Existential Analysis 20.

2: July 2009
Life is for Living
Claiming Past, Present and Future
Emmy van Deurzen
Any idiot can face a crisis -
It is day to day living that wears you out.
Anton Chekhov
Abstract
Existential therapy distinguishes itself by addressing the whole of human
existence and by considering an individual's experience from a
philosophical perspective. It calls each of us to a more deliberate way of
life and invites us to a considered reflection on our own existence.
It is easy to get out of touch with these fundamental givens of the
existential approach as we struggle to define our methods and techniques
in a world that sets great store by qualifications, standards and evidence
based practice. It is important to remember the most elemental aspects of
what we do, so that we can build on them for the future.
This paper takes stock of what really matters and what we often forget. It
reengages with the radical project of making sense of our lives, asking how
space and time figure in our lives and what values we want to live by. How
shall we approach the pressures and strains of a demanding yet fragile
world and how shall we respond to an ever growing sense that there must
be more to life than this? What old or new philosophy can save us from the
tedium or chaos of our lives? When you look back upon what you have
accomplished in the days that are given you, what will remain as the
guiding light?
Introduction
Our lives are for living. This is a self evident tautology. We know that we
were bom and that we will die and that during the time in between there is
nothing else for us to do but to live our lives, as best we can. There can be
no doubt that to learn to live life to the full is better than to suffer through
our lives or pretend it is not happening. Though we may be practised at
facing otir death anxiefy it is often our fear of life rather than of death that
gets the better of us. Living is not as easy as it seems. We have to learn to
stand up and be counted, to ek-sist and stand out of ourselves in past,
present and future. If we do not feel able to face the anxiefy of this effort to
truly be ourselves, we may disappear into the unseen, unknown, unspoken
mediocrify of a life that never comes into its own. Marcus Aurelius said
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that it is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never
beginning to live. How often do we not find ourselves deadened or
fiattened by life or catch ourselves hiding away in the hope there will be a
better day tomorrow? The paradox is that the less we face up to our
troubles and labours, the more we are exposed to them. The reverse is also
true. The realities of life that are death, failure, labour, hardship, pain,
anxiety, guilt and sorrow, once faced, become the source of learning and of
a depth of life that we did not previously knew existed. As we sink our
roots into this fertile soil we may also discover and savour their
counterparts of vitality, success, ease, comfort, pleasure, confidence, pride
and joy. But none of these things come easily and it may feel almost
impossible to absorb, let alone thrive on our troubles.
Human sorrow
When I speak to Rita, who is grieving for her husband and small son who
have perished in a car accident, the words that I say to her at first hardly
reach her. She is in a place of relative safety deep inside of herself, in a
state of suspended animation behind the faade that she turns to the world.
She barely engages with people at all. At first it is not my words that make
the link to her world, but the steady presence I can offer in being attentive
and carefiil not to hurt her any further or push her too hard. I spend nearly
half an hour in relative silence with Rita, at times formulating her fear on
her behalf, gently, tentatively, checking for verification by noting her
response. Mostly the work consists of letting myself be touched by her
suffering and learning to tolerate her pain with her, so that I can offer
reactions and words that soothe and move her forward to a place where she
can begin to absorb what has happened to her so shockingly out of the
blue. In this process she guides me and exposes more and more of her
nightmarish universe as she begins to perceive me as capable of venturing
fiirther into it with her and therefore can face it herself, almost. At first I
am safe in my personal assumptions of a reliable world. Gradually I let
myself open up more to the strange and horrific experience of seeing all of
one's points of reference, all that one loves and is devoted to, destroyed in
one day. It has profound and suddenly disturbingly live resonances inside
of me and I have to summon all my courage to hold my head high and keep
breathing, slowly, deeply. I know I have to be willing to let her experiences
affect me strongly and sharply, let myself be shaken by them, as much as I
can stand, if I am going to offer her true sanctuary. I trust myself to find a
way to let her crumbled world become part of me without fioundering and
without fear, shaken, but undaunted and intrepid, like a traveller to a new
and unexplored land. What she needs from me right now is safety, no more
and no less. For there is no safety left in her world and she has come to me.
