EXPERIENTIAL PSYCHOTHERAPY: ITS THEORY, RESEARCH, CLINICAL PRACTICE, AND HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

<p>Historically, experiential psychotherapy evolved from the client-centered approach, which traditionally has been intent on finding better ways to scientifically study and understand complex subjective experience. By the mid-1950's, Carl Rogers made an essential theoretical shift from the usual &quot;static content&quot; view of personality to &quot;the new process conception&quot; of the therapeutic experience. Meanwhile, educated in existential philosophy and phenomenology, Eugene Gendlin advanced this &quot;new process conception&quot; by clarifying the crucial distinction between &quot;direct experiencing&quot; as it is immediately given in awareness, and conceptualizations of that experiencing. Gendlin accurately described the distinct bodily-felt awareness that characterizes consciousness. This &quot;felt-meaningfulness&quot; implicitly contains all the values, attitudes, memories, and perceptions relevant for the individual in a given life situation in a single bodily-felt sense.</p><p>Gendlin realized that the essence of effective client-centered therapy was an accurate listening response that helped the client to stay closely in tune with his or her on-going process of experiencing. Gendlin also participated in the client-centered Process Scale research, which consistently found that clients who displayed a high degree of experiential focusing on immediate feelings were those who eventually succeeded in therapy. Consequently, Gendlin elaborated his philosophy of &quot;experiencing&quot; and sought ways of directly facilitating this &quot;focusing&quot; process in therapy. He developed the therapy procedure called &quot;focusing&quot; as well as principles for &quot;experientializing&quot; the use of conceptual knowledge in various forms of psychotherapy.</p><p>In addition to demonstrating the theoretical necessity of process variables, Gendlin implemented them as measureable variables in experimental research on therapy. However, a critical review of this research shows that it suffered from serious methodological problems. Hence there is little convincing experimental evidence that &quot;experiencing plays a central role in positive psychotherapeutic outcome.&quot; However, there are alternative philosophical and phenomenological grounds for the justification of &quot;experiencing.&quot; Finally, some recommendations are made for improving experimental research on experiential psychotherapy.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Year

1984

Author dc:creator

• JENNINGS, JERRY LOUIS

• Psychology
• Clinical

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/1427

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholars.unh.edu:dissertation-2426