Somatic - Semantic - Shifting: Clarifying Experienced Meaning

The Philosophy behind Focusing

Dr. Donata Schoeller
Presentation for the CEPC, Cambridge, Sept. 2014

1. Responsive Order
2. A Process Model
3. Roots
4. The Focusers Attention: Felt Sensing
5. Close Talking
6. Felt Sense and Somatic Marker
In my paper I will approach Eugene Gendlins Practice of Focusing, its philosophical
underpinnings, its roots and its consequences for a practice of thinking and articulation. In a
second step, I will compare and contrast the Felt Sense with Antonio Damasios 'Somatic
Markers', by showing how Gendlin makes conceivable that we do not have to react according
to embodied patterns of what we have experienced and learned. Bodily sense can unfold into
intricate steps of understanding through the practice of a certain kind of explicative
awareness. Articulating helps to stay in touch with a felt kind of meaning without handing it
over to some reaction, some story or analysis or becoming speechless in the face of too much
complexity or experienced meaningfulness.
Before I start. I want to invite you to feel how you sit, to feel how it is for you to be in this
room right now, to notice what is going on bodily wise while being in this place, this room,
with the people around you. Maybe you can feel the atmosphere of the room, notice your
body-posture and position, a bodily sense of pressure, or ease the noises from outside, my
voice .... Allow yourself to be with all of this too now and again, while I am speaking. Going
back and forth between different sorts of attention-modes: from attention towards what we
call outside, to attention towards what we call inside, from attention towards a conceptual
content, to attending the way you respond to it, is a part of the practice that is called
Focusing.
(I think this has also been an ideal in the monastic tradition: having one eye directed outward
and one eye directed inward.)

1. Responsive Order
To the people gathered here it is nothing new to hear that feeling is not a passive state but a
highly dynamic and complex process. But what is not yet widely shared is the concept of
words not just communicating information and to represent or construct ideas or intentional
states, but to carry experiential processes forward.
So before I focus on Focusing, I want to characterize the philosophical horizon it opens up.
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Focusing makes us directly aware, how our ways of experience are a constant crossing of vast
past experience and the present, how in a feeling, as fuzzy as it may be at the moment, there is
so much: What we experienced long ago, what went on this morning, what we may just have
read in newspaper, what someones said to us, just a glance while we passed someone, a
thought, a dream that is still with us, all this, not separate, but in a bodily sense of how we are
doing, or to paraphrase Damasio, in a feeling for what happens. Into what Gendlin calls
an unseparated multiplicity (Gendlin, 19911) the present moment occurs making the
situation diversely rich and multi-interpretational from individual to individual. By living in
situations, we carry a vast complexity along that is not inside of us like furniture inside a
house. Rather, it needs attentive development to lead to actions we can account for, to shortterm and long-term intentions that become clearer along the way.
To be attentive to your own situated experiencing process as a philosophical practice can be
considered as result of a different thinking. In a traditional kind of epistemology it is the
content of experience that counts, the judgement that can be formed. Its questions of interest
are, what sensory input is experienced, what category can be applied, with what cognitive
operation can it be ordered. The description of clear-cut cognitive elements and operations
thus characterizes a traditional epistemological way of thinking about thinking. Hermeneutics,
American Pragmatism and Phenomenology discovered a process. Intelligence came to be
conceived as a processual affair that constantly changes the results and systems it produces as
well as the concepts with which it proceeds, especially visible in science. Gendlins Focusing
cultivates this process on a micro scale. By being attentive towards subtle shifts happening on
a fine-grained experiential level while we articulate what we think, feel and experience, we
can feel and articulate our way more deeply into the implying of beliefs, intentions, concepts
and feelings - thereby changing them.
Gendlins core philosophical interest is concerned with what he calls a responsive (instead
of a determinative) kind of order (Gendlin, 19972). It is characteristic for the open and yet
precise interaction of bodily process and environment, which on a human level also, includes
the symbolic environment. By environment Gendlin does not mean a world surrounding us,
but something which has become a constitutive part of the living process, parts of which have
been co-created by this very process (Gendlin 1997, 20123) One could try to say: How
breathing implies an interactive and inseparable process of lungs and air, meaning implies an
interactive and inseparable process of experiencing and symbols. The main characteristic of
this sort of processual relationship is responsiveness instead of a one-way determination.
