This page describes my journey from philosophy, through psychotherapy, to the practice of philosophical counselling. This is an "about me" page, in which I convey my background and say something about what philosophy and psychotherapy are, as I practice them. That information is important in itself, but I hope it all shows how philosophy can be incredibly helpful when it comes to your personal concerns. As somebody trained and experienced in mainstream therapy I have come to view that practice as secondary to philosophy, when it comes to facing our challenges and making life better. Our society is mistaken about this, in part because we try to see everything as a machine, and so view ourselves as a psychological mechanism, and in part because we reduce philosophy to the form it takes in the universities, which likewise is technocratic.
In another piece of writing I begin with the following paragraph, which I will repeat here:
I grew up in the Mallee--a rural childhood in the harsh but evocative landscape of north-western Victoria. I come from a family of people who left school early and did physical work. In the heat and dust of that environment it was easy to feel the cruelty of life, but in the silence of that heat there was a sense also of something else. My memories as a young child include staring often at the horizon, which fades and shimmers in that place, and which feels like an evocation. So too, the magnitude of the sky. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting farm equipment seemed to glow with a hint of 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 vision, just out of focus, of being surrounded by other lives, births, deaths, loves, and pains, folded up in the unconscious memory of place. Further 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, but that it is.
Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. Of course I would come to work with many people for whom it begins in suffering. Philosophy begins in many ways, but it tends to arise out of an experience, and to be driven by that experience. That is how it is for me: the drive to philosophy is rooted in the above kinds of experience. Of course it was not until much later that I discovered philosophy as a formal tradition. I dropped out of high-school early and left home at 17. In part that was to escape an abusive step-father in a fibro house in a tiny dusty town. But it was equally to pursue a passion: I was a musician, and for a couple of years made a living out of that in Melbourne. Then a religious conversation, which lasted a number of years, drew me to Italy where I entered a monastery. That is a bigger story which I will tell another time. A year later I found myself back in Melbourne, working in a factory, when I wandered into a bookstore and walked out with a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the classic work of Stoic philosophy. I had discovered philosophy and its power for helping us deal with life. This form of philosophy that I found among the ancients was however different to what I would later encounter as academic philosophy, and the difference was important in terms of how enlightening and transformative philosophy was to become for my personal life, and for the people whom I would later help as a philosophy, so I will explore the nature of philosophy before continuing with my story.
The word philosophy is a conjunction of two ancient Greek words: philos and sophia. Philos means love, and sophia means wisdom. Hence, philosophy is the love of wisdom. This means that philosophy is also the pursuit of wisdom. That is what you and I are doing when we engage in philosophical coversation about life. The presence of love in the definition of philosophy should not be skipped over, however. Philosophy is a form of love. Love is, of course, transforms the lover. Philosophy transforms the person who does it.
The archetype of the philosopher is Socrates, a craftsman who lived in Athens 2500 years ago. Socrates engaged people in conversation during their day to day life. His student Plato wrote a series of dialogues which portray those conversations. Socrates' point was to invite people to examine their lives, which is to say, to pursue wisdom about their lives through such conversation. The function of such wisdom is to become a better person and to create a better life.
What is wisdom? We can say that it is truth, that it is a contemplative and practical lucidity about life. If we reflect a little deeper we will come to see that wisdom is the exercise of the virtues. A virtue can be defined as any good quality which makes us and our lives better, such as reason, courage, justice, compassion, love, creativity, fortitude, and many other good qualities / virtues. The virtues can be divided into two catgegories: the intellectual virtues, and the character virtues which is to say virtues of feeling and action. Many virtues fall into both categories but accordingly differ in nature: consider intellectual courage, and how that differs from courage of action, and how both differ from the emotional courage you exercise in psychotherapy when it comes to facing a fear.
There is a unity to the virtues, in the sense that they define each other. For example, we often think of anger as a vice, for it can be blind and destructive. But anger that is justified, appropriate, proportionate, is a virtue, and an important one. Indeed, the lack of such anger can be a vice, the kind of vice that enables other people to walk all over you. The question is: is the anger just, reasonable, compassionate, and so on in this context: it is a question both of avoiding anger's excess (rage) and anger's deficiency (cowardice), which can be understood as the presence of the relevant other virtues which temper and attune the anger to the context. I could go on with other examples, for example pride is often a vice--arrogance--but a lack of proper pride is also a vice--we might call it low self-esteem--and much work in therapy involves helping people to respect and honour themselves appropriately: to develop the virtue of proper pride. To speak of virtuous anger, is to speak of wise anger, anger tempered by wisdom. The best way to understand it is to think of a person who is wise in this respect, whose way of being angry expresses that wisdom.
Why do we care about, and so pursue, wisdom? This is also to ask, why do we exercise and pursue the virtues? Because of love. Some things need justification by other things, and some things do not: they are like bedrock. This is how it is with various of the things we love: that's just how it is, indeed it is definitive of who and how and what we are. We are creatures who love truth, and goodness, and all the forms of these goods which they unfold into, such as--to quote my list of virtuous qualities above--reason, courage, justice, compassion, creativity, fortitude, and so forth, as well as the myriad concrete goods we find in place and people and activity and so on. We love life when it embodies these goods. And we love others who embody these goods. We love ourselves when we embody these goods. Such love also divides into many forms, from desire, to admiration, to empathy and compassion, to friendship, to romantic love, to parental love, and so forth. Philosophy is the love of goodness, which is why it is the love and pursuit of wisdom which is the path to and embodiment of the good.
I learned about Socrates through the writings of his student, Plato. Plato in his turn went on to develop a profound vision of what life is--and can become--when we focus our mind and will on an unconditional commitment to truth, goodness, justice, beauty, and so forth. Raphael's painting The School of Athens shows Plato pointing upward, to a life oriented by such higher values. Beside him stands his student Aristotle, pointing down at the material details. Aristotle explored what virtue and character are, and how we cultivate them, and how they lead to greater strength, and meaning, and happiness, and flourishing. He created a framework for cultivating those qualities and outcomes in our own lives. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, each in their different ways according to their very different temperaments, saw the unity between (1) the pursuit of wisdom as the love and so cultivation of truth and goodness and (2) the various consequences which also follow from that cultivation: an increase of inner strength, of meaning, of happiness, and of flourising in life. Character is destiny, as a modern writer put it. Of course, these philosophers also saw how deeply vulnerable we are to malevolence and misfortune, but they recognised the important distinction which became the basis of Stoicism: there are things which are out of our control, and that calls for a certain kind of work, and there are things which are in our control, and that calls for a whole other set of virtues and efforts.
Philosophy as I have described it is quite different to what I would encounter in the universities. For the latter is less the love of wisdom, and more the love of theory, a technology of theory and reason. Academic philosophy is an expression of modernity, that ideology of the last few centuries whose vision reduces life to the mechanical. Modernity is reductive in that way because it is an expression of the vice of Narcissus: the human intellect has a tendency to fall in love with itself. We fall in love with our intellects, and so with their creations. Hence we slowly lose sight of reality and instead take our intellectual fabrications to be the most real. There is no reality out there to come up against, rather there are only our constructs. "It is all a social construct" or "brain chemicals"--it is all no more than the constructs of the intellect, notions containable by the human intellect. This is "the Faustian intellect" to reference Goethe, or "the Luciferian intellect" to quote the atheist philosopher Iris Murdoch. By contrast, in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the intellect is the ability to see, and its vision is only as good as the other virtues which the person emodies. To see clearly requires not only reason, but equally and perhaps moreso love, humility, curiosity, passion, empathy, and so forth. The intellect is a lover, as Plato describes in The Symposium. The intellect is a thirst, an appetite for reality, for what is true, and for what is good.
Many people assume that philosophy is not for them, for example that they are not intelligent enough. I have tried to point out that while that may be true regarding academic philosophy, it is not true of Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian philosophy, at least with respect to their ethical core. Even intellectually disabled people are capable of such philosophy, assuming their disability is not too profound: that they can converse, reflect and learn. For philosophy is the reflective work of the head and of the heart, aimed not at outcompeting others with respect to the IQ, but rather aimed at seeing things more clearly according to your own capacities and for your own sake, to make life better for yourself and those around you. Philosophy starts with where you are, and guides you in applying your head and heart to get to a better place. Philosophy is a re-orientation of value and meaning that opens your eyes and which changes you. I think here of some of the best books of philosophy, in which relatively little reasoning goes on, but which embody a certain way of seeing, and which lead the reader by degrees into that different and better way of seeing.
What I am saying may become more clear if we distinguish philosophy from a cultural technology. By cultural technology I mean activities such as medicine, or personal training, or psychotherapy, or education, or apprenticeship and training, and so on. These are technologies because they objectify a thing and then apply techniques to analyse and manipulate it. For example, the doctor diagnoses my health, and then she and I apply technologies/techniques such as medicine, better eating, exercise, et cetera. Likewise the personal trainer diagnoses my muscle strength and then leads me in practices, and the psychotherapist analyses my psychological patterns and problems, and then leads me through psychological techniques to change them. Such cultural and therapeutic technologies involve a formula: here is the problem, here is its cause, here is the solution, and now we apply that. Notice that what is objectified and focused on is a part of me--my health, my muscle strength, my psychological patterns--which are elements or aspects of me but are not me as a whole. Notice also that these parts of me are, in a very important sense, not me. I can for example lose my health or strength or mental balance and yet still be me. These cultural technologies constitute a whole way of understanding ourselves, as objects to be analysed and manipulated. Philosophy is different; we do not work on ourselves, so much as we embody a different state.
