Schedule

Presenter: Yaël Lewin

Description:

Shapeshifter and protector, messenger and interrupter, the mask is an object/symbol/concept that we have been negotiating a relationship with for the past few years. While it has been perhaps most foreground for us during the pandemic, the mask has a rich history that spans many centuries and cultures and includes theatrical, social, political, spiritual, and medical uses. Adding a Gestalt therapy perspective helps to raise awareness of the intrapsychic and relational issues that emerge when a mask is worn – whether literally or figuratively.

In exploring this material together, we will have the opportunity to reflect upon its connection to us and our clients. Please bring a mask for some experiential work. (Halloween costumes are optional!)

The title references a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Biography:

Yaël Lewin, MA, LP, BCPP, is a Gestalt therapist and dance historian. Her background includes over 30 years of somatic studies, plus a graduate degree in English and comparative literature that helps with obscure research if not income. She is the author of Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins (Wesleyan University Press). She hopes to go to Venice for Carnevale someday.

Presenter: Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb

Description:

I wish to present the concept of “The Psychopathology of the Situation” (also the title of a recent book that I have co-edited with Piero Cavaleri) and discuss it with colleagues of the Gestalt community. This concept is inspired by initial reflections by Jean-Marie Robine and the book by Georges Wollants, Gestalt Therapy: Therapy of the Situation. How can we describe psychopathology from the field perspective? How does our clinical work change if we use this perspective? Why is it good to use it, especially with post-traumatic experiences? Is it more useful than traditional clinical perspectives? The book is definitely part of the “relational movement” of Gestalt therapy and expresses clinical reflections of the Italian institute that I have chaired since 1979. 

Far from aiming to make a point, this presentation intends to open a live discussion about how our clinical glance – especially on traumatic fields – can actually be developed in the perspective of the situation. I will try to stay with clinical examples as much as possible, avoiding becoming theoretically abstract.

Biography:

Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb is the director of Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy (Milan, Siracuse, Palermo). She has developed some basic clinical concepts of Gestalt therapy, like intentionality of contact, aesthetic presence, self as contact, and organism/environment field, in her book The Now-for-Next in Psychotherapy: Gestalt Therapy Recounted in Post-Modern Society. Integrating what she has learned from Isadore From with her experiences with Daniel Stern and other exponents of intersubjectivity and primary relationships, and with neuroscientists like Vittorio Gallese, she has approached the description of the ground experience of the self (the “polyphonic development of domains”), of the intuition of the therapist as a function of the field condition (the “aesthetic relational knowledge”), until her recent studies on “the dance of reciprocity” between therapist and client, as a switch of paradigm needed in our pandemic times.

More about her work: https://www.gestaltitaly.com/margherita-spagnuolo-lobb/

Presenter: Peter Philippson

Description:

Many people dedicate their lives to actualize a concept of what they should be like, rather than to actualize themselves. This difference between self-actualizing and self-image actualizing is very important… Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are so busy projecting themselves as this or that.
(Perls, 1969: 20, italics in original)

It might seem a strange question to ask, “Who is the client?” But inherent in the Gestalt approach is the idea that self and other are polar and co-emergent. This loses the idea of an objective client coming to see an objective therapist, each showing their “inner” selves to the other. Rather, we are together exploring this process of co-emergence.

We could even say that, for the client, coming to therapy is itself an act of self-alienation, bringing his or her incompetence to the therapist, who is seen as more competent at living. What the client shows to the therapist is not himself/herself in their fullness, but the familiar personality function, the self-image that has now become what Goodman calls “second nature.” For both client and therapist, self is the artist, not the image; the actor rather than the role. In facing the artist-client with the artist-therapist, new possibilities for actualization can form, often quickly.

I propose to elaborate on these themes, and then invite participants to bring experiences from their practice and their own therapy to discuss in relation to the theory presented.

