Customer Reviews

Everyday Mysteries: Existential Dimensions of Psychotherapy

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Van Deurzen provides a strong and well-reasoned overview of thinkers who have inspired existential psychotherapy. Helpful and intelligent.

This book is a rich compendium of the philosophical underpinnings of existential psychotherapy. The author has invested her career in a branch of psychotherapy that is most relevant to modern man's search for meaning, but which has suffered unfairly for lack of experimental results. She has founded the "London School" at Regent's College of a discipline that has a deep philosophical tradition, much of which has unfortunately been "lost in translation" to psychotherapeutic practice.

She has crystallized into concise chapters the seminal works in pure philosophy by Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre, as well as those of a more psychological bent by Jaspers and Lacan. Her clear understanding and genuine belief in the basic existential situation that must be confronted in abnormal treatment as well as normal life as "everyday mysteries" comes through in her interpretations of otherwise impenetrable originals.

I would suggest this as required reading before diving into more formal treatises and case studies such as Yalom's "Existential Psychotherapy". The bibiliography is also a gold mine for key philosophical references, from which she has picked some of the most memorable and useful passages.

Everyday Mysteries: Existential Dimensions of Psychotherapy accomplishes several goals of giving one the general theoretical orientation to existential psychotherapy and its influence by the works of phenomenologist and existential philosophers like Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Sarre, Buber and Nietzsche. The author does a good job of relating their ideas to the development of existential psychotherapy and in summarizing the work of well known modern existential therapists like Boss, Binswangert, Yonkin and May. This is a hard book to read if one has no currency in these works and this one volume cannot do that. Still those who stay with the writer may find themselves turning to other easier works (Existence: a new dimension in psychiatry and psychology, May, Rollo, Angel, Ernest, Ellenberger, Henri F.) to broaden their view of their work and clients. All will enjoy authors' advice to therapists about setting up a practice and the detailed case study where Emmy reveals her talent and self examination as the therapist.

Existential therapy addresses the loss of meaning in life --a far different wording of problems than what we see in our offices, which are often couched in the "practical" issues of marriage or work,and inconvenience such as phobias. Existentialism is not well accepted or understood in this country whose roots and main values of capitalism and self reliance are so different from those of European countries in which this philosophy was inspired following rapid social change and world wars. We suffer the same loss of meaning as others in the world but it has not led to a philosophy and therapy except in the works of Rollo May, James Bugenthal and Irvin Yonken. Even these Emmy feels have moved more toward Humanistic oriented psychology.

Emmy van Deursen-Smith is very well qualified to write about this subject having earned a master's degree in Moral and Political Philosophy before studying psychology. She founded the Society for Existential Analysis or SEA(1988) and the International Collaborative for Existential Counselors and Psychotherapists (ICECAP)and created the two of the most important training institutes for the approach at the London School (Regent's College) and The New School of Psychotherapy and Counseling: the latter being a purely existentially-based training institute offering graduate and postgraduate degrees. She helped found the International Journal Existential Analysis.