ABSTRACT
As Sanders (2006b: 33) states, the first of Rogers’ necessary and sufficient conditions, the requirement that ‘contact’ (Rogers 1959: 213) or ‘psychological contact’ (Rogers 1957: 96) exists between client and therapist, is consistently overlooked in most books about therapy and often in the training even of person-centred therapists. This seems to be an important oversight because what is being expressed is that successful therapy depends upon there being a relationship between the client and the therapist. Rogers (1959: 207) makes this clear in his definitions of terms:
Contact. Two persons are in psychological contact, or have the minimum essential of a relationship, when each makes a perceived or subceived difference in the experiential field of another.
Another way of understanding this is that for therapy to be successful each person involved must, to some small degree and on some level, be aware of the presence of the other (even if not consciously) and that this awareness constitutes a relationship. Rogers (1957: 96) writes:The first condition specifies that a minimal relationship, a psychological contact, must exist. I am hypothesizing that significant positive personality change does not occur except in a relationship.
47Because human beings are innately relational, we have a strong need for psychological contact. Warner (2002: 92) points out that ‘even moderate increases in psychological contact are of great personal and psychological value to clients’. Contact with another person, a sense of being with rather than apart, however fleeting, can lessen anxiety and existential loneliness.