The Significance of Naikan Practice to a Psychotherapist: TAE（Thinking At the Edge）and the Naikan Experience

Abstract

  This is an exploration of the meaning of Naikan for a psychotherapist, who has been practicing Naikan as a way to know oneself. This study was carried out using the methodology of ‘TAE’（Thinking At the Edge）. TAE was found by E. T. Gendline, an American psychotherapist and philosopher who advocated ‘first-person science.’ TAE is a way to express in new words something which needs to be said but is at first only an inchoate ‘bodily sense.’ In this study, such bodily felt sensations elicited during Naikan practice were noted and listened to. As a result, it emerged that by exploring oneself through Naikan practice, one can recover an experience of a deeper lying, ‘empty’ sense of self. For the author, this was experienced as an ‘opening up’ of the self, which prompted her to give something back to the world with joy, which in turn supported the therapeutic relationship.