In the local gluing one glues local neighborhoods around the critical point of the stable and unstable manifolds to gradient flow lines defined on a finite time interval [−T,T] for large T. If the Riemannian metric around the critical point is locally Euclidean, the local gluing map can be written down explicitly. In the non-Euclidean case the construction of the local gluing map requires an intricate version of the implicit function theorem.In this paper we explain a functional analytic approach how the local gluing map can be defined. For that we are working on infinite dimensional path spaces and also interpret stable and unstable manifolds as submanifolds of path spaces. The advantage of this approach is that similar functional analytical techniques can as well be generalized to infinite dimensional versions of Morse theory, for example Floer theory.A crucial ingredient is the Newton-Picard map. We work out an abstract version of it which does not involve troublesome quadratic estimates.