Advanced International Training – A Gestalt Therapy Field Approach to Development and Psychopathology

Billy Desmond
Billy is a queer, married Irish man, an emigrant, once exiled from his land of birth and now living between London and Ireland. He works as a Gestalt psychotherapist and supervisor working with individuals, couples and groups in Ireland, UK and across Europe. He is a dialogical adult educator at the Gestalt Institute of Ireland and core faculty on the MA in Gestalt Psychotherapy and is also a guest faculty in UK and Europe. He is actively involved in qualitative practitioner-researcher inquiry projects exploring embodied and creative ways of knowing. He is on the editorial board of the Gestalt Therapy Book Series and the Gestalt Review journal. He has presented at many conferences and has written journal papers, articles and book chapters in the terrain of embodied inquiry, groups, sexuality, and sustainability.

Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb
Psychotherapist and researcher, international trainer, Director of the Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy (Syracuse, Palermo and Milan). In her clinical work, she has hermeneutically developed the principles of Gestalt therapy into a field-oriented, phenomenological and aesthetic approach. Her book The Now-for-Next in Psychotherapy is available in 11 languages. With Pietro Cavaleri, she has recently edited the book Psychopathology of the Situation in Gestalt Therapy: A Field Oriented Approach, published by Routledge in the Gestalt Therapy Book Series. She received the Lifelong Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy – AAGT (Toronto, Canada, August 2018).

Miriam Taylor
UKCP registered Gestalt psychotherapist (non-clinical), supervisor and trainer.
Having retired from clinical practice in which she specialised in trauma for over twenty five years, Miriam now includes aspects of collective trauma, social justice issues and climate change in her thinking on trauma. Based in embodied practice, her interest is in the formation of the traumatised relational field, leading to an ecological perspective. She teaches in the UK and internationally, and is on the Leadership Team of Relational Change. Publications include “Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice” (2014); “Deepening Trauma Practice” (2021), and several peer reviewed and invited articles.

Silvia Tosi
Psychologist and Gestalt therapist. She is a trainer at Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy and a Supervisor (accredited by EAGT). She trained in Gestalt Psychotherapy with couples, families and adolescents, in Gestalt Psychopathology and Contemporary Disturbances and in Gestalt Supervision at Istituto di Gestalt HCC Italy. She trained with Ruella Frank in Developmental Somatic Psychotherapy at Centre for Somatic Studies in New York. Since 1990 she has been working as clinical psychologist and since 1998 as Gestalt psychotherapist in private practice and in Public Health Services, with children, adolescents and families. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Quaderni di Gestalt (FrancoAngeli) and of Gestalt Therapy Book Series (Routledge) and author of articles on developmental psychotherapy.

Carmen Vàzquez Bandìn
Founder and director of the Centro de Terapia y Psicologia – CTP in Madrid, Spain. International Gestalt therapy trainer and supervisor. Co-director of the Gestalt therapy publishing company: Los Libros del CTP. Author of books, chapters and articles on Gestalt therapy. Spanish translator of books and articles on Gestalt therapy. Founder of the international conference of Gestalt therapy writers in Spanish (2001). Member of scientific board of some Gestalt journals.

First seminar
Siracusa (Italy), May, 4-8, 2026

Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb
Gestalt Therapy Relational Developmental approach.
Psychopathology as a function of the field.
The therapeutic situation and Aesthetic Relational Knowing.
Psychopathological functionings as different ground experiences of the self-in-contact.
Developmental and clinical dilemmas about wars, losses, unsafety, and other qualities of contemporary organism/environment fields.

Billy Desmond
Bodily processes as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool.
Clinical issues about human sexuality: beyond labels.
An embodied phenomenological approach to support vitality in groups.

Second seminar
Milano (Italy), November, 8-12, 2026

Silvia Tosi
Sufferings in children and adolescents: to support vitality and the “dance” of reciprocity in therapeutic situations.

Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb
Personality disturbances.
Narcissistic development of contact experiences.

Third seminar
Milano (Italy), March, 21-25, 2027

Carmen Vazquez Bandin
Losses and mourning.
Ethical dilemmas in the clinical fields of countries at war.

Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb
Personality disturbances.
Borderline development of contact experiences.

Fourth seminar
Siracusa (Italy), November, 7-11, 2027

Miriam Taylor
Trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder interventions.

Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb
Anxiety disturbances and Panic attacks.
Dissociations.