Focusing - Origin

Origin

At the University of Chicago beginning in 1953, Eugene Gendlin did 15 years of research analyzing what made psychotherapy either successful or unsuccessful. The conclusion was that it is not the therapist's technique that determines the success of psychotherapy, but rather the way the patient himself behaves, and what the patient himself does inside himself during the therapy sessions.

Gendlin found that, without exception, the successful patient intuitively focuses inside himself on a very subtle and vague internal bodily awareness — or "felt sense" — which contains information that, if attended to or focused on, holds the key to the resolution of the problems the patient is experiencing. He found that successful clients intuitively focused on a very subtle and vague internal bodily awareness, which he termed a "felt sense".

"Focusing" is a process and learnable skill, developed by Gendlin, which re-creates this successful-patient behavior, in a form that can be taught to other patients. Gendlin detailed the simple, learnable techniques is detailed in his book Focusing, written in conversational terms and meant for the layman, which describes the six steps of focusing and how to do them. Gendlin stated: "I did not invent Focusing. I simply made some steps which help people to find Focusing."