Time-Limited Existential Therapy. Alison Strasser
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Your Hungarian charm and infectious smile will continue to ripple in all those who have been touched by your irrepressible spirit.
Foreword
All therapy, de facto, is time limited and has a beginning and an end. In this it is very much like human existence. The more we allow ourselves to be aware of the limits of life, the defter we get at using the space and time available to us. It is like this with therapy too: the more we approach it with awareness of its limits and boundaries, the sharper becomes its lens, allowing us to throw a clear light on a person’s difficulties whilst illuminating their possibilities. Time, here too, is of the essence, as it leads us naturally from our memory‐laden past, through our present predicaments, towards a future purpose and destination. Throughout the pages of this book our journey in time points the way towards progress, meaning, and understanding.
When Freddie Strasser and his daughter Alison Strasser co‐authored their book on time‐limited therapy at the end of the 1990s, they had both relatively recently completed their existential training (with me), but had already shown themselves to be prime contributors to the existential approach. In that earlier book I recognised many of the ingredients I had introduced them to, though they had been mixed and prepared in a new way, providing a fresh and original take on existential therapy that foregrounded the important theme of the time‐limited nature of our profession.
In this new volume, Alison Strasser has remixed the themes, elegantly updating her vision of time‐limited work, displaying her maturity of thought and her professionalism. Here we find a broader spectrum, a more coherent narrative, and a much more sure‐footed account of time‐limited existential therapy. This is now a clear and carefully worked out guide demonstrating to existential therapists how they can concretely apply these ideas to their everyday practice with their clients. This is a book by a seasoned and talented therapist, who has not only seen hundreds of clients over the intervening decades, but who has created a thriving existential training institute of her own, in Sydney, Australia, and who has taught and supervised many hundreds of trainees over the years.
The experience jumps off the page and is continuously in evidence through the intertwining of theoretical concepts and practical application. There are many vignettes, whose storylines are engaging whilst highlighting the points that matter. There are great summaries of relevant philosophical ideas and of salient practitioners’ work. There are also plenty of original contributions, culminating in a brand‐new ‘wheel of existence’, which will speak to existential therapists worldwide.
Alison Strasser has boldly taken up the challenge of revising and reviving a highly successful book, which she wrote together with her late father. Having had the immense pleasure of knowing and working with Freddie Strasser myself, I have no doubt that he would have smiled proudly upon this feat of daughterly pluck and accomplishment. The book will give his own reputation a new lease of life, thus cheating time and death itself in the nicest possible way. Many new readers will now benefit from their joint ideas, and previous readers will note how these ideas have thrived and blossomed, through Alison’s work, over the years. The book is a true testimony to the ripening of life with the passing of time. It will be appreciated on many continents.
Emmy van Deurzen
Preface
The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1905)
The first edition of this book, Existential Time Limited Therapy: The Wheel of Existence (Strasser & Strasser, 1997), co‐authored by my father, Freddie Strasser, and me, paved a pathway to describing how existential therapy offers an effective approach to brief therapy where ‘it was the certainty of the ending that was identified as the most influential distinguishing factor’ (Lamont, 2012, p. 172). We proposed that time itself is the ‘tool’ that facilitates awareness and the potential for change.
One of the original aims of the first edition was to convey existential philosophy as a vehicle for common sense. Neither my father nor I saw ourselves as experts in existential philosophy; however, we were both stimulated by how the integration of existential and phenomenological philosophies added alternative perspectives and ways of understanding people that related to their concrete living in the world rather than being limited to a psychological perspective. As is probably true for most existential practitioners, we saw ourselves as existential‐oriented therapists, signifying that we are informed by numerous ideas and approaches that build on our own personal experiences.
In the first edition, we presented the modular approach where the client was offered 12 sessions with the first 10 sessions as consecutive and the final 2 sessions spread a month apart. A subsequent module of 12 sessions could be discussed and implemented depending on the client’s particular circumstances. Indeed, the discussion itself about continuing or not is one of the hidden gems of this approach in that some clients are adamant about wishing to continue or not. Such responses tend to relate to, and reveal, clients’ attitudes towards themselves and to relationships in general.
In conjunction with the development of the time‐limited modular approach, the first edition introduced two Wheels of Existence: Structure and Process wheels. This was a novel way of understanding existential philosophy and brought to existential psychotherapy a structure, albeit fluid, to delineate the aspects of existential theory and its application to psychotherapy practice. Since existential philosophy is not used overtly with clients but creates the backdrop or framework to inform how the therapist listens, how questions are framed, and how inferences and connections are drawn, the wheels provided an interrelational map. The various components provide a schema for understanding how the different elements of existential philosophy are integrated into the whole experience.
In the years following the publication of the first edition, my father and I lived in different countries, followed different pathways, and diverged in our interests but still continued with our weekly conversations. I began exploring supervision and devised a wheel to encompass the existential ideas that emerged from my doctoral research. My father became fascinated with mediation and also created a series of wheels to further enhance his ideas and to show the existential connections retained in this mediation framework. He developed the ideas along with Paul Randolph (a barrister) into the Alternative Dispute Resolution. Interestingly, although two wheels were introduced in the first edition, very soon only one wheel emerged in each of our individual work.
In 2007, when writing a presentation for the Australasian Existential Society, my father and I developed yet another version of the wheel that united our ideas combining our developing thoughts. And we realised that veiled within the original text was the germ of an idea that, as life is time limited, similarly every psychotherapy session, every group of sessions however contracted, has its limitations of time (Strasser & Strasser, 1997, p. 4). This we understood as reflective of the need to be time aware, irrespective of modality or length of sessions. We had every intention of developing these ideas further into a second edition of time‐limited therapy.
However, the time‐limited nature of life assaulted my own sense of certainty and predictability with the unexpected and untimely death of my father, forcing me to confront the finitude of his life, taking the wind out of my sails, and leaving me to honour the legacy and continue our work.
When, some years later, Emmy van Deurzen proposed the idea of my writing the second edition on my own, I felt excited to continue my father’s work. I had accessed his ideas about paradox on his computer and discovered some of his case studies. I knew how we would have written this book together, as we had done previously. I would now write to honour his work; I would write as a tribute to him.
Several months on, however, I was still struggling to gather my thoughts and put together any words related to time‐limited therapy. I was derailed by my wish to write my own thoughts,