Gendlin 1992 The wider role of bodily sense in thought and language
Reference # 174 at http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/gol_primary_bibliography.htm
Gendlin, E.T. (1992). The wider role of bodily sense in thought and language. In M. Sheets-Johnstone (Ed.), Giving the body its due, pp. 192-207. Albany: State University of New York Press.
– Translated into German by H.J. Schneider: Die umfassende Rolle des Körpergefühls im Denken und Sprechen. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 1993, 41 (4), 693-706. This translation is reprinted in Brennpunkt, no. 63, 1995, 17, 13-25.
” Eugene Gendlin, well-known founder of the psychotherapeutic technique of focusing, examines ways in which a bodily felt sense operates in everyday life situations as well as in deeper self-understandings. In his essay, “The Wider Role of the Body in Thought and Language,” he shows us in new and distinctive ways how a bodily felt sense is fundamental to our acts of thinking and speaking. In particular, he invites us to consider how the body implies, and how, by listening to its ‘implyings’ we come to fresh awarenesses and create new meanings. Drawing both on the most common of daily human experiences and on his own clinical experience, Gendlin shows us that there is an intricacy to our bodily life that not only far exceeds the possibilities of any merely material substance or mere robot utterly wed to culturally-derivative fads and forms of experience, but that far exceeds the categories and distinctions we take to order our lives. He sees this bodily “excess” as itself an order, an order of meanings—bodily implyings. He furthermore sees this order of meanings as literally coming from the body in the same way that sleep, appetite, orgasm, and emotions come from the body. In a broader sense, his research demonstrates that there is indeed such a thing as human nature, and that what is necessary to its appreciation is an opening to the ways in which the body speaks to us, ways that are not part of the established cultural order but that break through to a different order.” — Maxine. Sheets-Johnstone (Ed.) (1992). The wider role of bodily sense in thought and language. In Giving the body its due, pp. 192-207. Albany: State University of New York Press.
(emphasis added Katarina Halm)
NOTES from the book Giving the body its due:
1. I often use a string of words instead of just one in a given slot. For
example, I might say you feel your life, you are, have, live.your life.
The five dots leave room for other possible words. After the string and the sequence of dots once appear, any one of the words can later say what is meant. But furthermore, when we let each of the words work, then each says the (.) that includes the others so that the (.) is more than any ingle scheme. In this way we are not limited by any one formulation.
2. Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, Outwork (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 3-43.
3. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and
to a Phenomentological Philosophy, Book I, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983).
4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E.
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 172-173.
5. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works), Vol. 26, The
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (Following Leibnitz), trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984), 199.
6. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. and trans. D. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148.Wider Role of Bodily Sense 207
7. Eugene T. Gendlin, Experience and the Creation of Meaning, 2nd
ed. (New York: Free Press, 1970);
“Experiential Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, ed. M. Natanson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973);
“Two Phenomenologists Do Not Disagree,” in Phenomenology, Dialogues and Bridges, ed. R. Bruzina and B. Wilshire (New York: State University of New York Press, 1982);
“A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism,” in Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies, ed. D. M. Levin (New York: New York University Press, 1987);
“Thinking Beyond Patterns: Body, Language, and Situations,” in The Presence of Feeling in Thought, eds. B. den Ouden and M. Moen (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).