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of all people in the world, to discover whether there is a way of finding
some.
At first I can only hesitantly approach her experience. I say, softly and
enquiringly: 'you are keeping the pain at bay by hiding inside of it'. This is
a description of what I see in fi-ont of me, it is an observation; a modest
approximation of what I surmise is going on in her. I have no certainty
about what I observe for she is far away from me, though she is sitting
right there in that chair, across fi'om me by the fire, and so I constantly
verify my observations. But at the same time I know this, deep in my
bones, because I recognize her deep concentration, her total absorption in
something unnamed and unnameable that holds her entirely. I am aware of
the necessity of not assuming too much and of the risk of infecting her with
my own visceral knowledge of pain, so I let myself rest and lean into my
hard eamed capacity for remaining entire and I tune back into life and tmst
it will rally round. My heart beats strongly but calmly and I know I will be
able to sit, walk and stand beside her patiently and without promising too
much but also without tiring till we have gone through her hell of darkness
and re-emerge into the light. I know I cannot quench her unquenchable
thirst for lost love and that I cannot provide relief or repair. She needs
endless space and limitless time to drench her despair with tears before she
can ultimately douse it. But I also know that is just exactly what she has:
for time slows down and stands still when you are grief stricken and in the
midst of catastrophe and disaster you find etemity.
Discussion
This is an extract of the initial moments of hard work we did together for a
bit over two years, in the process of which I helped her reengage with life
(Deurzen, 2009). She often wanted to give up and die. Death seemed safe
to her, attractive, welcoming. It was a space of oblivion and release of the
tensions she found almost impossible to bear. She relished the idea of
going into that good night, letting go of the harsh light of life that she had
come to hate. Not for her the sense that thinking of death is like staring at
the sun. On the contrary, it was life that seemed overly bright and
scorching to her. Life was hard and loud and busy, chaotic and demanding
and there was too much of it, she often said. She wasn't at all sure why she
should bother. The attraction of letting herself become effaced entirely was
great. Diving into the great ocean of nothingness seemed wonderful; letting
go and giving up and drifting away towards nowhere seemed just the job.
She was, in actual fact, quite passionate about it. She did not prize the life
that others eked out for themselves by the sweat of their brow and all too
often with large doses of pills or alcohol, just to pretend they were having
fun.
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There was no way she would have gone back to living like that ever
again. There was no doubt that if she were going to reengage with life it
had to be a new and different life, one where she felt that she knew what
suffering was for and in which all her experiences would find their rightful
place so that everj^hing would make sense once more. But that was not
easily achieved and required many months of hard work, even just trying
to understand what had happened and beginning to express how her guilt
was crushing her. Only very gradually she began to see that perhaps here
was a chance for her to make a new start with a very different kind of life,
a life led in awareness and with people she could love, not in a needy way
or a desperate way, but wholeheartedly. She really had to let go of the past,
whilst mining it for the gems it held and releaming to live, almost fi'om
scratch, rethinking human existence, not in a cerebral way but in a deeply
felt, practical and pragmatic way, starting from the primeval level of
human suffering and fi-om there slowly tackling the iieights of human
consciousness and transformation.
Existential therapy
And this is what existential therapy does. It works with the whole of
human existence, directly and at the sharp edge, yet with the benefit of the
clarity of philosophical perspective. But this does not mean that we just
theorize and live in the abstractions of lofty universalism. On the contrary
it means to follow the yellow brick road of a person's life, towards the
deeply personal heart of their experience. It also means that we have to pay
attention to the psychological, biological and socio-political angles of their
existence as well as encompassing the concrete existential and aspirational
spiritual dimensions. We work with the context of a person's lived world,
as well as with their ideals, beliefs, values and projects. We almost always
start from where it hurts most, for pain is the source of human engagement
with life and it is the sine qua non of deepening understanding and
overcoming.
