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I need to go quick, because there's only a quarter left now, and I definitely want to speak to you about the emotions. I'm so sorry I won't be able to do all these things, but there it is.

These are some of the existential philosophers that we draw on a lot. So there are the philosophers of freedom — Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer. Phenomenologists starting with Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler. The existentialists, mainly the French — Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, Marcel, and Camus. The post-structuralists — Foucault, Levinas, Ricoeur, Lacan, Derrida. And the existential humanists — Buber, Tillich, May, Yalom, and Maslow.

Here are some of their pictures. What strange noises are here. Here are some of their pictures. So I won't dwell on it, I'll just race along. You can find these on the internet any day.

And then there are the existential practitioners. They started out just around the same time as Freud, but existential therapists were always in hiding. They always said existential therapy is not a mechanism, it's not a skill, it's not something we can teach other people. So people have to sort of come to it out of their own experience. That's different now.

But there they are — there were people like Binswanger, Boss, Frankl, importantly May and R. D. Laing, who I came to this country to work with, who have been the pioneers. And there they are — those pioneers.

And here is an overview of how the sort of lay of the land of this field is at the moment, with myself modestly at the bottom there. We had a world conference, first World Congress on existential therapy in 2015 in London, and the second one will take place in Buenos Aires — tango — in 2019.

And it's amazing: this approach has spread all around the world. I was in India over Christmas teaching in Goa. I taught 200 psychologists in Iran last week online, but I couldn't go to Tehran because I'd been to Israel within the year, so I couldn't get a visa.

But nevertheless, in each country people have translated books, they are eager for it. China has translated three of my books. Korea has. It's everywhere — Australia, America, South America.

And what is the most wonderful thing is that on each continent and in each country people reinterpret what existential therapy is. Why? Because they attach it to their own worldviews and their own philosophies. It's not being imposed on them. And it isn't about individualism — it is about making room for the whole of existence, no matter how you experience that and how you come to it.

So it's all about attunement. It's an educational project. It's about engagement with the world.

Of course, I can't teach you phenomenology as I was promising, because I just don't have enough time. Just to say that phenomenology was created basically by Husserl, who was a mathematician, by the way, because he came to the realization that the exact sciences were not enough.

That in order for us to truly understand the world, there had to be a subjective and an objective side to doing science. And that's what phenomenology is. It is not, as many people wrongly assume, the science of subjectivity. It is the bridge between subjectivity and objectivity.

And there are precise ways in which you apply it, and that's what we call the phenomenological method. And it involves the phenomenological reduction, the eidetic reduction, and the transcendental reduction.

And some of the things to say about that is: the phenomenological reduction stops you thinking that you already know what is the case about something or somebody. It makes you humble. It makes you question what your knowledge is doing to you and set it aside — bracket it.

And then it makes you go back to what it is you're observing and describe it in great patient detail. And you do various other things, but no time for that.

The eidetic reduction is very important too, because it helps you remember that things are dynamic. They are genetically constituted. Everything changes. Even objects change. Every object is in a process of change.

If you could take a longer view of things, you would see they're all alive, they're all changing the whole time. People are changing — don't pin them down on how they are today. They were different yesterday, they will be different tomorrow.

Give them back that sense of change. Help them understand they don't have to do anything to change — they just have to open up to what is the case and stop closing down who they are, or depriving themselves of their connectivity or their self-knowledge or their open-heartedness.

The transcendental reduction is about going inside oneself and examining how something affects you. In that process, you realize that we all connect up somewhere, because what I feel most of you feel, and what I'm afraid of most of you are afraid of.

And I can use myself as an instrument to resonate with you if I am open and critical enough to make sense of what I'm picking up, and also modest enough to know that at the end of the day my perception is mine and your perception is yours. So we work with bias.

I was going to talk a bit about Heidegger, who is such a conflicted person. I did actually a doctorate in philosophy on Heidegger and came at the end of that to the conclusion that I wanted no more to do with him at all — and yet he influenced me greatly, obviously, because he did study being and he did come up with some amazing ideas.

