Psychologies Magazine, November 2005
“Is Philosophy the New Psychotherapy?”
"Whether you want help dealing with a romantic setback or are looking
for more meaning in your life, the wisdom you seek could be centuries
old"
"Philosophy can help evryone to feel better about their lives"
The Independent on Sunday, October 2nd 2005
“Move over Carole Caplin. The
new gurus of self-help are philosophical counsellors from beyond the grave”
"One of the country's leading philosophical counsellers, and chairman of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP), Tim LeBon, said it typically took around six 50 minute sessions for a client to move from confusion to resolution.
The Independent, November 16
2004 "For the first time in two years, I was being honest
with myself about what I really wanted - listening to those voices that we all
have inside our heads, and too often try to muzzle."
Observer Magazine, November 21 2004 “Philosophical counselling addresses the
questions other therapies fail to reach"
If
you've got some problems in your life and need advice, there's a man who might
be able to help. He's wise, experienced and full of provocative thoughts that
might just help you turn things around. He's also been dead 2,404 years. Meet
Socrates, the latest self-help guru on the block.
Philosophical counselling, where people needing a new way of thinking about their lives are guided not by someone peddling the latest theories but by some of the biggest brains in history, is booming.
From The Independent
16 November 2004
It was the end of a love affair that broke her heart.
Could the wisdom of the great philosophers show her how to be happy again?
Claire Smith tries a novel form of therapy.
"The unexamined
life is not worth living," Socrates said. Nor is the life you're left with
after your boyfriend has left you for another woman - at least, that's how it
felt in October last year when mine broke rank and went off with an art student
from Cleveland, Ohio. We were over there for the opening of his new art
exhibition. He'd flown over four days before me and had met her at a party.
Supposedly, they "connected".
The five months that
followed were a roller-coaster of confusion, vitriol and despair. I knew
there'd been problems in our relationship. We saw the world very differently;
he delighted in the charm of the ordinary, I wanted maximum divinity. He
walked; I galloped. He drank tea; I loathed the stuff. But, along the banks of
the Thames, we'd made a promise to always stick together. Our love was
something unique: "transcendental", I called it. And besides, we
recycled. Surely a commitment to save the world would save our relationship?
Alas, no.
So there I was, a woman
scorned. Hell truly hath no greater fury. And what made it worse was that I
still believed in our transcendental love. If I wanted to change the way I was feeling,
I needed to alter the way I was thinking. But how? A few bottles of wine and a
sharp blow to the head might have done the trick. Fortunately, there's an
older, more trusted way of turning your head on its head that counsellors are
starting to use: philosophy.
The idea of employing
Plato as an agony aunt was begun in 1981 by the German philosopher Gerd
Achenbach. Although philosophy spends a lot of its time asking real-life
questions that affect real-life people - What is happiness? And is it always
wrong to lie? - most of the debate goes on in ivory towers. What Achenbach and
subsequent philosophers including Tim LeBon, the chairman of the UK's Society
for Philosophy in Practice, wanted to do was "give practical
application" to this gigantic library of great thoughts.
So how does it work?
Like most types of therapy, you sign up for a set of sessions. "Two would
give you a new perspective on one issue; six would help you to make a major
life-decision, like a career change; with 12 you can start to rethink your
entire life philosophy," explains LeBon. Each session lasts 50 minutes and
costs £50 - and, no, you don't have to have any previous knowledge of
philosophy.
"If you think of Friends,
it would suit Ross and Chandler more than Joey," LeBon says. "It's
for anyone who wants to make their emotions more intelligent. Or for those who
have tried other kinds of therapy, and want something more cerebral."
The first session begins
with the patient venting off about whatever's troubling them. The rant over,
the counsellor then picks out some key concepts that are crucial to the problem
- in the case of heartbreak, it is love and happiness that come hurtling to the
fore - and then gets the patient to define what they mean. So, what is love?
What is happiness?
To kick-start the
patient's thinking, LeBon describes what a great philosopher had to say about
it. In my case, he tells me what Plato wrote about love in his Symposium:
that to stop man fighting the gods, Zeus decided to cut each human in two, so
they would lose their strength. "This, then, is the source of our desire
to love each other," Plato said. "Each of us is a 'matching half' of
a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and
each of us is always seeking the half that matches him."
