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A Response to Lynn Preston'sExplication of ImplicitExperience in the Workof Eugene Gendlin: AnAppreciationDr. Joye Weisel-Barth Ph.D. and Psy.D. aa Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, LosAngeles, CAPublished online: 02 Dec 2008.

To cite this article: Dr. Joye Weisel-Barth Ph.D. and Psy.D. (2008) A Response toLynn Preston's Explication of Implicit Experience in the Work of Eugene Gendlin: AnAppreciation, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 3:4, 386-397,DOI: 10.1080/15551020802337450

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A Response to Lynn

Preston’s Explication of

Implicit Experience in the

Work of Eugene Gendlin:

An Appreciation

Joye Weisel-Barth, Ph.D., Psy.D.

This essay updates my 1970s memory of Eugene Gendlin. It finds him, to mydelight, alive and still growing. Currently, Gendlin writes from a thoroughlycontextual and systems perspective. The life process that he illuminates isself-organizing in a more intricately complex way than he originally imag-ined. In terms that feel spiritual, he tells us, “A great undivided multiplic-ity—of which we humans are a part—is always at work.”

Keywords: Gendlian body focus; edge of awareness; befindlichkeit; dynamicsystems theory of empathy; focusing voyage; the implicate

s I read Lynn Preston’s wonderful article about the implicit dimen-sion of experience in the work of Eugene Gendlin and contempo-rary psychoanalysis, I could not help taking a Gendlian focusing

voyage of my own. First, I tapped into my feelings, and up popped delight. Ifelt happy to know that Eugene Gendlin is still alive and growing. He hadbeen an important figure to me, along with Carl Rogers, Gregory Bateson,and Virginia Satir, during fertile times in early adulthood. I have always

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International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 3:386–397, 2008Copyright © The International Association for Psychoanalytic Self PsychologyISSN: 1555-1024 print / 1940-9141 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15551020802337450

Dr. Weisel-Barth is a member, instructor, and supervising and training analyst at the Insti-tute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles. She also serves as book review editor forthe International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.

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been glad to recognize Rogers in Kohut’s ideas, to see Bateson reexaminedin contemporary contexts (e.g., Ringstrom, 1998; Engleman, 1999), to hearechoes of Satir in Arietta Slade (1999), and to find Gendlin in both DanielStern’s “present moment” (2004) and Donnel Stern’s “unformulated expe-rience” (1997). But here was the real Gendlin, thanks to Preston, in theflesh, alive and kicking! How crucial and comforting to remember our fa-thers, to rediscover how much they have said and still have to say to us, andto realize that sometimes the old is still new—these were my firstthoughts—and how grand that one of these fathers is still around, thinkingand writing!

Then, I did a little Gendlian body focusing. As Preston points out,Gendlin believes “that it is through our body sense that we access the edgeof awareness.” The edge of awareness is Gendlin’s term for the nexus be-tween consciousness and the complex realm of the implicit, the pointwhere inchoate thoughts and feelings rise toward organization and articula-tion. Preston explains, “‘Focusing’ is his word for the zigzag, back-and-forthmovement needed to straddle the two realms,” the implicit, sub-symbolicrealm and the verbal symbolic. Along with describing my focusing experi-ence, I next discuss the implicit realm and its relation to the symbolic.

In a quiet state and breathing deeply, I sense into my body, and outpours—from the realm of the implicit—smells, images, and kinestheticmemories. The scent is of pine needles, sea-misted and bracing with a men-tholated charge down the nasal passages. I feel the ruddy cheeks, runnynose and achy, ringing ears that come after a morning’s walk by the windysea. And on an ascending path I see spilt sunlight in patches through tallevergreens. I am suddenly transported to Big Sur, on the coast between LosAngeles and Berkeley, a spot where land and sea meet with huge, dramaticfuss.

My body focusing ushers in precious associations to youthful opti-mism and spiritual stirrings. It also presents me with a reminder of time’spassing. Big Sur symbolically is a gateway to my growing up, a portal to en-gaged learning, true relationships, sexual itches and spiritual twitches, inti-mations of a larger world and life and of a better, more developed self. It isnot that I spent much time there really; mostly I just drove through, goingto and from college, entranced and enlarged by the beauty of the place. InBig Sur, as glorious a geography as any I have seen, I dreamed of preternatu-ral worlds. I also camped there once with my college boyfriend, sneaking aforbidden weekend for decidedly earthly pleasures. Later, on a few occa-sions in the 1970s and 1980s, I visited Esalen at Big Sur, the center of the

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human potential movement in California. This was a time when some ofthe best and brightest of my Berkeley classmates drifted down the coast towork and study there.

