About Me, and My Philosophical Counselling
N.B. This page is being edited, and I prefer to rewrite it here on the website, across some weeks, which means it may be quite a mess in places.
The homepage expresses the essence of my philosophical counselling, and you are welcome to book a session with me after having read only that. You do not have to read this page. This is a long discussion, and is offered for those who want such details.
This is an About Me page that tells the story of my coming to philosophy, and then philosophical counselling, which included the study of counselling and psychotherapy. This is also a reflective essay which contrasts philosophical and psychological counselling, explores why we need both, and discusses their integration. It ends with an exploration of some of the ways that my philosophical counselling may be helpful to you.
Origins in wonder
I grew up in the Mallee, a rural childhood in the harsh but evocative landscape of north-western Victoria. I come from people who left school early and did physical work. The heat, dust, and silence of that environment encouraged in me a philosophical sensibility at a very young age. My memories as a child include staring at the magnitude of the sky and at the horizon, which fades and shimmers in that place, and which seemed an evocation. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting farm equipment glowed with a hint of something more. There was a feeling of reality as containing depth. That was a depth of stories: a sense, at the periphery of the mind's eye, just out of reach, of being surrounded by other lives—those who had come and gone, living out the drama of each human story, and now folded up and held there in the unconscious memory of place. But it was more than that: existence itself had a feeling. In that heat, light, and silence, it was as though the landscape held up each thing in turn in a kind of question—not only what it is, and what it might have been, but that it is. Existence in itself had a feeling.
Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would work with people for whom it began in suffering. It begins in both, but that existential wonder, and the attempt to understand it, is where I became a philosopher.
Coming to philosophy
I dropped out of high school and left home at seventeen. Partly that was to escape an abusive stepfather in a tiny, dusty town, and partly it was because I was a passionate musician. A couple of years later, after a conversion to Christianity, I entered a monastery in Italy. My time there opened the door to a depth and richness to European culture that is not always encountered on a Mallee farm. The monastery's library included much classical literature, and I became a voracious reader. That set me up for what came next. Back in Melbourne, having left both the monastery and Christianity, I was working in a factory and wondering what was next in my life trajectory, and in the pursuit of meaning. One day I walked into a bookstore and came out with a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, that classic of Stoic philosophy. I had discovered classical philosophy.
In Socrates and Plato above all, as well as Aristotle, Epictetus, Aurelius, and Plotinus I found that wonder I had experienced my whole life. I encountered the same disturbance at life's suffering, as well as the most profound attempt we know, at the level of reason, to understand and answer it. So I made my way into the University of Melbourne, where I studied philosophy and eventually taught it, both there and elsewhere.
The nature of philosophy
People often contrast Western and Eastern philosophy in order to criticise the Western tradition as rationalistic, reductive, and so forth. They have a point, if by Western philosophy they mean modern philosophy: Descartes, Hume, and the like. Classical philosophy—ancient Greek philosophy--is very different.
Classical philosophy gave us reason as we know it, but it views reason as a tool in the service of things which exceed reason. It has a healthy sense of mystery, and a strong commitment to intellectual humility. Classical philosophy is deep attention to life as it shows itself. It is thinking that comes out of living, and which feeds back into how we live. If modern philosophy worships the intellect and too often loses itself in theory, classical philosophy is rooted in the attempt to describe reality, to describe life as we experience it. It is more than phenomenological, however, in that it traces the lines of the implicit and tries to see more deeply into the structure of reality. Above all, classical philosophy is the love, pursuit, and exploration of whatever is true, good, and beautiful. It is the attempt to participate in, and embody, such things. That is, classical philosophy is a "guide to life" and a transformative practice.
Classical philosophy centres around Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates wrote nothing down, yet he stands as the source of the tradition. Socrates was a working-class citizen of Athens, ancient Greece, and lives 2,500 years ago. Socrates would stop people as they went about their day—fellow soldiers known for their courage, prosecutors on their way to the law courts, young men in love--and ask them to explain the nature of courage or justice or love. His questions invited people to seriously examine the nature of their their understaning. Oftentimes it was discovered that people were deeply confused, and that they were basing their lives on these confusions. That diminished or harmed them and their life, as well as the lives of those around them. Socrates' goal was a life based on lucidity about the things which matter, so we can embody and participate more fully in that which makes life worthwhile.
Plato was Socrates' student. It is through his writing that we know Socrates. Plato saw that our deepest experiences—of love, of beauty, of justice—point beyond social constructs. Plato opens our eyes to the mysteries of meaning and value that structure our minds and our lives. Consider how a moment of moral clarity, or of arresting beauty, stops us in our tracks, and pulls us out of our neurotic, egotistical, fantasy-ridden little minds, into a bigger reality. Plato's philosophy is the attempt to see more regarding this dimension of reality. He aims to step out of the cave and its shadows. In many ways, Plato offers us a more rational version of what people seek in religion: a discernment of value, meaning, and beauty in life that really is there, but mysterious, and which seems to make it all worthwhile. His philosophy is the contemplation, participation, embodiment, and cultivation these things--of truth, goodness, beauty, justice in ourselves and in the world around us. Plato is the answer to the nihilism of Western modernity.
Aristotle was Plato’s student, and he shared his Socrates and Plato's conviction that a well-lived life requires an examined life. Aristotle's temperament was very different, however, and his attention was drawn more to the particular, the concrete. He focused on the embodied, social, practical dimensions of our being. He did this not as a sociologist, but as a philosopher, which is to say that he pursued answers to our deeper normative questions, such as the nature of a good life for a human being. To answer that question, Aristotle paid attention to our wants, our needs, and their general forms: the happiness, the flourishing, the goodness we long for.
The popular story of Plato that is taught in first year university courses is crude to the point of grossly false. It sets us up to reject Plato and to accept Aristotle. It is worth noting that most ancient philosophers, and many of the better scholars today, argue that Aristotle was deeply Platonic. If he differed from Plato, it is because he had a very different temperament. It is impossible to measure the degree to which the difference in temerament between these two men has enriched and benefitted the intellectual and spiritual life of the many societies who have looked to Greek philosophy over the last 2,500 years. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle recognised that the cultivation of wisdom and virtue is the key to creating a truly good life. However, Plato possessed a talent for a higher vision of what life can mean, while Aristotle possessed a talent for analysing the concrete details, of breaking things down into their parts and seeing how they work together for the sake of the whole. While Plato offers a more profound vision of life, Aristotle provides us with many practical concepts and tools for understanding and transforming ourselves and so creating that life. Aristotle's concepts such as contemplative wisdom versus practical wisdom, and the intellectual virtues versus the character virtues are easier for beginners to get a handle on, and they help a person to grow in precisely the ways that Socrates and Plato sought. For this reason I use Aristotle's concepts in my philosophical counselling.
Socrates gives us a method for seeing ourselves clearly and getting at truth. Plato guides us in the discernment of meaning and value, of truth, beauty, and goodness. Aristotle gives us the tools for transforming ourselves to embody these things. Each is an essential guide for my own life, and in my philosophical counselling.
Beyond these three, I can readily list two other philosophers as my key classical philosophical influences: Epictetus, and Plotinus. Epictetus was born a slave. He was ethnically Greek, but grew up in Rome, before his exile led him to set up a school in Greece, training young men in philosophy. Epictetus is the great Stoic philosopher. Stoicism is a branch of later philosophy whose roots are in Socrates and Plato, and which focuses on training people to live by wisdom and virtue above all: to cultivate what is in their control and is best in them, despite the slings and arrows of this outrageous world. To reshape their desires to match reality, and to focus on what matters most and to set their hearts on that. This is the path to wisdom, moral strength, but also to inner peace and freedom, no matter what the world throws at you.
Plotinus was a Platonist, or what some scholars call a Neoplatonist, who synthesised the entire ancient tradition I have just described. He brought together Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism into an over-arching system which some consider the capstone of ancient philosophy. In the centuries following Plotinus, "pagan" philosophy was outlawed by the rise of imperial Christianity. Plotinus is a great resource both for those who seek a spiritual path, for it is the great Western spirituality, though it was suppressed by Christianity and so many are not aware of it. He is also a great resource for many secular thinkers, who translate his insights into a secular form that sheds much light on the nature of our minds and inner lives.
Beyond the classical philosophers, who were and have always remained at the centre of my focus, I came to draw on insights and practices from across the 2,500-year history of Graeco-Roman-European philosophy. I have a strong interest in medieval philosophy, which is far richer than most people realise. Much work was done by medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas to clarify Aristotle's ethics and psychology, in ways that I find very helpful today in my philosophical counselling. I spent much time also with the modern existentialists: Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
I was especially drawn to a group of twentieth-century thinkers whom I call "phenomenological platonists." A Platonist is a philosopher who looks to Plato's profound discernment of meaning and value. I call these Platonists phenomenological because they limit their reflection to the description of experience, in the same spirit as the twentieth-century philosophical method called phenomenology. They include Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Australian philosophers Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner, my postgraduate supervisor.
Phenomenological platonism invites us to open our eyes and discern the spectrum of meaning and value that has been there all along, shaping our lives, even though we may have been blind to it. To recognise and encounter these things is to be nourished, guided, and transformed. These philosophers take the time to pay attention, and to follow the implications of our experiences of meaning and value. They are quite the antidote to nihilism, for many secular people.
I explored also various non-Western philosophical traditions. I spent several years focused on Buddhism, both in theory and practice, meditating for hours a day, while I wrote my Honours thesis on a comparison of Platonism and Buddhism. At the university I took the opportunity also to learn widely—enrolling in, or informally attending in their entirety, subjects in classics, ancient languages, medieval studies, history, literature, creative writing, art, music, theology, comparative religion, anthropology, law, and the social sciences. I took work as a note-taker for students with disabilities, which allowed me to attend courses across the humanities and law with the obligation of taking detailed notes for each lecture series. For somebody of my background, to attend the University of Melbourne felt like a miracle, and I took full, grateful advantage of it.
I started out by saying that classical philosophy is very different to modern philosophy. Another name for modern philosophy is Modernity. This is the age of science and reason, which has benefitted us so much, but it is also the age of scientism and rationalism, both of which are decidely unscientific and irrational. This dark side of Modernity wants to reduce everything to mechanisms. The only things which are real, are those things that fit inside the little theories we have invented, which make us feel like masters of the universe who can see through everything. We tell ourselves we are brave, when like arrogant cowards we run from any mystery, from anything which transcends our comprehension. The apogee of this dark side of Modernity is the cliche of the Redditor. Modern philosophy takes many classical philosophical concepts, which in their original form are rich and whole, and reduces them to some part of them. Usually to some more mechanical part of them.
