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Experiencing and the Nature of Concepts

EUGENE T. GENDLIN

Recent developments in the area of psychotherapy involve a basically different manner in which concepts relate to human experiencing.

First, let me describe in an overly simple way the earlier mode of applying concepts to human experiencing: Psychological concepts were thought to state "contents" or "underlying dynamics" of experience. Whatever a man might think or feel was viewed as really determined by psychological factors. Thus, experiencing was held to be "explained" or "reduced" to conceptually defined units. Thereby, the rich concrete stream of actual experiencing was "undercut."

This claim to "undercut" was noticeable in the relationships of psychological concepts to philosophy, aesthetics, religion, and other areas. Whatever canons one might hold for philosophical discussion, aesthetic quality, spirituality, or any other aspect of human experiencing, personality theories viewed it all as determined by its concepts of underlying psychological factors. [3, 14, 15].

In particular, the psychological study of man was dominated by two points of view: the behavioristic and the psychoanalytic.

• 1. The behavioristic approach considers man in terms of external observation only. In this respect it follows the orthodox scientific method. Its main weakness has been that fruitful and meaningful variables of human behavior are not easily selected, isolated, and defined from the outside. We are not yet able to translate even very simple humanly meaningful phenomena into terms that are externally observable and measurable. Consequently, much progress has been made only in a few areas (for example: audition, perception, the conditioning of isolated unit acts), areas furthest removed from concerns of main human interest.
  
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• While this scientific method, coming from the natural and biological sciences, justly commands respect, it has not succeeded in reducing human concerns to scientific terms. [16] The idea is still only an idea, that man, like anything else in nature, can be studied and understood as a mechanism of externally observed factors. This view is still only a program. [Page 246]
• Recently we have begun to apply scientific methods to research in psychotherapy. [1, 9, 12, 13, 18, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33] This and other developments have forced an extension of methodology: To devise humanly meaningful research one must begin with experienced—at first "subjective"—variables. Only from them can one move toward defining the observations one wants to study. [9] One begins with some aspects of the crucial experiencing which occurs subjectively in psychotherapy. One then asks: What observations can I define, which would be relevant to these crucial experiences? Useful scientific propositions stated in external terms then become possible.
• Thus the scientific method is being applied more fruitfully to central human phenomena, but only when we begin with experienced subjective variables and by means of them select and define observable variables for science.
• 2. The second major psychological emphasis has been psychoanalysis. Nearly no scientific research concerning psychoanalysis exists, but the prestige of the natural sciences, and the program of scientific psychology, devolved upon the claim that psychoanalytic concepts tell the basic units which make up personality.
• Present developments and trends in psychotherapy have strongly altered our views of how theoretical concepts can be applied. Not only are there now a great many competing theories (each claiming to offer the basic underlying factors), but our view of how these concepts apply, the type of truth they can have, has changed. As a result the newer concepts have a very different relationship to philosophy, religion, aesthetics, and other concerns, than psychoanalytic concepts were at one time thought to have. The nature of these concepts on their home grounds in psychotherapy is increasingly recognized to depend on experiential meanings. [2, 5, 10, 11, 17, 19, 28]
  
  Psychotherapy, in the older view, involved explaining the individual to himself, and convincing him to apply the basic psychological concepts to himself. True, it was recognized, for example, in Freud's [6, 7] later writings, that the conceptual reduction is not enough. In fact, while a patient might quickly accept the concepts of a diagnosis, Freud found that genuine change occurred only in a lengthy feeling process he termed "working through." However, the "working through" process of struggle in therapy was little understood. Later, Rogers [20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26] developed a therapeutic method of responding to feeling in the individual's "internal frame of reference." This method was a vital step, since it followed felt meanings rather than conceptual interpretations. Still, psychology's claim to a conceptual analysis of experiencing continued.
  
  The concepts arose from psychotherapy. They are generalizations of [Page 247] human experiences which actual individuals have "uncovered" in psychotherapy. Therefore, our personality theories have a good deal of truth. What has changed in the current developments? Not their truth value, but the kind of truth they have, the role they play vis-à-vis the concretely felt experiencing of an actual individual. We will undoubtedly keep and extend our concepts, but in a basically different mode of use.

