Existential Philosophy and Psychotherapy - Emmy van Deurzen

What is existential therapy? Well, I like to call it existential therapy because it is not just about psychotherapy. 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 and the way that you lead it. So, it focuses not just on what is in your mind, but also on 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 backgrounds, your history, your

future. All those different elements come just as much into focus as your mind. 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. 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. Later on, I decided to retrain and do another first degree, and then my training as a clinical psychologist. My start as a philosopher was 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 deep problems of mainly autistic and psychotic people that I worked with, I wanted to learn more about it. 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 Arbours Association, which you may not have heard of, but which are organizations that did 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! 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 in my third country. When I came here, 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 2 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. 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 for them. Because most of the time, that is how bad it is for people when they come and consult you. 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. 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, their sense of direction, and their 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—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. There is quite a difference between making sense of something and making meaning of something. 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. 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. You can argue with me about why—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 sixteen, 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 makes sense to people. So before we go any further, before I tame you with my ideas, take a piece of paper and a pen, and write down eight statements, or twelve statements, or sixteen statements, or twenty statements about yourself quickly—just a word. You know who you are, 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 establish whether these things you've written down are physical, social, personal, or spiritual. The things that are physical are statements like, "I'm a man or a woman," or "I'm both—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. 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 feeling of the meaning of being a woman. So I can deepen every statement I make and look at it in a layered way. 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. 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 interconnected 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? Sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, maybe a hundred years, doing stuff which we call living. Lots of us find

that problematic and difficult. 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. As I said, start to take charge of it; 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 relationship. It replies to 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. 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 toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes," meaning judgmental. "But the task is precisely to become objective toward oneself and subjective toward 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 allowing ourselves to learn to take different viewpoints—not just the viewpoints from our little hurt egos but the viewpoints from our community, or the viewpoint from our boyfriend or girlfriend, or spouse or children. To try out these different viewpoints and have a dialogue about it with the other people in our lives is vital to get a greater, wider perspective on our lives. Very interesting, but by no means easy to do. When people

come for psychotherapy, they are often 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 it, and to be able to engage in psychiatry with other professionals to be able to make sense of what they are 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. As existential therapists, we use philosophical methods. Now, let me throw some nice philosophical words at you. For instance, we use 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? Maieutic—so you know what that is? That’s Plato’s science of midwifery. That’s what maieutics 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 that they have hidden away and helping them give birth to it. So, that tells you straightaway

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, they find out what they know, and that is what hermeneutics is about. So, "hermeneutic" in Greek means "to interpret." I always have to show off my classical education; it's one of the things that gave me the 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. That's

become a sort of part of my identity. My ethics 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," or "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 "dough" 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. 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 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. Existential therapists are directional rather than directive. They enable people to find their own direction; they neither impose direction, nor do they not impose direction by being laissez-faire and allowing people in confusion. They engage but 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, woman, or all of us should become more reflective about life and about ourselves. And everything else, by the way, is a picture of the Oracle of Delphi. Martin

Buber, who was a theologian and also a philosopher, spoke about the inter-human—what happens between people. He said, "It is not you or I that do communication; it is something we create together." When we come together with another person, we create the interpersonal world, and it is a third thing in the space between us. Something is created that each of us responds to differently. It is a bit like cooking together; we create a new source of life, and we both contribute to that. So, existential therapists aim to teach people how they are powerful in that dialogue—not

to dominate that dialogue, but to enable the other person to become conversant with what happens for them when they enter into that dialogue. Buber thought that truth is found in that conversation and that all actual life is an encounter—an encounter between me and other people, or an encounter between me and a landscape, for instance, or a place or a memory. It is only when I enter into that encounter that something new takes place, that something is changed. This is what we call intersubjectivity. It isn't about me being subjective and you being subjective; it is about

us both putting our subjectivities together and creating something quite new, which we call intersubjectivity. But we can only do that if we've taken that first step of not just being in our own subjectivity in a defensive way or accusing the other of being "objectively speaking" this, that, or the other. We need to open our minds, get out from our defenses, and enter into what Ely called a loving struggle—a loving struggle with the other but also a loving struggle with life. You know that Buber made a distinction between "I–It" relationships and "I–Thou" relationships. Very clever insight!

