Eugene Gendlin (1926 to 2017) was an American philosopher and psychotherapist, born in Vienna, who worked closely with Carl Rogers and went on to develop FocusingFocusing. Eugene Gendlin’s method of turning towards the felt sense, the body’s whole sense of an issue, with curiosity and no agenda, and asking whether anything needs to happen. In this approach it is valued because, like journeying, it means going beyond the wants of the self and listening to something wiser and deeper. Read the full answer, a way of attending to what he called the felt senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer: the body’s wordless sense of a situation as a whole. Paul Francis’s books list his work in their reading lists, and Therapeutic Shamanism shares his trust in this bodily, wordless kind of knowing.
Who was Eugene Gendlin? #
A philosopher whose work changed how many therapists listen. He was born in Vienna on 25 December 1926. His family left Austria because of the rise of Nazism, first escaping to Holland, and arrived in New York in January 1939.1 He studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he gained his doctorate in 1958, and in the 1950s he studied under Carl Rogers, the founder of person-centred therapy. He then spent several years working with Rogers on a large research project at the University of Wisconsin, before returning to teach in both the philosophy and the psychology departments at Chicago.2 In 1985 he founded the Focusing Institute. He died in Spring Valley, New York, on 1 May 2017, aged 90.3 See Who was Carl Rogers, and why does he matter to Therapeutic Shamanism?
What did he discover about therapy? #
That whether therapy would help could often be predicted from the first few sessions, and that it seemed to depend on how clients attended to their own experience. A study at Rogers’s counselling centre in Chicago suggested this in 1956. Gendlin later remembered the reaction: “the centre staff was outraged.” Rogers alone stayed calm, telling them: “Facts are always friendly.”4
Gendlin and his colleagues went on to study thousands of recordings of therapy sessions. The clients who got better were the ones who attended to what they were feeling in the moment, often something not yet clear or put into words, rather than only talking about their feelings from a distance. So Gendlin asked whether this could be taught, and Focusing was the result: as the therapist Campbell Purton puts it, “clients could be taught to engage with their own experiencing in the way that successful clients did naturally.”5 His book Focusing came out in 1978.
What is the felt sense? #
The body’s sense of a whole situation, before it has words. And it is different from an emotion. “A felt sense is unmistakably meaningful, and yet we don’t know what it is. In contrast, we know the emotions when we have them.” It is, he wrote, “a bodily quality, like heavy, sticky, jumpy, fluttery, tight. At first it has no fitting label.”6 When the right word or image for it is found, something in the body eases and moves on, what he called a felt shift.
Behind this lay a whole philosophy. Gendlin’s first book described what he called experiencing, “that partly unformed stream of feeling that we have every moment”, out of which meaning is made.7 Late in life he developed a method he called Thinking at the Edge, “a systematic way to articulate in new terms something which needs to be said but is at first only an inchoate ‘bodily sense.’”8 One of his sentences sums much of it up: “We feel more than we can think, and we live more than we can feel.”9 See What are Focusing and the felt sense, and how can they support shamanic work?
Why does Gendlin matter to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Because both trust a kind of knowing that comes before words. All three of Paul’s books list Gendlin’s Focusing and his Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy in their reading lists, along with two books by others who built on his work, Campbell Purton’s Person-Centred Therapy: The Focusing-Oriented Approach and Ann Weiser Cornell’s The Radical Acceptance of Everything.10 And both Gendlin and Therapeutic Shamanism grew from the same root, the person-centred therapy of Carl Rogers. See What is intuition, and can we trust it?
How is Therapeutic Shamanism different? #
Gendlin’s work is a psychology and a philosophy, not a spiritual path. It makes no claims about realms or beings beyond the human. Therapeutic Shamanism offers it a wider world to know: real realms and beings beyond the human psyche, and a body understood as part of the living Earth. See What can shamanism offer Focusing?
Has his work been questioned? #
Yes, sometimes by his own admirers. The therapist Campbell Purton, who values Focusing highly, has written: “What I have come to have doubts about is not so much the practice of Focusing-Oriented Therapy but the way in which Gendlin thinks about the practice”, questioning whether the felt sense is as purely bodily as Gendlin said.11
Others have defended Gendlin’s view, among them the philosopher Jan Puc, who says that phenomenological theories of emotion give good grounds for treating feelings, and so the felt sense, as bodily.12 Gendlin himself had long described the body not as a separate object but as our living in our situations. In his words, “the body knows the situations because it is our living in them.”13
