Speaker 1Welcome to the Weekend University podcast, and this is your host, Niall McKeever. The Weekend University was set up to make the best psychology lectures available to the general public. To do this, we organise lecture days once per month, where attendees get a full day of talks from the UK's leading psychologists, authors and university professors. Our podcast features in-depth interviews with our speakers, so you can learn more about their work. To keep up-to-date on upcoming events and new lectures, you can sign up for the mailing list at theweekenduniversity.com. This episode features a lecture from Emmy Van Der Zin on existential philosophy and psychotherapy. Emmy is a philosopher, counselling psychologist and one of the world's leading existential psychotherapists. She founded the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling at Regent's University, the Society for Existential Analysis, and the new School of Psychotherapy and Counselling at the Existential Academy in London. Her application of philosophical ideas to psychology, psychotherapy and counselling has been instrumental in establishing the existential paradigm in the UK and elsewhere in Europe and around the world. Emmy lectures internationally, and her books have been translated into well over a dozen languages. To date, this has been one of my favourite lectures at the Weekend University, and I think you're going to get loads from it. Enjoy the show!
Speaker 2What is existential therapy? Well, I like to call it existential therapy because it is not just about psychotherapy. So, psychotherapy is a therapy that focuses on the mind, on one person's individual mind. It's very individualistic. But existential therapy focuses on life. It focuses on the life that you lead, in the way that you lead it. So, it focuses not just on what is in your mind, but also what is in between you and other people, in between you and the political world, in between you and your cultural environment, your family, your background, your history, your future, all those different elements come just as much into focus as your mind. And I'm going to try to explain to you how you can work with that whole range of human experiences without getting confused, chaotic or lost in that process. So, it is a philosophical myth. It is a philosophical method because we use philosophical ideas to make sense of all of that. And it is a method that came out of philosophy. And as you probably realize, psychology itself came out of philosophy. When I was studying philosophy in France in the early '70s, we still did a lot of psychology. a lot of psychology as part of philosophy. But it was just around that time that things were really being split. And so later on, I decided to retrain and do another first degree and then my training as a clinical psychologist, because I had started to work as a philosopher with only a master's degree in philosophy in mental hospitals in France. And while I found that a really great challenge to apply philosophical ideas to those really deep problems of mainly autistic and psychotic people that I worked with, and I wanted to learn more about it. So that's when I retrained as a clinical psychologist and as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in the Lacanian tradition, because that is what everybody did in France in the 70s. You couldn't get away from it. So when I came to this country, eventually in 1977, it was because I was invited by the Philadelphia Association and the Arbors Association, which you may not have heard of, but which are organizations to do alternative work. In those days, they called it anti-psychiatry, with people who had been in mental hospitals, and who wanted to stop being treated as patients, wanted to stop their medication, and wanted to go as deeply as they could into their difficulties to try and make sense of it for themselves with the assistance of professionals. You did it. Well done. Thank you. Thank you, my hero. Thank you, Phil. Fantastic. So I don't know what he did with the device. I don't know what he did with it. I don't know what he did with the device. I don't slides but let's go back to that one okay so as I said that was an offer I couldn't refuse and I left everything behind me in France bear in mind I had gone to France from the Netherlands so this was my third language and my third country when I came here and it was quite overwhelming I can tell you in spite of having worked in psychiatry for five years by then and having all the 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 15 minutes here and 15 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. And at the end of that year, after a long trip through California, staying in Esalen and other places where experimental things were being done in psychiatry and psychotherapy, I started teaching the way I had learned for myself to work with these people and how I could use both the philosophical ideas and the psychological ideas to pull that together to stand with people when they are at the depth of their suffering. So that is what this is about. To engage with the other person at quite a deep level, at quite a real level, and to really consider together with them what it is that is stopping them in their tracks and what it is that has made life unlivable to them. Because most of the time, that is how bad it is for people when they come and consult you. So one of the things I realized is that people lose a sense of meaning. They lose track of the idea of what life is for. They forget that they need to live life as we make a fire. They forget that if life doesn't offer us meanings that set us on fire automatically, then we need to learn to-- to set fire to ourselves. And I do not mean that in the literal sense, because I can assure you I've been at the receiving end of those kinds of things too. You know, people have done all sorts of things over the years in the therapeutic community or in the psychiatric places I have worked. But fortunately, I am now working in a more cultivated environment where people know these things are not acceptable. So setting yourself on fire is about finding your passion back. It is finding out what it is you want to live for. And what I discovered is that always and always, when people come to see me as a psychotherapist, it is because they've gotten out of touch with themselves. They've lost that inner fire. They've lost their passion. They've lost their sense of direction and purpose and meaning. All of that has become unraveled. They're out of touch with the very things that are good and beautiful and true in the world and in ourselves. So that is what existential therapy is about. It is about enabling people to get some perspective, to come out of the tunnel, not just to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but to actually move out of the tunnel, to get back into that physical movement that mental movement that emotional movement that spiritual movement that gives them a sense of yeah here we go i know where i'm going and i can see that i can navigate my life again so that is the objective of existential therapy it is about making sense of the world but particularly about making sense of the way in which we make meaning in life so there is quite a difference between making sense of something and making meaning of something and the way in which i view that is that meanings are always complex and they're always multi-layered as a