Robert's Respnse

[Robert Greco]

#698

Gendlin’s discussion of the situated body and its counter-Cartesian implications (in the typical sense of the word) prompted me to reflect on some of my experiences with anxiety. My feelings of anxiety, which have ebbed and flowed over the years, have often been associated with physical sensations, most notably a gnawing pain in my gut. How I get to Gendlen with this is that, at some point, the relationship between the two sensations–the conscious, qualitative sense of the anxiety and the physical discomfort that accompanies it–became blurred. I now sometimes find myself in the bizarre situation of having mild anxiety attacks when I get a stomach ache. Needless to say, this phenomenon can easily be understood through simple pavlovian conditioning, but this also helps me to challenge my latent Cartesian impulses. The process that I describe, and that Gendlen describes when he talks about the mind/body connection could be conceived as a linear process: brain (unconscious) > body (sensation) > mind (conscious), and the problem I see here isn’t the connection but the insistence on the linearity of the order. As such, I try to reconceptualize this relationship as the (non)brain body and the (un)conscious.

And then there’s the plant body; I’m still working on that one. The plant body’s “information” makes me wonder about the extent to which we let the language slip, and the consequences of doing so. I know that he’s very clear that words, for him, don’t mean what we think they mean, but we seem to be going beyond contextual variations here. What, in this context does “information” mean? Does it mean this in any other context? To what extent is Gendlen’s project of repurposing words more about avoiding words than making new meaning. In other words, is his project to advance a new meaning of “information,” one that has a reasonably reliable and durable meaning in this context or is it to push aside existing vocabularies that suffer from overly Cartesian influence. To my reading, he connects information with beings: “the plant is the situated information of the plant?” But, the choice of information for being also pushes away from being. Hmm. Getting there, not there yet.

[Sondra Perl]

#706

For Gendlin, I think it’s about turning toward what we sense in our bodies….what could be labeled anxiety or not…and letting it speak to us and through us. I think he’d say that this is ‘information’ similar to the kind of information plants have or get from the environment.

[Author]

Posts