What do I mean? In its primary form, philosophy does not work on a part of my being, rather it is the enactment of my self, of my essential being. I enact my self or being as a whole. Philosophy is the movement of the mind and the heart. Sure, as with a cultural technology, that movement is toward a focus on some thing, but what matters most in philosophy is the movement itself. To do philosophy is to to turn my mind and heart, my intellect and will, my consciousness, in a certain direction and according to a certain quality (virtue). Philosophy is the act of being in a certain way.
Philosophy is the enactment of a virtuous mode of being, rather than me doing something to something. It is an act of the whole conscious self, the whole self as active consciousness. It is like a person who is sleepy and who willfully becomes more awake. They could splash water on their face to wake up, and that is like a cultural technology, but instead they simply do this weird thing where they simply become willfulness-to-wakefulness, where they become the exercise of awakeness. The nature of language makes this difficult to describe, for it works with subjects and objects: "I splash water on my face" appears to have the same form as "I willfully make myself more awake," but while both sound like the act of doing something to something, a composition of multiple actions and things, the latter is rather the simple profound act of becoming and being something. It is like breathing more deeply: philosophy is the act of being the greater fullness of our being. This means of course that to do philosophy is transformational. A cultural technology might or might not transform us: it might be nothing more than the production of information and the attempt at a manipulation. Philosophy is inherently transformational precisely because it is the act of doing and being the things: looking with greater justice is being more just, and so on. Of course we can do that for only a moment, and then return to our usual shittier way, but to do philosophy ongoingly, is to do a different way of being ongoingly. In time it is to become naturally more like this better way of being. If we make a habit of philosophy, we make a habit of an improved way of being.
Yes, this is a very specific concept of philosophy, but it is one which goes to the heart of what Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were doing, and it is they who showed me what philosophy is, it is their philosophy that I fell in love with. When Socrates stopped somebody on the road and drew them into conversation, he was inviting them to do such philosophy. Plato's stories of Socrates capture these conversations, usually with a focus on a certain value / vritue. "You claim you are pursuing justice in taking your neighbour to court, but tell me, what is justice? What are its false forms? How can we distinguish true from false justice? What is a just man? How do they live? How do we recognise them? Do your actions embody that? This analytical conversation was important in itself, it was philosophy as a cultural technology of reason and analysis, but it struck people so much because it was at the same time an invitation and challenge to be more, to do better--to step into a just vision and mode of being. The challenge was rightly perceived as a threat to those citizens of Athens who wanted to benefit from the appearance of virtue, without making the sacrifices necessary to embody its reality, and so they put Socrates on trial ane executed him.
Socrates' conversation was the outward from of an inward act, a turning of the direction and energy of one's life. A philosophical conversation today can have this same form when it is about a personal malady. You are chronically angry, and when we examine this, we see that part of that involves your general belief that people, and life itself, are unjust. But what if you are in some way mistaken about the nature of justice? Or the nature of other people, and of life? Or about the nature of the particular things which you believe embody justice or injustice? And these are confusions you hold in general, and on a daily basis as you interact with others, both strangers and loved ones. In that case you may be unjustifiably angry, and this mistake might be ruining your character as well as your experience of life and harming others. Let us examine these things, therefore, so that you grow beyond unjust beliefs and their distorted perceptions, so that you can let go of unjust forms of anger, so that you become a more just person for your own sake and for others', and so that you can become happier in general. The work of philosophical reflection is a work of reflection, of analysis, but as I said that is the outward form--which is of course nonetheless important--which is ultimately an inward work of being. If you were to stop merely at the analysis of the topic, you would be engageing merely in a cultural technology. You might do something different based on the information we have gleaned, but you might not, and either way you might not become changed. But if you really open your mind and heart in this conversation, being fully present and putting your self on the line, then you are opening the energy of your life to what is seen in the discussion. You are encountering truth and goodness. You are encountering them because you are doing them: looking with a spirit of truth, looking through the embodied lens of goodness.
In philosophy we are seeking to expose ourselves to truth, and to goodness, as lucidly, as deeply, as penetratingly as possible. That involves an enounter with reality beyond us, but it is also the enactment of the qualities within us. In both cases, we become more those things, we actualise those potential qualities. Accordingly, we are also more nourished. Here is the answer to nihlism, one which cannot be proven by some extrinsic argument, but which can be experienced.
Does all of this not sound like psychotherapy, in the sense of what we would hope for from psychotherapy? Is it not a more profound form of what psychotherapy (in part--perhaps in large part) seeks to achieve? In some ways Socrates was an extrovert, but if we continue the above dialogue in today's more phenomenological mode and so add reflection on the inner life, we might extend the analysis of anger. Through such reflective digging we might come to see that your sense of injustice is partly grounded in fear: for example a fear that you are more weak than in fact you are, which makes you feel in greater danger from all these "bad people everywhere." No wonder you are aggressively hyper-vigilant, and constantly in conflict. We might keep exploring at this level, and notice that you respond to your fear, in general, through a habit of cowardly avoidance--you could face it, but you choose often to run away. We might notice that this bad habit sets up a bifurcated experience--either fear, or aggression--and so it tends to generate resentment as much as fear. In this analysis we might conclude that you need to cultivate courage in place of cowardice, if you are to be the stronger, better, happier person you hopefully want to be. Perhaps in this context we see also that your fear and resentment is bound up in a lack of what Aristotle called "proper pride," and that you need to work on that too: you need to cultivate the virtue of justice toward yourself! I am riffing here, for these things can go in many directions--people are like plants, like creepers.
In the above example, you do not have a psychological problem in any clinical sense, rather you have a philosophical problem, or at least a problem which is likely best addressed through philosophy. And yet the default approach in our society is to assume that the above anger is foremost a psychological phenomenon, reducible to a psychological lens, diagnosis, and treatment. Psychological reductivism, or psychologism, is not only a categorical mistake, but tragically it has made us much more superficial, objectifying, alienated, passive, narcissistic, and nihilistic. Of course this leads in turn to a litany of further problems, which we willfully and blindly persist in framing also as psychological problems. The cure cultivates the disease. Fortunately, some of the more insightful psychotherapists readily point out that the issues people bring to therapy are, for the most part, not strictly psychological problems. Rather, they are struggles with meaning and value, and questions of practical wisdom. Depression is often not a biological or even psychological problem, not at root, even if of course it includes effects at those levels and more. Rather, much depression is--as one example--a state of despair, aroused by a lack of meaning or purpose as embodied in some form (I am lonely, or newly seperated, I am unemployed, or newly retired, et cetera). Anxiety is often fear, which often points to a need for some form of greater clarity or wisdom or courage or acceptance or meaning in how we live and in how we face life's challenges. Anger is often outrage at perceived injustice, or desperation from feeling trapped, or a willful attempt to energise ourselves out of the quicksand of depression. Grief and bereavement is the experience of the loss of a loved one--one who matters, who means something--and of related problems such as a confusion about how to make sense of the world now, or guilt because we were never fully what we could have been for them. Likewise, our various desires in life: they are not psychological phenomena, at least not in their root and essence, rather they are values embodied in concrete form: I want a good relationship, a secure or a meaningful job, or genuine friendship, or some happiness. Values are real. Modernity has claimed to do away with them, but it achieves that only as an ideology, but in actuality. Modernity insists that what is real or true can only be determined by the tools of science or reason, which is the ideologies of scientism and rationalism, but again that Faustian delusion is simply false: there are many ways of knowing, determined by the nature of the thing seeking to be known. The truth of the love that my partner and I share is not to be tested by science, but by other means. The reality of value is more akin to the reality of pain and love; it is not an empirical hypothesis to be tested or rejected according to the standards of scientific empirical analysis. A scientist who insists otherwise is no longer doing science, they have become a confused and lazy ideologue
I fell in love with this philosophy. I decided to study it formally. So I made my way into The University of Melbourne, where in time I taught philosophy--both there and elsewhere.
In the subsequent years I focused my studies on certain philosophers. Most of all, that included Socrates and Plato, with their profound vision of what life is, and of what our lives can become, when we orient ourselves to the highest values or possibilities of our humanity, captured in concepts such as Tuth, Goodness, Beauty, Justice, and so on. Also their student Aristotle, with his deep but also common-sense exploration of what virtue and character are. Arsitotle explored how virtue and morality and any desire for what is genuinely good is precisely that: rooted in desire, and discernible in that way rather than based on hypothesis, science, religion, or metaphysics, even though it can engage deeply with those disciplines. In this context, Aristotle was able to develop a descriptive schema of how we cultivate virtue and character, and he was able to map how this, more than anything else, leads to the strength, the meaning, the goodness, the happiness, and the flourishing which we long for. The technical name of this today is "virtue ethics." These three philosophers set in train an explosion of different schools of philosophy during the following two millennia, from Stoicism, to Neoplatonism, to the medieval Muslim and Christian philosophers who synthesised these traditions, and into modern philosophy. I spent time exploring all of these, and have continued to do so ever since.