So time and space collapse in my focusing reverie about Gendlin, andI am at Esalen, where the life of the mind meets body consciousness in hottubs and massage tables that gaze on the Pacific Ocean below. EugeneGendlin, philosopher, psychotherapist, and humanistic shaman, actuallytaught a workshop on focusing during one of my Esalen idylls. From the per-spective of late adulthood, I notice that nostalgia—shadowed by a trace ofdisappointment—joins my memory image. Big Sur, Esalen, Gendlin—richmemories, developmental passages, the cultures of my young adulthood,and complicated feelings converge in these associative linkages. Somewords and phrases capture aspects of the feeling voyage: “youthful opti-mism,” “joy in being,” “expansiveness,” “becoming one with nature,”“wholeness,” “time-tripping,” and “memory language.” Yet, each of thesewords and phrases is too bounded or too cliché or too concrete to encom-pass the entirety of my cognitive and affective associational net. Rather, it isthe allusive image of me at Big Sur—on a morning walk above the sea and apart of all that beauty—which comes closest to the feeling experience.

Who knew that all this was here, implicitly poised to constellate injust this way, needing only a small nudge to consciousness, symbolic image,and language? Gendlin suggests that this is where sensing and focusing intoone’s body leads (1978). He uses the term befindlichkeit, borrowed fromHeidegger, to encompass the process of sensing into the implicit realm, thefeeling or mood of being in the process, the work of discovery that occurswith implicit material, and the conscious understandings that emerge fromthat work. Befindlichkeit! Our bodies, their processes, our experiences, andour language are so deeply and intricately connected that they become one.As Preston stresses, “There is no separation, Gendlin says, between us andwhat we find. Our situations don’t exist without us … .” Befindlichkeit isexpressive of a thoroughly contextual view of body, mind, and world. Beingreminded of befindlichkeit and then inadvertently engaging in my own“sensing into” process are two more reasons that I am so appreciative ofPreston’s article.

According to Gendlin, memories, received culture, unformulatedknowledge, and large meanings are part of the implicit realm of experience,a realm that enfolds and informs our lives. The implicate is both inside andoutside, within us and in the world. It is like water that not only surroundsour lives but flows into our cells and runs in our veins as well. Access to it

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changes us, and as we interact with implicit material, we change its natureas well. As Preston points out, the felt sense responds to us—“It talks back.”So, to review: Through sensing into our bodies, the focusing process opensus to the “implicate,” that “larger realm at the edge of thinking.” The pro-cess broadens our life horizons, facilitates the expansion of consciousness,and effects personal change. The process has, using Daniel Stern’s (2004)term, “temporal contour and vitality” (pp. 62–70): It creates a vivid story,alive and authentic, in which psychic development moves forward and newaction strategies often result.

In first reading Preston, I wondered whether Gendlin’s feeling voyageis a trip to discovering something that already exists or to creating some-thing that would not otherwise exist. After sensing into the idea ofbefindlichkeit, however, I am guessing that discovery and creativity are asingle, entwined experience for Gendlin. For him an authentic encounter-ing of the implicit necessarily results in creating something new: new af-fects, new words, new understandings, new ideas—more being. In a certainpsychic mode, then, discovery and creation are one and the same. From myshort focusing voyage, for example, I do feel a bit changed, a slightly fullerversion of myself, with new curiosity and motivation. And Gendlin has alsochanged for me. At this moment I think of him and will remember him inthe future much differently than before my “trip.” I want to find out nowwhat Eugene Gendlin has been doing all these years and what new thingshe has to teach me.

Gendlin and Empathy

Preston does a fine job describing the significance of Gendlin’s theory of theimplicit for a revised notion of empathy in self psychology. She suggests thatbefindlichkeit works intersubjectively as well as subjectively, and explainswhy and how Gendlin’s focusing theory can be used relationally. She beginsby quoting Gendlin’s (1966) ideas about human connectivity: “Words, acts,other people’s reactions all ‘carry forward’ the experiencing process, andthat is what humans are: sentient, interactive organisms.” Elsewhere,Gendlin (2004a) wrote:

The living body is … one interaction process with its situation. Thesituation is not out there, nor inside. The external “thing” and thesubjective “entities” are derived from one single life-interaction pro-cess … . We have to change the inner assumptions of our basic con-

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cepts. The entities with which we begin need to be both body and en-vironment as single events rather than today’s usual concepts thatpresent them as separate [p. 4–5].

