Top 9 Quotes & Sayings by Eugene Gendlin

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American philosopher Eugene Gendlin.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
Eugene Gendlin

Eugene Tovio Gendlin was an American philosopher who developed ways of thinking about and working with living process, the bodily felt sense and the "philosophy of the implicit". Though he had no degree in the field of psychology, his advanced study with Carl Rogers, his longtime practice of psychotherapy and his extensive writings in the field of psychology have made him perhaps better known in that field than in philosophy. He studied under Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy, at the University of Chicago and received his PhD in philosophy in 1958. Gendlin's theories impacted Rogers' own beliefs and played a role in Rogers' view of psychotherapy. From 1958 to 1963 Gendlin was Research Director at the Wisconsin Psychiatric Institute of the University of Wisconsin. He served as an associate professor in the departments of Philosophy and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago from 1964 until 1995.

You can have lots of feelings and have the same feelings over and over again. It isn't the recognizable feelings that make so much difference. It is sensing the edge, the unclear, what you don't recognize, but it is there, the bodily discomfort that the problem makes, which has meaning; it has its own peculiar quality, implicity, it is complex, it has in it everything that relates to that problem, but not in a way you can say.
Most traditional methods of working on oneself are mostly pain centered. People get to repeat over and over their painful emotions without knowing how to use the body's own inherently positive direction and force.
If there is something hauntingly beautiful or impressive in your dream, just honor it, respect it, recall it, sense it with your body. More will come. — © Eugene Gendlin
If there is something hauntingly beautiful or impressive in your dream, just honor it, respect it, recall it, sense it with your body. More will come.
Enjoying the dream is more important than interpreting it. Therefore, don't work so hard that it stops being pleasant and exciting.
I will not let you (or me) make me dishonest, insincere, emotionally tied-up or constricted, or artificially nice and social, if I can help it.
Most scary dreams bring something good which is not yet in a form the person can use.
What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.
Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness
Philosophy begins with the understanding that you cannot just observe or experience and then report what you see, because how you conceptualize and symbolize alters experience.
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