This method of probing
what we might think are "obvious" ideas, such as love and happiness,
was devised by Socrates in the squares of Athens. "The only I thing I know
is that I know nothing at all," he boasted. What Socrates showed was that
although many of the thinkers of his time thought they knew what justice,
happiness and goodness meant, their understanding was tied in to their personal
agenda and world view, and, what's more, when pushed, their ideas often
contradicted themselves.
A bit like me on love.
Whereas part of my understanding of love was something that gave life meaning,
made it worth living and bound us together, I also believed that true love was
"transcendental": that it was out of this world, and it didn't matter
if the two people who loved each other couldn't get along in the day-to-day.
Love was bigger than the mundane.
But when it came to the
next stage of the therapy, critical thinking - "to check out whether your
assumptions stand up to examination" - I walked head first into a
contradiction. If I think love's purpose is to make life worth living, but then
say it's irrelevant to daily life, surely my two ideas of love are not
compatible?
As the cogs in my brain
start to creak into motion, I feel myself taking a step back from my
predicament: thinking about how I've been thinking. This idea I had of
transcendental love might have started off as a romantic dream. But when the
relationship stopped working, and I found myself feeling trapped and
frustrated, I used it to justify the mechanics of a relationship that just
didn't work in the daily grind. I used it to lie to myself.
In the final stage,
LeBon gets me to start thinking about how to go forward. "You can't change
what has happened," he says. "You can't change that he's left you, or
how you behaved in the relationship. So, as the Stoics did, let's work on
controlling the controllables: the things that you can change."
To work out what can be
changed, he gets me to try out a thought experiment, a method often used in philosophy
to imagine other worlds where people can have different codes of behaviour.
Thought experiments shatter your preconceived ideas of how the world should be
and let your imagination run wild to how the world could be. "I find
Viktor Frankl very useful here, the Austrian psychiatrist and
concentration-camp survivor who actually believed that everything in life
happens for a purpose," LeBon says.
"Suppose this
break-up did happen for a reason that will work to your benefit," he
suggests. "What might that be? The answer might be that you can now focus
on something important that was denied in the relationship. Or - the Hollywood
version - so you'll meet someone who is really right for you."
Temporarily freed of any
sense of responsibility for the relationship that was, and its sorry demise,
the list came fast. I could now travel more; he didn't like me travelling on my
own, but too often he didn't want to go anywhere, preferring to stay in his
studio and make art. I'd love to meet someone with a similar sense of adventure
to mine.
For the first time in
two years, I was being honest with myself about what I really wanted -
listening to those voices that we all have inside our heads, and too often try
to muzzle.
So did philosophy save me? Well, I'm now dating a travel writer I have to run to keep up with. I still haven't got over the fact that my replacement came from Cleveland, Ohio. But I guess I never will.
Tim LeBon can be reached by e-mail at tim@timlebon.com
A
FEW WORDS FROM THE WISE Compiled
by Ed Caesar |
* "At the
touch of love, everyone becomes a poet" - Plato * "There is
always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in
madness" - Friedrich Nietzsche * "That man shall
live as his own master and in happiness who can say each day 'I have
lived'" - Horace * "The good of
man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with
excellence or virtue... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete
lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and
similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man
supremely blessed and happy" - Aristotle * "There is
nothing on this earth more to be prized than friendship" - Thomas
Aquinas * "Whatever
you do... love those who love you" - Voltaire * "Happiness
is not an ideal of reason but of imagination" - Immanuel Kant * "Happiness
is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you
are happy, you cease to be happy" - Jiddu Krishnamurti * "Love is an
ideal thing. Marriage is a real thing" - Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe |
I shrink, therefore I am
Therapy
has many answers, but some questions require the help of a philosopher, says
Clint Witchalls
Sunday
November 21, 2004
The Observer
Danny had been
struggling with his career conundrum for nearly five years when he met David
Arnaud, a philosophical counsellor. After a few soul-searching sessions, Danny
arrived at a decision. Today, he teaches economics to sixth-formers, and he
loves it. 'It's a much better lifestyle,' he says.