Preston notes how similar all this is to intersubjective field theory.Next, in very Kohutian terms, Gendlin (2004a) said :

We need to describe how human beings unfold and become verybeautiful when listened to. Listening shows that the nature of humanbeings is nothing like socialized content. It is a depth of richness thatneeds only interactive reception to open out, step by step, into a cre-ative self-correcting development with freshly discovered wanting,personal ethics, and unique work in the world [p. 5].

Gendlin (2004a) frequently lamented the insufficiency of language tocapture what he calls the “intricacy” of human interconnectivity:

It is hard to tell our colleagues about Focusing and our overall ap-proach to living, because there are no terms in the shared languagethat can speak of these new things … . We can’t speak about the bodyover here inside the skin envelope, using five separated senses to per-ceive something over there, and then interpreting that, and then do-ing something. We need to tell our colleagues that the physical bodyIS always already a doing with others … [p. 1].

Preston sums up Gendlin’s position, “In psychoanalytic language, weare not isolated minds, but the river of human intersubjectivity,” and thenshe uses this insight as the basis for illuminating Gendlin’s formulation ofempathy: “The concept of empathy understood as sensing into the implicit[relationally] rather than putting oneself in the other’s shoes, offers a non-linear, process-oriented expansion of Kohut’s central contribution.”

Preston presents six Gendlian principles that together create a dy-namic systems theory of empathy. It is a theory that relies heavily on affectattunement and staying at the “edge of awareness” both subjectively andintersubjectively. First, Gendlin counsels therapists to court the emergent,to invite the felt sense into the therapeutic dyad. Second, he also urgestherapists to look for the unclear edge of experience. The unclear edgepresents itself as “feelings of tendency,” with a visceral quality to its pres-ence. As yet there are not specific words to fit the feelings. Therapeutic

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work at the unclear edge requires therapist and patient to struggle in dia-logue to find fitting verbal or imagistic hooks to catch the feelings.

A third Gendlian therapeutic principle requires a kind of diffuse lis-tening on the therapist’s part. As key to accessing the edge of awareness,Gendlin advises a softening of one’s cognitive functions and a loosening ofboundaries between the explicit and implicit realms of experience. Prestondescribes the importance of the therapist listening to his or her own innerstirrings, and of relaxing into “open receptivity of his or her own and the pa-tient’s unclear edge.” Not only does the unclear edge often express itself ina language of images and metaphors, but it also touches us viscerally. AsPreston puts it, “The body acts as radar picking up the implicit level.”

Gendlin’s fourth therapeutic principle counsels the therapist to relyon his or her own felt sense to respond to the exact felt sense that the pa-tient is trying to convey. This is fancy intersubjective footwork, in-deed—feeling resonance, picking up vibes, and identifying them for the pa-tient—but when successful, such a listening stance “carries forward theformulating process, and also enables the patient to feel deeply under-stood.” This forth principle sounds very close to the dyadic expansion thatfollows an affectively harmonious interpretation or a marked mirroring a laFonagy or a recognition a la Benjamin. As Preston points out, this is a con-temporary version of a selfobject experience. Gendlin, like Kohut, suggeststhat such experiences have a developmental thrust. To me, this fourth prin-ciple is also perfectly consistent with Stolorow’s idea of a good interpreta-tion and Orange’s notion of “emotional understanding.”

To check how our patients react to our work at the edge of awareness isGendlin’s fifth principle. Preston illustrates: “After I have made an interpre-tation, or added my own thoughts or feelings to the therapeutic interaction, Iwatch carefully for my patient’s reaction on both the symbolic level and thesub-symbolic level. Iwanttoknow,asexactlyas Ican,whatmyinputdid….”

Finally, the sixth principle suggests marking moments of affective rec-ognition or shift. Whether a dramatic “aha”; a giggle of agreement; or aquiet sigh, tear, or smile, Gendlin calls these experiences instances of “click-ing in, a felt shift.” He feels that it is necessary to welcome, name, and nur-ture such moments.

