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 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 backgrounds your history your future all those different elements come just as much into focus as your mind and I'm going to try to explain to you how you can work with that whole range of human experiences without getting confused chaotic or lost in that process so it is a philosophical method because we use philosophical ideas to make sense of all of that and it is a method that came out of philosophy and as you probably realize psychology itself came out of philosophy when I was studying philosophy in France in the early 70s we still did a lot of psychology as part of philosophy but it was just around that time that things were really being split and so later on I decided to retrain and do another first degree and then my training as a clinical psychologist because I had started to work as a philosopher 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 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 reach reigned 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 thank you thank you my hero Thank You Phil fantastic so I don't know what he did Vista the slides but let's go back to that one okay so um 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 and it was quite overwhelming I can tell you in spite of having worked in psychiatry for five years by then and having all those qualifications to live in a therapeutic community with people who had given up using medication and who wanted to do things just by living there and talking whenever they wanted to not you know 50 minutes here and 50 minutes there no this was the place I lived for a year and they had access to me 24/7 which of course in practice meant knocks on your door at 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 it's made life unlivable to them because most of the time that is how bad it is for people when they come and consult you so one of the things I realized is that people lose a sense of meaning they lose track of the idea of what life is for they forget that they need to live life as we make a fire they forget that if life doesn't offer us meanings that set us on fire automatically then we need to learn to set fire to ourselves and I do not mean that in the literal sense because I can assure you I've been at the receiving end of those kinds of things too you know people have done all sorts of things over the years in the therapeutic community or in the psychiatric places I have worked but fortunately I am now working in a more cultivated environment where people know these things are not acceptable so setting yourself on fire is about finding your passion back it is finding out what it is you want to live for and what I discovered is that always and always when people come to see me as a psychotherapist it is because they've gotten out of touch with themselves days lost at 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 for well for 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 because it makes sense to people so before we go any further before I tamed you with my ideas take a piece of paper and a pen and write down eight statements or twelve statements or sixteen 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 don't think about it too long just write it down as it flows okay now what I would like you to do is to talk to your partner you've already sort of partnered up in the previous session and to establish whether these things you've written down are physical social personal or spiritual so the things that are physical are statements like I'm a man or a woman or I'm both trans perhaps but anything to do with gender certainly has a physical element but it may also have another element too so you may find that every statement you've made can actually be located at different dimensions so when I say I'm a woman I am surely thinking in a physical way but I'm also actually thinking about my social role and the interesting battles I've had to wage in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s particularly to get anywhere near where I am now I am also thinking about myself personally and making sense of my identity as a woman and claiming that in a way that suits me rather than the way in which other people define it and I also think of it in a spiritual way funnily enough when I think about giving birth to my children and raising them and my grandchildren there is a kind of a sense of a global sort of feeling of the meaning of being a woman so I can deepen every statement I make and look at it in a layered way so take a few minutes each to discuss what you've written down and let the other person help you think about this layered way of looking at that 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 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 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 CERN 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 an objective towards all others frightfully objective sometimes meaning judgmental but the task is precisely to become objective toward oneself and subjective towards all others there is something revolutionary in that which is like the Copernican revolution instead of thinking that everything turns around us it is about shifting our view to seeing how we connect to everything else that is in the world and to allow ourselves to learn to take different viewpoints not just the viewpoints from our little hurt egos but of point from our community or the view point for from our boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse or children and to try out these different viewpoints and have a dialogue about it with the other people in our life in order to get a greater wider perspective on our lives very interesting when you start doing it by no means easy to do when people come for psychotherapy they're always self-absorbed inevitably when we're in trouble when we're upset when we've lost something that's important to us or somebody in our lives and we feel we can't cope we become very self-absorbed we feel that the solution is going to be to navel gaze to really go into it and that somehow magically that will sort it all out well actually very often the solution is that we have become too cut off and too self-absorbed and too obsessed with the problems and that by taking a wider view and bringing other things into view things resolve and start to change all by themselves so it is often about re-engaging with the world rather than disengaging from the world and of course engaging in different ways as well existential therapists refuse the system of psychopathology now don't get me wrong I teach all my students to learn about the system of psychopathology and understand and being able to engage in psychiatry with other professionals to be able to make sense of what they are talking about but I also teach them too 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 methods 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 meiotic so you know what that is that's Plato's science of midwifery that's what my ethics means it's the science of midwifery but it's not giving birth to a baby it's giving earth to the wisdom that is at the heart or in the head or all over any person that you speak with it is about finding what they have inside of them in terms of knowledge and wisdom but have hidden away and helping them give birth to it so that tells you 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 them find out what they know and that is what hermeneutics is about so Herman arrow in Greek means always have to show off my classical education it's one of the things that gave me most confident when I was a teenager yes my sister bullied me but I spoke Greek and Latin so you know I must be okay so that's become a sort of part of my identity so 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 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 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 that no it's just a vehicle it is in fact what we call a heuristic device heuristics means the science of searching for something it is a philosophical way of searching for what can be found very often heuristic methods involve as looking into our own hearts and minds while we're working with the other person and this is also part of the phenomenological method so that is what you will find out about in a moment so existential therapists are directional rather than directive they enable people to find their own direction they do neither impose direction they are not prescriptive nor do they not impose direction by being less a fair 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 a 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 Boober Martin Buber who was a theologian and also a philosopher spoke about dust swishin mention 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 thoughts 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 inter subjectivity 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 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 Ely called a loving struggle a loving struggle with the