ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes therapeutic action as possible from the perspective of phenomenological contextualism. While the goal of psychotherapy remains the possibility of helping the patient to arrive at his or her own experiential authenticity, or at least to lessen the amount of suffering, both will depend on the degree to which we are successful in sharing a relational home with our patients. The differences between the traditional psychoanalytic conceptualizations and an intersubjective perspective were described through the prism of the risk of relatedness entailed in human encounters in general; and in particular in therapeutic encounters. The book examines the clinical exchange from the perspective of the three variables that are found to be salient in therapeutic change; the primacy of subjectivity, the primacy of mutual influencing, and the co-determined nature of change.
