Focusing, Chapter 3, Continued: The Idea Of The Implicit

Despite my disagreement on whether felt senses are physical, I love the breadth of pointers Gendlin gives his readers on what he means by Felt Senses. I'm still reading Chapter 3: What The Body Knows of the book Focusing. All quotes are from this chapter.

In his descriptions he goes way outside of the use case of Focusing for self-help and draws from his Philosophy Of The Implicit. (He has a whole book on this, called Experience And The Creation Of Meaning, to be reviewed at a later point.) 

The distinction between implicit and explicit is an amazing addition to one’s psychological vocabulary. I’ve talked elsewhere about the distinction between conscious and unconscious beliefs and the implicit-explicit dimension is related but notably different. Implicit refers to Felt Sense, a bodily sensed wholeness that is conceptual but holistic and non-discrete. 

“A felt sense doesn’t come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling. Since a felt sense doesn’t communicate itself in words, it isn’t easy to describe in words.
It is an unfamiliar, deep-down level of awareness that psychotherapists (along with almost everybody else) have usually not found.”

Explicit, on the other hand, is the word he uses for thoughts or words or other separate units (which can also be images). The process of Focusing deals with bringing the implicit and explicit together. Explicit and implicit content often show up together in our day-to-day awareness. 

“Let me illustrate. Think of two people who play a major role in your life. Any two people. I’ll call them John and Helen in this discussion, but substitute the names of your own people. Let your mind slide back and forth between these two people. Notice the inner aura that seems to come into existence when you let your attention dwell on John, the sense of “all about John.” Notice the entirely different aura of Helen.”

I want to add here, that when we think about John and Helen with our everyday mind, the felt senses of John and Helen are active and are being referenced. In this way our thoughts are a combination of words (if we mostly think in words, some people don’t) like “Oh John is coming to the party!”, but the attached to the words are felt senses, of John, the party, our sense of surprise at remembering that fact,  what John coming means to us, etc.

Inner words are a way of lugging felt senses around in our awareness, of arranging them into new meanings. It being the case that thinking usually involves both language and felt senses solves many of the philosophical puzzles from the Wittgenstein era. (Another fun book to review!)

But sometimes an implicit felt sense shows up on its own:

“I can best describe it to you by starting with a familiar human experience: the odd feeling of knowing you have forgotten something but not knowing what it is. Undoubtedly it has happened to you more than once. You are about to take a plane trip, let’s say, to visit family or friends. You board the airplane with a small, insistent thought nagging you: you have forgotten something. The plane takes off. You stare out the window, going through various things in your mind, seeking that elusive little piece of knowledge. What did I forget? What was it? You are troubled by the felt sense of some unresolved situation, something left undone, something left behind. Notice that you don’t have factual data. You have an inner aura, an internal taste. Your body knows but you don’t.”

And sometimes explicit content comes without implicit content attached. A good example is the experience of semantic saturation, where you say or write a word so many times that it seems to have lost its meaning. (This example is also from Gendlin, but I couldn’t find the quote.)

In fact, what this points us to is that felt senses are the meaning behind the words. Felt senses are the substrate of meaning.

Implicit is different from unconscious because we can easily consciously attend to felt senses without making them explicit to ourselves. In fact a bunch of thinking occurs solely in felt senses, unsymbolized. But sometimes felt senses are truly unconscious, as in we enact/embody them without being able to pay attention to them. We may even actively direct attention away from certain felt senses. And here is some of the meat of what focusing does beyond the explication of the implicit. It’s part of a process of recovering knowledge that’s repressed, and often painfully so.

This is also the spot where Focusing, by itself, falls short of giving people the transformation they are looking for. Dealing with repressed stuff seems to require more tools than just a method for explicating the relevant implicit content. Gendlin’s students Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin have a wonderful book, Untangling, which talks a lot about this. I think I'll review this next, after finishing Focusing.