Schedule

Presentation Zoom link to be announced.

Presenter: Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb

A concept of field in line with PHG will be presented. It will be outlined how this concept leads me to develop our method and practice focusing on the ground experience of the contact making and on the reciprocity (the dance) of contact. Examples on the practice of reciprocity will be made. The whole seminar will consider the new organism/environment balance in the actual pandemic times.

Presentation Zoom link to be announced.

Presenters: Scott Kellogg & Amanda Garcia Torres

Transformational Chairwork has its roots in the seminal experiential psychotherapy innovations of Dr. Fritz Perls during his Esalen/Gestalt Therapy Verbatim years. Moving beyond that, we have also studied the practices and insights of a wide range of other Gestalt and integrative therapists; this led to the discovery of the Four Dialogues model in 2018.

The Four Dialogues Model is based on the realization that there are only four core dialogical stances — Giving Voice, Telling the Story, Internal Dialogues, and Relationships and Encounters — and that all of Chairwork psychotherapy involves the use of these approaches — either alone or in combination with others.

In this presentation, we would:

1. Briefly introduce the Four Dialogues Model.
2. Show how Chairwork can be used when working with inner critic issues and experiences of trauma and mistreatment.
3. Explore how the Four Dialogues can be a deep and empowering form of healing with patients from historically oppressed or marginalized groups; Chairwork can be a particularly effective way of (a) challenging experiences of racism and discrimination, (b) working through issues with identity, and (c) resolving ambivalence.
4. Provide live case consultations and role-plays with the participants to see if Chairwork can help them overcome or find solutions for therapeutic impasses or difficult clinical situations.

Presentation Zoom link to be announced.

Presenter: Lee Zevy

The understanding of bullying and workplace harassment is usually limited to one side, the victim or the other, the bully/perpetrator.

Only recently has the relationship itself been explored as central to the process of how aggression, harassment, and violence progress over time.

However, just separating or punishing any one of the parties involved, as is often the case, is inadequate to prevent both individuals from continuing their role with someone else.

Locating the relational interplay within a field of intersecting forces would add depth and understanding to the wider field. This would allow for greater awareness of the points at which the building aggression can be interrupted. Then the participants can be helped to understand the forces driving them and the relational engagement of the process.

Presentation Zoom link to be announced.

Presenter: Peter Philippson

In a one-power family (according to Bob Resnick), only one person can have power at any one time: Either there is one person who always holds the power, or the power moves between the family members in different situations, but still is never shared. In a two-power family, everybody can be powerful, and there is more liveliness, creativity, and energy, and also more overt conflict.

Having been sensitized to this idea, it became clear that a very high proportion of the difficulties brought by my clients came out of an early family pattern of one-power relationships, which they then took into their later relationships with partners, children, friends, and work relationships.

And yet, most approaches to counseling and psychotherapy are based on one-power relationships between therapist and client! This workshop discusses what it means to engage in two-power psychotherapy.

Presentation Zoom link to be announced.

Presenters: Susan Gregory & Adam Weitz

The idea is to explore the many ways we, our communities, and our clients are ongoingly having to change in the face of both the pandemic and the movements for justice and their pushbacks.

We will emphasize classic Gestalt therapy theory, including figure/ground, creative adjustment, aware interruptions in contacting, and more. We hope, too, to draw from trauma amelioration therapies and social psychology.

Presentation date and Zoom link to be announced.

Presenter: Perry Gunther

A simple definition of space is about the distance between two objects. Space itself does not exist. It is simply the distance between things. But when space is embodied, it is more than an emptiness. It could be a dream space, a psychic space, a mind space, or the felt space between therapist and patient. Those are just a few ways to describe what space feels like.

In therapy, we understand that communication between therapist and patient is informed by embodied space. When there is a contact experience between the two, space opens up. It is a felt sense as if suddenly we have more room around ourselves. Embodied space is also how we experience paintings. Since paintings are flat, space is a virtual space that has provided endless “visual metaphors” to express it.

This presentation includes a slide demonstration as well as didactic experiments with space.

Presentation date and Zoom link to be announced.

Presenter: Mariano Pizzimenti (Italy)

A new orientation for couples therapy, working with sexual disorder, and other contexts where confrontation is important but dangerous and difficult.

With “sexual aggressiveness,” we define the experience in which aggression and sexuality can be combined with each other in a figure/ground relationship, which is not polarizing nor based on antithesis. It is the situation in which love and destruction, as well as hunger and sexuality, can simultaneously coexist. 

Sexual aggression is an evolutionary behavior and concept, which comes from experiencing that I can attack and destroy resting on a background of love, desire, and creativity. I can desire, love, and create while maintaining the ability to attack and eventually destroy what I do not need and/or damages me in the relationship with another person. Aggression and sexuality come together in a figure/ground relationship, in which one can stay in the foreground while the other feeds and limits it from the background.

After a short introduction, we will experience how to nourish the background with care, pleasure, erotism, and intimacy, while in the foreground, there will be aggressivity, clarity, and even separation. In accordance with the interest of the participants, we will experience this special kind of figure/background relationship in a couples session and/or group session, entering also in the field of sexual disorder.

The different experiments will be influenced by the group, and I hope that in the context of NYIGT, we will be able to build new experiences.

Biography:

Mariano Pizzimenti is a psychologist and psychotherapist, and the founder and director of the Gestalt School of Turin. He was trained in Gestalt therapy by Isha Larry Bloomberg and Robert Hall. He began his activity as a therapist in 1981 and has since practiced and taught Gestalt therapy in Italy, Germany, Scotland, and Ireland. Mariano is also the past president of FISIG (Federazione Italiana Scuole e Istituti di Gestalt). In addition, he is the author of the book Aggression and Sexuality: The Figure/Background Relationship Between Pleasure and Pain.

Presentation date and Zoom link to be announced.

Presenter: Yaqui Andrés Martínez Robles (Mexico)

When we reflect on the theme of love, we commonly refer to the various erotic-affective phenomena that arise in a couple’s relationship, or we think of love only as an emotional experience. In The Loving Gaze, we will reflect and share from a phenomenological-existential and relational proposal about love as an experience that goes beyond emotions and that transcends a couple’s relationship, to speak of it as a way of being-with-the-other, a posture that can enrich the Gestalt therapeutic relationship. We will try to reflect from our personal experience, as Plato suggests in the dialogue in his Symposium.

Biography:

My name is Yaqui Andrés Martínez Robles Ph.D. I live in Mexico City with my wife and our two cats. In my therapeutic practice, my work style is a mixture of a Gestalt relational approach and the existential-phenomenological model.

I’m a clinical psychologist, with an M.A. and a Ph.D. in humanistic psychotherapy and a major in Gestalt therapy.

I have also completed doctoral studies in philosophy with a major in psychotherapy.

I’ve been a teacher for more than 20 years at the Instituto Humanista de Psicoterapia Gestalt (Humanistic Institute for Gestalt Psychotherapy) in Mexico.

I founded the Círculo de Estudios en Terapia Existencial (Circle of Studies on Existential Therapy) in Mexico, 18 years ago, where I coordinate a master’s degree in existential therapy. www.circuloexistencial.org

I’ve been a teacher at several universities and institutes in Mexico and other countries.

Nowadays, I’m studying electric guitar and enjoy listening to music very much.