ABSTRACT
Sensations are the raw data from which awareness emerges. To allow awareness to emerge, therapists need to allow space for the full figure of the sensation to form. They also need to remember that from a gestalt perspective sensations may emerge bodily in the person but the person is of the field, it therefore follows that sensations are a field event rather than a self-contained experience and obviously this is the case for the therapist as well as the client. The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty saw perception as intrinsically linked to sensate experience and invited us to consider each of our senses as constituting a small world within a larger one. The vast majority of therapies, including gestalt, have strong verbal and cognitive biases that lead to a valuing of what can be explained. Assessment of competence in psychotherapy and counselling training is primarily through written assignments reinforcing this bias.