For example, in Modernity the concept of the intellect is reduced to a kind of calculating machine. The classical concept of the intellect, by contrast, is that of consciousness. It is the field of awareness that we are. It is the inner-most us, who knows and loves. We cannot explain consciousness, we cannot reduce it to a mechanical explanation, indeed every attempt to objectify consciousness is itself an act of consciousness, so it fails at the outset. We are a mystery to ourselves. As intellect, we look and apprehend the whole, and the many forms within that whole. Only then, secondarily, do we reason and calculate. Intellect is intuition in the first place, and reason in the second. Modernity, or at least its darker side, always reduces the whole to the part, and so reduces intellect to calculative reason. Please keep this in mind every time I speak of intellect in all that follows; I am referring to the mystery of knowing and willing that is us. The I, the true You. If you assume the modern idea, especially without realising you are doing so, then you are likely to accuse me of expressing that idea—you will accuse me of expressing and favouring your distorted idea—and so you will reject what I say about the primacy of the intellect, not because of what I say, but because of your distorted, modern concept of it. You will accuse me of reducing life to calculative reason, without richness and mystery, but that will be a radical misunderstanding.
This issue extends to other concepts I will use, such as virtue and goodness. A virtue is any activity and habit that makes you and your life genuinely good. What is good? Wisdom is good, as is strength, as is healthy pleasure, and friendship, and moral goodness such as justice and kindness, and success in life is good. Virtue is an ancient Greek concept and its meaning is broad in this way. However, it has been passed down to us through the prism of Western culture, which has mostly been very Christian. The meaning of virtue thereby became narrow, in the sense of moralistic, and dismissive of the animal joys of life, and lacking the Greek sense that human beings are full of good potentiality, as opposed to flawed sinners worthy of Hell. The philosopher Nietzche pointed out that Christianity rejected the Greek view that meaning and goodness can be found here in life, and instead placed the source of meaning in the heavens. When that religion collapsed, we did not regain the Greek sense, but instead retained the Christian sense that there is no meaning here in this life, but now there was no next life either.
That is the long historical process which led to the nihilism of Modernity that harms us so much today. I see people of many backgrounds, but to Westerners who are struggling in this historical moment of our civilisation, I say this: you do not have to be a Christian, but neither do you have to be a nihilistic modern. Neither do you have to go searching in non-Western traditions such as Buddism if that does not work for your psyche, as Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama have pointed out. The Greeks offer an alternative, much richer vision of life, which is rooted in our human capacity to look and see which we moderns so greatly value, and which goes so deep in our culture and so in our psyche. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Plotinus...these philosophers offer a profound way forward for many people. Classical philosophy, and the philosophical counselling based on it, is a retrieval of an older, profound vision of life. It is the pursuit of truth, and goodness, and beauty, and justice. It is the attempt to embody these things, which is to say: the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.
A philosophical career
I was doing well academically, and it was clear that this would be my life's work. Yet I was not drawn to an academic career. My passion was that of classical philosophy: philosophy as the love of wisdom, and as a transformative path. In hindsight, my time in the monastery was no mistake, even if I had abandoned that religion. I approached philosophy like a monk and priest, rather than an academic or scholar. My concern was to be personally strengthened and enriched by philosophy. I wanted to guide others in that same work. I saw that this meant forging an unorthodox path, probably outside the academy.
On the surface, this meant I shared the motivation that draws many to study counselling or psychology, but while I was very their drawn to therapeutic insights and practices, I had no interest in narrowing my focus to the psychological forces in us. My vision was much higher and richer: the philosophical vision outlined on this website. So I struggled for some time, unsure what form my career could take. Then I came across the relatively new field of philosophical counselling, and knew I had found my path.
Philosophical counselling
Philosophical counselling is philosophical guidance from a trained philosopher. It arose in Europe and spread to America during the second half of the twentieth century. Inspired by the practices of counselling and psychotherapy, most philosophical counsellors adopt much of the framework, spirit, and skills of modern counselling: a fifty-minute, confidential session, a respectful and empathetic manner, the elicitation of your own insights and desire rather than merely giving instruction. Today there are peak bodies, training courses, conferences, and publications dedicated to the field. At the same time, it remains comparatively small.
The character of any philosophical counselling depends on the philosophical paradigm and commitments of the practitioner. Some work from an existentialist perspective, others draw on Buddhist philosophy, and still others see themselves as engaged in Marxist liberation. There are also generalists, though of course they too will operate from some perspective. In my case, classical philosophy—the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and flourishing—is the paradigm for my philosophical counselling. It is my vision of life, including how I overcome challenges and how I make life good. It is not a dead historical artifact, but a living tradition. That is no surprise, because it is a perennial wisdom, which is to say, it resonates deeply with the wisdom of many times and places. Classical philosophy is an articulation of what goes deepest in human nature.
Wisdom can be defined as a more true and good understanding of life.
That more true and good understanding includes life's nature and meaning, its challenges and possibilities, plus what we should do, day by day, to live well.
Notice that I have just defined wisdom as a product, as something we possess. But what about being wise? What are we doing, when we are being wise? We are exercising the virtues.
Virtue refers to activities that make us, and our lives, better. Aristotle divides the virtues into two categories: the intellectual virtues and the character virtues.
The intellectual virtues are those activities, at the level of the mind, that enable us to better perceive, reflect, and choose. Such activities include reason, courage, balance, justice, compassion, creativity, and so on, all at the level of the mind. Each of those activities is a virtue. To cultivate each of these activities of the mind, is to see in ways that are more true and good, and so it is to cultivate the intellectual virtues, which is to say, to cultivate wisdom.
The character virtues are emotions, desires, and behaviour which have been reshaped to mirror that wisdom. We cultivate courage, compassion, self-control and so on at this level as well, so that our whole being embodies our wisdom, serves our conscious vision, values, and goals.
I said that the intellectual and character virtues are activities. We can intentionally repeat any activity so that it becomes a habit. A habit becomes a stable trait of our character, a personal quality, a part of who we are. This means that we can cultivate the virtues. We can make ourselves more wise and virtuous.
Yes, you can make yourself more wise. The above is the formula: wisdom is composed of certain activities of the mind such as reason, courage, and so on. You can look and think in ways that are more courageous, and you can turn that into a habit. Then you have become a courageous thinker. If you develop enough such virtues, you have become a wise thinker, you have become wise.
A wise person naturally wants to cultivate the character virtues, because without them wisdom is not only hypocrisy, but more importantly it is incomplete.
I have defined wisdom and virtue, but when I speak of them I often speak of a third thing too: flourishing.
Flourishing refers to a way of being and experiencing life that is genuinely good and fulfilling. The ancient Greek word for flourishing is eudaimonia. The literal translation for that is a good spirit. Other translations include a good state of life, happiness, flourishing, a successful life, the good life.
Increased flourishing is the consequence of increased wisdom and virtue. Sometimes that is a direct consequence—to increase in wisdom and virtue is, in itself, to increase your flourishing—while at other times the effect is less direct: increased wisdom and virtue makes the good life more likely.
We can reflect on this by using "the Stoic fork," which is to say, the wise recognition that "some things are in our control, and some are out of our control." With regard to what lies within our control, increased wisdom and virtue is itself a form of flourishing—we become more courageous, more just, more capable of happiness and joy, and that in itself is a transformation of how we experience life. With regard to what lies outside our control, wisdom and virtue cannot guarantee flourishing, but they greatly increase its likelihood: we become more capable of sustaining good relationships, more effective in our ventures, more resilient in the face of loss. Of course, life is often unfortunate and even tragic, and human beings are also malevolent, competitive, and jealous, so these external things can be obstructed or taken from us.
Is wisdom and virtue enough?
The exercise and cultivation of wisdom and virtue is the exercise and cultivation of the intellect and the will. People sometimes object that an effort of intellect and will is simply not enough. They have told themselves to be more rational, disciplined, or philosophical about their difficulties, and it has not worked. So they conclude that they need something else: psychological therapy, perhaps, or some deeper intervention that bypasses the conscious mind and works directly on the brain or the unconscious.
Sometimes people do need something else. Furthermore, I believe we do better with multiple means, for example both philosophical and psychotherapeutic (psychological) work. In most cases, however, most people make this objection on the basis of a mistake. They have given up too soon on cultivating wisdom and virtue, and so they have not experienced the profound difference it can make.
The fundamental fault here lies with our culture. Culture is a parent, who tells us how to be, why to be, and gives us the means to do that. It also obstructs, shames, and punishes what it does not want. Our culture is technocratic. It has made a religion out of technology.
Technocracy sees no richness in being, including the being of a human. It reduces us to objects, to mechanisms which must be acted upon from without. We are nothing more, ultimately, than measurable mechanisms to be manipulated. A technocratic culture also devalues the inner life, beyond concerns for psychological comfort.
None of this is genuinely scientific or rational, rather it is scientistic, rationalistic—the elevation of certain intellectual tools to a religion, and the reduction of life and reality to certain intellectual theories and tools. On the one hand, this is a kind of drunkeness or obsession, but on the other it is a choice. It is arbitrary. It is also why our culture is nihilistic. Which leads to so many of our problems. It is also the reason why our culture neglects the concepts and practices that make for wisdom and virtue, and provides no guidance for understanding and cultivating that wisdom and virtue.
Let me repeat that for emphasis:
For this reason, if an individual does try to cultivate wisdom and virtue, their attempts are disorganised, and the results reflect that. Without understanding, experience, and growth in the work of cultivating wisdom and virtue, it naturally seems like a weak faculty, and we conclude that technology is all we have. We have been set up to fail.
This situation is completely unnecessary. Consider my description above of wisdom as a more true and good vision, that is achieved through the exercise of the intellectual virtues. That is not complicated once you investigate it, and it gives us clear understanding, clear direction, and clear practices. But have you ever thought about it this way? If you have, then have you engaged in the effort and discipline required for such growth? If that was difficult to start and maintain, were you able to find a professional who could guide and support you? After all, it is relatively easy to locate a counsellor or psychologist, so why not a professional in this most important of life's concerns?
If we did psychotherapy in this way, it would fail too. If we tried to cultivate physical strength and fitness in this way, we would fail. This is why your attempts to deal with life at the level of the intellect and will seem to have failed.
Actually, in most cases you have succeeded in those efforts of intellect and will, but we often pay much less attention to our successes compared to our perceived failings. The latter loom large. But those failings are simply the places where more intensive work is needed—informed, coherent, systematic, disciplined effort. To do such kinds of work in any sphere, we often need guidance so that we can understand what needs to be done, and so that we are supported in the ongoing work of doing it.
It is telling that cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is in many ways an imitation of classical philosophy's cultivation of wisdom and virtue. You investigate your assumptions and improve your thinking, and you reshape your emotions and behaviour in light of that. CBT did not invent all this, indeed as some of its pioneers acknowledged, and as various academics have since argued, the inspiration was there in classical philosophy. CBT is a technocratic, therapeutic adoption of the cultivation of the intellectual and character virtues. CBT picked up what classical philosophers were putting down, and did it in a modern scientific style. Notice that we do not question that CBT works, because it is generally done in an informed, coherent, disciplined way.
There is another element to all this which I will discuss in greater detail below: what is more important, for most people, for overcoming or coping with most of life's problems, and for making life good? Is it the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, or is it psychological work? Of course, we do not have to choose between them, but our technocratic culture does, indeed it has become "a therapuetic culture," which neglects wisdom and virtue. How much of the passivity, confusion, despair, rage, egotism, and yes, mental disorder in our society is a consequence of that neglect? What would our communal lives look like, if the pursuit of wisdom, virtue, and the communal flourishing which follows that, were more highly valued in our culture? Not in a judgemental or condemning way, but in a open-hearted and positive way—the interesting, hopeful, even joyful pursuit of goodness and happiness. What if it was possibe to find professional guidance in this, just as one finds counsellors, psychologists and the like spread throughout our society.
