I have attempted to outline briefly the principal issues that are involved when two people (or more) come together for the purposes of healing growth and change. Contact has been our basic rule. We know that whatever else may be, people’s lives, both in quality and in fact, depend on contact with other people. Our prime consideration is to make and allow for a continuation of contact. No other consideration comes first.

Second, the foundation of that contact is respect. Respect in the therapeutic relationship begins with an acceptance of the patient’s maladaptive strategies for staying in contact as the subject of the work, not an expectation that the patient should surrender their lifelong and often unpleasant way of staying “intact” as a condition for being in the therapeutic relationship.