Existential therapy (ET for short), calls each of us to a more deliberate
way of life and invites us to a considered refiection on our daily existence.
It addresses fundamental, ontological issues but always starts from
pragmatic ontic problems, difficulties and confiicts and always returns to
them in order to re-establish the connections and fiuidity of our existence.
Starting from Husserl's point zero of a person's life world, we aim to
broaden her horizon and replace previous assumptions with a wider grasp
of truth. Existential therapy continuously keeps the universal and the
particular in juxtaposition. It is in the tension between these two that we
enable a person to reappraise the way they live their life and help them
understand the sheer power of the paradox that underpins it. But it never
imposes rules for living. It enables people to uncover the rules that work
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for them, helping them to get back on track and become inspired once
more when they were previously forlorn and desperate.
The wider picture
Merleau Ponty in his book the ' Visible and the Invisible ' said:
Things are structures - frameworks- the stars of our life: they
gravitate around us. Yet there is a secret bond between us and them -
through perception we enter into the essence ofthefiesh.
(Merleau Ponty, 1962:220)
It is indeed through the concrete things and events in our lives that we
wake up to the fact of otir existence. We are never in isolation and we
cannot come to ourselves without things happening to us. The events,
connections and relationships of our lives are the most elemental aspects of
our passage on earth and unless we allow ourselves to savour them we
cannot experience the intensity and realness that are so easily lost in our
efforts to cope. To live is to insert ourselves in a space time continuum and
somehow grasp our own existence as we experience it and leam to live it.
Heidegger, in 'Basic Problems of Phenomenology' said:
The Dasein exists in the manner of being-in-the-world and as such it
is for the sake of its own self. It is not the case that this being just
simply is; instead, so far as it is, it is occupied with its own capacity to
be.
(Heidegger 1982:170)
Our capacity for being and our ovm preoccupation with it, is what makes
life our own. It is only when we begin to reflect on our life that we begin to
get an inkling of what is at stake. We can never just be what we actually
are, for we must constantly explore, lose what we were and move forwards
towards the future. We are conduits for the passage of time, we are
constant change and we are projected towards a future. This also means
that we are, more than any-thing, our capacity for the realization of our
ownmost possibility.
Higher than actuality (Wirklichkeit) stands possibility (Mglichkeit).
(Heidegger, 1927:38)
Perhaps this is the ultimate secret of being human: the fact that we are
not essence but existence and that we can only ever be at all true to
ourselves if we are willing to be in the flow of time as well as actively
engaged with our own dynamic movement towards the realization of our
possibilities. To be ourselves is to be in time and not be anything specific
at all. It is precisely this that makes us anxious: the not knowing, the
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uncertainfy, the possibilify of failure as well as of success, the discomfort
and unease of never being settled {Unheimlichkeit).
In his lecture on 'Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human
Freedom' (1971:9) Heidegger put it even more compellingly that for
Schelling freedom was not the property (Eigenschaft) of man but man the
property (Eigentum) of freedom. In other words human beings are owned
by freedom and this means that they are committed to determining the
future rather than being purely determined by the past. But neither do we
entirely choose our lives, as the early Sartre (1943) suggested. Our lives
rather evolve out of the understanding we gather from what happens to us.
It is otir task to learn from living.
And here is the rub. For we tend to close our eyes and go through life
blind to the possibilities beyond our ken. As Nietzsche put it, we are
always limited by our own horizon, by the limit of the range of our own
vision. But at the same time that limit is transparent and transportable: for
as I move forwards or sideways so my horizon shifts and I can see more
than before. We do such shifting rarely, usually only when we are nudged.
