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. The following sections describe the nature, organization, intentions, creative dimensions, and experience of contact. 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 differ ences.
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. For contact, there must be the experience of difference. In order for people to meet, they must touch where they are different.