Emmy van Deurzen - on Existential Therapy - The London Psychology Collective

Hello, I'm Terry Georgia from the London Psychology Collective. Today, we have with us Professor Amy van Duzend, who is one of the UK's best-known figures in the field of existential psychotherapy. Amy is a philosopher, a psychotherapist, a psychologist, and a university professor.

She is also the author of many books on existential psychotherapy. Welcome, Amy. Hi there!

So, would you like to start, Amy, by telling us what existential psychotherapy is? Existential therapy, in a nutshell, is a philosophical method of working with people to help them resolve their difficulties in living. A summation.

And before we go into more detail, can I also ask why existential coaching as well? Okay, so existential coaching is a way to help people who have troubles or specific issues, usually in their work, to gain a more philosophical perspective on those issues. This allows them to be in a position to make wiser decisions.

Those decisions could pertain to their personal lives, the way they do their job, or they could also involve decisions within their organizations, enterprises, or even political decisions as well. So coaching can apply to lots of different settings where psychotherapy and counseling would not be appropriate or desirable. Both of these areas are, I suppose, influenced by similar figures.

You know, very much so—writers, scholars, psychologists, and, of course, philosophers. Absolutely! So, could you tell us about some of the key figures that have influenced you?

Yes, well, in terms of the existential aspect of therapy, the philosophers are more significant to me than the therapists. There really haven't been that many therapists who have worked with truly existential methods until recent years. The philosophers that influenced me the most include Socrates.

It’s Socrates rather than Plato, but I acknowledge Plato as well. However, it is the figure of Socrates and his approach of truth-finding, argumentation, and dialogue with people that has influenced me more than anything else. Other philosophers like Aristotle are also important, as well as the Stoic philosophers and other Athenian philosophers too.

In later periods, there was a philosopher who influenced me greatly: Spinoza, a Portuguese-Dutch philosopher, who had a fantastic systematic approach to philosophy and really understood how human existence is structured. I found that fascinating. Then, of course, there are figures like Hegel, but after that, it’s really the existential philosophers that have profoundly influenced me—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and then a whole range of more recent philosophers, including Ricoeur.

And, of course, my own teacher, Michel Arnaud, who is becoming more well-known now and who was a great phenomenologist that taught me really how to do proper phenomenology. I’m very grateful for that. In terms of therapists, Freud, of course, influenced me a lot, and I actually think he was somewhat of a phenomenologist.

You may or may not know that he and Husserl attended the same lectures by Franz Brentano, who is credited with inventing phenomenology. So, Freud and Husserl lived around the same time and were both influenced by that way of thinking. Freud's ideas not only engaged me with psychotherapy but also with psychoanalysis, obviously.

I was also quite influenced by Ludwig Binswanger, as he was the only well-known existential therapist in France. I studied Ludwig Binswanger’s case studies very early on, so he impacted me significantly. Yes, I was influenced by Jaspers’ work too, as well as a French psychiatrist named Alié, who created an entire system of psychopathology along phenomenological lines.

So they influenced me, and then, as I started working as an existential therapist, I discovered the work of R. D. Laing.

I read that very avidly, and it influenced me deeply because it encouraged me to find another way of working. I mean, he obviously discussed a theory of how we could think differently about mental illness, but he didn’t precisely establish a method. I was very aware that a gap existed, and from early on, I wanted to close that gap.

Yeah, yeah. And could you tell us briefly a little bit about phenomenology? Phenomenology, very briefly, was established by Edmund Husserl, who was a mathematician and logician.

He realized that mathematical methods were insufficient for the social sciences and psychological sciences. He also became aware that psychology plays an essential role in our observations across all other sciences. Therefore, we needed a method that could incorporate the values of science while also being adequate to address a person's experiences and their connection to the world.

So, phenomenology encompasses a series of methods that help describe and understand a phenomenon that you observe in the world. In helping you to grasp what that phenomenon is really about, you will also see how that phenomenon connects not only to yourself and your consciousness but also how it relates to everything around it. This gives you a comprehensive picture of how things fit together in the world, which you cannot achieve with the scientific methods that were established previously, as those methods tend to specialize and analyze only a very small part of the world.

Thus, phenomenology is an essential addition. Reading these texts, learning from these thinkers, these writers—yeah, what are some of the other concepts, do you think, that have emerged through all of that reading and that have influenced the work that you did? Hmm, well, the concept of being in relation with another person—so the work of people like Max Scheler and Martin Buber has also been very important to me, and indeed Paul Tillich and Jaspers, who have all spoken about the importance of rethinking the way we relate to other people.