Gendlin and Language

There is something of a controversy in contemporary theory about theplace of language in relation to the implicit or procedural realm of experi-

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ence. Preston alludes to this debate; and because it is relevant to Gendlin, Iwant to elaborate the discussion here a bit. In keeping with the classicalpsychoanalytic dictum of making the unconscious conscious, most contem-porary theoreticians stress the importance of articulating and making affec-tive implicit experience explicit; that is, of making the nonverbal verbal.Although many speak of the limitations of language to catch the fullness orcomplexity of the implicate, they nonetheless urge the effort to convert thenonverbal into words. Words, after all, are the traditional currency of psy-choanalysis.

In describing enactments and improvisational moments respectively,both Bromberg and Ringstrom lament the limitations of language but nev-ertheless suggest that articulated understanding will follow from dramaticrelational interaction. Similarly, traumatologists, like Davies and Howell,believe that discontinuities in self states and complex breaches betweenconscious and dissociated experience are potentially healed through enact-ments and subsequent verbal interpretation. And Bucci (2003), who hasproposed a sophisticated multiple-code theory that assigns analytic ex-changes to sub-symbolic, nonverbal symbolic, and verbal symbolic catego-ries, traces a complicated process from sub-symbolic to protosymbolic to,finally, symbolic experience. She suggests an elaborate process that eventu-ally integrates the three channels, that moves from sub-symbolic emotionalexperience and emergent imagery into a symbolic lexical narrative.

Many play therapists and some infant researchers, on the other hand,see the possibility of psychic reorganization without words. Play therapy hasalways viewed symbolic play, imaginative enactments—with or withoutverbal interpretation—as the means of working out inchoate inner con-flicts. And many infant researchers also view the reorganization of psychicpatterns as possible without words. As Preston points out, for Daniel Stern(2004), it is the doing in the saying that is mutative—that is, he believesthat language mostly functions as a medium for therapeutic interactionrather than as a curative end in itself. To quote Preston, “What is therapeu-tic is not primarily the content of what we are saying, but the action—thedoing in our saying.” And Karlen Lyons-Ruth (1999), for whom the proce-dural reorganization of relational configurations is the chief analytic goal,does not see development as necessarily moving from procedural coding tosymbolic coding. Using attachment research to describe a range of orga-nized relational strategies—what she calls “enactive representations”—Ly-ons-Ruth sees these strategies as developing in an implicit, procedural sys-tem that is parallel to but separate from an explicit or lexical system. She

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presents a theory of psychoanalytic development and change based on pa-tient–analyst interaction in the implicit, procedural system. According toLyons-Ruth, goal-directed, affectively charged therapeutic interaction mayresult in the elaboration or reorganization of primary enactive representa-tions without much influence from the symbolic system at all.

So where does Gendlin come down in this controversy? Gendlin is de-cidedly a word man—words are a philosopher’s stock and trade—but he is aword man in his own typically sophisticated and original sense. He beginswith a critique of what he calls the “unit” model of thinking and language,which requires “ … unitized things which are assumed to be either cleanlyidentical or cleanly separate, which can be next to each other but cannotinterpenetrate, let alone have some more complex pattern” (Gendlin,2004b, p. 3). Gendlin argues with the Western unit model and its way ofseeing words as isolated things. Borrowing from Wittgenstein, he takes acontrarian view about the limitations of language. He begins, “Wittgen-stein showed that the capacity of language far exceeds the conceptual pat-terns that inhere in it … what words can say is quite beyond the control ofany concept, pre-existing rule, or theory of language” (Gendlin, 2004b, p.3). This is because language is intricately connected to the body and im-plicit affective experience.

Gendlin (2004b) presented what he called a “bodily-sourced” lan-guage:

Language is deeply rooted in the human body in a way that is not com-monly understood. Language does not consist just of the words. Thesituations in which we find ourselves, the body, and the language forma single system together. Language is implicit in the human process ofliving. The words we need to say arrive directly from the body [p. 4].

Language, then, also inheres at the edge of awareness, at the nexus be-tween consciousness and the implicate. Gendlin (2004b) argued “Languageis not the deadly trap it is often said to be. Language is often blamed whensomething exciting becomes limited and lifeless. This might be true whenone uses only common phrases.” However, he continued, when language is“fresh,” emerging from the “felt sense” at the “edge of awareness” (p. 6).