My interest in the above philosophies could be called a preference for the pre-modern, in contrast with modernity. Philosophy as the humble attempt to understand a reality that is in some important sense always opaque, but in being so, also surprisingly rich, rewarding the effort of attention, especially when that is an expression of desire in the sense of the virtues and love. Of course, we cannot go backwards, only forwards, and besides we must not forget what lessons the virtues of modernity have taught us--if I emphasise modernity's serious flaws, do not assume that I have forgotten that it arose for very good reasons, and has given us much that we prize in life. Hence, we might also call my philosophical temperament post-modern, but that overly vague term needs qualification. I consider much of "post" modernity to be merely late-stage modernity: the phase when reductive reason throws its acid even on itself. The French tendency to blend philosophy with celebrity, and the brattishness of too many priviledged university students, has made a mindless fashion out of this reductive, relativistic, caustic movement, beginning in the universities and now permeating in the broader culture. But the reduction of everything to power or social constructs is merely a further blind, arrogant fabrication by the Faustian intellect. Accordingly, it merely breeds more of modernity's nihilism, though now in a relativist form. Other "post-modern" thinkers, however, live up to the best of their name: they reach beyond Faustian modernity including its recent, late stage, moving forward to something better: to awe and wonder at a world beyond our minds, which we rightly seek to approach with our intellect, but in a mode that is rightly and wisely more humble, and more in concert with our hearts and hands and embodiment and community and difference. We are currently in the early formenting phase of whatever this is which is coming next, and there are various names suggested, each expressing a certain ideological direction. For my part, a fruitful beginning of what is next cannot be developed simply out of a critical analysis of the narrow vision of what the moderns thought, given their tendencies to distort older, richer ideas, and given what can be seen when one's view is not modernity-centric and leads back much further, to the far greater riches of classical and medieval philosophy.
Returning to the theme of the philosophers whom I studied most during my time at the university, among 20th century philosophers I found much value in Ludwig Wittgenstein, who somewhat transformed my understanding of the method and point of philosophy, even if I am also critical of his work. Likewise Martin Heidegger and the various existentialists and phenomenologists, for example Albert Camus whose writings (e.g. Summer in Algiers) captured something of the sensibility I experienced as a child in the Mallee. I was above all influenced by the modern platonists including Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, and (the Australians) Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner. Philosophy is located in the humanities, and for good reason. At the university I took advantage also of the opportunity to become more widely and deeply educated across the classics, history, literature, art, music, as well as law and science. I went so far as to seek out work as a note-taker for students with disabilities, which meant that for a long time it was my job to attend lectures across the humanities and to take careful notes, which was a whole second education. I view the study of the humanities as a joyful exploration of life, but also as the pursuit of wisdom: of the bigger picture. I see it as integral to doing philosophy. The other great opportunity afforded by the university, which should not be underestimated, was the occassion it afforded to engage in conversation with some incredibly well-educated, intelligent, and thoughtful people. Hence I spent as much time at the university's cafes as I did in its libraries and lecture halls, and that time was very well spent.
One fortuitous area of interest which increasingly gripped me late in my under-graduate and then into my graduate years, was the relationship between philosophy, the psychological, and psychotherapy. I made the point above that philosophy and psychotherapy are quite different. Psychotherapy is a cultural technology which focuses on, analyses and works, on a part of us--usually a psychological part. I said that philosophy is instead the enactment of our essential being, of our powers as consciousness, a turning of the whole of our being. At the same time philosophy is in many ways analogous to psychotherapy. In describing his method, Freud wrote that "He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." My training in philosophy led me to see the difference between what a person says, for example that nihilistic dogma of modernity and of the Faustian intellect, that everything is nothing but an intellectual construct, compared to how that person feels and acts in life, the worldview and experience of reality which is expressed when they are not making the thoughtless "philosophical" statements which they imagine constitute today's insight. People's living often contradict their reflective statements, and people can learn much about themselves and reality if they are prepared to explore that. Importantly, they might discover much richer, more meaningful, and more wonderful, dimensions to themselves and reality. This is the work of making the implicit explicit. Our lives are full of important implications which can teach us, and sometimes transform our experience and way of being. I began to conceive of philosophy as doing this work, a kind of analogue to psychotherapy, and I focused on developing this way of doing philosophy. It was, for example, the substance of my masters thesis.
As I developed this analogically psychotherapeutic conception of philosophy. I began to see that there is a potential mutually complementary relationship between philosophy and psychotherapy, that may have very practical consequences. To do philosophy as I have described it is to do the main work of life, at least when it comes to life as enacted through reflection (which of course is not the whole of life). Psychotherapeutic reflection and growth is secondary to that, because its form is technocratic (a cultural technology), and its lens and focus much more narrow: psychology. At the same time, I came to see that a person might practice both these activities, without reducing one to the other, but rather by nesting psychotherapy inside philosophy: as an integrative way of doing both. Such an activity would be a composition of two different things in a mutually beneficial relationship; a marriage of two different individuals, if you like. Like a healthy modern marriage, the two individuals remain distinct beings, but their relationships forms a third thing: an us, a we, which is more than the mere collection of two different entitities.
Here is what I mean when I say that psychotherapy could be nested inside philosophy, or perhaps rather, married to philosophy, to create a third activity which integrates both different disciplines without reducing one to the other. I said that philosophy is the effort to become more fully conscious, more fully alive in our being, in our power and potential for the kind of being and life that we are, for all that is good. The problem we encounter in daily life, however, is our failure to rise to such consciousness, to such ways of being. Why does this happen? For many important reasons. One of them regards the mechanisms of our psychology. A large part of our psychology is defensive. Life is dangerous, and in all sorts of ways. The function of our psychology is in part to navigate those dangers well, but that includes the function of protecting us from that danger. Such protection can be quite primitive, fantastical: our defensive psychology (our "defense mechanisms") shape what we perceive, and how we feel, to protect us at the felt level. We distort things, we blind or delude ourselves. Any emotion which is a threat to the psyche, our defenses might repress. Any person who is a threat, may be devalued, whether outwardly or in our imagination. Any threatening reality may be ignored and forgotten. Any personal fault will be rationalised. Psychotherapists have listed about 30 such psychological "defense mechanisms," and different people favour different defenses and combinations of them. The trouble is that these defenses often diminish us, for example by making us more blind and selfish. They turn us into blind animals of fight, flight and freeze, in ways which can ongoingly distort our mind, heart, and life. I am scared, and defend myself through a habit of anger, and in time I become an arsehole. But I cannot see that, I think I am in the right, and the fault and failure to understand lies with others. Or I disappear into a fog, like a friend's mother who "forgot" that their partner sexually abused the daughter, my friend. These problems are the daily stuff of our lives. We are all a little insane, blind, and unjust, as a consequence of our defenses. Psychotherapy works at recognising our psychological defenses and freeing us from their damaging effects. The work of psychotherapy, says Irvin Yalom, is that of clearing away obstacles, so that we become free to create our desired life. We clear away our psychological obstacles in order to live our true life: the life of lucid consciousness which I have been describing and calling the work of philosophy. Here is the significant, practical complementarity relationship between philosophy and psychotherapy. Psychology deals with the blind, instinctual dimensions of our minds, enlightening us about them, and somewhat freeing us from the cage or the fog that is them, so that we are more free and able to step foward in our terms of our better selves, which is the work of philosophy.
I was doing very well academically. I was a philosopher "in my bones." It was clear that this would be my work's life. Yet, I could not see myself in an academic or scholarly career, for I had Socratic or Platonic vision of philosophy. I wanted to do such philosophy with people from all walks of life, to engage them in conversation that would help them with their personal concerns and with their pursuit of the good. In the context of acadmic philosophy, it would be suggested that I should become a psychotherapist instead of a philosopher, but that would not do, for that is not philosophy. I saw clearly the limitations of psychotherapy, versus the deeper power of philosophy which regard to the real nature of people's concerns, and the answers needed to them. I was unsure of how to proceed, especially in a world where one needs to pay the rent. Then I came across the idea of philosophical counselling. In that, I recognised exactly what I had been seeking.
The internet was then not what it is now. Most of the writing on philosophical counselling was contained in just a few books. When I read those books I was quite disappointed. Various of the writers treated philosophical ideas as supermarket items, to be judged by how a superficial encounter with them makes you feel. "You are depressed? Here is what Nietzsche said about despair, and what Kierkegaard said about it. Choose whichever notion appeals and make that your life philosphy." That is not philosophy. Philosophy involves a determined search for truth, rather than a reduction of ideas to their instrumental value, to their psychological effect. Truth is "a need of the soul." People become distorted and even corrupted, without a proper relationship with the spirit of truth. In other books I encountered the assumption that the goal of philosophical counselling was to help people become more rational, to help them apply logic to their living. That was better, it was philosophy, but it is essentially academic philosophy, or the narrowness of modernity. And as I said above when I quoted G. K. Chesterton, in Socratic philosophy reason is one virtue among others, various of which are its equal in importance with respect to sanity, wisdom, and a good life. Finally, there was a tendency in this literature to naively malign and dismiss mainstream psychological therapy. The point seemed to be that philosophical counselling is good, because psychological therapy is rubbish. Of course, I found some better writing, for example the work of Ran Lahav, but in general the ideas were so bad--the philosophy was so bad!--that I realised I would have to develop my own approach to philosophical counselling. Fortunately I had a more profound sense of philosophy on which to draw.
