general

Dr. Eugene Gendlin has created a book that describes his phenomenologically grounded practice of focusing. Gendlin wrote this book for therapists, but non-therapists (I am one) can profitably read it, too.

In the first part of the book, he gives a detailed description of focusing, along with generously annotated transcripts of focusing-oriented therapy sessions.

The second part is an attempt to explicate the field of psychotherapy, by taking the various orientations, extracting the techniques they employ, and reconceptualizing them as "avenues" or approaches to therapy. These avenues include bodily energy, role-play, dreams, images, reliving and catharsis, cognition, action steps, processing the superego, and values. Once the therapist (or the client) has learned to work on these avenues, as such, he is able to move freely among them, using the 'felt sense' of focusing as a touchstone.

As a client of an immensely talented focusing therapist years ago, I can say that this process saved my psychic life with its skill and compassion.

It has been a long time since there has been a system of psychotherapy that has its ground in a metapsychology/philosophy that stands up to inspection.

I recommend this book as an adjunct to self-therapy. It is a great way to take disparate techniques that you may have learned here and there and increase their potency by "experientializing" them and learning to use them with one another.