Барри Стивенс: Гештальт-терапевт және оның өмір жолы

American Gestalt therapist (1902–1985)
Barry Stevens (1902–1985) was an American writer and Gestalt therapist. She developed her own form of Gestalt therapy body work, based on the awareness of body processes. For the Human Potential Movement of the 1970s, she became a kind of "star", but she always refused to accept that role. She worked with, among others, the psychotherapists Fritz Perls and Carl Rogers. Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley were among her friends. Fritz Perls described Barry Stevens as "a natural born therapist."

Stevens was born Mildred Fox. She later changed her name from "Mildred" to "Barry." She was married to the pediatrician Albert Mason Stevens, who co discovered Stevens–Johnson syndrome. Barry Stevens was a self described "High School drop out, 1918, because what she wanted to know, she couldn't learn in school." She and her husband moved to Hawai'i in 1934. Before Albert Mason Stevens's death in 1945, Barry moved to the mainland. She worked at Orme Ranch School near Prescott, AZ, and from 1948 to 1951 she was an administrative aide at Deep Springs College, near Big Pine, California. She later worked as an editor in Albuquerque, New Mexico, then relocated to California. Barry Stevens is the mother of Judith Sande Stevens (1925 2011) and John O. Stevens (1935 2018) who was also a writer, Gestalt therapist and NLP trainer, known as Steve Andreas.

Her publications include Don't Push the River (It Flows by Itself), a first person account of Stevens' investigations of Gestalt therapy. It shows the author during a period of several months in association with Fritz Perls at Perls' Gestalt Institute of Canada at Lake Cowichan, Vancouver Island, in 1969. Barry Stevens describes both Gestalt therapy theory and practice and her relationship with Fritz Perls in a sensitive way, thus creating a vivid image of Perls in the last months of his life. In addition she explored Zen Buddhism, the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Indian American religious practices in an effort "to deepen and expand personal experience and work through difficulties." Alternating with episodes from her earlier days, it became a "best seller" in the circles of humanistic psychology. Her earliest published work was "Hide away Island" (1934) a loosely autobiographical novel about a woman on the far end of Long Island. She met Nakata Yoshimatsu, a former valet of Jack London, in Hawai'i in the 1930s, and helped him to write down his recollections. She also wrote an article about Nakata that was published posthumously in 2000.