They have all questioned the idea that there is a separate self and that we can just kind of create a relationship. Instead, they have rather highlighted the idea that we're always in relation and that, therefore, the way in which we do that relating is crucial to the way in which we would do psychotherapy as well. So that's influenced me majorly, and I have experimented over the years with different ways of relating to other people and of being in the world, really, altogether.

I think that's been very important for freeing myself from the kind of normally accepted norms around how to do psychotherapy, and it has made it much more experimental. Hmm, and I suppose in your approach to existential therapy, there are some concepts that have been highlighted by some of those existential philosophers, some of those earlier philosophers. Yeah, which concepts do you think are used kind of regularly?

Yeah, well, my sort of method of structural existential analysis is very much based on the four worlds as Heidegger has described them. Well, the fourfold—that was his expression. And also, for Newark School and Binswanger developing the idea that we actually operate at different levels and that if you look at different species, you will find they live in a different world.

But depending on how your consciousness is organized, how your brain is organized, you tune into the world in very different ways. Therefore, it is very important to be systematic in your observations of what the world seems like to another person and not to assume that you already know. Very often, other people create meaning from a different standpoint and a different worldview than you do yourself.

So you have to have a method to figure out where they are coming from and a method to dilute your own worldview and to be open to a different way of seeing things, but also, of course, coming to them in a dialogue so that they can see that there are other ways of looking at the same issues and, therefore, learn. Which is why I like group psychotherapy very much—because what happens when you do group psychotherapy is that you have many different standpoints. So that's the perfect place for practicing phenomenology.

Everybody comes from their point of view, and when you share those points of view, all of you get a much broader view, a much wider view, and a much deeper view. Therefore, you know, your experience changes. So one of the aspects you're saying is important here is helping people understand what their worldview is and allowing it to be challenged.

That can happen in group therapy and in individual therapy, where they can examine what their view of the world and themselves is. And that's it! But of course, that also means that as the therapist, you need to be prepared to get in there and to expose some of your own takes on things and to be aware that you're biased about things.

You can never be this so-called unbiased neutral therapist or these phenomenologists who set aside their bias—there's no such thing. It's not what Husserl intended. What Husserl intended is to be aware of our own interview and our own biases and to bring it into the equation, but to see how we bring it in.

Because your bias is your edge; it is the kind of point from which you approach the world. You have to use it. My particular background and experience is here today as I speak to you, and I can't pretend it isn't.

Well, I could, but I'd become very robotic and very switched off, and that is not, I think, the purpose of human relationships. The opposite is true. It's about being open to each other's experience, each other's riches, and each other's wealth of information and understanding, and putting it together so that we create a much bigger understanding.

So with each of my clients, my understanding changes and grows, and so it's quite compelling as a process that every time I am really open to another person, my own life is elucidated in a new way. So this is the idea that the therapist can allow themselves to be changed by the encounter. So every time you have a new client, you're saying that you won't keep an objective or your own subjective view and stick to it; really, you'll see that there's a difference in the way the client sees the world, and you try to enter that world and allow yourself to be changed to some degree.

Yes, yes! I think this is one of the ways in which you can verify whether you're doing the work properly. Are you stuck, you know, to your own position, or are you really immersed in the therapy sufficiently for you to be learning something new?

If I'm not moved, if I'm not touched, if I'm not challenged, if I'm not changing, if I'm not feeling that something is altered, I know I'm not working properly. When I feel that is happening, that something is diluted, that something between us comes together, and that out of that, new things are emerging which are good for that. .

. Other person, which makes that other person suddenly feel that life is possible again, life is good again. There are new discoveries to be had, there are new corners to turn, there are new discoveries to make.

New things will happen; life will bring them if I just open myself to it. Life will bring change for the better. When that starts to happen, I know I'm on the right track.

In terms of existential therapy, when people speak about it, what often comes to mind is the idea that it's something about also facing the fact that we're all eventually going to die at some point. Thank you for bringing that in. I was quite forgetting about that.

Okay, because I think people sometimes get confused as well. Maybe you can help us understand why it would be important to think about, therefore, the end of life. It's really about setting your own living experience against a background of time going by and becoming aware of the flow of life that happens as time ticks away.

So, it's not so much about your death when you're 92; it's about how you're dying now in the moment. But as you're dying now in the moment, you're also coming to life again. So, there is a process of transformation because when you become alert to this, you realize that something is flowing through you that is not stagnant and that is not set in stone, but that is fluid, that is flexible, that is open.

