ABSTRACT
For healthy functioning our contact boundaries need to be permeable enough to allow nourishment and intimacy in and sufficiently impermeable to maintain autonomy and to resist what is toxic in the environment. At one end of the continuum is complete merging, what the readers refer to in gestalt as confluence and at the other isolation marked by an armouring against letting anything in. The ebb and flow of the tide of contact between self and other is always co-created in the between of the relationship, that place where meaning making is developed, where the figure of our attention can gain depth and clarity in relation to the ground from which it has emerged. The place the readers call the contact boundary.