Practicing to cultivate the responsive order in the movement from experiencing to
articulation is the core capacity of Focusing. (We will see what this means further on).
Gendlin, E.T. (1991). Thinking beyond patterns: body, language and situations. In B.
den Ouden & M. Moen (Eds.), The presence of feeling in thought, pp. 25-151. New York:
Peter Lang.
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Gendlin, E.T. (1997). The responsive order: A new empiricism. Man and World, 30 (3),
383-411.
3
Gendlin, E.T. (1997). A Process Model. New York. Gendlin, E.T. (2012). Implicit
precision. In Z. Radman (Ed.), Knowing without thinking: The theory of the background in
philosophy of mind, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
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The challenge of the philosophy behind focusing is to conceive of a carrying forward

capacity of languaging that surpasses the Cartesian split of mind and body. Gendlin
conceives of language not in representative and constructive terms but along the lines of a
productive continuity of body/environment interactions. In the centre of this work is a
phenomenological close up study of a kind of open implying we find trying to articulate what
we think and feel. The challenge in a meaningful exchange or in the attempt to develop what
we think or feel can be experienced on an everyday basis as well as in scientific or creative
work: we can get lost in the complexity of our thoughts and feelings, not being able to convey
them in ways that can account for the meaningfulness we sense. We can even destroy the
significance and subtlety of a meaningful question or dilemma by putting it in words. Thomas
Nagel captures this, when he says: We can feel a question apart from its verbal expression,
and the difficulty is to pose it without turning it into something superficial, or inviting
answers that may seem adequate to its verbal form but that dont really meet the problem
beneath the surface. (1986, p. 56)
Theories of representation or construction make this challenge disappear. Gendlins
philosophy of language opens a perspective to understand articulation as a sequence that
needs to actually occur for meaning to happen. This process neither involves the
representation or construction of experience, no one sided determination but the interaction
of experience and symbols implying each other to unfold meaningful processes.
In his book Incomplete Nature, Terrence Deacon reflects in Chapter 0, that what matters in
our actions is not there as a materially and energetically present thing, that can be measured
and analysed into its components. He describes how the value and purpose even of a book is
what is not there in the way the book is there as an object. Concerning science and academic
activities he notices the same thing: what keeps it going, what keeps scientists working are not
the things, the buildings, the books, the machines, but the driving force of what he calls
absential features, as what is not describable and measurable in the scientific terms with
which scientist work. Absential features what is lacking, absent is what constitutes the
fabric of purpose, aim, values, goals as the specific centre around which human lives,
activities and strivings evolve. Thus Deacon critically comments: If the most fundamental
features of human experience are considered somehow illusory and irrelevant to the physical
goings-on of the world, then we, along with our aspirations and values, are effectively
rendered unreal as well. (Deacon, 2011, 12)4.
2. A Process Model
Deacons point helps to demonstrate the specificity and significance of Gendlins approach.
One could say: absential features are the methodological centre around which Gendlins
Deacon adds: No wonder the all-pervasive success of the sciences in the last century has been
paralleled by a rebirth of fundamentalist faith and deep distrust of secular determination of
human values. (Incomplete Nature. How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: Norton &
Company, 2011)
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thinking evolves. What I mean by methodological is: Gendlin does not describe absential
features he chooses the kind of working or functioning of something absential he calls
implying as starting point of his thinking. He engages what is yet difficult to say, to
explicate the process of speaking from .... what is not yet rendered symbolically, but needed,
to be able to continue the thought and to formulate, what we have to say. By making this lack
methodologically operative he can reflect how he can say more and more. His concepts
engage what is missing to conceive how he is able to develop these concepts. Every
occurring word, phrases, sentence, every found structure and connection, every new definition
happens into an open implying, that at the same time is very precise. Explicating this process
provides him with his basic concept: Occurring into implying. This concept again
carries forward (and does not represent) an implicit understanding that enables him to refine
this very concept, conceiving more and more of the special relationship of occurring and
implying. With his self-reflective methodology, an understanding of body, feeling, behaviour,
language becomes explicit which fills the blind spot, which Deacon (and others, among them
Drr 1988, Varela and Thompson 1993 etc.) spot at the centre of our scientific approach.
