Contact

The Gestalt therapy interest in awareness in the field leads to a focus on the relation of the elements of the field. Seen from our individual point of view, rather than another position in the field, it is a focus on our relation to the environment. We call this encounter, or meeting, or even dialogue, but primarily we call it contact.

Contact can be described in terms of its distinguishing characteristic, its location, and its primary dimension. Its distinguishing quality is the meeting of differences. Its location we call the contact boundary, and the fundamental organizing quality of contact we call figure/ground. The following sections describe the nature, organization, intentions, creative dimensions, and experience of contact.

The Meeting of Differences

Ordinarily, "contact" means to connect, to meet, or to join. We say, "3-2-l-contact," and we say that a person makes good contact with another person. We say, as in this savvy and bellicose song, "Do you take me for '~ such a fool / To think I'd make contact / With the one who tries to hide what he don't know to begin with?" Gestalt therapists use contact in a way which includes this meaning of meeting and refines it.

Contact is a quality of awareness which involves the meeting of differ­ences. From the phenomenological, first-person perspective, contact is the experience of difference. Without difference, there is no contact. If you touch your own fingers, you will feel in one finger the pressure of the other. If you do not, you will not feel the meeting--there is no contact. For contact, there must be the experience of difference. Think of this as a perspective on personal relations: In order for people to meet, they must touch where they are different. Without knowing how we are different, there is no relationship, because relating must involve two. (An application of this: A couple in which each partner is trying to be like the other is avoiding contact, avoiding relationship.)

There are times when the field is not divided in this way, into disparate meaningful elements--in the kind of landscape in which sea merges into sky and nothing stands out, for instance. If there is no difference, no contact, no meeting, what is there? What is left besides contact? What is left is the awareness of the undifferentiated field, the experience that nothing is differ­ent--or, since these formulations are experiential ones, that nothing makes a difference: Nothing matters. Sometimes it is the experience of oneness, belonging, being a part of a whole. Before the field is separated into fore­ground and background, it is called undifferentiated. There is no focus. If we contact the other, we experience the difference between us. (The difference is between us, and it also joins us. Actually, it is more accurate to say there is no between at all, only differences touching.) If we do not experience the difference, we do not meet. We may instead feel part of the other, or we may feel indifferent.

The hallmark of contact is excitement. It accompanies the encounter in the same way the heat and light of the sun accompany each other. The relation is not causal. Excitement is an aspect of the contact. It implies feeling and concern, energetic response or action, perhaps pleasure, curiosity, and mobilization. It stands opposite to indifference. It is not the same as pleasure, and figure formation should not be confused with pleasure seeking. Even when enjoyment is present, it is not the point of figure formation. "Enjoyment is not a goal," wrote Goodman, "it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity" (1960).

The Contact Boundary: The Venue of Contact

"Scarborough Fayre" is an English folk song with its roots going back nearly a thousand years, but it remains alive in cultures where English is spoken. It surfaced once again, in the 1960s, as a popular song. It is a beautiful, bitter song of love betrayed.

Are you going to Scarborough Fayre?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme -
Remember me to one who lives there
He once was a true love of mine.

But he is no longer a tree lover. He was untrue. He will not remember the singer as the singer remembers him. In a succeeding verse, the singer sets a task for the faithless lover. The task illustrates the singer's bitterness and the impossibility of the situation.

Tell him to buy me an acre of land -
Parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme -
Between the salt water and the sea shore
And he will be a true love of mine.

He will never be true, because there is no land at all where the salt water meets the seashore. There is nothing at all between the water and the sand. And yet, what happens here, at this juncture of sea and sand, is central to Gestalt therapy. Let us look and see what does exists here.

There is nothing - no thing between, nothing between the water and the sand. There is no physical entity, as the sand is and the sea is. There is nothing additional to the sea and the land. But there is the shoreline, at this point where the salt water is meeting the seashore.

What is the shoreline, though, if it is not a physical entity? The shoreline is an encounter, a meeting, a venue--"the locale of a gathering," according to Webster's Dictionary, from the Middle French and Latin "to come."

When the ocean's waters are lapping the beach, the sand taking in the waters, they are meeting. If the shoreline is not a physical entity, what is it? It is a "whole of experience," the kind of interplay we discussed under field theory. We usually call this actuality of occurrence an event, or a process. (Look carefully. We do not see the shoreline. We see the joining. It is a joining without a joint.)

