ABSTRACT
The New York Institute was the first psychology organization in the USA that did not consider homosexuality a pathology and from its very beginning in the 1950s it attracted people from the LGBT+ community. Only decades later did the institute’s view became mainstream. Chapter 2 explores how the LGBT+ community helped to shape the institute. I describe an organization called Identity House, which offers peer counsel services to LGBT+ people and which was envisioned in the early 1970s by Patrick Kelley—a member of the institute—as an organization based on gestalt principles. Even though there is not an explicit cooperation between the institute and Identity House, there is a significant overlap in terms of people and theory. The theoretical part of this chapter explores the role of Paul Goodman, looks critically at the explicit conceptualization of homosexuality in gestalt therapy theory, and identifies the gestalt principle of figure formation as the actual concept that was supportive to the LGBT+ community.