I began forming a vision of what philosophical counselling might be, and developing a practical plan for how to enact it. I saw the great value of combining philosophy and psychotherapy, not in the sense of collapsing one into the other, but of maintaining their distinction while blending them in practice. I decided I would (1) study counselling to masters level. I would (2) work as a mainstream therapist within counselling organisations. Then, in time, I would (3) practice purely as a philosophical counsellor in private practice.
These days I am on the other side of that plan: I am a masters-qualified counsellor and psychotherapist, with over a decade of experience working in mainstream organisations as a mainstream therapist, and now work solely in private practice purely as a philosophical counsellor.
Whenever I speak of "psychology" I do not mean "clinical psychology," which is more narrow and specific: psychology reduced to a medical lens. Decades of mental health marketing has taught us to reduce our lives to a psychological lens, and our psychology to a clinical lens, so people get confused about these distinctions. I did not study the profession known as Psychology, rather I studied the professions of Counselling and Psychotherapy. I am not a clinical professional, but a personal growth professional. I am trained in the humanistic and the existential and the depth psychotherapies, which are radically different to clinical therapy. As a therapist I do not help people with psychological illnesses or disorders, but with the challenges of living, especially with respect to their psychological dimensions. That is, both clinical therapists and therapists like myself often work with the same concerns, but we see them in very different ways. There are of course problems which are best seen as clinical, medical disorders, but even the best clinical research itself recognises that those are in the minority, and that many of these struggles are more natural reactions to life, for example depression is mostly "reactive." Psychotherapy is a century long discipline of looking at our psychological life and trying to make sense of it, hypothetically, descriptively, phenomenologically, experientially, through the insights of tradition and literature, and yes, through scientific research. It is a more wholistic lens. Over that century, a wealth of insight and practice has built up, and that is the substance of a therapist's training. Ultimately, one learns the most through years of actually doing therapy, week in and week out. The training then pales in comparison. Importantly, the justification for psychotherapy does not lie in how well it enacts the approved clinical theory, but rather in how well it works for individual human beings. Psychotherapy stands or falls on the quality of its practice and outcomes, as experienced by individual clients. There are no rebates to keep bad therapy going, rather the client pays out of pocket, and if the therapy is poor then they stop coming. My experience is that people stay.
I gained my first counselling job through the recommendation of one of my trainers who suggested I had quite a talent for the discipline. Indeed, I did fall in love with the riches of therapy. And so, across fifteen years, I worked in counselling organisations which included: a suicide prevention service focused both on crisis intervention (I spent a lot of time talking people back from bridges); a service focused on rural and isolated men and their relationships (I piloted what may be the first rural video counselling service in the country); an Australian Defense Force, and a combat veteran's, counselling service; a bereavement-after-suicide service; and workplace counselling (EAP) providing mainstream counselling to employees, and interpersonal and motivational coaching to managers. Within these services I worked also with the wide variety of other issues which come up in any counselling. I worked alongside other counsellors but also psychologists and clinical social workers, and so learned much about their tools and ways of thinking. Other work included employment in designing and providing counsellor training. Twice I was headhunted and offered an academic position at large counselling educational institutions in the country, but I declined in favour of my continued focus on the practice of counselling (plus, I was still teaching philosophy for some of this time).
During those years I was a voracious learner well beyond my formal studies, taking deep dives into many mainstream approaches to counselling and psychotherapy and applying them in my work, and entering such therapies as a client to experience them from the inside. These included the humanistic approaches such as Carl Roger's person-centred therapy, the various psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapies, beginning with Freud, and various existential therapies including those of Emmy van Deurzen, Irvin Yalom, and Viktor Frankl.
Carl Rogers was the foundational therapist of my formal training. In essence, his person-centred therapy is healing and growth through a therapeutic relationship of radical acceptance and truth-speaking. I am reminded of the words of the philosopher Simone Weil: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." Person-centred therapy is the practice of such attention, without judgement, in which a person is invited to become much more self-aware, more present to themselves, and ideally more integrated by means of that. In such therapy we try to think, feel, and speak as truthfully as possible. That may sound deceptively simple, but we spend much of our lives hiding from ourselves and each other, and such therapy is therefore liberating and transformative. Such therapy is obviously an excellent framework for the practice of philosophical counselling, and my philosophical counselling is essentially the combination of this form of therapy with the work of philosophy as described above and on the previous page and above.
The psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy which began with Freud created a Coperican revolution in our ability to understand ourselves psychologically. Psychoanalysis is the study of the implicit, of that which we do, but which we do not see. These are the patterns that make our lives, including our unhappy repetitions. This includes our defenses which I spoke of above, which twist and distort who we are and how our lives go. Psychodynamic therapy is incredibly because it helps us to see these things and to work on them. It liberates us to make choices about how we want to be, and guides us in habituating those new patterns. Of course, there are problems with psychoanalysis, and I am certainly alive to them in theory, as well as the ways they manifest among psychoanalysts. My approach to this tradition is influenced by Wittgenstein who saw it as less of a science, and more a set of insightful new metaphors which enable the very real and effective work just described. Hence, I favour the title psychodynamic therapy over psychoanalytic therapy.
Existential therapy is the title for a range of therapies, including the different approaches of Emmy van Deurzen, Irvin Yalom, and Viktor Frankl. Existential therapy is often defined as a philosophical approach to counselling and psychotherapy. This makes it highly relevant to the work I do, and it is the psychotherapeutic approach to which I have given most attention. At the same time, in this approach the philosophical aspect is secondary to the psychological, which makes it different to philosophical counselling. You might notice the URL of this website. For a decade I spent half the week counselling in organisations, and half a week in private practice honing my ability to draw on all these psychotherapies, with an explicit focus on existential therapy.
Existential therapy draws especially on existential philosophy, and the associated way of doing philosophy called phenomenology. Such philosophy and therapy helps us to better understand our human condition. Existential analysis reveals how many of our problems are not disorders, so to speak, but reactions to reality, to our condition as human existents. This is a surprise to many people, who thought there was something wrong particularly with them, and it enables a whole different way of understanding themselves and of approaching their problems. Phenomenological analysis guides people to more deeply understand their subjective experience and way of being. Phenomenology was an alternative to a psycho-analysis of one's psyche, and it proved so effective that it is now the core method of analysis within any psychotherapy (any humanistic, existential, or depth therapy).
There is a stoic element to much of existentialism, though it is shaped by other modern movements such as romanticism, such that existentialism combines that stoicism with a strong aesthetic aliveness and commitment to passion. One faces the hardness of life with courage and determination, while drinking in the beauty of the world. I think here of Albert Camus' essays in the book Summer in Algiers. Emmy van Deurzen articulates this romantic-stoic-existentialism well: life is tough, and her form of existential therapy helps people to look at how life works, while becoming also more capable of standing up to its challenges, while creating the happiness of which we are capable despite the apparent meaninglessness of life. If we think that van Deurzen offers toughness and substance, we should look to another major existential therapist and creator of one of its approaches: Viktor Frankl, Frankl honed his existential therapeutic insights during his years of terrible suffering as a Jewish prisoner in the Nazi death camps. The difference with Frankl is quite interesting. Existential philosophy assumes that modernity is correct, that life is mechanical and meaningless, but it acknowledges our need for meaning, and proposes Nietzsche's answer: a self-created, willful assertion of meaning. The heroic rebel, the self-made. This philosophy produces some wonderful insights, and a great deal of nonsense. It is the philosophy of an angry 19 year old male in love with their intellect. Frankl, suffering in that extreme laboratory of the human spirit, lacked the luxury to swallow such ideologies or to indulge in such romanticism and faux-heroism. In his writing we find a more sobre account of the mysterious reality of meaning and value, and the difference which such recognition and alignment makes. Frankl's notion of meaning is creative, certainly, but it is based on looking hard at what is there in reality, which is to say at the meaning and value to be discovered, and working creatively with that. This is a much truer picture, more humble, and more wonderful. The philosophers I have focused throughout my life--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and modern people like Iris Murdoch and Raimond Gaita--provide the tools to do what Frankl was trying to do, to say and to show what he was trying to say and show. We found insight and truth in many places, and then we sew things together. I have learned a great deal from van Deurzen, and from Frankl. I have learned much also from Irvin Yalom, whose approach is less coherent than it may seem, but which displays some of the finer aspects of what a good therapist does.
In traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics we speak of how the activity of being is both receptive and active. Philosophical counselling is philosophy as a way of seeing and understanding life, and of being transformed by that. It is receptive. But it is also active: the striving to step into our better potential, the virtues or myriad qualities of our being which make us stronger, more good, more purposeful, more happy, and which enable flourishing. The form of a human being involves many activities which are definitive of its nature, the highest of which is consciousness. However, we are a composition of elements, and that includes our psychology, which can benefit our consciousness or hinder it. Hence the need for psychological psychotherapy. As a philosophical counsellor I am a philosopher first and foremost, but I draw also on various psychotherapies to provide a richer form of help. I help you to see life clearly, to apprehend its meaning and value, and to be nourished and changed by that, and to put your best foot forward, to respond to your challenges, both inner and outer, and to make life better at both levels. And I help you to work on the psychological correlates of that. Of course, my work is tailored to the individual. With some clients it is completely philosophical, with some it is 80% psychotherapeutic, while with many it is a mix, with some sessions being largely philosophical while others are psychotherapeutic, or every session being a blend.