Becoming a counsellor and psychotherapist
I have been describing philosophical counselling of a kind that can be practiced with a background in pure philosophy. At the same time, quite a few philosophical counsellors choose to study mainstream counselling and psychotherapy as well, to integrate that into their work. I am not speaking of clinical Psychology, but the kind of psychological therapy that counsellors and psychotherapists offer: the kind that everybody can benefit from, regardless of whether they have a clinical disorder or not, because it helps any person to cultivate insight, strength, and the capacity for happiness, at the psychological level.
Drawn by the above vision of psychological work and its benefits, I decided early on that I would study mainstream counselling and psychotherapy, so that I could integrate this psychological work into my philosophical counselling. This would require years of study, and years to become an experienced therapist, with many challenges along the way. Yet, my goal was not to spend my life as a mainstream therapist, but ultimately to practice as a philosophical counsellor. I saw that we need both philosophical and psychological work, and that my philosophical counselling would be much more effective with both. The decision took shape in the mid-2000s during my late twenties. I started with volunteer training and counselling, while commencing formal counselling studies. In time I completed multiple counselling qualifications up to a master's degree. I took to the art naturally, and by the end of my training my educators were offering me both academic and therapeutic employment.
What followed was years of work as a mainstream therapist in organisations focused on bereavement, suicide crisis intervention, relationships, an Australian Defence Force and veterans' counselling service, and workplace counselling. In time I also designed and provided counsellor training within organisations, and I piloted one of the first government-funded video-counselling services in Australia, aimed at rural men. I gave public talks on suicide and bereavement, ran support groups, and presented conference papers on philosophical analyses of therapeutic concerns—the over-medicalisation of life's natural challenges, for instance. From 2012, I worked half-time in those organisations, and half-time in a private practice focused on existential therapy. I was registered with the Australian Counselling Association at their most senior level. Alongside all this, I continued to teach philosophy at universities until 2014.
I earned the respect of my peers and seniors, and was repeatedly offered promotions into management or academic positions teaching counselling. I declined such things in favour of ever more therapeutic experience. For I had a long-term plan: to become a highly experienced therapist, and then to step fully into philosophical counselling, bringing those hard-won skills with me.
The nature of counselling and psychotherapy, and of my training
This section became very long, so I removed much and turned it into a series of blog posts. If you want to take the longer journey then I suggest reading them in order:
What is counselling?
The nature of psychotherapy, and the relation between philosophical and psychological self work
The forms of psychotherapy I was trained in
Psychotherapy versus The Medical Model
Much of what I say in this section are merely assertions, and their explanations and justifications can be found in those blog reflections.
The titles 'counselling' and 'psychotherapy' are umbrella terms for many different activities. I argue that counselling is the exercise and cultivation of what Aristotle called phronesis, or practical wisdom. I define a psychotherapy as a psychological theory of human nature and what ills it, as well as what cures those ills, with a set of practices for effecting that cure. I define a human being as a centre of intelligent consciousness, woven into an animal life of bodily and psychological forces. As conscious beings, we can shape those forces; but they also shape us. They can hinder, blind, or distort our consciousness—our capacity to see what is true and good, and to live according to that vision.
That two-fold structure of human nature reveals a problem that lies at the heart of life, and so of classical philosophy and modern psychotherapy. Our psychology can be ordered toward our good life, or it can rebel, take over, and ruin our life. Hence the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote that "character is fate." Philosophy is the work of strengthening and expanding consciousness—wisdom and virtue. Psychotherapy, by contrast, is the analysis and reshaping of our unconscious psychology, or of its effects on us. Hence the psychotherapist Carl Jung wrote that "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
In his published advice to new therapists, the master psychotherapist Irvin Yalom wrote that psychotherapy clears away psychological obstacles to flourishing. It clears the ground for the different work of "becoming more fully human," which is the work of philosophy. We see here that philosophy needs psychotherapy—that you need psychotherapy--otherwise our "wisdom" becomes a mere projection of our psychology. But life is about more than clearing away obstacles. There must be more to life than psychological order, functioning, satisfaction, gratification. Psychotherapy needs philosophy in the sense that human flourishing is the ultimate point of psychotherapy. A society like ours that values psychotherapy, but neglects the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and genuine flourishing, possesses a superficial conception of the meaning and point of life: functioning, satisfaction, et alia. This does not mean that psychotherapists need to start doing philosophy, but rather that their task is one part of a greater whole.
This is why I studied counselling and psychotherapy. I did not want to spend the rest of my life in those careers, but to spend a decade or two (as I did), and ultimately to integrate them as tools into my philosophical counselling. Does that mean that, as a philosophical counsellor, I am practicing mainstream counselling or psychotherapy? No, You can see from those blog post essays that psychotherapy not not come from nowhere, creatio ex nihilo, but that its roots are philosophical, and that it draws deeply on philosophy for its core practices today. Does this mean that counselling and psychotherapy are forms of philosophy? No. A discipline is largely defined by its paradigm: a worldview, a set of values, a purpose. Therapy is...therapy. And it uses philosophy to that end. Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, virtue, and flourishing, and it can draw on psychotherapy to that end.
The three schools of psychotherapy in which I was trained are the humanistic, the cognitive-behavioural (CBT), and the psychodynamic. Each of them is an umbrella term for a collection of therapies. I describe these approaches in more detail in those blog posts, so I will be brief here.
I define Humanistic therapy as phenomenology adapted to therapeutic ends. Remember that I spoke of phenomenological Platonists? Phenomenology is a philosophical discipline for paying deep attention and describing what is there in life. That is in contrast to the hypothetical mindset, which starts with theory. Phenomenology is both seeing and feeling, insight and "being in touch with."
The therapeutic phenomenological, or humanistic, dimension of my philosophical counselling means that I help you to become aware of, and to get in touch with, your own experience. We are all often unaware of our own experience, and unaware that we are unaware. We notice the blindness in one another, and the problems that causes, but we are blind to our own blindness, and how that causes many of our problems. Phenomenological insight helps in a variety of ways:
Cognitive-behaioural therapy (CBT) is a modern therapeutic version of the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, as I decribed that above. It has a strong focus on empirical research into the mechanisms of change. So it offers many tools, many techniques, for creating change in how we think, feel, and act. On its own, many people seem to find CBT mechanistic, and so boring, and even worse alienating, even depressing. Fortunately, those tools can easily be integrated into emotionally richer, more humanistic forms of psychotherapy, and into philosophical counselling. I integrate CBT into my philosophical counselling, just as I did into my existential therapy.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy, which includes psychoanalysis, has come a long way from Freud. Today it can be deeply phenomenological, and genuinely humanistic in the sense that it no longer reduces us to psychological mechanisms, and has space for the richness and mystery of human nature. At the same time it retains its earlier powerful psychological insights and tools. Indeed, I view psychodynamic psychotherapy as the psychological therapy par excellence. Those unconscious psychological forces can take many forms, with respect to being unconscious, including the forgotten, the habitual, the avoided, the never-yet-articulated. Phenomenology, cognitive-behavioural therapy, and of course philosophical counselling are excellent at perceiving the first two, for we can all do that with some effort, no special intellectual tools required. The latter two, however--the avoided, the never-yet-articulated—can be a very different matter. The primary power of classical psychoanalysis is insight into these things. It is a more hypothetical kind of work, which joins those implicit dots so we can see our unconscious patterns, despite the fact that those patterns are often designed by our psyche to be invisible to us. This is psychodynamic psychotherapy's enduring value, and the reason you can benefit so immensely from it.
Remember my definition of human nature? There is a struggle between our conscious wisdom, values, and goals, versus those unconscious, animal-psychological forces in us that want comfort and satisfaction, sex and power, with little regard for truth, goodness, justice. Surely you have noticed that some people's mind is possessed by the latter, that they appear to perceive others as mere resources for satisfaction, or as competition for those resources who need to be dominated or devalued? Again, we all fall prey to some degree of this problem, whatever our predilections and our vices. Psychodynamic psychotherapy helps us to see this animal self in action. It helps us to see the dynamics of our psychology, its patterns, including in their tendency to overwhelm and hypnotise our conscious minds. It answers questions such as: Why do I do that? And, why do things always go that way for me? And, what are my true motivations? (They are often mixed—geniune values, and problematic psychological drives.)
Given that I have never been a psychoanalyst, but rather I draw deeply on ideas from psychodynamic psychotherapy, alongside these other therapies I have discussed, my interest in the approach is very practical. I draw on those things which are relevant from a general therapeutic perspective. Chief among these are the many psychological defenses that this therapy has discerned. Here are a few of them, so you can get a sense of the way this work can help you to uncover hidden psychological dynamics in yourself that undermine your capacity for truth, goodness, happiness and flourishing.
The psychological defense of projection casts your own unacceptable feelings or traits onto someone else. The outwardly calm person who is secretly very angry experiences others as angry. The egotist is shocked at the egotism of others. The ashamed person shames others. Rationalisation spins elegant, plausible reasons for what you have done or failed to do, or about the nature of life, to avoid facing your less-than-laudible motivations or actions. Reaction formation turns a forbidden impulse into its exaggerated opposite, for example aggression dressed as friendly humour. Avoidance keeps you at a safe distance from emotional material by changing the subject, busying yourself with tasks, or in the case of intellectualisation, explaining and theorising rather than facing and feeling. There are about 30 recognised defence mechanisms. They range from the relatively adaptive, to the significantly pathological, and in that order they include affiliation, altruism, anticipation, self-observation, sublimation, suppression, displacement, dissociation, intellectualisation, isolation of affect, rationalisation, reaction formation, repression, undoing, devaluation, idealisation, denial, projection, omnipotence, projective identification, acting out, apathy, help-rejecting complaining, passive aggression, autistic withdrawal, concretisation, delusional projection, distortion, fragmentation, and psychotic denial.
For the most part, and with respect to my training, counselling and psychotherapy are not clinical mental health services. The clinical professions include much of Psychology (I capitalise that profession in my writing, to distinguish it from psychology as a dimension of our being), psychiatry, and clinical social work. The paradigm for these professions is "the medical model." Hence, these professions variously offer clinical assessments, diagnoses, treatments, reports, medication, and so forth. I offer none of those services. Having worked alongside psychologists, and in organisations where their concepts dominated, and having done plenty of my own reading, my knowledge and thinking about clinical matters is much more sophisticated than the average person, however my work has nothing to do with the clinical paradigm. Clinical Psychology has an important place in our society, but like psychotherapy it is one part of a greater whole, and life should not be reduced to its concepts, just as life should not be reduced to medicine in general. The service your medical doctor provides for your body is very, very important, but again it is hardly the point of life.
Existential therapy
In 2012 I started a private practice in Carlton, Melbourne, which ran for a decade alongside my organisational counselling work, and focused on existential therapy. My philosophical counselling includes my sophisticated understanding and practice of existential therapy.