Placing implying and its productive relation to every occurring, and also every occurring
concept, phrase or sentence in the centre, this thinking shows (and simultaneously reflects as
its own methodology) how this process builds itself its own environments (on organic as well
as behavioural levels). On a symbolic level it creates, in Wittgensteinian terms, its contexts by means of which terms become meaningful in specific ways, so they can work in precise
ways, becoming definable and systematically connectable by further thinking and articulating.
It is a productive kind of need, building its own environments (and contexts) that Gendlin
uncovers as continuity between bodily and symbolic process that can be experienced, even in
abstract thinking! In chapter eight he thereby creates a language to explicate the immense
plasticity and informational richness of situated feeling, its precise and intricate kind of
implying and the continuous growth of meaning through further interaction of experience and
symbols.
In his Process Model Gendlin thus construes the emergence of symbolic processes in closest
relation to bodily/environmental interaction and behaviour sequences. In this way an already
complex and intricate behaviour space, in which one behavioural sequence implies many
others, is further developed by gestures and symbols that emerge as pauses in behaviour. In
these pauses behaviour is not carried out as usual, it is versioned through gestures and sounds.
Paused behaviour and the gestures at first are inseparable. The gesture meaning depends on
the behaviour and the way the body is and feels itself during this behaviour. Step by step
Gendlin makes conceivable, how by this process, symbolic interactions gradually take over,
finally becoming the new space in which we behave and interact. It is constituted by vast new
possibilities that emerge by crossing and versioning behavioural sequences in new ways,
creating a human space or what we call situations.
As symbols carry the vastness of newly versioned behaviour possibilities with them as well as
bodily process that is involved in these, an inside/outside split emerges. This means nothing
more than: much more happens in gesturing or speaking than can be observed as simple
gestures or sounds. The human space with its symbolic connections has become wider, has
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more experiential possibilities, more felt sequences, more interaffective relations than a
behaviour space without symbols.
The emerging complexity Gendlin conceives by setting up concepts for mutual implicit
relations (of experienced sequences) that interaffect each other. In that way every happening
can be conceived also as a complex change of implicit sequences. Present occurring can thus
change its own implicit pre-conditions and is not only determined by these. The vast scope of
possible crossings and inter-affections grow with the emergence of symbols, that collect their
situated meaning by being able to work, to carry forward situations and thereby change
implicit conditions of the situation as well as their own meaning.
In this way Gendlin reconceives in fundamental ways a structuralist take on reality that
proceeds in fixed units. And he undercuts a signifier-signifying conception of language, not
by deconstruction, however. Instead, words, meaning, situation and bodily living must be
conceived together. Gendlin writes: It is important to realize that for us today, also, words
form in a bodily way. The right words must come to us. (If they don't, there is little we can do
about it, except wait, and in a bodily way, sense what our situation is, and what we sensed that
we were about to try to say.) It is our bodily being in the situation we are in, that lets the right
words come. If the reader would stop for a moment, and self-observe, it will be immediately
clear. The words of speech and thought "just come." How do they come? We do not sift
through many wrong words, as if going through a file. We don't "select" words from among
many other words. The right words, or close to the right words, "just come." What precedes
this coming? Sometimes a bodily sense of the situation. But often there is no separately
attended to sense, of this kind. Being in the situation lets the words come. The system of
interrelated words and the system of interrelated situations and interactions is, in some basic
way, a single system. And, in another basic way, there are two interrelated systems: the
system of words and the system of our living in situations. (A Process Model, 188).
