Encounter refers to what happens between two people when neither reduces the other to an object, but both meet each other as a genuine “You.” It is not a technique or a method, but an event — one that cannot be manufactured, only made possible.
What Encounter Means
The human being is, at the core, a relational being. The entire range of human emotion springs from the I-You relation, not from the I-It. In the family, the most elemental You-relations find expression, and relationship is the absolute centre of human existence — from which all philosophies follow and everything that becomes visible in the world.
Martin Buber (1878-1965) gave this insight a philosophical language. He distinguished two fundamental attitudes through which a person can meet the world: I-It and I-You. In the I-It attitude, the other is an object — something observed, used, categorised. This is unavoidable and not inherently wrong. But when I-It becomes the only attitude, when the other person is nothing more than a function, life withers, even if everything still works on the surface. “All real living is meeting,” Buber wrote in I and Thou (1923), and he meant this not as sentimentality but as an ontological statement: real life arises where an I encounters a You — without agenda, without programme, without the safety net of a role.
Buber’s second principle overturns the whole of Western psychology: “In the beginning is the relation.” Not the individual first, then the relation, but the relation first, then the individual. The person becomes an I through the You. If relation is primary, then entanglements are not individual failures but distortions of a fundamental structure. And resolution does not lie in separation, but in restoring the right relationship.
Where the Concept Comes From
The experience that encounter is more than communication runs through the philosophical tradition. Schopenhauer (1788-1860) described compassion as a primal phenomenon: in compassion, a person grasps that they are also the other. The principium individuationis — the illusion of separateness — is just that: an illusion. Compassion breaks through it and reveals the metaphysical unity of all beings.
Feelings are spatial entities, not inner-psychological states. One falls into a feeling or is seized by it — language itself reveals this spatial quality. In antiquity, this was self-evident: Thymos, rage, seizes Achilles as a real force. Hermann Schmitz confirms the spatial nature of feelings in his phenomenology of the lived body. Moods can grip entire societies, and the modern person vastly underestimates this spatial dimension.
In the experience of beauty, subject and object flow into one another. The usual sharp separation between inner and outer falls away in aesthetic encounter. Beauty is a form of knowledge that goes beyond analytical distance and reveals the unity of the knower and the known. Encounter with the beautiful is therefore not aesthetic pleasure, but an act of cognition.
Encounter in Practice
Space has the quality of creating closeness; it is a surface of contact. In constellation work, this becomes directly felt: people stand in the room in relation to one another, and the room itself mediates that relation. Closeness and distance are spatial qualities, not merely psychological categories.
Every bond dies painfully in a separation. The energy of attachment has a life of its own: no one created it, it lives of itself and follows its own laws. This is why bonds are a serious matter. In partnerships, giving and receiving must be balanced. A thriving relationship lives from mutual generosity — a small surplus: one always gives back a little more than one received. If one partner consistently gives more, they slip into the parental role and destroy the partnership.
In philosophical accompaniment, encounter is not a side-effect of the work but its actual substance. What therapeutic approaches achieve through the framework of the professional relationship happens here too. The path is different: it is not the role that creates the frame, but the willingness to truly engage — with everything that demands.
Related Concepts
Encounter requires Thinking Empathy: without a thinking that also feels, the other remains an object. In Order Work, encounter brings about what never took place in life — between parents and children, between the living and the dead, between what was said and what was kept silent. In Philosophical Accompaniment, encounter is the sustaining quality of the conversation: not method, but event.