We find the shoreline whenever and wherever water touches sand. The existence of the shoreline requires sea and sand, and it requires that they meet. Without these, there is no event called a shoreline. If sand touches sand, we call it sand, or sand dunes, or sometimes a beach. If water touches water, we call it an ocean, a lake, a river. Only if sand touches water can we call it a shoreline. (Sometimes we use the word "beach" to describe the unity of sand and water, but that is a different whole altogether--not a meeting at all. Not all gestalts are meetings.)

This meeting consists of the touching of two things which are different: water and sand. In Gestalt therapy, the meeting of differences is called contact. So, this meeting of sand and sea is contact. The event that is created by this meeting of differences is called the contact boundary. In this example, the contact boundary is the shoreline.

The contact boundary takes into account both the differences between the elements which are meeting and also the unity of their meeting, the whole created by it. The contact boundary always has this duality within it: One, it acknowledges the differences, without which there would be no contact. Two, it acknowledges what unifies them, without which there would be no gestalt, no whole of experience. This is a special use of the word "bound­ary,'' which most often suggests only separation. In Gestalt therapy, it suggests union as strongly.

The boundary does not belong to one side or to the other. It is not the sand's boundary or the sea's. It is a collaborative effort created by the meeting. The boundary belongs to itself, to the meeting, not to either of the elements, the sand or the sea. In Gestalt therapy, we say it is a function of the meeting. Other psychologies use concepts and phrases involving the term boundary: ego boundary, for instance. Or we say, "He tried to push past my boundaries." The contact boundary is not that kind of boundary. It belongs to the encounter, not the individual or the ego. Another difference is that the boundary belongs to all meetings in the field, even those which do not involve persons--the salt water and the seashore, for instance. Still another difference is that contact boundary exists only as long as the boundary event itself. It is dissolved when the meeting ends. And, to repeat, the boundary is an event, a venue, not an entity.

The special qualities of the contact boundary are captured in this old story.

A Zen master, the seventeenth in a direct line of teachers of the Dharma from Gotama Buddha, when walking with his disciple, asked about the wind bells suspended from the four comers of the temple roof. "What is ringing," he said, "the wind or the bells?" The disciple said, "The wind is not ringing, the bells are not ringing, the mind is ringing." Dogen, a later master who first taught Zen in Japan, commented on this story, "It is the wind ringing, it is the chimes ringing, it is the blowing ringing, it is the ringing ringing."

Foreground and Background: Contact's First Differentiation

Experientially, the field is usually organized into a center and a periphery. The center is the foreground, the figure or gestalt; the periphery is called the background, or the ground; and this primary structure is known as figure/ ground, the foreground contains what is central, important, focal, meaningful to the present moment. The background contains what is irrelevant, unim­portant, immaterial to the present moment. Because contact requires differ­ence, figure/ground is a function of contact. When there is no contact, the field is not differentiated; there is no figure and no background.

The field is organized in this way according to our interests and the interests of other elements of the field. It is organized in this way because our nervous systems can do nothing other than this. This is how we experi­ence. When we become interested, background and foreground appear. As the figure develops, with each change, each passing moment, the field--foreground and background together--is continuously reorganized. This process is called figure formation. It will be described in the next section.

At this very moment, you, the reader, have probably formed a figure that includes the book you are reading, the words on the page, related psychologi­cal concepts that you have studied, perhaps also the notes you are taking and the scratching sound your pen makes. Perhaps you are also aware, though probably less centrally, of your sitting position and the quality of the light which illuminates this book. Most of this is figural awareness, the center of your attention. Perhaps some of it--the lighting, maybe, or the sound of your pen, or your posture--is in the near background, along with such aspects of your present contact as the gravitational field in which you are adjusting your posture and the nature and quality of your breathing (slow or fast, deep or shallow, anxious or tense or relaxed, and so on). They may become figural as you read these words.

Farther yet into the background are a host of assimilated and partly assimilated experiences and undeveloped capabilities, from the earliest days of your life to recent times, from school learning to personal relations, including feelings about yourself, the place you live in, ideas about your future, your ability to understand your native tongue and perhaps other languages, musical and physical talents. This part of the background includes ideas, conclusions, memories, attitudes, feelings and beliefs. These may be true or false, accurate or not; our experience will likely include distortions of what we have heard or seen, and will surely include entirely fictitious elements (from books, plays, movies as well.) At any given time, these constitute a substantial part of the background.

