projection, because what we see in another person with such an emotional charge often also speaks about us, or as a polarity, rigidity and freedom, with him identified with the first pole.

He had created the boss to serve her scene, and the character ended up showing him something of his own. In Gestalt, we speak of the field here: what emerges in a scene is produced between those taking part and the group watching it.

Afterwards, the rest of the group also shared some of their perceptions.