Schedule

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.

Biographies:

Susan Gregory has been a Gestalt therapist and life coach in private practice for almost 30 years and has taught aspects of Gestalt therapy theory and practice throughout the world as both guest faculty and workshop presenter at conferences. In addition, she teaches singing and the Gindler approach to breath and body work. She has written four book chapters on the nexus of Gestalt therapy and breath and body work as well as more than 20 articles that treat various aspects of Gestalt therapy/voice/breath. Susan is a past president of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy.

Adam Weitz, LCSW, is a New York State–licensed psychotherapist and a graduate of the NYU Silver School of Social Work. He is a past president of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy.

Adam works in private practice in New York City. He previously served as a staff therapist at the Blanton-Peale Institute and Counseling Center. At Blanton-Peale, he had the opportunity to work with a broad spectrum of people and issues. He carries this experience into his ongoing work as a therapist.

Adam is a full member of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy (NYIGT); a member of the Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy (AAGT); a member of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW); and a member of Identity House, a nonprofit peer counseling organization serving the needs of LGBTQ people.

Adam creates workshops that reflect the current social field. These have included You, Me and Our Cell Phones, Looming Figures on Shaky Ground: This Era’s Authoritarianism in Our Lives and Practice, and now Looking Up and Looking Down: Ranking and Privileging at the Contact Boundary. All aim to heighten awareness and support experimentation for ourselves as we live in the world.

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.

Biography:

This is Perry Gunther’s second presentation at NYIGT. His first one was entitled Meeting Art at the Contact Boundary.

Perry began his career as an artist studying with noted artists of the New York School, including Ad Reinhardt and Tony Smith. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree under the tutelage of William Rubin, then the head curator at MoMA. After he submitted a paper on the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright on the De Stijl movement in Holland, Rubin suggested that he pursue a career as an art historian. Instead, Perry chose to continue as a practicing artist, as a denizen of the SoHo renaissance in Lower Manhattan, subsequently becoming a professor of sculpture at Cleveland State University, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College. His works have been exhibited at OK Harris Gallery and Max Hutchinson Gallery in New York City, and are in numerous collections, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Museum. In 1988, Perry installed a site-specific artwork inside the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland. He pursued a career in Gestalt therapy when he came to understand that the greatest gift an artist can be given is a sense of self-esteem. Perry received his training at Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy.

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.