Comments for Emmy van Deurzen

Comment on Existential Therapy by Emmy

Emmy — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:21:26 +0000

Several projects are currently underway. Take a look at Mick Cooper’s work at Strathclyde University.

best
emmy

Comment on Emmy’s 2012 workshops and lectures by Emmy

Emmy — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:20:50 +0000

No connection. The link is that we use the same wordpress package to create our websites.

Comment on Existential Therapy by Evannia Celeste

Evannia Celeste — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:30:58 +0000

Emmy, has any research been done on the efficacy of Exixtentialist Therapy so that there can be seen to be an evidence base for its use in the field of Mental Illnesss.
Thank you
evannia

Comment on Emmy’s 2012 workshops and lectures by Ian Cleary

Ian Cleary — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 20:00:33 +0000

Hello, can you please confirm whether http://www.counsellinglincs.co.uk/ is an affiliate, as I have noticed a strong visual similarity between your websites?

Thank you.

Comment on Existential Therapy by Carey Foster

Carey Foster — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:12:59 +0000

I do understand the points you raise and appreciate and respect your views. But please remember that I am not a therapist, existential or otherwise so forgive me for not responding as one.

Thank you again.

Comment on Existential Therapy by Emmy

Emmy — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:03:10 +0000

Carey. We clearly have very different ideas about the ground rules of human relations. We also have different views of what makes philosophy great. I don’t think it is the tradition of argumentation, disputation, refutation and dissent that is its strength, especially not when this leads to ad hominem attacks such as ‘you must be either disingenuous or too sensitive a flower for me to correspond with you’. I don’t think any existential therapist with any sort of decent training would even dream of speaking to someone in such a manner. Especially not after having gone to their website to initiate a challenge which had already been responded to rather generously.

I think what is great about philosophy is its genuine search for truth, when this is undertaken, not in an adversarial manner, but through a collaborative enquiry into the way in which different points of view may illuminate the same issue from different perspectives. My experience of being an expert witness in court has shown me that barristers are generally far more into game playing than truth finding and I am glad you judge me not to be up to their standard of sophistry.

I will not respond any further on this page. If you did want to engage in a constructive debate, there are plenty of fora in which I participate and I am sure our paths will cross again.
best regards
emmy

Comment on Existential Therapy by Carey Foster

Carey Foster — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:17:22 +0000

Sorry Emmy – you don’t need to publish this as it is a personal message. Thank you for your invitation to join your LInked In group. Unfortunately I really limit my online presence on social and professional networking sites these days as both myself and a number of colleagues and personal friends have experienced some serious privacy issues with Twitter, LInked In and Facebook.

Thanks again

Carey

Comment on Existential Therapy by Carey Foster

Carey Foster — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:04:17 +0000

Emmy. I cannot find anything in my posts which dismisses, traduces or condemns your work or that of any of the philosophers you admire. I am also rather surprised that you find what I intended as a challenging and open debate asking genuine questions in a spirit of critical consideration to be “upsetting”. Perhaps this hinges upon a key differentiator which you yourself highlight in your very cogent and heartfelt response. What I find most exciting and interesting about philosophy – its tradition of argumentation, disputation refutation and dissent – seems to be precisely what you yourself find problematic about it. That concerns me, not just because I feel that some of my important questions have been somewhat glossed over (I am certain, for example, that your take on Heideggerian phenomenology would have had much to offer me) but also in the sense that debate centred upon discerning judgement of ideas and theories has been the foundation of philosophical enquiry since time immemorial and if philosophers lose sight of that imperative in the light of personal feelings then they risk missing the point of philosophy altogether. My questions and critique are levelled at ideas and concepts not at individuals. I do not know you and have never met you and even had I done so I would be extremely careful not to allow whatever personal feelings arose to colour any academic dialogue I might have with you. By way of example, I am fortunate enough to number among my close friends several barristers who have on occasion appeared against each other in court and engaged in the most excoriating attacks upon each other’s legal interpretations and cases with the intention of arriving at some kind of synthetic agreement on what is actually “true”. I have also sat down to dinner with these people and found them able to hold the most amicable and genuinely friendly dialogue with each other utterly unaffected by what might have been said in a courtroom weeks or months before. Please do not make the fatal mistake of confusing my robust questioning of your philosophical standpoint with a personal attack. That having been said, I do understand that it is sometimes hard to separate one’s passion for an idea with one’s own sense of self-worth and value particularly when one is working in a field such as yours where what you do and who you are are sometimes necessarily conflated. As a dry old academic that is not a dichotomy which troubles me, although strangely enough as a painter I am often deeply hurt if my work is given a poor critical reception or if I feel it has been misunderstood. Having said all that Emmy, if the only way you feel able to respond to my questions concerning your work and your theorising is to confuse my serious interest and desire to engage in the kind of informed and energetic debate to which career academics such as myself are accustomed with some kind of personal animus then I am sorry I troubled you. I am also frankly rather offended by your, to my mind, unwarranted and serious accusation of “cyber-bullying”. It is all too easy to stifle online debate with accusations of that nature and I fear this is precisely what will happen here, because I feel that you are either being disingenuous in your reluctance to engage or that you are too sensitive a flower for me to correspond with further. Either way I will try to find some other forum for my questioning. I wish you all the best for the future – particularly with the new course which sounds very interesting. Thank you for your contributions so far and goodbye for now.

