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A Process Model
Eugene T. Gendlin (1926-2017) is increasingly recognized as one of the seminal thinkers of our era. Carrying forward the projects of American pragmatism and continental philosophy, Gendlin created an original form of philosophical psychology that brings new understandings of human experience and the life-world, including the "hard problem of consciousness."
A Process Model, Gendlin's magnum opus, offers no less than a new alternative to the dualism of mind and body. Beginning with living process, the body's simultaneous interaction and identity with its environment, Gendlin systematically derives nonreductive concepts that offer novel and rigorous ways to think from within lived precision. In this way terms such as body, environment, time, space, behavior, language, culture, situation, and more can be understood with both great force and great subtlety.
Gendlin's project is relevant to discussions not only in philosophy but in other fields in which life process is central-including biology, environmental management, environmental humanities, and ecopsychology. It provides a genuinely new philosophical approach to complex societal challenges and environmental issues.
A Process Model, Gendlin's magnum opus, offers no less than a new alternative to the dualism of mind and body. Beginning with living process, the body's simultaneous interaction and identity with its environment, Gendlin systematically derives nonreductive concepts that offer novel and rigorous ways to think from within lived precision. In this way terms such as body, environment, time, space, behavior, language, culture, situation, and more can be understood with both great force and great subtlety.
Gendlin's project is relevant to discussions not only in philosophy but in other fields in which life process is central-including biology, environmental management, environmental humanities, and ecopsychology. It provides a genuinely new philosophical approach to complex societal challenges and environmental issues.
- GenresPhilosophy
306 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1998
22 people are currently reading
99 people want to read
About the author
Eugene T. Gendlin
31 books77 followersEugene T. Gendlin is an American philosopher and psychotherapist who developed ways of thinking about and working with living process, the bodily felt sense and the 'philosophy of the implicit'. Gendlin received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago where he also taught for many years. He is best known for Focusing and for Thinking at the Edge, two procedures for thinking with more than patterns and concepts.
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 29, 2026
Most people who start this book don't finish. Some start more than once and don't finish more than once. Among those who claim to have finished, most can still point to multiple parts they don't understand. In some sense, it is a text book but of a peculiar kind. One reads it to understand its subject matter--I'll try to say what that is in a bit. Or to understand "something" which may not fall under the category of "subject matter." It's not just a coincidence that I see no other written reviews of this book with more than 10 words on Goodreads.
The author, Eugene Gendlin, first came to my attention, and perhaps to the attention of most people who have heard of him, for his book Focusing[Focusing]. In it, he claimed, with research to back it up, that one could tell right away which psychotherapy patients would succeed. "Succeed" may be the wrong word. "Progress" is probably better. (also, Gendlin, following Carl Rogers, uses "clients" rather than "patients.") Its blurb on Goodreads
says: "In this highly accessible guide, Dr. Eugene Gendlin, the award-winning psychologist who developed the focusing technique, explains the basic principles behind focusing and offers simple step-by-step instructions on how to utilize this powerful tool for tapping into greater
self-awareness and inner wisdom." "Highly accessible" is the opposite of what one would call the book here under review. What's more, Gendlin is NOT a psychologist as the term is formally used--he has no degree, certainly not a PhD, in psychology. His doctorate is in philosophy (I want to add "what ever THAT is"but we for now will assume we all have some idea what "philosophy" means. ) I read all or some of Focusing in the 90s, over a decade after it was written, not knowing he wasn't a psychologist, not knowing the book wasn't new, not following the step-by-step instructions or why they were important, taking away a vague notion that good psychotherapy patients know what to pay attention to--what is important--while the others do not.
The "step-by-step" part was significant, because it meant that knowing how to be a bad psychotherapy patient wasn't something one was stuck with--one could be taught to be a good one (the book noted that therapists weren't teaching them.) I learned that (and other things I should put in a review of Focusing) just a few years ago, when I also found out that Gendlin was a philosopher who was interested in how people theorized and understood things. I shared
this interest in how we used models to comprehend our world. He was the first person I was aware of who discussed this directly.
A Process Model was, in fact, a model of how models worked, among other things. I tried to read it but it started, I thought, with a peculiar subject--what do we mean by "environment?" I was told that he wouldn't get to explaining models until chapter 7. I was soon lost in the early chapters, wondering why he started where he did and where he was heading, and having no Goodreads reviews to help, tried to read the foreword.
But enough about me and my struggles. I did give this book 5 stars, after all, so let me explain what it is actually trying to do. It is a work of phenomenology. That is, it attempts to explain the world as phenomena--as it exists before we organize it with our concepts and models.
