ABSTRACT
Rogers’ first condition of therapeutic personality change or therapeutic process is that the two (or more) people involved in the therapy are ‘in contact’. As noted in Chapter 4, ‘Organisms are in contact without thinking about it, and such contact is not dependent on being conscious or aware’. In his 1957 text, Rogers catches the sense when he writes about psychological contact as when each person makes a perceived difference in the experiential field of the other, adding, the authors think, significantly, that ‘probably it is sufficient if each makes some “subceived” difference [to the other], even though the individual may not be aware of this impact’. The authors think that this concept of subception, which Rogers adopted from McCleary and Lazarus, for whom it signified discrimination without awareness, helps us think about contact between organisms, and embodied minds. Keith can certainly affirm having this experience as he was editing this book while Bernie was dying: a reality and process that certainly made a difference in his experiential field—and, he knows, in Bernie’s.