The most clever part of it is usually forgotten, and it works like this: when I enter into a relationship with this clock, I see this as an object. I relate to it as a thing—same with the computer, same with that table, same with this clicker—and I might get very annoyed with it. I am in an "I–It" relationship. Now, a lot of the time we treat people as if they too are like objects in our life. We use them, we abuse them, we say nasty things to them, we think bad things of them, we become suspicious

of them, and we’re annoyed with them. We treat them as annoying objects or objects we can use in our lives. To truly learn to see the other person as a subjective entity, as a bit of life in the world, takes quite a bit of undoing. Even when I stand here, I can do it with you because you have a nice open look in your eyes, and some of the other looks, you know, make me a little frightened. I think I mustn’t pick you because you might feel I’m assaulting you in some way. You’re up for

it. I look at you. And I think, gosh, what's hidden behind your eyes? What history is hidden there? What experiences, what worries are there? What anxieties? It's quite overwhelming when I start seeing you like that, with an inquiring and open mind. I already feel something quite different about you when I allow myself to do that. It almost brings me to tears to start guessing at who you really are and what your struggles are in this world. And if you can do the same for me, too, then something amazing happens between us; we put together that

loving openness with the other, and we change ourselves. And that's the genius bit in Buber: when I relate to the world in an objective way, I harden myself. I make myself instrumental; I become like a thing myself. When I open to the other and inquire as to who they really are and how they really are in life, in the world, they live for what matters to them. Something shifts—something shifts in them, in between us, and something shifts in myself. So it is when I'm in therapy with my clients. I become a better me than when

I am doing the principal bits, and I have to, you know, keep order, or I have to make annoying decisions about discipline or things like that. I become instrumentalist, and I hate that feeling. But that, too, needs doing. We cannot just be "I"; though some of the time, we have to be "I" it. We have to be tough-minded, and we have to deal with the world of things. So both those things are necessary as long as we remember—as Pauli Kerr has it, a very good philosopher who hasn't had anything like the fame he deserves. He

spoke about the only way to achieve some form of knowledge is to come through it, through dialogue. And you know why that is: it is simply because if I come to knowledge without coming through dialogue, I have only one perspective on it. I do not have the benefit of the different views. And it is really in dialogue that we find out all the blind spots we've got and all the set ways of interpreting, thinking, and meaning-finding that we are all stuck with. So, this kind of therapeutic dialogue we get into is amazing because it helps

us to go beyond what we normally would assume is the case about things. It involves us both in the archaeology or the landscapes of the past. So yes, we explore the past as if it is archaeology and also the teleology or the landscapes of the future. And of course, we do that very much in the present by creating this intersubjective dialoguing that changes us both. And in that process—going between past, future, and present, weaving like the symbol of eternity the whole time, looping around—we create something quite new. We alter meanings. Now, briefly, let's go back

to what I said before about sense and meaning and the distinctions between them. So, sense-making we do by relating to external things, and meaning we make by coming to our own intrinsic motivations. And of course, we need to again loop around and do both. If people make meanings that are intrinsically important to themselves, they become cut off from the world. If people make sense without making meaning and connecting things to themselves, they become very good at functioning in the outside world. They may get very high up in society because they fit in nicely, but they

might find that life is lacking that depth of meaning. I see both kinds of people. I see people who have gotten to amazing situations in their lives—heads of businesses, politicians, pop stars, even—and they’ve got it down to a tee. But they use drugs or alcohol or are in despair most of the time because they've completely missed out on this. I also work with people who have become cut off from the outside world, who live in a universe of their own making, where they daren't go out of their room. They have to be brought to the

therapy room by their mother, their father, their sister, or their wife, or their husband because they’re in a world of their own and they have disconnected. Why? Because, as usual, there was no place for them in the world—or so they thought. These people are just as poor as those who thought they had to be out there in the world, conquering the world all the time. There was no room for that in our thoughts that reconnect with meaning. So, we need to do both these things. Funnily enough, I don't know how many of you know about

linguistic theory and the seer's and structuralism and all of that, but that was a large part of my training in philosophy. I can't help but go back to it. Estação Seer said the sign-like table has always two parts to it. One is the signifier and one is the signified. The signifier is the word or the image, and the signified is what is actually evoked in the mind about it. The funny thing is that there is a slippage between those things, and that is what makes it possible for us to communicate. When I say to Joyce,

