ABSTRACT
After an account of working as a psychotherapist, some affinities, similarities and intersections between Zhuangzi, Nietzsche and Heidegger and some versions of psychoanalysis are identified. These include warnings about our overvaluation of calculative knowledge, our equating thinking with rational, calculative thinking, and our being dominated by a technological view of all things, including ourselves. The writers drawn together here emphasise vastness, complexity, ambiguity, contrasting this with our smallness, finitude, our limitedness, our tendency to conform, comply and crave certainty. In contrast to technological thinking and convictions, they favour and show a kind of indirectness, meandering, a freedom to associate and wander, the cultivation of a capacity to take a view that is less constrained. They value our capacity to be solitary, to be ourself, and they are at least suspicious of the desire to be like everyone else. They champion being able to face pain and suffering without losing our love and appetite for life.
