Becoming an Existential Therapist

Emmy van Deurzen
Original draft for the programme “Existential Me” The Essay- BBC Radio 3
Shorter, revised version read on 15 November 2013.

Early decisions about religion

I can trace the moment when I decided to commit myself to the search for truth. I was seven years old and had just realized that other children in my class were generally baptised and thus somehow branded and defined by belonging to a particular creed or church. As this took place in the Netherlands in the nineteen fifties, they were mostly Protestant, Calvinist, Lutheran or Reformed. Some were Catholic or Jewish and in one or two cases Hindu. With so many options on offer, I was dismayed that I had been left out of this distribution of riches. It did seem to convey one slight advantage in that I was exempt from having to go to a place of worship on the weekend. Most of my friends and cousins seemed to find this tedious and annoying.  But I was acutely aware that the lack of religious affiliation was also a social handicap, as it created an aura of difference and suspicion around me. I was not ‘one of the chosen’ as others seemed to think they were. Several times friends or their parents warned me that I would be barred from salvation and would not go to heaven after my death. This troubled me deeply although I had no image of hell or heaven and refused to believe them. I decided that I would have to start searching to figure out what the truth of the matter was and turned to my parents.

My parents were free thinkers, who had abandoned their childhood Christian beliefs after their trials and tribulations in the Second World War, in which they had come to question everything they had been taught. They had joined the theosophical society, an organization that looked at the great world religions to try and make sense of spirituality in a more pluralistic way. In practice it meant that they exposed me to Hindu and Buddhist ideas as much as to Judeo-Christian ones, though I cannot remember being told much about Moslem concepts till later on. When my primary school teacher asked everyone in our class to state their religion, I really was not sure what to say and said I had no religion, then went home to ask my parents what I should have replied. My dad laughed and scoffed. He provocatively suggested I tell my teacher that I was a heathen. This scandalized my mother, who thought I should call myself an atheist or an agnostic. When I was beginning to get my seven-year-old head around these terms, I found them troublesome and deeply wanting, for I did not want to be defined by what I was not. I wanted to engage with something.

I already had deep and secret beliefs of my own and wanted to commit my entire soul to something that was true and good and worthwhile rather than stating I was an unbeliever or a doubter. I loved nature and freedom and fairness and kindness, the sunshine on the North Sea waves, the wind sweeping me along or challenging me on my bike through the dunes. And I loved going camping with my parents, for four weeks each summer, trekking through Europe with little tents, meeting people from different countries, learning languages, realizing how many different sorts of existence there were for each person to choose from. I relished rain when it made the tent seem cosy or made the forest or mountain streams come to life. I loved watching clouds drifting through the sky and I was mesmerized by thunderstorms and sunsets. At night, sitting in the dark by our tents, the stars and planets overawed me. I was eager to know more about the universe and wanted to understand what it was all about.

Impact of my parents’ war experiences

Most of the time I lived in a confined situation however, in our tiny second floor flat in the North Sea dunes at the South West of The Hague in the Netherlands. We looked out towards the sea on one side and on all other sides to rows of new-built flats and post-war construction sites. My elder sister and I shared a box room so compact that one of our beds had to be stored under the other during the daytime. We were initially uncomplaining, as we were never left in any doubt that we were lucky to have this modest space at all. Never mind that our cousins were better off. We were on the move and life would improve.

The stories we were told by our parents on a daily basis were harrowing. We knew that The Hague had been occupied by the Germans for five years and had been bombed continuously. The population had suffered greatly from hunger, persecution and fear, especially for that last dire, ice-cold winter of 44–45, known as the Dutch Famine. My father had been in hiding in a freezing loft, in danger of his life for many months. He had contracted double pneumonia and continued to suffer from severe asthma as a result. My mother had nursed sick children, who suffered from starvation, diphtheria, tetanus and tuberculosis. Our maternal grandparents had lost their home and all their possessions twice over, first when their house was bombed to the ground in The Hague by the Germans and a second time when their new accommodation in Arnhem was bombed by the allies at the end of the war.  Many of my uncles and great uncles had been deported to Nazi labour camps or in some cases had been summarily shot in the street whilst resisting. During the German blockade of food and fuel to the West of Holland, all of my family suffered and came to the edge of the tolerable. My parents were so traumatised by it all that they talked to us about it non-stop during our early years. I have no doubt that this created second-generation traumatisation and that many of my choices in later life were rooted in this sensitization. Our parents deliberately exposed us to different nations and languages so that we would become a force for the good in terms of fraternization in Europe. I grew up with an acute sense of scarcity and learnt to count my blessings from very early on. I felt responsible for making the world a better and more peaceful place if at all possible. Though I was born some years after the end of the war I can vividly remember the coupons my mum still used to buy sugar and butter. We lived with very little. What excitement when my mother was able to buy her first fridge for that diminutive kitchen. What luxury when a washing machine came along some years later and she no longer had to stand bending over a tub, hand washing our sheets and our smalls.