New phrasing is possible because language is always implicit in humanexperiencing and deeply inherent in what experiencing is. Far from reducingand limiting what one implicitly lives and wants to say, a fresh statement isphysicallya furtherdevelopmentofwhatonesenses(Gendlin,2004b,p.6).

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Gendlin and Dynamic Systems Theory

I have loved this chance to revisit and update my relationship with Gendlinthat Preston’s article affords. In comparing the “old Gendlin” with the“new” one, I have found the most salient change to be his growth into athoroughgoing contextualist, a dynamic systems thinker. Implied in thewritings of many humanistic psychologists from the 1960s and 1970s, in-cluding Gendlin, was the idea that individuals are potentially connected toforces, spirits, powers greater than themselves. Through exercises such asgroup interaction, spiritual practices, body awareness, “focusing,” onecould find and claim for himself these forces, spirits, and powers. The hu-manistic psychologist was something of a prophet or shaman, and the indi-vidual’s story was that of a hero’s quest. A successful quest resulted in newpersonal development, understanding, enlightenment, and language. Thisnew development also had the potential to change other people and thehuman community. Carlos Castendeda’s (1968) The Teachings of Don Juan:A Yaqui Way of Knowledge comes to my mind as an epitome of the era andgenre.

While keeping the basic hero story structure, Gendlin has vastly ex-panded his understanding of human interconnectivity. Thanks to gloriousGoogle™, I have been able to get current on Gendlin’s thinking and havefound that his present ideas are every bit as contexualist as Stern, Ly-ons-Ruth, Beebe and Lachman, Coburn, and Stolorow and Orange.

The overarching systems idea that Gendlin proposes is that of com-plexity or what he calls “intricacy.” The term conveys the vast networks ofconnections and interconnections operating within and between open liv-ing systems: within and between the body, the brain, language, individuals,the environment, the universe—what Ringstrom (2007) jokingly called“the big-altogether-everything-else” (p. 3). These connections exist in a re-cursive process of perpetual organization and reorganization. As Gendlin(2003) puts it, “The life process is self-organizing, but much more intri-cately than we can conceptualize” (p. 7). Intricacy is the rule in the body asGendlin (2003) tells us over and over: “A living body … has the intricacy ofour situations” (p. 4), and “Living bodies have a holistic life-forward direc-tion that is usually called adaptive … . But in fact the living systems createnew and more intricate meanings and action … The experiencing process Ihave described has its own coherence” (p. 6).

As we have already seen, for Gendlin (2003) the body is intricatelyconnected to the world: “Your situation and you are not two things, as if the

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external things were a situation without you. Nor is your bodily sense onlyinternal … it includes more of the intricacy of your situation than you cansee or think” (p. 4), and “Real interactions are … intricate … . The othersand the world are already implicit in our bodily-sensed experiencing” (p. 5).

And, finally, according to Gendlin (2004a), through the focusing pro-cess individuals may discover unfinished order in what looks like founda-tional chaos. He writes, “There is greater order beyond the alternatives offormed forms or disorder. We can shift the basis of human thought to thepoint of emergence, where new terms arise in the interaction (the ‘zig-zag,’the conversation, the back and forth …) between what we say and the re-sponse we find in implicit intricacy” (p. 5).

One difficulty I had in reading Preston’s article was in distinguishingwhich ideas were particularly Gendlin’s and which belonged to other con-temporary thinkers. I thought she should have delineated these distinc-tions more clearly. Yet, in writing this response, I began to think a bit differ-ently about my observation. Rather than a problem, I realized thatGendlin’s ideas are a part of the zeitgeist, the climate of the times, the inheri-tance of influence for contemporary thinkers on the implicate. Currentthinking, in turn, has affected Gendlin and moved him toward acontextualist, mutual influence model of mind. Therefore, the melding ofGendlin’s thinking with contemporary analytic thought generally, the mix-ing and folding of ideas, the untethering of them from particular writ-ers—unauthoring them, if you will—is, in fact, one illustration of Gendlin’smajor contextualist thrust. As he writes, “The life process is self-organizing,but much more intricately than we can conceptualize. A great undividedmultiplicity is always at work” (Gendlin, 2003, p. 115).

References

Bucci, W. (2003), Varieties of dissociative experiences. Psychoanal. Psychol., 20:542–557.Casteneda, C. (1968), The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press.Engleman, B. (1999), The Unending Search for Love: On Narcissistic Parenting, Eating Disor-

ders and the Double Bind. Paper presented at the 1999 annual convention of the AmericanPsychological Association, Division of Psychoanalysis, April, Boston, MA.

