Gendlin and New Phenomenology : The Application to Rehabilitation Medicine

This paper clarifies the content of the "new phenomenology" proposed by Eugene Gendlin and examines its possibilities. Gendlin is a prominent researcher in the field of clinical psychology, having invented a counseling technique called "Focusing." Parallel to his research in clinical psychology and psychotherapy, he also pursued studies in philosophy. Gendlin's "Theory of Experiencing" is the philosophy underlying Focusing. In it, he emphasizes that bodily feeling, or felt sense, plays an important role in thinking and cognition. The felt sense, in particular, has the power to create new meanings, and this is what causes the effects of Focusing. Gendlin envisioned a new phenomenology by introducing this speaking from felt sense into phenomenological description. In conventional phenomenology, phenomenological description is supposed to capture the essence of experience, but in Gendlin's new phenomenology, the phenomenological first-person description has the creativity to discover new aspects of experience. Gendlin's new phenomenology is specifically developed in his theory of metaphor. Metaphor-based descriptions bring about new awareness and transform self-understanding. This paper argues that his theory of metaphor can be applied to rehabilitation medicine. It offers the possibility that patients with physical paralysis will find new meanings and new understandings of their bodies and derive benefits from rehabilitation by describing their own physical experiences using metaphors.