Director: Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb
Training places: Siracusa, Palermo, Milano

Presentation

With Ministerial Law 9/5/94, the Minister for the Universities and for Scientific and Technological Research approved the Gestalt Therapy Training Course run by our Institute, in accordance with article 3 of Law 56/89.
The background to this recognition is fifteen years devoted to training psychotherapists. In this period we fully proved the truth of Paulo Freire's observation that 'nobody educates anybody'. We cannot think of our understanding of Gestalt Therapy, of our competence as teachers and supervisors, without a sense of deep gratitude towards our students. It is their questions that have stimulated our research, making us reconsider certain assumptions with a critical eye and encouraging us to develop hitherto unexplored aspects of Gestalt Therapy.

For us, being trainers has meant and still means taking-care-of-the-person of the student as an 'apprentice' of a therapeutic model which is to be assimilated and redeveloped in a personal style, which is to say in an original mediation between orthodoxy and creativity.
Gestalt Therapy, in its new, well-constructed analysis of the contact between the organism and its environment, seen as the prime structuring reality of any growth, makes it possible to marry the freshness of the human relationship with a strict theoretical and clinical definition of therapy.

The research we are carrying out with our group and in continuing confrontation with European and American Institutes, will be further stimulated in terms of reflection ad ascertainment in these new Training Programs.
In this sense we are also confident of the invaluable contribution of the academics and trainers whom we are happy to count among the teaching staff at our School, and whose experience and approach differs from our own. Our relationship with them over the years has been characterized by respect and constructive comparison regarding the very heart of the psychological and psychotherapeutic debate.