In these first two sections I have briefly outlined what are essentially external (1) or conceptual (2) ways of using concepts.

A. The individual in psychotherapy does not find within himself the conceptually defined factors the theories propose. What he finds instead, are felt meanings which he differentiates as a mass of extremely specific and finely textured meanings. When one focuses one's attention on one's felt meaning, one can use certain words to explicate its meaning. Such an explication is momentary . . . a few minutes later, further aspects of the felt meaning will arise, and further words will be needed. More and more specific aspects of felt meaning will become "differentiated" and, during this process of symbolizing (especially when it occurs in the context of a personal relationship), the whole texture of felt meanings also changes. The therapist must point his words at the individual's felt meanings and help refer to them, explicate them, and allow them to evolve and change. Without this process of felt meanings, the merely conceptual uses of psychological concepts does not result in psychotherapy.

This role of felt meanings in psychotherapy alters the relationship between experience and psychological concepts. The concepts do not tell us the underlying dynamics. Concretely felt experiential meanings really "underlie." Concepts have real meaning only as they are made to refer to some of these specific and finely differentiated aspects of felt meanings. In so using concepts, the meaning resides in the felt meanings one concretely refers to. The concept is a pointer. Concepts have only a poor, nearly empty general meaning, when not used in direct reference to aspects of felt meanings. The aspects of felt meaning one finds are so very much more specific, and shift in such nonlogical modes, that aside from this use in pointing and differentiating, the concepts are not at all explanatory of anyone.

The role of felt meanings changes the way we view and use all theoretical concepts (be they psychological, theological, or philosophical).

• a) We must employ some concepts. Without explication, felt meanings can barely be called "meaningful." They are a bodily sentience. Only as we let this bodily sentience interact with symbols, words, (or other people's reactions) does "meaning" develop.
• b) The application of concepts to experiencing is a process of differentiating and interacting. Through the application of (verbal and other) [Page 248] symbols, the experiencing process moves on. We do not state a meaning which merely "waits to be found" in experiencing. We make, shape, and carry forward that meaning when we symbolize it. To do so is experiencing, when feeling interacts with words, as well as when it interacts with things or people.
• c) When concepts lose the status of "undercutting" experiential meanings, they gain, in return, a different status: That of essential aids in the process of experiencing and symbolization. When one uses concepts in reference to experiential meanings, and in differentiating such meanings, then concepts have a more specific meaning which one has directly and concretely.
• d) Because differentiating is a process, therefore the felt meanings change during it. There is, at one moment, a concretely felt connection between experiencing and just these correct words. [10] This can lead, at the next moment, to a very different and truer differentiation in which one may use all one's concepts in a new and contrary way. Phenomenology is an interaction between concepts and feelings, not a "reading off" in which I claim infallibility for my conceptualization. Such a claim only again places some supposedly "underlying" conceptual structure into experiencing.

The character of concepts used in reference to experiential felt meanings may best be illustrated by some examples:

"Oh . . .," I may say, "it isn't that I like him. I thought I liked him. Really, I try so hard to please him because I want him to like me, that's it." And later, I may say "I don't care whether he likes me or not. But, to realize that I'm really all alone, I can't stand that, yet that's true, I guess." And still later, I may say "Being alone is fine with me, in fact, I feel fully real only when I'm alone. But, that good kind of alone comes only when I feel there is someone out there who knows me. Otherwise I feel like I could disappear."

In this example, each step logically contradicts the previous one. However, in some sense the same experiencing is being pointed to by these different sentences, and, all the while, some experiential change process is occurring, as these concepts are being applied to differentiate experiencing.

B. A definitely felt relationship exists between what one feels and the "right" words. One feels a physically sensed experience of relief when one manages to find the "right" words to state a feeling. A few moments later one may find that what seemed to be a correct statement now no longer seems correct. Different "right" words now state the feeling much more truly. At that point there is again the bodily experience of felt relief in having stated the feelings "correctly."

