Dick Price

Richard "Dick " Price ( born October 12, 1930 in Chicago, † 25 November 1985) was an American psychologist and founder Michael Murphy of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur California coast.

Life

Price is with a twin brother - he died at the age of three years - and an older sister at several locations in the state of Illinois grew up. He studied psychology at Stanford University, then Clinical Psychology at Harvard University. In 1955 he moved to the newly founded by Alan Watts and the Stanford professor of comparative religion and Indology, Frederic Spiegelberg American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. There he came into contact with leading representatives of the Beat generation, especially Gary Snyder.

In 1956, he underwent a severe psychosis. In the course of which he was brought by his parents to a clinic in Hartford and treated there, among others, by means of electric shock and insulin shock therapy. After almost a year, he was released on Thanksgiving in 1957 and returned to the Chicago area.

In 1960 he moved back to California to Gia - Fu Feng and met his Stanford classmates Michael Murphy. On a located in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Murphy family plot in 1962 they founded the Esalen Institute. Price looked at Esalen an alternative to conventional psychiatry, as he has experienced it. He wanted a place where the was allowed to proceed "internal process " undisturbed. From 1964 he was introduced to Esalen by Fritz Perls in Gestalt therapy. This he practiced and taught there until he died in 1985 in the vicinity of the institute on a hike to a rockfall.