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Contact Interruptions (2003)

2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/gestaltreview.22.1.0091

1945-4023

Karen K. Humphrey, Dan Bloom,

Counseling, Therapy, and Family Dynamics

Karen K. Humphrey died in 2017. She was my colleague and close friend for decades.1 She delivered the paper, reproduced below, in June 2003 at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy's (NYIGT) 50th Anniversary conference, “Gestalt Alive!” The paper gives a sense of her place in the development of Gestalt therapy theory/practice. I am pleased to introduce it and follow it with my own reflections.Karen2 was a quintessential New York Gestalt therapist. She gathered the nutrients of her Gestalt therapist identity from the soil of New York City in the late 1950s and grew along with the community that became the NYIGT. She was a Fellow of the Institute and central to its functioning as a teaching/learning community. Jean Marie Robine's (1991) interview with her, in which she discusses some of the Institute's history and her friendship with Paul Goodman, is on the NYIGT website (see www.newyorkGestalt.org/1991–interview–with–Humphrey/).Overall, the NYIGT conference looked closely at the theory of self and contacting in terms of its foundational role in Gestalt therapy as understood by the Institute. This was the frame on which the conference canvas was stretched. It demonstrated how the Institute was questioning this foundation as represented by the principal text taught there: Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality by Fritz Perls, Ralph Hefferline, and Paul Goodman (1951; afterward, PHG). Further, the conference itself was set up as an experiment in which the attendees would participate in this mode of continued questioning through various forms of group process. The day included a welcoming address, keynote speeches, and a series of short presentations, which conference attendees were to consider within the event's small and large group processes.Karen's topic was “contact interruptions.” As will be seen below, she broadens the topic and includes several other basic ideas of Gestalt therapy. She shows how these tenets were studied at the institute and looks with a critical eye. And most far-reaching, she disturbs some radical proposals. Central concepts are relocated. The contact interruption/loss of ego function model had been taught as an informal Gestalt therapy catechism since the 1950s, and to question it at the NYIGT anniversary conference announced the end of orthodoxy. How she manages to bring serious critical thinking to bear on these complex themes in so short a paper is remarkable in itself. Her paper deserves to be read closely.Iconoclastic as it is, this reformulating of the basic model nevertheless keeps intact the fundamentals of Gestalt therapy as articulated in PHG while challenging its assumptions. The rethinking in Karen's paper is the equivalent to “variations on themes” in the classical musical tradition. Ideas are played in different keys or rewritten in recognizable but different configurations. These “variations” are ways that she critically evaluates the classical theory and reformulates it for our contemporary clinical practice.Imagine Karen delivering her paper to the hundred or so Gestalt therapists attending the NYIGT anniversary event. Imagine them expecting to hear a more or less an orthodox view of Gestalt therapy from the institute known for its orthodoxy. Imagine Karen now presenting this other perspective as one of a series of papers given by institute members. Listen for her voice. And notice the challenges to Gestalt therapy that she makes in 2003 on behalf of the NYIGT—and on behalf of herself, a fellow of the NYIGT since the early 1980s. My own reflections follow the paper.In this brief paper, I address the place of the model of contact interruptions in the theoretical bases of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy (NYIGT). I will attempt to illustrate how understanding of contact interruptions has developed and changed over time, as well as some of the difficulties of the model. In particular, I will discuss how recent theoretical work both improves the possibility of a field-based analysis of contact interruptions and reveals assumptions inadequately supported in a conceptual framework at the present time.During the fifty-year history of the NYIGT, one of our constants has been an allegiance to the schema of contacting processes that are delineated and named, for clinical purposes, as well as for the purpose of teaching beginning therapists. This “schematized sequence of grounds-and-figures in excitement and in the reverse sequence in inhibition” are the subject of the final four chapters of the theory volume of Gestalt Therapy by Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman (1951, 450). PHG has served as the Institute text, and familiarity with the text is a requirement of full membership.Importantly, the concept of stages of contact and contact interruption has functioned to support this Institute's commitment to what we have called our “radical conservatism,” or alternately, “Gestalt analysis.” Particularly during our second and third decades when Gestalt therapy was captured by the human potential movement, Lore Perls and Isadore From, in counterbalance to some of the extravagances of that movement, were both teaching a careful step-by-step approach to the therapy