Barry Stevens (1902–1985) was an American writer andGestalt therapist. She developed her own form ofGestalt therapy body work, based on theawareness of body processes. For theHuman 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 psychotherapistsFritz Perls andCarl Rogers.Bertrand Russell andAldous Huxley were among her friends.Fritz Perls described Barry Stevens as "a natural born therapist."[1]
Stevens was bornMildred Fox. She later changed her name from "Mildred" to "Barry." She was married to the pediatrician Albert Mason Stevens,[2] who co-discoveredStevens–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."[3] 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 atDeep 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 asSteve Andreas.
Her publications includeDon't Push the River (It Flows by Itself), a first-person account of Stevens' investigations ofGestalt therapy. It shows the author during a period of several months in association withFritz Perls at Perls' Gestalt Institute of Canada atLake 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 exploredZen Buddhism, the philosophy ofJiddu Krishnamurti, andIndian 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.[1] "We have to turn ourselves upside down and reverse our approach to life."[4]
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 ofJack London, in Hawai'i in the 1930s, and helped him to write down his recollections.[5] She also wrote an article about Nakata that was published posthumously in 2000.[6]
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