Phenomenology is difficult to do because any explanation already IS a model. The very words we use have models built in to them. We're like the fish in that speech David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College (which I once had attended, coincidentally) called "This is Water." You could
google it (I just did). It's from 2005 and it's about how water is background to a fish and thus invisible. You couldn't make it foreground because--what would become the background? I am (yes, it's about me again) now rereading this speech. Much of it would make an excellent foreward to A Process Model, except that it has a model of its own to create.
It turns out we can't do without our models. The trick of A Process Model is that it creates one that is mostly at odds with the one DFW would call our default. And because of that, it's hard to
understand and stay with. But also, because of that, it makes our background into a foreground so we don't have to take it for granted.
APM (which, following the community of its fans--I'm avoiding the word "cult"-- we will hereafter call this book) is a model of everything. Or would be that if it was about things, but
it is about process. A process is a thing which . . .
See, I'm already calling it a thing. We speak a thing-based language so it's hard to avoid. Gendlin understands the problem--our language has built in models which get in our way. It's not just processes, it's a whole way of thinking our language(s) can't handle, but we're stuck with them if we want to communicate beyond what animals do. He works around this obstacle by using language in an odd way. He makes up new words. He verbifies nouns. He adds lots of "-ing"s to make nouns sound like processes. Later on, in a process model, we learn this practice is in keeping with the model's understanding of how words work. But we don't strat out with that knowledge so, in effect we need understand in advance what we have yet to understand.
Part of that will be solved by rereading what we've already read over again, but it doesn't completely avoid the problem--that in reading (understanding) APM you have to already understand it to understand it. Now, who can do that? We can! We've all done that! It's how we learned to talk as babies. Stuff was said to us as if we understood. And then later, we did. And now we speak to each other and to new babies.
Another way to understand this idea is to ask why we learn/study by reading things several times. It is because the 'times' are not units. They are not the same. When we read a second time it is in the context of having read the first time. At least that's the optimistic way of putting in. Too often the opposite occurs and reading something again is just reading it again. We have become stuck in the way we approached it the first time and can't get unstuck. APM is ultimately about getting us unstuck, but that is hard work. And most people give up, as I said in my first sentence.
The aforementioned step-by-step focusing instructions also have the goal of getting us unstuck.
And, of course, this is the goal of psychotherapy--to get us to see our situation differently. It's not just "work" though--it's loss. We cling to our old ways. And it's not just loss. It's giving up who we think we are--who we "know" we are.
I'll just list a few of the things we will have to give up to understand APM:
1) Words have fixed meanings found in dictionaries.
2) We discover and participate in the world through our perceptions.
3) Thinking is a logical process that can be copied by computers.
4) Our inner world is fuzzy and imprecise until we codify it in language.
5) We live in a world of infinite time and space.
6) The building blocks of everything are matter and energy.
7) The past is fixed and unchanging.
You don't have to give them up forever. You just have to understand they are unnecessary. More generally, so many of the fixed ways in which we organize our experience and organization of reality--ways which usually stay comfortably in the background--aren't necessary but are so accepted by everyone with whom we communicate, that there is never space to question them with others, and ultimately within ourselves.
Seeing things (and ourselves) differently can lead to various outcomes:
1) We can "replace" our understanding with a newer better understanding. (one view of the goal of psychotherapy)
2) We can see that multiple understandings are possible. (one view of the philosophy of postmodernism, leading to the conclusion that all views are arbitrary and thus wrong. This is addressed in Language Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin Philosophy.
3) We can ask, what is the function of what we call understanding in our lives? (perhaps the topic of Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective
People I've spoken to about this all seem to like choice 1 but I am partial to choice 3.
The author, Eugene Gendlin, first came to my attention, and perhaps to the attention of most people who have heard of him, for his book Focusing[Focusing]. In it, he claimed, with research to back it up, that one could tell right away which psychotherapy patients would succeed. "Succeed" may be the wrong word. "Progress" is probably better. (also, Gendlin, following Carl Rogers, uses "clients" rather than "patients.") Its blurb on Goodreads
says: "In this highly accessible guide, Dr. Eugene Gendlin, the award-winning psychologist who developed the focusing technique, explains the basic principles behind focusing and offers simple step-by-step instructions on how to utilize this powerful tool for tapping into greater
self-awareness and inner wisdom." "Highly accessible" is the opposite of what one would call the book here under review. What's more, Gendlin is NOT a psychologist as the term is formally used--he has no degree, certainly not a PhD, in psychology. His doctorate is in philosophy (I want to add "what ever THAT is"but we for now will assume we all have some idea what "philosophy" means. ) I read all or some of Focusing in the 90s, over a decade after it was written, not knowing he wasn't a psychologist, not knowing the book wasn't new, not following the step-by-step instructions or why they were important, taking away a vague notion that good psychotherapy patients know what to pay attention to--what is important--while the others do not.
