The article presents a reworking of the interview with Dr. Riccardo Zerbetto, conducted in January 2025 as part of the series “SIPG recounts: The history of Italian Gestalt psychotherapy”. The text offers a significant contribution to the reconstruction of the origins and developments of Gestalt psychotherapy in the Italian context, outlining Zerbetto’s pioneering role in the dissemination of the “West Coast” approach and its application to the contexts of addiction and public health.
Through a journey that intertwines clinical experience, social commitment, and epistemological reflection, the foundations of a Gestalt perspective emerge, understood as a humanistic, phenomenological, and existential practice, in dialogue with contemporary cultural and scientific transformations.
The interview also explores the author’s most recent research directions, which include the comparison between psychotherapy and quantum physics, the exploration of the connection between myth and psyche, and the enhancement of the poetic dimension as a path to knowledge and healing.
As a whole, the text offers a vision of Gestalt therapy as an open and integrative approach, capable of combining symbolic depth and experiential vitality, in a perspective that Zerbetto himself defines as “archetypal Gestalt”.
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