Re-Visioning Existential Therapy

Counter-traditional Perspectives

Manu Bazzano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000191097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

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

1Is relatedness a normative ideal?

John Mackessy and Manu Bazzano

To translate is to betray

There is a problem at the heart of existential phenomenology. The very founding call of the tradition – Edmund Husserl’s appeal to go ‘back to the “things themselves”’ (Husserl, 2001, p.168) – threatens to confound us. This call roused great hope at first. Later, Herbert Marcuse, among others, saw in Martin Heidegger the possibility of ‘a new beginning, the first radical attempt to put philosophy on really concrete foundations’. He saw the possibility of a ‘philosophy concerned with human existence, the human condition, and not merely with abstract conditions and principles’ (Moran, 2000, p.245).

Both phenomenology’s vaunting aspirations and its Achilles heel are simultaneously present here – the yearning for concrete foundations and the assumption of a homogenous human condition upon which a general philosophy of existence may be based. Despite this admirable wish to go beyond abstractions, the very notion of a human condition (alongside, for instance, the doctrine of Dasein) places abstractions at the heart of the phenomenological project. Just because an idea is conceived in terms of a philosophy of existence does not make it any less abstract than any other thought that has passed through a philosopher’s mind.

The call to return to the foundational aspects of experience inspired Heidegger. Despite his rejection of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, he went on to resurrect the antique, pre-Kantian convention of hermeneutics, a practice which is at heart ‘a process of reading … based on a prior pre-comprehension or proto-comprehension’ (Laplanche, 1996, p.7, emphasis added). Indeed, not only does hermeneutics rely almost entirely on Auslegung (interpretation) rather than the enshrined phenomenological method of description; it is also firmly ensconced within that thoroughly idealist philosophy which phenomenology had set to demystify in the first place. Heidegger’s disinterment of the traditional practice of hermeneutics drew significantly upon Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Schleiermacher, and it was the latter who reminded us of the close connection of interpretation and translation. Habitually overlooked within traditional existential therapy, translation is central to hermeneutics; it provides the interpretive code or key; there is no hermeneutics without translation. Two important ramifications emerge from this:

(1)The translator (the hermeneut) is none other than the old unreconstructed Cartesian cogito. No matter how inventively cloaked he/she may be (as shepherd of being, Dasein, herald of so-called authenticity, etc.), we are still faced with the same, inescapably self-bound adult human.

(2)Tradurre è tradire, as a proverbial Italian saying has it: to translate is (despite our best intentions) to betray. It inevitably appropriates and modifies (consciously or not) the clinical content the hermeneut attempts to interpret or describe.

A credible and ingenious way out of this impasse was offered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968, 1942/1983, 1945/1989) through his constant reminder of the possibility of an embodied interpretation of the world, radically different to that of an abstract interpreter or cognitive ‘experiencer’. Regrettably, despite a handful of in-depth studies at the outer reaches of the existential tradition (e.g., Bazzano, 2014; Cayne, 2014; Harrison, 2014; Kennedy, 2014; Moreira, 2014; Synesiou, 2014; Welsh, 2014), plus sporadic intonations of favourite passages from Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1989), Merleau-Ponty’s coherent and far-reaching approach hasn’t altered traditional existential therapy, particularly in the way it is taught and practised in the U.K. A close look at the studies cited earlier may help us understand why Merleau-Ponty offers real promise to those who feel constrained by the medical model and Cartesian/Kantian dualisms and who wish for a more experiential exploration of the life-world.

Was Heidegger a phenomenologist?

The manner in which Heidegger frames his question of Being casts a long shadow over the existential-phenomenological tradition. Simply put, in Husserl we have a transcendental subject that apprehends a transcendental object. Heidegger’s Dasein apprehends the disclosure (aletheia) of the world and the entities within it: a movement from truth as transcendent knowledge to the truth of transcendental revelation. Heidegger’s conceptualization of aletheia and the manner in which it relates to ‘truth’ changed over time, and by the late 1960s, when he wrote Zur Sache des Denkens (Heidegger, 2002), we find aletheia as disclosure or an opening. This is the opening up to Dasein of presence, the presence of the world and the entities of the world. If aletheia is to be thought of as truth, it is truth in the ontological context of Dasein’s mode of being-in-the-world. Moreover, the existence of such ‘truth’ and of Dasein itself are unified in the Being behind/within all beings – everything that ‘is’ shares in Being. Hence, Heidegger’s ontology, his theory of Being, is a unifying project with aletheia, despite Heidegger’s attempts to place it in the world, becoming effectively part of an overarching transcendental theory.

One may sensibly ask: ‘Why should practicing therapists bother themselves with such abstruse metaphysical reflections any more than pursue the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ Well, we hold that it is relevant because a Heideggerian perspective, despite its ‘worlding’, threatens to disembody and tame experience in the service of an abstraction called ‘Being’. Though it is an entirely philosophical abstraction, ‘Being’ is held as the fundamental and omnipresent reality, which supposedly grounds and unifies our experience of the world. Why do we label it an abstraction? Because while beings and processes are, in a sense, everywhere to be seen, ‘Being’ proves to be more than a little elusive; it might just be a thought in a philosopher’s mind.