And that means that anything is possible. To make things impossible or cold requires you to pretend that things do not change and that there is a self which is set in stone and will remain the same—hard and unchangeable. So, to be open to the flow of time is usually a good way into being open to the flow of your own life and to become aware of how precious that is and how you can either choose to deny that or run away from it, or to engage with it and to really make it count and make it matter.

Hmm, so the idea that we've got this lens that we look through—where we're thinking of time and thinking of that time will end—in a sense focuses us on the importance of living fully now: to live, to be alert, to be engaged. Yes, and that's not just about living now lest people believe that I'm preaching about the here and now—far from it. Because it is about being alert to older, rich experiences from the past and not letting those just be in the past, but to claim them, to use them, and to learn from them now.

Every day, I go back over past experiences and every day my past changes. It's like there's a new bit of the puzzle falling into place again. I hadn't seen that yet; actually, that happened to me and I thought of it this way, but I can also think of it this way, and this way, and this way.

So, all of your past experiences are like jewels that you can polish up and that shine new lights in your present. And the same is true for the future. Your future can be just some kind of dark unknown—something that you're more or less cut off from—or it can be this kind of openness with so many paths you can take and so many projects you can follow or put yourself into.

To think about that and to think about which way to turn, and to stay open to that, changes it again. So, time in all those ways is important. And then these concepts that we're talking about sound quite different from some of the concepts that might be focused on in other therapy approaches.

You know, thinking of recent approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy, which is really popular at the moment, and how there's a very different emphasis there. But I was wondering what your view was on how existential therapy relates to or contrasts with these recent approaches. Yes, well, CBT is a very pragmatic approach and it is very specific.

So it teaches people to do some very specific things about the way in which they think about the world. It's quite cognitively and behaviorally based, obviously, so that narrows the focus of what you look at in therapy, and that can be very helpful if you want to do a small job of therapy—a specific job, a fairly short-term job. But it's not enough if you want to help a person to really approach the bigger questions of life and then to have a much bigger exploration of what they want their lives to be about, what they want to become, what they want to do with the time allotted to them.

Those kinds of deeper questions require a different method and a different kind of openness. And I think CBT is aware of that too. So if you look at the third wave of CBT with mindfulness and those kinds of methods coming in, it's already a move in that direction to make up for that lack of breadth and that lack of depth.

But I actually think it doesn't really matter what we call the therapy as long as we take these kinds of philosophical dimensions into account and we're willing to be with the person rather than to dictate or prescribe to the person. Then it's okay—I'm easy. You know, not everybody has to be an existential therapist, but I think everybody needs to be aware that people's issues are very rarely about these pragmatic problems.

They are usually about some big thing that's gone wrong in their life, and that's usually because they are confused about who they are, what life is about, and what death is. About what their beliefs are, what their values are—so as long as you don't address those, I don't think you're doing much of a job. And so, just to round up, I wanted to ask you: for those people that are not having existential therapy, is there a way that they can access some of these ideas and apply some of the existential themes to their daily lives?

Absolutely! I'm a great believer in that. I think I will do this horrible thing of writing popular books before too long for a wider public.

We look forward to them! Yes, I actually think that is crucial. If you wait for a person to go wrong and to get lost, confused, and acquire pathology, it's a bit too late, really.

This should be happening around education—in schools, in families. It should happen to ordinary people. Yeah, they should have an opportunity to benefit from what we know about how to live one's life—what happens if you do this or what happens if you do that—how you can look at things in a different way and how you can bring things to life for yourself.

It's essential! It's amazing to me that we don't teach people these things, and whenever I have a chance to do so, I find people are incredibly greedy for it at all ages. So, you know, little kids?

They're great natural philosophers! Teenagers—the teenage years are an essential moment, a threshold moment—where the person thinks, “God, who am I going to be? What is all this about?

How can I possibly find my way around this world? ” It's anxiety-provoking! We leave them to it.

No! Why not provide them with the resources? Help them think, help them feel, help them be with other people in different ways.

The same is true at mid-age, and the same is true in old age. Working with dying people, even if they haven't had that privilege of knowing things throughout their lives, they often have a moment where it's vitally important to them to make sense of what they've done and what they haven't done, and to have a chance to round it up and bring it together and find meaning in it. Yeah, I mean, I think people of all ages, as you said, could really benefit from this.

I think there's a real thirst at the moment for psychological and philosophical ideas in people's everyday lives, and people are reading more, and there are more books published. So we'll look forward to anything you publish in the future, especially in the popular format for us. Thank you very much!

I'm working on it. Well, it's been a great pleasure having you here, Amy. Thank you very much!

Thank you! I've enjoyed it! Thank you!

You.