Well, I haven’t had time to get around to finishing my new post, and I don’t have time to address everything in your posts before leaving on a trip tomorrow, Summerlander, but I’ll try to respond to your initial post, at least. The rest has got to wait for next week.

Indeed, the present moment is very important in Gestalt theory – and practice. Despite what the name of the book suggests, there’s actually very little about what Gestalt therapy is like in there, and so what I know about it comes mostly from other sources. But it is made clear that, in contrast to Freudian and other approaches, it does not involve delving into one’s past to unearth the origins of present problems. It just works with the problems as they present themselves. I’ve also read from other sources that Gestalt therapy is ideally practiced in groups for this reason – providing problems with a real interpersonal context in which to present themselves. But the one person I know who’s actually been through it seemed to find the idea of it being done in groups rather weird, so maybe that’s more of an ideal than the way things are typically done, or else something that’s changed over the decades.

Regarding ‘mindfulness’, I have no problems with most of the things it’s used to signify. It’s more – so to speak – the gestalt of the word I don’t like. I’m an editor: I have lots of opinions about words. But I’m really not interested in foisting them on other people unless they’re paying me for it. Or unless it happens to involve ‘ironic’. I only mentioned my dislike of the word here because I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds the vague cloud of concepts around it off-putting, and there may be people out there who don’t take the idea that one can fundamentally change the texture of one’s experience seriously because of that. I wouldn’t want anybody to pass it by for a reason like that.

Ditto on the book’s use of masculine pronouns (which you actually mention in your next post, but why not?). I don’t consider it a big deal: I just wanted the first time it comes up in this thread to be me complaining about it rather than it suddenly appearing in a quotation, where it would serve as a rather jarring reminder that psychology has had quite a lot of time to develop since the book was written – and that it has, at least in some ways. Funnily enough (but not ironically!) it’s already made an appearance here, but in a quotation from another book. C’est la vie.