ABSTRACT

Re-Visioning Existential Therapy is a collection of essays from leading practitioners and theorists around the globe which questions some of the key tenets of traditional existential therapy.

The book enlightens, stimulates, and provokes the reader out of complacency. It expands the breadth and scope of the approach, discusses recent developments in psychotherapy and philosophy, and aligns existential therapy to a progressive, radical, and counter-traditional ethos. Through clinical studies, personal reflections, discussions on aspects of theory, and exciting links to art, literature, and contemporary culture, these very diverse and wide-ranging contributions take existential therapy into the fertile wilderness of shared experience. Through renewed links to seminal writers, it captures the subversive spirit, the deep compassion, the unflinching gaze and playfulness that is at the heart of the approach.

The book will share knowledge and enthusiasm for the practice of existential therapy in order to encourage therapists and trainees to partake of the joys and challenges of existential practice.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

part I|70 pages

The risk of communication

chapter 3|11 pages

Learn to forget

A Nietzschean revaluation of forgetting in psychotherapy

chapter 5|10 pages

Where angels fear to tread

A lived experience of striptease

chapter 6|9 pages

Existential therapy

Relational creative engagement in action

part II|99 pages

Compliance and emancipation

chapter 8|13 pages

Authenticity and difference

Heidegger’s ontological problem

chapter 9|11 pages

Radical existentialism is manuski

Existentially influenced psychoanalytic psychotherapy

chapter 12|11 pages

Hack therapy

A radical existential practice

chapter 13|10 pages

A person on the edge of inner and outer realities

A therapist’s reflections

chapter 14|10 pages

The bi-rooted migrant

An existential journey

chapter 15|10 pages

The poetry of the world

A tribute to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty

part III|81 pages

Unreasonable reason

chapter 16|11 pages

Kafka reading Kierkegaard

Always in a process of becoming

chapter 17|12 pages

Myth as a container for anxiety

Bion, the unconscious, and Daseinsanalysis

chapter 18|12 pages

Talking cure and curing talk

Therapy, theory and the already dead

chapter 19|11 pages

Existence, self, and meaning

A stranger in search of home

chapter 21|11 pages

Existentialism or a philosophy of existence?

Shestov and existential therapy

part IV|68 pages

The clinic and the everyday

chapter 23|8 pages

The psychotherapeutic use of psychedelics

Reflections, critique and recommendations

chapter 24|10 pages

Understanding Francisco’s schizophrenia

A humanistic phenomenological research method

chapter 25|9 pages

Dream harder

A phenomenological exploration

chapter 26|8 pages

‘Igor’s pet cemetery? Igor is out. Burying cat’

A memoir of living and dying

chapter 27|12 pages

Metaphoric affect processing

Reflecting and transcending self as metaphor

chapter 29|8 pages

Beautiful losers