NYIGT 75th Anniversary
Conference
in New York and Online
June 4-5, 2027
NYIGT Conference: Our Past in the Present, Our Future in the Moment
Our conference celebrates the 75th anniversary of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy as well as the founding of gestalt therapy itself. The NYIGT emerged nearly simultaneously with the formal identification of gestalt therapy as a revolutionary new psychotherapeutic modality through the publication of Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, by Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman.
This conference will be a laboratory in which we re-create gestalt therapy as a fluid, ongoing theory and practice. We will embody our past as it is alive in the present and our to-be-lived future shaped by the aesthetic of contacting. While we pay homage to our founders and senior mentors – Isadore From, Paul Goodman, Richard Kitzler, and, of course, Fritz and Laura Perls, and others – we most importantly underscore how gestalt therapy and the NYIGT continue to be vital processes at the cutting edge of psychotherapy’s theory and practice.
Each day will be the experience of our past in the present and our future in the moment.
The event will be structured in terms of gestalt therapy’s field-emergent group approach. That is, the figures of interest of the conference-as-a-whole will shape who we are. Each participant will be a part of this whole. The event will be structured in terms of large and small groups.
This will be a hybrid conference with both online and in-person participation.Our schedule will include hours that allow participation for people in different time zones.
In the evening, we will celebrate at a dinner-dance party.
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Schedule
Friday, June 4, 2027
9 a.m. – registration and continental breakfast
10 a.m. – welcome by Dan Bloom, NYIGT President
Today will focus on the emergence of the NYIGT in New York City and the development of gestalt therapy throughout the world over the decades. Our past is in the present. Our history is alive in the moment. We will underscore this by small and large group processes and, of course, process groups, which arose decades ago from the institute’s attention to field-emergent experiences. Together, we will bring our history to life and launch us into the future.
Topics will include reflections on our founders and other important people who helped create the institute and trained generation after generation of gestalt therapists locally, nationally, and internationally. They were instrumental in developing our culture as a non-hierarchical teaching-learning community, where novelty, risk, and experiment co-exist with a careful understanding of the theory and practice.
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We will see how their students have been assimilating and further developing their work. We will achieve this through the experiences of our current members trained by them. Among the people we will hear describe their experiences over the decades will be Nancy Amendt-Lyon, Dan Bloom, Frank Bosco, Gayla Feinstein, Iris Fodor, Ruella Frank, Elinor Greenberg, Susan Gregory, Perry Klepner, Joe Lay, Burt Lazarin, Michael Vincent Miller, Peter Philippson, Jean-Marie Robine, Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, Lee Zevy, and others.
We will consider how the institute reflected and was impacted by the changing sociopolitical situation over the decades. We have been at the forefront of the civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and other social justice movements.
These will not be presentations to the conference. Rather, they will emerge within our ongoing engagement with the conference participants, all of whom represent the current vitality of the institute and whose presence at the conference represents teaching-learning in action.
Saturday, June 5, 2027
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This day will continue the momentum and group process of the first day. We will explore the trajectory of gestalt therapy within our teaching-learning culture. Every teacher learns, and every learner teaches, since understanding is a function of contacting – a relational, not an isolated process. We will acknowledge both the experiential dimensions of teaching-learning and the scholarship that has emerged from our past and continues in the present, shaping our future.
Significant field events are always impacting the institute, our members, and the world itself.
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We will take time to reflect on institute members who died of AIDS – Michael Altman, Billy Giroux, John Kane, Patrick Kelley, Charles Nance, Michael Ptasek, and others.
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We will look at what it is like to be alive as gestalt therapists in the Trump era and in a world fractured by conflict, displacement, migration, and the rise of authoritarianism, which are affecting our national and international communities.
The aftermath of the COVID epidemic, the surge in telehealth, online virtual formats, and remote participation have changed the world and continue to have a direct impact on us as an institute.
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In our process groups and as the conference-as-whole, we will look at how understanding of gestalt therapy and the NYIGT has changed over the course of the conference itself. We will ask, “What are we taking away from the conference and into the worlds in which we live and practice?”
Our conference finds closure as we will attend to our experiences of gestalt therapy’s liveliness in the moment, where lived-past and to-be-lived future offer the rhythm of contacting – exemplified by this conference.
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Location
The conference will be held at the historic Ethical Culture Society, New York, across the street from beautiful Central Park and not far from Lincoln Center.
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The conference will also be online.​​​