christophb
02-05-2007, 09:11 PM
This is from the same Guy Claxton article (http://www.guyclaxton.com/documents/New/CJE%20article.pdf)I posted, but seemed to need its own thread. Again, thanks to Ian
Eugene Gendlin is a philosopher and researcher with a longstanding interest in
psychotherapy. During the 1960s, he led a large research team at the University of
Chicago trying to pinpoint what was happening in successful therapy sessions. It
turned out that the ‘magic ingredient’ that predicted whether clients would make
positive progress was not the therapist’s ‘school’, not their technique, not even their
personality, but something to do with the client’s spontaneous way of talking and
thinking. If they spoke with clarity and certainty about their problems, they were
likely to stay stuck. But if their talk was punctuated with pauses and hesitations, as if
they were groping for just the right fresh words to capture what they wanted to say,
then they were much more likely to be making progress. The second thing that
Gendlin’s team discovered was that those clients who did not yet have the knack of
this gentle, tentative, exploratory way of thinking and talking, could be taught it.
And if they were, their satisfaction with their sessions increased and their therapeutic
progress speeded up (Gendlin, 1978, 1996).
The key to focusing
was learning a new way of attending to yourself. You ask yourself a very general
question such as ‘What is this whole thing (whatever it is) about?’, and then, instead
of giving yourself the usual quick answer, you direct your attention to your body,
especially to the throat, torso and stomach area, and become patiently receptive to
any small stirrings or promptings that occur there in response to the query. You are
on the look-out for the kinds of ‘embodied knowing’ that occur, for example, when
you feel out of sorts with a friend, but cannot quite put your finger on what is wrong,
or when you leave a meeting with a vague, visceral sense of dissatisfaction that you
cannot, for the moment, explain.
Such pre-conceptual promptings Gendlin refers to as a ‘felt sense’.
This seems like the question “how do you want to move?” asked by oneself prior to performing ideomotion
Recent work in neuroscience and immunology, for
example, has revealed how intricately and instantaneously ‘brain’ and ‘body’ affect
each other (through a host of neuronal and neurochemical means): so much so that
they are better seen as a single, integrated cognitive system. Changes in this system
are quite capable of manifesting as physical sensations, despite the fact that there is
no explicit, articulated corollary in consciousness.
*There is that pesky neuroscience work again and somebody who apparently doesn’t understand it
Chris
Eugene Gendlin is a philosopher and researcher with a longstanding interest in
psychotherapy. During the 1960s, he led a large research team at the University of
Chicago trying to pinpoint what was happening in successful therapy sessions. It
turned out that the ‘magic ingredient’ that predicted whether clients would make
positive progress was not the therapist’s ‘school’, not their technique, not even their
personality, but something to do with the client’s spontaneous way of talking and
thinking. If they spoke with clarity and certainty about their problems, they were
likely to stay stuck. But if their talk was punctuated with pauses and hesitations, as if
they were groping for just the right fresh words to capture what they wanted to say,
then they were much more likely to be making progress. The second thing that
Gendlin’s team discovered was that those clients who did not yet have the knack of
this gentle, tentative, exploratory way of thinking and talking, could be taught it.
And if they were, their satisfaction with their sessions increased and their therapeutic
progress speeded up (Gendlin, 1978, 1996).
The key to focusing
was learning a new way of attending to yourself. You ask yourself a very general
question such as ‘What is this whole thing (whatever it is) about?’, and then, instead
of giving yourself the usual quick answer, you direct your attention to your body,
especially to the throat, torso and stomach area, and become patiently receptive to
any small stirrings or promptings that occur there in response to the query. You are
on the look-out for the kinds of ‘embodied knowing’ that occur, for example, when
you feel out of sorts with a friend, but cannot quite put your finger on what is wrong,
or when you leave a meeting with a vague, visceral sense of dissatisfaction that you
cannot, for the moment, explain.
Such pre-conceptual promptings Gendlin refers to as a ‘felt sense’.
This seems like the question “how do you want to move?” asked by oneself prior to performing ideomotion
Recent work in neuroscience and immunology, for
example, has revealed how intricately and instantaneously ‘brain’ and ‘body’ affect
each other (through a host of neuronal and neurochemical means): so much so that
they are better seen as a single, integrated cognitive system. Changes in this system
are quite capable of manifesting as physical sensations, despite the fact that there is
no explicit, articulated corollary in consciousness.
*There is that pesky neuroscience work again and somebody who apparently doesn’t understand it
Chris