Mostly we are caught up in a certain way of seeing the world and have a
particular perspective, an angle of vision, which creates our take on the
world. This vista is perfectly valid, as long as we do not take it for the
whole truth, but only for a perspective. It is important to know our own
minds before we try to expand them. For if we try to jump on other
people's bandwagons, such shortcuts to a wider or better perspective may
simply lead us up blind alleys. We have to do our own explorations and
piece the puzzle of life together bit by bit. Nietzsche's quip in his book
'Daybreak' is not far off the mark.
The supposed 'shorter ways' have always put mankind into great
danger; at the glad tidings that such a shorter way has been found,
they always desert their way - and lose their way.
(Nietzsche, 1982:55)
We simply cannot understand about life, imless we are willing to explore
its many paths for ourselves. It is only to the extent that we are willing to
go the long way and keep learning and living for real that life comes right.
In taking shortcuts we often come to grief and discover that we squandered
our time. We can only learn how to live, by actually looking life straight in
the eye, collecting what we can from the past for the future and valuing the
present, no matter what. And as we know, if we do not learn from the past
we will almost invariably get to repeat it until our learning is complete.
And if we are not to lose our way we have to be prepared to go over old
ground often, so as to familiarize ourselves completely with the terrain and
draw up our own inner map of existence. We can only claim full authorify
when we have started owning life by working things out the hard way, for
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ourselves. You don't know a country until you have not just travelled
through it but lived in it and worked out its customs and learnt to solve its
problems by yourself And so it is with life as well.
So, if we are to be like Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith and live our lives
for real, what will be our path through the world and how shall we keep
ourselves safe? How to make our tracks through the jungle of existence?
How to brave the waves and the weather of the ocean of our emotions,
circumnavigating potential dangers and finding a safe course back to the
harbour when we are tossed about and lost? How can we be brave, yet
relatively safe, instead of cowardly? How to avoid getting disoriented and
confused? What will be our map and compass? How will we be clear
minded enough to find our bearings and set a clear course? How will we
know where to go?
While we should never confuse the map for the territory, nor the theory
for reality, in each case the one helps us deal with the other. It is easier to
become cognizant of our global positioning in the world if we can trace
some of the parameters of our lives. For each of us has to deal with the
complexities and intricacies of existence in the physical, social, personal
and spiritual spheres of oiir lives, as these intersect with the fourfold.
Different dimensions of the four
spheres of existence
Physical
survival
Social
affiliation
Personal
identity
Spiritual
meaning
Umwelt
Nature
Public
Private
Sacred
Mitwelt
Objects
Others
Me
God
Eigenwelt
Body
Ego
Self
Soul
Uberwelt
Cosmos
Humanity
Individual
Transcendence
Each of these sixteen categories of life is a world in itself which throws
up multiple challenges and tensions. Nature alone includes the entire
complexity of minerals, plants, earth, animals etc, each of which has
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generated an entire scientific discipline of its own, which we carmot all
master. But we can get a general sense of how we approach nature in its
various guises and whether we are at ease with the sort of challenges it
poses and resources it provides. So it is with the other fifteen categories.
They are a rough framework to help us recognize the orientation of our
life-worlds and the extent to which we are fiexibly aware of the different
tasks, tensions and opportunities of each. Mostly as we leam to live we
acquire some facility in each of these areas, but sometimes the now gets
blocked or cut off entirely in a particular sphere of our existence.
In Rita's situation her life world was blocked at almost all of these
levels, as she had lost faith in each. Nature had become a danger, objects
only figured in her life as obstacles or reminders of the past. Her body was
an enemy that made too many demands on her. The cosmos was a
frightening empty space, a kind of black hole into which living things were
occasionally sucked, to die. The public space was too challenging and
belonged to others, who seemed weirdly blind and willing to live without
any sense of tragedy or understanding of the fragility of life. Her ego was
the cause of many of her troubles and she had tried to eliminate it and
punish herself for her previous hubris in taking love for granted. Humanity
wasn't worth committing yourself to. Her private world was her only
sanctuary and it was merged with the sacred, thus creating a world of
mouming and secret rituals to honour her loved ones. But she had no
respect for the ' me' she encountered in that world, for she despised herself.
