This page describes my journey through philosophy, psychotherapy, into 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 go into some detail to show how philosophy can be incredibly helpful when it comes to your personal concerns. As well as a philosopher I am a masters-trained and highly experienced psychotherapist, and I love mainstream therapy, however it is clear to me that philosophy is even more powerful for improving life, when done in an appropriate way. What follows is a lengthy reflection, and it is not necessary to read it before making a booking; I offer it merely for those who are interested in a bit more detail.

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 experiences of the world and other people that have a depth of feeling and which invite articulation. Of course it was not until much later that I discovered the formal tradition of philosophy. 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 conversion, 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. 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 and 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. Aristotle explored how virtue and morality and any desire for what is genuinely good is precisely that: rooted in our deepest desire, so that we can make sense of it through an exploration of that. His philosophy is based on and justified by such description, rather than being 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 description 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. Aristotle's description consitutes a framework and method for the cultivation of those things. The technical name for it 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.

Among the 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. Above all, I was influenced by the modern platonists--philosophers who draw on Plato today--including Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, and (the Australians) Raimond Gaita and Christopher Cordner. You might be familiar with Gaita's popular memoir Romulus, My Father. Cordner, who is the author of Ethical Encounter, had a great impact on my during my undergraduate years, both academically and personally, and was later my masters supervisor. 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 occasion 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. 

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. As a form of love, philosophy is therefore also the pursuit of wisdom. That is what you and I are doing when we engage in philosophical coversation: we are pursuing wisdom about some interest or concern.

The element of philos, of love, in the definition of philosophy should not be skipped over. Philosophy pursues wisdom but it is also, vitally, an act of love. Love transforms the lover, they become changed by the nature of what they love and by the quality of their love. When you do philosophy in this spirit, it transforms you. 
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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 conversation. The point of such wisdom was to become a better person and to create a better life.

What is wisdom, what consitutes it? Wisdom is the exercise of good qualities: good qualities of the mind, good qualities of the heart, good qualities of the hands. We call these good qualities the virtues. A virtue is any good personal quality which makes us and our lives better. Hence the virtues include courage, justice, reason, compassion, love, creativity, fortitude, and many other qualities besides. Aristotle divides the virtues into two catgegories: the intellectual virtues, which are the virtues of perception, thought, volition, and the character virtues, which are the virtues of feeling and action. Many virtues are found in both categories, but accordingly differ in nature. As an example, consider courage: there is intellectual courage, the courage to look, to see clearly, to think clearly. There is also, of course, courage of action. But there is also emotional courage, for example when you face a thought or fear which hitherto you have anxiously avoided. In short, philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, which also means the exercise of wisdom. Wisdom is the pursuit of what is good and true, and it is the exercise of what is good and true. 

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.

A modern novelist wrote that character is fate. Of course, these philosophers also saw how deeply vulnerable we are to malevolence and misfortune--that is the whole point of Stoicism, a later approach which arose out of their philosophy. The Stoics recognised that there are things which are in our control, which call for the exercise of wisdom as a set of certain virtues, and that there are things outside of our control, which also call for the exercise of wisdom as a set of certain virtues, in each case determined by the nature of the individual and their context. Insofar as happiness and flourishing are in your power to cultivate, they are not the product of materialism, or of endless psychological self-help, rather they are a consequence of the intentional act of cultivating all that is best in you as a human being. That is, the cultivation of wisdom, of the virtues. Consider the difference it makes in life to cultivate the virtues that lead to wisdom--both practical wisdom, and also wisdom in terms of the big meaningful picture--and that lead to being a better person for others (more understanding, more loving), and a stronger person in oneself (courage, appropriate anger, healthy pride), and a more creative, more directed, more consistent and energetic, person and so forth. The path of philosophy is the cultivation of oneself as the engine of those things we most deeply desire.

