He studied under Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy, at the University of Chicago and received his PhD in philosophy in 1958.

Realizing that people could be taught this skill, in 1978 Gendlin published his best-selling book Focusing, which presented a six step method for discovering one's felt sense and drawing on it for personal development.

In the mid-1980s, Gendlin served on the original editorial board for the journal The Humanistic Psychologist, published by Division 32 of the American Psychological Association (APA).

The mass-market edition of his popular classic Focusing has been translated into 17 languages and sold more than a half million copies.

Gendlin regarded himself first and foremost as a philosopher and he brought a rigorous philosophical perspective to psychology, presented in his early book Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning and later developed into a comprehensive theory of the deep nature of life processes, articulated in his masterwork A Process Model.

Gendlin has shown that it is possible to refer directly to this process in the context of a given problem or situation and systematically generate new concepts and more precise logical units.

With specific training, one can learn to attend to this feeling more deeply, so that a holistic felt sense of the whole situation can form.

A felt sense is more ordered than concepts and has its own properties, different from those of logic; for example, it is very precise, more intricate, and can be conceptualized in a variety of non-arbitrary ways.

For example, Gendlin has found that when the felt sense is allowed to function in relation to concepts, each carries the other forward, through steps of deeper feel and new formulation.

[12] Gendlin underlines that one can (and often does) "progress" in one's understanding, and that this involves transitions in which existing conceptual models are disrupted, but that one can "feel" when a carrying forward in insight is (or is not) occurring.

Gendlin developed a way of measuring the extent to which an individual refers to a felt sense; and he found in a series of studies that therapy clients who have positive outcomes do much more of this.

[14] In 2007, he was a recipient of the Viktor Frankl Award of the City of Vienna for outstanding achievements in the field of meaning-oriented humanistic psychotherapy.

Using TAE, it is possible to develop concepts that explicate the felt sense very precisely so that what was implicit knowledge can generate an explicit theory that can contribute to the field.

They first fled to the Netherlands and later emigrated to the United States on the SS Paris (1916) on its last voyage to New York, arriving January 11, 1939.

The family changed their name to Gendlin upon their arrival in the United States, and in English it is pronounced JEHND-lin (not with the hard "g" as in German pronunciation).