That is enough about me. In 2020 I left my office in Carlton, Melbourne, and began working purely from home by phone and video. When it comes to seeing clients, I work part-time, for my profession is fully that of a philosopher--a philosophical counsellor--and so I live out a passion and commitment to full-time work on the continuous development of myself philosophically, through reading and writing. I live in central Victoria, in an old home by the forest. Beyond my work, I am a jazz drummer, a bush walker, and I restore and ride vintage motorcycles.
In another piece of writing I begin with the following paragraph, which I will repeat here:
I grew up in the Mallee--a rural childhood in the harsh but evocative landscape of north-western Victoria. I come from a family of people who left school early and did physical work. In the heat and dust of that environment it was easy to feel the cruelty of life, but in the silence of that heat there was a sense also of something else. My memories as a young child include staring often at the horizon, which fades and shimmers in that place, and which feels like an evocation. So too, the magnitude of the sky. Even the falling-down timber houses and rusting farm equipment seemed to glow with a hint of 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 vision, just out of focus, of being surrounded by other lives, births, deaths, loves, and pains, folded up in the unconscious memory of place. Further 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, but that it is.
Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. Of course I would come to work with many people for whom it begins in suffering. Philosophy begins in many ways, but it tends to arise out of an experience, and to be driven by that experience. That is how it is for me: the drive to philosophy is rooted in the above kinds of experience. Of course it was not until much later that I discovered philosophy as a formal tradition. I dropped out of high-school early and left home at 17. In part that was to escape an abusive step-father in a fibro house in a tiny dusty town. But it was equally to pursue a passion: I was a musician, and for a couple of years made a living out of that in Melbourne. Then a religious conversation, which lasted a number of years, drew me to Italy where I entered a monastery. That is a bigger story which I will tell another time. A year later I found myself back in Melbourne, working in a factory, when I wandered into a bookstore and walked out with a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, the classic work of Stoic philosophy. I had discovered philosophy and its power for helping us deal with life. This form of philosophy that I found among the ancients was however different to what I would later encounter as academic philosophy, and the difference was important in terms of how enlightening and transformative philosophy was to become for my personal life, and for the people whom I would later help as a philosophy, so I will explore the nature of philosophy before continuing with my story.
The word philosophy is a conjunction of two ancient Greek words: philos and sophia. Philos means love, and sophia means wisdom. Hence, philosophy is the love of wisdom. This means that philosophy is also the pursuit of wisdom. That is what you and I are doing when we engage in philosophical coversation about life. The presence of love in the definition of philosophy should not be skipped over, however. Philosophy is a form of love. Love is, of course, transforms the lover. Philosophy transforms the person who does it.
The archetype of the philosopher is Socrates, a craftsman who lived in Athens 2500 years ago. Socrates engaged people in conversation during their day to day life. His student Plato wrote a series of dialogues which portray those conversations. Socrates' point was to invite people to examine their lives, which is to say, to pursue wisdom about their lives through such conversation. The function of such wisdom is to become a better person and to create a better life.
What is wisdom? We can say that it is truth, that it is a contemplative and practical lucidity about life. If we reflect a little deeper we will come to see that wisdom is the exercise of the virtues. A virtue can be defined as any good quality which makes us and our lives better, such as reason, courage, justice, compassion, love, creativity, fortitude, and many other good qualities / virtues. The virtues can be divided into two catgegories: the intellectual virtues, and the character virtues which is to say virtues of feeling and action. Many virtues fall into both categories but accordingly differ in nature: consider intellectual courage, and how that differs from courage of action, and how both differ from the emotional courage you exercise in psychotherapy when it comes to facing a fear.
There is a unity to the virtues, in the sense that they define each other. For example, we often think of anger as a vice, for it can be blind and destructive. But anger that is justified, appropriate, proportionate, is a virtue, and an important one. Indeed, the lack of such anger can be a vice, the kind of vice that enables other people to walk all over you. The question is: is the anger just, reasonable, compassionate, and so on in this context: it is a question both of avoiding anger's excess (rage) and anger's deficiency (cowardice), which can be understood as the presence of the relevant other virtues which temper and attune the anger to the context. I could go on with other examples, for example pride is often a vice--arrogance--but a lack of proper pride is also a vice--we might call it low self-esteem--and much work in therapy involves helping people to respect and honour themselves appropriately: to develop the virtue of proper pride. To speak of virtuous anger, is to speak of wise anger, anger tempered by wisdom. The best way to understand it is to think of a person who is wise in this respect, whose way of being angry expresses that wisdom.
Why do we care about, and so pursue, wisdom? This is also to ask, why do we exercise and pursue the virtues? Because of love. Some things need justification by other things, and some things do not: they are like bedrock. This is how it is with various of the things we love: that's just how it is, indeed it is definitive of who and how and what we are. We are creatures who love truth, and goodness, and all the forms of these goods which they unfold into, such as--to quote my list of virtuous qualities above--reason, courage, justice, compassion, creativity, fortitude, and so forth, as well as the myriad concrete goods we find in place and people and activity and so on. We love life when it embodies these goods. And we love others who embody these goods. We love ourselves when we embody these goods. Such love also divides into many forms, from desire, to admiration, to empathy and compassion, to friendship, to romantic love, to parental love, and so forth. Philosophy is the love of goodness, which is why it is the love and pursuit of wisdom which is the path to and embodiment of the good.
I learned about Socrates through the writings of his student, Plato. Plato in his turn went on to develop a profound vision of what life is--and can become--when we focus our mind and will on an unconditional commitment to truth, goodness, justice, beauty, and so forth. Raphael's painting The School of Athens shows Plato pointing upward, to a life oriented by such higher values. Beside him stands his student Aristotle, pointing down at the material details. Aristotle explored what virtue and character are, and how we cultivate them, and how they lead to greater strength, and meaning, and happiness, and flourishing. He created a framework for cultivating those qualities and outcomes in our own lives. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, each in their different ways according to their very different temperaments, saw the unity between (1) the pursuit of wisdom as the love and so cultivation of truth and goodness and (2) the various consequences which also follow from that cultivation: an increase of inner strength, of meaning, of happiness, and of flourising in life. Character is destiny, as a modern writer put it. Of course, these philosophers also saw how deeply vulnerable we are to malevolence and misfortune, but they recognised the important distinction which became the basis of Stoicism: there are things which are out of our control, and that calls for a certain kind of work, and there are things which are in our control, and that calls for a whole other set of virtues and efforts.
Philosophy as I have described it is quite different to what I would encounter in the universities. For the latter is less the love of wisdom, and more the love of theory, a technology of theory and reason. Academic philosophy is an expression of modernity, that ideology of the last few centuries whose vision reduces life to the mechanical. Modernity is reductive in that way because it is an expression of the vice of Narcissus: the human intellect has a tendency to fall in love with itself. We fall in love with our intellects, and so with their creations. Hence we slowly lose sight of reality and instead take our intellectual fabrications to be the most real. There is no reality out there to come up against, rather there are only our constructs. "It is all a social construct" or "brain chemicals"--it is all no more than the constructs of the intellect, notions containable by the human intellect. This is "the Faustian intellect" to reference Goethe, or "the Luciferian intellect" to quote the atheist philosopher Iris Murdoch. By contrast, in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the intellect is the ability to see, and its vision is only as good as the other virtues which the person emodies. To see clearly requires not only reason, but equally and perhaps moreso love, humility, curiosity, passion, empathy, and so forth. The intellect is a lover, as Plato describes in The Symposium. The intellect is a thirst, an appetite for reality, for what is true, and for what is good.
Many people assume that philosophy is not for them, for example that they are not intelligent enough. I have tried to point out that while that may be true regarding academic philosophy, it is not true of Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian philosophy, at least with respect to their ethical core. Even intellectually disabled people are capable of such philosophy, assuming their disability is not too profound: that they can converse, reflect and learn. For philosophy is the reflective work of the head and of the heart, aimed not at outcompeting others with respect to the IQ, but rather aimed at seeing things more clearly according to your own capacities and for your own sake, to make life better for yourself and those around you. Philosophy starts with where you are, and guides you in applying your head and heart to get to a better place. Philosophy is a re-orientation of value and meaning that opens your eyes and which changes you. I think here of some of the best books of philosophy, in which relatively little reasoning goes on, but which embody a certain way of seeing, and which lead the reader by degrees into that different and better way of seeing.
What I am saying may become more clear if we distinguish philosophy from a cultural technology. By cultural technology I mean activities such as medicine, or personal training, or psychotherapy, or education, or apprenticeship and training, and so on. These are technologies because they objectify a thing and then apply techniques to analyse and manipulate it. For example, the doctor diagnoses my health, and then she and I apply technologies/techniques such as medicine, better eating, exercise, et cetera. Likewise the personal trainer diagnoses my muscle strength and then leads me in practices, and the psychotherapist analyses my psychological patterns and problems, and then leads me through psychological techniques to change them. Such cultural and therapeutic technologies involve a formula: here is the problem, here is its cause, here is the solution, and now we apply that. Notice that what is objectified and focused on is a part of me--my health, my muscle strength, my psychological patterns--which are elements or aspects of me but are not me as a whole. Notice also that these parts of me are, in a very important sense, not me. I can for example lose my health or strength or mental balance and yet still be me. These cultural technologies constitute a whole way of understanding ourselves, as objects to be analysed and manipulated. Philosophy is different; we do not work on ourselves, so much as we embody a different state.