Philosophy as I have described it is quite different to what I would encounter in the universities. Academic philosophy is too often less the love of wisdom, and more the love of theory, a technology of theory and reason. Academic philosophy is often an expression of modernity, that ideology of the last few centuries which reduces life to the mechanical. Nobody else thinks that way, every other culture sees the ground of being as in some sense Life, which is mysterious and rich. We have not gone beyond others, we have simply dogmatically applied an interpretation, a mechanical picture which has become our lens, which we treat as reality itself. Modern Western is the age where we have fallen in love with our intellects, and so with their creations. Slowly we have lost sight of, indeed have lost a feeling for, reality as something outside of us that is rich and deep, which invites humble contemplation and description. Instead, we are the master and judge of all, and reality must be reducible to some idea we have invented, a mental construct. "Everything is just a social construct." 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 a lover of reality. Their attitude to the intellect is as a servant to reality, a servant to our desire for truth and goodness, even if this decentres the intellect and indeed the self--even if it diminishes the ego. The academic assumption was that Socrates claimed that a life of reason is the best life. He never said that, rather he said that nothing matters so much as to be "a good man" and to love truth, and goodness, and beauty, and to do what is just (see the dialogues Gorgias and Apology). For Socrates, wisdom requires the virtue of reason, certainly, but equally and perhaps moreso, it requires other intellectual virtues such as humility, love, curiosity, passion, empathy, and so on. I think here of G. K. Chesterton's words: "The mad man is not the one who has lost his reason, but the one who has lost everything but his reason." Plato in his Symposium makes clear that the intellect is a lover, and that a true lover always reaches higher. The intellect in itself is poor, says Plato, it is Cupid in rags--a thirst, an appetite--which aims its arrows in a spirit of hope at whatever is true, whatever is good, whatever is beautiful in life. I read a lot of theoretical philosophy, but it is a secondary form of philosophy, or at least it is a different form and should not overshadow philosophy as the love of what is good in life, as the pursuit of wisdom and the cultivation of virtue. Philosophy is contemplative descriptive, humble, obediant--it is thinking which comes out of living, which then feeds back in to living by the attentive and effortful cultivation of what it sees that is true and good.

Philosophy is what we all do anyway. We all do philosophy, in the sense that we all pursue truth and wisdom in some way, to some degree. This is true even among people whose motives are quite base or whose reflection is very incoherent. The point is that we need to do this reflection well, and philosophy is the formalisation of that. Philosophy is for everybody, and it is the improvement of what they are already doing. Even intellectually disabled people are capable of philosophy, assuming their disability is not too profound. That is, assuming that they can converse, reflect, learn, and have moral agency. I certainly know such people. Indeed, there is an interest in talking with anybody regardless of their high or low IQ, insofar as they bring the better dimensions of themselves to the conversation. There is something real, substantial, unique. Conversation with somebody who is not present in their talk can become boring very quickly. This applies even if the conversation is highly intelligent. My point is that most of us have the intellectual capacity to do philosophy of the kind I am describing: to bring the better dimensions of ourselves forward, oriented to whatever is true and meaningful. Of course, there is also high level philosophy, and that is very important for a civilisation, but it is not for everybody. I read a lot of very abstract philosophy, for example classical and medieval metaphysics, which is dense and often exhausting (but also profoundly beautiful and enlightening). Therapeutic literature becomes leisure-reading by comparison. But specialist philosophy, while connected to it--especially when we think of ourselves as a community where people cover different bases in life--is different to the philosophy that I describe on in this page. Some people use intelligence to bolster their ego, while others, out of egotistical insecurity, attack the intellect (anti-intellectualism). By contrast, philosophy is an act of love, at the level of the intellect and of the will. It is the open and humble attempt, starting from wherever you stand, to see life more clearly, out of the desire for whatever is good and meaningful. Interestingly, some of the best books of philosophy involve relatively little reasoning, rather they exercise a certain way of seeing, which guides the reader by degrees into that different, hopefully better vision. Philosophy starts where you are, and guides you in applying your head and heart to get to a better vision and so a better place. It is not a snob, it is a lover; it is the exercise of the love and desire in each of us for the true and the good. It is the formalisation (i.e. the improvement) of our natural tendency to do this anyway.