The "step-by-step" part was significant, because it meant that knowing how to be a bad psychotherapy patient wasn't something one was stuck with--one could be taught to be a good one (the book noted that therapists weren't teaching them.) I learned that (and other things I should put in a review of Focusing) just a few years ago, when I also found out that Gendlin was a philosopher who was interested in how people theorized and understood things. I shared
this interest in how we used models to comprehend our world. He was the first person I was aware of who discussed this directly.
A Process Model was, in fact, a model of how models worked, among other things. I tried to read it but it started, I thought, with a peculiar subject--what do we mean by "environment?" I was told that he wouldn't get to explaining models until chapter 7. I was soon lost in the early chapters, wondering why he started where he did and where he was heading, and having no Goodreads reviews to help, tried to read the foreword.
But enough about me and my struggles. I did give this book 5 stars, after all, so let me explain what it is actually trying to do. It is a work of phenomenology. That is, it attempts to explain the world as phenomena--as it exists before we organize it with our concepts and models.
Phenomenology is difficult to do because any explanation already IS a model. The very words we use have models built in to them. We're like the fish in that speech David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College (which I once had attended, coincidentally) called "This is Water." You could
google it (I just did). It's from 2005 and it's about how water is background to a fish and thus invisible. You couldn't make it foreground because--what would become the background? I am (yes, it's about me again) now rereading this speech. Much of it would make an excellent foreward to A Process Model, except that it has a model of its own to create.
It turns out we can't do without our models. The trick of A Process Model is that it creates one that is mostly at odds with the one DFW would call our default. And because of that, it's hard to
understand and stay with. But also, because of that, it makes our background into a foreground so we don't have to take it for granted.
APM (which, following the community of its fans--I'm avoiding the word "cult"-- we will hereafter call this book) is a model of everything. Or would be that if it was about things, but
it is about process. A process is a thing which . . .
See, I'm already calling it a thing. We speak a thing-based language so it's hard to avoid. Gendlin understands the problem--our language has built in models which get in our way. It's not just processes, it's a whole way of thinking our language(s) can't handle, but we're stuck with them if we want to communicate beyond what animals do. He works around this obstacle by using language in an odd way. He makes up new words. He verbifies nouns. He adds lots of "-ing"s to make nouns sound like processes. Later on, in a process model, we learn this practice is in keeping with the model's understanding of how words work. But we don't strat out with that knowledge so, in effect we need understand in advance what we have yet to understand.
Part of that will be solved by rereading what we've already read over again, but it doesn't completely avoid the problem--that in reading (understanding) APM you have to already understand it to understand it. Now, who can do that? We can! We've all done that! It's how we learned to talk as babies. Stuff was said to us as if we understood. And then later, we did. And now we speak to each other and to new babies.
Another way to understand this idea is to ask why we learn/study by reading things several times. It is because the 'times' are not units. They are not the same. When we read a second time it is in the context of having read the first time. At least that's the optimistic way of putting in. Too often the opposite occurs and reading something again is just reading it again. We have become stuck in the way we approached it the first time and can't get unstuck. APM is ultimately about getting us unstuck, but that is hard work. And most people give up, as I said in my first sentence.
The aforementioned step-by-step focusing instructions also have the goal of getting us unstuck.
And, of course, this is the goal of psychotherapy--to get us to see our situation differently. It's not just "work" though--it's loss. We cling to our old ways. And it's not just loss. It's giving up who we think we are--who we "know" we are.
I'll just list a few of the things we will have to give up to understand APM:
1) Words have fixed meanings found in dictionaries.
2) We discover and participate in the world through our perceptions.
3) Thinking is a logical process that can be copied by computers.
4) Our inner world is fuzzy and imprecise until we codify it in language.
5) We live in a world of infinite time and space.
6) The building blocks of everything are matter and energy.
7) The past is fixed and unchanging.
You don't have to give them up forever. You just have to understand they are unnecessary. More generally, so many of the fixed ways in which we organize our experience and organization of reality--ways which usually stay comfortably in the background--aren't necessary but are so accepted by everyone with whom we communicate, that there is never space to question them with others, and ultimately within ourselves.
Seeing things (and ourselves) differently can lead to various outcomes:
1) We can "replace" our understanding with a newer better understanding. (one view of the goal of psychotherapy)
2) We can see that multiple understandings are possible. (one view of the philosophy of postmodernism, leading to the conclusion that all views are arbitrary and thus wrong. This is addressed in Language Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin Philosophy.
3) We can ask, what is the function of what we call understanding in our lives? (perhaps the topic of Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective
People I've spoken to about this all seem to like choice 1 but I am partial to choice 3.
March 29, 2024
Dense and wonderful. Best read in a group with humility.
August 19, 2013
YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Read
April 6, 2018modeling
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews