Talk:Eugene Gendlin
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Corrected a reference to Gendlin's "Focusing" practice coming from psychoanalysis. It came from research into success in psychotherapy - where 'success' included 'success' from both a client and a therapist perspective. This work was, I believe, across multiple therapy traditions. His core affilitation was with Carl Rogers and Rogers' client centered therapy. [See the references in the footnotes to Carl Roger's 'On Being a Person' for Gendlin's influence on Rogers.] This research program had strong roots in Gendlin's philosophical work in phenomenology, so he descibes "Focusing" as coming from his philosophical work - which he now calls 'The Philosophy of the Implicit'. Greg Walkerden, 8 July 2005.
Two basic objections:
- almost the entirety of the article appears to be taken verbatim from www.focusing.org
- Gendlin is not a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago at this time. He appears as an emeritus professor in the university catalog and not at all on the department's home pages. This should be clarified
These point to larger problems. It does not appear that any of the information that appears in this article has been independently checked. Taking the article verbatim from elsewhere would appear to be a copyright violation, and lack of fact checking would appear to be a violation of the Wikipedia:Check_your_facts recommendation. The immediate inclusion on the list of twentieth century philosophers for lack of this is potential soapboxing, and the included link may be taking as link spamming, given that it also serves a commercial purpose. As this appears to be your first article, I don't want to discourage you, but please consult these policies (and the general list of policies and procedures) and promptly revise the article. Buffyg 01:20, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
I've expanded the discussion of Gendlin's philosophy, correcting the error about Gendlin being in the Psychology Dept at U of C. There are no copyright violations and I've checked all facts. I think reference to the Focusing Institute is justified by the amount of information available there. Rob Parker, 9-26-05
I (and I would assume others) would be interested in what sort of criticisms other philosophers would wager against Gendlin. The theoretical framework and many of the concepts are very exciting and interesting, but I'm wary of the one-sidedness of this page, as well as of the implicit (no pun intended) correlations to new-age mythologies, etc. The self-help component also casts concern, though on the other hand, why shouldn't philosophy be made more accessible to the average person? All in all, would just appreciate the critical input of someone with a more potent philosophical background that I have.
