AGORA - tidsskrift for forskning, udvikling og idéudveksling i ...

AGORA - tidsskrift for forskning,
udvikling og idéudveksling i professioner
of self and situation). This understanding is also highlighted by Stern (2004) who stresses the present
moment as the starting point for a developmental process in psychotherapy and everyday life.
Epoché
The orientation towards the present moment should be taken in conjunction with epoché, meaning
suspension of judgment. The term comes originally from Greek philosophy, there defined as a principle
originally espoused by non-dogmatic philosophical Sceptics of the ancient Greek Academy. Scholars
used epoché when they viewed the problem of knowledge as insolvable. When a controversy arose,
the proposal was then to show an attitude of non-involvement in order to gain peace of mind for daily
living. In 20th century philosophy, the term has been employed by Edmund Husserl, the founder of
Phenomenology, who saw epoché as a technique more fundamental than that of abstraction and of the
examination of essences. The aim is to highlight consciousness itself by suspending presuppositions and
preconceptions.
From a psychological perspective, the idea of epoché can be understood as being in the present moment
without being judgemental in regard to oneself as subject and in regard to the situation, an understanding
which is one of the fundamental attitudes of therapists in relation to their clients in a therapeutic context,
but also for athletes involved in a specific sports activity. Here, judgements only spoil the execution and
realization of the action itself.
Depraz and Varela (2000) elaborated three principal phases which describe the unfolding of epoché:
A. A phase of suspension of habitual thought and judgement. This is a basic precondition
for any possibility of change in the attention which the subject gives to his own
experience and which represents a break with a “natural” or non-examined attitude.
B. A phase of conversion or redirection of attention from “the exterior” to “the interior”.
C. A phase of letting-go or of receptivity towards the experience.
(p. 123; italics in the original)
Depraz and Varela (ibid.) describe these phases as organically linked “for the simple reason that phases B
and C are always reactivated by and reactivate phase A.” This merging together of the three phases also
indicates that there is no real “starting point” in the process.
Epoché implies an attentive and non-judgemental shift to the act and activity itself, a shift which is based
on being in the present moment. In that sense, we could speak about a kind of meditative state which can
simply be defined as being in the here and now and which we know for example from different movement
techniques like yoga, tai chi, and several Asian martial arts. Different techniques like focusing on
breathing, on specific body parts, etc. make it easy to develop epoché (see an exercise in Depraz, Varela
and Vermersch, 2003, pp. 32-34). Also the “inner game” approach developed by Gallwey (1976; 2000)
and Gallwey and Kriegel (1977) is in its practice based on similar ideas – without being explicit about the
theoretical fundament, though.
The intentional perspective
The third premise for a body-anchored and experience-based learning – one of the fundamentals of
phenomenological thinking, as well – is the intentional orientation of our lived body to the world. That
means: The individual is always embedded and embodied in the world while being immanently related
to the specific situation. It is to the merit of Merleau-Ponty (1962) that he establishes an understanding of
the lived body as the organ of senses which, in the process of perception and action, is directed towards
the environment itself. In that sense, Merleau-Ponty goes further than Husserl who sees intentionality
as a transcendental, non-physical consciousness (see Zaner, 1964). In contrast to that, Merleau-Ponty
considers intentionality to be all forms of directedness of the whole and embodied person. Fuchs (2000)
comes with the following interpretation of Merleau-Ponty´s concept: “Intentionality is even primarily
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