This work is an attempt to root Gestalt therapy - its theory and practice, in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). It is not an attempt to fix this wonderfully versatile therapy in concrete or to subtract anything of its existential openness from it, but to give it a foundation and a philosophical framework from which it can operate and develop. Its point of departure is the wonderful, even awesome, gratuity of one's being: 'I am given to myself'."