Breaching the silence: accessing ‘acquired worlds’ at the primordial level

Abstract

"Abstract: This article is a progressive phenomenological enquiry into ‘contact’. It leads us back to that most originary, non-constructed, and totally-given condition which Merleau-Ponty calls ‘primordial contact’. This is the source for what we call our ‘human nature’. The author suggests that the Gestalt therapist is called upon to embrace a lifestyle which embodies this most basic intuition of the world. This will facilitate her/his ability to engage with those closed ‘acquired worlds’ of clients, to speak from within those viewpoints, while at the same time maintaining a solid grip on their own world. Openness to dialogue is the basic posture of the Gestalt therapist, informed by humility and sustained by thankfulness. It is, however, quite clear that constituted speech, as it operates in daily life, assumes that the decisive step of expression has been taken. Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin, so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. The spoken word is a gesture and its meaning a world. (Merleau-Ponty, 1986, p. 184; F214)1 Key words: acquired world, awareness, contact, dialogue, perception, transcendence, primordial contact."