Dick Price

File:RichardPrice68NBq.jpg

Dick Price 1968

Dick Price co-founded Esalen Institute in 1962.

Biography

Dick Price was born October 12, 1930 to Herman and Audrey Price in Chicago, Illinois.

Price had a twin brother, Bobby, who died at age 3, and an older sister, Joan.

Herman Price (anglicised from 'Preis') was born in 1895 and emigrated from Lithuania in 1911 and became an Executive Vice President at Sears. Herman headed appliance manufacturing and design with Coldspot and worked extensively with Raymond Loewy, who was a close family friend. With the onset of World War II, he applied the assembly line experience to assisting in the mass production of the B-17.

Audrey Meyers (Price) was born in Indiana in 1895 and grew up in Illinois. She was of Dutch, Irish and English extraction.

Education

In the early 1930s, the Price family moved to Kenilworth on the North Shore of Chicago. Price graduated from New Trier High School in 1948. Price was on New Trier’s wrestling team and placed second in his weight class in the state of Illinois.

Price graduated Stanford University in 1952 with a major in psychology and went on to do graduate studies in clinical psychology at Harvard University.

San Francisco

After Harvard, in 1955, Price moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. While in the Air Force, he took a room at Alan Watts’ and Frederic Spiegelberg’s newly founded American Academy of Asian Studies (the precursor to the California Institute of Integral Studies though it was to close in late 1956) in San Francisco. This placed him at the hub of the newly emerging North Beach Beat scene.

Psychosis

In 1956, in San Francisco, Dick Price had undergone an episode of psychosis, which he later termed as simply "a state" referring to a break that was seen as transitory and needed to be gone through and experienced rather than repressed or managed. On December 7, 1956 he was committed to the Institute of Living mental health center until released on Thanksgiving Day of 1957. He was subjected to electroshock treatment and insulin shock treatment during this time. After release, he returned to the Chicago area.

Price’s own words on the experience:

“There was a fundamental mistake being made and that mistake was supposing that the healing process was the disease, rather than the process whereby the disease is healed. The disease, if any, was the state previous to the “psychosis”. The so called “psychosis” was an attempt towards spontaneous healing, and it was a movement towards health, not a movement towards disease… In some categories it would be called mystical, really a re-owning and discovery of parts of myself…”

Founding Esalen

In May, 1960, Price returned to California and took up residence at the East-West House with Gia-Fu Feng. That year Price met fellow Stanford University graduate, Michael Murphy at Haridas Chaudhuri’s Cultural Integration Fellowship where Murphy was in residence. Price moved in to the Cultural Integration Fellowship as well. In 1961 they visited 127 acres of ocean side property which included natural hot springs in Big Sur, California which was owned by Murphy's family. In 1962, using that property, capital that Price had, and assistance from Watts, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, Frederic Spiegelberg (with whom both Price and Murphy had studied at Stanford), and others, they founded Esalen Institute together (Previously, the natural hot springs baths were part of a run-down resort, whose security guard was a young Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Baez was also in residence). Among other objectives, Price saw in Esalen an alternative to then current mental health practice, especially the practices of mental hospitals, a place where inner process could move forward safely and without interruption. In 1964 it was notable that he was romantically involved with Jane Fonda. Also in 1964, Fritz Perls arrived at Esalen. Price became one of Perls' closest students during Perls' time at Esalen. Price continued practicing, modifying, and teaching Gestalt at Esalen until his own death in a hiking accident in November, 1985.

Further reading

• Anderson, Walter Truett. The Upstart Spring: Esalen and the American Awakening January 1983, Addison Wesley Publishing Company ISBN 0-201-11034-2 and February 2004, Backinprint.com ISBN 0-595-30735-3

• Kripal, Jeffrey. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, April 2007, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-45369-3. Summary published in Chronicle of Higher Education .

• Kripal, Jeffrey and Glenn W. Shuck (editors). On The Edge Of The Future: Esalen And The Evolution Of American Culture, July 2005, Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-21759-8

• Aperture, Number Ninety-Three, Winter 1982-1983. ISBN 0-89381-129-7

External links

• Interview with Dick Price conducted by Wade Hudson
• "Totally on Fire: The Experience of Founding Esalen" excerpted from Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal
• Esalen Alumni Group