Presenter: Dan Bloom

Description:

This workshop opens the 75th-anniversary year of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. It invites us to pause – not just to reflect on our history, but also to reawaken the very spirit that gave birth to it: the creative aesthetic of contacting, the surprise of the always-new, the call of wonder.

It feels as if Earth’s rotation has sped up. What once unfolded in its own time now rushes past us. Everything is immediate – devoid of a past, blind to a future. Impatience overtakes us, dulling our felt sense of the situation. The time needed to nourish curiosity and dwell in presence is overrun by urgency.

And yet – we sense that wonder is possible. We know life can be more fulfilling. We yearn for it. Even when dulled to the world’s splendors, we feel the ache of something missing. We are always chasing rainbows – glimpsing their shimmer even when they do not appear.

Contacting – the essential theme of Gestalt therapy – opens us to this shimmer, to the surprise of the always-new. It is the process of interest and desire, of sensing and moving, of feeling and knowing. It is an openness to the unexpected, to curiosity, to the aesthetic of wonder.

To contact is to take time. To linger. To find the rhythm in which surprise and novelty, wonder and growth, can emerge. In the living-present, we sense, feel, move – and are moved. Meaning takes form within the aesthetic dimension of the living-present, lived-past, and lived-future.

From this perspective, we will revisit foundational concepts of Gestalt therapy: the field, the situation, the contact boundary, the sequence of contacting – and, centrally, the aesthetic of the contact event itself.

These themes will be explored through a combination of didactic presentation, clinical demonstration, and small and large group processes – each grounded in our contemporary relational practice.

Biography:

Dan Bloom, JD, LCSW (www.danbloomnyc.com), is the president of NYIGT and a psychotherapist, supervisor, clinical trainer, and writer in New York City. He studied with Laura Perls, Isadore From, and Richard Kitzler. Dan is guest and adjunct faculty at Gestalt therapy institutes worldwide; he has spoken and given workshops at many international conferences; and he leads webinars in Gestalt therapy and phenomenology. He is also a Fellow of NYIGT, a past president of IAAGT, a member of EAGT, and a co-founder of the International Gestalt Therapy Study Group on Field-Emergent Self and Therapy (www.ig-fest.org). In addition, he is an associate editor of the Gestalt Review, a book review editor of Quaderni di Gestalt, and a member of the Scientific Board of the Gestalt Therapy Book Series. Dan is widely published.