philosopher i have entirely rejected the opposition between dualism and monism i believe everything is layered and multi-layered and diverse it isn't binary it's never binary but it's always complex so i'm not interested in materialism or idealism all of it is true in some way our challenge is to fit all of that together and to understand how we create a pattern of meaning that we can thrive on and enjoy living with so i have this system of looking at things always systematically at a physical level a social level a personal level and an ideological or spiritual level because everything has each of those aspects and you can argue with me about why four four historically because of what other philosophers have said about that and because if you have more than four it gets a bit unwieldy but then of course you can divide the four into fours each of them so you have 16 and you can play with it or you can say well if this is life like a big cake we can cut it up into four slices or we could cut it up into five or six I don't really care I just use this arbitrary four way cutting up of the cake because it works for me and because it makes sense to people so before we go any further before I taint you with my ideas take a piece of paper and a pen and write down eight statements or 12 statements or 16 statements or 20 statements about yourself quickly just a word you know who are you what defines you who are you what are your meanings but try to make it divisible by four it will make it much easier okay now what I would like you to do is to talk to your partner you've already sort of partnered up in the previous session and to establish whether these things you've written down are physical social personal or spiritual so the things that are physical are statements like I'm a man or a woman or both I'm trans perhaps but any thing to do with gender certainly has a physical element but it may also have another element too so you may find that every statement you've made can actually be located at different dimensions so when I say I'm a woman I am surely thinking in a physical way but I'm also actually thinking about my social role and the interesting battles I've had to wage in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s particularly to get anywhere near where I am now I am also thinking about myself personally and making sense of my identity as a woman and claiming that in a way that suits me rather than the way in which other people define it and I also think of it in a spiritual way funnily enough when I think about giving birth to my children and raising them and my grandchildren there is a kind of a sense of a global sort of feeling of the meaning of being a woman so I can deepen every statement I make and look at it in a layered way so take a few minutes each to discuss what you've written down and let the other person help you think about this layered way of looking at that 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 that in a moment 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 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 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, we're going to turn around ourselves. We're going to turn around ourselves. 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 hurt 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 we'll 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 understand and 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. 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. Do 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 to. 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. It's 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 I must be OK. So that's become a solution. It's 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 today, it is about that other person owning their life, their understanding of who they are. And 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 100 on that. No, it's just a vehicle. It is, in fact, what we call a heuristic device. Heuristics. It 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're 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. Buber, Martin Buber, who was a theologian and also a philosopher, spoke about das Zwischenmenschlichen, the inter-human, what happens between people. And 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 to 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 happens. That something new takes place. That something is changed. This is what we call inter-subjectivity. 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 inter-subjectivity. But we can only do that if we've taken that first step not just being in our own subjectivity in a defensive way or accuse 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 Thiele called a loving struggle. A loving struggle with the other. But also a loving struggle with life. Buber made a distinction between I-it relationships and I-thou relationships. Very clever insight. So the most cleverest 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. 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've got a nice open look in your eyes. And some of the other looks 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? And it's quite overwhelming when I start seeing you like that, with an inquiring and open mind. And 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, I/it way, I harden myself. I make myself instrumental. I become like a thing myself. When I open to the other, and I inquire as to who really they are, and how really they are in life, in the world, what they live for, what matters to them. Something shifts. Something shifts in them, in between us, and something shifts in myself. And so it is when I'm in therapy with my clients. I become a better me than when I am doing the principle bits, and I have to keep order, or I have to make annoying decisions about discipline or things like that. I become instrumentalist, and I hate that. I'm not feeling. But that too needs doing. We cannot just be in I/thou. 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 Paul Ricoeur has it, a very good philosopher, 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 and thinking and meaning-finding that we 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 intersubjective dialoguing that changes us both. And in that process, going between past and future and present, weaving like the symbol of eternity the whole time, looping around, we create something quite new. We alter meanings. And now briefly go back to what I said before about sense and meaning. What I mean by sense and meaning is that it is the way that we make sense. It is the way that we make sense. people who have gotten amazing situations in their lives, heads of businesses, politicians, pop stars even, and they've got this 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. But 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 dare not go out of their room, where they have to be brought to the therapy room by their mother or their father or 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. Why? Or so they thought. And these people, just as poor as these people, thought they had to be out there in the world and just conquer the world all the time. And there was no room for that inner thought that helps us reconnect with meaning. So we need to do both these things, funnily enough. And so we need to do both these things, funnily enough. Why? Or