The Notion of Therapists` Empathy and' Their Perception of the Diatance with a Client

Psychological distance is an attribute of psychological counseling; most of the time studies focus on mistakes, due to their harmful potential, even though distance exists during the whole process. In psychotherapy, a psychological distance is understood as a person's ability to differentiate experience, despite their substantial and emotional closeness. The phenomenon of losing oneself is most important in psychotherapy, which can manifest itself when the therapist is immersed by the emotions of the client. So the smallest distance exists when there is a deep emotional contact between the therapist and the client. According to P.Riker's theory, there are two positions in relation to the client's experience: "understand with" (immersion in the client's experience) and "know about" (objective analysis). Empathy is one of the ways to understand client’s experience: cognitive (intellectual understanding of the situation) and emotional (knowledge of the client's emotions). This research includes two parts: 1) identifying the definition of psychological distance with the client.2) the correlation between empathy and distance. This study partially confirmed the relationship between emotional empathy and the experience of distance as close as possible (immersion in the client's world). However, the hypothesis was made on the basis of the existence of two positions in therapy, while this study increased them to five. There are five ways of distance -1) In the client's world 2) Contact 3) No Interaction 4) Common space 5) Consideration of the experience "from above". Also, an element of interpersonal distance was revealed in therapy, which is not considered in this phenomenon. This research expanded the definition of psychological distance in therapy, including new elements: the therapist's openness to the client and the attitude to the client's experience