In that cramped and uptight environment we sometimes heard the nightly screams of the downstairs neighbour who suffered from recurrent nightmares after having been tortured in a Japanese war camp. We heard gruesome stories from other children about their fathers’ suffering and experiences of torture too. For a while I lived in terror of it happening to me. Our next-door neighbour had lost one of her arms in a bombing. We saw the tattoos on the forearms of those who had returned from concentration camps. My imagination ran wild and I used to picture myself living in such circumstances as I read books like Anne Frank’s diary when I was still a small child and I played out concentration camp scenes in my mind most nights, which led to horrific nightmares. No wonder we panicked during the Suez crisis when Dutch safety was once again severely threatened and we were made to practise running for cover to cellars and bomb-shelters, in case we were going to be under nuclear attack.

Search for knowledge

Reality was far too scary for me to be casual about my beliefs. I was searching for something that could make sense of it all, but did not have the luxurious assurance of creed or God. I grew up with an acute sense of danger in the world and an equally great sense of gratitude for every moment of relative safety. In that post war atmosphere of struggle, reading books was an exhilarating (and often secretive) activity that opened up new and more promising worlds and ways of life. As my father spent six months in Paris when I was a little girl and we went camping all around France early on, I was attracted to French literature. Reading Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir was intoxicating. Their books spoke of choices that had to be made, freedoms that had to be fought for, living that had to be learnt and loves that could be earned. I wanted all that and wanted it badly. Anouilh’s plays of Antigone and Joan of Arc provided me with much needed female role models.

The way the existentialists questioned the bourgeois principles that my family had lost in the war gave me hope: perhaps it was an advantage to be so deprived. The existential rebellion against the dogma of religion gave me a home. These ideas all at once saved me, electrified me and called me to account. What was I going to do to make sure I would not go under in a world of easy options or hypocrisies? We were now moving towards the rewards of the early sixties and I was wary and aware of the dangers of going under in make believe as I swooned into the seductive sentiment of pop and blues music and yearned for a life of discovery and great love. How would I live my life? I had the urgent idea that it was important to make the most of the new opportunities and wanted to help create a better world rather than expecting it to be offered to me as a gift.

In secondary school, where I studied classics, I briefly but enthusiastically adopted the pantheism of the Greeks and Romans and read about their rituals and myths with the same eagerness I had felt in reading folk tales. I had a liking for the Stoics too and plastered Seneca, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius’ quotes all over my school diary. But I was ready for more serious fare and became fascinated with Plato, falling in love with Socrates’ dialoguing spirit and his fierce enquiry into truth combined with his firm challenges to those who only pretended to know. He gave me a method for my later work as a therapist as well: the Socratic dialogue in which two people try to establish what is right and what is wrong and at the best of times, collaboratively, come to reveal some elements of wisdom that enable them to live with more clarity.

After this I could never just fall in blindly with existentialism again. I would always come to it critically, challenging it from the perspective of my own experiential reality and from the method of enquiry that Socrates had shown me. Later on, as I studied science and logic, I became committed to checking any assertions against scientific facts and rational thought as well. At the same time the passionate nature of existentialism dovetailed beautifully with my own life preoccupations and with the desire to live a freer kind of life than my parents had lived. When Sartre showed that hell was other people this made good sense to me in the claustrophobic atmosphere of our tiny flat, where tempers flared and I felt oppressed and thwarted and craved privacy and respect. De Beauvoir’s questioning of female assumptions was also formative and inspiring, as I knew that I would never want to be a housewife in the way my mother was. I wanted to liberate myself from these narrow confines and find the existential freedom these authors promised.

Then, in 1967 on one of our long summer travels, this time in a still pristine pre-tourist Portugal, I fell in love with a Frenchman five years older than me. He was a student, a poet and an existential rebel. The vehemence of his feelings for me overwhelmed me. Our subsequent daily correspondence utterly transformed me and opened an entirely new vista in my life. His visits to the Netherlands where I was still a schoolgirl drew me into a world I had thus far only dreamt about. And then in May ‘68 came the French revolution with its total stoppage of post for months. My heart ground to the occasional halt but grew ever fonder, as I lived on the Parisian barricades with him in spirit. My emotions were strong and my commitment was entire and total. The relief of seeing him that summer was ecstatic. During the next year I found it hard to concentrate on my schoolwork and Latin and Greek seemed torrid and boring by comparison to the transcendent love I was swept up in.  This was eased by the fact that my French grades kept improving as letters continued to fly back and forth. I was living the poetry, the love and the promise of a better future. But a year later, after another heady visit, sailing on the Dutch lakes and walking on the North Sea beach, spending the night watching the defining Apollo 11 mission, he abruptly and silently disappeared from my life, without a word or explanation, leaving me with an enormous inner vacuum, that I was unable to fill. I became desolate and suicidal and only barely managed to survive because of the kindness of family and teachers. It taught me much about the importance of friendship and the importance of contributing to the world. It taught me also about the vital need for self-reliance, autonomy and courage.

