New Gestalt Voices - Special Edition on Love in Gestalt Therapy

This Special Edition started as a curiosity where direct references to love in gestalt writing felt absent yet present, ‘taboo’ yet reaching to be spoken out. It felt risky and raw, courageous and vulnerable to step into this ‘experiment’ of calling ‘love’ in. Yet ‘we’, the editorial team for this edition – Anne, Helen, Liz and Dawn, had energy to explore this rawness in all its diversity, difficulty and difference. As the topic 'love' rarely has a platform, we particularly welcomed contributions from voices that also do not usually have a platformed publishable space, especially those with minoritised or counter-cultural perspectives within therapy.

The response to the call was extraordinary bodying forth lived experience of love in practice, supervision and training. In the spirit of gestalt, of holism, creativity, experiment and inclusion, we invited contributors to let their expressions of love in therapy flow across a range of tempos, styles and modes of presentation. There are many languages of love and this edition presents and live-links - music, poems, images, stories and videos alongside more traditional written articles and research, not privileging one form over another.

In many ways this process has been a liberatory practice and queering experiment illuminating the unspoken inbetweens of love and oppression. And as NGV’s Lena endorses, speaking from the field of war, when ‘love appears and hope is absent it often becomes the only resource able to heal wounds at least for a moment’.