How Can an Existential Sensibility
Enhance the Practice of Psychotherapy?
Existential Book Club 4.0
- Richard Smith, Presenter
- 8 CEUs
Insight-oriented psychotherapy excels at exploring patients’ inner subjective lives. It offers fewer tools, however, for steering patients toward what’s being omitted from the concepts and thoughts that guide their interactions with the world.
And there are times when what needs to be discussed is exactly what is not being thought—for instance, the potential consequences or ethical implications of patients’ contemplated actions, or certain facts in patients’ social worlds that they ignore or simply don’t observe. In this four-session “book club,” we’ll read two plays and two novels, using each as an extended case study to explore non-punitive and non-directive ways therapists can help patients think from broader perspectives.
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
Providing another human being with total acceptance and unconditional positive regard is not always a good idea or a wise move. While existential therapy is… a constructive dialogue, where the therapist participates empathically in the client’s understanding of the world, this therapeutic encounter needs to have some sharp edges and it has to allow for deeper probing.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
The Existential Sensibility: Self and Psychotherapy in an Uncertain World
In this article, I summarize some of the major themes of this two-day conference. It was designed to engage participants both cognitively and affectively, and the conference sessions included lectures, a case presentation and consultation, an experiential session on death anxiety, small group work, and a plenary session.
What It’s Like to Visit an Existential Therapist
If you ever find yourself sinking into the plush blue couch of Dr. Jane Prelinger, you should know that she doesn’t want you to call her Dr. Prelinger. In her office, even when you’re on the couch and…
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure
“Shakespeare’s plays stretch so wide, and his characters are so multi-faceted, that they might seem incoherent. But the fact is: all our ideas about life, and people, are narrower and less interesting than the real thing. Shakespeare is a great writer partly because his ideas were way bigger than most people’s. That’s uncomfortable.”
—Richard Smith on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, one of a dozen works we’ve read in our Existential Book Club
Grey Gardens (Film)
“As viewers, it’s not so easy to escape our own death anxiety as we watch the film. We are forced to hold both life and death in mind throughout the documentary, beginning with the paradoxical title of the house and the film, “Grey Gardens,” death or life? In fact, the film can feel like a vicarious assault on our own denial of death.”
—Megan Flood on the film Grey Gardens, one of CESP’s Existential Movie Nights presentations
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CONTACT US
We can be reached using this form.
Center for Existential Studies and Psychotherapy
4910 Massachusetts Avenue NW
STE 223
Washington DC 20016
cesp.wdc@gmail.com
CONTACT US
We can be reached using this form.
4910 Massachusetts Avenue NW
STE 223
Washington DC 20016
cesp.wdc@gmail.com