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'."

Within this collection are the unpublished writings of philosophy teacher, gestalt therapist, and historian Kitzler.