Existential therapy is a philosophical form of psychotherapy. Across those years of private practice I took deep dives into the approaches of Irvin Yalom, Betty Cannon, Viktor Frankl, and various others. Above all, I was influenced by Emmy van Deurzen. I will summarise some of these approaches.
Irvin Yalom's existential therapy is essentially psychodynamic psychotherapy structured around existential concerns. For classical psychodynamic (or psychoanalytic) therapy, we have intrapsychic conflicts, which arouse anxiety, and that anxiety arouses psychological defenses such as those mentoined above. For Yalom, the structure is the same except that rather than intrapsychic conflict (e.g. a desire that clashes with an internalised social norm) what arouses anxiety are the existential conditions of life.
Yalom focuses on four such existential challenges: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. His therapy involves recognising one's defenses, and how they are responses to anxiety that is aroused by these existential conditions. The cure is to learn to make peace with these existential facts of life, and so to diminish the anxiety they arouse—to live wisely and courageously with the inevitability of such anxiety, and to find more beneficial ways of responding to it, abandoning your older disfunctional defenses.
Moving to another form of existential therapy, it is little known that the most famous existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, was fascinated by Freud and psychoanalysis. He was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, and wrote numerous brilliant books that explored analysis from an existential perspective. Sartre developed the seeds of an "existential psychoanalysis." Betty Cannon brought those seeds to fruition. It focuses on Sartre's idea that as children we encounter the world, with all its challenges. Or rather, we encounter a particular world, shaped by our family, with all the problems and expectations that brings. In response to that world, including especially the challenges we experience, we embark on a "life project" which unfolds across the rest of our life. At least, it continues until we become aware of it, and make adult choices about it. You encounter vulnerability and fear in your family, and decide you will become heroic. In adulthood you live in a way that enables you to see yourself as heroic, and invites others to do the same. If that is an expression of a genuine, deep passion, then wonderful. But what if it turns out to be a mask?
If it turns out that our life project is a form of inauthentic life, that restricts life, that diminishes it, then we may want to abandon it. To do that, you need to see it, and this is what Sartre's and Cannon's existential psychoanalysis helps you to do. You also need for formulate a new life project, and this therapy helps you do that, and enact it.
Irvin Yalom, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Betty Cannon offer brilliant syntheses of some of the best aspects of pschodynamic psychotherapy, and of existential philosophy. Viktor Frankl developed an approach that is more focused on the conscious cultivation of wisdom, meaning, and purpose. Not only an existential therapist, but a Holocaust survivor, Frankl observed that the person who can find a Why can bear almost any How. I have seen this repeatedly in my own work: people are remarkably resourceful...when they are motivated. The malaise of our culture is not a lack of tools or techniques but a lack of a deep Why. Frankl tested this thesis in the laboratories of Auschwitz and Dachau.
The power of Frankl's existential therapy, which he called Logotherapy, lies in its capacity to explore the potential meaning in people's struggles, and to thus help them cultivate a stronger sense of value, purpose, and motivation. Logotherapy is helpful beyond the kind of terrible struggles Frankl recounted in his memoir Man's Search for Meaning. Indeed, the premise of his approach is that life is a struggle, at an existential level, for most people. Nihilism threatens. So does boredom, or the pull of addiction, or rage, or loss and grief. All of us need to clarify and create our deeper purpose, so as to possess the clarity and energy to tolerate the many challenges of living, and not only that, but in order to live well, to live deeply and richly.
Above all, I was influenced by the work of Emmy van Deurzen. Her Existential Therapy draws more directly on the philosophical tradition than either Yalom's or Frankl's. Where Yalom adapts existential themes to a psychodynamic framework, van Deurzen grounds her practice in the phenomenological method as developed by Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, and in the existential analysis of thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Her approach begins not with a set of predetermined existential concerns such as per Yalom's four conditions, but with a rigorous attempt to understand the client's world as it is lived—the particular way this person experiences and makes sense of existence. She maps the human condition across four dimensions: the physical world of nature and embodiment, the social world of others, the personal world of self, and the spiritual world of ideals, values, and meaning. A flourishing life requires something like balance across these dimensions, and therapy is an exploration of where that balance has been lost, and how it might be recovered.
Emmy van Deurzen emphasises that the therapist is not a technician applying a method, but a fellow traveller, accompanying the client into the difficult, rewarding work of facing existence honestly and, we might say, heroically. For the philosophical counsellor, van Deurzen offers a model of how to integrate phenomenological depth with existential courage—how to help a person not only see their life more clearly, but to take responsibility for it, to choose, to commit, to live with the anxiety that comes from freedom rather than fleeing. Her work stands as a bridge between the therapeutic and the philosophical. It was an excellent bridge into my final goal of Philosophical Counselling.
Who this is for
"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
--Marcus Aurelius
"We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think."
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts. It is made up of our thoughts."
--The Buddha
"Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny."
--Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese founder of Taoism
"Character is fate."
--The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus said that people are made miserable not so much by events, as by their perception of those events, and their reactions to their perceptions. He was not a radical subjectivist, nor was he preaching a naive optimism, rather he was expressing the nuanced recognition that reality is experienced through the filter of our perception and character—through the prism of our wisdom and virtue, or lack thereof, and the particular form that takes in us. (Today we can add our psychology as another ingredient.) If we want to see more clearly, and to experience reality in better ways, and live in a truly good and meaningful way, then we need to work on ourselves. We need to do some psychological work, but more importantly we need cultivate wisdom and virtue.
Let us apply Epictetus' insight to a concrete situation. Imagine two people who suffer the same misfortune, and who share similar psychological temperaments, childhood experiences, and so on, which is to say that "all other things are equal." Will they therefore be affected, and changed, in the same way? Not necessarily. Imagine that the first person meets their suffering with an attempt to be wise. They strive to be rational and balanced: "I am not special; we all suffer." "I need to see the truth here, and not lose myself in merely consoling thoughts." This requires courage. Indeed, it requires a range of virtues: resisting the envy that suffering can breed, practising compassion toward oneself, remaining just toward others even when in pain, a determined love of truth. In the context of their suffering, this person is likely to grow in wisdom and virtue, and often in deeper forms of peace and happiness, even as they have to suffer.
Imagine that the second person meets the same suffering without that striving. They give into their anger, their envy, their sense of injury. "This is an injustice. It's unfair that I suffer while others are happy!" They become resentful, bitter, egotistical. The suffering does not cause their worsened state, so much as their lack of wisdom and virtue, their failure of effort in that regard. In the context of their suffering, this person is likely to become more foolish, and more and viscious (vice-filled), and so to become miserable. The worse they get, the less willing and able they will be to see their part in all this, and the way out of it. Instead, they make life worse for themselves, and they make life worse for others.
Everything in human nature is a matter of degree. We are all wise and foolish, virtuous and viscious. Hence, both examples are very common; there are about eight billion of them. You are and I embody both.
A life that neglects wisdom and virtue becomes disordered. The opposite of wisdom grows: foolishness, blindness, distortion, confusion, dogma, obsession, despair. The opposite of virtue takes over: visciousness or vice. And so, instead of being rational we become irrational, even as we engage in intellectualisation, rationalisation, and so on. Instead of possessing courage, we fall into cowardice and so fear, anxiety, avoidance, or the opposite extreme--aggression, rage, entitlement, pushiness, resentment, exploitation, manipulation, arrogance. Instead of temperance or self-control, sloth, gluttony, disordered lust, addiction—those are not mere medieval concepts; they are at home on today's secular couch, and on today's screens. Instead of justice, imbalance, disorder, injustice, narcissism.
A clinical mental health professional might diagnose all of the above as clinical disorders, as if they are an illness that happens to you. But are they? Schizophrenia is certainly an illness. So is about 10% of depression, which is caused by organic disorders (brain chemicals et cetera). Psychiatric mental illness is real. But should we frame the above as illnesses, or do we lose something, and harm ourselves, when we do so? Likewise, when psychotherapy frames the above as psychological disorders, which again turns them into something that happens to us, what does that do to us?
What happens when we deny or neglect a vision of ourselves as centres of consciousness, whose existence is of a kind that can see, know, love, choose, and whose being is free, powerful, rich, deep, wonderful, mysterious?
Or to turn the question around: what will happen in your life if you begin to make yourself more wise and virtuous?
If you cultivate a vision of life, and of many of your concerns, that is much more true and good?
If you cultivate the intellectual virtues, so that you perceive, think, imagine, and sense in ways that are more rational, courageous, balanced, compassionate, creative, and so forth.
If you cultivate emotions, desires, and actions—the character virtues—that embody wisdom, courage, temperance, justice?
What will happen with respect the above disorders of the head and heart? What will happen with respect the kind of person you become, and to the meaning of your life, and its value for others, and to the quality of your relationships, and to your own strength and happiness, and to your success and flourishing in life?
So I help you to cultivate wisdom. And I help you to reshape your being, and your life, according to wisdom. This is the funamental work I do, and it is the main work we need to do, if we are to become the kind of people it is most worth becoming, and to experience life in the ways we most deeply long for. I repeat: we pursue wisdom. I help you to become more wise.
We pursue wisdom to deal with your challenges; but more importantly, those challenges are an occassion for general growth in wisdom, and so for a good life well beyond the present moment. In this context of improving yourself and creating a more flourishing life, it is important to do psychotherapeutic, psychological work, and so we do that too.
Philosophical counselling for:
Postscript
In 2020 I closed my office in Carlton and began working purely from home by phone and video. Early this decade I stopped offering mainstream counselling and psychotherapy, including existential therapy, and stepped into the final stage of the long-term goal toward which I had been working since the mid-2000s: philosophical counselling.
Today, I live a rather frugal and hands-on life in central Victoria, in an old mud-brick cottage by a forest. I see clients part-time, and dedicate the other half of my time to my ongoing philosophical growth. Beyond my work in philosophical counselling, which is my absorbing passion, I am a gigging jazz drummer; I have a passion for vintage and adventure motorcycling, which goes beyond the machines to a love of landscape and its exploration; I enjoy developing my general handyman skills; and I read much Australian fiction. I enjoy also the fine art of wasting time well, indulging in life's pleasures, and in essence what Raimond Gaita called "a summer-coloured humanism."
N.B. This page is being edited, and I prefer to rewrite it here on the website, across some weeks, which means it may be quite a mess in places.
The homepage expresses the essence of my philosophical counselling, and you are welcome to book a session with me after having read only that. You do not have to read this page. This is a long discussion, and is offered for those who want such details.
This is an About Me page that tells the story of my coming to philosophy, and then philosophical counselling, which included the study of counselling and psychotherapy. This is also a reflective essay which contrasts philosophical and psychological counselling, explores why we need both, and discusses their integration. It ends with an exploration of some of the ways that my philosophical counselling may be helpful to you.