process.3 Lore's insistence on adequate support, which she located relationally as well as physiologically, provided some of the foundation for our understanding of field. And Isadore, of course, became the ambassador in the wider world for a model of doing therapy based on the stages of contact and interruptions of contact. Ultimately, he began to parse a diagnostic system developing character types extrapolated from moments of interruption and extended over time.During our more recent history and into the present, as an Institute we have been occupied with notions of field, and of self as process. Since our 1991 Conference on Group, convened in celebration of Beyond the Hot Seat: Gestalt Approaches to Group by Bud Feder and Ruth Ronall's (1980), we have been fine-tuning the small group and process group as manifestations of field dynamics. Our organizational structure has changed to reflect our sense of self-of-the-institute. Within the past ten years, we have been reexamining our core concepts and making efforts to more clearly articulate these concepts in the available language of process and phenomenology. It has been a struggle that resulted, at times, in awkward phrases reminiscent of attempts at political correctness. Now, at least within the confines of our meetings, we have been at pains to understand contact as contacting/withdrawing. We try to be clear that contact boundary is boundary of, not boundary between, and that it cannot really be located. It is perhaps better understood as a moment of interface in the environment/organism field. That moment, for example, when my attraction meets your availability, or, as we are capable of making our body environment, the moment of noticing a painful muscular spasm. The momentary noticings are boundary phenomena, the boundary functioning for the duration of the noticing. Awareness is both at the boundary and is the boundary.We have moved from speaking of interruptions as fixed steady-state disturbances to thinking of interrupting, as changing or selecting a course in the ongoing ripple of contacting/withdrawing. When we use the model of the sequence of contacting/withdrawing, we are clear that we are speaking of figure/ground activity that is rapid, simultaneous, and more “sprayed” than sequential. We recognize that no individual, in session or in life, plods along from fore-contact through contact and final contact, ultimately pausing at post-contact before beginning again at fore-contact. Nor does interrupting happen with easily predictable regularity. Rather, we are always contacting something, and out of myriad possibilities for going forward, some options are set aside, checked, but still brought along, available if needed, not presently noticed. Perhaps the term interruption, even interrupting, is misleading. It suggests that there is a “good” progression of contacting and any pause or deviation is “bad.” In fact we pause, interrupt, check, when we focus. Other possibilities are checked when we fall in love, have a meal, pick a fight, go down one street and not another, and so on. All the other permutations of action in the available present are brought along, checked, held in reserve in the event that the chosen course falters. When this process becomes interesting in psychotherapy, it is because the flow of experience is sluggish and dull; checked options do not emerge. We, the therapy dyad or group, are stuck. The situation is one of diminished awareness. One, both, even all concerned may not notice that checked possibilities do not manifest. Absence of awareness is what signals pathology in the contacting process. Ideally, Gestalt therapy, experimental and experiential, provides a structure for expanding the halo of awareness. Loss of ego function is one way of explaining what is happening. Conceptually, it rests on the flow of aesthetic responses in the present moment.Within the NYIGT, there have always been differences of opinion as to the usefulness of contact interruptions as a guide for doing therapy. It may be that where the therapist chooses to focus determines whether the model is useful. If the focus is on the moment of interrupting, attempting to help the patient4 experience his or her own interrupting, then the model is useful. If the focus is on following the excitement, reenergizing dead spots in the field, then the model feels inhibiting. Thus for some of us, the schema of contact interrupting is a valuable tool, while for others it is itself an interruption. For those of us intent on supporting excitement, what is needed is a more comprehensive description of contacting. Most descriptions of contacting interruption, even those embedded in the language of phenomenology, suggest that the interrupting or checking in the ripple of contacting is something that happens in the therapist/patient field only to the patient. The therapist observes it. Our language suggests that these two events are separate. We do not have adequate concepts for experiences, familiar to all of us when, for instance, in dialogue the vivid picture forming in my (therapist's) “mind” clarifies and re-energizes the memory forming in your (patient's) “mind.” Or when, in group, one member makes an observation that in the instant we all recognize as being our own. George Herbert Mead's (1938) “thickened” depiction of contacting in the act, as well as his inclusion of mind5 and self in the social character of the perceptual process have greatly broadened our ability to