ABSTRACT
Of particular interest to us as integrative psychotherapists is the ®rst meeting with a client. We notice how the client organizes the relationship with us from the moment of the ®rst contact, be that over the phone, by email or face to face. When the client walks into your consulting room, you immediately gain a sense of how that person organizes relationships with others, how the person occupies space, and how the person uses their senses. Stolorow and Atwood (1992) talk of `developmentally preestablished principles that organize subsequent experiences' (p. 24) but they stress that the intersubjective context will determine which among this array of principles will be called upon in any particular relationship. These unconscious organizing principles will in¯uence the way in which the person's perceptions are shaped and con®gured. We have found it useful to be alert to `how the client organizes the relationship with us' from the outset, as this supplies interesting information about the characteristic relationship stance that the client brings to new experiences. The client may come into the room very tentatively and not remove her coat for the whole session even in a warm room; or she may say: `Is it OK if I move this chair further away as I do not like sitting so close to another person'; or `I have brought along a list of my priorities and I would like to work through these in this exact order'; or `My colleague who referred me to you says you are the best in the ®eld'; or ` I hope you don't mind if my mobile rings because I am on call tonight.' What you are learning here is something about the client's expectations of you but also something about their characteristic organizing principles in other relationships. These principles are open to being updated but if they were established under extreme stress they may be more ®xed and resistant to change. This we see as closely allied to the transactional analysis concept of script (Berne, 1972) and the relevant question in this
body We would advocate that you note carefully your own sensory, emotional and cognitive responses, so that you stay phenomenologically close to the experience of the impact that this unique new person makes on you. As you get to know the person better, you will gradually get a clearer and fuller picture of the signi®cance of this early contact as the person's story emerges in the therapy, but you will have as a basis this invaluable felt sense of how the person organizes relationship to inform your understandings. In Gestalt psychotherapy there is likewise an emphasis on styles of contact that re¯ect the manner in which a person speaks, listens, responds kinesthetically, looks at the other, approaches the world (see Mackewn, 1997). By a careful phenomenological observation of these functions, and with awareness of the person's impact on you, you obtain a picture of the person's characteristic contact style (or their adult attachment style or organizing principles). Based on our previous discussion of the client as the most important common factor, we honour the central importance of taking into account the client's view of the problem. Beitman et al. (2005) point out that the client usually brings along some ideas about what is wrong and how this may be remedied by therapy. Those authors point out that the relationship between client and psychotherapist is a collaborative one in which the therapist works with the client on a reformulation of the problems by re¯ecting on client patterns as well as future expectations.
