Re-Visioning Existential Therapy Counter-traditional Perspectives

Re-Visioning Existential Therapy is a collection of essays from leading practitioners and theorists around the globe which questions some of the key tenets of traditional existential therapy. The book enlightens, stimulates, and provokes the reader out of complacency. It expands the breadth and scope of the approach, discusses recent developments in psychotherapy and philosophy, and aligns existential therapy to a progressive, radical, and counter-traditional ethos. Through clinical studies, personal reflections, discussions on aspects of theory, and exciting links to art, literature, and contemporary culture, these very diverse and wide-ranging contributions take existential therapy into the fertile wilderness of shared experience. Through renewed links to seminal writers, it captures the subversive spirit, the deep compassion, the unflinching gaze and playfulness that is at the heart of the approach. The book will share knowledge and enthusiasm for the practice of existential therapy in order to encourage therapists and trainees to partake of the joys and challenges of existential practice.

Part I The Risk of Communication; 1 Is Relatedness a Normative Ideal?; 2 Existential aspects of experiencing; 3 Learn to Forget: a Nietzschean Revaluation of Forgetting in Psychotherapy; 4 Fragments of an Existential Discourse; 5 Where Angels Fear to Tread: a Lived Experience of Striptease; 6 Existential Therapy: Relational Creative Engagement in Action; Part II Compliance and Emancipation; 7 Psychotherapy in an Age of Stupidity; 8 Authenticity and Difference: Heidegger’s Ontological Problem; 9 Radical Existentialism is Manuski: Existentially influenced psychoanalytic psychotherapy; 10 The Other of a Feminist Practice of Empathy; 11 Subversion Therapy and the Imperialism of Everyday Life; 12 Hack Therapy: A Radical Existential Practice; 13 A Person on the Edge of Inner and Outer Realities: a Therapist’s Reflections; 14 The Bi-Rooted Migrant: an Existential Journey; 15 The Poetry of the World: a Tribute to the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty; Part III Unreasonable Reason; 16 Kafka reading Kierkegaard: Always in a process of becoming; 17 Myth as a Container for Anxiety: Bion, the Unconscious, and Daseinsanalysis; 18 Talking Cure and Curing Talk: Therapy, Theory and the Already Dead; 19 Existence, Self, and Meaning: A Stranger in Search of Home; 20 Meaning and Meaninglessness of the Self ; 21 Existentialism or a Philosophy of Existence? Shestov and Existential Therapy; 22 Questioning Existential Psychotherapy from some Critical Existential-Analytic Moments; Part IV The Clinic and the Everyday; 23 The psychotherapeutic use of psychedelics: Reflections, critique and recommendations; 24 Understanding Francisco’s Schizophrenia: a Humanistic Phenomenological Research Method; 25 Dream Harder: a Phenomenological Exploration; 26 ‘Igor’s Pet Cemetery? Igor is out. Burying Cat’: a Memoir of Living and Dying; 27 Metaphoric Affect Processing: Reflecting and Transcending Self as a Metaphor; 28 Researching the Reference Points of Therapeutic Work of Existential Therapy; 29 Beautiful Losers

Manu Bazzano is a psychotherapist/supervisor in private practice and an internationally recognized author, lecturer, and facilitator. He is an associate tutor at Cambridge University.Among his books: Buddha is Dead (2006); Spectre of the Stranger (2012); After Mindfulness (2014); Therapy and the Counter-tradition (2016); Zen and Therapy (2017); Re-visioning Person-centred Therapy (2018); Nietzsche and Psychotherapy (2019). He is a regular contributor to several academic journals and magazines.