conceptualize some of what makes Gestalt therapy novel. The basis for understanding the interrupting and observing, referred to above, as one event exists in the framework of Mead's analysis of the social development of humankind: What is essential … in this analysis is that in human social conduct certain gestures, notably the vocal gestures, arouse in the individual who makes them a response that is of the same nature as that which they call out in those with whom they are engaged in co-operative activity. In vocal gesture, in speech, one has already indicated to one's self what one indicates to the other with whom one is conversing. One finds one's self already in the attitude of the other. It is this common response, excited in the organism, which is the inner nature both of the others and of one's self. It is a mistake to assume that the self has projected itself into the other, for the self arises as an object in the same process. (150)The promise of Gestalt therapy fifty years ago in its radical holism was to heal the rift between subject and object, self and other, as well as to solve the age-old mind–body dilemma. We have proceeded as if the pronouncement was the accomplishment. Mead analyzes in excruciating detail the process of the self becoming an object to itself, while simultaneously an object is becoming an object to the self. The two arise together, not one after the other, separately. It is one event. The infant does not extrapolate “I have toes—therefore you have toes,” or the other way around. Rather the occurrence of “toeness” emerges in the “this-little-piggy-went-to-market” game. In the therapy dyad, it makes as much sense for the therapist to speak from the experience of the closing down of options in the session, as to request that the patient struggle to find the border of the missing awareness. It is one event.It is the case that the sequences of interrupting, detailed in the final chapters of PHG, remain the most explicit outline of neurotic or pathological functioning in Gestalt therapy theory. There is no comparable guide for those of us wishing for a less dichotomous structure for our work.6 Gestalt therapy, unitary and holistic, is as concerned with the usual or “healthy” as it is with “pathology.” In this Institute, most of our recent theoretical focus has been on how human beings operate and develop. Much of our current “theory building” has involved advancing our understanding of the self as process; implicitly, self as process within ordinary constraints. In Richard Kitzler's seminar, with Richard doing the heavy lifting, we have been rethinking what makes an adequate philosophical and psychological foundation for our theory of Gestalt therapy. Again, our concern has been so-called normal functioning. We are just beginning to turn our attention to clinical implications of our newer understanding. In revisiting the practice volume of PHG, the volume usually attributed to Fritz Perls, I notice again how clear, simple, and useful the experiments are. I do not feel a need for new or different awareness exercises; what I notice is a shift in my (therapist) orientation to the experiments. I place myself somewhat differently, or perhaps in the same place more authentically.If we are to carry forward the model of interrupting of contacting as a useful tool of Gestalt therapy, we must address the limitations of a concept so slanted in the direction of ego functioning and “loss” of ego functioning. Within our increased clarity as to the nature of a self-in-process lurk remnants of the mind–body split in the way in which we speak of id function and id function disturbances. We need to elaborate the interconnections of the partial structures of the self. Obviously, in our clinical work we see examples of “pathology” that appear to straddle “id function disturbance” and “loss of ego functioning.” It is also a little irritating to be vague about what is meant by “loss.” Our ability to choose and discriminate diminishes or disappears—presumably a biological event, a surfeit of anxiety, not a loss of ego. Further, there are events, framed as ego losses, in which the ego is actually working hard to protect the organism.Finally, I realize that we speak of “background” without really defining what we mean. Our Gestalt therapy “treatment” is based on a conviction that present energy is expended to maintain background fixity. Also, this requires “treatment” because, while once aware, the ongoing fixity is now unaware. Whether the therapist's focus is on the moment of interrupting or on following the excitement, the method is intended to liberate something held captive as background with important aspects of the self devoted to the task of maintaining that captivity. If, by background, we do not mean “the unconscious,” then how do we address what happens in the sequence of contacting when there is repression and reaction formation? Is background a function of biology? In introspection, I can catch myself repressing, that is, squeezing against unwanted thoughts and feelings by tightening glottal and pelvic sphincters, clenching my jaw, and lifting and constricting my brow as if to force those thoughts out through the top of my head.In PHG, background is also understood to be part of the organism/environmental field that is irrelevant, unnecessary in the formation of a present figure of interest. In this instance, background is momentary and “contains” both bodily sensations not noticed in a situation