I don’t think this is very important for my overall view on CFAR’s curriculum, but FWIW I was quite surprised by you describing Focusing as
a technique that forms the basis of a significant fraction of modern therapeutic techniques and I consider a core skill for doing emotional processing. I’ve benefited a lot from this, and it also has a pretty significant amount of evidence behind it (both in that it’s pretty widely practiced, and in terms of studies), though only for the standards of behavioral psychology, so I would still take that with a grain of salt.
Maybe we’re just using “significant fraction” differently, but my 50% CI would have been that focusing is part of 1-3 of the 29 different “types of psychotherapy” I found on this website (namely “humanistic integrative psychotherapy”, and maybe “existential psychotherapy” or “person-centred psychotherapy and counselling”). [Though to be fair on an NHS page I found, humanistic therapy was one of 6 mentioned paradigms.] Weighting by how common the different types of therapy are, I’d expect an even more skewed picture: my impression is that the most common types of therapy (at least in rich, English-speaking countries and Germany, which are the countries I’m most familiar with) are cognitive-behavioral therapy and various kinds of talking therapy (e.g. psychoanalytic, i.e. broadly Freudian), and I’d be surprised if any of those included focusing. My guess is that less than 10% of psychotherapy sessions happening in the above countries include focusing, potentially significantly less than that.
My understanding had been that focusing was developed by Eugene Gendlin, who after training in continental philosophy and publications on Heidegger became a major though not towering (unlike, say, Freud) figure in psychotherapy—maybe among the top decile but not the top percentile in terms of influence among the hundreds of people who founded their own “schools” of psychotherapy.
I’ve spent less than one hour looking into this, and so might well be wrong about any of this—I’d appreciate corrections.
Lastly, I’d appreciate some pointers to studies on focusing. I’m not doubting that they exist—I’m just curious because I’m interested in psychotherapy and mental health, but couldn’t find them quickly (e.g. I searched for “focusing Gendlin” on Google Scholar).
I haven’t looked super much into the literature on this so I might be wrong, my sense was that it was more of a case of “lots of therapeutic techniques share a lot of structure, and Gendlin formalized it into a specific technique, but a lot of them share a lot of structure with what Gendlin is doing”, which makes sense, because that’s how focusing was developed. From the Wikipedia article:
Gendlin developed a way of measuring the extent to which an individual refers to a felt sense; and he found in a series of studies that therapy clients who have positive outcomes do much more of this. He then developed a way to teach people to refer to their felt sense, so clients could do better in therapy. This training is called ‘Focusing’. Further research showed that Focusing can be used outside therapy to address a variety of issues.
The thing that made me more comfortable saying the above was that Gendlin’s goal (judging from the focusing book I read and the audiobook I listened to) seems to have been in significant parts a study into “what makes existing therapeutic techniques work”, instead of “let’s develop a new technique that will revolutionize therapy”, so even if a school of therapy isn’t downstream of Gendlin, you expect a good fraction to still have focusing-like things in them, since Gendlin seemed to be more interested in refining techniques instead of revolutionizing them.
I do agree that I should probably stop using words like “significant fraction”. I intended to mean something like 20%-30% of therapy sessions will likely include something that is pretty similar to focusing, even if it isn’t exactly called that, which still seems roughly right to me and matches with my own experience of therapy with a practitioner who specialized in CBT and some trauma-specific therapies, but our actual sessions weren’t really utilizing either of those schools and were basically just focusing sessions, which to that therapist seemed like the natural thing to do in the absence of following a more specific procedure.
Some of my impression here also comes from two textbooks I read on therapy whose names I currently forgot, both of which were mostly school-independent and seemed to emphasize a lot of focusing-like techniques.
However, I don’t have super strong models here, and a significant fraction of my models are downstream of Gendlin’s own writing (who as I said seems to describe focusing more as “the thing that makes most type of therapy work”), so I am pretty open to being convinced I am wrong about this. I can particularly imagine that Freudian approaches could do less focusing, since I’ve basically not interacted with anything in that space and feel kinda averse to it, so I am kind of blind to a significant fraction of the therapy landscape.
I hadn’t considered the possibility that techniques prior to Gendlin might have included focusing-like techniques, and especially that he’s claiming to have synthesized what was already there. This makes me less confident in my impression. What you say about the textbooks you read definitely also moves my view somewhat.
(By contrast, what you wrote about studies on focusing probably makes me somewhat reduce my guess on the strength of the evidence of focusing, but obviously I’m highly uncertain here as I’m extrapolating from weak cues—studies by Gendlin himself, correlational claim of intuitively dubious causal validity—rather than having looked at the studies themselves.)
