Humanistic · 1970
Experiential Therapy
Therapy moves forward when the person makes contact with felt experience, names it and lets it transform.
Experiential Therapy brings together a family of humanistic developments that understand psychotherapy as a process of attending to, symbolising and transforming immediate experience. Its central thesis is that many psychological difficulties are maintained because relevant parts of lived experience remain implicit, blocked, poorly symbolised or handled only through intellectual explanation; change appears when the client can make contact again with that felt experience, hold it within a safe therapeutic relationship, find words, images or gestures that fit it and allow it to reorganise from within. In Gendlin, this process is formulated through experiencing and the felt sense: a global, pre-conceptual bodily sensation, laden with meaning, that contains more information than the available verbal explanation. In Rice and Greenberg, the approach becomes clinically more operational: the therapist identifies markers of blocking, conflict, problematic reaction or unfinished business, and selects experiential tasks that facilitate emotional deepening, the differentiation of meanings, internal dialogue and emotional change. The therapist neither interprets from outside nor forces a conclusion; they accompany the process, reflect nuances, slow the exploration down, ask about bodily resonance, evoke concrete scenes where necessary and help the primary adaptive emotion, the implicit need or the emerging meaning to be expressed more clearly. Its principal contribution to the field has been to turn the humanistic intuition of lived experience into a clinical theory of the therapeutic process that is observable, trainable and connected with deep emotional change.
Influences
- Person-centred therapy
- Phenomenology / Hermeneutics
- Humanistic psychology (the third force)
- Gestalt therapy
Key references
- Rogers, C. R. (1951). Client-Centered Therapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Gendlin, E. T. (1962). Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective. New York: Free Press.
- Gendlin, E. T. (1978). Focusing. New York: Everest House.
- Rice, L. N., & Saperia, E. P. (1984). Task analysis of the resolution of problematic reactions. In L. N. Rice & L. S. Greenberg (Eds.), Patterns of Change: Intensive Analysis of Psychotherapy Process. New York: Guilford Press.
- Rice, L. N., & Greenberg, L. S. (Eds.). (1984). Patterns of Change: Intensive Analysis of Psychotherapy Process. New York: Guilford Press.
- Greenberg, L. S., Rice, L. N., & Elliott, R. (1993). Facilitating Emotional Change: The Moment-by-Moment Process. New York: Guilford Press.
- Gendlin, E. T. (1996). Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method. New York: Guilford Press.
- Greenberg, L. S. (2002). Emotion-Focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
- Elliott, R., Watson, J. C., Goldman, R. N., & Greenberg, L. S. (2004). Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy: The Process-Experiential Approach to Change. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.