Time-Limited Existential Therapy. Alison Strasser
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therapy and there are other benefits to working in a more long‐term way. The requirements of the client, the orientation of the therapist or the specific agency rules are all taken into account when contracting with the client. In all of these circumstances, understanding and working with time as an explicit theme can alter the flavour of the therapy. Case studies and client vignettes will be used throughout the book to illustrate and to breathe life into what is often turgid or difficult language to understand. This edition includes new case studies and vignettes as well as those from the original book, namely, ‘Lynn’, one of the studies written by my father which was pivotal in the development of the time‐limited modular approach. In this second edition, all of the other case studies are composites and representative of being human.
Much has changed since our writing of the first edition, including my understanding and working definition of time‐limited therapy. My own practice as a therapist, supervisor, coach, and trainer continues to inform my understanding and interpretation of existential philosophy. I am indebted to my clients, supervisees, and colleagues for the questions they ask and their inherent courage to question not only themselves but me in any of these roles and positions.
The second edition is written to be inclusive of many of the ideas that were important to my father. I decided to use the pronoun ‘I’ rather than define which ideas and client stories were his and which were mine. This decision was part of my personal process of finding my voice and recognising my father’s influence.
Finally, as my father had, and still has, enormous influence on who I have become and on the way I think and experience life, this second edition honours both his contribution to the world of existential practice as a therapist, coach, and mediator and the immense impact he had on defining the modular time‐limited approach. His framework still works and continues to be enormously useful.
Note
1 i A term used by Jean Paul Sartre (1958) to describe a form of self‐deception and avoidance of one’s freedom.
Acknowledgements
I’m deeply grateful to my sisters Carolyn and Yvonne, to my step‐daughter Sacha Woodburn, to all my family, friends and colleagues who have supported me in my much longer than anticipated journey in completing this second edition.
I have travelled around the world, sat at many kitchen tables with my trusted laptop and both written, revised, and conversed with my wonderful friends and family; in particular, the tables I remember with warmth are with Nari and Lucia Ghandhi in London, Frank and Sara Megginson in Monaco and other beautiful settings, Peggy Hankey in Seyssel, France, Sal Flynn in Byron Bay, Margalit Barnea in Portugal, Jo and Alex Fok in Tasmania, and Annie Buchner in our COVID‐bound holidays in New South Wales, Australia, and a big thank you to Leanda Elliott and Joyce Morgan for their wise counsel and unswerving friendship.
I thank my colleagues who never erred from the firm belief that I would finally hand in the manuscript. In particular, Emmy van Deurzen, Ernesto Spinelli, Greg Madison in the UK and, closer to home, Adam McLean and Lyn Gamwell.
And I thank all my clients and supervisees who inadvertently provided the backdrop and clarity to the existential themes that I was writing about, including their myriad of responses to time, and to Maria Clark for sharing her time and her rich case studies for inclusion in this book.
I acknowledge the calm and insightful support of Jo Silbert who stepped in after the first draft as my editor and mentor; together we cut and dissected chapters, pages, and ideas and shaped them into the current coherent creation.
Finally, my thanks go to my husband Rob Woodburn who was a surreptitious existential thinker, only revealing later in our relationship that he had studied existential philosophy as an undergraduate. As a writer, he patiently read and edited the first draft of this book, asking awkward but poignant and useful questions. The two most significant men in my life, Rob and my father, Freddy both died within 10 years of each other, handing over the baton to my humble and nervous hands.
About the Author
Alison Strasser DProf (Psychotherapy & Counselling), MA, BA Hons
Alison is a practising psychotherapist, coach, and supervisor. She is also an educator with a passion for imparting how existential themes can be integrated into every therapeutic approach. She was instrumental in creating the existential curriculum for many counselling and psychotherapy trainings in Australia and founded Centre for Existential Practice in 2008. Her doctorate focused on the process of supervision, work that led to a framework for supervisor training, now a major component of CEP’s annual programme.
1 Existential and Phenomonological Philosophies and the Wheel of Existence
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and … surround myself with obstacles … The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
Igor Stravinski, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (1970)
Existentialism and Phenomenology Overview
Existentialism and phenomenology are different and yet complementary philosophies that attempt to understand what it means to be human. In simple terms, existentialism focuses on human existence, reflecting on the issues of what it is to be human, while phenomenology concerns itself with how human beings subjectively interpret their existence. These philosophies stem not from a traditional, objective, rational, scientific focus or impetus but from an examination of how humans understand themselves in the midst of their lived experience.
The word ‘existence’ has its roots in the Latin word ex‐istere – translated variously as ‘to stand out’, ‘to emerge’, ‘to proceed forward in a continuous process’.
Rollo May, the distinguished American protagonist of existential philosophy, defined this existential approach to understanding the human condition in his book The Discovery of Being:
For the very essence of this approach is that it seeks to analyse and portray the human being – whether in art or literature or philosophy or psychology – on a level which undercuts the old dilemma of materialism versus idealism. Existentialism, in short, is the endeavour to understand man1 by cutting below the cleavage between subject and object that has bedevilled Western thought and science since shortly after the Renaissance.
(May, 1983, p. 49)
Existential philosophy is concerned with the science of being – with ontology (Gk ontos, ‘being’). It examines the attitudes we adopt towards being and what we can do about it. Existential philosophy observes that each individual makes his or her own unique pathway in the world, that each of us will experience our own existence in our own distinctive manner. Simultaneously, each individual exists in a relational or co‐constituted mode to others and to the world. In other words, as soon as we exist we are inexorably connected to other people, objects and even ideas.
Kierkegaard, the grandfather of existentialist philosophy, explored the anxiety and aloneness humans experience as they struggle in their attempts to find their own truth, their personal freedom, against the backdrop of the ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ that life inevitably demands. Heidegger pertinently asked, ‘What is it to be human?’ and spent his life’s work defining and redefining both his questions and answers, emerging with the concept that humans are inextricably connected to the world, are perpetually in a state of ‘being‐in‐this‐world’,