Tribute to Gerald Kogan

This is a revised version of the text that I read aloud at the memorial service honoring Jerry Kogan in early 2014. About 200 people who knew and loved Jerry were in attendance.

Thank you for this honor and blessing asking me to speak here and now.

Jerry Kogan was Jewish and American. He was from Brooklyn. He told me stories about how he used to go fishing off the piers at Brighton Beach. It was a metaphor for how people abuse each other and how to handle it. During the time of Jerry’s childhood and youth – the mid-20th century – Brooklyn had more of an independent identity from New York City than it does now. The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team moved to Los Angeles in 1958. Today, I sense a revival of Brooklyn identity, with the Brooklyn Nets, an NBA basketball team, and the Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor league baseball team.

Jerry had deep Jewish religious beliefs, influenced by Kabbalah. He was very close to Martin Buber’s I and Thou, as well as to the Jewish founders of Gestalt Therapy, such as Laura Perls, Fritz Perls, and Paul Goodman. I am sure that Jerry believed in God. But I think there were small components of atheism and agnosticism in Jerry’s worldview. He respected my atheism, although he tried to get me to temper it with more spirituality. Jerry’s experiences and worldview were planetary. He visited and spent time in close to one hundred countries.

Jerry lived in Berkeley, California, for a long time in the 1960s and 1970s. He taught psychology at the famous university there. I also had the honor of meeting the luminary physicist and philosopher Hans-Peter Dürr, who passed away in 2014. Hans-Peter had several long stays in Berkeley, both as a doctoral student and as a visiting professor. He told me stories about his interactions at Berkeley with Edward Teller and Hannah Arendt.

Jerry worked together with Gregory Bateson.

The first contact between Tibetan Buddhism and American culture occurred in the early 1960s, when the Dalai Lama sent emissaries to Berkeley. Jerry knew these emissaries. He called himself a Ju-Bu, a Jewish Buddhist. He was also very influenced by Japanese Zen Buddhism. He played Zen-like tricks on me sometimes, or issued Zen-like challenges. He visited India often and was connected with Indian Hindu spirituality, healing, and meditation practices.

Christian theology was another influence on him. He often mentioned Meister Eckhart and St. Thomas Aquinas.

He often spoke about the principles of Native American religions and philosophy.

I don’t remember his ever talking about the prophet Mohammed, but I am sure that he had reflected on that as well.

Berkeley was the center of many liberation movements in the 1960s. Jerry was deeply involved and interested in all of them: the Marx-Freud synthesis, the revolution of everyday life, the critique of consumerism and the media spectacle, the antiwar movement, African American civil rights, women’s liberation, men’s liberation, gay liberation, and sexual liberation. He wrote about Reichian and energy therapies, Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, and embodiment therapies in his book, Your Body Works.

I met with Jerry once a month for twelve years. We were both Brooklyn Jews living in Frankfurt. Our age difference was twenty-five years. I had done a couple of years of psychoanalysis in New York, but it had not helped me. Almost all post-Marxist poststructuralist intellectuals like myself who write books affiliate themselves in one way or another with psychoanalysis. I am the exception to this. Jerry always said that Freud was the basis for Gestalt Therapy. Without psychoanalysis, Gestalt Therapy would not have been possible. My psychoanalysis in New York helped me in the sense of remembering some of the original scenes in childhood that were the basis of my patterns and conundrums. Psychoanalysis was good for recognition. But it was too intellectual to help me to grow. heal, and change. I wanted to have a conversation with a psychotherapist sitting face-to-face across from me.

A couple of times, when I mentioned Gestalt Therapy to my fellow post-Marxist deep thinkers, they replied, “No, you must be confusing it with Gestalt Psychology, which we historically respect.” Gestalt Therapy is one of those “American ego psychologies” like Maslow or Rogers that Lacan criticized, or that Russell Jacoby correctly tore down (according to them) in his book Social Amnesia.

Jacoby is based on Adorno. Adorno was hostile to all psychology except for classical psychoanalysis. The same with Derrida.

Nope.

Carl Gustav Jung was another strong influence on Jerry.

Gerry’s transdisciplinary-based psychotherapy, as he often stressed, was a psychology of consciousness, not of the unconscious. Mindfulness, Achtsamkeit, awareness. The importance of flexibility in consciousness. It’s good to take gambles, but don’t become attached to any one outcome. You might win or lose, and be prepared in your mind for either outcome.

But hey Alan, you got lucky.

It was also about feelings and emotions. As you are speaking about what you are speaking about, “What are you feeling right now?” The content of what I am saying in the moment is less important than what I feel in my body while I am saying it. It’s about making a better mind-body connection.

Another thing I learned from Jerry that sticks out in my mind is that it is often better to enact a fictional or imaginary conversation with someone with whom I need to settle something than to actually have the real conversation with them.

In this spirit, I will now have another brief conversation with Jerry, playing the parts of both Jerry and me, since he is no longer here to play his part.

Alan: Jerry, I feel angry at you.

Jerry: Why is that, Alan?

Alan: I expected you to live to 103, as your mother did. I didn’t expect that you would be leaving me now.

Jerry: Have I left you, Alan?

Alan: On second thought, no. I’ve got a database of a thousand things you said to me. I can listen to that wisdom until the end.

Jerry: Sounds very good. I think you’re doing great.

Alan: So now you’re structured like a language, just like Jacques Lacan said.

Jerry: Forget that intellectual bullshit. It’s a form of self-protection. It’s mindfucking. Sei Gesund, Alan.

Alan: But some of my best friends are Lacanians!

Jerry: What do you want to talk about next?

Alan: Should I do this or that?

Jerry: Remember this. If you get more than three hits in every ten at-bats, you would be making ten million dollars a year playing Major League Baseball. You would be Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb. You would be a very rich man.

Alan: I will miss our sessions.

Jerry: No, you won’t. Your therapy was completed at exactly the right time. But don’t thank me. When someone gives you a gift, it belongs to you.