of health and elements of the environment not part of our present concern. On the other hand, background as included in the schema of contacting and contacting interruptions is understood to have duration. It has an important part to play in the habitual fixed interference with spontaneous living that is the object of our therapeutic attention. Most of our efforts are directed at reanimating the background, restoring graceful, vigorous figure/ground formation. We seem to know what we mean by this, but what do we mean by this?Please accept my apology for ending this brief paper with questions. I think our task for the future is to continue the clarification and restatement necessary to maintain with integrity our belief that Gestalt therapy is indeed revolutionary: experiential, existential, and holistic.Humphrey's paper describes how many of us at the NYIGT thought that the orthodox PHG model no longer held together. It was as if “1 plus 1” no longer added up to “2.” We had to take a closer look at it. We started looking at the assumptions. As Humphrey put it, at the NYIGT “we [in Richard Kitzler's seminar] have been rethinking what makes an adequate philosophical and psychological foundation for our theory of Gestalt therapy”(97). This search for more adequate foundations led, among other things, to a questioning of the centrality of PHG's contact interruption model.The conference of 2003 made it clear that the NYIGT was no longer to be considered the enforcer of Gestalt therapy orthodoxy. Yet, as Humphrey's remarks show, and the following reflections will indicate, our rethinking emerges from within the PHG model and push beyond, restructuring, reforming, adding, and subtracting from it. The original model can be reformulated to offer a clinically powerful phenomenology and epistemology for a contemporary relational perspective (see Bloom 2016). Provoked by Humphrey's paper, I will reflect, wonder, and suggest. I will hypothesize and conjecture—and explore.In the process of exploring, we engage the creativity of understanding. That is, we learn “contactfully,” as we engage our curiosity. This is a process that “looks” forward for its completion, yet discovers itself in the doing, not in the done. And it finds in the “done” new questions to explore. It is contacting process that is never fulfilled but is always reaching forward with questioning. This was the discovery of those at the institute, who questioned the bases of Gestalt therapy—and continue to do so.At the outset, I disagree with Humphrey's use of “contacting/withdrawing.” It is not necessary. Splitting “contact” from “withdrawal,” even uniting them by the virgule “/,” implies separate, equivalent actions of “withdrawing” and “contacting.” Yet, does not “contacting” already include the “fading,” “diming,” or “receding “of the figure into increasingly deeper background? “Fading,” for example, is passive. On the other hand, “withdrawing” is active. Active verbs do not match our actual experience. “Withdrawing” even seems to impute an intention to the experience, while “fading,” “dimming,” or “receding” are intention-free. In contacting, the figure fades to the background rather than withdraws. PHG describes the contacting process: “[In] final contact … deliberateness is relaxed and there is a spontaneous unitary activity of perception motion and feeling”; then in “post contact, there is a flowing organism/environment interaction that is not a figure/background” (403–4). Contacting, then, is one process that includes spontaneity, flowing, and fading. Contacting, then, is an active and passive7 process “withdrawal” is implicit. And, most significantly, “withdrawal” is not an activity within contacting.8In the title of his famous essay of 1904, read by all of us (including Humphrey) in the NYIGT study group, the American pragmatist William James (1988) asked: “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” He argued that it did not. If it did, it would be something apart from us rather than a process. Consciousness is the stream of experience. We can understand contacting likewise as a stream or process if we take a moment to focus our attention on “it.” Even with the pinpoint of our focus, we do not stop that stream, which continues to flow around, before, and after that instant of our attention. The study group found an adequate foundation for the process of contacting in James's stream of experience.There were, of course, other bases for such a stream. Gestalt therapists routinely leap to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and his perpetually flowing river as a paradigm for the flow of experience. I could add Edmund Husserl's description of the genetic phenomenology of consciousness's continuous extension over time. But “stream” itself, as used by Humphrey, has its provenance in William James. The study group spent some time connecting Gestalt therapy's original theory with the American pragmatists. This formulation of the stream of experience has dramatic consequences, as Humphrey remarks. “Contact” is no longer an instant but a flowing process. Contact is contact/withdrawing. Figure/ground activity is “sprayed” rather than sequential. And these are all part of the ongoing “ripple of contacting/withdrawing.”I explore this concept further: this ongoing ripple of contacting has qualities in motion. It is not touch, but touching. It is moving with all its kinetic, kinesthetic, sensed, felt orientation of the field. Contacting is