Unfortunately, it was all seen from his own cultural perspective, which became so very damning in so many ways. So one of his main contributions is to realize that we're all thrown in the world in time. We're all limited in time. And it is only with our death that our life is completed.

And so we need to bring our view towards the whole span of what we are capable of doing, and to be aware of the things that we care about, the things that matter to us, and how we relate to them.

He's also the one who understood that our emotionality, our resonance with the world, is the first port of call. We feel into the world long before we understand the world or we have a discourse about the world. So that's how it works: first the feelings, then the understanding, then the theorizing and the discourse.

And so we need to go back to tuning in to our anxiety, which takes us into the things we want, and into our depression, which takes us away from the things we don't want.

In his later work, Heidegger was all about realizing that we need to re-own our own relationship to being, with a capital B — all the things that are in the world. How do we actually relate to them?

Well, he said it's the fourfold, thus the four worlds model — that was the big bang: being exploded into earth, world, men, and gods. And ever since, we've had to make sense of all of that in some way.

And he also had this amazing idea that the word “thinking” actually comes from the same word as “thanking,” and that before we learn to think, we need to learn to thank. Very powerful, that idea, I think.

And it is really about opening up to a level of inner thought and inner being that allows us to find a whole new breadth in life, a whole new way of being here, which he often called the Spiel, which is translated as “elbow room,” so that you have room for maneuvering.

But actually, it means play space. So it is about resituating ourselves in the world in such a way that we can play with our lives, that living becomes an adventure again and becomes something we enjoy.

And of course, with an awareness of time, getting to know yourself in past, present, and future — not trying to cut off bad experiences or forget about them, but owning them, earning them, digging into them, understanding them, taking every ounce of learning from them.

Structural existential analysis is what you do when you systematically look at somebody's existence through the lenses of space and time and various other things.

Simone de Beauvoir really understood something when she said you can't lead a proper life in a society which isn't proper, in which every way you turn you are always caught — because you can't draw a straight line in a curved space.

And that is what you try to do in existential therapy: to enable people to re-own their own space, so that they can step outside of the curved space that they have been given, and they can become the creators of their world rather than the victims of it.

And that is, I think, the most important thing we can do for another person: to hand them back their creativity, their freedom, their passion, their connectivity to all that is and all that is possible.

And that is what I try to do when I do existential therapy, and it is what I try to teach my students.

Hey, alas, I don't have time for all the other things I wanted to tell you, but let me quickly show you the emotional compass, which is so extremely helpful in understanding your emotions.

So don't suppress your emotions. If anything screws you up, it is you trying to behave yourself and cut yourself off from your emotions. Feel into it. Make sense of it. Give room to yourself — you're worth it, as they say.

So suppression of feelings absolutely leads to dysfunction and despair and to loss of freedom. The best thing you can do is to retrieve all of your emotions.

And I've created this wonderful compass of emotions, where the colours of the rainbow are fitted together exactly as they are when you are an artist, with the primary colours and the secondary colours in their right spaces, and the emotions in their right basis.

Because the emotions, Spinoza knew, relate to each other and relate to this desire we have for the good things and this despair we have of losing the good things.

So in a nutshell: we feel high when we are on top of the world, united with what we love and want. And when we start losing it, we become a bit distant and proud — a bad sign, you know, pride comes before a fall.

When it's really under threat, we start to feel these feelings that we call jealousy, which is caution, vigilance of my territory. But when we've not done that properly, and really our values are under threat, there is that last bit of energy we can muster, which is called anger, where we fight to get back to where we want to be.

But you know, some of us are not very good at that. As soon as we start losing, we go straight into despair, and we go to fear, where we just want to run away and be in bed all day, and then to sorrow, when we are giving up what we value and we're grieving, which leads us right to the bottom, which is where we call ourselves sad, where we feel low — literally rock bottom.

When we start building up again towards a new purpose, we go to shame at first, because we think we're not good enough to do it, but we always are.