Comment on Existential Therapy by Emmy

Emmy — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:54:04 +0000

Dear Carey
Thanks for your vigorous comments, which I find stimulating in their knowledgeable and passionate challenge though, once again, rather more adversarial than I am comfortable with and because of that overall more upsetting than illuminating.

The attacking manner of your engagement with my work makes it a chore rather than a pleasure to respond with calm consideration. This is not, as you are supposing, because anyone who challenges my views is to be dismissed as condemnatory, but because anyone who is condemnatory rather than constructive is in my experience not able and willing to debate an issue with fairness or with a serious commitment to mutuality and joint learning.

This is, I believe the problem with much of philosophy, which has a tradition of dismissive argumentation rather than cooperation. In the sciences we tend to base ourselves on facts instead and this can often lead to cooperation in thinking, which in my view is a far more conducive model for progress. There is a lot to learn from the practice of psychology and psychotherapy in terms of how to conduct human relations in a way that is collaborative rather than competitive. I relish engaging in philosophical conversations that are based in dialogue. But I object to being taken to task in an attacking manner.

If you want to engage in a dialogue about my work in the spirit of mutual learning, I shall, as always, welcome this, as I am keen to remain open and flexible. I have however no patience with people who pick fights with me in order to dismiss me and accuse me of all sorts of failings. I consider that a form of cyber bullying. I would invite you to join the LInked In Existential Therapy group, which is a more appropriate forum for an interchange than my personal website.

Just a final word about your criticism of existential therapists.
Of course it is easy to show that existential therapists do not have the kind of wide range of reading that you yourself have acquired. I have to admit I have not had the time to keep up with authors such as Sokal and Bricmont, myself, but will now certainly do so. Thank you for that tip. But certainly Adorno is on our reading list and a critique of the philosophers we teach is very much part of the NSPC curriculum. But of course I cannot vouch for the rather more superficial way in which others are now teaching existential therapy on counselling courses across the country.

Your own knowledge of the field is admirable and I would love you to come and teach a one day course for NSPC at some point. But only if you can, for your part, show some respect for what therapists may have to teach you in turn, especially about how to engage with someone else’s perspective, rather than try to prove it wrong, and then accuse them of patronisation or stifling the debate or of carrying ‘humanist’ notions. Such statements, in my experience usually lead to less human understanding and a desire to dismiss the other.

Let me explain where I am coming from in my response. It has taken me forty years of extremely hard work to get psychologists and psychotherapists to the point where existential methods are now widely accepted. This has meant dealing with broad disagreements, constant conflicts and sometimes vicious attacks of all sorts with patience and consideration and continuing to build a strong base from which to teach and train people.

Of course it is easy to show that people who have been trained in this approach, fail to bring the wide philosophical background and training that you display yourself. If you think you can improve on what has been achieved, that is great, but you will then still have to make that contribution, in a positive manner, rather than by dismissing other people’s work. I have long thought that a philosophy degree is the best background for therapy training, but sometimes it creates the wrong attitude in a person and it can take quite some time before they understand a more therapeutic way of engagement, in the tradition of people like Jaspers, Tillich, Marcel, Buber and Scheler. That is my personal preference. Not because I want to patronise, but because I do not want to be patronised, especially not by those who haven’t yet proven their worth.
best regards
emmy

Comment on Existential Therapy by Carey Foster

Carey Foster — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 23:16:29 +0000