Her self was therefore weak and unable to have desires or longings.
Besides the sacred space of mourning she did not allow for a god, for no
god would have allowed the tragedy that had stmck her. She did hope that
souls might survive, if they were pure and she hoped that one day she
would be lifted above her miserable plight and be redeemed when reunited
with the souls of her deceased loved ones. She lived almost entirely in this
reduced world in which everything she had lost and yeamed for had
become cramped into this personal sacred space that she hid within. The
therapeutic task was to enable her to reach out from behind that blockade
and reconnect slowly, not only to others, but to herself and her possibilities
and gradually infuse all other aspects of living with new life.
Possibility instead of actuality
Although our phenomenological observations about the state of play in the
person's world is always concemed with the actuality of that person's
current life, it is possibility that guides the process, but such possibility is
inexorably set against the background of the givens, limits and actual facts
and limitations of this particular person's life. As long as there is life there
is possibility, for life is the very possibility of possibility. Death is when
we come to the end of our possibility; it marks the impossibility of
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possibility. Someone who is bereft is literally encotintering the end of
many of the possibilities in their life. Loss takes us back to the original
emptiness and no-thingness of our lives and our consciousness. When we
become pure project again, because we have been divested of the things
that fill our lives and that give it weight and meaning, we are discormected
from the world, isolated and streamless. It is our intentionality that
reconnects us, but pure intentionality and pure freedom are initially purely
confusing. Projects only make sense when we commit to them and we
become filled with a sense of worth and meaning because we exist in our
commitments. Even the Buddhist detachment or the existentialist
engagement with freedom is still a commitment to a value, which fills us
with a sense of rightness or even righteousness. The nihilism of loss feels
like nothingness and meaninglessness. It is only when we reengage that we
recommit to life.
But as we commit we also restrict and constrict ourselves, becoming
absorbed by the things we pledge ourselves to. We anchor ourselves to
these, but this means that we might stagnate and get caught up in the
sediment at the bottom of our existence. We become identified with the
choices we have made and the things we are engaged with. We may
become alienated from our capacity for consciousness and freedom. We
avoid risk and contradiction. We forget that we are consciousness that can
transcend and move along. We forget that we are pure project, a projection
in time towards a future and a potential. Husserl in this context spoke of
our genetic constitution, to indicate that our consciousness is always
dynamic rather than static. It is on the move, in the throw of its project.
How easy it is to forget this and to reify our existence. Sartre similarly
spoke of truth as the totalization of all that we know at any one point. It is
not something that we can capture, encapsulate and hold on to once and for
all. Truth is to be constantly added to and altered as we find out more about
all there is to know. In 'Search for a Method'., Sartre redefined truth in this
way:
For us truth is something which becomes, it has and will have become.
It is a totalization which is forever being totalized.
(Sartre, 1960: 30).
Life is constantly changing and in movement and as it changes we learn
its lessons and totalize what we know. And though we can and have to
learn the lessons from the past, we need to do so whilst having real
presence in the present and with preparedness to be altered again in the
future. Because ofthat we cannot set anything in stone, not even the basics
of morality, for all is in fiow.
There is no abstract ethics. There is only an ethics in a situation and
therefore it is concrete. An abstract ethics is that of the good
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conscience. It assumes that one can be ethical in a fundamentally
unethical situation.
(Sartre, 1983:17)
For Sartre then, this is what people do: they leam to engage with the
situation, leam from it and change it as much as is possible, in line with the
projects they believe in and are committed to.
Man is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation and by
what he succeeds in making of what he has been made. This is what
we call the project.
