ABSTRACT
Contact is the ongoing meaning-making process that human beings engage in constantly. It is the patterning of our experience of the other, the way in which the readers form and shape that experience. Gestalt therapists attempt to bring what is unaware into awareness and this is achieved through focused attention on the process of contacting for, ‘Gestalt therapy is organized around the central theoretical concepts of awareness and contact’. The ability to make good contact enables us to form clearly defined figures of interest against a ground or context; it enables us to connect self to other, emotion to cognition to behaviour and the impact of our early development to our contacting in and now. However, gestalt therapists are not on a crusade for ever-increasing contact, rather increasing the capacity of a person to move flexibly along a contact continuum in relation to each situation they encounter.
