ABSTRACT
In 1981, Rogers wrote a text in which he highlighted our practice as a political one. In political philosophy there are two different stances on natural right: Hobbes’ notion is the idea of people currently dominant (which supports the neoliberal strategy), according to which the sum of individuals becomes reduced to a passive conglomerate of bodies and wills. For Spinoza, on the other hand, the idea of multitude represents a plurality that persists as such without merging into a One, with a common expressive power that nevertheless respects singular multiplicity. A multitude is a texture of relationships that allows thinking of singularity as an effect, as a knot in a changing network of relationships in which the notion of a separate individuality becomes meaningless.
I understand the psychotherapy encounter to be an instance of the micro multitude in which the increase of the common power does not imply the erasing of each individual’s power. The constitution of the event implies the questioning of the identity of participants as fixed, separate entities. It fosters presence (presentia) as a creative act and the understanding that this relationship is what determines who we are at this moment. It is the psychotherapist’s intent to displace ‘internal statistics’, the idea that he knows whom he will meet (both the other one and himself), to venture into that meeting with no intention to control, and from the deep desire to meet both the other and oneself.
