Embodied enquiry : phenomenological touchstones for research, psychotherapy, and spirituality

This book essentially wishes to honour the valuable role that the phenomenological tradition has played in disciplining my academic and professional development over many years. As a philosophically oriented psychologist I have been fascinated by a certain coherence and depth within this tradition in spite of its many polemics and differences between the partners within the conversation. My own participation as a philosophically oriented psychologist was to try and take forward some of these ideas into the more applied areas of research methodology, psychotherapy, and spirituality. Recently, when I looked over a 16-year period of publishing articles in academic journals, I realized that there was a story that I wished to tell about this development. A certain latent common theme and sensibility seemed to have been at work and functioned as a touchstone in my thinking and practice. It is this common theme that I wish to articulate in this book by re-presenting a number of my published articles within the context of a thematic unifying narrative. Introductions to various parts of the book, as well as its concluding chapter, articulate the theme of embodied enquiry and how this matters. I would also like to acknowledge that there is an interesting and valuable groundswell of thought and practice that is leaning towards embodied enquiry in other philosophical orientations, qualitative research approaches, psychotherapeutic approaches, and spiritual practices. For example, the works of Rosemarie Anderson (2001, 2(04) in qualitative research and Michael Washburn (2003) in spirituality provide some very interesting directions for more embodied forms of research and spirituality. In the present book, however, I wish to bow to what has emerged for me from phenomenology, and hope that readers and practitioners outside this tradition may be interested in some of the possibilities that have been generated. I am grateful to my primary mentors in phenomenological psychology: Dreyer Kruger and Amedeo Giorgi. I am also indebted to the work of John Welwood, and thank him for his very helpful conversations about the relationship between spirituality, psychotherapy, and embodiment Drawing on a particular emphasis within the phenomenological tradition as exemplified by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Eugene Gendlin, this book considers the role of the lived body as a way of knowing and being. The author, a psychologist, psychotherapist and qualitative researcher pursues this theme within the three practical contexts that illustrate some of the nuances of embodied enquiry: 1 In research methodology: how embodied understanding is not just 'cognitive', but involves embodied, aesthetic experience and application 2 In spirituality: how embodied understanding opens up a view of human existence that lies between great freedom and great vulnerability, a view of spirituality that integrates the personal and the transpersonal 3 In psychotherapy: how embodied understanding may occur through the process of psychotherapy where one is able to increasingly experience oneself as 'more than' the ways one has been objectified and defined (freedom), and therefore, more fluidly in accord with the human realm (vulnerability) The three sections of the book also provide examples of how embodied enquiry is not just a philosophical perspective but also a practice with very tangible implications for research, psychotherapy and spirituality. The integrating theme that is threaded through these three practical contexts is the concern to articulate and demonstrate a knowledge-practice that is both personally transformative and intersubjectively humanising. The ideas and illustrations in the book may be particularly relevant in these current times where the de-personalisation and de-humanisation of self and other are rampant in obscuring the human ground that we share Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Introduction: An Embodied Path at Beginning and End....Pages 1-4 Front Matter....Pages 5-6 The Qualitative Description of Human Experience: The Aesthetic Dimension....Pages 7-13 The Meaning of Understanding and the Open Body: Some Implications for Qualitative Research....Pages 14-29 The Bodily Complexity of Truth-Telling in Qualitative Research....Pages 30-43 Writing Phenomenological-Psychological Descriptions: An Illustration Attempting to Balance Texture and Structure....Pages 44-58 Front Matter....Pages 59-61 Humanising Forces: Phenomenology in Science; Psychotherapy in Technological Culture....Pages 63-75 The Rhythm of Psychotherapeutic Attention: A Training Model....Pages 76-90 The Primacy of Phenomenological Process and Sequence in Psychotherapy: A Case Study....Pages 91-102 Globalisation and the Complexity of Self: The Relevance of Psychotherapy....Pages 103-109 Freedom-Wound: Towards the Embodiment of Human Openness in Psychotherapy....Pages 110-123 Front Matter....Pages 125-127 Psychological and Spiritual Freedoms: Reflections Inspired by Heidegger....Pages 129-140 How Does Liberating Self-Insight Become Tacit Understanding?....Pages 141-149 The Wound that Connects: A Consideration of ‘Narcissism’ and the Creation of Soulful Space....Pages 150-163 Embracing Ambiguity: Transpersonal Development and the Phenomenological Tradition....Pages 164-174 Concluding Thoughts and Touchstones: A Wide Embrace....Pages 175-186 Back Matter....Pages 187-201