As soon as my final exams were over, I was off to France, a free spirit ready to live the life I had longed for but no longer burdened with romantic illusions and determined to remain alone for the rest of my life. Though I was very lonely, I was in terrific company, discovering a literature so rich that it soothed my soul. Alongside the existential authors came Flaubert and Proust and Rousseau and many others. But I was also immersed in Freud and Jung and Hesse and the poetry of Verlaine and Rimbaud. Music, as always made its own crucial contribution to my search for expansion and my groping towards redemption. I discovered the melancholy joy of French chansons and revelled in Aznavour, Brel and Brassens. As soon as my philosophy studies took off in seriousness I found that the huge precipice inside of me could easily accommodate the entire range of European philosophers. I delighted in their yearning for understanding and their search for meaning.

I was fortunate enough to study for my masters in philosophy with Michel Henry, an existential-phenomenological philosopher who knew Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau Ponty, Marx and Engels, but also Kant and Hegel and Nietzsche better than most and whose search for human decency beyond philosophy was enlightening. He taught me much and was inspirational in the way in which he drew wisdom from controversy, remaining aloof from academic rivalries. He gave me the confidence to pursue my therapeutic practice as a form of applied philosophy. While I began to do so by thinking about it from scratch, inventing it in the process, I soon became aware of the rich tradition of existential philosophers like Buber, Scheler, Tillich, Jaspers and Marcel showing me the way. Then I discovered Binswanger and shortly afterwards R.D. Laing and realized I had found a field to which I wanted to contribute, as it badly needed further development.

The defining idea of existential therapy is that it is philosophy in practice. Existential therapists do not accept a restrictive picture of the human psyche and do not formulate the task of existence as one that is predetermined by human nature. If there is no essence of being and no blue print for morality, human beings have to struggle with the human condition and define the way they want to live, understanding the obstacles and difficulties they encounter in ever better ways. Since human beings evolve and change as they become more conscious and alter their position in the world, the objective of existential therapy is to awaken a person to consciousness and awareness of their own position in the world. Context is crucial. We are moulded by the culture and history we find ourselves embedded in. People create their lives out of what has been given to them and what they have managed to understand of life. Human life is a relatively brief experience, which starts with conception and ends in death, leaving each of us to make something meaningful out of what happens in between. The golden rule of phenomenology is to describe rather than to interpret and this allows us to approach the mystery of human consciousness in a careful and respectful manner, noticing that life is rather different according to our different cultures, situations and circumstances though we have some fundamental experiences in common and we are all capable of transcending our early givens to some extent.

Practising what you preach

I became involved in psychiatry through my relationship with a French medical student when I was myself a philosophy student in Montpellier in the early 1970ies. He decided to specialize in psychiatry and I decided to move on to psychotherapy training so that our disparate interests could come together. My study of the works of psychoanalytic authors like Freud, Jung, Lacan, Deleuze and Irigaray was absorbing and intriguing and affected me deeply, but it did not satisfy my search for a philosophical way to practice. As I joined my now psychiatrist husband in his work in various psychiatric settings, first with autistic children, then with young anorexic women, I was shocked at the lack of care given. I found that many people as soon as they became patients lost their own voice and self-respect, giving up their agency and humanity as they became dependent on medical care and chemicals. I was now being confronted with the depth of despair in people so alienated from themselves and society that they were often unreachable. In spite of this it was obvious to me that their struggles and suffering were not so dissimilar to my own, though they had fallen more deeply into desolation and isolation than I ever had. I was able to resonate with them strongly enough to sense what they wanted and needed. For they too had lost their gods, their identity and their sense of belonging and redemption. I had found a field of work in which I was at home and where my capacity for clear thinking and my desire for truth and understanding were wanted, needed and required to be further sharpened rather than to be blunted or silenced. I found in existential philosophy an endless source of inspiration and a wealth of ideas from which to draw when helping other people to make sense of their troubles and create new meanings in life.

