FOCUSING: Selected Essays 1974-1999

Introduction: An Overview of This Book

Since 1976 I have written thirty-eight pieces on focusing. Twenty-six are collected in this volume. Thirteen have appeared in The Focusing Connection. Three in The Focusing Folio. Two in Experiential Therapy and Focusing. Two in On Focusing. Two in Focusing and Listening. One each in Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice; The Journal for Humanistic Psychology; and The New York Chapter for Humanistic Psychology Newsletter. One is dressed up to go out in public for the first time in this book. They are "Neil Friedman’s Best Writings Thus Far on Focusing."

I did not set out to make a mini-career writing about focusing. Ann Weiser Cornell deserves an assist. In 1982 she asked me to be on the Editorial Board for the Focusing Connection. I accepted. I have been there ever since. I have done little to nothing toward editing the newsletter. But the position has given me a stake in it. I have sent Ann fourteen mostly handwritten pieces. She has published thirteen.1 She has provided me a remarkably reliable outlet for writing on focusing. She is about to find out how important she has been.

Here is what happens under less auspicious circumstances. In 1980 I wrote "Experiential Listening." I submitted it to The Person-Centered Review. The editor sent it to two readers. Germaine Lietaer loved it. The second reader gave a detailed critique and voted against its being published. The editor asked me to incorporate the criticisms and cut the length by one-third.

I did not agree with the critique. I liked the essay at its original length. I never re-submitted it. I published it as one chapter in Therapeutic Essays (1987). I put it in the back of my file cabinet. I never sent another piece to the Review. I never sent the piece to any other journal.

The story has a happy ending. In 1998 Joan Klagsbrun used the paper in her training-group for focusing-oriented therapists. They loved it. I re-read it. It had always been for me a companion piece to "On Focusing" (1986). I suddenly saw how to change the opening of "On Focusing", with which I had never been satisfied. I rewrote it. Together I self-published the two essays as Focusing and Listening (1999)--only seventeen years after I had submitted the Listening piece to the Review.

The point is that there was a time in my life when I lacked a stubborn persistence, rapid recovery from rejection, and flexible determination about resubmitting my writing to someone else’s notion of what deserved publication.2 That period lasted from 1968 to, well, now. Ann Weiser Cornell’s near-total acceptance of my writings has helped keep the flow going. I have had an outlet for my writing about focusing.
Thanks, Ann.

II

This book consists of twenty-six focusing-related writings. I have had some fun and some headaches deciding how to organize them. After a combination of playfulness of spirit and despairing travail, I decided on five categories:

• In The Beginning refers to my time in New York (1973-1981) during which I met Gene Gendlin, focusing, and--as he called it then--experiential psychotherapy. I was living in New York City, building a private practice and commuting to teach at the School of Social Welfare at Stony Brook, on Long Island. I tell how focusing came into my life. I reprint my review of FOCUSING. And I include the very first piece I ever published that was influenced by Gene’s work: a history of the experiential in psychotherapy.

• Focusing is a collection of articles that could be called A Focusing Manual. They are about the basic concepts and processes of focusing. They are my contributions to the teaching of focusing. It is interesting to me that the oldest article in this section was not published until 1986--twelve years after I met Gene. It was that long before I felt confident that I had something to say about teaching and learning focusing.

• Focusing and Psychotherapy was the most difficult section to organize. Partly this was because of the number of things I have written on the topic. Partly it was because my writings stretched from 1976 to 1999. Partly it was because during that time Gene changed what he called his therapy from Experiential Psychotherapy to Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy. And partly it was because I wanted to introduce yet another term for our therapy: Focusing-Oriented Experiential Therapy.

The essays are all over the place. They include a theory piece, case reports, a comparison with another theory of therapy, pieces about different aspects of my therapy, descriptions of how I do therapy. There is no summary piece. In the prologue to the section I do attempt a road map to help the reader through the thicket.

• Focusing and Meditation consists of three pieces I wrote between 1988 and 1991 and a brand-new piece looking back at them and the subject of focusing and meditation again. I was struggling in the earlier essays to carve out a clear distinction between focusing and meditation and then to comment upon their compatibilities and incompatibilities. Being on the Internet focusing discussion list helped me do the fourth article.

I am a sporadic, erratic, and eclectic mediator. I am not expert at meditation. Yet the first three articles just came tumbling out. Natural childbirth. The fourth was definitely Caesarian.

• Focusing and Miracles was the last section to get named. A miracle is something good that cannot be explained by one’s governing paradigm of explanation. There are events in these papers that I cannot explain. Mostly I don’t feel a need to explain them. They all happened. They are or are about miracles. And they are related to focusing.

There is, Dear Reader, no reason whatsoever for you to read these pieces in order or, for that matter, to read all of them. (I do expect my mother to do so.) To everyone else--read the ones you are drawn to. Read the ones that speak to you. Read the ones you missed. Read the new ones. Read the ones that match your special interest. Read the ones that don’t match your special interest. Read your favorites.

There will be no final exam.

III

To put together this book I have had to re-read twenty-five years of my writings on focusing. The task has been daunting but relatively painless. I still like a lot of the articles. Or, perhaps I should say, I don’t dislike too many of them too much. I am talking about the writing qua writing. I have made revisions in several articles. I have corrected spelling, punctuation, and typos. I have changed some titles. I have added and deleted sentences and paragraphs. I have improved (I hope) the writing. (I have also retained slight differences in style: e.g., roman numerals between sections in some essays; sub-headings in others; nothing in others.)

My changes in literary style have been consistent and instructive.