"Joyce, I'm going to buy some more shoes," Joyce thinks of some particular kinds of shoes that she likes, and I think of some particular shoes that I like. When I say to my husband, "You really need a new pair of shoes," he says, "No, why?" And then we become aware that we talked about it—that his idea of his really old shoes that I think are scandalous... "Full of holes" is the right idea about shoes, and my idea of nasty new shoes that will be hard and horrible is not his idea of shoes. So, though we

communicate about shoes, actually we have very different meanings attached to it, and it's funny how we forget that. It's also good we forget it because it allows us to think we're talking about the same things when actually we are not. Now, this is hugely important in existential therapy because we constantly go back to asking people, "What does it mean to you? What is that like for you? What is your idea of that? How would you define that?" We investigate with the other person what their life, their universe, is actually about, and the difference, the slippage

between those terms, is the most interesting bit. You know how I told you earlier that I grew up in the Netherlands for 18 years, did my classical education there, then moved to France, then worked and studied and lived there for many years, and then came to England? Well, you know, each time I made that linguistic move, I lost all my signals. I lost all my ability to make myself understood or explain things. But you know, at the end of the day—and there is now research on this—when you do that, one really good thing happens: you

get disconnected from the signifiers, and you tune into the signified. So, I'm always aware when I use words. I don't think about the words; I think about the thing itself. I think about what it is I'm actually talking about, and then, like magic, I get words in Dutch, in French, and in English, and I just need to pick the right one. Sometimes, now that I'm getting ancient, that is failing—the wrong language coming into my mind—and I go, "What? I know it in Dutch and in French, but what the hell was it in English?" Or the

other way around. It's random. Well, it isn't random, but you know it can be different languages that come or don't come. So, to get back to what you were talking about earlier today: dreams. But also, to get back to what you were talking about before this session: memories. These things are not connected to the words. They are in between your dreams and your private meanings, and our memories and your imagination—they are not objectified in the way that you might think they are. They are invisible, and to recover the freedom to go back to those realms

is what will make you feel really good about your life. So, the term I like to use is that in existential therapy, we try to connect to a person's "Anto-dynamics," which means, of course, the dynamics of life, of being, of existence, rather than psychodynamics. We help them to figure out what it is that is most meaningful to them and how they can make progress towards creating more meaning and more understanding in their lives as well. So, it is very much what I like to think of as an evolutionary project. But that means it's also about

learning; it's about learning new ways of thinking about themselves and about the world, about interacting and communicating, about planning things and wanting things and abandoning things. It is always about dialogue. It's always about a search for truth. It's always about finding your passion, finding your inner authority, and learning to value your own voice and thinking for yourself. Don't let anybody tell you what you believe or what you think. Allow yourself the space to hear yourself and listen and communicate with yourself; it's so important. And out of that, you will know what your overriding purpose in

life has got to be. We have many small purposes in life. There are many tasks and duties we need to accomplish, but beyond that, there is a wider purpose. What is it you want to have done with your life when it's the last day of your life? How do you want to look back? What do you want to have achieved with it? In order to make sense of it, we have to use all these things I've said before. We have to understand the paradoxes that function in life and the dialectics at work. We have to

think about oppositions, like freedom and responsibility, and life and death. We have to think both about our talents and our vulnerabilities. We have to think about the whole range of time, not just about one. And of course, existential therapists don't abandon the facts in psychology; they still learn about Piaget and Jung and Freud and Skinner and William James and Watson and Pavlov and all of that because these were the pioneers who came up with ideas about how things do work out. It’s important to know about it and to be critical about it and engage with

it critically so that you can rethink it. Now, a more sensitive issue: yes, we also accept positive psychology because it is useful to know some of the scientific data about what makes a person feel better and what makes a person feel worse. So, let me take you through this quickly. These are all scientifically proven facts: if you practice smiling, you will report greater happiness in your life. If you sleep more, you will say your well-being has improved. If you practice gratitude—thinking, "What was good today? What are the gifts I have received today? What has life

offered me today?"—you will feel better. Most religions do this, you know; it wasn't positive psychologists who invented it. If you help others—back to religion—most religions do this too: if you help others two hours a week, it's got to be two hours a week. It can't just be setting... Somebody across the zebra crossing; you will feel much better about yourself if you exercise at least seven minutes every day. I do 15 minutes of yoga every morning; it makes a hell of a difference. You open yourself up to the day instead of going through another day. It's

really important to do these things. If you go outside more often for walks, especially when it is thirteen point nine degrees, you will really thrive on that. I try to walk as often as I can. I go on a hill walk every week at least. If you move closer to work, you will also feel better. Yes, I can see a lot of people thinking, "One day," but if you spend more time with family and friends, you will feel much better too. If you plan a trip, but please don't take it, you will increase your well-being.