3. Roots
Before I want to narrow down my scope more on Gendlins notion of the felt sense, I want
to mention some roots of his thinking. Gendlin continues a thread that was started by Diltheys
emphasis on the role of Erleben and its epistemological potential for our use of categories.
Erleben (provides connections, which are inaccessible by a logical and categorical system
alone). Dilthey speaks about Lebenszusammenhnge which unite past and present, which
unite contradictory instances and notions and which pulls together experiences in ways that
logical connection could not provide. These kinds of connections, however, constitute our
sense of self, which is necessary for our understanding of the logical category of identity.
Dilthey thus shows, how our use of categories need Erleben and on the thereby constituted
Lebenszusammenhnge and not vice versa. He also showed how this kind of need is left in a
philosophical oblivion.
Gendlin obviously also takes up an important heritage from the philosophy of American
Pragmatism and Phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty notices the completing effect of language
for thought. He speaks of a process of maturation and clarification when we put a thought into
verbal form. And John Dewey describes of an evolving intelligence on an onto- and
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phylogenetic dimension that is conceived in continuity to basic body-environment interactions

discovered. But next to this he demonstrates something empirical as well as rationalistic
traditions have neglected as a starting point of thinking: he calls it the quality of a situation.
Dewey recognized that it is not conceptions on the one hand and perception on the other, but
the complexity and challenge of a situation from where we start to think. In a careful
phenomenological way Dewey describes how we have situations. He thereby reformulates the
notion of feeling. We do not perceive a situation as a list of objects that need to be
categorically ordered. But we feel the situation, and from this kind of feel we know what is
relevant to say or do. In this way he reformulates: feeling is not a subjective internal state, but
the way we can have situations. It functions necessary in everyday living, but also for higher
and abstract operations. Dewey states: It is more or less a commonplace that it is possible to
carry on observations that amass facts tirelessly and yet the observed facts lead nowhere. On
the other hand, it is possible to have the work of observation so controlled by conceptual
framework fixed in advance that the very things which are genuinely decisive in the problem
in hand and its solution, are completely overlooked. Everything is forced into the
predetermined conceptual and theoretical theme. The way, and the only way, to escape these
two evils, is sensitivity to the quality of a situation as a whole. In ordinary language, a
problem must be felt before it can be stated. If the unique quality of the situation is had
immediately, then there is something that regulates the selection and the weighing of observed
facts and their conceptual ordering. (John Dewey, 1938, pp.70f.)
Dilthey analysis of Erleben, as the core absential feature in philosophic discourse, as well as
Merleau-Pontys articulate process and Deweys situational feeling, which is still more or less
ignored in epistemological discussions centring around the Conceptuality of NonConceptuality (see Jung 20095), are the roots of Gendlins notion of felt sense or more
precisely felt sensing. Because the felt sense is not an entity, not an internal state, it is
generated, as Gendlin shows carefully at the end of his Process Model, a highly dynamic,
interactive and responsive process. However, I should not forget to mention the
interdisciplinary horizon that helped Gendlin create this concept as well as the practice of
Focusing going along with it. In the 1960ies, Gendlin participated in Rogers first time project
to find ways to measure psychotherapeutic progress. Gendlin contributed one unquestionable
characteristic of progress. This finding won him many prizes, a lot of attention and quotation,
and finally also let him develop the method of focusing. To the disappointment of
psychotherapists, Gendlins research could proof, that it was not a matter of the therapists
competence and school, but a certain way of the client relating (experiencing, erleben) to his
or her felt situation now, that leads to movement and further development. No change was
brought about through more analysing or more intense feeling of emotions (Gendlin, 19646).
The one factor that really seemed to matter was an awareness, a kind of referential closeness
to the present experienced situation, even if that was fuzzy, murky, at first quite unspeakable.

M. Jung, J. Heilinger (Hg), Funktionen des Erlebens. Neue Perspektiven des qualitativen
Bewusstseins. Walter de Gruyter: Berlin 2009.
