Preamble: A Cluster Contacting the Other

Abstract

Gestalt Review celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary with this issue. We, in this cluster of the journal, feel honored to participate in this event.The journal engages Gestalt therapy theory and practice at the highest level. Its debut edition in 1997 was edited by Joseph Melnick with articles by Arnold Beisser, Judith R. Brown, Petruska Clarkson, Helga Matzko, Joseph Melnick, Malcolm Parlett, and Joseph Zinker. If you are lucky enough to have the volumes of this journal in your library, take a look at them now. You will see articles that cover the breadth and width of Gestalt therapy, from clinical theory and practice in various settings with various populations to Gestalt therapy's expansion into organizational development, social policy, and education. You will see how the journal searched out and developed various themes in Gestalt therapy. You will see articles that first appeared here and became part of the curricula of training programs everywhere: they are part of the foundation of our theory and practice.As a cluster coordinator, I select a theme and choose writers from among the multiverse of expert Gestalt therapists. This anniversary issue appears in a world undergoing the weight of COVID-19 and sociopolitical transformations. This anniversary issue of the journal is also special by way of this world-historical event. As such, it is part of Gestalt therapy's response to this world, this place, and this time. You will take ideas from these essays written in a pre-COVID world into your current Gestalt practices.I was asked to choose a theme in the world prior to COVID-the-disrupter, prior to racial and social awakening across a fold in the lived-historical field. This was not too long ago in terms of time as marked by calendars, but eternities ago in terms of the lived-time of our experiential field. I chose “contacting the other” because the concept is central to our theory and practice. In the time between my choice and its realization in this journal, the theme I selected is developing even more relevance as the world shudders under the rolling disruptions of COVID-19, climate catastrophes, and continuing social and political reconfigurations. New dimensions of otherness are being thrown at us. The coronavirus hijacks people's DNA and turns them into potentially lethal others. Strangers, friends, and even loved ones could be dangerous. Our homes are engulfed by flaming forests and turned into furnaces. We are awakening to how we have brutalized our neighbors and ourselves through the silent atrocities of centuries of racism. We, Gestalt therapists, are trained in the clinical art of contacting the other. When we focus our trained eyes most widely across the time and space horizon of the field, we can see how our skill at contacting the other can illuminate the darkness that seems unremitting on a personal, social, and global scale. Gestalt therapy has been at the front lines from its natal day.My article, “From the Night Before Being,” is the final essay of this cluster as a postlude in the sense that it addresses contacting full-on and from a relational perspective. Contacting is the heart of Gestalt therapy, and the other is implicit in contacting. Consequently, to consider “contacting the other” is essentially to consider contacting at a granular level. By attending to the qualities of contacting at this level, we can locate our fit or misfit with ourselves-and-others in-the-world. Radically, then, contacting the other is the existential and relational core of Gestalt therapy. My essay's theme makes explicit the implicit theme linking all the previous essays: contacting the other.The other essays that follow consider contacting the other from different perspectives. The authors represent the global presence and varied approaches to Gestalt therapy. The article by Ruella Frank (New York City), “The Lived-Body: A Moving-Feeling Experience,” describes how, through phenomenological attention to contacting in terms of the author's developmental and somatic approach, we can see the ways in which we always exist in relation to the other. With close study of phenomenology and Gestalt therapy in “Sensing the Other: The Pathic-aesthetical Dimension of Human Experience,” Monica B. Alvim (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) contributes to our understanding of the pathic aesthetic dimensions of contacting. In “On Being Seen Doing,” David Picó (Valencia, Spain) focuses on the other in the experience of stage fright in terms of contemporary Gestalt therapy and proposes innovative clinical approaches. The essay by Leanne O'Shea (Melbourne, Australia), “Fat is a Therapeutic Issue,” discusses the implications of obesity in therapy from the perspective of her own experience. My article, “From the Night Before Being,” concludes the section.We, in this cluster, are proud to be included in this celebration of our journal's silver anniversary. This extraordinary time now, and this unforeseeable place here, both underscore the need for Gestalt Review to continue on. We hope our contributions to this issue are justifying this claim.