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Process Oriented Psychology (POP) refers to a body of theory and practice that encompasses a broad range of psychotherapeutic, personal growth, and group process applications. It is more commonly called "Process Work" in the United States, the longer name being used in Europe and Asia. Process Work was founded by Arnold Mindell, then a Jungian analyst, in the late 1970s. It has its origin in Mindell’s observation that nighttime dreams both mirrored and were mirrored in his clients’ somatic experiences, particularly physical symptoms. He generalized the term “dreaming” to include any aspect of experience that, while possibly differing from consensus views of reality, was coherent with a person’s dreams, fantasies, and somatic experience, as well as the unintentional but meaningful signals that form the background to interpersonal relationships. Mindell’s training in physics encouraged him to view the unconscious mind phenomenologically as well as symbolically, leading him to apply information theory (Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. Historically, information theory was developed to find fundamental limits on compressing and reliably communicating data')concepts to the observation of his clients’ behavior. In this light, the concept of the ‘unconscious’ expanded to include a whole range of unintentional verbal and non-verbal signals, on the one hand, and of perceptions, beliefs and ideas with which the individual does not identify, on the other. In order to help his clients integrate these forms of unconscious material, Mindell expanded upon the Jungian techniques of “amplification” (Amplification is to amplify physical symptoms based on psychological factors such as anxiety or depression "somatosensory amplification refers to the tendency to experience somatic sensation as intense, noxious, and disturbing. What may be a minor 'twinge' or mild 'sorenes' to the stoic, is a severe, consuming pain to the amplifier.)such as active imagination and dream interpretation, by adding methods for working directly with nonverbal, body-level experience. Building upon patterns of awareness found in sources ranging from Taoism, Vajrayana and shamanism through modern physics, Mindell developed a framework for encouraging clients to identify with unconscious experience through a process he called ‘unfolding’. This unfolding process is a deconstruction of the client’s named experiences that relies not only on verbal material and imagery but also on movement, deep somatic experience, interpersonal relationship, and social context.
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