The best first book on what it means to meet someone: relating to a person as a “Thou” rather than as an object of knowledge or use.
What being met is like
What do people actually experience in the moments they describe as being seen or met?
Micro-phenomenological interviews can describe lived experience with precision. Circling’s central moments have never been described this way.
Builds on nine works
Why it matters
The practice’s words for its central moments (being met, being seen, presence) point at experiences that are vivid to participants and opaque to outsiders. A careful first-person description would give philosophy and psychology something concrete to work with, and show whether these moments share a structure.
A possible design
Micro-phenomenological interviews, after Claire Petitmengin, with participants shortly after a circle, each focused on a single moment they mark as significant. Analyse them for recurring structure and compare the results with the descriptions in I and Thou and Focusing.
Pitfalls
Participants will reach for the community’s own vocabulary. The interview method is designed to get beneath it, and interviewers from outside the community help.
Builds on
- 1923I and Thou
- 1978Focusing
For contact with your own experience: the “felt sense”, an unclear bodily sense of a whole situation from which more precise meaning can emerge.
- 1927Being and Time
Changes how you understand experience, relationship and authenticity. Being-with, solicitude and attunement give a vocabulary for what happens in a circle.
A way in: Being-in-the-World · Dreyfus · Moderate
- 2019Talking to Transform: Aesthetic Experiments in Conversational Inquiry
A philosophical and artistic study of transformative conversation practices, from Socratic dialogue to psychodrama. Authentic Relating and Circling appear among its examples.
- 2007Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition
Introduces participatory sense-making: an enactive account of how people understand one another, in which their bodies and the dynamics of their interaction play a part, not only what happens in each person’s head.
- 2006Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness
A methodological paper explains how guided interviews can bring out details of lived experience and discusses how to assess the resulting accounts.
- 2014The neural bases of feeling understood and not understood
Cautions: Small sample
A brain-imaging experiment found different activity patterns when people felt understood or misunderstood, alongside differences in how much they liked the supposed listener.
- 1998Intimacy as an interpersonal process: The importance of self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges.
Cautions: Self-report only
Two diary studies linked disclosure and feeling that a partner responded with understanding to greater intimacy, with emotional disclosure more strongly linked than factual disclosure.
- 1993Do people know how others view them? An empirical and theoretical account.
A review found that people judge their general reputation more accurately than the distinctive impressions particular others have of them.