Theory and Practice of Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy

Beyond the Talking Cure

Greg Madison

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857007827
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Movements in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This comprehensive introduction to Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy lays out the background and fundamentals of the approach covering theory and practice.

Gendlin, after many articles on Focusing-oriented psychotherapy, finally published the text Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy in 1996, making these ideas more widely available to the world. With contributions from some of the world's most influential contemporary Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapists and a foreword by Gendlin, this book provides a long overdue survey of this growing field. It explores how Focusing has been integrated with other theoretical orientations such as attachment theory, solution focused therapy, relational psychoanalysis, and existential therapy. Contemporary issues in Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy are also covered, such as its suitability across cultures, and how it relates to the latest findings in the field of neuroscience.

The book is essential reading for all practicing therapists and counselors, as well as trainee therapists, particularly those who want to explore the potential of experiential dimensions in their therapy and coaching practice.

Jessica Kingsley Publishers also publishes a companion volume, Emerging Practice in Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: Innovative Theory and Applications, edited by Greg Madison [9781849053716].

PART I

Understanding the Focusing-Oriented Approach

The first part of this book opens with three chapters designed to offer a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the theoretical and philosophical framework of Focusing-Oriented Therapy.

Opening the book is Akira Ikemi’s chapter presenting Gendlin’s essential facets of FOT, including a discussion of what constitutes “personality” and how the assumptions in FOT set it apart from other orientations to therapy.

Following on, Anna Karali and Pavlos Zarogiannis explore the fundamental topic of “change” within focusing-oriented theory and practice. Their chapter illustrates a combination of internal and external aspects of change, weaving together both conceptual and practice issues as well as a discussion of the positioning of the profession of psychotherapy in social-cultural context.

Finally in this first part, Kevin C. Krycka asks central questions about FOT and its future in relation to its own development and interaction with various developments in the profession of psychotherapy.

All three chapters set the stage for a deeper understanding of FOT and Part II, which moves into clinical integrations with other traditions.

CHAPTER 1

A Theory of Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy

Akira Ikemi

Introduction

Conventional major theories of psychotherapy elucidate a specific set of assumptions about human living—what is optimally human, what is “normal” and “abnormal,” or what personality “is” and how it developed. For example, Sigmund Freud portrayed the person as driven by unconscious, infantile, and libidinous impulses. In contrast, Carl Rogers portrayed the person as being on the way to actualizing her or his own self. A self to be actualized existed for Rogers, but not for Freud. These basic views of the person give rise to theoretical models of what psychotherapy is and how it works.

Is there such a coherent psychotherapy theory in Focusing? The Focusing literature is explicit with the practice of Focusing and its applications, but psychotherapy theory tends to remain implicit in the literature. Eugene Gendlin has written on this topic, most notably in the book Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy (1996), but much of Gendlin’s other writings since the late 1990s are in the field of philosophy, and these papers are difficult for many psychotherapists to follow and understand. It is the attempt of this chapter to weave together a somewhat coherent sketch of a psychotherapy theory from some of Gendlin’s writings.

The enterprise of this chapter needs to be carried out with care and caution. The coherent theory, which this chapter hopes to arrive at, will not be like a “product” comparable to other products, that is, other psychotherapy theories. This is because Focusing assumes a different kind of theory. For instance, if classical psychoanalytic theory could be symbolized as an Audi engine, and person-centered theory as a Ford engine, Focusing theory would not look like an engine at all. It would be more like gasoline, which could make both Audi and Ford engines run. This is because Focusing is about how we have experience, and not about the contents of what we experience. So if one were to ask if one’s experience is related to a Freudian libidinous unconscious or a Rogerian actualizing self, the reply would be that it can be one of the two, both or neither. Focusing is concerned with how it is that one finds libidinal forces, or an actualizing self, operating within experiencing. A close investigation of this process may reveal that it is indeed one of the two, or an entirely new and unique concept emerging from this investigation. In short, Focusing theory is not a content theory, it is a theory of the process with which contents arise and change. Nevertheless, this does not mean that there is no view of the person at all in Focusing. Thus far, we already have a view of the person as an experiencing subject from which concepts can emerge.

