A Process Model (APM) by Eugene Gendlin is a book I will be making sense of for a long time. It is, at this point, the most sophisticated and ambitious attempt I've seen to move past some of the most fundamental problems in both philosophy and psychology. In particular, it manages to explain or bypass many difficulties inherent in the analytic-continental divide (scientism and postmodernism), or their analogs within the world of psychology (behaviorism/cognitive psychology, as opposed to humanistic or existential psychology). The fundamental issue in all of these divisions is the relationship between experience and nature or reality. Analytic/scientistic/behavioral orientations are more willing to sacrifice the phenomenon (i.e. experience) in the name of a reductive or deterministic account of nature. The "scientific" (i.e. unitized/reductive) explanation is more important than the integrity of the experience. Pomo/existential orientations generally laud the irreducibility of experience and, in various ways, posit some sort of discontinuity between nature and human beings (i.e. history/culture as a screen or cage). As Gendlin observes, however, both agree that human experience cannot be both studied scientifically and retain its phenomenological integrity.
The core of APM is thus to develop an account of humans, language, culture, and science that is consistent with our experience of the world. We experience ourselves, for example, as choosing, deliberating, being active in the world. Gendlin pursues this account in a two-pronged fashion that could be discussed as content and form.
In terms of content, Gendlin's philosophy begins with the concepts of body and environment. The basic, irreducible existence and interaction of living bodies and their environments is his starting point. As he says in an essay on imagery, "Every living event is a body-environment unit." From this dyad he builds a series of interrelated concepts intended to describe and explain different kinds of living processes: from plant growth to living animals and finally to human language and culture. Thus in terms of the content Gendlin is telling an evolutionary or emergentist story in which plant life becomes animal life which becomes human life.
The form of Gendlin's account, however, is what is more significant. Gendlin is no doubt offering a theory, but it is a different kind of theory, he claims. Most theories, he claims, try to break things down into units and then reconstruct reality from those units. Even theories that try to describe processes (like life), he claims, often fall back on unitizing things. In this way most 'logical' theories leave out significant aspects of reality (are Procrustean). His sort of theory, then, is one that exhibits process. The concepts change as the text develops (this happens in all good writing). I suppose Gendlin would claim his thing is different because it explicitly describes dialectic while also enabling dialectic. But I feel myself getting annoyed, sympathizing with Keir, over this neomania and how Gendlin buys into it.
He puts all this explicitly and briefly at the end of an essay on the body:
"Elsewhere (A Process Model, available from The Focusing Institute) I have built a new theoretical model of the body, its vegetative life-process, behavior, and the role it plays in language and culture.
The model has dual powers: It has the power of logic, of precise interrelated concepts, but it also has a new power. The concepts are not only ordinary logical ones. They are also a new kind. They are concepts that bring the experience I have been describing along with them. The concepts stem from and retain in them that kind of experience. One can move from these concepts in two ways: One can move from them in a logical way, but one can also and differently move from the bodily-sensed ..... which they bring."
This sort of theory, then, includes the logical dimensions of concepts, but also includes a deeper aspect that could be called process or experience. They are process concepts and experiential concepts. They have both of these relations.
Similarly, Gendlin says on page 114 of APM that he is indeed telling a story of natural history of how body process in plants 'becomes' animal life' which 'becomes' human symboling power. The purpose of this story is not only to develop a systematic theory, but to develop the kind of concept that can systematically incorporate lived experience or process. "In developing the symbol power, as it seems, from animal behavior and body-process, I am not trying to do a natural history. I think, quite in the opposite order, that those who study actual developments of this sort will be aided by the concepts developed here. Why? Because these concepts stem from out of what symboling is." What Gendlin means in this last statement, that his theory 'stems from out of what symboling is' is deeply important.
When most theories rely on units, Gendlin claims, they are relying on a very thin portion of what experience and language really are and do. Our unitized concepts are only one, and a very thin and impoverished form, of what language is in a deeper sense. In a deeper sense, language is something that emerges from and carries forward ongoing living processes. Language is part of the total activity of living bodies, comparable to an animal's growl or a bee's dance. Indeed, Gendlin begins his discussion of symbols by talking about 'body looks' and dances of animals.
We therefore need concepts about life and embodiment that allow us to appreciate the deep intertwining of language and living process. Gendlin thus explains on 114 "To think clearly, one needs concepts that share an internal structure, that develop together, so to speak. What each is, and what the others are, constitute a single structure so that one can grasp what each does in relation to the others." Concepts, in their embodied life, don't appear to us as singular units, cleanly separated, but more often as clusters and networks. When describing an experience or situation we may find an variety of words that reveal different facets. The real significance of concepts is in this network or mesh that they constitute in relation to one another.
Engaging concepts in this way, as an embodied mesh, is truer to the nature of language. The real life of language is in our embodied felt sense of things. It is in a felt sense, a unique form of body process, that words cluster and present themselves to us. It is through a felt sense that we know we have the right word that expresses precisely just that thing that we wanted to say.
It takes Gendlin about 25-30 pages before he begins speaking about his account or model in itself. Up until then he is just building concepts. It isn't until 114 pages in that we get a more explicit statement about how the book is proceeding. And it isn't until the final pages of the final chapter that we realize that felt sensing was involved the whole time. The end of the book, an account of the felt sense as where clusters or webs of concepts come from, was implicit at the beginning.
The opening line Gendlin says: "Body and environment are one, but of course only in certain respects." With this initial qualification, 'of course only in certain respects,' introduces us to the basic dialectical structure of the whole book. Concepts are built in precise ways by being dialectical, by saying 'well we could put it like that, but that is misleading because of XYZ... but if we put it like that then we see this aspect of it...' The whole text is an exercise in such dialectic.
It is a felt sense that allows dialectic to proceed. Dialectic proceeds by detecting or sensing the fault in statements. This means that statements are being evaluated in some way outside of the statement. The felt sense is the place outside of language from which language both emerges and can be evaluated.
Gendlin makes this explicit in the final chapter of APM (VIII). Gendlin notes that his concept of 'eveving' (everything interaffecting everything, in chapter VI-A-e) was possible only from a felt sensing space, which isn't described until chapter VIII. The book, therefore, is using its own conclusions as presuppositions; the end is implicit in the beginning. "In IV-A-e, our concept there of 'eveving' already employed this kind of 'direction' [discussed immediately above] when we formulated how an evev becomes stable. Only now can this be said clearly. The concept of 'eveving' is from direct referent formation [felt sensing], from VIII." The text employs throughout the type of concept that can only be described in the final chapter.
Because it is only in the final chapter that Gendlin tells the developmental story of science and philosophy. Up until then he has to tell the story of plants, behavior, traditional human culture. Only then can he describe how traditional "VII" style concepts can be creatively redeployed for the purposes of felt sensing and complex concept development.
The permanent choice, of course, remains whether we use those concepts in a unitized "VII" way, or we return to felt sensing, try to move deeper into the process.
Put differently, do we allow our concepts to become frozen units, or do we return them to the more fluid space of experiencing.
This feels like an unruly post, I am grappling with a difficult text that is claiming to present radical or revolutionary concepts. I'm generally skeptical of such claims. But I am deeply impressed by this book.
It seems to me that the process of therapy contains a similar question about the end being present in the beginning. As therapy deepens someone has access to more, can do more felt sensing, can check in with themselves more. People become, in short, more skilled at process, less attached to structures or rigid forms. This corresponds fairly coherently onto the difference between logical or experiential concepts.
As I've said to friends, and as someone who knew Gendlin confirmed for me, everything Gendlin ever wrote can be understood as an attempt to answer the question "How is psychotherapy possible?"
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