2. Existential Philosophy and Psychotherapy

I'll give you five minutes for that, now maybe more.

You have just started doing existential therapy because you have started talking about yourself in a more philosophical and exploratory way.

You haven't gone to a particular problem. You have gone to look at yourself in the round. You have challenged yourself to look at everything that came to your mind from different perspectives.

You have also been in dialogue with another person rather than another person doing something to you. All of those are characteristics of existential therapy.

It is very much dialogic. We work together as human beings. We work together to try and understand how this person is perceiving the world, is engaged with the world, is entangled in the world, is moving in the world, is connected or disconnected to the things that matter to them.

So that is very much the beginning of the process of existential therapy.

And of course we find that everything is layered. I'm not going to ask you to feedback about it at all, but we'll come back to it later.

Everything is layered and connected in the universe. You know where we are, don't you? I'm sure you know this picture.

Our galaxy is here somewhere. The galaxy, you can't see the sun and the different planets, let alone the Earth.

The universe is bloody complex and it is both extremely uplifting and quite scary to think of ourselves as tiny little specks in that great, vast, amazing, astonishing, awesome thing that we really haven't got a clue about what it is about.

We have many different theories, religious theories, philosophical theories, but really nobody knows the full truth of it.

We are just here on this Earth for, what, 60, 70, 80, 90, maybe a hundred years, doing stuff which we call living.

And lots of us find that problematic and difficult, and existential therapy is a way to enable you to get a hold of it instead of wasting your time and actually begin to make sense of it and, as I said, start to take charge of it.

Start to think about where you want to be with all of that and how you want to move forward with it.

But never forget, we are never but one aspect, one element of something that's much wider. And relationships are always essential to our survival and are what inspires us.

So look back to what you've written down and you will see that every single statement you've made implies a relationship.

It replies relationship to your body, to your mind, to other people, to yourself, to your image of yourself, to your purpose, to your future, to your past.

There is always a definition of how you are in relation to your world.

And that is far more significant than you realize because by defining what you connect with, you choose your territory. And by disconnecting from things, you also choose your territory.

Now some people are in need of more connectivity and some people are in need of less connectivity. Some people are in need of simply organizing their connectivity so that it isn't overwhelming any longer.

One of my favorite philosophers is Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher who is often called the father of existentialism. He worked at the beginning of the 19th century.

And this, what he said here, is very interesting. He said, most people are subjective toward themselves and objective towards all others, frightfully objective sometimes, meaning judgmental.

But the task is precisely to become objective toward oneself and subjective towards all others.

There is something revolutionary in that, which is like the Copernican Revolution.

Instead of thinking that everything turns around us, it is about shifting our view to seeing how we connect to everything else that is in the world.

And to allow ourselves to learn to take different viewpoints, not just the viewpoints from our little herd egos, but the viewpoint from our community or the viewpoint from our boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse or children.

And to try out these different viewpoints and have a dialogue about it with the other people in our life in order to get a greater, wider perspective on our lives.

Very interesting when you start doing it. By no means easy to do.

When people come for psychotherapy, they're always self-absorbed, inevitably.

When we're in trouble, when we're upset, when we've lost something that's important to us or somebody in our lives and we feel we can't cope, we become very self-absorbed.

We feel that the solution is going to be to navel gaze, to really go into it and that somehow magically that will sort it all out.

Well, actually, very often the solution is that we have become too cut off and too self-absorbed and too obsessed with the problems and that by taking a wider view and bringing other things into view, things resolve and start to change all by themselves.

So it is often about re-engaging with the world rather than disengaging from the world and, of course, engaging in different ways as well.

Existential therapists refuse the system of psychopathology.

Now, don't get me wrong. I teach all my students to learn about the system of psychopathology and understand and being able to engage in psychiatry with other professionals to be able to make sense of what they're talking about.

But I also teach them to get away from pinning labels on people and calling things names that reduce a person's capacity for openness and broadening of their understanding of themselves because most often when people come for therapy, they've had labels pinned on them and they say, oh, I'm coming because I'm very OCD-ish and I really need to sort it out or, you know, I am really quite autistic and I really need to think about that some more.

People take these labels very seriously and they think they define them. Not true.

We all have the capacity for all of those behaviors and all of those experiences. Some of us more than others, you know, let's not fool ourselves.

But nevertheless, we are much more changeable and much more flexible than we often like to think.

So existential therapists inquire as to what people's problems with living are rather than what their psychopathology is. And they draw on the wisdom of philosophy to work on that.

So as existential therapists, we use philosophical method.

Now, let me throw some nice philosophical words at you.

So we use, for instance, phenomenology, which I'm going to teach you in a moment, quite simply. How many of you know how to work with phenomenology? Very few. I will tell you a bit about that.

Dialectics, you've all heard about dialectics, but how to use that in psychotherapy.

Meiotics, you know what that is? That's Plato's science of midwifery. That's what meiotics means. It's the science of midwifery.

But it's not giving birth to a baby, it's giving birth to the wisdom that is at the heart or in the head or all over any person that you speak with.

It is about finding what they have inside of them in terms of knowledge and wisdom, but have hidden away and helping them give birth to it.

So that tells you straight away what existential therapists do. They give birth so that the other person can become more than what they were before.

They do not impose their own idea or their own interpretation on the person. They help them find out what they know.

And that is what hermeneutics is about.

So hermeneo in Greek means, I always have to show off my classical education. It's one of the things that gave me most confidence when I was a teenager. Yes, my sister bullied me, but I spoke Greek and Latin. So, you know, I must be okay. So that's become a sort of part of my identity.

So meiotics is the science of interpretation, but not in a Freudian way, not in a way where we have a theoretical framework and we apply that framework to what we see in the person and we make an interpretation saying, that's an Oedipus complex, that's a Freudian slip.

No, we say, look what's happening there. Let's describe it. Let's look at it together. What do you make of it? What is your understanding of it? What is your interpretation of what is going on?

And then we can dialogue about it. We can argue about it even.

But at the end of the day, it is about that other person owning their life, their understanding of who they are.

I'm not going to tell you what it means that you wrote down those words rather than other words. And you might write something quite different next week or would have written something different yesterday.

I'm not going to say that's a psychological test. I'm going to mark you out of a hundred on that.

No, it's just a vehicle. It is in fact what we call a heuristic device.

Heuristics means the science of searching for something. It is a philosophical way of searching for what can be found.

Very often, heuristic methods involve us looking into our own hearts and minds while we're working with the other person. And this is also part of the phenomenological method.

So that is what you will find out about in a moment.

So existential therapists are directional rather than directive. They enable people to find their own direction.

They do neither impose direction, they are not prescriptive, nor do they not impose direction by being laissez-faire and allowing people in confusion.

They engage, but they allow the other person to find their own way, to get out of their stagnation, to become more productive in their life and to be able to feel conversant with their possibilities.

Nietzsche, who is also one of my favorite philosophers and who of course followed on quite nicely from Kierkegaard as he worked at the end of the 19th century, said, man's task is simple. He should cease letting his existence be a thoughtless accident.

Man, or woman, or all of us, should become more reflective about life and about ourselves and everything else.

That, by the way, is a picture of the Oracle of Delphi.