Duncan Sabien (Inactive) comments on Focusing

[Duncan Sabien (Inactive)]

Yeah, definitely not the name we would have chosen if we’d been naming the technique (we were somewhat stuck with Eugene Gendlin’s choice).

[Raemon]

I do think calling it “Gendlin’s Focusing” is probably a bit better.

[Duncan Sabien (Inactive)]

Ah, but then we’d be misrepresenting it as the full technique?

“Step four of Gendlin’s Focusing” :/​ :/​ :/​

[green_leaf]

I like the name focusing—it creates the feeling of the technique being powerful (since it signals it’s strong enough it can use a non-most-frequent meaning of focus (i.e. to concentrate)). Or maybe I’m feeling it incorrectly—English isn’t my first language—but I do like it.

[localdeity]

Since when are we bound to the original discoverer’s wishes about naming?

Stigler’s law of eponymy, proposed by University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in his 1980 publication Stigler’s law of eponymy,^[1] states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. [...] Stigler himself named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of “Stigler’s law” to show that it follows its own decree, though the phenomenon had previously been noted by others.