Introducing Existential Analysis

From the onset of my training in psychology, I had reservations about how psychology was being done.? My English professors seemed to have a much better grip on an understanding of the human condition than my Psychology lecturers.? Classes on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot seemed to say more about how we relate to our own existence than a lesson on the characteristics and proposed treatment for supposed conditions like bipolar disorder.? By the time I was in my final year of master’s training in Psychology, I was asked to leave my internship because I continually challenged the efficacy of psychometric tests as the means for understanding a person, their struggles, and their response to their life circumstances.? Fortunately, I had a very supportive supervisor who happened to be head of our master’s program and he helped me find a new placement straight away.? I wanted to explore the art of therapeutic conversation, and I had romantic ideas about the “The talking cure”, but I also distrusted psychodynamics and psychoanalysis.? I was concerned for how the psychoanalytic approach was overly focused on our early years and gave too much agency to the unconscious. ??The psychoanalyst seemed too stoic to be of any help and the process seemed intent on breaking the analysand apart.? I believed Freud was dead and we should move on.? I discovered Narrative Therapy, an approach that had developed under the influence of Michelle Foucault’s ideas, very critical of the psy-industry (psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis).? As a methodology, Narrative Therapy was against the idea of therapist as gatekeeper to a client’s experience – the therapist job was not to interpret the client’s world for them.? In this way, Narrative Therapy attempts to avoid the potential power differential between client and therapist by focusing on how the client languages their own experience.? It considers the client as the authority and author in their own lives, respecting the language that the client uses to articulate their own problems. ?I found it helpful to see our lives in terms of stories and the therapy room became an editing suite for understanding and transforming these stories.? To some extent, therapy became a resistance movement to the dominant stories imposed on us by society and even our own families, about who and how we should be.?

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I took this further, writing a thesis in Discursive Psychology, scrutinising the everyday language we use in constructing our reality.? In philosophical terms, this put me on the side of structuralism and post-structuralism, exploring how we structure reality through language.? This seemed like the appropriate skill for a psychologist to develop, language being the means of “treatment”.? This, however, set me off on somewhat of a lonely path of attempting to carve out a different way of doing Psychology.? I applied this approach in many contexts, including sexuality; illness and injury; neurological rehabilitation; addiction; trauma; and relationship therapy. ?More than a decade and a half later, COVID-19 hit, and I printed the portraits of the thinkers I was finding most helpful at the time.? It felt particularly lonely in this daunting time to be a therapist.? I stuck the portraits above my desk and as I looked up at them, I realised that most of these figures – including R.D. Laing, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus - were existentially inclined.? There was also the existential Buddhists, Stephen Batchelor, and the postmodern author, Jeanette Winterson, who wrote: “To be ill-adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown”. ????

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Just before covid hit, Fiona and I had attempted to turn our home into a retreat centre – a live-in therapy centre that moved away from the clinic as a setting for dealing with problems of living and feeling.? As part of this project, I started to merge ideas from Western Philosophy and Buddhism.? My interest in Buddhism spanned back to the onset of my 20’s.? During Covid I decided to formalise this thinking in the form of a PhD in Philosophy.? I had come across a contemporary philosopher and psychoanalyst whose work I appreciated, Julie Reshe.? A lecture of hers on Sado-Masochism led me to the Global Centre for Advanced Studies (GCAS).? ??

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As I began my studies with GCAS College Dublin, Ltd. I came to realise that the thinkers I had been exploring shared similar origins, Phenomenology (the study of experience from within experience), and some had translated this into a practice that could be called Existential Psychoanalysis.? GCAS teaches Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, and I had the privilege of being exposed to contemporary thinkers and psychoanalysts like Jamieson Webster. ?I was very quickly seduced by Jamieson’s reading of Freud.? It wasn’t so much Freud’s ideas but Jamieson’s intensity, the return to a deeply embodied practice of client and therapist being with each other in the almost inarticulatable struggles that we face.? There was something deeply meditative about the approach.? Jamieson and many others at GCAS favoured Lacan, a complicated language-based reading of Freud.? Given my interest in how reality is constructed through language, I had often flirted with studying Lacan, but never had the courage to engage with his riddles.? This gave me the chance to dabble in Lacan, even though I was drawn mostly to phenomenology and existentialism, and I even saw Lacan as a closet phenomenologist.? For me, the important questions for us to start with was “how do we exist” and, from there, “how do we go on”.?

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I was appointed a super smart supervisor who held three doctorates, Prof Kevin Boileau.? He knew so much and had many incredible ideas bursting out of him, more than he could write down in one lifetime and he had already written a lot.? But I needed to develop my own ideas, my own way.? I knew what I wanted to say, I just needed the time and the space to agonise with the words.? Prof Boileau introduced me to a path that straddled the study of embodied experience (phenomenology) with an appreciation of how we function within a language (structuralism).? In the end, I completed my PhD with a nudge and some inspiration from Julie Reshe herself.? I wrote an exploration of a therapy that was against diagnosis and treatment.? Using some ideas from Buddhist practice, I attempted to describe how to help people by being with them in their struggles, rather than acting upon them with a particular treatment methodology.? It became somewhat of a study of consciousness and an account of how there is no “true self” behind consciousness, looking out at the world.? It followed Sartre’s notion that “Existence precedes essence” – how we are in the world defines what we are.? In this way, the “psych” fell away from “psychoanalysis”.? ???

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This has led me along a path of developing a practice more inclined towards Existential Analysis.? Our struggles are not seen as individual pathos but as inherent aspect of how we exist in the world.? It views our struggles, that we are in the habit of naming depression, anxiety, bi-polar, or addiction, as inherent to consciousness.? These struggles are seen as responses to our lives, rather than conditions in the brain.? It is not a practice that proclaims to tell people how they should live or what they should do with their lives, but brings a presence to your own experience and supports a courage with being with things as they manifest.? Change is not something that we force but that we try and open up to, through giving contemplation to our responses, rather than giving in to our habitual reactions. Existential Analysis also involves an ethical stance towards our struggles: an appreciation of truth, responsibility and freedom.? ????

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In order to address our struggles with this kind of openness, resisting the impulse to try and “fix” and “get over” things, requires a certain courage, commitment, and sufficient containment.? The objective is not “cure” but finding ways of “being” in the world, in ways that feel most true to our intentions.? However, something needs to “hold” us as we allow ourselves to undo and redo ourselves in this way.? Therapy becomes a constant process of relinquishing any grasp on a fixed idea of “who I am” or how things should be.? For this reason, I have come to increasingly value commitment from both therapist and client to a weekly ceremony of connecting, the same day and time, for as long as we feel we need to, or for as long as the relationship lasts.? In this way, we can really give our lives, the relationships it is made up of, and our experience of things sufficient care and attention.? The therapy process becomes a lived-out experience of staying alert to things as they arise in our consciousness.? ??

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In order to make this style of therapy more feasible, I will be offering weekly 50min therapy sessions, or twice-weekly 40min sessions, at a reduced rate to those who are able to commit to this on an ongoing monthly basis.? If you are interested, please let us know and Fiona will send you more information on the fee structure.? Please feel free to contact me if you have any thoughts or questions about Existential Analysis.?

Warmest regards,

Jason