Contributions To Existential Therapy and Psychotherapy
Existential therapy has its origins in applied philosophy, where Hellenistic philosophers used the Socratic method to reveal truths about personal dilemmas. The practice was largely neglected until the twentieth century when existential theory began to be applied to clinical work undertaken by psychiatrists, mainly in Germany and Switzerland. By the mid-twentieth century the idea had spread to the United States and the United Kingdom.
Deurzen has been instrumental (Cooper, 2003) in establishing the existential approach in the United Kingdom in the nineteen eighties and nineties, through her publications, through the creation of the Society for Existential Analysis (SEA) in 1988 and the creation of the International Collaborative of Existential Counsellors and Psychotherapists (ICECAP) in 2006. She founded the International Journal Existential Analysis, in 1988, which continues to publish important articles in the field of existential therapy. She has also facilitated the training of hundreds of existential therapists in the UK by founding and directing the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling at Regent's College along existential principles and by setting up the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling specifically for the purpose of existential training (Cooper, 2003). NSPC is associated with Middlesex University and offers joint doctoral programmes.
She further enabled the recognition of the approach in the UK when she was chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy 1993-1995 and at a European level when she was co-Chair of the training standards committee of the European Association for Psychotherapy. She also established a new approach to life improvement for the wider public, by setting up the Existential Academy and offering 'life training' classes for lay people as well as existential coaching training for professionals.
Her idea that human living takes place on four fundamental existential dimensions (physical, social, personal and spiritual), each of which is dominated by specific paradoxes, dilemmas and conflicts between polar opposites, has been widely built on by other psychotherapists (Jacobsen 2007, Barnett 2009).
Read more about this topic: Emmy Van Deurzen
Famous quotes containing the words contributions to, existential and/or therapy:
“The vast material displacements the machine has made in our physical environment are perhaps in the long run less important than its spiritual contributions to our culture.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“Show business is the best possible therapy for remorse.”
—Anita Loos (1888–1981)