Focusing

Focusing is a self-help therapeutic technique pioneered by Eugene Gendlin and coworkers at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The core of the technique is described in the text Focusing, and consists of six steps that aim to establish a connection between our rational understanding and the somatically rooted part of our psychological problems. It is especially concerned with blockedness, the sense that we feel unable to face problems for reasons we find hard to articulate.

The therapeutic tool of Focusing is closely related to work carried out by Eugene Gendlin that he terms Thinking at the Edge. This describes his idea that the most creative edge of our psychological skills are where we begin to accommodate the not wholly coherent thoughts that are not yet rational. The technique of focusing is held to useful also for these mental changes.

The self-help nature of Focusing is related to a critique by Gendlin, a practicing psychotherapist, of the failure of most psychotherapy to achieve results: the authoritarian relationship established in the tradiational setting of psychotherapy disables many patients from attaining the felt changes needed to progress with their condition: patients typically understand their problems better through psychotherapy, but do not feel empowered to change. Nonetheless, Gendlin does see a continuing role for psychotherapy in psychiatry, if a much reduced one.

Bibliography

• E. T. Gendlin. Focusing. Second edition, Bantam Books, 1982. ISBN 0553278339.

• John J. Shea. Religious Experiencing: William James And Eugene Gendlin. Rowman and Littlefield, 1987. ISBN 0819161365.

• E. T. Gendlin. Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method. Guilford Publications, 1996. ISBN 0898624797.

• E. T. Gendlin. What happens when Wittgenstein asks “What happens when...?”. The Philosophical Forum Volume XXVIII. No. 3, 1997.

• E. T. Gendlin. A Process model. Unpublished manuscript, 1997.

External Links

• The Focusing Institute