undergird the libertarian social criticism he would pursue for the rest of his life. Gestalt therapy Aside from anarchism, the late 1940s marked Goodman's expansion into psychoanalytic therapy and urban planning. In 1945, Goodman started a second common-law marriage that would last until his death. Apart from teaching gigs at New York University night school and a summer at Black Mountain College, the family lived in poverty on his wife's salary. By 1946, Goodman was a popular yet "marginal" figure in New York bohemia and he began to participate in psychoanalytic therapy with Alexander Lowen. Through contact with Wilhelm Reich, he began a self-psychoanalysis. Around the same time, Goodman and his brother, the architect Percival, wrote Communitas (1947). It argued that rural and urban living had not been functionally integrated and became known as a major work of urban planning following Goodman's eventual celebrity. Fritz and Lore Perls contacted Goodman after reading his writing on Reich and began a friendship that yielded the Gestalt therapy movement. Goodman authored the theoretical chapter of their co-written Gestalt Therapy (1951). In the early 1950s, he continued with his psychoanalytic sessions and began his own occasional, unlicensed practice. He continued in this occupation through 1960, taking patients, running groups, and leading classes at the Gestalt Therapy Institutes. During this psychoanalytic period, Goodman continued to consider himself foremost an artist and wrote prolifically even as his lack of wider recognition weathered his resolve. Before starting with Gestalt therapy, Goodman published the novel State of Nature, the book of anarchist and aesthetic essays Art and Social Nature, and the academic monograph Kafka's Prayer. He spent 1948 and 1949 writing in New York and published The Break-Up of Our Camp, a short story collection, followed by two novels: the 1950 The Dead of Spring and the 1951 Parents' Day. He returned to his writing and therapy practice in New York City in 1951 and received his Ph.D. in 1954 from the University of Chicago, whose press published his dissertation as The Structure of Literature the same year. The Living Theatre staged his theatrical work. Mid-decade, Goodman entered a life crisis when publishers did not want his epic novel The Empire City, a new lay therapist licensing law excluded Goodman, and his daughter contracted polio. He embarked to Europe in 1958 where, through reflections on American social ills and respect for Swiss patriotism, Goodman became zealously concerned with