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Gendlin, E.T. (1964). A theory of personality change. In P. Worchel & D. Byrne (eds.),
Personality change, pp. 100-148. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Gendlin noticed: staying with this kind of murky feeling, (Gendlin 19617, 19638) developing
from there opens up connections and meanings, that affect the experience one is talking
about: speaking from this not yet identifiable experiencing going on right now, affects this
very process. Even more, Gendlin noticed: this murky sense responds accurately to way it is
articulated. It closes down, feels more stuck and tense, or it moves around even in the body
- , shift, opens up further, unfolds into pictures, situations, memories. These responsive shifts
can lead to measurable strong tension release9 and together with this new ways of
experiencing the situation, or the issue, which gradually becomes clearer during the process.
New possibilities of action and communication can arise. This kind of responsive sense
Gendlin gave the famous name: felt sense and the dialogical kind of process that interacts
with it he called Focusing.
3. The Focusers attention: Felt Sensing
Focusing is a very misleading name. because it invites the idea of a kind of focused attention
we know from perception. But focusing does not mean to introspect and describe what is
there inside. Rather, it is far better to be explained with the words of Petitmengin and Bitpol,
as defocusing of the field of attention, that has also been called non-observational
awareness (Petitmengin, Bitpol, 2013). Both authors show, who Husserl already has become
very specific in characterizing phenomenological reduction, as giving access, not to the inner
world, but rather to the whole field of pure experience before exclusive intentional focusing
has narrowed down the region of our full awareness. Phenomenological reduction, says
Husserl (Husserl, 2002, p.11), helps revealing the sides (or the margins) of our experience
that are overlooked as long as exclusive concern for objects prevails. On these lines,
Petitmengin and Bitpol come up with their own characterisation, which can apply well to
Focusing far from being like a gaze on some object (be it focused or expanded), is
tantamount to (re) establish an intimate and close contact with what is to be explored (to wit
the field of lived experience) (Petitmengin & Bitbol, 2009). The metaphor of the sense of
touch (...) here replaces the metaphor of the sense of vision. (Petitmengin and Bitpol, 2013)
In Focusing this kind of attentive mode is practiced in a certain way, as it includes the
dimension of articulation. Very early on, already in the 60ies, Gendlin describes an
intertwined relation of thinking and feeling, which was a revolutionary conception in this
time. Damasio did something similar the 90s, emphasising then and today, how such a view is
still very much against-mainstream. Gendlin, in the 60es describes a continuous kind of
feeling, that is not identical with emotions and incorporates a vast sense of what had happened
and what is happening right now. Gendlin writes:
Gendlin, E.T. (1961). Experiencing: A variable in the process of therapeutic change. American
Journal of Psychotherapy, 15(2), 233-245.
8 Gendlin, E.T. (1963, January). Process variables for psychotherapy research. Wisconsin
Psychiatric Institute Discussion Paper, 42. Madison: University of Wisconsin.
9 Compare: Klein, M. H., Mathieu-Coughlan, P., Gendlin, E.T. & Kiesler, D. J. (1985). The
Experiencing Scales. In W. P. Pinsof & L. S. Greenberg (Eds.), The psychotherapeutic
process: A research handbook. New York: Guilford.
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Feeling is always a living texture of environmental interaction. (...) the flow of felt sense
implicitly contains the complex world we live in, the environment, our perceptions, the
context of all that has been done and said till now, what is being gotten at, the purpose, the
definitions, and a very great deal more. (1966, 45).
May be you want to take a moment and try to sense this kind of on-going felt sense
responding to what I am saying, manifesting in some kind of bodily sense right now, as an
interest, irritation, a fatigue as questions, thoughts, doubts or some kind of bodily
awareness. We are not trained to be aware of this constant on-going receptivity. Peirce writes:
It is extremely difficult to bring out attention to elements in experience which are continually
present. For we have nothing in experience with which to contrast them; and without contrast,
they cannot excite our attention... the result is that round-about devices have to be resorted to
in order to enable us to perceive what stares us in the face with a glare that, once noticed,
becomes almost oppressive with its insistency10.