Origins in wonder
I grew up in the Mallee, a rural childhood in the harsh but evocative landscape of north-western Victoria. I come from people who left school early and did physical work. The heat, dust, and silence of that environment encouraged in me a philosophical sensibility at a very young age. My memories as a child include staring at the magnitude of the sky and at the horizon, which fades and shimmers in that place, and which seemed an evocation. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting farm equipment glowed with a hint of something more. There was a feeling of reality as containing depth. That was a depth of stories: a sense, at the periphery of the mind's eye, just out of reach, of being surrounded by other lives—those who had come and gone, living out the drama of each human story, and now folded up and held there in the unconscious memory of place. But it was more than that: existence itself had a feeling. In that heat, light, and silence, it was as though the landscape held up each thing in turn in a kind of question—not only what it is, and what it might have been, but that it is. Existence in itself had a feeling.
Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder. Later in life I would work with people for whom it began in suffering. It begins in both, but that existential wonder, and the attempt to understand it, is where I became a philosopher.
Coming to philosophy
I dropped out of high school and left home at seventeen. Partly that was to escape an abusive stepfather in a tiny, dusty town, and partly it was because I was a passionate musician. A couple of years later, after a conversion to Christianity, I entered a monastery in Italy. My time there opened the door to a depth and richness to European culture that is not always encountered on a Mallee farm. The monastery's library included much classical literature, and I became a voracious reader. That set me up for what came next. Back in Melbourne, having left both the monastery and Christianity, I was working in a factory and wondering what was next in my life trajectory, and in the pursuit of meaning. One day I walked into a bookstore and came out with a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, that classic of Stoic philosophy. I had discovered classical philosophy.
In Socrates and Plato above all, as well as Aristotle, Epictetus, Aurelius, and Plotinus I found that wonder I had experienced my whole life. I encountered the same disturbance at life's suffering, as well as the most profound attempt we know, at the level of reason, to understand and answer it. So I made my way into the University of Melbourne, where I studied philosophy and eventually taught it, both there and elsewhere.
The nature of philosophy
People often contrast Western and Eastern philosophy in order to criticise the Western tradition as rationalistic, reductive, and so forth. They have a point, if by Western philosophy they mean modern philosophy: Descartes, Hume, and the like. Classical philosophy—ancient Greek philosophy--is very different.
Classical philosophy gave us reason as we know it, but it views reason as a tool in the service of things which exceed reason. It has a healthy sense of mystery, and a strong commitment to intellectual humility. Classical philosophy is deep attention to life as it shows itself. It is thinking that comes out of living, and which feeds back into how we live. If modern philosophy worships the intellect and too often loses itself in theory, classical philosophy is rooted in the attempt to describe reality, to describe life as we experience it. It is more than phenomenological, however, in that it traces the lines of the implicit and tries to see more deeply into the structure of reality. Above all, classical philosophy is the love, pursuit, and exploration of whatever is true, good, and beautiful. It is the attempt to participate in, and embody, such things. That is, classical philosophy is a "guide to life" and a transformative practice.
Classical philosophy centres around Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates wrote nothing down, yet he stands as the source of the tradition. Socrates was a working-class citizen of Athens, ancient Greece, and lives 2,500 years ago. Socrates would stop people as they went about their day—fellow soldiers known for their courage, prosecutors on their way to the law courts, young men in love--and ask them to explain the nature of courage or justice or love. His questions invited people to seriously examine the nature of their their understaning. Oftentimes it was discovered that people were deeply confused, and that they were basing their lives on these confusions. That diminished or harmed them and their life, as well as the lives of those around them. Socrates' goal was a life based on lucidity about the things which matter, so we can embody and participate more fully in that which makes life worthwhile.
Plato was Socrates' student. It is through his writing that we know Socrates. Plato saw that our deepest experiences—of love, of beauty, of justice—point beyond social constructs. Plato opens our eyes to the mysteries of meaning and value that structure our minds and our lives. Consider how a moment of moral clarity, or of arresting beauty, stops us in our tracks, and pulls us out of our neurotic, egotistical, fantasy-ridden little minds, into a bigger reality. Plato's philosophy is the attempt to see more regarding this dimension of reality. He aims to step out of the cave and its shadows. In many ways, Plato offers us a more rational version of what people seek in religion: a discernment of value, meaning, and beauty in life that really is there, but mysterious, and which seems to make it all worthwhile. His philosophy is the contemplation, participation, embodiment, and cultivation these things--of truth, goodness, beauty, justice in ourselves and in the world around us. Plato is the answer to the nihilism of Western modernity.
Aristotle was Plato’s student, and he shared his Socrates and Plato's conviction that a well-lived life requires an examined life. Aristotle's temperament was very different, however, and his attention was drawn more to the particular, the concrete. He focused on the embodied, social, practical dimensions of our being. He did this not as a sociologist, but as a philosopher, which is to say that he pursued answers to our deeper normative questions, such as the nature of a good life for a human being. To answer that question, Aristotle paid attention to our wants, our needs, and their general forms: the happiness, the flourishing, the goodness we long for.
The popular story of Plato that is taught in first year university courses is crude to the point of grossly false. It sets us up to reject Plato and to accept Aristotle. It is worth noting that most ancient philosophers, and many of the better scholars today, argue that Aristotle was deeply Platonic. If he differed from Plato, it is because he had a very different temperament. It is impossible to measure the degree to which the difference in temerament between these two men has enriched and benefitted the intellectual and spiritual life of the many societies who have looked to Greek philosophy over the last 2,500 years. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle recognised that the cultivation of wisdom and virtue is the key to creating a truly good life. However, Plato possessed a talent for a higher vision of what life can mean, while Aristotle possessed a talent for analysing the concrete details, of breaking things down into their parts and seeing how they work together for the sake of the whole. While Plato offers a more profound vision of life, Aristotle provides us with many practical concepts and tools for understanding and transforming ourselves and so creating that life. Aristotle's concepts such as contemplative wisdom versus practical wisdom, and the intellectual virtues versus the character virtues are easier for beginners to get a handle on, and they help a person to grow in precisely the ways that Socrates and Plato sought. For this reason I use Aristotle's concepts in my philosophical counselling.
Socrates gives us a method for seeing ourselves clearly and getting at truth. Plato guides us in the discernment of meaning and value, of truth, beauty, and goodness. Aristotle gives us the tools for transforming ourselves to embody these things. Each is an essential guide for my own life, and in my philosophical counselling.
Beyond these three, I can readily list two other philosophers as my key classical philosophical influences: Epictetus, and Plotinus. Epictetus was born a slave. He was ethnically Greek, but grew up in Rome, before his exile led him to set up a school in Greece, training young men in philosophy. Epictetus is the great Stoic philosopher. Stoicism is a branch of later philosophy whose roots are in Socrates and Plato, and which focuses on training people to live by wisdom and virtue above all: to cultivate what is in their control and is best in them, despite the slings and arrows of this outrageous world. To reshape their desires to match reality, and to focus on what matters most and to set their hearts on that. This is the path to wisdom, moral strength, but also to inner peace and freedom, no matter what the world throws at you.
Plotinus was a Platonist, or what some scholars call a Neoplatonist, who synthesised the entire ancient tradition I have just described. He brought together Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism into an over-arching system which some consider the capstone of ancient philosophy. In the centuries following Plotinus, "pagan" philosophy was outlawed by the rise of imperial Christianity. Plotinus is a great resource both for those who seek a spiritual path, for it is the great Western spirituality, though it was suppressed by Christianity and so many are not aware of it. He is also a great resource for many secular thinkers, who translate his insights into a secular form that sheds much light on the nature of our minds and inner lives.
Beyond the classical philosophers, who were and have always remained at the centre of my focus, I came to draw on insights and practices from across the 2,500-year history of Graeco-Roman-European philosophy. I have a strong interest in medieval philosophy, which is far richer than most people realise. Much work was done by medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas to clarify Aristotle's ethics and psychology, in ways that I find very helpful today in my philosophical counselling. I spent much time also with the modern existentialists: Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
I was especially drawn to a group of twentieth-century thinkers whom I call "phenomenological platonists." A Platonist is a philosopher who looks to Plato's profound discernment of meaning and value. I call these Platonists phenomenological because they limit their reflection to the description of experience, in the same spirit as the twentieth-century philosophical method called phenomenology. They include Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Australian philosophers Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner, my postgraduate supervisor.
Phenomenological platonism invites us to open our eyes and discern the spectrum of meaning and value that has been there all along, shaping our lives, even though we may have been blind to it. To recognise and encounter these things is to be nourished, guided, and transformed. These philosophers take the time to pay attention, and to follow the implications of our experiences of meaning and value. They are quite the antidote to nihilism, for many secular people.
I explored also various non-Western philosophical traditions. I spent several years focused on Buddhism, both in theory and practice, meditating for hours a day, while I wrote my Honours thesis on a comparison of Platonism and Buddhism. At the university I took the opportunity also to learn widely—enrolling in, or informally attending in their entirety, subjects in classics, ancient languages, medieval studies, history, literature, creative writing, art, music, theology, comparative religion, anthropology, law, and the social sciences. I took work as a note-taker for students with disabilities, which allowed me to attend courses across the humanities and law with the obligation of taking detailed notes for each lecture series. For somebody of my background, to attend the University of Melbourne felt like a miracle, and I took full, grateful advantage of it.
I started out by saying that classical philosophy is very different to modern philosophy. Another name for modern philosophy is Modernity. This is the age of science and reason, which has benefitted us so much, but it is also the age of scientism and rationalism, both of which are decidely unscientific and irrational. This dark side of Modernity wants to reduce everything to mechanisms. The only things which are real, are those things that fit inside the little theories we have invented, which make us feel like masters of the universe who can see through everything. We tell ourselves we are brave, when like arrogant cowards we run from any mystery, from anything which transcends our comprehension. The apogee of this dark side of Modernity is the cliche of the Redditor. Modern philosophy takes many classical philosophical concepts, which in their original form are rich and whole, and reduces them to some part of them. Usually to some more mechanical part of them.
For example, in Modernity the concept of the intellect is reduced to a kind of calculating machine. The classical concept of the intellect, by contrast, is that of consciousness. It is the field of awareness that we are. It is the inner-most us, who knows and loves. We cannot explain consciousness, we cannot reduce it to a mechanical explanation, indeed every attempt to objectify consciousness is itself an act of consciousness, so it fails at the outset. We are a mystery to ourselves. As intellect, we look and apprehend the whole, and the many forms within that whole. Only then, secondarily, do we reason and calculate. Intellect is intuition in the first place, and reason in the second. Modernity, or at least its darker side, always reduces the whole to the part, and so reduces intellect to calculative reason. Please keep this in mind every time I speak of intellect in all that follows; I am referring to the mystery of knowing and willing that is us. The I, the true You. If you assume the modern idea, especially without realising you are doing so, then you are likely to accuse me of expressing that idea—you will accuse me of expressing and favouring your distorted idea—and so you will reject what I say about the primacy of the intellect, not because of what I say, but because of your distorted, modern concept of it. You will accuse me of reducing life to calculative reason, without richness and mystery, but that will be a radical misunderstanding.