The sense of relief or tension-release does not really, in an objective sense, [Page 249] verify the truth of any given statement. There is a distinctly experienced relationship between a seemingly "correct" statement and the felt meanings. However, this relationship is not one of identity. Felt meanings, since we feel them in a bodily way, can be thought of as having the organization and order of the living human body. It is a very complex and highly patterned order, a concrete, biologically ongoing, rather than a conceptual type of order.

Felt meanings are not conceptually shaped in just one way. They do not in themselves have just this or that scheme, number, or character. What one at any given moment feels is, of course, quite definite and determined. One cannot say of it just anything one pleases. Quite the contrary, most of what one might say feels distinctly "wrong" and one may have to search with much difficulty to arrive at a conceptual statement which feels "correct" and releasing. Such a conceptual statement gives structure, selection, logical form, and conceptual shape, to what at first is a felt organismic phenomenon which has "meaning" only in a preconceptual sense.

Thus our concepts are more correctly used, when they refer to specific and directly felt meanings.

An example: Mr. X has "authority" problems, related to some unresolved "Œdipal conflicts" due to which he transfers to current people certain emotions he has toward his father. Mr. X has a "castration fear."

Compare these simple "dynamics" which are supposed to underlie Mr. X's feeling life with the texture of meanings he actually finds there. Note the broad, general correctness of the concepts, and note the felt meanings which underlie the concepts. Note the changes which occur as he focuses his attention on these felt meanings. The felt meanings are not the broad conceptual dynamics nor are they given as any type of stable shaped units. Rather, as Mr. X applies concepts (and speaks to the therapist), this process changes, shapes, and alters how he differentiates his experiencing.

"Yes, from what I've read I agree that I have an Œdipal conflict, but I'm not aware of that. I guess I must have repressed it. What I am aware of is that I get so mad I can't eat or sleep and I argue with myself constantly. I know how I ought to behave, how I wish I behaved, but when some little thing happens, then I blow up."

Here, we can still think that the Œdipal (or whichever) conceptual structure "underlies" this man's experience but he doesn't know it. He has "repressed" it. But let us follow Mr. X further.

"I'm mad. Let's see, why do I get so mad? I understand a lot about the dynamics of it, but that gets me no place. I mean, I know it's true and all that, but I'm still just as mad. It hasn't gotten any better. It just doesn't 'give.' Let's see." (Silence . . . he focuses his attention directly on the felt meanings of his experiencing.) Sigh. "Well, uh, it's funny but it seems to me now that I'm not really angry. Resentful is more like it. My feelings are hurt, really. Hurt, I think really [Page 250] I'm hurt. I feel so bad that people don't think more of me, that I'm such a mere hireling, I mean that's nobody's fault, of course, but I can't be talked to like that, like they talk to me. I won't stand for it, I mean it hurts my feelings."

Not only does this new conceptualization by Mr. X change the picture he has, but his concrete inward experiencing is momentarily changed. He has moved from being so angry that he can't eat or sleep to something different: feeling humiliated. Nor could one shake Mr. X's certainty that he is now speaking truly, for he can feel the concrete continuity between his felt meanings and the words he uses. He feels that direct relief which accompanies focusing on what bothers one, and explicating it truly. Yet, in a few moments he may say:

"Oh, I'm not really hurt by this at all. I don't care what they think of me. The trouble is that I will have to leave this job, and I am afraid to go out and look for something. I'm afraid to go out and tackle the world, and I get very desperate when they show me in every way that I can't stay in this job and respect myself. I feel that they just have to treat me better, because I need not to have to leave."

And later,

"I've always been afraid to be a person among people, a man among men. It's as if, just because I'm me I can't quite get around in the world or face life."

Here we have an example of the unique and finely differentiable texture of moving felt meanings.