What do I mean? In its primary form, philosophy does not work on a part of my being, rather it is the enactment of my self, of my essential being. I enact my self or being as a whole. Philosophy is the movement of the mind and the heart. Sure, as with a cultural technology, that movement is toward a focus on some thing, but what matters most in philosophy is the movement itself. To do philosophy is to to turn my mind and heart, my intellect and will, my consciousness, in a certain direction and according to a certain quality (virtue). Philosophy is the act of being in a certain way.
Philosophy is the enactment of a virtuous mode of being, rather than me doing something to something. It is an act of the whole conscious self, the whole self as active consciousness. It is like a person who is sleepy and who willfully becomes more awake. They could splash water on their face to wake up, and that is like a cultural technology, but instead they simply do this weird thing where they simply become willfulness-to-wakefulness, where they become the exercise of awakeness. The nature of language makes this difficult to describe, for it works with subjects and objects: "I splash water on my face" appears to have the same form as "I willfully make myself more awake," but while both sound like the act of doing something to something, a composition of multiple actions and things, the latter is rather the simple profound act of becoming and being something. It is like breathing more deeply: philosophy is the act of being the greater fullness of our being. This means of course that to do philosophy is transformational. A cultural technology might or might not transform us: it might be nothing more than the production of information and the attempt at a manipulation. Philosophy is inherently transformational precisely because it is the act of doing and being the things: looking with greater justice is being more just, and so on. Of course we can do that for only a moment, and then return to our usual shittier way, but to do philosophy ongoingly, is to do a different way of being ongoingly. In time it is to become naturally more like this better way of being. If we make a habit of philosophy, we make a habit of an improved way of being.
Yes, this is a very specific concept of philosophy, but it is one which goes to the heart of what Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were doing, and it is they who showed me what philosophy is, it is their philosophy that I fell in love with. When Socrates stopped somebody on the road and drew them into conversation, he was inviting them to do such philosophy. Plato's stories of Socrates capture these conversations, usually with a focus on a certain value / vritue. "You claim you are pursuing justice in taking your neighbour to court, but tell me, what is justice? What are its false forms? How can we distinguish true from false justice? What is a just man? How do they live? How do we recognise them? Do your actions embody that? This analytical conversation was important in itself, it was philosophy as a cultural technology of reason and analysis, but it struck people so much because it was at the same time an invitation and challenge to be more, to do better--to step into a just vision and mode of being. The challenge was rightly perceived as a threat to those citizens of Athens who wanted to benefit from the appearance of virtue, without making the sacrifices necessary to embody its reality, and so they put Socrates on trial ane executed him.
Socrates' conversation was the outward from of an inward act, a turning of the direction and energy of one's life. A philosophical conversation today can have this same form when it is about a personal malady. You are chronically angry, and when we examine this, we see that part of that involves your general belief that people, and life itself, are unjust. But what if you are in some way mistaken about the nature of justice? Or the nature of other people, and of life? Or about the nature of the particular things which you believe embody justice or injustice? And these are confusions you hold in general, and on a daily basis as you interact with others, both strangers and loved ones. In that case you may be unjustifiably angry, and this mistake might be ruining your character as well as your experience of life and harming others. Let us examine these things, therefore, so that you grow beyond unjust beliefs and their distorted perceptions, so that you can let go of unjust forms of anger, so that you become a more just person for your own sake and for others', and so that you can become happier in general. The work of philosophical reflection is a work of reflection, of analysis, but as I said that is the outward form--which is of course nonetheless important--which is ultimately an inward work of being. If you were to stop merely at the analysis of the topic, you would be engageing merely in a cultural technology. You might do something different based on the information we have gleaned, but you might not, and either way you might not become changed. But if you really open your mind and heart in this conversation, being fully present and putting your self on the line, then you are opening the energy of your life to what is seen in the discussion. You are encountering truth and goodness. You are encountering them because you are doing them: looking with a spirit of truth, looking through the embodied lens of goodness.
In philosophy we are seeking to expose ourselves to truth, and to goodness, as lucidly, as deeply, as penetratingly as possible. That involves an enounter with reality beyond us, but it is also the enactment of the qualities within us. In both cases, we become more those things, we actualise those potential qualities. Accordingly, we are also more nourished. Here is the answer to nihlism, one which cannot be proven by some extrinsic argument, but which can be experienced.
Does all of this not sound like psychotherapy, in the sense of what we would hope for from psychotherapy? Is it not a more profound form of what psychotherapy (in part--perhaps in large part) seeks to achieve? In some ways Socrates was an extrovert, but if we continue the above dialogue in today's more phenomenological mode and so add reflection on the inner life, we might extend the analysis of anger. Through such reflective digging we might come to see that your sense of injustice is partly grounded in fear: for example a fear that you are more weak than in fact you are, which makes you feel in greater danger from all these "bad people everywhere." No wonder you are aggressively hyper-vigilant, and constantly in conflict. We might keep exploring at this level, and notice that you respond to your fear, in general, through a habit of cowardly avoidance--you could face it, but you choose often to run away. We might notice that this bad habit sets up a bifurcated experience--either fear, or aggression--and so it tends to generate resentment as much as fear. In this analysis we might conclude that you need to cultivate courage in place of cowardice, if you are to be the stronger, better, happier person you hopefully want to be. Perhaps in this context we see also that your fear and resentment is bound up in a lack of what Aristotle called "proper pride," and that you need to work on that too: you need to cultivate the virtue of justice toward yourself! I am riffing here, for these things can go in many directions--people are like plants, like creepers.
In the above example, you do not have a psychological problem in any clinical sense, rather you have a philosophical problem, or at least a problem which is likely best addressed through philosophy. And yet the default approach in our society is to assume that the above anger is foremost a psychological phenomenon, reducible to a psychological lens, diagnosis, and treatment. Psychological reductivism, or psychologism, is not only a categorical mistake, but tragically it has made us much more superficial, objectifying, alienated, passive, narcissistic, and nihilistic. Of course this leads in turn to a litany of further problems, which we willfully and blindly persist in framing also as psychological problems. The cure cultivates the disease. Fortunately, some of the more insightful psychotherapists readily point out that the issues people bring to therapy are, for the most part, not strictly psychological problems. Rather, they are struggles with meaning and value, and questions of practical wisdom. Depression is often not a biological or even psychological problem, not at root, even if of course it includes effects at those levels and more. Rather, much depression is--as one example--a state of despair, aroused by a lack of meaning or purpose as embodied in some form (I am lonely, or newly seperated, I am unemployed, or newly retired, et cetera). Anxiety is often fear, which often points to a need for some form of greater clarity or wisdom or courage or acceptance or meaning in how we live and in how we face life's challenges. Anger is often outrage at perceived injustice, or desperation from feeling trapped, or a willful attempt to energise ourselves out of the quicksand of depression. Grief and bereavement is the experience of the loss of a loved one--one who matters, who means something--and of related problems such as a confusion about how to make sense of the world now, or guilt because we were never fully what we could have been for them. Likewise, our various desires in life: they are not psychological phenomena, at least not in their root and essence, rather they are values embodied in concrete form: I want a good relationship, a secure or a meaningful job, or genuine friendship, or some happiness. Values are real. Modernity has claimed to do away with them, but it achieves that only as an ideology, but in actuality. Modernity insists that what is real or true can only be determined by the tools of science or reason, which is the ideologies of scientism and rationalism, but again that Faustian delusion is simply false: there are many ways of knowing, determined by the nature of the thing seeking to be known. The truth of the love that my partner and I share is not to be tested by science, but by other means. The reality of value is more akin to the reality of pain and love; it is not an empirical hypothesis to be tested or rejected according to the standards of scientific empirical analysis. A scientist who insists otherwise is no longer doing science, they have become a confused and lazy ideologue
I fell in love with this philosophy. I decided to study it formally. So I made my way into The University of Melbourne, where in time I taught philosophy--both there and elsewhere.
In the subsequent years I focused my studies on certain philosophers. Most of all, that included Socrates and Plato, with their profound vision of what life is, and of what our lives can become, when we orient ourselves to the highest values or possibilities of our humanity, captured in concepts such as Tuth, Goodness, Beauty, Justice, and so on. Also their student Aristotle, with his deep but also common-sense exploration of what virtue and character are. Arsitotle explored how virtue and morality and any desire for what is genuinely good is precisely that: rooted in desire, and discernible in that way rather than based on hypothesis, science, religion, or metaphysics, even though it can engage deeply with those disciplines. In this context, Aristotle was able to develop a descriptive schema of how we cultivate virtue and character, and he was able to map how this, more than anything else, leads to the strength, the meaning, the goodness, the happiness, and the flourishing which we long for. The technical name of this today is "virtue ethics." These three philosophers set in train an explosion of different schools of philosophy during the following two millennia, from Stoicism, to Neoplatonism, to the medieval Muslim and Christian philosophers who synthesised these traditions, and into modern philosophy. I spent time exploring all of these, and have continued to do so ever since.