This issue extends to other concepts I will use, such as virtue and goodness. A virtue is any activity and habit that makes you and your life genuinely good. What is good? Wisdom is good, as is strength, as is healthy pleasure, and friendship, and moral goodness such as justice and kindness, and success in life is good. Virtue is an ancient Greek concept and its meaning is broad in this way. However, it has been passed down to us through the prism of Western culture, which has mostly been very Christian. The meaning of virtue thereby became narrow, in the sense of moralistic, and dismissive of the animal joys of life, and lacking the Greek sense that human beings are full of good potentiality, as opposed to flawed sinners worthy of Hell. The philosopher Nietzche pointed out that Christianity rejected the Greek view that meaning and goodness can be found here in life, and instead placed the source of meaning in the heavens. When that religion collapsed, we did not regain the Greek sense, but instead retained the Christian sense that there is no meaning here in this life, but now there was no next life either.
That is the long historical process which led to the nihilism of Modernity that harms us so much today. I see people of many backgrounds, but to Westerners who are struggling in this historical moment of our civilisation, I say this: you do not have to be a Christian, but neither do you have to be a nihilistic modern. Neither do you have to go searching in non-Western traditions such as Buddism if that does not work for your psyche, as Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama have pointed out. The Greeks offer an alternative, much richer vision of life, which is rooted in our human capacity to look and see which we moderns so greatly value, and which goes so deep in our culture and so in our psyche. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Plotinus...these philosophers offer a profound way forward for many people. Classical philosophy, and the philosophical counselling based on it, is a retrieval of an older, profound vision of life. It is the pursuit of truth, and goodness, and beauty, and justice. It is the attempt to embody these things, which is to say: the cultivation of wisdom and virtue.
A philosophical career
I was doing well academically, and it was clear that this would be my life's work. Yet I was not drawn to an academic career. My passion was that of classical philosophy: philosophy as the love of wisdom, and as a transformative path. In hindsight, my time in the monastery was no mistake, even if I had abandoned that religion. I approached philosophy like a monk and priest, rather than an academic or scholar. My concern was to be personally strengthened and enriched by philosophy. I wanted to guide others in that same work. I saw that this meant forging an unorthodox path, probably outside the academy.
On the surface, this meant I shared the motivation that draws many to study counselling or psychology, but while I was very their drawn to therapeutic insights and practices, I had no interest in narrowing my focus to the psychological forces in us. My vision was much higher and richer: the philosophical vision outlined on this website. So I struggled for some time, unsure what form my career could take. Then I came across the relatively new field of philosophical counselling, and knew I had found my path.
Philosophical counselling
Philosophical counselling is philosophical guidance from a trained philosopher. It arose in Europe and spread to America during the second half of the twentieth century. Inspired by the practices of counselling and psychotherapy, most philosophical counsellors adopt much of the framework, spirit, and skills of modern counselling: a fifty-minute, confidential session, a respectful and empathetic manner, the elicitation of your own insights and desire rather than merely giving instruction. Today there are peak bodies, training courses, conferences, and publications dedicated to the field. At the same time, it remains comparatively small.
The character of any philosophical counselling depends on the philosophical paradigm and commitments of the practitioner. Some work from an existentialist perspective, others draw on Buddhist philosophy, and still others see themselves as engaged in Marxist liberation. There are also generalists, though of course they too will operate from some perspective. In my case, classical philosophy—the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and flourishing—is the paradigm for my philosophical counselling. It is my vision of life, including how I overcome challenges and how I make life good. It is not a dead historical artifact, but a living tradition. That is no surprise, because it is a perennial wisdom, which is to say, it resonates deeply with the wisdom of many times and places. Classical philosophy is an articulation of what goes deepest in human nature.
Wisdom can be defined as a more true and good understanding of life.
That more true and good understanding includes life's nature and meaning, its challenges and possibilities, plus what we should do, day by day, to live well.
Notice that I have just defined wisdom as a product, as something we possess. But what about being wise? What are we doing, when we are being wise? We are exercising the virtues.
Virtue refers to activities that make us, and our lives, better. Aristotle divides the virtues into two categories: the intellectual virtues and the character virtues.
The intellectual virtues are those activities, at the level of the mind, that enable us to better perceive, reflect, and choose. Such activities include reason, courage, balance, justice, compassion, creativity, and so on, all at the level of the mind. Each of those activities is a virtue. To cultivate each of these activities of the mind, is to see in ways that are more true and good, and so it is to cultivate the intellectual virtues, which is to say, to cultivate wisdom.
The character virtues are emotions, desires, and behaviour which have been reshaped to mirror that wisdom. We cultivate courage, compassion, self-control and so on at this level as well, so that our whole being embodies our wisdom, serves our conscious vision, values, and goals.
I said that the intellectual and character virtues are activities. We can intentionally repeat any activity so that it becomes a habit. A habit becomes a stable trait of our character, a personal quality, a part of who we are. This means that we can cultivate the virtues. We can make ourselves more wise and virtuous.
Yes, you can make yourself more wise. The above is the formula: wisdom is composed of certain activities of the mind such as reason, courage, and so on. You can look and think in ways that are more courageous, and you can turn that into a habit. Then you have become a courageous thinker. If you develop enough such virtues, you have become a wise thinker, you have become wise.
A wise person naturally wants to cultivate the character virtues, because without them wisdom is not only hypocrisy, but more importantly it is incomplete.
I have defined wisdom and virtue, but when I speak of them I often speak of a third thing too: flourishing.
Flourishing refers to a way of being and experiencing life that is genuinely good and fulfilling. The ancient Greek word for flourishing is eudaimonia. The literal translation for that is a good spirit. Other translations include a good state of life, happiness, flourishing, a successful life, the good life.
Increased flourishing is the consequence of increased wisdom and virtue. Sometimes that is a direct consequence—to increase in wisdom and virtue is, in itself, to increase your flourishing—while at other times the effect is less direct: increased wisdom and virtue makes the good life more likely.
We can reflect on this by using "the Stoic fork," which is to say, the wise recognition that "some things are in our control, and some are out of our control." With regard to what lies within our control, increased wisdom and virtue is itself a form of flourishing—we become more courageous, more just, more capable of happiness and joy, and that in itself is a transformation of how we experience life. With regard to what lies outside our control, wisdom and virtue cannot guarantee flourishing, but they greatly increase its likelihood: we become more capable of sustaining good relationships, more effective in our ventures, more resilient in the face of loss. Of course, life is often unfortunate and even tragic, and human beings are also malevolent, competitive, and jealous, so these external things can be obstructed or taken from us.
Is wisdom and virtue enough?
The exercise and cultivation of wisdom and virtue is the exercise and cultivation of the intellect and the will. People sometimes object that an effort of intellect and will is simply not enough. They have told themselves to be more rational, disciplined, or philosophical about their difficulties, and it has not worked. So they conclude that they need something else: psychological therapy, perhaps, or some deeper intervention that bypasses the conscious mind and works directly on the brain or the unconscious.
Sometimes people do need something else. Furthermore, I believe we do better with multiple means, for example both philosophical and psychotherapeutic (psychological) work. In most cases, however, most people make this objection on the basis of a mistake. They have given up too soon on cultivating wisdom and virtue, and so they have not experienced the profound difference it can make.
The fundamental fault here lies with our culture. Culture is a parent, who tells us how to be, why to be, and gives us the means to do that. It also obstructs, shames, and punishes what it does not want. Our culture is technocratic. It has made a religion out of technology.
Technocracy sees no richness in being, including the being of a human. It reduces us to objects, to mechanisms which must be acted upon from without. We are nothing more, ultimately, than measurable mechanisms to be manipulated. A technocratic culture also devalues the inner life, beyond concerns for psychological comfort.
None of this is genuinely scientific or rational, rather it is scientistic, rationalistic—the elevation of certain intellectual tools to a religion, and the reduction of life and reality to certain intellectual theories and tools. On the one hand, this is a kind of drunkeness or obsession, but on the other it is a choice. It is arbitrary. It is also why our culture is nihilistic. Which leads to so many of our problems. It is also the reason why our culture neglects the concepts and practices that make for wisdom and virtue, and provides no guidance for understanding and cultivating that wisdom and virtue.
Let me repeat that for emphasis:
- Our technocratic culture neglects the concepts and practices that make for wisdom and virtue, and so
- Our technocratic culture therefore provides no guidance for understanding and cultivating wisdom and virtue.
For this reason, if an individual does try to cultivate wisdom and virtue, their attempts are disorganised, and the results reflect that. Without understanding, experience, and growth in the work of cultivating wisdom and virtue, it naturally seems like a weak faculty, and we conclude that technology is all we have. We have been set up to fail.
This situation is completely unnecessary. Consider my description above of wisdom as a more true and good vision, that is achieved through the exercise of the intellectual virtues. That is not complicated once you investigate it, and it gives us clear understanding, clear direction, and clear practices. But have you ever thought about it this way? If you have, then have you engaged in the effort and discipline required for such growth? If that was difficult to start and maintain, were you able to find a professional who could guide and support you? After all, it is relatively easy to locate a counsellor or psychologist, so why not a professional in this most important of life's concerns?
If we did psychotherapy in this way, it would fail too. If we tried to cultivate physical strength and fitness in this way, we would fail. This is why your attempts to deal with life at the level of the intellect and will seem to have failed.
Actually, in most cases you have succeeded in those efforts of intellect and will, but we often pay much less attention to our successes compared to our perceived failings. The latter loom large. But those failings are simply the places where more intensive work is needed—informed, coherent, systematic, disciplined effort. To do such kinds of work in any sphere, we often need guidance so that we can understand what needs to be done, and so that we are supported in the ongoing work of doing it.
It is telling that cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is in many ways an imitation of classical philosophy's cultivation of wisdom and virtue. You investigate your assumptions and improve your thinking, and you reshape your emotions and behaviour in light of that. CBT did not invent all this, indeed as some of its pioneers acknowledged, and as various academics have since argued, the inspiration was there in classical philosophy. CBT is a technocratic, therapeutic adoption of the cultivation of the intellectual and character virtues. CBT picked up what classical philosophers were putting down, and did it in a modern scientific style. Notice that we do not question that CBT works, because it is generally done in an informed, coherent, disciplined way.
There is another element to all this which I will discuss in greater detail below: what is more important, for most people, for overcoming or coping with most of life's problems, and for making life good? Is it the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, or is it psychological work? Of course, we do not have to choose between them, but our technocratic culture does, indeed it has become "a therapuetic culture," which neglects wisdom and virtue. How much of the passivity, confusion, despair, rage, egotism, and yes, mental disorder in our society is a consequence of that neglect? What would our communal lives look like, if the pursuit of wisdom, virtue, and the communal flourishing which follows that, were more highly valued in our culture? Not in a judgemental or condemning way, but in a open-hearted and positive way—the interesting, hopeful, even joyful pursuit of goodness and happiness. What if it was possibe to find professional guidance in this, just as one finds counsellors, psychologists and the like spread throughout our society.
Becoming a counsellor and psychotherapist
I have been describing philosophical counselling of a kind that can be practiced with a background in pure philosophy. At the same time, quite a few philosophical counsellors choose to study mainstream counselling and psychotherapy as well, to integrate that into their work. I am not speaking of clinical Psychology, but the kind of psychological therapy that counsellors and psychotherapists offer: the kind that everybody can benefit from, regardless of whether they have a clinical disorder or not, because it helps any person to cultivate insight, strength, and the capacity for happiness, at the psychological level.