other but also a loving struggle with life you know that Boober made a distinction between I it relationships and idle relationships very clever inside 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 you know 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 got 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 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 by 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 but 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 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 in 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 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 archeology or the landscapes of the past so yes we explore the past as if it is archeology and also the teleology or the landscapes of the future and of course we do that very much in the present by creating this inter subjective 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 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 and 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 got is 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 Darrent 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 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 in our thought that reconnect with meaning so we need to do both these things funnily enough and I don't know how many of you know about linguistic theory and the so sewer and structuralism and all of that but that was a large part of my training in philosophy and 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 so the signifier is the word or the image and the signified is what is actually evoke in the mind about it and 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 things 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 of we talked about it that his idea of his really old shoes that I think are scandalous and the 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 and 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 or what is your idea of that or 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 and 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 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 things happen 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 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 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 psycho dynamics and 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 and 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 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 there is 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 and 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 opposition's 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 and it's important to know about it and to be critical about it and engage with it critically so that you can rethink it and 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 a life offered me today you will feel all 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 to 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 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 going on 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 in somnath yuck and she can't sleep at all any more 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 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 mulling 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 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 mmhmm 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 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 it's 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 man lived that they may eat and drink whereas good man eat and drink that they may live because me 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 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 about 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 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 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 better way they were a 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 atoms 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 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 hewed ammonia 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 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 - 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 and 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 call 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 forwards 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 and 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's 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 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 to courage to say something about it should I put my hand up shall I put my hand up shall I do what shall I not shall I do and 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 you know it won't make any sense or she seems so in the flow I don't dare cut her off and 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 direct 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 and 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 interest it's 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 - a positive charge on a sunny day with a negative charge at the bottom of the cloud in 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 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 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 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 forwards 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 functions 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 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 quarter for 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 Philosopher's of freedom Kierkegaard needs to Schopenhauer's phenomenologist starting with Brentano her soul yes was Heidegger sailor the existentialists mainly the French soft mellow ponte de Beauvoir Marcel and Camus the post-structuralist Foucault Lavigne re-curl La Cantera da and the existential humanists Buber Tillich may Arvind 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 Bertilak boss Frankel importantly May and RD Laing 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 in 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 to 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 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 assumed the signs 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 in 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 - and what I'm afraid of most of you are afraid of - 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 for 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 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 coal 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 reown 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 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 thinking and that before we learn to think we need to learn to think very powerful that idea I think and 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 means it's translated as elbow room so that you have room for maneuvering but actually it means the place space so it is about resituated ourselves in the world in such a way that we can play with our lives that living becomes an adventure again and become 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 of forgetting about him 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 she 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 reown 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 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 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 colours 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 rights basis because the emotions Espinosa new 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 hi oh we feel hi 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 full 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 literally rock bottom when we start building up again so words 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 achieve something towards our high feelings where we have to do the work of love love is work love his 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 you know what's gonna 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 plains 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 off 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 I 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 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 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 as being equals in dialog 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 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

Channel: The Weekend University

Views: 26,534

Rating: 4.9000001 out of 5

Keywords: the weekend university, psychology lectures, Existentialism, Existentialism philosophy, Existential meaning, Phenomenology, Emmy van Deurzen, Existential therapy, Existential anxiety, Psychotherapy

Id: JCo266WuzJg

Length: 96min 13sec (5773 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 09 2018