Project Vision 21

Recently, I read a story (probably fictional) about the CEO of a company who keeps an empty chair beside his desk because his late brother was the company’s cofounder. Beyond this story, the empty chair appears independently in numerous cultures, religions, therapeutic practices, organizations, and families.

In fact, when I was a child, my family and I often visited some neighbors who always kept an empty chair at the table (and even a plate of food in front of it) because, as I recall, “you never know who might knock on the door and become a guest at our dinner.”

In many families, the empty chair represents a loved one who has left this world, a family member who emigrated to another country, or even a missing person whose current situation is unknown. The empty chair is a physical representation of the fact that the connection continues, that the relationship has been transformed but has not ended.

In another context, the empty chair appears in Judaism and Christianity, as well as in Eastern and Indigenous religious traditions, whether to remember a prophet, emphasize the presence of the Messiah, honor ancestors, or represent an act of hospitality toward unexpected guests.

The German psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Fritz Perls, who lived in the 20th century and coined the term “Gestalt therapy,” used the empty-chair technique so that patients could engage in an imagined conversation with someone with whom they needed to resolve an issue, such as a deceased parent, an estranged spouse, their future self, or even God.

From an anthropological perspective, the empty chair represents a ritual that, through its symbolism, reveals and illuminates the presence of absence: something that cannot be explained in words but can only be lived or experienced. For that reason, the empty chair becomes a kind of threshold between what is and what is not, what was and what will be.

In any case, the empty chair is not merely an invitation to remember a past that is gone or to think about a future that will never arrive. The empty chair can be interpreted as a way of recognizing that human identity is fundamentally relational and that, for this reason, an open space is preserved, symbolized by the chair, in which relationships continue to emerge.

In other words, the empty chair is the space in which absence becomes presence. Absence is not erased; rather, it finds in the empty chair a way to become present, acting as a kind of “portal” between the visible and invisible dimensions of human experience.

Then the question is no longer, “Who should sit in the empty chair?” but rather, “Who will occupy the other chairs when humanity’s chair becomes empty?”