Some of these elements remain continuously in the background, virtually irretrievable: memories of learning to speak, or of coming to love your parents, perhaps, or the way you developed your feelings about your native country or city, for instance. They are so thoroughly embedded throughout the farthest reaches of the ground that they will be brought to awareness only if the very ground of your being is challenged. This was the case for the allegiance of many Americans in the 1960s, as a consequence of the Vietnam War, and it is typically the case in a thoroughgoing psychotherapy.

The background is, for the most part, what is outside our awareness. In Gestalt therapy, it replaces most of what is usually termed "the unconscious" in other psychologies. The background, the elements of the field of which we are presently unaware, is dynamic and organized. The background is a field concept, not an individualistic one, as the unconscious is. It is a unifica­tion of the parts of oneself and the parts of the environment which are not in the present figure.

The background also has none of the connotations of the unconscious which suggest malevolence, nor those which suggest the unknown and un­knowable. To the contrary, the background is always present as the founda­tion for contact, framing and supporting our present experience. It holds the figure together and is available to awareness as figures emerge and develop. We are continually in contact with aspects of the background, out of aware­ness. This can be seen in the way sleepers adjust their postures, taking into account the size of the bed and the overlay of blankets. A more vivid example occurs when the background thrusts itself into the foreground in emergencies, as when we wake bolt upright in the middle of the night, hearing an untoward noise in the house, or when a mother wakes out of the deepest sleep because her baby's breathing pattern has changed.

Creative Adjustment: The Design of Contact

Contacting is the way we change and grow. It is how we come to grips with our lives, organizing the field to make possible the best achievements and solutions it will support. At the same time, contacting is the way in which the environment, the rest of the field, adjusts us to it. We call this interplay, all of it, creative adjustment, because the result is assimilation and growth and because the process of adjustment is mutual. In creative adjustment, our achievements and solutions are made by us and given to us both in the give and take of our creative partnership with the rest of the field. Adjustment is creative as well because it cannot follow a formula. It must be accomplished uniquely, according to each opportunity. Our achievements and solutions must be novel if they are to be the best each situation can produce.

This creative activity is a given for us as we live. It is living. Out of our needs and appetites, our wishes and desires, our curiosity, we encounter the environment and work and rework it to suit our own interests. And, out of the needs and appetites, wishes and desires of the environment, it encounters and molds us. The result is a true universal ecology.

From our first-person perspective, creative adjustment is organismic self-regulation, the way we use the abilities inherent in us to make the best of any situation. Conceiving of our lives in this way, as creative achievements, while unusual in psychology, is not unique to Gestalt therapy. Psychologists from Freud onward have been fascinated with the creative life of artists. Otto Rank, an intimate of Freud and an important earlier contributor to the growth of psychoanalysis, was singularly important in recognizing the kinship of the creative process of the artist and the everyday activities of ordinary people. For this reason, and others, his was a major influence on the develop­ment of Gestalt therapy.

All contact is creative adjustment, not only contact which results in new solutions and vistas. All of it is organismic self-regulation, the best we can do in the present circumstances--though some of it is not very good at all. The vitality of free functioning is worlds away from the dullness of apathy and indifference and the peculiar urgency, the driven quality which accompa­nies so much unsatisfying behavior. But each individual, even the one who continually avoids other possibilities in life--someone, for example, who has the reverse Midas touch, and can turn anything into dross – is, even so, doing the best he or she can. Though the lively, uniquely varied responses and reactions of free functioning are lacking, replaced by contacting that is routinized and stereotypic, this is creative adjustment. (Surely you know someone who insists on steering a destructive course, turning all possibilities to the same conclusion.) Creativity can serve many ends.

Creative adjustment replaces the conventional term "resistance" in the vocabulary of Gestalt therapy. Resistance is the usual psychological charac­terization for the individual's seeming unwillingness to change or grow, or to accept the therapist's direction. Implied in it is the conviction that the person in therapy being resistant should stop doing so. But resistance is creative adjustment, and organismic self-regulation. It is integral to the indi­vidual's way of being in the world, and no approach driving at holistic solutions can ask a person to set aside parts of themselves. The goal in Gestalt therapy, and any holistic approach, is integration---or, in this case, reintegration--not amputation.

According to this principle, and as will be seen in the succeeding chapters of this volume, Gestalt therapy practice replaces the conventional emphasis on overcoming, breaking through, or ignoring resistances with procedures which encourage and explore these creative adjustments. By taking them seriously, by bringing them into awareness, individuals can wrestle with their own conflicts and discover their own way to integrate these seemingly opposed desires into new wholes.