Biography:

Peter Philippson, MSc (Gestalt psychotherapy), is a UKCP registered Gestalt psychotherapist and trainer, a Teaching and Supervising Member of the Gestalt Psychotherapy & Training Institute UK, a founder member of Manchester Gestalt Centre, a Full Member of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, a Senior Trainer for GiTa (Slovenia), a faculty member at IpsiG (Turin), an advisory board member for the Center for Somatic Studies, a founder member of IG-FEST, and a guest trainer for many training programs internationally. He has been working as a psychotherapist for 33 years. He is also a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy. Peter is the author of Self in Relation (Gestalt Journal Press), The Emergent Self (Karnac/UKCP), Gestalt Therapy: Roots and Branches (Karnac), and many chapters and articles. He is a teacher (4th dan) and student of traditional aikido.

Presenter: Christine Stevens

Description:
Basically, this workshop involves playing with clay! This is an experiential workshop involving hands-on experiments with clay and theory discussion. It combines embodied connections and interpersonal neurobiology with clinical application. Clay can offer back to us our way of being in the world. Haptic perception, through touch, is our earliest and most fundamental form of human experiencing. We come to understand about the world through our hands. Using clay within the Gestalt therapy relationship combines kinesthetic motor action with sensory perception and field sensitivities. It gives us access to non-verbal affect, materializing into awareness experience that is then therapeutically available.

Learning Objectives:
Participants completing this workshop will be able to 1) integrate an informed understanding of the use of clay into their clinical practice; and 2) differentiate a distinctively Gestalt therapy theoretical approach to the use of clay from a phenomenological perspective.

Participants who would like the fully haptic experience should feel free to bring clay or a substitute. The most basic modeling material can be made with flour, salt, and water; a recipe will be sent out in advance.

Biography:
Christine Stevens, PhD, is the editor of the British Gestalt Journal. She is a Gestalt therapist, supervisor, trainer, and writer. She is a member of EAGT, IAAGT, UKAGP, and GPTI. For 16 years, she was a faculty member for the doctorate in psychotherapy programs at Metanoia Institute, specializing in research methods. She is a visiting trainer to institutes in Slovenia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Poland as well as in the UK. She is the director of The Clay Studio, Nottingham, where she is involved in arts-based social engagement work with refugees. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary collaboration and arts-based research in psychotherapy.

Presenter: Dan Bloom

Description:

Wars. COVID. Fires. Floods. Autocracies and hate. Our world is fractured. Our earth is ablaze. We find ourselves dispossessed from our own homes – exiles in a land that was once familiar to us. We are haunted by terrors of the visible and barely visible, the present and barely present, and the nightmares of an accelerated future that is too quickly imminent. We are dislocated – thrown out of our place, out of our time. Can contemporary Gestalt therapy respond to the cries of persons alive in this world?

Of course it can.

This presentation will describe a contemporary relational and post-dialogical Gestalt therapy that responds to our being in this “uncanny” world. I will present the life-world and the situation in terms of the exiled self, the other, the alien, and the responsivity of contacting as existential-phenomenological dimensions of our field-emergent self model.

With these conceptual constructs included in our clinical phenomenology, the process of contacting becomes the articulation of our being-in-the-world-with-others and our means to soften the fractures of our phenomenal world. This perspective facilitates our being available to the clinical suffering in our practices.

The presentation will begin with an outline of these ideas. It will follow with small and large group experiments and discussions that are intended to concretize these ideas in an embodied way. I will facilitate the presentation in terms of the group-as-a-whole.

Biography:

Dan Bloom, JD, LCSW (www.danbloomnyc.com), is a psychotherapist, supervisor, clinical trainer, and writer in New York City. He studied with Laura Perls, Isadore From, and Richard Kitzler. Dan teaches at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, and is guest and adjunct faculty at Gestalt therapy institutes worldwide. He has spoken and given workshops at many international conferences. He leads webinars in Gestalt therapy and phenomenology. He is a past president and a Fellow of NYIGT and a past president of IAAGT. He is a member of EAGT. Dan is a co-founder of the International Study Group on Field-Emergent Self and Therapy (www.ig-fest.org). 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.

