Presenter: Cornelia Muth

Description:

In Gestalt therapy, Martin Buber’s dialogical principle is the guiding model for social interaction between the participants. Its central focus is the personal and intersubjective perceptual event in the present, which makes this approach phenomenological from a theoretical and clinical perspective.

Buber’s critical concept of the “in-between” as the meeting place of the I and the Thou is an essential place from where everything reveals itself or becomes clear to our world of experiences. The in-between is the background of contacting without which the mutuality of a healing encounter, dialogue, is not possible. This mutuality is at the heart of Buber’s I-Thou meeting in contrast to Emmanuel Levinas’s emphasis on non-mutuality of self-Other dialogue.

In this presentation, I will develop and deepen the idea of Buber’s in-between as background in terms of dialogue in Gestalt therapy. The in-between makes the figure/ground processes of personal, interpersonal, and social experiences at the heart of therapeutic dialogue. It is not merely the “third” of dialogue – as background to all experience, it is intrinsic to contacting’s emergence.

I will also touch upon Buber’s perspective on the spirit and soul. Buber considered himself neither a real philosopher nor a scholar nor a theologian. Instead, he saw himself as an atypical person who does not philosophize about but has faith in God’s energy.

Biography:

Cornelia Muth is a professor of transcultural educational sciences and philosophy at the University of Social Sciences and Arts in Bielefeld, Germany. She has been a Gestalt educator since 1995.

Her relevant publications include In-Between!?: A dialogic-phenomenological perspective (2025) and “Buber’s Concept of the Soul” (in: A Companion to Martin Buber, 2025).