4. Close Talking
The roundabout device, that Focusing establishes, is not only to learn to defocus our field
of attention to become aware of experiential processes continually present and thus most
difficult to notice, but also to try to articulate these. This again needs a certain training that I
want to call close talking. Very helpful for this process is a listener. Focusing is usually
done in a dyadic setting: the listener, by repeating what is said, helps to focus the attention
toward something that is usually not in focus, because too present in a background-like way,
too fuzzy, too little an object (idea or emotion) to notice. By mirroring or saying back the
listener helps to hold a referent-in-forming. In a daring analogy one could say, like on the
quantum-mechanic level, where a particle forms by being observed, what is being described
in Focusing forms as something by this very process of attending and speaking of it. This is
sharply to be contrasted from what we call construction. The speaking does not detach itself
from what is going on right now, by pursuing the conceptual or analytical implications of
what is said, however interesting that may be. Speaking from the experiential process means
to always go back and feel what has changed, attending to bodily response to what has been
described. Speaking from it, as Gendlin says, constantly creates subtle experiential contrasts,
not as constructed or deconstructed but because the feeling on this kind of level responds in
very precise and yet undeterminable ways. It shifts and changes in ways that cannot be
logically deduced, but only experienced. Even something that seems entirely somatic, like a
bolt in the neck, of pinch in the heart area or pressure in the stomach can step by step or
suddenly open up into meaningful incidents, clarifying our present situation by making more
meaningful what we felt in an unclear way. In this process something more intricate unfolds
than what we could or would have thought or said without listening/attending/feeling the feltsensing process going at the present moment.
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Quoted according to Dewey: Prefatory Remarks, in G.H. Mead, Philosophy of the

Present, Prometheus Books: Chicago, 2002, 33
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Responsive speaking, as I mentioned before, is in this way utterly different to determinative

speaking (categorizing). I would like also mentioning the importance of the friendliness in the
focusing process. What seems philosophically not much explored is friendliness as a
reflective mode enabling the unfolding of what we call self-insight. The friendliness is a kind
of attitudinal environment, I would like to say, in which this subtle and micro-genetic
sequence unfolds into a more conscious way of having it.
What, according to Peirce, glares us in the face concerning its insistency, in this way becomes
a resource for experiencing a felt situation in its rich connectedness to many more aspects, to
what Dilthey terms Lebenszusammenhnge. In this way Focusing cultivates the continuity
between feeling and thinking, the transitions between vaguely felt to more conscious ways of
experiencing and intending, valuing and being concerned.
A feeling, that in the beginning may only seem fuzzy and murky thus opens up in precise
aspects and correlations of a felt issue in its entanglement to many other situations, factors,
values, thoughts, that far outreaches the alphabet offered by the New Phenomenology of
Herman Schmitz that only accounts for narrowness of wideness. In Focusing on a felt-sense
vast alphabet of feeling opens up: one can feel empty boxes that hurt, knots, that push,
thick walls, that separate from aliveness, one feels the good feeling of not being alone, one
feels specific qualities of connectedness, of feels cutting pain, that is not bodily, one feels
the pressure of something grey..(...)
In this way the notion of the felt sense already anticipates in the 60ies what Ratcliffe criticises
in our days as a too simple juxtaposition of bodily feeling and emotional intentionality by
introducing Existential Feelings (2008). Ratcliffe notices that it is only through change that
these kinds of existential ground-feelings can come to awareness and become conscious. It is
Gendlins important contribution to think and show how awareness of this feeling-dimension
can also come about through a process that initializes change through articulation. The major
challenge his thinking faces it why this is so. Describing our feelings, which are processes in
themselves (and not internal states or entities), can come to be understood as activating
additional felt and experiential processes. In his first major work, Gendlin conceives of seven
functional relationships of experiencing and symbols (Gendlin, 1962). The first of these
relationships notices and conceives how feeling functions in the coming of words. But words
also function in elicitating an experienced meaning. That is why we can explain or define
words in different ways, why we can say more or less (or more and more) about a concept, a
word. According to different experiential backgrounds, people can say very many different
things about the meaning of notions. Thus a word elicitates what Arne Naess calls a variable
depth of meaning (...). Gendlin adds, a word functions in calling forth the felt meaning
(Gendlin 1962, 101f.)
