From the author: Variations of the desire for another person: communication through sameness and communication through differences. What's scarier? Let's talk a little about two different ways of communicating and understanding another and oneself. Schematic description of merging If the mental world of two people is schematically designated as circles, then merging is the intersection of circles or the inclusion of one circle inside another. It’s as if the other is inside me or I’m inside the other. This is a very delicate situation. In this metaphor, as soon as he (she) moves inaccurately, I feel discomfort. After all, psychologically he (s), or a part of him (her) is inside me. And then he cannot do a single action that is not agreed with me, without causing me suffering or pain. The same goes in the opposite direction. There is a lot of unfreedom in this state, even if (at times) people manage to coordinate their movements without causing much inconvenience to each other. And in our culture, this is often the preferred or only familiar way of communicating. Cultural Foundations “Communication through sameness” is a phenomenon that we absorb into culture. Due to history and habits, we are afraid of differences between each other, we are afraid of “otherness”, which often leads to rejection. In the time of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, people were imprisoned and shot for a worldview that was different from the only true one. During our school childhood, we were scolded for having an answer to an arithmetic problem that was different from the one everyone else had. In kindergarten we were told, “Well, you’re alone in a corner, that’s not good, let’s go with everyone else.” It is not surprising that there has been some imbalance: we do not know how to deal with the fact that another person thinks, does and perceives differently. Deep down in our souls it often seems to us that there is only one thing that is right. It's either his or ours. And we try to either convince (change) him, or double-check the “correctness” of our opinion. Is it possible to be happy otherwise? The Gestalt approach develops a model of contact between people, as meeting with each other’s differences, finding a zone in these differences in which exchange and mutual enrichment. Such contact always changes both participants, that is, after a meeting with another (who is different), where I shared a little of myself, and was shared with me, I am already a little different from “myself before the contact.” Contact paradoxically adds energy to both participants, energy seems to be born and increases “at the border of contact”, as a result of contact. Explaining in words how contact differs from non-contact forms of communication is a rather unpromising task, but in the format of an article there is no need to look for other options. "Schematic "description of contact At the beginning of the article, describing the merger scheme, I proposed to imagine the spiritual world of two communicating people in the form of circles. What does contact look like in this metaphor? The circles do not overlap and do not have a common area. How else? Here we need to introduce one more concept – the contact boundary. (This is something that is completely missing with the merge case). In our geometric metaphor, the contact boundary is the space between the circles, which does not belong to any of them, thanks to which exchange, contact, “sharing” is realized. To create a contact, the activity of both is required. One circle brings something out of itself to this border. And the other perceives something from what was learned. And he also leaves something of his own at the border. He will be the first to choose something from what is left. Due to this, the internal composition of the circles has changed a little, they digest what they took, build a new self, if there is something unnecessary or harmful in it, it is rejected again outside the circle into the external environment. I will specifically note that what is taken from the border by the second person in contact is not identical to what was brought out by the first. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that there are two moments of activity of the contacting subject: 1) I push something of my own to the border; 2) I actively perceive something put forward by another at its border. In the absence of any of these activities, contact exchange does not occur. Of course, it is impossible to describe mental processes with geometry.…