If we now look back to the "dynamic" diagnosis, we find that it is correct—that is to say, the broad generalizations which were used, can fit. We can (and if Mr. X wishes, he can) employ the terms "castration fear" and "authority problem" to one or another of the felt meanings he is wrestling with. However, we also find that we can "fit" to these felt meanings some of the terms which would come from a vocabulary of "life styles" or "power drives" or "life avoidances" or "interpersonal patterns." And this is no accident of this one example. Because felt meanings are the body's complex interactive life patterns, they are capable of being conceptualized by modifying any vocabulary, and using it in reference to this experiential process of felt meanings and differentiated aspects.

Many clients in psychotherapy use none of the diagnostic vocabularies. Instead, they fashion one of their own. Sometimes an individual may use a vocabulary which stems from some area with which he is especially acquainted, like boating or tennis. If Mr. X is a tennis player, he may say instead of the above:

"It's like in tennis, I know when I'm playing well because I can feel in my arm just how I am going to aim the ball, and I feel the follow-through feeling in my body as I prepare to swing. If I don't have this, I know I'll play badly. It's like that with everything. I live in the world somehow without that follow-through feeling. I've never been able to play well in the world. That's why I'm afraid. That's why I know I'll lose if I go out into the world."

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We may use any of these various theories as a vocabulary with which to shape and discriminate our experiential meanings, and to help us obtain a more worked out sensitivity for common human patterns of feeling. We may use any of these concepts to carry forward our own experiencing of ourselves and others, to explicate what we feel with that directly felt inward tension-release which comes from referring directly to what we feelingly mean, and saying something true of it in words. However, the truth of us resides in the concrete pre-conceptual felt meanings of experiencing, not in the conceptual patterns we employ. We can see this fact in the finely textured, uniquely specific and on-goingly changing meanings we actually refer to when we focus our attention on the felt meanings of our experiencing.

These discoveries from the process of psychotherapy quite definitely obviate the claim of psychology or any other discipline to read any set of conceptual abstractions into concrete experiencing, and then to attempt to explain experience in terms of it.

C. When this role of felt meanings is examined, we can also clarify the very nature of theoretical concepts. What is the nature of a concept?

All our meanings, all our thinking, really occur as we pay attention to the "feel" of meaning, as Dewey [4] termed it. Concepts are felt meanings in interaction with verbal symbols!

For example, you have been listening to a conversation and now you are about to say something. You "know" what you want to say . . . yet most likely you have not worked it out in words. Only if you are very tense about the others in the room are you likely to try the sentences out in your mind before you say them aloud. In the normal case, all day whenever you are about to say something, you "know" what you want to say . . . you "know" it in a bodily felt sense. When you open your mouth the words come and you say what you wanted to say. We cannot speak meaningfully without this directly felt sense of our meaning. If we miss this directly felt sense, we have to apologize and say: "I forgot what I was going to say—just a moment." We then search for the "feel" of the meaning until we "find" it. Where do we search for such a forgotten feel of "what I was going to say?" We search for it by referring directly to felt experiencing, inwardly.

Notice that we usually have not, as yet, put what we want to say into words. If we lose track of it, we search for it: We search for a felt meaning which never had words. When we find it, we exclaim "Oh, now I know what it was," and again, as we find it, it is still not words. Only as we speak do we explicate it in words.

Concepts are relationships between felt meanings and linguistic symbols. The linguistic symbols are really only noises or sound images of noises—except in so far as they relate to felt meanings. Only as we have the felt meaning, do we have the meaning of a concept. Only with the felt meanings of concepts do we think. [Page 252] It is thus the very nature of concepts, that they consist not only of noises but also of felt meanings.

Concepts are logically defined and as such they do have logical structure. From their logical structure follow necessary logical implications. One can consider concepts as purely logical (L-concepts) and deal with them only as that.

Similarly, concepts can have external objects as referents. When they are used in this way, empirical findings of observable relations between objects guide the way we relate concepts. One can consider concepts as purely objective in their reference (0-concepts) and deal with them as only that.

However, concepts are also employed by humans. In their employment, we have the meaning of concepts only as felt meaning.