so they thought. Why? Or so they thought. And these people, just as poor as these people, thought they had to be out there in the world. seeing 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 makes a hell of a difference you open yourself up to the day instead of going another day it's really important to do these things if you go outside more often for walks especially when it is 13.9 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 going i one day one day one day 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 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 what happens when i work with the woman who comes to me who says in the last six months i have lost both my mother and my father and 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 insomniac 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 a complete nonsense these things are useful but they're 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 and people and situation 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 it is that we want or that we don't want to have and that's what this is about 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 people 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 can't 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 you sounded a bit angry there he says anger that's nothing by comparison to what you'll see in me if you keep telling me what my feelings are and 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 to how not to just protect ourselves but 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, Socrates 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 saying, you will find it everywhere, all over the place. You'll find it in Taoism, you'll find it in Islam, 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. As far as I'm concerned, you know, these guys here are sitting chained up to a wall with their back 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's 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 like 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, and 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 to 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 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 insignificant 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 better ways they were really psychotherapists you know they were talking with people which is why um socrates of course had to die because he was talking to the youth in athens and he got him to have ideas about freedom and change and all that kind of thing they were psychotherapists and aristotle thought well to be a proper psychotherapist you have to have more knowledge so he started his 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 spirit to be open to your spirit to be open to your spirit to be open to your spirit 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 and 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 too 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 should be able to live in harmony with the world and that's what we're trying to do with this book and i think that's what we're trying to do with this book and i think that's what we're trying to do with this book and that's what we're trying to do with this book and i think that's what we're trying to do with this book and that's what we're trying to do with this book and that's what we're trying to do with this book and that's what we're they read stories it's about goodies and baddies and they get really into this, this black and white thinking. It's either this or it's that. It's very important that we learn to do this because we learn to discriminate when we do that 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 too. 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, have you seen the 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. How do I get more problems in my life? Well, I could suggest a few things, like going out of your way to help other people, or join political organizations, or try to solve poverty in the world, or try to work out what has really gone wrong with your relationships and try to really speak to all the people in your life to try and get to the bottom of that. Just a few suggestions. Might that help? 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 there. 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, something they hadn't thought about. So, it always involves rediscovering the movement in your life, that forward feeling of going somewhere, of something good happening, of something changing for the better. And not just by chance, but because you have understood how it works and you're engaging with it, and 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. And 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. And at each level we have these tensions, these contradictions, what I call paradoxes. And 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. And we can't just have harmony and no chaos. If we're going to open up to life, 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 multi-fold 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 one thing that 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, Jaspers, Heidegger, Scheler, the existentialists, mainly the French, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, Marcel and Camus, the post-structuralists, Foucault, Levinas, Ricoeur, Lacan, Derrida, and the existential humanists, Boubar, Tillich, May, Arendt, and Maslow. Here are some of their pictures. What strange noises I hear. 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. And then there are some of the ones that came out of their own experience. That's different now. But there they are. There were people like Binswanger, Jaspers, Tillich, Boss, Frankel, importantly, May, and R.D. Lange, who I came to this country to work with, who have been the pioneers. And there they are, those pioneers. And here is an overview of how the sort of lay of the land of this field is at the moment with myself, modestly at the bottom there. We had a world conference, first World Congress on Existential Therapy in 2015 in London, and the second one will take place in Buenos Aires, Tango, in 2019. And it's amazing. This approach has spread all around the world. I was in India over Christmas, 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 to Iran. But nevertheless, in each country, people have translated books. They are eager for it. China has translated three of my books. Korea, 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 world views 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 achieving 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 by, basically by Husserl, who was a mathematician, by the way, because he came to the realization that the exact sciences were not enough. That in order for us to truly understand the world, there had to be a subjective and an objective side to doing science. And that's what phenomenology is. It is not, as many people wrongly assume, the science of subjectivity. It is the bridge between subjectivity and objectivity. And there are precise ways in which you apply it. And that's what we call the phenomenological method. And it involves the phenomenological reduction, the eidetic reduction, and the transcendental reduction. And some of the things to say about that is the phenomenological reduction stops you thinking that you already know what is the case about something