From the title chapter, "Teaching a Paranoid to Flirt" to "The Aesthetics of Commitment: What Gestalt Therapists Can Learn from C zanne and Miles Davis," author Michael Vincent Miller explores the facets of Gestalt therapy - the aesthetic, the theoretical, and the clinical. In his forty-year career as a practicing Gestalt therapist, a teacher of Gestalt therapy, his essays, reviews and commentaries on Gestalt therapy in particular and psychology in general have appeared in publications throughout the world including The New York Times Review of Books and The Boston Globe. His book, Intimate Terrorism, appeared in eight languages. This 400 page volume is divided into three sections: "Themes: Clinical and Philosophical," "Commentary," and "Founders and Shapers: Introductions and Elegies."

Only a few teachers, thinkers, and writers among Gestalt therapists have succeeded in extending its beautiful groundbreaking theory and practice which originally appeared in Perls, Hefferline & Goodman's Gestalt Therapy which published in 1951. Among this small group Jean-Marie Robine, who lives in Bordeaux, France, stands out as one of the most inventive and important figures on the current scene. Robine's special gift as a theorist is a sensibility that moves with ease from the philosopher's absorption in the task of fine-tuning concepts to the clinician's fascination with the nuances of feeling and behavior. The essays in this book illuminate one facet of Gestalt therapy after another from fresh points of view. Despite Robine's taste for the philosophical, there are passages of personal reflection alongside samples drawn from individual and group sessions, so that one comes away from the book with a sense of intimate connection between his development as a theorist and his experience as a therapist. On the Occasion of an Other is a work of value for not only the Gestalt therapists, but also for all psychotherapists who use an existential-humanistic approach in their clinical practice.

The Crisis of Love in an Age of Disillusion

"A witty, ironic, poetic, deeply intelligent and iconoclastic book about love . . . serious, wise and ultimately hopeful."--Carol Gilligan

We live in an age when love and power have become virtually interchangeable. Intimate Terrorism is a profound and beautifully written exploration of this condition that draws from psychology, literature, popular culture, current events, and the author's own therapeutic practice to examine the contemporary crisis of intimacy--and suggest what we all might do about it. In doing so it offers one of the most probing readings of the American psyche in years.

"This is a serious essay, a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation on what has gone wrong with love and marriage in the lives of individuals and in society as a whole."--Francine Klagsbrun, Boston Globe

"This is an exciting, troubling and lucid exploration of the ties that bind, even when they shouldn't."--Phillip Lopate

"Extraordinarily well written popular psychology. . . . A probing account of contemporary pain."--Kirkus Reviews

Michael Vincent Miller, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He lectures widely on his ideas about contemporary love and intimacy.