Contact Interruptions (2003)

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