You understand how that works; it's the idea of opening up your universe, seeing new places, looking at the pictures, imagining it—that gets your imagination creative, and that makes you happy. But when you're on the trip, there are too many difficulties and too many challenges, and many people come back home from holiday saying, "Never again," or "Now I need a holiday." So that's how that works. And finally, if you meditate and rewrite your brain, that will affect your sense of well-being. So, these things are proven to be the case. But think for a moment about what

happens when I work with a woman who comes to me and says, "In the last six months, I have lost both my mother and my father, my husband has just left me, and my son has just died in a car accident." Do you think I tell her to practice smiling or to sleep more when she is in somnath yuck and she can't sleep at all anymore? Or do I tell her, "Just go for a walk, and you'll feel better"? Of course not; it's complete nonsense. These things are useful, but they are not what existential therapy

is about. Existential therapy is about exploring those huge challenges that life puts to us—those difficulties that we think, "I can't cope with anymore," but you will find a way to understand and cope with. That's what it's about. And in order to do that, you need to have some understanding of how things affect us. You need to think about how we are all resonating all the time with these things, people, situations, and ideas that are all around us and that are hammering away at us the whole time and that we resonate with. But we can learn

to either pick up these things and let them affect us, or we can change these things. We can alter them when they hit us; we can interpret and reinterpret meanings. We can transform what happens to us or what comes to us. We can transform it into something productive or creative. We can reflect on it and therefore mull it over internally—not in a worrying way, but in a receptive way—with a trust that we can find a place for it somewhere, that we can receive whatever happens to us. And that's what the session before this was about;

it gives you a shortcut to how you might actually stop going over the same thing over and over again and find a space in yourself to just receive it alongside other things that are important too. We can either choose to absorb things and really take the meat out of it, or we can reject it. We can even stop it. Some people get very good at warding things off or sending things back to other people. You know, some people in business are extremely good at this. I've had to learn to do that myself because otherwise, I

can't be in therapy with them. I have to be able to give as good as I get with every single individual. So, when I work with somebody who, when I say, "Hmm, you sounded a bit angry there," responds, "Anger? That's nothing by comparison to what you'll see in me if you keep telling me what my feelings are," he’s right; that is his way of protecting himself. People find different ways of protecting themselves. The objective, however, of existential therapy is to learn how not to just protect ourselves, but to get good at taking all the grist

into our mill, no matter what it is, and do something with it. So we can learn to magnify things. We can learn to illuminate things. We can learn to refract its many different facets as we would do through phenomenology. We can transform meanings as well as receiving them. And now, I'm going to take you through a little bit of Western philosophy because this is what Western philosophy was all about, and all of the different brands of psychotherapy were there in ancient Athens already. Plato said, "Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good

men eat and drink that they may live," because we may well want to do both those things. Socrates was the first philosopher really who said, "The unreflective life is not worth living." But that's something you'll find everywhere, all over the place. You'll find it in Taoism, you'll find it in Islam, and you'll find it in every world religion. The challenge to human beings is to learn to receive life, reflect on it, and make something of it. You know Plato's cave; you know how that works. That is absolutely the epitome of what existential therapy is about,

as far as I'm concerned. You know these guys here are sitting chained up to a wall with their backs to the wall. They're watching these shadows on the wall of the cave on the other side. And you know what they're doing? They're sitting there their whole lives, arguing with each other, saying, "This means this and that means that," and they're competing with each other, and they're getting into all sorts of problems. What's actually happening is there are some other guys here that are marching up and down that wall with these images in their heads, and

that is reflected on the wall because there's a fire here. Strange situation, quite a lot how we live a lot of the time, where we watch our screens and our televisions, and we get very worked up about all sorts of things. We think we know better than the others, and we get so in a huff about it all. Well, said Plato, what really needs to happen is that one day the philosopher needs to come into the cave and set these guys free, take away their chains, allow them to get behind this wall, see what's happening

