Presenters: Gianni Francesetti and Michela Gecele, with Dan Bloom and Michael Vincent Miller

Description:

Transformations in contemporary social and cultural life are producing isolation, rigid individualism, increasing fragmentation in the sense of self, and troubled relational experiences. We are losing shared narratives and witnessing a progressive weakening of the collective and relational grounds of experience and community. These developments are altering the forms that clinical suffering takes. They are changing how personality disturbances manifest themselves and demand that we revise our understanding of psychopathology. It is increasingly important that clinical practice addresses the often-overlooked existential dimensions of personality, including the impact of society and culture on the very shape and contours of self. We need to look at what Gestalt therapy calls the personality function of the self in a new light and bring personality and its disturbances back to the center of our clinical attention.

Our personhood is at stake.

At a time when psychotherapy is increasingly reduced to problem-solving techniques, attending to the backgrounds and landscapes within which the dimensions of personality unfold becomes essential. We must not lose ourselves in a confusion between problems to be solved and existential themes that must be lived through and experienced.

In this presentation, using both didactic and experiential methods, we propose a reorientation of the personality function of the self. This enables us to speak not only of the “id of the situation” but also of the “personality of the situation.” In doing so, we move beyond Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman’s original explication of the personality function and open a direction that offers theoretical support for contemporary clinical practice. The future of psychotherapy depends not merely on treating symptoms but also on sustaining spaces in which new forms of relationality, narrativity, responsibility, boundaries, and embodied meaning can emerge within a fractured social world. Our task is not only to support the personality function but also to expand our understanding of its broader landscape – the personality of the situation.

These ideas are developed more fully in Dimensions, Landscapes, and Clinical Aspects of Personality (Gecele & Francesetti, Routledge, 2026).

Biographies:

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. His current interests are expansion of the clinical phenomenology of Gestalt therapy and its engagement with the geopolitical world.

Gianni Francesetti, MD, a psychiatrist and Gestalt therapist, is an adjunct professor of phenomenological and existential approach in the Department of Psychology, University of Torino (Italy). An international trainer and supervisor, he has published widely on psychotherapy and psychopathology. He is the co-director of the IPsiG – International Institute for Gestalt Therapy and Psychopathology (www.ipsig.it) and of the Turin School of Psychopathology; a past president of the European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT) and of the Italian Federation of Psychotherapy Associations (FIAP); and a co-founder of IG-FEST. His last two books are Field Perspectives in Clinical Practice: A Dialogue Between Relational Psychoanalysis, Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis, and Gestalt Therapy (Routledge, 2025) and Dimensions, Landscapes, and Clinical Aspects of Personality (Routledge, 2026). He is the co-director of the books series Prospettive psicopatologiche e psicoterapia della Gestalt (Fioriti) and of Field Perspectives and Clinical Practice (Routledge).

Michela Gecele, MD, a psychiatrist and Gestalt therapist, trained in cultural anthropology. An international trainer and supervisor, she has published books, articles, and chapters on themes of psychotherapy and psychopathology, exploring clinical suffering from a phenomenological and Gestalt therapy viewpoint. Another clinical and research topic is that of cultural and intercultural issues (risks, opportunities, trauma and post-trauma, language, communication, and connections between social and cultural context and forms of illness and care). She has been working for 27 years in public mental health services, and she has coordinated, in Turin, a psychological and psychiatric service for immigrants. She is also a former member of the Human Rights & Social Responsibility (HR&SR) Committee of the European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT). She is the co-director of the IPsiG – International Institute for Gestalt Therapy and Psychopathology and of the Turin School of Psychopathology as well as a co-founder of IG-FEST. She is the co-director of the books series Prospettive psicopatologiche e psicoterapia della Gestalt (Fioriti) and of Field Perspectives and Clinical Practice (Routledge). She has also published fiction and educational books.

Michael Vincent Miller, PhD, has practiced and taught Gestalt therapy for over 40 years, primarily in New York City. He was trained in Gestalt therapy by its original founders. He has also been on the faculties of Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a co-founder of the Boston Gestalt Institute. He is a former president and currently a fellow of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. Michael is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and introductions to books, and his own book Intimate Terrorism has appeared throughout the world in nine languages. He is also the author of Teaching a Paranoid to Flirt: The Poetics of Gestalt Therapy, a collection of essays, and, most recently, Paths of Curiosity.