Eugene Gendlin

Eugene Tovio Gendlin (born Eugen Gendelin; 25 December 1926 – 1 May 2017) was an American philosopher who developed ways of thinking about and working with living process, the bodily felt sense and the "philosophy of the implicit".

Though he had no degree in the field of psychology, his advanced study with Carl Rogers, his longtime practice of psychotherapy and his extensive writings in the field of psychology have made him perhaps better known in that field than in philosophy.

In the 1950s and 60s, under the guidance of Rogers, Gendlin did research demonstrating that a client's ability to realize lasting positive change in psychotherapy depended on their ability to access a nonverbal, bodily feel of the issues that brought them into therapy.

Gendlin gave the name "felt sense" to this intuitive body-feel for unresolved issues.

He studied under Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy, at the University of Chicago and received his PhD in philosophy in 1958.

Gendlin's theories impacted Rogers' own beliefs and played a role in Rogers' view of psychotherapy.

From 1958 to 1963 Gendlin was Research Director at the Wisconsin Psychiatric Institute of the University of Wisconsin.

He served as an associate professor in the departments of Philosophy and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago from 1964 until 1995.

Gendlin is best known for Focusing, a psychotherapy technique, and for "Thinking at the Edge", a general procedure for "thinking with more than patterns".

From 1968 to 1995 he taught at the University of Chicago, where he taught a course on theory-building that later gave rise to a new practice called "Thinking at the Edge", a fourteen-step method for drawing on one's non-conceptual, experiential knowing about any topic to create novel theory and concepts.

Gendlin asserts that an organism's living interaction with its environment is prior (temporally and philosophically) to abstract knowledge about its environment.

Living is an intricate, ordered interaction with the environment, and as such, is a kind of knowing.

Abstract knowledge is a development of this more basic knowing.

The fact that concepts change does not mean that they are arbitrary; concepts can be formulated in many diverse and incompatible ways, but to the extent that they are rooted in experience, each formulation has its own precise relationship to experience.

Thus Gendlin's philosophy goes beyond relativism and postmodernism.

He agrees with postmodernists that culture and language are always already implicit in experiencing and in concepts.

Empirical testing is crucial, but it does not keep science from changing every few years.

No assertions are simply "objective".

Gendlin points out that the universe (and everything in it) is implicitly more intricate than concepts, because a) it includes them, and b) all concepts and logical units are generated in a wider, more than conceptual process (which Gendlin calls implicit intricacy).

This wider process is more than logical, in a way that has a number of characteristic regularities.

Gendlin has shown that it is possible to refer directly to this process in the context of a given problem or situation and systematically generate new concepts and more precise logical units.

Because human beings are in an ongoing interaction with the world (they breathe, eat, and interact with others in every context and in any field in which they work), their bodies are a "knowing" which is more than conceptual and which implies further steps.

Thus, it is possible for one to drive a car while carrying on an animated conversation; and it is possible for Einstein to say that he had a "feel" for his theory years before he could formulate it.

Human beings' ongoing interaction with the world provides ongoing validity.

Each move, from pumping blood to discussing philosophy, implies a next step, an organic carrying forward.

Humans feel this carrying forward both in the move itself and in the feedback it generates: at each moment, it is possible to feel how things are moving and what is implied next.

With specific training, one can learn to attend to this feeling more deeply, so that a holistic felt sense of the whole situation can form.

A felt sense is quite different from "feeling" in the sense of emotions; it is one's bodily awareness of the ongoing life process.

Because a felt sense is a living interaction in the world, it is not relative in the way that concepts are.

A felt sense is more ordered than concepts and has its own properties, different from those of logic; for example, it is very precise, more intricate, and can be conceptualized in a variety of non-arbitrary ways.

Much of Gendlin's philosophy is concerned with showing how this implicit bodily knowing functions in relation to logic.

Realizing that people could be taught this skill, in 1978 Gendlin published his best-selling book Focusing, which presented a six step method for discovering one's felt sense and drawing on it for personal development.

In the mid-1980s, Gendlin served on the original editorial board for the journal The Humanistic Psychologist, published by Division 32 of the American Psychological Association (APA).

He has been honored by the APA four times, and was the first recipient of their Distinguished Professional Award in Psychology and Psychotherapy (given by Division 29, this award is now called the Distinguished Psychologist Award for Contributions to Psychology and Psychotherapy).

Gendlin founded The Focusing Institute in 1985 (now the International Focusing Institute) to facilitate training and education in Focusing for academic and professional communities and to share the practice with the public.

He was awarded the Viktor Frankl prize by the Viktor Frankl Family Foundation in 2008.

In 2016, he was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the World Association for Person Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and Counseling and another lifetime achievement award was given to him that same year by the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy.

Gendlin was a founder and longtime editor of the journal Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice as well as the in-house journal of the Focusing Institute called the Folio, and is the author of a number of books, including Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method.

The mass-market edition of his popular classic Focusing has been translated into 17 languages and sold more than a half million copies.

Gendlin regarded himself first and foremost as a philosopher and he brought a rigorous philosophical perspective to psychology, presented in his early book Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning and later developed into a comprehensive theory of the deep nature of life processes, articulated in his masterwork A Process Model.