Browsing the early issues of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology last month for my paper, I came across a review of a book by the American psychologist Eugene Gendlin. I’d seen his name once before in an unlikely place — a booklet by a British Quaker writer named Rex Ambler, whom I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre.
As I read him, Rex argues that in the early years (1650-) of the Quaker movement, what one did in a Quaker meeting was rather more specific than it is today. Rather than simply sitting in silence, or waiting to hear from God in a general way, early Quakers would endeavor to pay close attention to their inner experience, in order to come into greater contact with reality as it is — the truth about their condition and the condition of the world.
In other words, they were doing a sort of grassroots, practical phenomenology. Which explains why, as he explored this point of view with colleagues, eventually one suggested it sounded similar to a psychotherapeutic technique developed by our Eugene Gendlin, called “focusing.” Rex finishes by synthesizing the two approaches into a series of guided meditations, which a certain portion of liberal Quakers (especially in the UK) regularly practice.
(Which, incidentally, was part of the inspiration for a group meditation I held at my house on December 15, which I hope to blog about soon.)
I hadn’t known Gendlin was part of the humanistic psychology movement, but it makes perfect sense. A few excerpts from the aforementioned book review:
He would distinguish between a fact and the feel of a fact. His position is one which recognizes the unquestionable merits and successes of the logico-empirical tradition and its methods, but he regards positivistic methodology for the behavioral sciences as necessary but insufficient. This is because it leads to logical constructs concerning observable behavior but neglects the whole realm of direct experiencing…. Symbolic scientific structures in the behavioral sciences have been very successful in moving us from the known to the unknown. Operational methods have achieved high predictability by neglecting the dimension of feeling … but from this it does not follow that either the phenomenological processes are to be regarded as unreal or that they are to be regarded as unnecessary to the scientific enterprise. Phenomenological analysis is, of course, indispensable to the psychotherapeutic enterprise.
…
It should be a must in the arsenal of those therapists who respect the values of scientific method, philosophy of science and logical positivism and, at the same time, appreciate that these must now be balanced by some of the theses and concerns of a humanistic psychology and existentialism.
(Henry Winthrop, review of Experiencing and the creation of meaning by Eugene Gendlin, J. of Humanistic Psych. II:2, Fall 1962, 134 and 137.)
I’m sympathetic to this point of view, except I’m skeptical that phenomenological exploration is somehow necessary to “the scientific enterprise.” It may have a place in human culture, perhaps even academia, but it seems too radically individual to be scientific. I’m reminded of what Carl Rogers once said — humanistic psychology hasn’t had much effect on academic psychology, but it’s had a large effect on the wider culture…