My interest in the above philosophies could be called a preference for the pre-modern, in contrast with modernity. Philosophy as the humble attempt to understand a reality that is in some important sense always opaque, but in being so, also surprisingly rich, rewarding the effort of attention, especially when that is an expression of desire in the sense of the virtues and love. Of course, we cannot go backwards, only forwards, and besides we must not forget what lessons the virtues of modernity have taught us--if I emphasise modernity's serious flaws, do not assume that I have forgotten that it arose for very good reasons, and has given us much that we prize in life. Hence, we might also call my philosophical temperament post-modern, but that overly vague term needs qualification. I consider much of "post" modernity to be merely late-stage modernity: the phase when reductive reason throws its acid even on itself. The French tendency to blend philosophy with celebrity, and the brattishness of too many priviledged university students, has made a mindless fashion out of this reductive, relativistic, caustic movement, beginning in the universities and now permeating in the broader culture. But the reduction of everything to power or social constructs is merely a further blind, arrogant fabrication by the Faustian intellect. Accordingly, it merely breeds more of modernity's nihilism, though now in a relativist form. Other "post-modern" thinkers, however, live up to the best of their name: they reach beyond Faustian modernity including its recent, late stage, moving forward to something better: to awe and wonder at a world beyond our minds, which we rightly seek to approach with our intellect, but in a mode that is rightly and wisely more humble, and more in concert with our hearts and hands and embodiment and community and difference. We are currently in the early formenting phase of whatever this is which is coming next, and there are various names suggested, each expressing a certain ideological direction. For my part, a fruitful beginning of what is next cannot be developed simply out of a critical analysis of the narrow vision of what the moderns thought, given their tendencies to distort older, richer ideas, and given what can be seen when one's view is not modernity-centric and leads back much further, to the far greater riches of classical and medieval philosophy.
Returning to the theme of the philosophers whom I studied most during my time at the university, among 20th century philosophers I found much value in Ludwig Wittgenstein, who somewhat transformed my understanding of the method and point of philosophy, even if I am also critical of his work. Likewise Martin Heidegger and the various existentialists and phenomenologists, for example Albert Camus whose writings (e.g. Summer in Algiers) captured something of the sensibility I experienced as a child in the Mallee. I was above all influenced by the modern platonists including Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, and (the Australians) Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner. Philosophy is located in the humanities, and for good reason. At the university I took advantage also of the opportunity to become more widely and deeply educated across the classics, history, literature, art, music, as well as law and science. I went so far as to seek out work as a note-taker for students with disabilities, which meant that for a long time it was my job to attend lectures across the humanities and to take careful notes, which was a whole second education. I view the study of the humanities as a joyful exploration of life, but also as the pursuit of wisdom: of the bigger picture. I see it as integral to doing philosophy. The other great opportunity afforded by the university, which should not be underestimated, was the occassion it afforded to engage in conversation with some incredibly well-educated, intelligent, and thoughtful people. Hence I spent as much time at the university's cafes as I did in its libraries and lecture halls, and that time was very well spent.
One fortuitous area of interest which increasingly gripped me late in my under-graduate and then into my graduate years, was the relationship between philosophy, the psychological, and psychotherapy. I made the point above that philosophy and psychotherapy are quite different. Psychotherapy is a cultural technology which focuses on, analyses and works, on a part of us--usually a psychological part. I said that philosophy is instead the enactment of our essential being, of our powers as consciousness, a turning of the whole of our being. At the same time philosophy is in many ways analogous to psychotherapy. In describing his method, Freud wrote that "He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." My training in philosophy led me to see the difference between what a person says, for example that nihilistic dogma of modernity and of the Faustian intellect, that everything is nothing but an intellectual construct, compared to how that person feels and acts in life, the worldview and experience of reality which is expressed when they are not making the thoughtless "philosophical" statements which they imagine constitute today's insight. People's living often contradict their reflective statements, and people can learn much about themselves and reality if they are prepared to explore that. Importantly, they might discover much richer, more meaningful, and more wonderful, dimensions to themselves and reality. This is the work of making the implicit explicit. Our lives are full of important implications which can teach us, and sometimes transform our experience and way of being. I began to conceive of philosophy as doing this work, a kind of analogue to psychotherapy, and I focused on developing this way of doing philosophy. It was, for example, the substance of my masters thesis.
As I developed this analogically psychotherapeutic conception of philosophy. I began to see that there is a potential mutually complementary relationship between philosophy and psychotherapy, that may have very practical consequences. To do philosophy as I have described it is to do the main work of life, at least when it comes to life as enacted through reflection (which of course is not the whole of life). Psychotherapeutic reflection and growth is secondary to that, because its form is technocratic (a cultural technology), and its lens and focus much more narrow: psychology. At the same time, I came to see that a person might practice both these activities, without reducing one to the other, but rather by nesting psychotherapy inside philosophy: as an integrative way of doing both. Such an activity would be a composition of two different things in a mutually beneficial relationship; a marriage of two different individuals, if you like. Like a healthy modern marriage, the two individuals remain distinct beings, but their relationships forms a third thing: an us, a we, which is more than the mere collection of two different entitities.
Here is what I mean when I say that psychotherapy could be nested inside philosophy, or perhaps rather, married to philosophy, to create a third activity which integrates both different disciplines without reducing one to the other. I said that philosophy is the effort to become more fully conscious, more fully alive in our being, in our power and potential for the kind of being and life that we are, for all that is good. The problem we encounter in daily life, however, is our failure to rise to such consciousness, to such ways of being. Why does this happen? For many important reasons. One of them regards the mechanisms of our psychology. A large part of our psychology is defensive. Life is dangerous, and in all sorts of ways. The function of our psychology is in part to navigate those dangers well, but that includes the function of protecting us from that danger. Such protection can be quite primitive, fantastical: our defensive psychology (our "defense mechanisms") shape what we perceive, and how we feel, to protect us at the felt level. We distort things, we blind or delude ourselves. Any emotion which is a threat to the psyche, our defenses might repress. Any person who is a threat, may be devalued, whether outwardly or in our imagination. Any threatening reality may be ignored and forgotten. Any personal fault will be rationalised. Psychotherapists have listed about 30 such psychological "defense mechanisms," and different people favour different defenses and combinations of them. The trouble is that these defenses often diminish us, for example by making us more blind and selfish. They turn us into blind animals of fight, flight and freeze, in ways which can ongoingly distort our mind, heart, and life. I am scared, and defend myself through a habit of anger, and in time I become an arsehole. But I cannot see that, I think I am in the right, and the fault and failure to understand lies with others. Or I disappear into a fog, like a friend's mother who "forgot" that their partner sexually abused the daughter, my friend. These problems are the daily stuff of our lives. We are all a little insane, blind, and unjust, as a consequence of our defenses. Psychotherapy works at recognising our psychological defenses and freeing us from their damaging effects. The work of psychotherapy, says Irvin Yalom, is that of clearing away obstacles, so that we become free to create our desired life. We clear away our psychological obstacles in order to live our true life: the life of lucid consciousness which I have been describing and calling the work of philosophy. Here is the significant, practical complementarity relationship between philosophy and psychotherapy. Psychology deals with the blind, instinctual dimensions of our minds, enlightening us about them, and somewhat freeing us from the cage or the fog that is them, so that we are more free and able to step foward in our terms of our better selves, which is the work of philosophy.
I was doing very well academically. I was a philosopher "in my bones." It was clear that this would be my work's life. Yet, I could not see myself in an academic or scholarly career, for I had Socratic or Platonic vision of philosophy. I wanted to do such philosophy with people from all walks of life, to engage them in conversation that would help them with their personal concerns and with their pursuit of the good. In the context of acadmic philosophy, it would be suggested that I should become a psychotherapist instead of a philosopher, but that would not do, for that is not philosophy. I saw clearly the limitations of psychotherapy, versus the deeper power of philosophy which regard to the real nature of people's concerns, and the answers needed to them. I was unsure of how to proceed, especially in a world where one needs to pay the rent. Then I came across the idea of philosophical counselling. In that, I recognised exactly what I had been seeking.
The internet was then not what it is now. Most of the writing on philosophical counselling was contained in just a few books. When I read those books I was quite disappointed. Various of the writers treated philosophical ideas as supermarket items, to be judged by how a superficial encounter with them makes you feel. "You are depressed? Here is what Nietzsche said about despair, and what Kierkegaard said about it. Choose whichever notion appeals and make that your life philosphy." That is not philosophy. Philosophy involves a determined search for truth, rather than a reduction of ideas to their instrumental value, to their psychological effect. Truth is "a need of the soul." People become distorted and even corrupted, without a proper relationship with the spirit of truth. In other books I encountered the assumption that the goal of philosophical counselling was to help people become more rational, to help them apply logic to their living. That was better, it was philosophy, but it is essentially academic philosophy, or the narrowness of modernity. And as I said above when I quoted G. K. Chesterton, in Socratic philosophy reason is one virtue among others, various of which are its equal in importance with respect to sanity, wisdom, and a good life. Finally, there was a tendency in this literature to naively malign and dismiss mainstream psychological therapy. The point seemed to be that philosophical counselling is good, because psychological therapy is rubbish. Of course, I found some better writing, for example the work of Ran Lahav, but in general the ideas were so bad--the philosophy was so bad!--that I realised I would have to develop my own approach to philosophical counselling. Fortunately I had a more profound sense of philosophy on which to draw.
I began forming a vision of what philosophical counselling might be, and developing a practical plan for how to enact it. I saw the great value of combining philosophy and psychotherapy, not in the sense of collapsing one into the other, but of maintaining their distinction while blending them in practice. I decided I would (1) study counselling to masters level. I would (2) work as a mainstream therapist within counselling organisations. Then, in time, I would (3) practice purely as a philosophical counsellor in private practice.