It became essential to seek out places where working with people could be done in an experimental and more humane way than was possible in the psychiatric hospital of Font d’Aurelle in Montpellier. We chose to go work and live in a revolutionary psychiatric hospital in the Massif Central, in the small town of Saint Alban, Lozère, which was the birthplace of French social and community therapy. Here I was able to apply my philosophical understanding to my work with individual patients and groups and was for ever changed by this baptism of fire, in which I was stretched and changed. I summarized my learning in my master’s dissertation with Michel Henry on the phenomenology of solipsism, loneliness and schizophrenia. This also sparked his interest in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis on which he was to write a book later. For my part I decided to get further training and so I went back to University to qualify as a clinical psychologist, doing research on attempted suicide. I wanted to develop a method for helping people understand their shipwrecked lives better and realized that the time had come to begin to develop my own way of working.

During my training in Lacanian psychoanalytic therapy I disagreed with so much of that particular interpretation of reality that I searched high and low for alternative models and methods and came to appreciate the work of R.D. Laing and other radical psychiatrists who had been inspired by the work of Jean Paul Sartre. In the UK in the sixties and seventies these so called ‘anti-psychiatrists’ created therapeutic communities for people who were struggling with survival but who did not want to be consigned to mental hospitals or pumped full of medication.

I came to the UK in 1977 to work with this movement and lived and worked in one of these communities, immersing myself in people’s problems and experimenting with alternative ways of approaching mental illness. While the communities were often lacking in structure and good support, the idea was ground breaking and remains of value today. This way of working was not unlike what I had experienced in Saint Alban, except that my relationships with the people I lived with were much closer and led to life-long friendships. By now I could no longer take the method of psychopathological diagnosis seriously. What people needed was understanding not medication. They wanted to solve their problems, not suppress them. Their condition was not medical, but existential. I knew that the only way to overcome the problems was to face them with courage. This strengthened my resolve to describe more carefully how to actually do this, systematically and to this purpose I created a new training school for existential therapy and began writing about my way of working.

This existential therapy is firmly based in human living and in the philosophical wisdom I am committed to continue to study. I started teaching these ideas all over London, first at the Arbours Association, then at the Institute of Psychotherapy and Social Studies, Antioch University and South West London College counselling courses. I founded a School at Regent’s College in the 80’s and the New School in the 90’s. My objective was not to be clever or successful but to do justice to the suffering of the people I worked with and to spread the word about the alternatives available. None of it is valid unless it matches what people experience. Any philosophy worth having has got to be fit to be applied in practice. It has to be real and firmly based in life itself. It can’t be just about words and theories.

What I find in the writing of existential philosophers are sacred principles and intellectual riches that these authors have worked hard to extract from their own life experience and depth of suffering. I feel a profound sense of gratitude that human beings can be so creative and inventive and so generous with in sharing their understanding. It makes life worthwhile and right, in a world that continues to be riddled with conflict, anxiety, aggression, loss and sadness. I aim to contribute to the pool of wisdom, as much as I can.

The application of these existential ideas to existential psychotherapy means that clients are not offered reassurance or treatment for symptoms, but are encouraged to consider their anxiety as a valid starting point for the work that has to be done. They are helped to face facts and find the resilience to make changes for the better by affirming their freedom and capacity for choice, always in open fair-minded conversation and with a view to exploring the consequences of choices with a careful weighing up of rights and duties.

Philosophy can benefit all of us, not just psychotherapy clients. It encourages us to develop moral and existential principles for ourselves. Such ideas call us to live to the full, making the most of the time we have got, unafraid of suffering, and not shirking from plumbing our own depths, in which we sometimes lock up our passions as well as our fears.

When I work with my clients I aim to help them to understand their lives better, to regain their balance, their perspective, their sense of direction and to find the meaning that they have lost or purloined, or perhaps never found in the first place. And hopefully they will discover to their delight that times of crisis are moments for reflection rather than moments where we should rush into panicky action. They learn to thrive on anxiety and find their true depth when despairing or upset. People who are engaged with something of value always surprise themselves. They find fresh energy and purpose to engage with life in a new and wholehearted fashion. A calm and kind, quiet but searching dialogue is often all it takes to help them find their depth.

In that process people learn to recognize the contradictions and paradoxes of life, to face their troubles and solve dilemmas. They also learn to decide what is important and precious in life. I have done this job for over forty years and continue to be amazed at people’s resilience and intelligence in overcoming their problems once they put their heart and mind into it. Since it is Camus’ 100th birthday this year, I shall end on a couple of quotes by him, for they sum up so well what clients discover, as they face their fate and learn to love their life. Camus says it very elegantly and poignantly:

‘In the depth of winter, I finally learnt that there was in me an invincible summer.’

And:

‘Happiness is nothing except the simple harmony between human beings and the life they lead.’