Consciousness, contact, and individuation
In Gestalt Therapy, one of the few books that deserves to be called a ‘metapsychological’ account of psychotherapy, we find this remarkable sentence:
“Consciousness is the result of a delaying of an interaction at a boundary.”
In contrast to typical ideas about consciousness being a ‘spark’ or circuit, an objectification that can only amount to its reduction, here the authors offer a radical alternative: that what we understand as our ‘self-awareness’ is nothing but an interruption or defect, something with no existence in itself, but a privation of some ongoing process.
This ongoing process is called, in this quote, ‘an interaction at a boundary’. But in the context of Gestalt psychotherapy, it’s known as contact, which the authors define as follows:
“Your sense of the unitary inter-functioning of you and your environment … and the process of contacting is the forming and sharpening of the figure/ground contrast, which is the work of spontaneous attention and mounting excitement.”
The reference to a ‘figure/ground contrast ’ is what gives Gestalt psychotherapy its name: it’s the gestalt, the image that emerges from the interaction of an organism and its environment.
For example, if you’re walking down the street and suddenly have to pee, this…
