Gendlin’s Vast Space

April 30th, 2008 Fred McVittie

The technique of ‘focusing’ developed by Eugene Gendlin aims to optimise performance and psychic health through the use of mental and physical imagery and schema. Emerging out of phenomenology and Rogerian counselling, focusing invokes an awareness of the body and its responses and maps these onto cognitive states. One interesting feature of this technique is its use of the metaphor of ’space’ in organising the understanding of certain states, and the relation of these to the person.

The first stage in the process, what Gendlin refers to as the first ‘movement’, involves the clearing of a ’space’ in one’s mentation by proposing the question, to the body, that ‘everything is fine’. This is immediately followed by a kind of active listening; the utilisation of the ‘felt sense’, to detect what responses the body makes to this proposal. Typically, to the experienced focusser, the body then presents a set of sensations and feelings, usually vague and unformed, which represent in corporeal form those aspects of being which are ‘not fine’. It is almost as if the body is replying to the original proposal made by the mind and saying “you think everything is fine? What about this?”

This prompting of a bodily response in which issues or problems normally considered to be entirely cognitive events are identified within the space of the body allows these events to be considered separately from the mental space of their arising. The technique subsequently involves the detailed identification of these issues out of the rather ill-formed initial felt response such that these issues begin to take on the ontology of objects external to the site from which they are viewed, almost as if they are outside of oneself. They can then be ‘put down’ or ‘put aside’ or ‘held up for view’, moves which only make sense as part of the overall schema in which entities which began as (possibly painful) phenomena lodged within the core of the self are redefined as objects outside of that (version of the) self and which one can take a more ‘objective’ viewpoint of. Simultaneous with this objectification of problematic concepts is the identification of self with the space in which such objects appear. There is a feeling that one is not coterminous with the thoughts and feelings one might normally be ’subject to’, that is, those located within what are normally thought of as the bounds of the subject. Instead the sense is of oneself as an emptiness, a calm immensity, or a kind of illuminated void.

Gendlin, E. T. Focusing. Second edition, Bantam Books, 1982.

Posted in Attention, Boundary, Dualism, Gendlin, Eugene, Non-duality, Psychology, Sense, Space, Void | No Comments »