(Sartre, 1960 :91)
This same idea is present in Beauvoir's 'Ethics of Ambiguity' (1948),
which is similariy grounded in an ongoing active and reflective existence
and which can never be captured once and for all. It is also present in
Ricoeur's idea of narrative tmth which he argues is arrived at through
dialogue (1990), so that tmth is not just a living tmth but is a tmth arrived
at in communication. If we want to live in tmth we have to be prepared to
not live with certainty and to be light enough on our feet to be ready for
constant change.
All of this is of course profotindly relevant to psychotherapy, since we
aim to help people to find tmth about their lives and to reorientate
themselves to the world in a way that allows them to fulfil their potential.
Hans Cohn contended that therapy was about:
The restoration of an unlived dimension of life, whether this is
described as forgotten, denied, repressed or abandoned.
(Cohn, 2005: 384)
In this sense therapy is a search for one's life in an attempt at recreating
it in a more complete manner. It is a kind of project of totalization in which
we make as many connections as possible in order to understand our lives.
I would add it is also to discover new possibilities, we never even knew
existed and were ignorant of
Living a human life: what does it mean?
So the question is whether it is an accumulation of projects and
commitments that makes us most fulfilled and also whether this is the
objective of life: to be fulfilled and happy? In my recent book on happiness
(Deurzen 2009) I have argued that this is far from the tmth. The objective
of life is not to get to some destination, some utopia where all will be well
forever after. Happiness is not the objective, but only an occasional port.
The idea of happiness as a state to achieve or as a value to judge one's life
by is suspect and limited, whereas happiness, as an emotion is to be set
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amongst the other emotions as one colour is to be set amongst the other
colours of the spectrum. It is not whether we are having or have had a
happy life that matters, but whether we have lived it right and well. I stand
with the Athenian concept of Eudaimonia on this point. It is right living
that is where it is at. It is not about well-being, but about being well. And
being well has a lot to do with how deeply we allow ourselves to be in
space and time.
Madison (2009) has described that depth of our experience as being in
touch with the evocative. The atmospheres and moods that hint at the
actualify and intensify of experience are what is most precious in the
world, though we often seem to do everything we can to avoid them. We
access this evocative aspect of life by the way in which our senses are
touched by the world. We embody the evocation and are seduced into a
new atmosphere, memory or depth of feeling through smells, by music, by
movement, as in dance or by images that subliminally draw us into new
strata of realify. Weather and landscape can also affect us in this way as
can atmospheres in a room full of people, or a line from a letter or poem.
We are caught into a new sphere, inveigled into a new wave of emotion or
rumbled by darkness or bursts of joy and light when touched by the
richness of texture and colour, of sound and fragrance that tell a new story
about ourselves or the iiniverse. We live our time-space in very different
ways at different moments.
Time/Space
Heidegger introduced the idea of time/space in his later work as a kind of
backdrop to Dasein's existence in-the-world. While he described human
beings as connected closely to a world from the start, it was only in his
later work that he emphasized the human abilify to release itself into Being
rather than merely affirm its own existence resolutely. In his
'Contributions to Philosophy' he described the fourfold of human beings
as situated in an in-between
the Between [between men and gods] first grounds the time-space for
the relation [between men and gods]
(Heidegger, 1989: 312)
Heidegger's Zeit-raum, his time-space, is not the same as the space-time
of physicists. Time-space is the point where space and time come together
before the big-bang and they have their origin in a common root.
The big bang in which Being explodes into EARTH, world, men and
gods, also creates the time-space in which the fragments are related to
each other
(idem: 485).
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Only when we open up to this complex time-space do we acquire the
kind of elbow room that allows us to own our existence in a playil
manner that lets us explore what being is about. To live in time, I once said
(Deurzen, 2002), is not to favour past, present or fiiture. It is to have the
courage to keep exploring all three and to keep learning and transcending
our self narrative.