So when we articulate something, the felt meaning of the word interacts with the felt
meaning we try to explicate. Thereby a shift can happen that allows a fuzzy felt-sense to
unfold and become more differentiated by additional implicit (felt) aspects provided by our
use of a phrase, contributing contrasts that enhance what we describe or help us to correct
what we said. The articulation clarifies the experiencing not by putting a label on it, but by
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allowing the feeling to unfold in ways that allows us to become aware of more and more of
what we feel and experience.
So Gendlins philosophy is training in understanding this process in a certain way. It is a
dead-end to think this is the phrase that fitted, it represented correctly or it supplied aspects
and elements that where missing to clarify our feeling. The more promising way to think
about this process is: only after something unclear has been carried forward in clarifying
ways, can we know what it was. Only after a feeling, a felt sense, an experience, a thought,
by being rendered symbolically, is actually carried forward into clarified meaning, can we
know what it was about. It is the occurring interaction of felt sensing and symbolizing, which
creates a meaning that can somatically and semantically unfold, so that we can experience and
feel further, and then again say more. The emphasis is on the interaction, on the process the
clearness is a result that is unforeseeable before the process. With this very very short hint at
the dynamic conception of language according to Gendlins philosophy of language, I want to
compare felt sense and somatic markers.

6. Felt Sense and Somatic Marker

What Gendlin depicts as a felt meaning or felt sense today seems rediscovered by
Damasio making a point to differentiate between emotion and feeling. Emotions, as Damasio
suggests, are not just the classical joy, anger, sadness etc. For Damasio Emotions are
complex bodily (bio-chemical, neuronal, organic, muscular) responses that help the
organism to lead it`s life.
Damasio writes: Emotions are about the life in an organism, its body to be precise, and
their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life. (Damasio, 1991, 51).
Changes caused by emotions in the brain, in the biochemical homeostasis of the body, the
visceral and muscular states we can feel. And the changes, which these changes trigger, we
can feel. There is a complex happening auf resonance between Emotion, Feeling and Feeling
of the Feeling that Damasio describes as following:
We can feel our emotions consistently and we know we feel them. The fabric of our minds
and of our behaviour is woven around continuous cycles of emotions followed by feelings
that become known and beget new emotions, a running polyphony that underscores and
punctuates specific thoughts in our mind and actions in our behaviour. (Damasio, 1999, 43).
Feeling according to Damasio is the very threshold between being and conscious being. It is
this processual approach of transitions from feeling to consciousness that importantly relates
Damasios ands perspectives. It applies on a phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic level. The
conception of feeling does not know a rigid separation between unconscious, inattentive and
attentive feeling and from there to more conscious states which, as Gendlins practices and
philosophy demonstrates vividly, continues and is enhanced by the symbolization of feeling
and experiencing.
According to Damasio, feeling is a kind of informative shadow of the cognitive process,
which contains further bodily information to be experienced and to be considered. Damasio
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writes about the constant co-happening of a cognitive and felt process, which he emphasizes
against the stream of dominant conceptions in the cognitive science:
Feeling is just as cognitive as any other perceptual image, and just as dependent on cerebralcortex processing as any other image. (...) Feeling let us mind the body, attentively, as during
an emotional state, or faintly, as during a background state. They let us mind the body live,
when they give us perceptual images of the body, or rebroadcast, when they give us
recalled images of the body state appropriate to certain circumstances, in as if feelings.
Feelings offer us a glimpse of what goes on in our flesh, as a momentary image of that flesh
in juxtaposed to the images of other objects and situations; in so doing, feelings modify our
comprehensive notion of those other objects and situations. (Damasio, 1994, 159).
