Introductory Note

Chapter Announcement by Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb (Italy)

In H.P. Dreitzel, The Art of Living and the Joy of Life. Developing and Maturity in a Changing World. Siracusa (Italy): Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy Publishing Company.

In a social context in which constituent and primary relationships are in great difficulty; educational relationships appear to unfold in family and social contexts where everything is permitted and nothing is contained; and where the relationship with the social community is a sterile void yet full of anxiety, the teaching of the aesthetic sense of what works is a strategy both revolutionary and imperative. In her introductory remarks, Spagnuolo Lobb highlights the book’s intrinsic value in developing the reader’s awareness. Dreitzel explains the positive anthropology of Gestalt therapy, which overcomes the dichotomy between individual urges and social life to see humans as intentioned on contact with the other and with the environment. Without explicitly addressing the field perspective, the book provides an excellent grounding to understanding its essence. Dreitzel’s work conveys more than a lesson or message; it provides an experiential exercise in which the individual, the social, and the spiritual intertwine in the uniqueness of experience.

https://www.gestaltitaly.com/the-art-of-living-and-the-joy-of-life-hans-peter-dreitzel/

Aesthetic Relational Knowledge of the Field:
A Revised Concept of Awareness in Gestalt Therapy and Contemporary Psychiatry

Article Announcement by Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb (Italy)

Lobb, M.S. (2018). Gestalt Review, 22(1):50-68.

In a social context in which constituent and primary relationships are in great difficulty; in which educational relationships appear to unfold in family and social contexts where everything is permitted and nothing is contained; and where the relationship with the social community is a sterile void yet full of anxiety, the teaching of the aesthetic sense of what works is a strategy both revolutionary and imperative. This article supports the need for psychotherapy and psychiatry to overcome the fragmentation of scientific knowledge. The author focuses briefly on the evolving relationship between psychotherapy and society, providing an overview of today’s clinical needs. She then proposes a new development in the clinical concept of awareness from the optics of the field: aesthetic relational knowledge as a clinical tool that emerges from the phenomenological, aesthetic, relational and process-oriented approach that is the Gestalt method. Therapeutic competence, in other words, is empathic and resonates with the client in a cocreated field. A clinical example will demonstrate how the concept of aesthetic relational knowledge can be used in a Gestalt therapy setting.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/gestaltreview.22.1.0050

Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb
Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy
Scuola di Specializzazione in Psicoterapia
Siracusa, Palermo, Milano
Email Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb