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Presenter: Perry Klepner
Description:
Gestalt therapy, as originally presented in PHG and more recently developed, is an extraordinary contribution to how we can understand human psychological coherence and conduct psychotherapy. This presentation will consider its holistic and phenomenal qualities by exploring the experiences of attendees as our emergent NYIGT community, created and discovered, emerging from our personal and collegial synergy. It will include conceptual and experiential segments and discussion to explore awareness and contact, attending to our experience of differences and commonalities such as new/old, local/distant, student/teacher, practice/theory, author/reader, participant/observer, fellow/member/associate – that is, our community and our situation.
The exploration is inspired by my long-term NYIGT membership and regard for the age-old human endeavor to conceptualize and navigate our individual, personal, and shared social and communal experience through the realms of our discontents, desires, hopes, ambitions, happiness, grief, anger, common and eccentric interests, successes, etc. Additionally, by the epidemic disturbances, divisions, and disharmonies of our everyday world as well as by the emphasis on individualized experience versus the unitary view of the organism/environment field or a Sanskrit phrase for universal interconnection, “What is out there is in here, and what is in here is out there.”
Also, by the words of Rainer Marie Rilke:
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner – what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
Biography:
Perry Klepner, LCSW, has been a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City and Kingston, NY, since 1977. He provides supervision and individual and couples therapy. For over three years, starting in April 2022, he has facilitated a support group for Ukrainian Gestalt therapists and currently is facilitating six line-by-line study groups of Gestalt Therapy by Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman. He trained with Laura Perls, Isadore From, and Richard Kitzler at NYIGT, where he is a past president (1993–95) and Fellow. He has authored articles and led workshops on Gestalt therapy at numerous conferences.