Damasios powerful notion of minding the body expresses, how in fine visceral and
musculoskeletal adjustments sit informative responses to a situation that as cerebral patterns
echo cerebral patterns of thought, memories, decisions. He is well known in showing the
importance of these functions in situations of decision. When the felt feed back loops are
damaged, it becomes hardly possible to navigate through the boundlessness of all things to be
considered, to be able to live efficiently on a daily basis. This is where Damasios somatic
marker comes into play. In most situations in which something has to be decided, the
components needing consideration unfold in extraordinary speed, even if only like glimpses,
not completely thought through, so fast, that not everything can be considered. In this process
Damasio discovers the role of what he calls gut feeling (Damasio, 1994, 173). The
possibility of which he conceives as a kind of automated signal, which formed out of situative
trainings, learned sequences, punishment and reward-procedures as embodied patterns.
Somatic Markers contain complex information and they change with further living
experience. He writes Somatic markers are thus acquired by experience, under the control of
an internal preference system and under the influence of an external set of circumstances
which include not only entities and events with which the organism must interact, but also
social conventions and ethical rules (Damasio, 1994, 179). As they are products of
situational learning, the programmed patterns are individually different. They support
decision-processes concerning the plenitude of scenarios, concerns, risks, innumerable
thought, which need considering, by reducing the effort to go through all these details:
because they provide an automated detection of the scenario components which are more
likely to be relevant. (1994,175).
Although Damasio describes the intricate kind of relations and complex information
contained by these markers, his language for the signal effect emphasises a dual character:
happy or sad feeling, danger or go for it, painful, not-painful. Noticing this dual
kind of response this kind of definite answer from the body is what the popularizing
literature to somatic markers further propagates and which you find transformed in seminars
and exercises for managers etc. (Maya Storch, Weiterbildung UZH).
Like the somatic marker, the felt sense denotes a mesh of preferences, circumstances,
events, habits, conventions and rules. But the big difference is, that Gendlin conceives and
demonstrates the possibility of a responsive referring to this complex-unclear sense. He also
shows that that this kind of sense becomes a referent only through the act of referring to it,
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staying with it, interacting with it, not just acting (deciding) from it. In attending to this felt
mesh, which lets us experience a situation or the challenge of deciding in a situation in a
certain way, its connections to other situations open an up and make new ways of deciding
and approaching available:
From a felt sense we can obtain much more intricate and better information about the
situation, and how we are living in it. The great amount of pre-separated information I
mentioned earlier is implicit in the felt sense. But at first, when a felt sense comes, it is an
unclear, murky sense, and seems quite unpromising. One does not know what it is one feels.
To spend time attending to such a concrete sense of something, without quite knowing what it
is, that is what we call focusing (1991, 258)11.
One could put it this way: what Damasio describes as the complex conditions of the
possibilities of a somatic marker (all the situations in which it forms) manifesting in dual
possibilities, are potential information which can open up by attending the felt sense. What
thereby opens up is a more conscious way of understanding ourselves in our situation. In
other words, what Damasio conceives as the complex conditions of the possibility of somatic
markers concerning the distinctness of their signalling, (being all the situations that
participated forming these markers), Gendlin demonstrates as a gradually accessible content,
which has the potential to unfold step by step into a more conscious way of being in the
situation12.
Thereby we can become aware of an arena of further differentiations and connections. By
becoming more conscious by realizing how this somatic signal has to do with a mesh of
situations that play out in this situation, we better understand why we feel and think the way
we do. Furthermore: feeling in this gradually understanding way changes the feeling we feel.
Thus a space is created in which experiencing functions without determining our spectrum of
possible actions and reactions. Responding to the somatic sense in this careful ways allows a
movement that carries old patterns and what is learned forward so that they need not stay the
same. Finally, understanding and cultivating the intricacy of our own experiencing in this way
enables a more unfolding interaction with the complexity of others. This is the ethical edge of
Focusing and its philosophy: opening up social awareness for the complexity of todays living
that needs responsive skills, granting individuals a space (and thereby the freedom) to make
sense.

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From Emotion in Therapy.

As I quoted above: we must take care not to forget that one can specify highly
detailed aspects of (this kind of feeling), each of which can be referred to very
specifically by our attention, each of which can be employed to give rise to very many
specific meanings. (Gendlin, 1962, 14f.)
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