As I have tried to show, the felt meanings of experiencing are also organized—though not in the manner of conceptual structures, and they are also related to external objects—though not in the manner in which objective concepts refer to objects. Experiencing has the organization and the external relations of the living organism. Living bodies are concrete interactions with an environment. Thus, when we refer our attention directly to a felt meaning we are referring to something that does have order and relation to external surroundings. The nature of all concepts is such that we have their meaning only as a felt meaning. Therefore, we may or we may not follow out the logical implications of the concept as defined. We may or may not follow the external reference of the concept as defined. Always, we can also follow the felt meaning and "its" implicit preconceptual organization. When we follow the felt meaning, we will find ourselves using concepts in quite a different way. The logical definitions of our concepts will shift in non-logical ways, and we may talk about a series of different, seemingly unrelated external objects. We may follow the felt meaning of a concept either because we want temporarily to illuminate our discussion so that we may return to its logical or objective purpose with new meanings, or because the felt meaning as such is our main interest.

The very nature of concepts is such that they are meaningful to us only as felt experiences. Therefore, one cannot read them into felt experience.

D. The role of felt meanings in psychotherapy, and the philosophic developments in the phenomenology of concepts fundamentally alter the status of concepts in regard to experiencing.

One direction in which these developments do not point, is a purely relativistic or arbitrary one. One may not say that, since the psychological concepts no longer "undercut" experiential meanings, therefore one may say anything at all. A felt meaning is always just "this" one. It is highly specific, complexly organized, and only words which very exactly fit it will be correct for it (though this very experience of correctness is, as I have said, in itself a bodily change carrying the experiencing forward. One then has further felt meanings). Felt meanings do not [Page 253] place less requirements for accuracy on us than concepts. On the contrary, felt meanings are always organized and implicitly meaningful in more ways than any one set of concepts can render. Concrete experiential reference, not relativism, results.

Another direction which does not follow from these developments is an overly simple kind of phenomenology which claims that it doesn't "interpret" anything, it simply "reads off" descriptively what is "given." There is no way to do that without concepts, and hence it always imposes the logical patterning of the concepts one uses. We can know that this logical patterning does not necessarily belong to the experiencing. Therefore we can step out of the logical implications of the set of concepts we use. We can move freely to different sets of concepts with different logical implications. We can, all the while, hold fast to the direct reference to the felt meaning (which, after all, is what the concept means to us). In this way concepts do not replace experiencing. A direct reference to it is possible, though not a non-conceptual description. To claim for any set of descriptions that it "only" describes and does not read anything into experiencing is, really, again the assertion that certain conceptual structures are those of experiencing itself.

Not that the labor is lost when one formulates well specified concepts. We need them! But we need always to consider and use the fact that all such concepts refer, they do not replace, the directly felt meanings of experiencing.

So used, concepts have the weakness, recognized through the ages, that they mean to an individual only so much as his personal growth enables him to grasp. However, in this mode of use, concepts have specific meanings, and the power to aid the forward development of experiencing so that such specific meanings can be acquired.

A man's experiential meanings exist as the organismically organized sentience of a living body. Therefore one always finds meanings that "make sense." We differentiate and fashion our meanings out of already organized and alive feeling.

But we cannot rely upon the conceptual formulation as such, except in the purely logical or the purely external way of using concepts. In its very nature a concept as used by a person consists of felt meaning along with verbal noises, and hence specifies and refers to that felt meaning. Concepts as had by humans are made of something which is capable of being further differentiated internally in ways which may obviate the logical implications of that very concept. Hence the relation of concepts to experiencing, and the correctness of concepts about experiencing, lies in their reference to directly felt and further differentiable felt meanings.

The relationship of psychological concepts to religion and other areas is changing just as the role of these concepts in psychotherapy is changing. There is no way to do without the concrete experiencing. Psychological, religious, or other concepts cannot purport to be the conceptual structure of experiencing. In [Page 254] each discourse, we must ask, instead, what aspects of experiencing these or those concepts help us differentiate and refer to. That is the nature of concepts in their relationship to human experiencing. [8] Only in a man's direct touch with his felt experiencing does he find what he then calls "himself." Only in the concrete interaction between directly felt meanings and the linguistic symbols that refer to it do our concepts have the grounds of their meanings.