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Appendix a the Wider Context Appendix A The Wider Context Psychotherapy does not exist in a vacuum. It is an activity which is inextri- cably connected with the rest of human life. Some relevant connections are: • Principles and procedures in psychotherapy clearly have ethical and social implications. • There is a creative element in psychotherapy which must in some way connect with creativity in the arts. • Similarly, there must be connections with creative thinking in general. • Views of psychotherapy are inevitably embedded in general philosophical conceptions of the nature of the world and our place in it. • Human beings are embodied beings, so that ultimately there have to be connections between what goes on in psychotherapy, and the biological and physical underpinnings of our lives. • Many of us feel that human beings have a spiritual dimension, and that too must stand in significant relationship with what goes on in psychotherapy. In assessing any theory of psychotherapy it is important to take into consid- eration this wider context. Assessment of any form of psychotherapy should not be limited to empirical studies of process and outcome, as if therapy could be separated from everything else in our lives. The general principles which lie behind a psychotherapy will have implications elsewhere, and these implications need to be assessed as part of the assessment of the general principles. In this part of the book I will discuss briefly several areas in which Gendlin’s principles can be seen to be illuminating or fruitful. In so far as this is so in these other areas, we have reason to take the general principles seriously. Then we can, with extra confidence, employ them in the field of psychotherapy. To write at all adequately about these areas would require a whole chapter for each of them – or in some cases a whole book – but I hope at least to give some glimpses of the context and implications of Gendlin’s thinking. What follows will be a set of swift, kaleidoscopic impressions, rather than a systematic survey. 210 Appendix A 211 Ethics and values In wrestling with a moral problem we often seem to be pulled in two ways. There is often the immediate feeling of wanting to do something, but opposed to that is the pull of a moral principle, such as that of not hurting people or not taking what does not belong to us. Some philosophers, such as Kant, hold that morality is entirely a matter of acting from principle, from a sense of duty; if one also wants to do what duty prescribes, that creates the risk of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Others, such as Aristotle, hold that we only act morally when our character has developed to the point that we naturally want to do what is in accordance with moral principles. Both these views contrast with the view that people should simply do whatever they want to do, and ignore ‘moral principles’ which are seen as constrictions laid upon the individual by the society. Gendlin (1986b, 1996, Chapter 21) gives us a novel way of looking at these issues. For Gendlin a human being is not an organism on which society imposes its values; a human being is an interaction between organic feeling, and the general concepts and principles of society. Much of what we feel about what is right and wrong, we have picked up from parents and others. Later we may come to sense that some of these absorbed principles do not fit our developing experience, and we modify or reject them. But the others we keep; the fact that we learned them from others is no reason for saying that they are not our principles, any more than it is for saying that what we have learned from others about history or science is not our knowledge. Whether a way of thinking or feeling is ours is not a matter of where it came from, but of whether it connects now with our own experiencing. From our society we absorb some principles which naturally fit with our experiencing, others which are initially uncomfortable but with which we later come to appreciate and identify with, and still others which we cannot feel comfortable with and which we need to reject. We will only take the third kind of case as the norm if we mistakenly think of human beings as initially isolated organisms which later have to be ‘socialised’. Rogers always held that as people become more themselves they become more sensitive to the needs of others, more ‘moral’, but his theoretical framework (which sets ‘organismic experience’ against ‘conditions of worth’ imposed by society) makes it difficult to understand why this is so. For Gendlin there is still a real distinction between moral principles which are our own, and principles which we live by in an inauthentic way, out of fear, or habit, or anything other than our immediate experiencing. But the distinction does not rest on where the principles come from; it rests on whether the principles in question are really alive for us in our immediate experiencing, or whether we are telling ourselves that we ‘ought’ to feel that way when really we do not. Gendlin’s thinking allows for the case where we genuinely feel that we ought to feel different from the way we do feel (e.g. we genuinely want to feel 212 Appendix A accepting of certain kinds of people that we cannot yet feel accepting of ) . It is not a matter of whatever we feel being right for us. In this connection I think that Harry Frankfurt’s (1971) distinction between first- and second- order desires is helpful. It is characteristic of human beings that we not only have our desires and feelings but also have desires and feelings about our desires and feelings. It can seem that in Focusing, and in the person-centred approach generally, we are encouraging people just to follow their feelings, irrespective of the impact of this on others. But that is a misunderstanding. Rather, we are encouraging people to notice their feelings, to stay with them, to sense what needs to be acted on and what does not, taking into account the whole of their experiencing including their moral principles. It may seem that there is still a question of why we need moral principles at all. Why can we not simply rely on our immediate felt experiencing in making a moral choice? In terms of Gendlin’s theory the answer is that experiencing is always an interaction between the immediate feeling-process and something general. An animal simply reacts to events in its environment out of its feeling-process, but a human being responds to a situation which is constituted as much by what is general and social as by the individual’s feeling-process. For example, an animal simply reacts to threat with counter-threat or flight. A human being may be inclined to do the same, but can also respond in terms of a general awareness that ‘tit-for-tat’ responses can be harmful, or that giving in to bullying is not a good thing. In the human response there are general principles involved. These are not imposed on human beings, but partly constitute what human responses are. There is then the vexed question of which moral principles we should subscribe to, given the variety of such principles found in different societies or within subgroups of a single society. This is a question which has become especially acute as we have become more aware of the variety of moral posi- tions which can be adopted. Here Gendlin’s answer is that the moral principles which are right for us are those which arise from our engaging fully with the whole of our experiencing. Consider the example of a student who is trying to decide whether he ought to abandon his university career. Suppose he says after a short discussion that his parents really want him to stay and that he does not want to let them down, that settles the matter. His friends then criticise him for doing the wrong thing, on the grounds that young people should not do what their parents tell them to do. Or suppose he says that it’s just silly doing something you do not want to do, so he’s going to leave. His parents then criticise him for doing the wrong thing, on the grounds that people should make the most of the educational opportunities which they have. Here there are conflicting moral reactions. It can seem that the important issue is whether the friends or the parents are right, but who is to say who is right? Now a counsellor working with the student is unlikely to adopt the position of either the friends or the parents. The counsellor helps the student to Appendix A 213 reflect on what is right for the student to do, but this process of moral reflection does not begin with general principles. It begins with the student going into his experiencing, exploring new aspects of it, such as the general difficulty he has in making decisions, the associated self-doubt, his contempt for him- self for being so indecisive and so on. Out of this process of exploration something will emerge. It may be that he decides to leave the university or it may be that he decides to stay, but either way it now seems appropriate to say that he has made the right decision. That the decision is a good one is not a matter of its content but of the process by which it is reached.
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