Gendlin, E. (1966), Existentialism and experiential psychotherapy. In: Existential ChildTherapy, ed. C. Moustakas. New York: Basic Books, pp. 206–246. Retrieved from http://www.focusing.org

_____ (1978), Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the Philosophy of Psychology. New York: BasicBooks. Retrieved from http://www.focusing.org

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_____ (2003), Beyond postmodernism: From concepts through experiencing. In: Under-standing Experience: Psychotherapy and Postmodernism, ed. R. Frie. New York: Basic Books,pp. 100–115. Retrieved from http://www.focusing.org

_____ (2004a), Five Philosophical Talking Points to Communicate With Colleagues Who Don’tYet Know Focusing. New York: Basic Books. Retrieved from http://www.focusing.org/news-letter

_____ (2004b), Introduction to Thinking at the Edge. New York: Basic Books. Retrieved fromhttp://www.focusing.org/tae-intro.html

Lyons-Ruth, K. (1999). The two-person unconscious: Intersubjective dialogue, enactive re-lational representation, and the emergence of new forms of relational organization.Psychoanal. Inq., 19:576–617.

Ringstrom, P. A. (1998). Therapeutic impasses in contemporary psychoanalytic treatment:Revisiting the double bind hypothesis. Psychoanal. Dial., 8:297–315.

_____ (2007), “Inductive Identification” and Improvisation in Psychoanalytic Practice:Some Comments on Joye Weisel-Barth’s Article on Complexity Theory. Accepted,Internat. J. Psychoanal. Psychother.

Slade, A. (1999), Representation, symbolization, and affect regulation in the concomitanttreatment of a mother and child. Psychoanal. Inq., 19:797–830.

Stern, D. (1997), Unformulated Experience: From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis.Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.

_____ (2004), The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton.

Joye Weisel-Barth, Ph.D., Psy.D.4826 Andasol Ave.Encino, CA 91316818–986–4098dr.joye@sbcglobal.net

Translations of Abstract

Este ensayo actualiza mi recuerdo de Eugene Gendlin en los años setenta. Y lo encuentra,para mi deleite, vivo y creciendo todavía. Actualmente, Gendlin escribe desde unaperspectiva absolutamente contextual y sistémica. El proceso de vida que Gendlin iluminaes auto-organizador de una manera más compleja que la que él pudo imaginar. En términosde tipo espiritual, nos dice, “Una gran multiplicidad indivisible—de la que los humanosformamos parte—está siempre en escena.”

Cet essai met à jour mes souvenirs de Eugene Gendlin datant des années soixante-dix. Amon grand plaisir, je l’y retrouve vivant et toujours en croissance. Actuellement, les écrits deGendlin se situent complètement dans une perspective de systèmes et contextuelle. Leprocessus de vie qu’il éclaire est auto organisant d’une manière beaucoup plus complexequ’il l’avait d’abord imaginée. Dans des termes qui semblent spirituels, il nous dit, «Unegrande multiplicité non divisée—de laquelle nous, humains, faisons partie—est toujours àl’œuvre».

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Dieser Aufsatz aktualisiert meinen Aufsatz: “Nineteen seventies’ memory of EugeneGendlin.” Er stellt sich zu meiner Freude lebendig und immer noch als entwickelbar dar.Derzeit schreibt Gendlin aus einer gänzlich kontextuellen und systemischen Perspektive.Der Lebensprozess, den er erhellt, ist der der Selbstorganisation als ein komplizierterer,komplexerer Weg, wie er ihn sich ursprünglich vorgestellt hatte. In Begriffen, die sichspirituell anfühlen, erzählt er uns, dass “eine große, ungeteilte Multiplizität—von der wirMenschen einen Teilaspekt darstellen—am Werk ist.”

Questo articolo aggiorna il mio ricodo degli anni settanta di Eugene Gendlin. Con miogrande piacere lo trovo vivace e ancora in crescita. Attualmente Gendlin scrive seguendouna prospettiva decisamente contestuale e sistemica. Il processo vitale che chiarisce siauto-organizza in un modo più complesso e intricato di quanto si immaginasseoriginariamente. In termini che hanno un alone spirituale, egli ci dice che: “Una grandemolteplicità indivisa – della quale noi esseri umani siamo parte – è sempre all’opera”.

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