These days I am on the other side of that plan: I am a masters-qualified counsellor and psychotherapist, with over a decade of experience working in mainstream organisations as a mainstream therapist, and now work solely in private practice purely as a philosophical counsellor.
Whenever I speak of "psychology" I do not mean "clinical psychology," which is more narrow and specific: psychology reduced to a medical lens. Decades of mental health marketing has taught us to reduce our lives to a psychological lens, and our psychology to a clinical lens, so people get confused about these distinctions. I did not study the profession known as Psychology, rather I studied the professions of Counselling and Psychotherapy. I am not a clinical professional, but a personal growth professional. I am trained in the humanistic and the existential and the depth psychotherapies, which are radically different to clinical therapy. As a therapist I do not help people with psychological illnesses or disorders, but with the challenges of living, especially with respect to their psychological dimensions. That is, both clinical therapists and therapists like myself often work with the same concerns, but we see them in very different ways. There are of course problems which are best seen as clinical, medical disorders, but even the best clinical research itself recognises that those are in the minority, and that many of these struggles are more natural reactions to life, for example depression is mostly "reactive." Psychotherapy is a century long discipline of looking at our psychological life and trying to make sense of it, hypothetically, descriptively, phenomenologically, experientially, through the insights of tradition and literature, and yes, through scientific research. It is a more wholistic lens. Over that century, a wealth of insight and practice has built up, and that is the substance of a therapist's training. Ultimately, one learns the most through years of actually doing therapy, week in and week out. The training then pales in comparison. Importantly, the justification for psychotherapy does not lie in how well it enacts the approved clinical theory, but rather in how well it works for individual human beings. Psychotherapy stands or falls on the quality of its practice and outcomes, as experienced by individual clients. There are no rebates to keep bad therapy going, rather the client pays out of pocket, and if the therapy is poor then they stop coming. My experience is that people stay.
I gained my first counselling job through the recommendation of one of my trainers who suggested I had quite a talent for the discipline. Indeed, I did fall in love with the riches of therapy. And so, across fifteen years, I worked in counselling organisations which included: a suicide prevention service focused both on crisis intervention (I spent a lot of time talking people back from bridges); a service focused on rural and isolated men and their relationships (I piloted what may be the first rural video counselling service in the country); an Australian Defense Force, and a combat veteran's, counselling service; a bereavement-after-suicide service; and workplace counselling (EAP) providing mainstream counselling to employees, and interpersonal and motivational coaching to managers. Within these services I worked also with the wide variety of other issues which come up in any counselling. I worked alongside other counsellors but also psychologists and clinical social workers, and so learned much about their tools and ways of thinking. Other work included employment in designing and providing counsellor training. Twice I was headhunted and offered an academic position at large counselling educational institutions in the country, but I declined in favour of my continued focus on the practice of counselling (plus, I was still teaching philosophy for some of this time).
During those years I was a voracious learner well beyond my formal studies, taking deep dives into many mainstream approaches to counselling and psychotherapy and applying them in my work, and entering such therapies as a client to experience them from the inside. These included the humanistic approaches such as Carl Roger's person-centred therapy, the various psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapies, beginning with Freud, and various existential therapies including those of Emmy van Deurzen, Irvin Yalom, and Viktor Frankl.
Carl Rogers was the foundational therapist of my formal training. In essence, his person-centred therapy is healing and growth through a therapeutic relationship of radical acceptance and truth-speaking. I am reminded of the words of the philosopher Simone Weil: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." Person-centred therapy is the practice of such attention, without judgement, in which a person is invited to become much more self-aware, more present to themselves, and ideally more integrated by means of that. In such therapy we try to think, feel, and speak as truthfully as possible. That may sound deceptively simple, but we spend much of our lives hiding from ourselves and each other, and such therapy is therefore liberating and transformative. Such therapy is obviously an excellent framework for the practice of philosophical counselling, and my philosophical counselling is essentially the combination of this form of therapy with the work of philosophy as described above and on the previous page and above.
The psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy which began with Freud created a Coperican revolution in our ability to understand ourselves psychologically. Psychoanalysis is the study of the implicit, of that which we do, but which we do not see. These are the patterns that make our lives, including our unhappy repetitions. This includes our defenses which I spoke of above, which twist and distort who we are and how our lives go. Psychodynamic therapy is incredibly because it helps us to see these things and to work on them. It liberates us to make choices about how we want to be, and guides us in habituating those new patterns. Of course, there are problems with psychoanalysis, and I am certainly alive to them in theory, as well as the ways they manifest among psychoanalysts. My approach to this tradition is influenced by Wittgenstein who saw it as less of a science, and more a set of insightful new metaphors which enable the very real and effective work just described. Hence, I favour the title psychodynamic therapy over psychoanalytic therapy.
Existential therapy is the title for a range of therapies, including the different approaches of Emmy van Deurzen, Irvin Yalom, and Viktor Frankl. Existential therapy is often defined as a philosophical approach to counselling and psychotherapy. This makes it highly relevant to the work I do, and it is the psychotherapeutic approach to which I have given most attention. At the same time, in this approach the philosophical aspect is secondary to the psychological, which makes it different to philosophical counselling. You might notice the URL of this website. For a decade I spent half the week counselling in organisations, and half a week in private practice honing my ability to draw on all these psychotherapies, with an explicit focus on existential therapy.
Existential therapy draws especially on existential philosophy, and the associated way of doing philosophy called phenomenology. Such philosophy and therapy helps us to better understand our human condition. Existential analysis reveals how many of our problems are not disorders, so to speak, but reactions to reality, to our condition as human existents. This is a surprise to many people, who thought there was something wrong particularly with them, and it enables a whole different way of understanding themselves and of approaching their problems. Phenomenological analysis guides people to more deeply understand their subjective experience and way of being. Phenomenology was an alternative to a psycho-analysis of one's psyche, and it proved so effective that it is now the core method of analysis within any psychotherapy (any humanistic, existential, or depth therapy).
There is a stoic element to much of existentialism, though it is shaped by other modern movements such as romanticism, such that existentialism combines that stoicism with a strong aesthetic aliveness and commitment to passion. One faces the hardness of life with courage and determination, while drinking in the beauty of the world. I think here of Albert Camus' essays in the book Summer in Algiers. Emmy van Deurzen articulates this romantic-stoic-existentialism well: life is tough, and her form of existential therapy helps people to look at how life works, while becoming also more capable of standing up to its challenges, while creating the happiness of which we are capable despite the apparent meaninglessness of life. If we think that van Deurzen offers toughness and substance, we should look to another major existential therapist and creator of one of its approaches: Viktor Frankl, Frankl honed his existential therapeutic insights during his years of terrible suffering as a Jewish prisoner in the Nazi death camps. The difference with Frankl is quite interesting. Existential philosophy assumes that modernity is correct, that life is mechanical and meaningless, but it acknowledges our need for meaning, and proposes Nietzsche's answer: a self-created, willful assertion of meaning. The heroic rebel, the self-made. This philosophy produces some wonderful insights, and a great deal of nonsense. It is the philosophy of an angry 19 year old male in love with their intellect. Frankl, suffering in that extreme laboratory of the human spirit, lacked the luxury to swallow such ideologies or to indulge in such romanticism and faux-heroism. In his writing we find a more sobre account of the mysterious reality of meaning and value, and the difference which such recognition and alignment makes. Frankl's notion of meaning is creative, certainly, but it is based on looking hard at what is there in reality, which is to say at the meaning and value to be discovered, and working creatively with that. This is a much truer picture, more humble, and more wonderful. The philosophers I have focused throughout my life--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and modern people like Iris Murdoch and Raimond Gaita--provide the tools to do what Frankl was trying to do, to say and to show what he was trying to say and show. We found insight and truth in many places, and then we sew things together. I have learned a great deal from van Deurzen, and from Frankl. I have learned much also from Irvin Yalom, whose approach is less coherent than it may seem, but which displays some of the finer aspects of what a good therapist does.
In traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics we speak of how the activity of being is both receptive and active. Philosophical counselling is philosophy as a way of seeing and understanding life, and of being transformed by that. It is receptive. But it is also active: the striving to step into our better potential, the virtues or myriad qualities of our being which make us stronger, more good, more purposeful, more happy, and which enable flourishing. The form of a human being involves many activities which are definitive of its nature, the highest of which is consciousness. However, we are a composition of elements, and that includes our psychology, which can benefit our consciousness or hinder it. Hence the need for psychological psychotherapy. As a philosophical counsellor I am a philosopher first and foremost, but I draw also on various psychotherapies to provide a richer form of help. I help you to see life clearly, to apprehend its meaning and value, and to be nourished and changed by that, and to put your best foot forward, to respond to your challenges, both inner and outer, and to make life better at both levels. And I help you to work on the psychological correlates of that. Of course, my work is tailored to the individual. With some clients it is completely philosophical, with some it is 80% psychotherapeutic, while with many it is a mix, with some sessions being largely philosophical while others are psychotherapeutic, or every session being a blend.
That is enough about me. In 2020 I left my office in Carlton, Melbourne, and began working purely from home by phone and video. When it comes to seeing clients, I work part-time, for my profession is fully that of a philosopher--a philosophical counsellor--and so I live out a passion and commitment to full-time work on the continuous development of myself philosophically, through reading and writing. I live in central Victoria, in an old home by the forest. Beyond my work, I am a jazz drummer, a bush walker, and I restore and ride vintage motorcycles.