or somebody. It makes you humble. It makes you question what your knowledge is doing to you and set it aside, bracket it. And then it makes you go back to what it is you're observing and describe it in great, patient detail. And you do various other things, but no time for that. The eidetic reduction is very important, too, because it helps you remember that things are dynamic. They are genetically constituted. Everything changes. Even objects change. Every object is in a process of change. If you could take a longer view of things, you would see they're all alive. They're all changing the whole time. People are changing. Don't pin them down on how they are today. They were different yesterday. They will be different tomorrow. Give them back that sense of change. Help them understand they don't have to do anything to change. They just have to open up to what is the case and stop closing down who they are or depriving themselves of their connectivity or their self-knowledge or their open-heartedness. The transcendental reduction is about going inside 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, too. And what I'm afraid of, most of you are afraid of, too. And I can use myself as an instrument to resonate with you if I am open and critical enough to make sense of what I'm picking up. And also modest enough to know that at the end of the day, my perception is mine and your perception is yours. So we work with bias. I was going to talk a bit about Heidegger, who is such a conflicted person. I did actually a doctorate in philosophy on Heidegger and came at the end of that to the conclusion that I wanted no more to do with him at all. And yet he influenced me greatly, obviously, because he did study being and he did come up with some amazing ideas. Unfortunately, it was all seen from his own cultural perspective, which became so very damning in so many ways. So one of his main contributions is to realize that we're all thrown in the world in time. We're all limited in time, and it is only with our death that our life is completed. And so we need to bring our view towards the whole span of what we're 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 reality, our resonance with the world, is the first port of call. We feel into the world long before we understand the world or we have a discourse about the world. So that's how it works. First the feelings, then the understanding, then the theorizing and the discourse. And so we need to go back to tuning in to our anxiety, which takes us into the things we want and into our depression, which takes us away from the things we don't want. In his later work, Heidegger was all about realizing that we need to re-own our own relationship to Being with a capital B. All the things that are in the world, how do we actually relate to them? Well, he said, it's the fourfold, thus the four worlds model. That with the Big Bang, being exploded into earth, world, man and gods. And ever since, we've had to make sense of all of that in some way. And he also had this amazing idea that the word thinking actually comes from the same word as thanking. And that before we learn to think, we need to learn to thank. Very powerful, that idea, I think. And it is really about opening up to a level of inner thought, an 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 Spielraum, which means, it's translated as the inner being, the inner being of the soul, the inner being of the soul. It's translated as elbow room, so that you have room for maneuvering. But actually, it means the play space. So it is about re-situating 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, taking every ounce of learning from them. Structural existential analysis is what you do when you systematically look at somebody's existence through the lenses of space and time and various other things. Simone de Beauvoir really understood something when she said you can't lead a proper life in a society which isn't proper, in which every way you turn you are always caught because you can't draw a straight line in a curved space. And that is what you try to do in existential therapy, to enable people to re-own their own space so that they can step outside of the curved space that they have been given. And they can become the creators of their world rather than the victims of it. And that is, I think, the most important thing we can do for another person, to hand them back. Their creativity, their freedom, their passion, their connectivity to all that is and all that is possible. And that is what I try to do when I do existential therapy and it is what I try to teach my students. Alas, I don't have time for all the other things I wanted to tell you, but let me quickly show you. The emotional compass which is so extremely helpful in understanding your emotions, so don't suppress your emotions. If anything screws you up, it is you trying to behave yourself and cut yourself off from your emotions. Feel into it, make sense of it, give room to yourself. You are worth it, as they say. So, suppression of feelings absolutely leads to dysfunction and despair and to loss of freedom. the best thing you can do is to retrieve all of your emotions and I've created this wonderful compass of emotions where the 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 and relate to this desire we have for the good things and this despair we have of losing the good things so in a nutshell we feel high 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 for 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 there 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 that's really rock-bottom when we start building up again towards a new purpose we go to shame at first because we think we're not good enough to do it but we always are 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 thing we value and when that works out we experience joy and that takes us right back to feel on top of the world and that's how we become hopeful we become hopeful we become hopeful and you know what's going to happen next don't you you're going to 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 with a little bit of help thank you very much do we have time for questions just two questions maybe yay 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 thanks for it that question because I forgot to point that out I have better diagrams that show that
Speaker 3and that's yeah
Speaker 2that reminds you of you know 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 and joy can be thrill and excitement but as I said it can also make us lose our mind completely and get into trouble every single space in our emotions has pluses and minuses like everything does thank you yes I was really interested
Speaker 3because you shared a lot about the values and ideas of, but in practice, what is it, you know, because a lot of schools of psychotherapy, they said, well, we do it this way or that way. And when you look how they work, a lot of the time they're very similar. They would ask the question, they would be really curious about the client, they would try to help them find a way, but I'm just trying to understand.
Speaker 2Good 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 us 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. Try it. Passion. 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 are keen to go home. Enjoy your evening. Bye.
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