Why and How Gendlin Matters for Anyone
I want to say why and how Gendlin’s practices matter in a way that will move anyone to want to try it. Inspire them, pique their interest, their curiosity. I feel that the way to do that is to appeal to our in-born desire as children to play “make-believe,” to play at being “mommy,” or, in my case, to play tennis like my Dad. In other words, a desire to play roles, to act like adults around them or perhaps other older children. We like to build or create things, doll-houses, tree-houses, turn boxes into ships at sea, build sand-castles at the beach endlessly. Gendlin appeals to that in-born pleasure in making things, building things, creating things, playing roles, including the role of making and building and creating things. Many individuals, such as poets, and others in what we might call the creative arts, have never lost their childhood love of the creative powers of their imagination, their sense of world-making agency. Many more need to recover it.
Why Gendlin Matters in Our Turbulent Times
Why did Marilyn Ferguson’s Introduction to his book, Focusing,(Bantam, 1978 edition) strike me with such force? A lot had to do with her sense of the culture of “our turbulent times,” its dizzying movements and “mazeways,” what is happening to “roles,” experiences of disorientation, “disorganization social forms,” “customary sequences of behavior … blocked,” or “stuck,” and “cultural ‘awakenings,’” “every institution … challenged,” (viii), “no collective maps” (viii). Being a parent today (p. viii), a large mass of people “with expanded needs to be creative,” feeling confined by stock roles and emotions,” “unclear feelings, emotions and sensations,” trying to create new forms.” In response she cites Gendlin’s claim that “if we accept ourselves and each other as form-makers, we will no longer need to force forms on ourselves or each other.” Gendlin and others are offering “not only cultural alternatives but a tool for understanding our unclear feelings and inventing new patterns for living….that can guide us through the tricky mazeways of a new world.” (viii). “It works for any form of ‘stuckness’” (ix).
Focusing, she says, “taps and articulates new subliminal knowing. It befriends and listens to ‘the body.’” (p. ix). For Gendlin “the body” means “the total brain-mind environment as we sense it.” She associates Gendlin’s concept of the “felt shift” that can occur in focusing with “a sudden knowing in both of the brain’s two cerebral hemispheres,” a “whole-brain knowing” xi).
My first encounter with Gendlin’s practice of focusing was an “Aha” moment. Before I even tried it out, it I could feel that it was going to be important. I knew it deep down.
Striking Fire with Words
The essence of Gendlin’s two practices:
Rubbing the two words, “felt” and “sense” together
Last night I completely lost touch with why I have been so obsessed with democracy, agency, Gendlin, the whole project. I was shocked. This morning I was still shocked at how suddenly and completely empty I felt last night, all passion gone, except the depth of my shock, my loss. Then, a few minutes ago I felt the image of a spark being struck by two sticks rubbing against each other. Instantly the image of Gendlin’s two words, “felt” and “sense” rubbing against each other flashed across my mind. The next instant, the title of an Emerson biography appeared, “A Mind on Fire.” I spotted “the second birth in grace,” a document by Tilo Schabert and see a reference to a “gift of the gods,” where Schabert is citing Socrates. Socrates was referring to “a gift ‘some Prometheus’ ‘hurled down’ from the gods to humans. It brings clarity to human beings. All of a sudden, they see things in a full light. They recognize the chaosmos of the world and seize upon the experience, which is given with the world, of orientation and confusion, order and chaos. They find the way that leads to their world and to their life.”
The essence of both of Gendlin’s wonderful practices consists of rubbing two words together, the two words, “felt” and “sense.” If you stop and think about it, these two words don’t seem to belong together. But both practices consist of rubbing them together and “listening” carefully to what happens.” You’re listening for anything that might come to mind, a word, an image, a vague memory, anything. Be patient. It may be fuzzy. It may not quite fit. You may discard several words. Pay attention to anything you’re not sure of. In any case treat what comes as important, valuable, useful. Set them aside, but don’t dismiss them altogether. Go back in any case, and see if other words, or another word comes to mind, and ask it the same questions. That’s the essence of the magic.