Human beings have consciousness and this allows us to leam from
experience, understand and transform it. We can choose to increase our
capacity for feeling and being or decrease it. If we increase it we will also
suffer more. But the price for less suffering is to care less and protect
ourselves more. It means to be less sensitive - less open - less entire - less
alive. We can control the process of our existence by having less of it, but
we may find ourselves frozen or paralysed. You decide: do you want to
live for real and to the full, or hide in pseudo-comfort and fear? The choice
is yours. Your life belongs to you.
When we discover that the tension we feel in our lives is no more than
the energy that drives us forward and that it is the electric current between
positive and negative poles that produces power, then perhaps we will stop
trying to smooth everything out. We need this dynamic differential, for it is
what life is made of Without the differential and the opposing there would
not be the possibility of dialectics and transformation, no movement
forward, no overcoming, no transcendence.
So, we might as well allow ourselves to be the lenses, the prisms,
through which the energy is transformed. We may as well polish our lenses
and leam to be a better conduit to refract or reflect the light and the life.
We always transform what we receive, but we have a choice to reflect it,
absorb it, stop it, ward it off or pass it on in tact.
But we can also magnify and illuminate it fiirther, refi-acting all facets
and making life shine stronger than when it first touched us. To elucidate
life we need first to clear the lens and let life shine through us. We need to
clear our minds and our daily existence and know when to be open and
when to be closed. We need to leam to be prepared to process that which
opposes us and not be put off by the fire of life. Tuning into to the tmth we
know, we make ourselves draw breath in the passionate depth of life, with
as much joy as sorrow and with a readiness for what time and destiny holds
in store.
Conclusion
My conclusion, inspired by Camus, is that the best way to live is to aim for
being in harmony with your own life and to love it in all its manifestations:
past, present and future. This means of course being in harmony with
others as well as with your self, with nature as well as with ideas. It means
not just to be in touch with the actuality of what is, but also with its
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dynamic and dialectical reality. It is in sum to love the potentiality of living
as much as its actuality. This attitude goes beyond Nietzsche's Amor Fati,
since it does not just love what is, but also what has been and what will or
may be.
Of course in this process challenges, difficulties, confiicts and even
crises are not the enemy, nor are they necessarily to be avoided, feared or
scomed. They are necessary moments of opposition and difficulty that
deepen us and allow our roots to grow strongly into the most fertile earth:
that of our moments of loss and sorrow. Once earthed in that most
fundamental way we shall be able to reach out again and send new shoots
up from that darkness, first small tendrils, then stronger branches, until we
are able to blossom and fmit with renewed life.
Emmy van Deurzen is a psychotherapist and author whose work is
intemationally well known and translated into a dozen languages. She is
one of the foremost authorities on existential therapy who has established,
directed and developed both Regent's College School of Psychotherapy
and Counselling and the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in
London. She is Professor of Psychotherapy with Schiller Intemational
University, Honorary Professor with the University of Sheffield, where she
co-directs the Centre for the Study of Confiict and Reconciliation and
Visiting Professor with Middlesex University, for whom she directs two
doctoral programmes at NSPC. She founded the Society for Existential
Analysis in 1988. Amongst her books are the bestseller Existential
Psychotherapy and Counselling in Practice (2"^ edition Sage, 2002) as
well as her most recent book: Psychotherapy and the Quest for Happiness
(Sage, 2009). A co-edited book on Existential Supervision will be
published later this year with Palgrave, as will the second edition of her
textbook Everyday Mysteries.
References
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Cohn, H. (2005). Interpretation: Explanation or understanding. In Deurzen,
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Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Deurzen, E. van. (2002). Existential Counselling and Psychotherapy in
Practice. Revised Second Edition, London: Sage Publications.
Deurzen, E. van. (2009) Psychotherapy and the Quest for Happiness,
London: Sage.
Deurzen, E. van. (2009b). Everyday Mysteries: A Handbook of Existential
Psychotherapy. T^ edition, London: Routledge.
238
Life is for Living
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