1. Existential Philosophy and Psychotherapy

Speaker 1:

What is existential therapy?

Well, I like to call it existential therapy because it is not just about psychotherapy.

So psychotherapy is a therapy that focuses on the mind, on one person's individual mind. It's very individualistic, but existential therapy focuses on life. It focuses on the life that you lead, in the way that you lead it.

So it focuses not just on what is in your mind, but also what is in between you and other people, in between you and the political world, in between you and your cultural environment, your family, your background, your history, your future.

All those different elements come just as much into focus as your mind.

And I'm going to try to explain to you how you can work with that whole range of human experiences without getting confused, chaotic, or lost in that process.

So it is a philosophical method because we use philosophical ideas to make sense of all of that. And it is a method that came out of philosophy and, as you probably realize, psychology itself came out of philosophy.

When I was studying philosophy in France in the early 70s, we still did a lot of psychology as part of philosophy. But it was just around that time that things were really being split.

And so later on I decided to retrain and do another first degree and then my training as a clinical psychologist, because I had started to work as a philosopher with only a master's degree in philosophy in mental hospitals in France.

And while I found that a really great challenge to apply philosophical ideas to those really deep problems of mainly autistic and psychotic people that I worked with, and I wanted to learn more about it.

So that's when I retrained as a clinical psychologist and as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the Lacanian tradition, because that is what everybody did in France in the 70s. You couldn't get away from it.

So when I came to this country eventually in 1977, it was because I was invited by the Philadelphia Association and the Arbors Association, which you may not have heard of, but which are organizations to do alternative work, in those days they called it anti-psychiatry, with people who had been in mental hospitals and who wanted to stop being treated as patients, wanted to stop their medication, and wanted to go as deeply as they could into their difficulties to try and make sense of it for themselves with the assistance of professionals.

You did it. Well done. Thank you. Thank you, my hero. Thank you, Phil. Fantastic.

So I don't know what he did with the slides, but let's go back to that one.

Okay, so as I said, that was an offer I couldn't refuse, and I left everything behind me in France.

Bear in mind I had gone to France from the Netherlands, so this was my third language and my third country when I came here, and it was quite overwhelming, I can tell you, in spite of having worked in psychiatry for five years by then and having all those qualifications to live in a therapeutic community with people who had given up using medication and who wanted to do things just by living there and talking whenever they wanted to, not, you know, 50 minutes here and 50 minutes there.

No, this was the place I lived for a year, and they had access to me 24-7, which of course in practice meant knocks on your door at two o'clock in the morning, I'm suicidal, can I come in, and sitting on your bed.

This teaches you to think about psychotherapy in quite a different way.

And for me, the philosophical side of that became more and more important, and at the end of that year, after a long trip through California, staying in Esalen and other places where experimental things were being done in psychiatry and psychotherapy, I started teaching the way I had learned for myself to work with these people, and how I could use both the philosophical ideas and the psychological ideas to pull that together, to stand with people when they are at the depth of their suffering.

So that is what this is about, to engage with the other person at quite a deep level, at quite a real level, and to really consider together with them what it is that is stopping them in their tracks, and what it is that has made life unlivable to them, because most of the time that is how bad it is for people when they come and consult you.

So one of the things I realized is that people lose a sense of meaning, they lose track of the idea of what life is for, they forget that they need to live life as we make a fire.

They forget that if life doesn't offer us meanings that set us on fire automatically, then we need to learn to set fire to ourselves.

And I do not mean that in the literal sense, because I can assure you I've been at the receiving end of those kinds of things too. You know, people have done all sorts of things over the years in the therapeutic community or in the psychiatric places I have worked, but fortunately I am now working in a more cultivated environment where people know these things are not acceptable.

So setting yourself on fire is about finding your passion back. It is finding out what it is you want to live for.

And what I discovered is that always and always when people come to see me as a psychotherapist, it is because they've gotten out of touch with themselves. They've lost that inner fire, they've lost their passion, they've lost their sense of direction and purpose and meaning.

All of that has become unraveled. They're out of touch with the very things that are good and beautiful and true in the world and in ourselves.

So that is what existential therapy is about.

It is about enabling people to get some perspective, to come out of the tunnel, not just to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but to actually move out of the tunnel, to get back into that physical movement, that mental movement, that emotional movement, that spiritual movement that gives them a sense of, yeah, here we go. I know where I'm going and I can see that I can navigate my life again.

So that is the objective of existential therapy. It is about making sense of the world, but particularly about making sense of the way in which we make meaning in life.

So there is quite a difference between making sense of something and making meaning of something. And the way in which I view that is that meanings are always complex and they're always multi-layered.

As a philosopher, I have entirely rejected the opposition between dualism and monism. I believe everything is layered and multi-layered and diverse. It isn't binary. It's never binary, but it's always complex.

So I'm not interested in materialism or idealism. All of it is true in some way. Our challenge is to fit all of that together and to understand how we create a pattern of meaning that we can thrive on and enjoy living with.

So I have this system of looking at things always systematically at a physical level, a social level, a personal level, and an ideological or spiritual level, because everything has each of those aspects.

And you can argue with me about why four. Well, four historically, because of what other philosophers have said about that, and because if you have more than four, it gets a bit unwieldy.

But then of course you can divide the four into fours, each of them. So you have 16, and you can play with it.

Or you can say, well, if this is life, like a big cake, we can cut it up into four slices, or we could cut it up into five or six. I don't really care.

I just use this arbitrary four-way cutting up of the cake because it works for me and because it makes sense to people.

So before we go any further, before I taint you with my ideas, take a piece of paper and a pen and write down eight statements or 12 statements or 16 statements or 20 statements about yourself.

Quickly, just a word. Who are you? What defines you? Who are you? What are your meanings?

But try to make it divisible by four. It will make it much easier.

Don't think about it too long. Just write it down as it flows.

Okay, now what I would like you to do is to talk to your partner. You've already sort of partnered up in the previous session.

And to establish whether these things you've written down are physical, social, personal or spiritual.

So the things that are physical are statements like I'm a man or a woman or I'm both. I'm trans, perhaps. But anything to do with gender certainly has a physical element, but it may also have another element too.

So you may find that every statement you've made can actually be located at different dimensions.

So when I say I'm a woman, I am surely thinking in a physical way, but I'm also actually thinking about my social role and the interesting battles I've had to wage in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, particularly to get anywhere near where I am now.

I am also thinking about myself personally and making sense of my identity as a woman and claiming that in a way that suits me rather than the way in which other people define it.

And I also think of it in a spiritual way. Funnily enough, when I think about giving birth to my children and raising them and my grandchildren, there is a kind of a sense of a global sort of feeling of the meaning of being a woman.

So I can deepen every statement I make and look at it in a layered way.

So take a few minutes each to discuss what you've written down and let the other person help you think about this layered way of looking at that.

If you want, I can also turn the next transcript into the same LingQ-friendly format.