Marianne Fry Lectures
Date/Time
Date(s) - Saturday, 28 September 2024
10:30 am - 4:30 pm
Location
Armada House, Bristol
About the lecture
NOW is the starting point of Gestalt, a psychotherapy sometimes described as the psychology of the obvious. This present moment, now, can seem so obvious as not to need a mention. Gaie will be inviting those present to let in the enormity, the complexity and the frailty of this most present and exciting, this transient, magical and loaded reality.
The day will provide an opportunity for everyone to enjoy and even intensify their awareness. Fritz Perls spoke of awareness as a glow arising within. The bombardment of information we are subject to for much of our waking life is more like a hurricane blowing out the embers than a perception giving space for a glow to form. Advertisement images are screened to us at a rate of one every half-second. Words flood us on all sides.
Perls once wrote:
Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Freud and Einstein started with the structure of events and kept up the primary contact with the non-verbal world, verbalising only a posteriori what they had found. How different is the approach of most of us. We start with words.
With luck and a fair wind, we can travel behind and below words for part of one day of our lives, and do whatever talking we need to do in simpler words than Perls used to make his salutary comment. Gaie hopes that together we can create a peaceful and nurturing present.
The Afternoon Session
In the afternoon, Gaie will facilitate an experiential exploration of issues raised in the lecture.
About Gaie Houston
Gaie read English language and literature at Oxford. She first studied group behaviour with National Training Laboratories in the USA. She is now Emerita Adviser to the Gestalt Centre, London, with whom she has worked over the last forty years. Gaie has taught supervision and supervised since 1980.
She is on the editorial boards of The Gestalt Review, USA; The British Gestalt Journal; and, until its demise in 2024, Self and Society: Journal of Humanistic Psychology.
Gaie has written nine books on group and individual psychotherapy, and eighteen plays, many for BBC Radio, and some for theatre. She has co-presented several television series on behaviour in small groups and on sexual behaviour. She has been a local Councillor and directed opera in Italy.
Click here for the format of the day
Lunch catering will be vegetarian. You can make any other dietary or special needs requests on the booking form.
Bookmark booksellers will be present.
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