Eugene T. Gendlin

CROSSING AND DIPPING: Some Terms for Approaching the Interface between Natural Understanding and Logical Formulation

Gendlin proposes experiential concepts as bridges between phenomenology and logical formulation. His method moves back and forth, aiming to increase both natural understanding and logical formulation. On thesubjective side, the concepts requiredirect reference tofelt orimplicit meaning. There is no equivalence between this and the logical side. Rather, in logical “explication”, the implicit iscarried forward, a relation shown by many functions. The subjective is no inner parallel. It performsspecific functions in language. Once these are located, they also lead to developments on the formulated side.To show some of this, Gendlin modifies Lakoff and Johnsons theory of metaphor, and expands it into a theory of all language use. He denies that a metaphor consists of a pattern or image, shared by two situations. There is only one situation — the metaphoric one. The original situation is actually a family of many uses (in the Wittgensteinian sense). As in all speech, a word makes sense only as its use-family “crosses” with an actual situation in the actual spot in a sentence. Subjectively, a metaphor means this crossing. From it, long chains of new similarities and differences can be generated. Ways to study the functions and features of thiscrossing are proposed.

Celebrations and problems of humanistic psychology

Abstract This paper celebrates the history and victories of Humanistic Psychology, and it also considers the tasks ahead, especially the problem that Humanistic Psychology may not be reproducing itself into the next generation.

A Phenomenology of Emotions: Anger

Although verbally and recognizably there is some small list of common emotions and sentiments, experience is vastly multi-faceted. Innumerable aspects, barely distinct, course through each other and breed others, utterly defying any thin scheme, logical system, or dictionary of kinds. Experience is not just packaged units. The seeming units—experiences, emotions, perceptions, ideas, feelings—which seem to stand still and stable always also involve a myriad flux. We will develop some ways to think about this myriad, hopefully so successfully that the question will then turn about and, if anything, we will be puzzled at how there can be something seemingly stable, recognizable, and universal. How is it, for example, that, with the myriad facets of any moment and the vast variety of what may make us angry in each different situation, when we lose our temper the stomping, hitting, or kicking of anger is always the same? Or is it? We must ask about both the myriad and the stable.

We Can Think with the Implicit, As Well As with Fully-Formed Concepts

We can now adopt a new understanding of scientific knowledge and its role in our society. The concepts which science presents change every year. Neither today’s nor next year’s concepts are representations of reality. Many people mistrust science altogether and gladly adopt anything from any other source. Our best thinkers also attest to the fact that every picture, every representation, every theory and set of concepts can break down and be found false.

Initiating psychotherapy with “unmotivated” patients

SummaryA clinical procedure is presented to deal with the problem of initiating psychotherapy with hospitalized patients who refuse continuing meetings with a therapist. Eight therapists spent a total of 13 hours a week on a state hospital ward with 24 patients. The therapists were available to the patients in a therapy office on the ward, but also initiated relationships, often tentative and silent, in the hall or day room. In a large proportion of cases, therapy relationships gradually began, and regular meetings became possible. Some significant points of this procedure are discussed.

Process Ethics and the Political Question

Two questions will be discussed in this paper: (1) can ethics be found on a certain manner of process, the kind of decision making, rather than the content or conclusions?; and (2) does our personal decision-making process merely reflect social and political control? Or can more arise from the individual than what society has built into the body?

Imagery is More Powerful with Focusing: Theory and Practice

Let me begin with an extremely brief and summarized theoretical statement. How might we think about “the unconscious”, that rich source of imagery and of course, of other processes? I would like to say simply: the unconscious is the body. Of course, we need to devise entirely new kinds of concepts about the body, for this and many other reasons. The body is no mere physiological machine. The body is inherently interactional. Let me say more clearly what this means: We guide our behavior most of the time by a bodily sense of each situation. We do not speak to ourselves about each facet of a situation—if we did, we could not handle any situation at all. To do any simple thing, we must “know” what led up to the situation, what we are trying to bring about or avoid, who the people present are, how to walk, sit, speak, and countless other facets. We can think only very few of these explicitly. All the rest are “known” in a rich, holistic feeling of the whole context, which we can have only in a bodily concrete way.

A Critique of Relativity and Localization

Abstract A new philosophical model makes particles and information at single points derivative. Space-time grids are not events but only ideal comparisons made by observers. Therefore the identity of space-time points and also of single particles is inherently a speculative assumption. The conservation of units can be derived and is not a foundation for events. An interaction is an actual change and can determine changed particles and a changed space-time grid from itself, both forward and backward in time. In contrast, relativity theory still retains the classical unit model in which information is localized at single points, merely positing more than one observer. One implication of the new model is that quantomechanical solutions meed not be limited by the requirements of relativity as is currently done. The model correctly predicts where difficulties should be found, and relates and explains many puzzles which are otherwise separated and inexplicable.

Recollections of how the journal Psychotherapy came to be.

The founding Editor of Psychotherapy offers some recollections of how the journal Psychotherapy came into being, and also provides a larger professional context for this event in the American Psychological Association at that time.