Presenter: Helena Kallner

Description:

Working as a psychotherapist requires the ability to judge how to act in relation to the uniqueness of each situation. How do we do this? In Gestalt therapy theory, we refer to this knowing as the aesthetic criterion, that which is felt and sensed in the unfolding dynamic of the therapeutic encounter. Sometimes this knowing is referred to as tacit knowing, or silent knowing – silent because it can be challenging, if even possible to fully verbalize. But sometimes silent as in silenced. Often this aspect of knowing is referred to as mere feelings, vague or mysterious and not as a core element of professional judgment that requires extensive practice, experience, and a theoretical foundation. 

This experiential presentation will explore movement and kinesthetic resonance as an essential foundation of knowing. We will inquire into that which we know before we know it, and attend to how always-emerging body-to-body dynamics between therapists and clients inform therapeutic interventions. I will base this presentation on my PhD research, exploring a psychotherapist’s practical knowledge of working with movement in psychotherapy. 

Biography:

Helena Kallner, MA, MSc, UKCP registered psychotherapist, practices Gestalt psychotherapy in Stockholm. She is a senior teacher and supervisor of Developmental Somatic Psychotherapy™. She is currently a PhD student at Metanoia Institute/Middlesex University. 

Presenter: Iris Fodor

Description:

More and more people worldwide are experiencing dislocation, trauma, and loss in these troubled times and they are telling their stories, writing about and sharing photos of their painful journeys. There appears to be a healing in these narratives and the process surrounding them – the showing, writing, and telling of the stories and letting others see, hear, know, and respond. Drawing on my own experiences in storytelling and memoir writing with people from diverse cultures undergoing stress, I will present some of the techniques honed from storytelling and memoir-writing workshops to foster experiential writing. In the experiential segment, I will introduce theme-based techniques to support our personal writing and tell our stories, and also discuss the use of storytelling and writing for Gestalt therapeutic work.

Biography:

Iris Fodor, PhD, professor emerita, New York University, is a Gestalt therapist in New York City known for teaching as well as conducting workshops and writing about women’s issues, anxiety management, mindfulness, and integrating Gestalt and cognitive therapy. Iris is also a social activist and photographer whose projects have focused on digital storytelling with adolescents in India, South Africa, and Peru. Her recent work focuses on memoir, experiential writing, and life story.

Presenter: Michael Vincent Miller

Description:

The main themes I want to explore in this presentation are related to the importance of form-making in Gestalt therapy as a central principle in the thought of Paul Goodman and what his work continues to teach us. Goodman was a master maker of form. He applied his gift for shaping and reshaping experience and giving it expression in an astonishing number of different artistic, psychological, social, cultural, and political areas, from writing poetry and novels to writing utopian city planning, from his powerful social and political criticism to the radically innovative psychology he brought forth in his collaboration with Perls.

One of Goodman’s most important messages to us as Gestalt therapists is that experience is never merely given to anyone; it is always being made by the forms we give it. And in our ongoing forming of experience reside both the moral and aesthetic dimensions of the lives we live, from our intimacies to our politics. One could say that for Goodman, the moral and aesthetic were integrated, and in that integration resides the radical human-centered message that pervades everything he wrote and taught.

I hope we’ll have an opportunity to open and delve into this question of form in our thinking and practice, as well as to examine its place in Goodman’s work.

Biography:

Michael Vincent Miller, PhD, is the current president of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. He was trained by Frederick Perls, Erving and Miriam Polster, and Isadore From. He has been practicing, teaching, and writing about Gestalt therapy since 1973. Before that, he taught literature and poetry writing at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His poems have been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Metamorphosis, and Occident. He is the author of numerous articles, chapters, book reviews, and introductions to books, along with five books: Revolution at Berkeley (Delacorte, 1965); Intimate Terrorism: The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion (Norton, 1996), which has been published in eight languages; La Poétique de la Gestalt-thérapie (l’Exprimerie, 2002); Teaching a Paranoid to Flirt (Gestalt Journal Press, 2011), a collection of his writings on Gestalt therapy; and A Gestalt Therapy Testament (Casaperlarte, Milan, 2014), published in English and Italian. New expanded editions of the last book in English and French under the titles Paths of Curiosity and L’itinéraire d’un curieux will be published by l’Exprimerie in September 2022. Michael also wrote the introduction to the collection of Paul Goodman’s psychological writings, Nature Heals.