The Origins of Focusing

Abstract

Eugene Gendlin joined Carl Rogers’ group at the Counselling Center of the University of Chicago in 1953. He was at the time working on his PhD in philosophy, having completed a philosophy MA three years previously. Gendlin’s interest in philosophy centred around the question of how we symbolise our experience, and what the relation is between our experiencing and the symbols in terms of which we articulate our experiencing. The philosopher Richard McKeon (to whom Gendlin referred as ‘my great teacher’) had emphasised what today has become a commonplace: that there are alternative ways of conceptualising our experience. The world is not simply there, already divided up into natural categories; rather, our ways of thinking and living have an important part to play in how the world is for us. Today this is often referred to as the ‘social construction of reality’. But for Gendlin it is not the whole story. Although there are many ways of conceptualising our experience some of these ways lead somewhere, or ‘carry us forward’, while others do not. Gendlin holds that in thinking about the relationship between concepts and experience we have to avoid not only the trap of saying that there is just one way in which our experience can be conceptualised, but also the trap of saying that an experience can be conceptualised in any way we please.