Drawn by the above vision of psychological work and its benefits, I decided early on that I would study mainstream counselling and psychotherapy, so that I could integrate this psychological work into my philosophical counselling. This would require years of study, and years to become an experienced therapist, with many challenges along the way. Yet, my goal was not to spend my life as a mainstream therapist, but ultimately to practice as a philosophical counsellor. I saw that we need both philosophical and psychological work, and that my philosophical counselling would be much more effective with both. The decision took shape in the mid-2000s during my late twenties. I started with volunteer training and counselling, while commencing formal counselling studies. In time I completed multiple counselling qualifications up to a master's degree. I took to the art naturally, and by the end of my training my educators were offering me both academic and therapeutic employment.
What followed was years of work as a mainstream therapist in organisations focused on bereavement, suicide crisis intervention, relationships, an Australian Defence Force and veterans' counselling service, and workplace counselling. In time I also designed and provided counsellor training within organisations, and I piloted one of the first government-funded video-counselling services in Australia, aimed at rural men. I gave public talks on suicide and bereavement, ran support groups, and presented conference papers on philosophical analyses of therapeutic concerns—the over-medicalisation of life's natural challenges, for instance. From 2012, I worked half-time in those organisations, and half-time in a private practice focused on existential therapy. I was registered with the Australian Counselling Association at their most senior level. Alongside all this, I continued to teach philosophy at universities until 2014.
I earned the respect of my peers and seniors, and was repeatedly offered promotions into management or academic positions teaching counselling. I declined such things in favour of ever more therapeutic experience. For I had a long-term plan: to become a highly experienced therapist, and then to step fully into philosophical counselling, bringing those hard-won skills with me.
The nature of counselling and psychotherapy, and of my training
This section became very long, so I removed much and turned it into a series of blog posts. If you want to take the longer journey then I suggest reading them in order:
What is counselling?
The nature of psychotherapy, and the relation between philosophical and psychological self work
The forms of psychotherapy I was trained in
Psychotherapy versus The Medical Model
Much of what I say in this section are merely assertions, and their explanations and justifications can be found in those blog reflections.
The titles 'counselling' and 'psychotherapy' are umbrella terms for many different activities. I argue that counselling is the exercise and cultivation of what Aristotle called phronesis, or practical wisdom. I define a psychotherapy as a psychological theory of human nature and what ills it, as well as what cures those ills, with a set of practices for effecting that cure. I define a human being as a centre of intelligent consciousness, woven into an animal life of bodily and psychological forces. As conscious beings, we can shape those forces; but they also shape us. They can hinder, blind, or distort our consciousness—our capacity to see what is true and good, and to live according to that vision.
That two-fold structure of human nature reveals a problem that lies at the heart of life, and so of classical philosophy and modern psychotherapy. Our psychology can be ordered toward our good life, or it can rebel, take over, and ruin our life. Hence the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote that "character is fate." Philosophy is the work of strengthening and expanding consciousness—wisdom and virtue. Psychotherapy, by contrast, is the analysis and reshaping of our unconscious psychology, or of its effects on us. Hence the psychotherapist Carl Jung wrote that "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
In his published advice to new therapists, the master psychotherapist Irvin Yalom wrote that psychotherapy clears away psychological obstacles to flourishing. It clears the ground for the different work of "becoming more fully human," which is the work of philosophy. We see here that philosophy needs psychotherapy—that you need psychotherapy--otherwise our "wisdom" becomes a mere projection of our psychology. But life is about more than clearing away obstacles. There must be more to life than psychological order, functioning, satisfaction, gratification. Psychotherapy needs philosophy in the sense that human flourishing is the ultimate point of psychotherapy. A society like ours that values psychotherapy, but neglects the cultivation of wisdom, virtue, and genuine flourishing, possesses a superficial conception of the meaning and point of life: functioning, satisfaction, et alia. This does not mean that psychotherapists need to start doing philosophy, but rather that their task is one part of a greater whole.
This is why I studied counselling and psychotherapy. I did not want to spend the rest of my life in those careers, but to spend a decade or two (as I did), and ultimately to integrate them as tools into my philosophical counselling. Does that mean that, as a philosophical counsellor, I am practicing mainstream counselling or psychotherapy? No, You can see from those blog post essays that psychotherapy not not come from nowhere, creatio ex nihilo, but that its roots are philosophical, and that it draws deeply on philosophy for its core practices today. Does this mean that counselling and psychotherapy are forms of philosophy? No. A discipline is largely defined by its paradigm: a worldview, a set of values, a purpose. Therapy is...therapy. And it uses philosophy to that end. Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, virtue, and flourishing, and it can draw on psychotherapy to that end.
The three schools of psychotherapy in which I was trained are the humanistic, the cognitive-behavioural (CBT), and the psychodynamic. Each of them is an umbrella term for a collection of therapies. I describe these approaches in more detail in those blog posts, so I will be brief here.
I define Humanistic therapy as phenomenology adapted to therapeutic ends. Remember that I spoke of phenomenological Platonists? Phenomenology is a philosophical discipline for paying deep attention and describing what is there in life. That is in contrast to the hypothetical mindset, which starts with theory. Phenomenology is both seeing and feeling, insight and "being in touch with."
The therapeutic phenomenological, or humanistic, dimension of my philosophical counselling means that I help you to become aware of, and to get in touch with, your own experience. We are all often unaware of our own experience, and unaware that we are unaware. We notice the blindness in one another, and the problems that causes, but we are blind to our own blindness, and how that causes many of our problems. Phenomenological insight helps in a variety of ways:
- It is a benefit in itself. We see reality more clearly, which here means the reality of our own inner life and way of being and their consequences.
- This insight also provides information for doing further kinds of work, such as CBT or the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, in response to what we have come to see about ourselves.
- This process of seeing and feeling is also a form of processing emotional tangles such as grief or trauma.
- Insight in itself can be transformative—you realise you have been playing a certain harmful game, and now you see it clearly, and are more self-aware in general, so you can stop playing it. Or you discover a better vision of life, and are changed by that.
- Such work is the opposite of repression: we intentionally see and feel what is there, which enables us to feel more deeply in general, and so to become more passionate, more joyful as well as said, more emotionally nourished and enriched. If the problem is less repression and more an instability of emotions, we are able to see and sit with them, rather than becoming blind, entangled, and amplifying the waves.
Cognitive-behaioural therapy (CBT) is a modern therapeutic version of the cultivation of wisdom and virtue, as I decribed that above. It has a strong focus on empirical research into the mechanisms of change. So it offers many tools, many techniques, for creating change in how we think, feel, and act. On its own, many people seem to find CBT mechanistic, and so boring, and even worse alienating, even depressing. Fortunately, those tools can easily be integrated into emotionally richer, more humanistic forms of psychotherapy, and into philosophical counselling. I integrate CBT into my philosophical counselling, just as I did into my existential therapy.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy, which includes psychoanalysis, has come a long way from Freud. Today it can be deeply phenomenological, and genuinely humanistic in the sense that it no longer reduces us to psychological mechanisms, and has space for the richness and mystery of human nature. At the same time it retains its earlier powerful psychological insights and tools. Indeed, I view psychodynamic psychotherapy as the psychological therapy par excellence. Those unconscious psychological forces can take many forms, with respect to being unconscious, including the forgotten, the habitual, the avoided, the never-yet-articulated. Phenomenology, cognitive-behavioural therapy, and of course philosophical counselling are excellent at perceiving the first two, for we can all do that with some effort, no special intellectual tools required. The latter two, however--the avoided, the never-yet-articulated—can be a very different matter. The primary power of classical psychoanalysis is insight into these things. It is a more hypothetical kind of work, which joins those implicit dots so we can see our unconscious patterns, despite the fact that those patterns are often designed by our psyche to be invisible to us. This is psychodynamic psychotherapy's enduring value, and the reason you can benefit so immensely from it.
Remember my definition of human nature? There is a struggle between our conscious wisdom, values, and goals, versus those unconscious, animal-psychological forces in us that want comfort and satisfaction, sex and power, with little regard for truth, goodness, justice. Surely you have noticed that some people's mind is possessed by the latter, that they appear to perceive others as mere resources for satisfaction, or as competition for those resources who need to be dominated or devalued? Again, we all fall prey to some degree of this problem, whatever our predilections and our vices. Psychodynamic psychotherapy helps us to see this animal self in action. It helps us to see the dynamics of our psychology, its patterns, including in their tendency to overwhelm and hypnotise our conscious minds. It answers questions such as: Why do I do that? And, why do things always go that way for me? And, what are my true motivations? (They are often mixed—geniune values, and problematic psychological drives.)
Given that I have never been a psychoanalyst, but rather I draw deeply on ideas from psychodynamic psychotherapy, alongside these other therapies I have discussed, my interest in the approach is very practical. I draw on those things which are relevant from a general therapeutic perspective. Chief among these are the many psychological defenses that this therapy has discerned. Here are a few of them, so you can get a sense of the way this work can help you to uncover hidden psychological dynamics in yourself that undermine your capacity for truth, goodness, happiness and flourishing.
The psychological defense of projection casts your own unacceptable feelings or traits onto someone else. The outwardly calm person who is secretly very angry experiences others as angry. The egotist is shocked at the egotism of others. The ashamed person shames others. Rationalisation spins elegant, plausible reasons for what you have done or failed to do, or about the nature of life, to avoid facing your less-than-laudible motivations or actions. Reaction formation turns a forbidden impulse into its exaggerated opposite, for example aggression dressed as friendly humour. Avoidance keeps you at a safe distance from emotional material by changing the subject, busying yourself with tasks, or in the case of intellectualisation, explaining and theorising rather than facing and feeling. There are about 30 recognised defence mechanisms. They range from the relatively adaptive, to the significantly pathological, and in that order they include affiliation, altruism, anticipation, self-observation, sublimation, suppression, displacement, dissociation, intellectualisation, isolation of affect, rationalisation, reaction formation, repression, undoing, devaluation, idealisation, denial, projection, omnipotence, projective identification, acting out, apathy, help-rejecting complaining, passive aggression, autistic withdrawal, concretisation, delusional projection, distortion, fragmentation, and psychotic denial.
For the most part, and with respect to my training, counselling and psychotherapy are not clinical mental health services. The clinical professions include much of Psychology (I capitalise that profession in my writing, to distinguish it from psychology as a dimension of our being), psychiatry, and clinical social work. The paradigm for these professions is "the medical model." Hence, these professions variously offer clinical assessments, diagnoses, treatments, reports, medication, and so forth. I offer none of those services. Having worked alongside psychologists, and in organisations where their concepts dominated, and having done plenty of my own reading, my knowledge and thinking about clinical matters is much more sophisticated than the average person, however my work has nothing to do with the clinical paradigm. Clinical Psychology has an important place in our society, but like psychotherapy it is one part of a greater whole, and life should not be reduced to its concepts, just as life should not be reduced to medicine in general. The service your medical doctor provides for your body is very, very important, but again it is hardly the point of life.
