Journey Toward A Mission:
TheGestalt! Editorial

I am writing this first editorial for the new ejournal Gestalt! with a feeling of both exhilaration and fear. When Philip Brownell first approached me, and others on the associate editorial staff, with the idea of an electronic journal, I think we all felt a healthy skepticism. The production of a professional journal is a daunting task and I think we all saw that the potential to become overwhelmed by the project was just as great as our chances at achieving anything. I certainly felt like a novice.

However, as we began to dialogue about the potential of this fantastic new medium called the internet, it became clear that we would have to reexamine many of the assumptions we associated with professional journals. This became apparent when, in what seemed to be a matter of days, we were interacting with colleagues from different countries, each bringing his or her perspective of Gestalt from a unique cultural background, from a different training, and that both delighted and mystified. We saw that the "global gestalt field" was larger than most of us had imagined and that, although we all felt more similar than not, we would have to allow each other communicative latitude in order to bridge the disjunctions in our new "instantaneous" community.

In the process of our dialogues, we also realized that the internet itself offered us opportunities not possible in the medium of hard-bound journals. This is a world pregnant with the possibility of participation from anyone with a background in Gestalt and a warm modem. What first began as a journal modeled after the standard tradition quickly became the vision of a living document, capable of adapting itself. What better model of a periodical dedicated to Gestalt principles! The electronic medium allows for the response that follows publication to actually become included in the document itself. In this respect, Gestalt! does not merely exist as an archive of static pages, as if collecting dust in some library of cyber-manuscripts; each issue moves. It grows with time.

What results may look more like a global review site rather than a traditional journal. However, what the observer sees may be the best use of this new technology.

Here is a quick shot at a mission statement:

• To provide a global community forum where Gestalt-related work of every level of complexity and orientation will be welcomed, encouraged and published!
• To particularly encourage the publication of texts aimed at educating the worldwide public about the Gestalt approach.
• To define Gestalt! as a community journal aimed at informing the general public and exploring the edges of Gestalt development.
• To publish not only pure Gestalt work, but also to include interesting and meaningful submissions where Gestalt principles are described.
• To define ourselves broadly enough to be able to experiment with varying levels of text complexity and subject content.
• To encourage interactive dialogue around issues and situations hilighted in Gestalt!, and to record this interaction in such a way that contributes to the field.

This is, in one sense, a global training site where people from very different positions in the field can meet and share their views. Many feel that we lack contact in this medium, but that is not so. It's just a new kind of contact, with a dialect of its own, and we'll learn it as we did the other means by which we communicate with one another.

Morgan Goodlander
Associate Editor, Gestalt!
Winter, 1997