Several principles of gestalt therapy are applied in an analysis of the similarities between the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and The NAMES Project Quilt. The NAMES Project Quilt memorializes people who have died of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The creators of the two memorials engaged in the initial searches for "whole" images which could symbolize the gestalt of human losses. A tenet of gestalt therapy maintains that the contact between people and their environments define their identity. Both memorials provide opportunities for such contact, producing creative adjustment in the form of learning or insight. Gestalt therapists believe that an accurate perception can only be achieved when the figure is distinguished from the ground. Both memorials present the viewer with a figure that emerges from the ground and ultimately connects into a mosaic or tapestry of figures which can never again be seen as a generalized ground. Both memorials confront the visitor with gestalten. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and The NAMES Project Quilt are each cast in a form which allows an approach to the gestalt--a gestalt which is larger than the instrument which carries its message and realizable only in the free responses of the viewer's mind. Although the two memorials are not similar in every aspect, each enlarges the vision of those who make contact and encourages the internal creative adjustment which gestalt therapists believe is essential to personal growth and healthy response. (Twenty-six references are attached.) (MM)