Existential therapy
In 2012 I started a private practice in Carlton, Melbourne, which ran for a decade alongside my organisational counselling work, and focused on existential therapy. My philosophical counselling includes my sophisticated understanding and practice of existential therapy.
Existential therapy is a philosophical form of psychotherapy. Across those years of private practice I took deep dives into the approaches of Irvin Yalom, Betty Cannon, Viktor Frankl, and various others. Above all, I was influenced by Emmy van Deurzen. I will summarise some of these approaches.
Irvin Yalom's existential therapy is essentially psychodynamic psychotherapy structured around existential concerns. For classical psychodynamic (or psychoanalytic) therapy, we have intrapsychic conflicts, which arouse anxiety, and that anxiety arouses psychological defenses such as those mentoined above. For Yalom, the structure is the same except that rather than intrapsychic conflict (e.g. a desire that clashes with an internalised social norm) what arouses anxiety are the existential conditions of life.
Yalom focuses on four such existential challenges: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. His therapy involves recognising one's defenses, and how they are responses to anxiety that is aroused by these existential conditions. The cure is to learn to make peace with these existential facts of life, and so to diminish the anxiety they arouse—to live wisely and courageously with the inevitability of such anxiety, and to find more beneficial ways of responding to it, abandoning your older disfunctional defenses.
Moving to another form of existential therapy, it is little known that the most famous existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, was fascinated by Freud and psychoanalysis. He was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, and wrote numerous brilliant books that explored analysis from an existential perspective. Sartre developed the seeds of an "existential psychoanalysis." Betty Cannon brought those seeds to fruition. It focuses on Sartre's idea that as children we encounter the world, with all its challenges. Or rather, we encounter a particular world, shaped by our family, with all the problems and expectations that brings. In response to that world, including especially the challenges we experience, we embark on a "life project" which unfolds across the rest of our life. At least, it continues until we become aware of it, and make adult choices about it. You encounter vulnerability and fear in your family, and decide you will become heroic. In adulthood you live in a way that enables you to see yourself as heroic, and invites others to do the same. If that is an expression of a genuine, deep passion, then wonderful. But what if it turns out to be a mask?
If it turns out that our life project is a form of inauthentic life, that restricts life, that diminishes it, then we may want to abandon it. To do that, you need to see it, and this is what Sartre's and Cannon's existential psychoanalysis helps you to do. You also need for formulate a new life project, and this therapy helps you do that, and enact it.
Irvin Yalom, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Betty Cannon offer brilliant syntheses of some of the best aspects of pschodynamic psychotherapy, and of existential philosophy. Viktor Frankl developed an approach that is more focused on the conscious cultivation of wisdom, meaning, and purpose. Not only an existential therapist, but a Holocaust survivor, Frankl observed that the person who can find a Why can bear almost any How. I have seen this repeatedly in my own work: people are remarkably resourceful...when they are motivated. The malaise of our culture is not a lack of tools or techniques but a lack of a deep Why. Frankl tested this thesis in the laboratories of Auschwitz and Dachau.
The power of Frankl's existential therapy, which he called Logotherapy, lies in its capacity to explore the potential meaning in people's struggles, and to thus help them cultivate a stronger sense of value, purpose, and motivation. Logotherapy is helpful beyond the kind of terrible struggles Frankl recounted in his memoir Man's Search for Meaning. Indeed, the premise of his approach is that life is a struggle, at an existential level, for most people. Nihilism threatens. So does boredom, or the pull of addiction, or rage, or loss and grief. All of us need to clarify and create our deeper purpose, so as to possess the clarity and energy to tolerate the many challenges of living, and not only that, but in order to live well, to live deeply and richly.
Above all, I was influenced by the work of Emmy van Deurzen. Her Existential Therapy draws more directly on the philosophical tradition than either Yalom's or Frankl's. Where Yalom adapts existential themes to a psychodynamic framework, van Deurzen grounds her practice in the phenomenological method as developed by Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, and in the existential analysis of thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Her approach begins not with a set of predetermined existential concerns such as per Yalom's four conditions, but with a rigorous attempt to understand the client's world as it is lived—the particular way this person experiences and makes sense of existence. She maps the human condition across four dimensions: the physical world of nature and embodiment, the social world of others, the personal world of self, and the spiritual world of ideals, values, and meaning. A flourishing life requires something like balance across these dimensions, and therapy is an exploration of where that balance has been lost, and how it might be recovered.
Emmy van Deurzen emphasises that the therapist is not a technician applying a method, but a fellow traveller, accompanying the client into the difficult, rewarding work of facing existence honestly and, we might say, heroically. For the philosophical counsellor, van Deurzen offers a model of how to integrate phenomenological depth with existential courage—how to help a person not only see their life more clearly, but to take responsibility for it, to choose, to commit, to live with the anxiety that comes from freedom rather than fleeing. Her work stands as a bridge between the therapeutic and the philosophical. It was an excellent bridge into my final goal of Philosophical Counselling.
Who this is for
"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
--Marcus Aurelius
"We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think."
"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts. It is made up of our thoughts."
--The Buddha
"Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny."
--Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese founder of Taoism
"Character is fate."
--The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus said that people are made miserable not so much by events, as by their perception of those events, and their reactions to their perceptions. He was not a radical subjectivist, nor was he preaching a naive optimism, rather he was expressing the nuanced recognition that reality is experienced through the filter of our perception and character—through the prism of our wisdom and virtue, or lack thereof, and the particular form that takes in us. (Today we can add our psychology as another ingredient.) If we want to see more clearly, and to experience reality in better ways, and live in a truly good and meaningful way, then we need to work on ourselves. We need to do some psychological work, but more importantly we need cultivate wisdom and virtue.
Let us apply Epictetus' insight to a concrete situation. Imagine two people who suffer the same misfortune, and who share similar psychological temperaments, childhood experiences, and so on, which is to say that "all other things are equal." Will they therefore be affected, and changed, in the same way? Not necessarily. Imagine that the first person meets their suffering with an attempt to be wise. They strive to be rational and balanced: "I am not special; we all suffer." "I need to see the truth here, and not lose myself in merely consoling thoughts." This requires courage. Indeed, it requires a range of virtues: resisting the envy that suffering can breed, practising compassion toward oneself, remaining just toward others even when in pain, a determined love of truth. In the context of their suffering, this person is likely to grow in wisdom and virtue, and often in deeper forms of peace and happiness, even as they have to suffer.
Imagine that the second person meets the same suffering without that striving. They give into their anger, their envy, their sense of injury. "This is an injustice. It's unfair that I suffer while others are happy!" They become resentful, bitter, egotistical. The suffering does not cause their worsened state, so much as their lack of wisdom and virtue, their failure of effort in that regard. In the context of their suffering, this person is likely to become more foolish, and more and viscious (vice-filled), and so to become miserable. The worse they get, the less willing and able they will be to see their part in all this, and the way out of it. Instead, they make life worse for themselves, and they make life worse for others.
Everything in human nature is a matter of degree. We are all wise and foolish, virtuous and viscious. Hence, both examples are very common; there are about eight billion of them. You are and I embody both.
A life that neglects wisdom and virtue becomes disordered. The opposite of wisdom grows: foolishness, blindness, distortion, confusion, dogma, obsession, despair. The opposite of virtue takes over: visciousness or vice. And so, instead of being rational we become irrational, even as we engage in intellectualisation, rationalisation, and so on. Instead of possessing courage, we fall into cowardice and so fear, anxiety, avoidance, or the opposite extreme--aggression, rage, entitlement, pushiness, resentment, exploitation, manipulation, arrogance. Instead of temperance or self-control, sloth, gluttony, disordered lust, addiction—those are not mere medieval concepts; they are at home on today's secular couch, and on today's screens. Instead of justice, imbalance, disorder, injustice, narcissism.
A clinical mental health professional might diagnose all of the above as clinical disorders, as if they are an illness that happens to you. But are they? Schizophrenia is certainly an illness. So is about 10% of depression, which is caused by organic disorders (brain chemicals et cetera). Psychiatric mental illness is real. But should we frame the above as illnesses, or do we lose something, and harm ourselves, when we do so? Likewise, when psychotherapy frames the above as psychological disorders, which again turns them into something that happens to us, what does that do to us?
What happens when we deny or neglect a vision of ourselves as centres of consciousness, whose existence is of a kind that can see, know, love, choose, and whose being is free, powerful, rich, deep, wonderful, mysterious?
Or to turn the question around: what will happen in your life if you begin to make yourself more wise and virtuous?
If you cultivate a vision of life, and of many of your concerns, that is much more true and good?
If you cultivate the intellectual virtues, so that you perceive, think, imagine, and sense in ways that are more rational, courageous, balanced, compassionate, creative, and so forth.
If you cultivate emotions, desires, and actions—the character virtues—that embody wisdom, courage, temperance, justice?
What will happen with respect the above disorders of the head and heart? What will happen with respect the kind of person you become, and to the meaning of your life, and its value for others, and to the quality of your relationships, and to your own strength and happiness, and to your success and flourishing in life?
So I help you to cultivate wisdom. And I help you to reshape your being, and your life, according to wisdom. This is the funamental work I do, and it is the main work we need to do, if we are to become the kind of people it is most worth becoming, and to experience life in the ways we most deeply long for. I repeat: we pursue wisdom. I help you to become more wise.
We pursue wisdom to deal with your challenges; but more importantly, those challenges are an occassion for general growth in wisdom, and so for a good life well beyond the present moment. In this context of improving yourself and creating a more flourishing life, it is important to do psychotherapeutic, psychological work, and so we do that too.
Philosophical counselling for:
- People who want a purely philosophical conversation, to develop greater wisdom about life and their concerns.
- Those who want to cultivate wisdom and the character virtues: who seek from me a wise conversation, but also practical guidance in developing the wiser emotions, desires, and actions that make for a more strong, good, happy, meaningful, flourishing life.
- Those who want both philosophical and psychological growth. I help with many of the same issues people take to mainstream counselling—grief and loss, relationships, difficult emotional states, life direction and goals, flourishing—but within a larger vision. While seeking wisdom and the virtues, we will also attend to your psychological defences, your unconscious patterns, the forces within you that resist your conscious efforts.
- Professional helpers—psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, and others—who want to deepen their own work in philosophical ways, whether to develop a richer way of helping, or to find greater strength and nourishment for themselves in the context of their challenging work.
Postscript
In 2020 I closed my office in Carlton and began working purely from home by phone and video. Early this decade I stopped offering mainstream counselling and psychotherapy, including existential therapy, and stepped into the final stage of the long-term goal toward which I had been working since the mid-2000s: philosophical counselling.
Today, I live a rather frugal and hands-on life in central Victoria, in an old mud-brick cottage by a forest. I see clients part-time, and dedicate the other half of my time to my ongoing philosophical growth. Beyond my work in philosophical counselling, which is my absorbing passion, I am a gigging jazz drummer; I have a passion for vintage and adventure motorcycling, which goes beyond the machines to a love of landscape and its exploration; I enjoy developing my general handyman skills; and I read much Australian fiction. I enjoy also the fine art of wasting time well, indulging in life's pleasures, and in essence what Raimond Gaita called "a summer-coloured humanism."