Many people are
turning to philosophical counsellors to get answers to questions such as: 'How
do I make sense of myself?' 'What is important to me?' 'Where am I going?'
These are perhaps not the sort of questions that require psychiatric
intervention, but Arnaud, who recently completed the first empirical study of
philosophical counselling in the UK, has found that within just five sessions
the majority of clients, with important decisions to make, tend to move from a
state of concern and confusion to a resolution.
Modern
philosophical counselling can be traced back to 1981, when the philosopher Gerd
Achenbach opened the first practice near Cologne. Achenbach referred to the new
discipline as 'therapy for the sane.' Today, there are hundreds of
philosophical counsellors around the world, with the movement particularly
strong in the US, Britain and the Netherlands.
'The dilemmas
people face aren't always primarily psychological,' says Alex Howard, a
philosophical counsellor from Newcastle. 'If people face problems that are
social or economic, it doesn't make sense to define their problems in purely
psychological terms.' Tim LeBon, a founder member of the Society for Philosophy
in Practice (SPP) and author of Wise Therapy, adds: 'We are faced with far more
life choices than our grandparents, yet have far fewer resources to deal with
them. Our grandparents may have gone to a priest or to other family members for
advice; most people don't trust these solutions any more and so want to make
their own well-informed, well thought-out choices. Philosophical counselling
can help these people - people in mid-life crises who are wondering how to make
the most of the rest of their life. People who want to take stock of their
values.'
Where stressed
executives might once have been prescribed a course of tranquillisers or
antidepressants, they can now get a dose of Bertrand Russell instead: 'Success
is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to
obtain it.' While some philosophical counsellors do recommend books for their
clients to read, most sessions are about helping the client identify faulty
thoughts. For example, a briefing in Aristotelian logic might show a client why
their beliefs are erroneous. The person might infer that they're a screw-up
because they've screwed up. The counsellor could point out that they're making
an error called 'fallacy of composition' - that is, what's true of the part
isn't necessarily true of the whole.
In philosophical
counselling, problems aren't pathologised as they are by the psychiatric
profession, and the dialogue between client and counsellor is more like a
meeting of equals, compared to many therapies where the client is treated like
a patient and seen as someone who is, in some way, inadequate. 'Anybody can
benefit from philosophical counselling,' says Howard. 'But it does require
someone who is willing to take stock.'
Lou Marinoff,
author of international bestseller Plato Not Prozac! has done much to promote
philosophical counselling. 'Some people who have stabilised their
neurochemistry and validated their emotions now wish to examine or re-examine
the criteria of their beliefs, the principles of their conduct, or the meaning
of their lives,' he says. 'With whom shall they do this? Psychologists and
psychiatrists can shed light on such issues - as can rabbis, priests, imams and
gurus. Philosophers are now rejoining the ranks of helpers.'
LeBon believes
certain therapies (such as cognitive behavioural therapy) don't go far enough
in helping their clients. 'For instance, if you are anxious about your
relationship, a cognitive therapist would try to dispute your catastrophising
and jump to conclusions to make you feel less anxious,' says LeBon. 'A
philosophical counsellor would do this, but would also look for existential
meaning in your anxiety - perhaps you really don't want to be in the
relationship and that is what your anxiety is telling you.' LeBon also gives
short shrift to psychoanalysts. 'There's very little evidence for the Freudian
unconscious, and it's time to move on to more intellectually satisfying and
helpful therapies,' he says.
However, Alain de
Botton, the man who popularised philosophy as self-help, isn't ready to bury
psychologists and their ilk just yet. 'The truth is that psychoanalysis grew
out of philosophy - it's not some completely new idea, and in fact, done
properly, psychoanalysis is philosophical anyway. It may even be dangerous to
the mental health of some people to suggest a philosopher rather than a
properly trained analyst. The knowledge of analysts when it comes to many
emotional problems is now much greater than that of most philosophers.'
Book a consultation with Tim LeBon today
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