Eugene T. Gendlin

Describes an effective technique for identifying one's personal problems by developing an awareness of one's innermost feelings and thus altering behavior and solving problems on a step-by-step basis. Reissue.

Focusing

Gavin

2/5 with an asterisk.* A very useful technique, but with very weak scientific backing (but at least he tried!), and but a fairly bad book. 

There are classic self-help red flags:

  My philosophy leads to new concepts in physics and biology... Focusing is now a worldwide network... this can seem insane to the rest of our society. How could new realistic ideas and steps arise from the body? This new institution is changing the atomization of society... Unlocking the wisdom of your body... using the body's own life-centered and inherently positive direction and force...


'Focusing has been crucial for many bodyworkers. I would hope that it would be more widely integrated within the education of Somatics practitioners. - Don Hanlon Johnson, Professor, California Institute of Integral Studies'


  The most important rule for a therapist to observe, while helping someone to focus, is to stay out of the focuser's way... [Soon:] Another agitated, self-destructive emotional spiral was beginning and I interrupted her.



  IF DURING THESE INSTRUCTIONS SOMEWHERE YOU HAVE SPENT A LITTLE WHILE SENSING AND TOUCHING AN UNCLEAR HOLISTIC BODY SENSE OF THIS PROBLEM, THEN YOU HAVE FOCUSED.



...but also things I know to be true and which aren't in the interest of a therapist / self-help guru to say:

  Why doesn't therapy succeed more often? In the rarer cases when it does succeed, what is it that those patients and therapists do? What is it that the majority fail to do? 



  When the revolution in self-help [democratization] takes place and people do these helpful processes with each other, will professional psychotherapy be unnecessary? 


It did take place, we are they; it didn't change much, because most of it is nonsense. I suppose it is cheaper than the old way.
(There is of course the possibility that he's saying them to disarm me.)

I got incredibly annoyed at him going on about this 'method' for 50 pages without describing it; skip to chapter 4 if you do too. It's roughly

1) Clear your head
2) Pick one problem and just think about it in general ("feel it holistically")
3) Slowly try to find the right words to describe it
4) Switch back between the "felt sense" (2) and your description a bunch.
5) Wonder what it's all about. 
6) Continue until you feel your attitude towards it change.

Is this profound? No. Is it crackpot? Also no.

Also annoying was his dismissing alternative strategies for handling problems, all of which I sometimes like. He belittles 'belittling the problem' (e.g. reminding yourself that others have it worse - which is both noble and effective); 'analyzing' (he rightly belittles Freudian Analysis, i.e. blaming your present state on the nastiest past event that comes to mind, but as if breaking things into subproblems is always a bad idea); just enduring it (often just works for me); lecturing yourself (often works for me because parts of me want to listen). Why is it so hard for writers like this to concede that some things don't work for some people? (They lose authority I suppose.)

Surprising that he's a sincere empiricist, or at least trying to be. 

  One reason why research is so important is precisely that it can surprise you and tell you that your subjective convictions are wrong... As hard as it was for me to accept the finding that therapy doesn't do the job, research findings can never hurt you. They move you forward.


This is a list of about 100 studies on the topic (Ctrl+F "Table 1"), no doubt with a terrible file-drawer problem. Total n~=500, probably with a lot of duplication. Measures used are a mix of standard boring ones like PFQ and woo boring ones like Gestalt. 

Gendlin makes a few specific, testable claims (which is always to be encouraged so allow me to hereby present him with his certificate of falsifiability at worst):

* "therapy has better outcomes when clients 'focus". Too vague, but a few of the studies are nominally about this.
* "better functioning of the immune system". Only one mention of immune system in that big chart, for this n=76 study, no mention of focusing in the abstract at least.
* successful patients (i.e. one-year outcomes) can be predicted from recordings of "their first two sessions". This would be good and clean evidence that something real is involved. I think the claim refers to this PhD, n=35. It wasn't exactly cross-validated, shall we say.

That review was cursory but tells me enough. (You might think you could just look at clinical practice, 40 years on - which, outside of California, doesn't exactly foreground Gendlin - to get a sense of whether it works as well as he claims. But medicine is too far from a rational system for that.)

The core idea is not insane. It's that there is an equivalent of proprioception for your own emotions, and that you can't change anything about yourself except through it. There's a touch of the old Zen problem to it, that you're trying to describe a nonverbal thing in words. But then, most descriptions aren't descriptions of verbal processes - consider e.g. "Succulent plants' dark fixation makes them ideal for air quality control in bedrooms".

What about support from respectable, academic phenomenology? I don't know that there is any such thing. There may be non-propositional, non-procedural knowledge. It wouldn't be surprising - the conscious mind is a relatively small and unskilled thing. It's Gendlin's idea of our apriori and undeluded access to it that's the problem. Gendlin's experiments don't establish the existence or the access. I find it hard to think how to test this, actually. If the epistemology of focusing was real, what would be different about its practitioners? Happiness? Cortisol? Decision speed? I don't know. We are too skilled at deluding ourselves. It would be pretty easy to run an experiment where Gendlinites tried to predict which patients recover, and then check that against normies' predictions.

To be fair, this book isn't his strongest face ("I also want this book to be readable by anyone"). But I'm not grading on intended audience (and I wasn't encouraged by those no-power, pre-Crisis psychology studies either).

Open questions: why should there be any therapy that works in general? Grant that there is bodily knowledge; where is this knowledge stored? The enteric nervous system? Why should introspection work? Theory of mind is for modelling other people so that they can't harm me.

This is all probably harmless; people doing Rogerian listening to each other is unlikely to cause any problems (in fact, since it's free, then if the null hypothesis of talk psychotherapy is true, this might be a social improvement; same benefit without the deadweight); he doesn't advocate withdrawal from treatment (pills are completely absent from the picture, actually). And the opportunity cost of trying this is low, because other self-help is worse. Not for me; maybe for you.

* Gendlin seems like a very nice man, he's just not the discoverer of the one neat trick to psychiatry. The emphasis (3 chapters) here on helping others and not just yourself in sweet. His acceptance of the need to do science makes it easier to get at him than at other self-helpists - which makes me feel bad about getting at him and not them. (I won't get at them because they're not worth arguing with.)

Focusing

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