Gendlin (1990, p.208) writes of a need “to communicate how very different our philosophical assumptions are, compared to everything else in the field.” According to Gendlin, this difference has resulted in some of the difficulty that Focusing approaches have in communicating with practitioners from other approaches. What exactly are these philosophical or theoretical assumptions that are so different from everything else? Gendlin doesn’t write much about it in his psychological works. For example, the book Focusing is mostly practical, showing the readers how to do Focusing. It does include a “Philosophical Note” which is Appendix A, two pages only. Similarly, in Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams, theory appears in Appendix A (Gendlin 1986, pp.141–162), not in the main text. In this appendix, Gendlin writes:

If you don’t like this theory, don’t let it get in the way of the experiential steps the book describes. They are not based on theory. You don’t need the theory for them. That is why it is an appendix, here… Theory does not ground what I described in the book. I love theory, but it does not ground life. Many people think everything is “based on” theory. If that were so, what would theory be based on? (p.141)

Yet the “Theory of the Living Body and Dreams” that appears in this appendix is 21 pages in length and very rich in content, requiring some background in philosophy to understand it.

“Theory does not ground life,” Gendlin writes. Truly, most of what we do in our daily lives are not “based on” any theory. I love listening to jazz, but that is not “based on” any theory, for example. Yet theoretical concepts point to phenomena, they enable us to see things in ways that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to see. Moreover, with concepts, we can begin to see the relations between one concept and another, which is theory. Theory is not something that is to be “based on,” but something to be “built.” (I recall that Gendlin used to teach a course called “Theory Construction” at the University of Chicago. It has now developed into TAE, “Thinking at the Edge.”) We cannot translate or reduce a person’s life into theory, but a person can reflect on their lives and build theories that bring new light to their lives. Thus the attempt of this chapter is not to reduce, nor to “fit” a person into a set of concepts. Rather, the theoretical elaborations woven in this chapter may serve to see therapy, our lives, and our client’s lives, in ways that are implicit in Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy.

A view of “personality”

Psychotherapy orientations are often grounded in their personality theories, and these are usually mutually exclusive. One needs to adopt either a Freudian view of personality as basically regressive or a Jungian view of the progressive nature of the process of individuation, for example. One cannot have both, without making major revisions in the theories. As mentioned above, Focusing espouses a different kind of personality theory, which can make use of both Freudian and Jungian concepts and more. How is this possible? And what exactly is the personality theory that enables the use of supposedly mutually exclusive concepts?

For Gendlin, personality is “a theory of how people live, rather than what they are and do. People are their living, not the products, not the facts and the concepts they make… The existential view [which Gendlin advocates] denies that any theory can render what a human person is, since that is always in the making by living, and thus radically open. Theory is made by people, and can never be such that people can be derived from it” (1973, p.329). Further in this article, Gendlin writes: “to study the person apart from community, to conceive of ‘personality’ as purely internal machinery, are errors” (p.330). “Psychological maladjustment is not the classical neuroses, nor any ‘bad content’ inside…” (p.331).

To understand these assertions, we need to discard the classical view of personality as an “internal psychic apparatus.” Together with this, the view of psychopathology as pathological contents “inside” that causes malfunctioning of the psyche must also be abandoned. If “personality” is not inside us, where is it then?

Personality is not so much “what one is,” as how one carries oneself forward in further living, further feeling and self-responding, and further interpersonal relating… Personality is not stuff inside, but the capacity to carry forward in words or acts what is experientially felt as focal and next. (Gendlin 1973, p.333)

Gendlin strongly upholds the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1962). The hyphens in that term “are meant to indicate that one being, one event, is both the person and the situations (or environments and universe) in which the person lives. Human beings are encounterings in the world and with others… Sartre (1956) discussing sadness, says that it is ‘…a situation too urgent’” (Gendlin 1973, p.323). Thus, Gendlin cites the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in asserting that an emotion such as sadness is not a feeling inside, but a situation. Humans are the situation, the relationships.

When I feel frustrated in a relationship, the frustration is not inside me. The frustration is the way this relationship is. Thus to work on this frustration would not be a personal and internal process. Rather it would involve changing the nature of the relationship with the other person involved. Contrast this view with a more popular view, which I shall refer to as the “representationalist” view. In that view, the frustration I feel in the relationship represents another relationship of which I cannot recall, thus unconscious. That unconscious relationship must have occurred at a prior time, so the frustration must be a manifestation of an earlier frustration in a signifi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Understanding the Focusing-Oriented Approach
• Part II Integrating with Other Orientations
• Part III Modes of Clinical Practice: The FOT Way
• Part IV Topics From the Focusing-Oriented Context
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Also available