Compound sentences have become simple sentences. Complex sentences have become simple sentences. Semicolons have become periods. Commas, ‘ands,’ and ‘buts’ have been removed. Subordinate clauses have either disappeared or become whole sentences. Adjectives and adverbs have been reduced by 25%. Sentences have become shorter. Words shorter. The total number of syllables per paragraph has been reduced. Monosyllabic words have increased by 15%. One, two, and three word incomplete sentences have multiplied. Except where they haven’t.

The paring down is not 100%. I have kept some ‘club-sandwich’ size sentences. They are among my favorites.3 Although I have generally put my writing on a diet, the remaining plump sentences stand out more now against the background of slim, spare, crisp, plain, simple English.

The reasons for this change are autobiographical. My ‘un-self-conscious’ writing style has always tended towards the down-to-earth, unpretentious, and first-person singular. My early writing role models were Henry David Thoreau and James Baldwin.

Thoreau is a master of the first-person singular:
I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and
sincere account...

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich islanders, as you who read these pages...

And the short aphorism:
The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.
That government is best which governs not at all.

James Baldwin is also a first-person writer:
I am the man. I was there. I suffered.
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

But he is also given to flourishes of lyrical, complex, and sometimes murky elegiac writing:

And now--now it seemed that they were all equal in misery, confusion, and despair... And something in him was breaking; he was, briefly and horribly, in a region where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color, nor of male and female. There were only the leap and the rending and the terror and the surrender. And the terror: Which all seemed to begin and end and begin again--forever--in a cavern behind the eye. And whatever stalked there saw, and spread the news of what it saw throughout the entire kingdom of whomever though the eye itself might perish. What order could prevail against so grim a privacy? And yet, without order, of what value was the mystery? Set thine house in order ...

In 1987, at Coki Beach, in St. Thomas, I read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. The ending left me crying into my goggles while snorkeling.4 It was the first Hemingway I had ever read. I soon read six more books by him. And then I stumbled upon Ernest Hemingway on Writing. It is a collection of simple sentence or single paragraph entries on the writer’s craft:
-- The secret is that it is poetry written into prose..
-- Good writing is true writing.
-- The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight, honest prose on human beings.

-- Write the truest sentence that you know.

-- On The Star [a newspaper], you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone.

Hemingway pushed Baldwin a little to the side. Hemingway’s lean prose because the ground to my writing--just as focusing is the ground to my doing therapy. My more lyrical flourishes--and my soft spot for sometimes well-chosen adjectives and adverbs--stand out more now from their Hemingway-ish background--just as my more expressive interventions do in my focusing-oriented therapy. I do Hemingway-oriented writing.

I have gone on at such length because writing matters to me. Writing ought to come from the heart. Writing out to be an extension of one’s focusing. I put on the page what I have ‘seen’ in my focusing. I include the ‘I.’

Writing matters to me in at least three senses. It matters to my mental health whether I am writing or not. (It is much harder for me to be neurotic when I am writing.) I cannot read bad prose even when the content is rumored to be important. And I take pride in my own writing. Like doing therapy, writing is also my craft and vocation. In my not-so-secret heart of hearts I am a writer almost as much as I am a therapist.

IV

This book is a "summing-up-thus-far." In the Conclusion I have some things to say about where I see focusing being now as the century turns. Here I want to be more personal.

I started in therapy in 1973 at the age of thirty-three. This was one and one-half years before I met Gene. My life was in a shambles--as it has been periodically. I think of myself before 1973 as my "pre-therapy, relatively unconscious self." I think of myself since 1973 as my "in therapy, becoming more conscious self." I am a work-in-progress.

There have been three major influences on my therapized-and-becoming-more-conscious self.

The first was Leida Berg. I began seeing her on April 13, 1973. She was a seventy-five-year-old Park Avenue psychiatrist who always wore what I thought of as opera clothes. She smoked cigarette after cigarette through a long, black, ever-so-delicate cigarette holder. When I asked her--accusingly--why she smoked, she replied, "Because I love it!"

Leida was a tough, confrontational existential therapist. She had been analyzed by Abraham Kardiner. At some point she had thrown out her psychoanalytic textbooks and become herself. She was haughty, tough, and absolutely right-on. She had x-ray vision. She was the first person to lovingly assault me with the question, "And what are you feeling?"

My therapy with her was very cathartic, very helpful in getting me to reclaim and express my anger, and led to large life-changes rather quickly (Friedman, 1981).

You will see in a minute why I now skip to the third influence on my therapized self. It was the Opening the Heart workshop at Spring Hill, in Ashby, Massachusetts. It found me in 1982. I was at another ebb tide. I had been there for eight months.

The Heart workshop is a loud, intense, body-centered, cathartic experience. It is a weekend marathon that wears down mind and body and opens the heart (Friedman, 1987).

My first experience as a participant in the Heart workshop ended my depression. The depression did not return for ten years. During that time Spring Hill remained in my life as I became a Heart staff member (1983-1998) and, for a while, co-director of Spring Hill (1985-1988).

In between these two intensities stands focusing. It was the second influence on my becoming more conscious self. It began with Gene in December, 1974, and has continued to this day to be absolutely central to who I am and what I do. I am a focusing-oriented therapist and a focusing-oriented person. Focusing--a quiet, inward, non-violent way to befriend and accurately symbolize fine discernments of felt senses--focusing is basic to my self-therapy and professional therapeutic work. The more expressive and cathartic work that came from Leida and the Heart workshop depend upon and grow out of the ground of focusing.

I resonate with focusing more than I do with the other two. I am not like Leida. I do not relish and take delight in an angry-exchange therapy. I am not as confrontational. I can’t be her.

And after two open-heart surgeries of the medical kind, my body is not as at home with the Heart work as it once was.

Another way to say all this: Leida died. Spring Hill closed down. And through it all, focusing and I keep on truckin’.

Come along with me now as I share my life in focusing with you.

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