It is because of the purported unity of Being and Dasein that the latter can allegedly experience things as they present themselves to be experienced. It appears to guarantee that a ‘phenomenon’ can be something more than ‘merely’ a transient phenomenon (because it has Being behind its being, so to speak). The phenomenon, thus, can become disclosed and truly present and thereby understandable and interpretable, not just any-old-how, but in a grounded and authentic way. Thus understood, Heidegger is not, strictly speaking, a phenomenologist, for his interest in any given phenomenon (literally ‘that which arises’ in the process of becoming) is only as a preliminary study, as it were, to the disclosure of Being. Our engagement with the world, by this view, becomes authentic when it acknowledges and embraces the nature of Being, of our existential mode of being-in-the-world. With Heidegger, the very language of experience and existence becomes a language of Being. Being-with, Being-towards, etc. and with this, as Derrida observed, comes the imagery of presence and immediacy that Derrida (1978) critiques as metaphysics of presence.

Derrida valued much in Heidegger, agreeing with him that philosophy, thinking and, indeed, language were impossible without some form of metaphysics − a going beyond, or transcendence, and a going ‘back’ towards some ultimate ground or root. However, although Derrida held that we cannot exit metaphysics, his deconstruction constantly sought to show the ultimate contingency and groundlessness of overarching metaphysical systems. In all forms of discourse, he sought that which is privileged or raised above, and what is deployed as a foundation. These tell us a great deal about the founding, and normally unacknowledged, values implicit to the discourse.

Even here he was profoundly influenced by Heidegger, with Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ finding its inspiration in Heidegger’s destruktion. Destruktion was, itself, aimed at earlier ontological thinking. However, what this earlier thought shares with Heidegger’s new existential ontology is its desire for wholeness, truth and presence – the unifying wholeness demanded in all metaphysics. Like all holism(s), however, Heidegger’s project finds its very wholeness not simply through what it prioritizes and valorizes but in what it excludes in forging this unity. A unity is simply not possible that encompasses all difference. Something is always jettisoned for the sake of coherence and consistency.

Mother’s cooking

Heidegger extols a return to Being, a homecoming in which our mode of being and even our language comes closer to the reality of aletheia itself. It is not difficult, though, to see the contingency of some of Heidegger’s core notions, with some of his values simply elevating his predilections to an unwarranted status. One finds, we believe, a frankly absurd example of this in Heidegger’s examination of the relation of language to Being. According to Heidegger, the Ancient Greek and German languages have a closer, more immediate relationship to Being than do other, dare we say degenerate, languages. Even the German language, however, has become tired and fallen. In Being and Time, Heidegger writes that ‘the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself’ (1927/1962, p.262). To deconstruct this is not difficult. Heidegger preferred German and Ancient Greek, language, ideas and values. Bravo, but don’t try to sell this to us as a fundamental truth about being-in-the-world!

His stance is obviously at odds with the tradition in philosophy, semantics and semiotics initiated by Saussure, in which language is regarded by its nature as separate from being. It is the wonder and the creative potential of language that there are not ‘elemental words’. Words find their meaning, according to Derrida and others, through a dynamic, unstable, unfolding web of associations. No word is elemental, and no meaning should be clung to as if it were, in itself, ‘the real thing’.

The notion of elemental language is, at heart, a mystical one and we certainly find it in many traditions. For instance, if we wander a little from European shores, the Vedic tradition regards Sanskrit as sacred and the utterance of sacred words, vac, are non-different from the divine reality itself. From this we get the chanting of mantras, etc. The vibration of the word ‘Krishna’ is Krishna. Heidegger may not go this far but he believes that certain words and certain languages have a more direct connection to Being. They disclose the world in a more immediate manner, make it more authentically present.

We believe that this is one of the reasons that Heidegger still appeals to many humanistic and existential psychotherapists who have a yearning for ‘the sacred’, for the ground of Being. Despite his dance of a thousand veils that shroud aletheia, Heidegger still tantalizes us with the anticipation of direct contact with Being and, perhaps, with the prospect of ‘being fully present in the here and now’. His evident bias towards Ancient Greece and Germany, however, is informative. It affirms how pervasive nationalistic and parochial attitudes can be. My language is special, authentic; it must be protected from outsiders and degeneration. But there is nothing ‘ontological’ about this. It is the preference of one man for his mother’s cooking.

This ‘metaphysics of presence’ contains the prospect of an immediate (i.e., unmediated) access to Being or even to the presence of one’s own Dasein, and is quite at odds with Derrida’s différance – the idea that meaning is always deferred into the web of meaning and cannot be disclosed in its ‘ownmost’ being or possibility (Derrida, 1978). The ‘system’ of meaning, moreover, is also contingent and incomplete: neither in the most exhaustive dictionaries nor in the most revelatory revelations do we uncover uniquely true or original meanings. The world and our own selves, therefore, maintain a dimension of unknowability, strangeness and of emergent possibility.

And herein lies the danger of ‘back to the things themselves’. The ‘things themselves’ in-themselves are not available to us, except in fantasy. Phenomena are mediated and become ‘themselves’ in relation to other ‘things’ in the context of a ‘world’ of experience. Perhaps, then, a phenomenologist might better ground understanding not through direct access to phenomena, but rather, through the system of signification itself, the ‘life-world’. Here the focus is not upon individual phenomena but upon the meaning system in which phenomena emerge. This, however, may simply bump the problem down the road − to find the true meaning in the system itself and, perhaps, in the human capacity to systematize. This, for example, is how the influential structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss approaches the meaning of diverse myths in his seminal study Myth and Meaning (1978/2005) and this is, of course, typical of ‘structuralism’.

Relatedness as normative ideal

‘World view’ and ‘worlding’ – with the attendant structures of meanin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The risk of communication
• Part II Compliance and emancipation
• Part III Unreasonable reason
• Part IV The clinic and the everyday
• Index