Hi Emmy. Thanks for a considered response. Actually you are quite wrong in your assumption about my background. I am no great fan of the analytic or linguistic philosophers for reasons that are probably outside the context of this forum. In fact my philosophical and theoretical background is no less “continental” in flavour or learning than your own and actually conceivably rather wider since little of your work seems to take into account movements in continental philosophy which have taken place since the birth – and conceivably (with the advent of critical realism) – the death of postmodernism. So I’ll agree to overlook your rather patronising comment on the understanding that perhaps I did not make myself fully clear. Let me also clearly state that I do not dismiss “existential” writers or thinkers in the “sweeping” manner you suggest. That, of course, does not mean I have to accept their work, or, for that matter, that contained within any other philosophical edifice, uncritically. Existentialism, together with structuralism and post-structuralism, was a valuable foil to the sophistry of Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Harvard. having said that, although I am frustrated by twentieth century Anglophone philosophy in many ways, I do think that some of their ideas about the use of language provide a powerful critical lens through which to view many of the continentals. On that note it is important to remember also that these criticisms are far from purely “Anglo-Saxon” in origin. You may be familiar with the work of Popper, Marcuse and Adorno – none of whom were remotely Anglo-Saxon in their thinking. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont provide another good example of a non-Anglophone critique. Their Impostures Intellectuelles delivers a damning critique of, among others, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard. (Sokal is best known for submitting a deliberately absurd article to Social Text, a respected critical theory journal, who published it in spite of its being completely meaningless. Sokal and Bricmont argue very much along the lines of Ayer et al that much of continental philosophy is grounded in the unhelpful and unscholarly use of scientific or pseudoscientific terminology, the importation of concepts from the natural sciences or classical languages without any real understanding, justification, or rationale. They also go on to suggest that many continental thinkers (and I would include both Heidegger and Sartre among them) display superficial erudition by coining and deploying ill-conceived neologisms and irrelevant technical terms. They also accuse the writers who form the subject of their critique of displaying an unjustified degree of self-assurance on topics which are far beyond their competence. This latter criticism has been levelled time and time again at Heidegger who clumsily plagiarised and misrepresented many Greek concepts which were far beyond his level of understanding and erudition in that language. It’s true that I have great problems with Heidegger, largely because so much of his writing is confused and contradictory and tautological. Subsequent thinkers have gone a long way to unravel many of these contradictions but in so doing they have effectively splintered interpretations to the point where no truly coherent meaning has emerged. As for Sartre, his basic problem of reconciling determinist Marxism with its insistence on the “self” as an economically constructed subject and notions of individual freedom have never been satisfactorily reconciled either by him or his followers. I appreciate your point that therapists do not have to be philosophers (or vice versa) but am confused by your postulating that “improvement rarely happens from criticising others”. In the philosophical world – i.e. the world which underpins you theorising and therapeutic model – the ONLY way in which improvement or progress happens is by taking a critical view of others and their work. You say that “Therapy is about understanding and clarifying, not about argumentation” as if disagreement and contention where to be frowned upon and avoided. There seems to be a concealed value judgement here which implies that anyone who challenges your views is somehow guilty of being “condemning” and thereby culpable and that intellectual debate should be stifled in the interests of some woolly humanist notion which is in direct contradiction to much existential thought (didn’t Heidegger himself split with Sartre because the latter sought to insert Englightenment Humanism into a phenomenological perspective which denied the primacy of the concrete self and was essentially anti-humanit if not anti-human?). As a philosopher my project is not to sanctify or enshrine any one abstraction as inviolable truth but to remain open to all possibilities and also to an intellectual critique of my own views. This is what I meant by “cultish”. You seem unwilling to engage in a debate about the seeming contradictions in your work and I get the feeling that you are somehow muddling the idea of debate with notiond of attack or conflict. I am particularly puzzled by your repated reference to logic. Had I levelled a critique of the existentialists purely from a perspective based on axiomatic consistency then that would make sense. But I didn’t. So it doesn’t. I have only met a handful of existential therapists but I have read the work of many of them and for me the basic problem remains unresolved. They seem to be taught to believe that they are philosophers when they are actually anything but, and I have to say that your apparent discomfort with “argumentation” seems to militate against a rounded view of the material in hand. Perhaps this is best summed up by a conversation I had with a student at a London University recently (not your own) who was in the final stages of a diploma in integrative counselling which included a strong emphasis on the existential model. We were talking about “authenticity” and when I referred to Adorno’s critique of Heideggerian notions of authenticity in his book “The Jargon of Authenticity”. She first asked who Adorno was, then asked if he was “existential” and when told that he was probably not concluded the conversation by saying that “in that case he doesn’t know what he’s talking about so it doesn’t matter”. Duh!