with this fire, and then encourage them to climb out from that cave into the sunlight and discover that not only is there a different world here, but there's an entirely different world out there that these poor guys have been completely alienated from. Well, that's existential therapy. When people come to me, they're like in chains, they're going round in their heads with all sorts of things that really ought not to be the problem. And when they start to think about the big issues, about the things that truly matter to them—things that will matter to them by

the time they die, hopefully at the age of 90 after a long, productive life—then these problems are insignificance. Suddenly, they start to think about what their purpose is, what their direction is, what they want to do. Of course, there's another way to look at it, which is that they should explore the cave because the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek, and that's true too. So, you can play with meanings in all directions, and as usual, everything is true—but everything needs to be set in proportion and in perspective with everything else. So,

after Socrates came Plato, and after Plato came Aristotle. Plato taught Aristotle, and Aristotle thought that these ideas that Socrates and Plato had come up with were very helpful to enable people to live their lives in a better way. They were really psychotherapists, you know; they were talking with people, which is why Socrates, of course, had to die, because he was talking to the youth in Athens, and he got them to have ideas about freedom and change and all that kind of thing. They were psychotherapists. Aristotle thought, well, to be a proper psychotherapist, you have to

have more knowledge. So he started this whole system of trying to describe human knowledge, but he also came up with this idea that what people should try to achieve is eudaimonia. Now, eudaimonia means to be on good terms with your demons, to be open to your spirits, to be in good conscience, if you like, to have that process of reflection and understanding going on inside of yourself at all times. And at the same time, he thought you had to benefit the community at large rather than just yourself. I won't go into it more. After that,

we got the Epicureans, who started to look at how to treat human suffering—again, a psychotherapeutic system to try and make people happier. What his solution was, was to eliminate all pain and disturbance, which is what he called ataraxia: reduce your life so that you can just control what is still there, and all the disturbing elements are gone, and make the most of what you've got. After that, you got the skeptics. They did even weirder things; they said if we can become skeptical and unknowing and uncaring about everything, then all our problems will be gone. Then

nothing will upset us; we won't have emotions at all anymore because we'll just say, "Who cares?" or "What's that?" or "Hmm, not important." And so we get a little way of life without emotions where everything is hunky-dory. So they weren't getting rid of false beliefs; they got rid of all beliefs. Well, I know a fair few people like that these days—not a good way to live at all. The Stoics got a bit more clever about it; they said the goal has got to be that a person becomes their own teacher in the end and that

we can improve a person's soul by making them exercise their soul every day. So they need to use logic and poetry and other arts to make themselves more open to the good things so that the flourishing life can affirm good meanings like wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. But at the end of the day, it also meant detaching yourself from caring or worrying about things, and they called that apathy. Many of my clients, when they start out, have a complaint about apathy; they have lost a sense of enjoyment or importance about their life, and what they

prefer to do is stay in bed all day and not do anything, get away from everything they can. They're not happy at all, of course. So let me skip all the way about 15 centuries forward now to the philosopher Spinoza. The reason I skipped so fast—and I hope I'm not going to offend anybody—but what happened in between the Stoics and this time of Spinoza is that philosophy became entirely taken over by Christianity, and philosophy basically died as an open discipline. It was taken over by one way of looking at things. But, rispa Nosa! Things change,

and of course, Descartes is also a very important influence on that, much as he's maligned because Spinoza understood that our emotions are actually extremely important. That these early guys, these Athenians, got it all wrong. They tried, each in their own way, to stop our emotions taking us over. No, said Spinoza, what we need to do is understand our emotions—not to reduce them, but actually make sense of them. He understood something extremely important, which is that essentially we have two sorts of emotions: we have emotions that make us feel we're going up towards something that matters

to us, or we have emotions that take us down away from something that matters to us. Now, the funny thing is when Kierkegaard talks about this, he says all our emotions of aspiration, of going up, make us anxious. That's what anxiety is. Anxiety is those up-swinging emotions that make us want something, that make us want to do something. Because what is anxiety? It's just a simple mechanistic thing; it's adrenaline. It's our body getting geared up for the thing we want to achieve, the thing we need to do. The problem arises when we want to do

