ABSTRACT
Building upon what Laura Perls’ brought to gestalt therapy through her meetings with Martin Buber, one of the elements of dialogue that contemporary gestalt therapists Hycner, Jacobs and Yontef developed further was commitment and surrender otherwise referred to as commitment to dialogue. Yontef firmly states, that ‘relational Gestalt therapy is characterized by its welcoming of imports’. Those imports need to fit with gestalt’s situational-phenomenological philosophy to integrate seamlessly into the approach, and the importation of Buber’s poetic writing and thinking on dialogue achieves this. Commitment to dialogue is the therapist being prepared to ‘walk the narrow ridge’ with the client as Buber says ‘between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed’. Such a commitment means entering the others phenomenological world that in turn risks one being thrown and knocked off balance with our previously secure sense of what is challenged, sometimes radically challenged.