My Gendlin Story
My wife, Ruth, introduced me to Gendlin in 1982 when I first heard about listening to one’s own “felt sense” until one finds a word or words that “fit” the felt sense, and then continue to do so, in order to keep nourishing one’s writing from that wellspring of embodied energies.
At the time I was in the middle of writing a dissertation at the University of Chicago. Gendlin’’s simple suggestion transformed my writing process. Before that moment, I would “get an idea,” then snap it off from the impulse that had given rise to it. I had been trained not to let feelings, impulses, or urges, anything “subjective,” or “down there inside me,” contaminate my god-given, objective, rational mind. Subjectivity was taboo.
(Before plunging into the university’s culture of pure objectivism, I had learned the same taboo in a Calvinist Christian culture that used the language of minds hopelessly darkened by sin. I had broken out of that culture by the time I learned of Gendlin, only to find myself in a secular version of the same thing).
Still another moment in my Gendlin encounter occurred in 2014, over thirty years later. I learned that Gendlin had invented a second practice, based on the same paradoxical experience of a “felt sense,” paradoxical, that is, in a Modern culture, which, in the name of Science, or rather, Scientism, has become possessed by the dream of Pure Reason.
Who is Gendlin?
At the time I was in the middle of writing a dissertation at the University of Chicago. Gendlin’’s simple suggestion transformed my writing process. Before that moment, I would “get an idea,” then snap it off from the impulse that had given rise to it. I had been trained not to let feelings, impulses, or urges, anything “subjective,” or “down there inside me,” contaminate my god-given, objective, rational mind. Subjectivity was taboo.
According to the Irish Focusing Network, “Eugene Gendlin, who developed Focusing, was born in Vienna in 1926, living there until the age of 11 when the Nazi takeover of 1938 made it mortally dangerous to be a Jew in Austria. Together with his parents he narrowly escaped, first to Holland and then to the United States. His early experience of Nazi totalitarianism deeply affected his thinking and shaped his unyielding opposition to any form of power over other people. He was also deeply affected by the many decisions his father made on the basis of deep intuitive feelings — “felt senses,” as Gendlin later termed them — by which he navigated the family’s escape amidst the chaos of their extreme circumstances.” “Opposition to any form of power over other people” sounds exactly like Danielle Allen’s eight-word summing up of what “democracy” means: “neither of two parties can dominate the other.”
Th Irish Focusing Network’s introduction to the history of focusing, which I have quoted, goes on to identify “the key ingredient necessary for a successful therapy outcome.” which is the client’s capacity for accessing a bodily-felt experience of the issues they are struggling with.” In other words, successful therapy depends on the client’s capacities, not the therapist’s. It is a “somatic kind of knowing.” The short summary of the history jumps to the 1950s when Gendlin was a student at the University of Chicago, and then to 1985 when the International Focusing Institute was founded. A short timeline brings the story up to 2016 when Gendlin received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Association for Person Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and Counseling. Later that year he receives a Lifetime Achievement Award from the US Association for Body Psychotherapy.
Update on the Culture Wars
Gendlin’s importance for our present moment in 2026
There is one more suggestion I must make about the importance of Gendlin for all of us today who are experiencing what one writer called today’s “great derangement,” another called our “grand illusions, and still another called “the American berserk.” It is this. We in US-America especially, are experiencing the poisonous fruit of a global Culture War which, in its pre-Trump manifestation, was being waged by the White Supremacist colonizing Culture of the West in the name of the runaway Culture of modern global capitalism, a culture that denies that it is a mere culture, like the Rest, a culture that is convinced its Science has catapulted it into the position of the Masters of the Universe. It is a culture war that, in that guise, goes back at least five centuries, but which in its earlier manifestation, has been traced back by more than one cultural pathologist, to what I will call the Myth of the One.