it on the one hand, and on all the other hands we suppress it. Then it spins out of control; it becomes like panic. So imagine you're sitting there thinking, "Oh my god, what rubbish she's talking! I wish I had the courage to say something about it. Should I put my hand up? Shall I do—what shall I not do?" You get this adrenaline, this lovely flow of energy, but you suppress it, and you say to yourself, "No, they're all gonna think I'm stupid," or "It won't make any sense," or "She seems so in the flow; I

don't dare cut her off." So you suppress your energy, and then you become slightly unpleasantly out of touch with yourself. But if you use the energy and you go for it, and you go for that purpose that your passion directs you towards, you won't be anxious; you'll feel energized. You'll feel excited. I can guarantee you that it works that way. I used to be an extremely oversensitive and very nervous child and teenager, and I put myself through lots of risky and difficult challenges and situations. Once I learned that this is how it works, I could

reinterpret those feelings, and I could say, "Yeah, here it goes; I'm on a roll. Here's my energy rising. Great! I know what I want to do with it," and from that moment on, it was no longer a problem. So Spinoza took the view that the universe is lawful, which we pretty well think it is, and that therefore, if we understand how ontology works, we can basically work with that. One of the things he found—and many others have found—is that everything has an opposite. This is how kids learn to make sense of their existence. They say

something is low or high, big or small, far or near, good or bad. You know, when they read stories, it's about goodies and baddies, and they get really interested. It's black-and-white thinking; it's either this or that. It's very important that we learn to do this because we learn to discriminate between one thing and another. But it is entirely wrong to think that that discrimination is in one thing and another because, actually, this is just a way for us to make meaning of things. What is really the case is that everything is incredibly complex and must

be looked at in the round to really truly make sense of it. But at first, we start with the flow of energy between the extremes. You know, there we are, the positive charge and the negative charge—that's what energy is, the flow between. That's what thunderstorms are like: a positive charge on a sunny day with a negative charge at the bottom of the cloud, and kaboom! You've got your lightning and your thunder. So is there enough differential in your lives, or are you running out of energy? How do you get the differential back into your life?

Very often, it is about having more diversity in your life, having more challenges in your life, having more difficulties in your life, having greater problems in your life. Ha! We turn it upside down because problems and difficulties are there to give you energy, to bring you to life, to make you think about solutions. You can find ways in which you can be creative around it. This is how life works, and this is how we come to dialectics. You know that thing that Hegel came up with and then Marx turned into an economic theory—but actually, let's

go back to Hegel for a bit and see how that works. One thing opposes another; we find the synthesis, and then that in itself becomes a new thesis with an opposition, and so on and so forth. Well, as it happens, there is an ongoing process there. Yes, use your energy! Tell me all about it. Well, I could suggest a few things, like going out of your way to help other people, joining political organizations, trying to solve poverty in the world, or working out what has really gone wrong with your relationships, and trying to really speak

to all the people in your life to try and get to the bottom of that. Just a few suggestions! My dad helped—no, seriously, it is important we challenge ourselves and we do seek out problems and difficulties. So this is how it works in therapy. That was old Hegel. Somebody comes in with their view of their past, and in the dialogue together, we are comparing that with the present situation we’re in. And out of that is generated a picture for the future: a synthesis, a wider view, a new... Perspective is something they hadn't thought about, so

it always involves rediscovering the movement in your life that forwards the feeling of going somewhere, of something good happening, of something changing for the better—not just by chance, but because you have understood how it works and you're engaging with it. You start to feel that actually your little unit of humanity can function much, much better than you've ever functioned before, and the sky is really the limit. This is my overview of some of the tensions we all have to work with at these four levels: physical, social, personal, and spiritual. They go across, you know, we

have to work with the physical in nature, in relation to things—the body and the cosmos, different layers of that. At each level, we have these tensions, these contradictions, what I call paradoxes. We can't opt for one; we can't have all pleasure and no pain, we can't have just health and never illness, we can't just have harmony and no chaos. If we're going to open up to life, we've got to accept that; we've got to be prepared for both those sides. We can't solve Brexit by leaving or remaining; we've got to look at the issues and

