Re-Visioning Existential Therapy

This is a brave and engaging book that takes no prisoners. For too long, existential therapy has been recruited in the service of socio-political conformity and evidence-based orthodoxy. It is not surprising then that many clinicians feel existentialism has failed to live up to its potential for inspiring psychic transformation. In this book, Bazzano has marshalled a formidable array of thinkers, academics and clinicians to provide a significant counter-traditional perspective on existential theory and practice. It offers a fresh and provocative ‘take’ on radical existential values, making an unmistakable clarion call for therapy whose values are underpinned by creativity rather than compliance, playfulness rather than protocols and meaning rather than medicalisation. It is a book for all thinking therapists. Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.

Rosemary Rizq. Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, University of Roehampton, UK.

"With everything that’s solid melting into air, therapy has a choice: between peddling yet more conformist ways of adjusting to an unsustainable status quo (the ‘data before existence’ approach), or daring to ask the deepest existential questions about our humanity and being. With his finger invariably on the pulse, and with therapy-writing set free from its conventional, stultifying moorings, Manu Bazzano has assembled another leading-edge collection that opens up the kind of thinking that we must dare to allow, if we’re to make any sense of the current conjuncture. This is a book to work hard at – and a book that anyone caring about our human future must read."

Dr Richard House, Chartered Psychologist and author of Therapy Beyond Modernity and In, Against and Beyond Therapy

An essential and important read for anyone wishing to explore the therapeutic aspects of existentialist philosophy. This collection evades, expands and enfolds traditional Western ideas concerning self and existence and invites into being (or becoming) a new tradition.

Dr Alexander Carter ITO and Academic Director for Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge

At a time when we are witnessing a move towards reducing our experience of life to linear and well-trodden narratives, this fascinating collection, edited by Manu Bazzano, accompanies us through familiar philosophical horizon, challenging us to encounter new perspectives

Jo Hilton, Clinical Fellow, Counselling, Psychotherapy and Applied Social Science, University of Edinburgh.

"This is a brave and engaging book that takes no prisoners. For too long, existential therapy has been recruited in the service of socio-political conformity and evidence-based orthodoxy. It is not surprising then that many clinicians feel existentialism has failed to live up to its potential for inspiring psychic transformation. In this book, Bazzano has marshalled a formidable array of thinkers, academics and clinicians to provide a significant counter-traditional perspective on existential theory and practice. It offers a fresh and provocative ‘take’ on radical existential values, making an unmistakable clarion call for therapy whose values are underpinned by creativity rather than compliance, playfulness rather than protocols and meaning rather than medicalisation. It is a book for all thinking therapists. Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest."

Rosemary Rizq. Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, University of Roehampton, UK

"With everything that’s solid melting into air, therapy has a choice: between peddling yet more conformist ways of adjusting to an unsustainable status quo (the ‘data before existence’ approach), or daring to ask the deepest existential questions about our humanity and being. With his finger invariably on the pulse, and with therapy-writing set free from its conventional, stultifying moorings, Manu Bazzano has assembled another leading-edge collection that opens up the kind of thinking that we must dare to allow, if we’re to make any sense of the current conjuncture. This is a book to work hard at – and a book that anyone caring about our human future must read."

Dr Richard House, Chartered Psychologist and author of Therapy Beyond Modernity and In, Against and Beyond Therapy

"An essential and important read for anyone wishing to explore the therapeutic aspects of existentialist philosophy. This collection evades, expands and enfolds traditional Western ideas concerning self and existence and invites into being (or becoming) a new tradition."

Dr Alexander Carter ITO and Academic Director for Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies,

Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge

"At a time when we are witnessing a move towards reducing our experience of life to linear and well-trodden narratives, this fascinating collection, edited by Manu Bazzano, accompanies us through familiar philosophical horizon, challenging us to encounter new perspectives."

Jo Hilton, Clinical Fellow, Counselling, Psychotherapy and Applied Social Science, University of Edinburgh

Themes of home, renunciation of home and nostalgia for home resound through the essays collected in Re-Visioning Existential Therapy.

The essays collected in the bookinstantiate various strategies for revivifying and politicising the thought of existential therapy, and getting out from under the long shadow of Heidegger.

In Re-Visioning Existential Therapy we see the [existential] tradition hearteningly alive, vigorously contending with its inner contradictions and seeking to re-imagine itself, as every healthy tradition periodically must.

Reviewed by Alex Gooch in the AHPB Magazine for Self & Society