ABSTRACT
Eugene Gendlin ingeniously and subtly demonstrates how feeling and meaning – all too often held to be separate matters – are deeply intertwined in human experience, including its intersubjective dimensions. Further, he argues for their intimate intercalation with bodily gesture and action, and thus cannot be reduced to anything purely cognitive. I insist on the importance of emotion in the evolving model Gendlin devises for human experience. Working from clues he leaves but does not develop systematically, I propose a view of emotion as interfusion of body and world and as accruing to local atmosphere as well as to linguistic and gestural articulation. I maintain that this is the direction in which Gendlin’s mature thought – in the decades after the publication of Focusing – was moving. This was toward special attention to the edges of human experience, their outermost limits. This is to move beyond subjectivistic models of meaning and emotion toward the sophisticated conceptuality of A Process Model. It serves to fill out one of the most radical, and radically original, paradigms of post-modern thought.