look at all the sides of the equation, which is what we haven't done. We need to understand the connections between things, the multifold connections between things, because things are in patterns, and every person's life has many different points that are important, and they're all interconnected together. I need to go quick because there's only a quarter to four now we're left, 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, yes, Heidegger, Sartre, the existentialists, mainly the French: Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, and Camus. The post-structuralists: Foucault, Deleuze, Rancière, and the existential humanists: Buber, Tillich, May, Arendt, 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, yes, 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. 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—the first World Congress on existential therapy—in 2015 in London, and the second one will take place in Buenos Aires, tango in 2019. 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 to teach within the year, and so I couldn't get a visa to go. 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. It's amazing! 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. 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. There are

precise ways in which you apply it, and that's what we call the phenomenological method. It involves the phenomenological reduction, the eidetic reduction, and the transcendental reduction. Some of the things to say about that is the phenomenological reduction stops you from 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 sets it aside, brackets it. Then it makes you go back to what it is you're observing and describe it in great patient detail. 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 of 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. 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 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 into the world in time; we're all limited in time, and it is only with our death that our life is completed. 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 it 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. 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 four-fold, thus the four worlds model: that was the Big Bang being exploded into earth, world, men, and gods. Ever since, we've had to make sense of all of that in some way. He also had this amazing idea that the word thinking actually comes from the same word as thinking, and that before we learn to think, we need to learn to think; a very powerful idea, I think. It is really about opening up to a level of inner thought and inner being that allows us to find

a whole new breath in life, a whole new way of being here, which he often called the "schpeel," which translates as elbow room, so that you have room for maneuvering. But actually, it means the place-space. 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 forgetting about them, but owning them, earning them, digging

into them, understanding them, and 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, 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 she can't draw a straight line in a curved space. 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. That is what I try to do when I do existential therapy, and it is what I try to teach my students. Hey Laz, 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. Suppression of feelings absolutely leads to dysfunction, despair, and loss of freedom. The best thing you can do is to retrieve all of your emotions. I've created this wonderful compass of emotions where the colors of the rainbow are fitted together

exactly as they are when you are an artist, with the primary colors and the secondary colors in their right spaces, and the emotions in their right spaces, because the emotions, as Spinoza knew, relate to each other. 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—oh, 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 of it. 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, so words of a new purpose, we go to shame at first because we think we're not good enough to do it, but we always are. We become envious of others who we see capable of doing it, but we too are capable of doing it. We get in touch with

our desire again, and with that, we become hopeful. We are now going into that nice space of achieving something towards our high feelings, where we have to do the work of love. Love is work; love is work we do to tend to the things we value, and when that works out, we experience joy, and that takes us right back to feeling on top of the world. And you know what's going to happen next, don't you? You can slip right back down to the bottom, and you're doing this at so many different levels, on all the

planes of your life, all at the same time. So in order to make sense of that, when I'm in dialogue with my clients, I need these kinds of diagrams so that I know where the person is, what it is that is contradictory for them, what paradox they're working with, what possibilities they see, what hopes they have, what aspirations they have. And in all of that, our work together is about achieving together that understanding of what it means to be human and struggle with the difficulties, which we all find so hard. But we can all make

more of it with a little bit of help. Thank you very much. You've enough time for questions—just two questions, maybe? Yeah, no, no, no. It's not like that. These things are also negative. You can become very giddy in your joy, and that can be extremely annoying or destructive. Every emotion has a positive and a negative side; they're all necessary things. With that question—because I forgot to point that out—I have better diagrams that show that and that. Yeah, that reminds you of different things that can happen to that. So, you know, jealousy can be negative, but

it can also be vigilance; it can be a positive. Joy can be thrill and excitement, but as I said, it can also make us lose our minds completely and get into trouble. Every single space in our emotions has pluses and minuses, like everything does. Thank you. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes! Good question, good question. Many psychotherapists from other schools will also work in similar ways to what I have described, and many existential therapists will use some cognitive-behavioral ideas, some psychoanalytic ideas—you know, lots of different things are in common. But where this is different is the

focus and the emphasis. So this is very much about being equals in dialogue together, and it is always about your life rather than about you and your psyche. The psyche comes into it, and your emotions are hugely important as part of that, but it is not what we focus on. We go way, way beyond that. We have lots of political discussions, social discussions, philosophical discussions, cultural discussions—it is much, much broader-based; that's the best I can say. Sorry, compassion—absolutely! It is all about finding our passion together and seeing how we need to interact with that and

kind of give-and-take with each other. Absolutely right. I think that's probably it, people. I came to go home. Enjoy your evening. All right.