an unfolding (see Bloom 2011).But is contacting actually a “ripple” experienced as “ongoing?” If we take a moment to notice, it is immediately evident that this argument is true. We do not experience a succession of discrete instants but an ongoing stream. The sequence of contacting is not cyclical but flows over life's course. It is not the perpetual dipping of a hand into Heraclitus's flowing river, of one now–after–another, but a process with experienced beats that sound the tempo of a meaningful life.I take this argument further. The rhythm of contacting is intrinsically embedded in our sense of time. This opens us to a new way of understanding our clinical work in terms of temporal experience, also known in phenomenology as the “temporal field” (Zahavi 2010). Since contacting marks the experience of time's passage, how we experience the duration of a session might indicate pathological experiences. Perhaps a sense of rapid time reflects a patient's anxious or hypomanic experience. Slow drawn-out time indicates depressive experiences. To note the temporality of contacting opens us to an existential sense of being-toward-an-end; Martin Heidegger's notion of being-toward-death.The existentiality of contacting is not often considered. A person's awareness of finitude and the ending of life's possibilities, for example, may emerge and become figural (Perls 1992). Psychotherapeutic insight is “folded” into how a person continues to live and meaningfully organize his or her world. When this insight is experienced within the framework of finitude, within a life span, personal meaning-making can become foreground.Humphrey writes that though contact/withdrawing is a continuous stream, it never stops; further, there is no bad and good contacting. This is a very different, even radical, way of looking at contact from that of most of Gestalt therapy work, in which the binaries of “making contact” or “not making contact” are basic. It is explicitly contacting as a process model, with “ongoingness” as an explicit dimension. We are always in contact, and this is the basis for the activity of making contact. It is one whole, uninterruptable process, as we shall see below. How then do we therapists use our clinical skills, evaluate the contacting process? We attend to the aesthetic qualities of the emerging figures of contacting, their shape, rhythm, fluidity, and so on. This is the aesthetic criterion of contacting (see, e.g., Bloom 2003; Francesetti and Gecele 2002; Spagnuolo Lobb 2013).What of the step-by-step professions in PHG's sequence of contacting model? They are not steps to be trod upon, each succeeding another up the stairs to reach and open the door of contact (403). Humphrey observes that contacting does not “plod along” from fore-contact to post-contact to begin again with final contact, but that those “phases” are mixed. Or, as she writes, “Contacting is more ‘sprayed’ than sequential. Contacting is always contacting something out of myriad possibilities” (94–95; emphasis added).Let me consider more closely this notion of “myriad possibilities.” A “possibility” is something that might be chosen. Is contacting actually about “possibilities”? It is “possible” that I may decide to take a walk, have lunch, pick up a pencil, or stop typing. Each of these involves figure/ground activity, and so on. To call them “possibilities” makes them objects of my choice—of my intention—which, of course, they are.But what if I smell the aroma of sandwich and am drawn to it. What if birdsong emerges from background to my foreground, I am moved by the beauty of its melody, I look out my window touched by the sunlight, and I want to take a walk? In these cases, I am called upon to choose. Contacting is not merely linear but a function of a field of “myriad possibilities.” A more precise way of putting it would be to say “a field of myriad potentialities”—a field with myriad potentials for contacting. The sandwich aroma, birdsong, and sunlight reach out to me with the potential for contacting, were I to direct my attention to them. A potential is more dynamic than a possibility; a potential “belongs” to the contact boundary of me and to the object-to-be-contacted. A potential is of the ground. Contacting is a process of innumerable potentialities of the field, not only of an intentional agent reaching out to possibilities apparent to a person.Further, how do we describe these potentialities as phenomena within this stream? For example, the aroma of the sandwich, the sound of the birds, the warmth of the sun. They were all present within my awareness, yet not figural until a certain moment when it caught my attention. Are these background contacting processes? Do we simply call them figure/ground processes co-constituting this ripple? Or can we consider them as activities of the contact boundary itself, situated along with us in one whole, indivisible field? Or, better, can we refer to them as inchoate contacting processes, budding figure/grounds of a stream that flows with whirlpools and eddies rather than coursing in a single direction.Inchoate contacting processes constitute the changing backgrounds to the figure/ground of focal contacting and are apparent in any moment. As I take a moment to be aware and conscious of my experience, I can note the activities that surround as being horizons of my focal attention: for example, the solid chair that supports me, the light in the room. I can also sense, or be somewhat aware