This is a collection of writings by members of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy previously published from 2000 to 2014. Here you will find essays with much in common and with important differences. These papers reflect the authors' relationship to the institute and offer what they believe is representative of their work. This collection exemplifies the institute: our membership, our mission our sense of history-and marks our place in contemporary gestalt therapy.

This work is an attempt to root Gestalt therapy - its theory and practice, in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). It is not an attempt to fix this wonderfully versatile therapy in concrete or to subtract anything of its existential openness from it, but to give it a foundation and a philosophical framework from which it can operate and develop. Its point of departure is the wonderful, even awesome, gratuity of one's being: 'I am given to myself'."

With the world facing the greatest global crisis of all time – climate change – personal and political indifference has wrought a series of unfolding complications that are altering our planet, and threatening our very existence. Reacting to the warnings sounded by scientists and thinkers, writers are responding imaginatively to the seriousness of changing ocean conditions, the widening disappearance of species, genetically modified organisms, increasing food shortages, mass migrations of refugees, and the hubris behind our provoking Mother Earth herself. These stories of Climate Fiction (Cli-fi) feature perspectives by culturally diverse Canadian writers of short fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and futurist works, and transcend traditional doomsday stories by inspiring us to overcome the bleak forecasted results of our current indifference.

Within this collection are the unpublished writings of philosophy teacher, gestalt therapist, and historian Kitzler.