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The author is interested in a question frequently asked by students of clinical psychology: “What makes—or does not make—a clinical encounter?” This question leads her to clarify what is the therapeutic “art” in psychotherapy. The author is inspired by Hippocrates’s aphorism (“medicine is of all the arts the most noble”) and by Balint’s interpretation of this aphorism (which was the foundation of his famous group technique, aimed at developing “the caregiver’s growing sensitivity and therapeutic skills”), and she proposes to adopt a “phenomenological attitude.” This attitude highlights the motion sources of therapeutic skill, in continuity with the latest progress made by psychoanalysis with the concepts of “counter-transference” and “active position” of the analyst. This is followed by an “analysis of essence” of the clinical encounter. This work echoes the phenomenological concept of “thymic space” (Binswanger, 1932) to deduce the three dimensions (topical, dynamic, and economic) of a “meta-encounter.” This appears as the necessary condition for the clinical encounter to occur in psychotherapy.