Learn Gestalt

Copyright notice - professional statement

Each book on this site represents significant care, effort and dedication by the author. We acknowledge their work deserves respect.
There are traditionally two ways to access books. One is by purchasing them, the other is by accessing them through a library.
You can walk into any public or university library, anywhere in the world, and sit down to read a book. Or you can become a member, and borrow a book.

This library is a digital public library, established with the intent of supporting educational endeavours. The books in this library are available to read online (those are not downloadable), or you can ‘borrow’ a book electronically - which means that after the period of the book loan, the file will no longer be readable. This is the same principle as a public library where you borrow book for a certain period, and then need to return it.

As a library, we are not in the business of renting or selling books, though we hope that through getting acquainted with the books, you may want to purchase them yourself. Where possible, we provide links to sites where you can purchase the books. This library is free, in the spirit of making knowledge available. We do not derive any income from the library. The one time membership fee contributes towards the cost of cloud storage space for the books which are available for borrowing.

We are not in competition with book sellers, who have an important place in the private sphere. Libraries are traditionally places where you can read or borrow a large number of books without expending a great deal of money. They are designed to make knowledge accessible, without the limitation of financial means. That is the spirit and practice of this library.

Personal statement.

I was born in 1959, to parents of the Beatnik generation. My childhood home had large bookshelves with a range of fascinating books, from The Bible As History, through to Alan Watts on Zen Buddhism. In my first years of school I used to come home and watch TV on a little black-and-white set. When I was 10 my parents bought a modest home in Tasmania, where we lived. Several weeks after moving there, excitement settled, I suddenly realised that the TV was missing. I asked my mother about it, and she said casually ‘oh we left it behind in the old place’. Subsequently the library of Hobart became one of my favourite places. We would go there weekly to borrow books, and LP's. I read a lot of books over those years. I was a nerd. For many years I read mostly fantasy fiction, and classical tales - Greek, Roman, Viking.

When I completed my Gestalt training in 1987, I went to the US for a year to do a variety of graduate studies. In the middle of that journey I took two weeks to hang out in the UCLA library. It was like a treasure trove; I had a wonderful time, and encountered many influential works on psychology, psychotherapy, sociology, and activism.

When I started the Northern Rivers Gestalt Institute in 1994, I brought all my professional books together and placed them in a library that students could borrow from. Over the years I added constantly to that library, buying mostly secondhand books from places such as Powell's in Portland, The Bodhi Tree in Los Angeles, and Green Apple Books in San Francisco. I was proud and delighted in the library, and in making books available to the students. That was the very early days of the Internet.

Fast forward 30 years. We live in a digital world now. It is my honour and pleasure to bring students around the world the opportunity to access a digital library of Gestalt and psychology related books. They are curated on the basis of my own interests, and related to the units that I have structured in my teaching program, and on this website. It contains many of my own favourites, books that I held physical copies of, and many other more recent books that I have purchased over the years.

I've received criticism for doing so. The public library is an institution that is many millennia old, but the notion of a digital library is less than decades old. Although, in line with other digital libraries, I protect copyright by downloads being time-limited, many people find it hard to think of a public library without walls. Public libraries have always made books available to people, regardless of income. As I was growing up, books were precious things. My parents were middle class, so could afford to have a bookshelf full of them. But the thousands of books I read in my childhood could never have been possible if they had to be purchased. We live in a different world now, even more transactional, where a megalithic corporation such as Amazon rides on the sale of books, and they can be purchased with a click. I don't think public libraries ever hurt the interests of authors, and I don't think a digital library does either.

Stewart Brand is credited with saying ‘information wants to be free’, echoing the sentiments Norbert Wiener, Michael Polanyi, Arnold Plant and Chelsea Manning amongst others. This is in the spirit of Robert David Steele’s ‘Open Source Everything’. In a world where commodification reaches into every area of life imaginable, the barely surviving areas that have not yet succumbed are public radio and public libraries. I am championing the latter.