of, peripheral, moving, unformed shapes and patterns, shadows and light, colors—which constitute the halo around the active figure/ground process of what is now in the center of my attention.Each of these processes has different qualities, different levels of sharpness and presence. At any moment, if I shift my attention, any of them can become part of my dominant figure/ground process and, as such, proceed to full contact.9 This process may be clearer with another example: I can relax the seeing of my eyes and lose focus. What I had been perceiving in orderly forms now becomes chaotic dots and swirls. These are inchoate contact processes in the “sprayed” ripple of contacting “Gestalt.” They are background activities of potentialities necessary for the contacting process.Humphrey turns to the interruptions of contact and the loss of ego function that are the centerpiece of PHG's clinical model. As Humphrey describes it, in one understanding of this model “the interrupting or checking in the ripple of contacting is something that happens, in the therapist/patient field, only to the patient. The therapist observes it” (95; emphasis added). Note that she already adds “checking.” As a consequence of this interruption, the patient is “stuck.” To be stuck means that a person is not aware of something; something is in the way. Absence of awareness, therefore, signals pathology in the contacting process. This points to a loss of ego functioning since, according to PHG, the ego function of self is a person's capacity to exercise orientation, discrimination, and action in the given situation. This loss of ego function marks a cascade of disruptions of id and personality functions. In short, it is a mess.The above formulation raises immediate questions. Clearly, if the interruption is in the patient and observed by the therapist, this is a one-person model. How does it account for contacting as a field-emergent process or, indeed, the contact boundary itself? Is it a psychotherapy done to a patient by an observing therapist? Or is it a process within what we now refer to as a psychotherapeutic relational field? If the latter, the phenomenon of “interruption” and “loss” is of the field and, as such, is a contact boundary process. While the experience is initiated from the patient—after all, the patient is the patient—it is of this field, and the therapist is included in some experiential way. On this basis, patient and therapist experience the qualities of the emerging figure at the contact boundary, the only possible “location” of experience.Humphrey remarks, in her characteristically understated way, “It is a little irritating to be vague about what is meant by a loss” (99). What is actually lost in a loss of ego functioning? Do we know where it goes? PHG refers to a loss to the secondary physiology of the organism. That is, clear seeing is lost to tightened muscles around the eyes. A sense of free choosing is lost to rigid posture. Disagreeing with authority is lost to tight jaw or indigestion. Again, what is lost? Humphrey observes that rather than something being “lost,” anxiety is gained.Moreover, when we place the so-called loss of ego function at the center of a Gestalt therapy clinical approach, we become “ego bound.” This “loss” is not a loss, but a shift in the qualities of contacting. For example, if the id functioning of contacting is affected, a person has somatic symptoms. If the personality functioning is more figurally affected, a person's attitudes become more rigid. These are shifts in the balance of self-functions: id and personality functions might play a more important role than ego functioning in affecting the qualities of contacting. So, in a Gestalt therapy approach in which self is understood as one whole, integrated, embodied process, including all functions, there is no gain to focus on the loss of any single function. To base our clinical approach on ego functioning splits that function from the other self-functions—as though that were possible. Self is an integrated whole process and contacting is a stream of indivisible self-functions.Gestalt therapy is a therapy of the whole, not of the part; it is a therapy of creative adjusting, where the vitality of a person is found in the creativity of contacting, not in its deficiencies. So, in Gestalt therapy, our eye is not on what is not there—on conjecturing about a “loss”—but on the creative energy of contacting: however, wherever, and with whatever qualities it appears. This is the aesthetic criterion of contacting mentioned above. Our therapy does not excavate to recover the “repressed” but is always engaged in the present creativity of the qualities of contacting, not good or bad, but as they emerge as the ripples of the stream of experience.An absence haunted me while I reflected on Karen Humphrey's paper. That absence was Karen. I hope her paper will show how important she was to the history of Gestalt therapy, how central she was to the development of the NYIGT community, and how her ideas still have the power to provoke new thinking by challenging what we have taken for granted. She was a standard-bearer for the iconoclasm of the NYIGT and showed herself as such at the 50th Anniversary conference.Clearly, I chose only some of Humphrey's points upon which to reflect. I intended my comments to carry forward the iconoclastic spirit of her paper. It is one of the values I bring to my continuing understanding of the theory/practice of Gestalt therapy.