ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with what might be considered, a post-existential/post-phenomenological view of the relational. The post-phenomenological is considered to question ways in which theory can be used to close down possibility in practice and in learning about practice, whilst dread is implicated in the problematic of closure of thought. Post-phenomenology can re-open the question of what kinds of epistemology are most appropriate for a practice discipline such as psychotherapy in which the post-phenomenological calls for the therapist to remain open to possibility and are thus required to tolerate uncertainty. Existential psychotherapeutic thought has at times reduced existentialism to that which it originally attempted to critique by reducing being to categories such as givens. For a therapy influenced by post-existentialism, the decisions therapists make about various betweens: patient/therapist, inside/outside, the story/the telling cannot be taught and learned mechanistically.