This all still doesn’t square well with my own experiences with and models of therapy, but they may well be wrong or idiosyncratic, so I don’t put much weight on them. In particular, 20-30% of sessions still seems higher than what I would guess, but overall this doesn’t seem sufficiently important or action-relevant that I’d be interested to get at the bottom of this.
I don’t think this is very important for my overall view on CFAR’s curriculum, but FWIW I was quite surprised by you describing Focusing as
Maybe we’re just using “significant fraction” differently, but my 50% CI would have been that focusing is part of 1-3 of the 29 different “types of psychotherapy” I found on this website (namely “humanistic integrative psychotherapy”, and maybe “existential psychotherapy” or “person-centred psychotherapy and counselling”). [Though to be fair on an NHS page I found, humanistic therapy was one of 6 mentioned paradigms.] Weighting by how common the different types of therapy are, I’d expect an even more skewed picture: my impression is that the most common types of therapy (at least in rich, English-speaking countries and Germany, which are the countries I’m most familiar with) are cognitive-behavioral therapy and various kinds of talking therapy (e.g. psychoanalytic, i.e. broadly Freudian), and I’d be surprised if any of those included focusing. My guess is that less than 10% of psychotherapy sessions happening in the above countries include focusing, potentially significantly less than that.
My understanding had been that focusing was developed by Eugene Gendlin, who after training in continental philosophy and publications on Heidegger became a major though not towering (unlike, say, Freud) figure in psychotherapy—maybe among the top decile but not the top percentile in terms of influence among the hundreds of people who founded their own “schools” of psychotherapy.
I’ve spent less than one hour looking into this, and so might well be wrong about any of this—I’d appreciate corrections.
Lastly, I’d appreciate some pointers to studies on focusing. I’m not doubting that they exist—I’m just curious because I’m interested in psychotherapy and mental health, but couldn’t find them quickly (e.g. I searched for “focusing Gendlin” on Google Scholar).
I haven’t looked super much into the literature on this so I might be wrong, my sense was that it was more of a case of “lots of therapeutic techniques share a lot of structure, and Gendlin formalized it into a specific technique, but a lot of them share a lot of structure with what Gendlin is doing”, which makes sense, because that’s how focusing was developed. From the Wikipedia article:
The thing that made me more comfortable saying the above was that Gendlin’s goal (judging from the focusing book I read and the audiobook I listened to) seems to have been in significant parts a study into “what makes existing therapeutic techniques work”, instead of “let’s develop a new technique that will revolutionize therapy”, so even if a school of therapy isn’t downstream of Gendlin, you expect a good fraction to still have focusing-like things in them, since Gendlin seemed to be more interested in refining techniques instead of revolutionizing them.
I do agree that I should probably stop using words like “significant fraction”. I intended to mean something like 20%-30% of therapy sessions will likely include something that is pretty similar to focusing, even if it isn’t exactly called that, which still seems roughly right to me and matches with my own experience of therapy with a practitioner who specialized in CBT and some trauma-specific therapies, but our actual sessions weren’t really utilizing either of those schools and were basically just focusing sessions, which to that therapist seemed like the natural thing to do in the absence of following a more specific procedure.
Some of my impression here also comes from two textbooks I read on therapy whose names I currently forgot, both of which were mostly school-independent and seemed to emphasize a lot of focusing-like techniques.
However, I don’t have super strong models here, and a significant fraction of my models are downstream of Gendlin’s own writing (who as I said seems to describe focusing more as “the thing that makes most type of therapy work”), so I am pretty open to being convinced I am wrong about this. I can particularly imagine that Freudian approaches could do less focusing, since I’ve basically not interacted with anything in that space and feel kinda averse to it, so I am kind of blind to a significant fraction of the therapy landscape.
Thanks, this is helpful!
I hadn’t considered the possibility that techniques prior to Gendlin might have included focusing-like techniques, and especially that he’s claiming to have synthesized what was already there. This makes me less confident in my impression. What you say about the textbooks you read definitely also moves my view somewhat.
(By contrast, what you wrote about studies on focusing probably makes me somewhat reduce my guess on the strength of the evidence of focusing, but obviously I’m highly uncertain here as I’m extrapolating from weak cues—studies by Gendlin himself, correlational claim of intuitively dubious causal validity—rather than having looked at the studies themselves.)
This all still doesn’t square well with my own experiences with and models of therapy, but they may well be wrong or idiosyncratic, so I don’t put much weight on them. In particular, 20-30% of sessions still seems higher than what I would guess, but overall this doesn’t seem sufficiently important or action-relevant that I’d be interested to get at the bottom of this.