This brings us to an important point about the form of what we do, when we do philosophy, which shows how such philosophy is so transformative. We distinguish philosophy from what I might call a cultural technology. By a "cultural technology" I mean activities such as medicine, or personal training, or psychotherapy, or education, or apprenticeship and training, and so on. I call these cultural technologies because they objectify a thing and then apply technologies or techniques to analyse and manipulate it. For example, the doctor diagnoses my health, and then she and I apply technologies such as medicine and techniques such as 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, therapeutic technologies involve a formula: here is the problem, here is its cause, here is the solution, and now we apply that. We focus our consciousness on something that is outside of consciousness. For what is objectified and worked on is a part of me--my health, my muscle strength, my psychological patterns--but in an important sense it is also not me. For example, I can lose my health or strength or mental balance and yet still be me.

Cultural technologies objectify. They work on the extrinsic, even when that extrinsic thing is a part of me, and even when it is a part of my psyche, my psychology. Philosophy is different. To do philosophy as I am describing it can also be a cultural technology, indeed it often is, but its core is different. Its core activity does not work on things, parts, objects. Rather, to do such philosophy is to embody a different state. It is the activity of being differently.

It is generally the case in such philosophy that two things are happening at once: there is an aspect which is a cultural technology, and a simultaneous and core aspect which is the enactment of a way of being. The cultural technological aspect within a philosophical conversation or reflection may be my focus on a deeper understanding of my depression, or on understanding a specific virtue and how to cultivate it. But as the pursuit and cultivation--indeed the enactment--of wisdom about the issue, which is the required lens to do this philosophical reflection, I am stepping into a different way of being. That is, I am stepping into a different way of seeing and willing, or of willing and so seeing, and ultimately of feeling and acting. To see courageously is an act of courage. It is a challenge to our whole being, so it is the enactment not only of the intellectual virtue of courage, but of the character virtue too, of courage in feeling and action. Genuine philosophical reflection on courage, or on an aspect of life which requires a lens of courage, is a courageous way of being. Academic philosophy in the pejorative sense engages only in the cultural technology aspect of this, as if courage could be understood through theory and reason alone. It cannot. And such reflection becomes mere intellectualisation. True philosophical reflection demands the whole being, and it orients the whole being. It is a participation in the thing being contemplated, or in the qualities required for such contemplation, for such understanding. 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 virtuous quality. Philosophy is an act of being.

This is a radical conception of philosophy. It is also something that I have come to see by my own reflection, and is not well recognised among philosophers. It is, however, nothing new. It is there in Socrates and Plato, in Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, in the existentialists and the modern Platonists. It is this very element that made philosophy so powerful for me, and I believe it is what is operating in many other people who love philosophy, even without their articulating it. 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. At the surface they look like philosophy as a cultural technology, as critical thinking about one's life, and that is certainly an important activity. "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? Beneath this important surface, there is another dimension going on at the same time. Socrates is inviting and challenging people to step up into a better vision and mode of being. Of course, not everybody liked this, and Socrates was executed for his troubles.

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. Imagine that you are chronically angry, and when we examine this, we see that an element of your anger 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? In that case you may be unjustifiably angry, at least in certain big respects, and this mistake might be damaging your character--you are unjustly angry with others--and it is ruining your experience of life and even 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, and become a more just person, a better person to be around, and happier in terms of your experience of life and your relationships. This critical examination of your beliefs, this correction of the perceptions on which you base your daily life, could amount to a whole practice of philosophy, and a whole practice of philosophical counselling. If you were to stop here, however, you would be engaging in a cultural technology. You might do something with the information we have gleaned from the exploration and critical analysis, but then again you might not, and either way you might not become genuinely changed. However, if you were to really bring yourself to this reflection, and to make a genuine effort of stepping into a more just way of seeing, then you would be adopting a different way of being in the midst of, and due to, the reflection. You would be encountering a higher form of truth and goodness, and you would be encountering that because you are doing that, being that.

In philosophy we are seeking to enounter reality as it is beyond us. To do that requires seeing through the lens of certain virtues, certain good qualities, or forms of goodness, and that is itself the enactment of those qualities, at least within. In both cases, we become more those things. They are potentialities within us which we actualise. The physical image I use to imagine this more concretely is a sleepy person who wills themselves into wakefulness. They have not done something to themselves, so much as enacted a way of being. I think also of intentionally breathing deeply, which is not really something I do to myself, so much as simply something I do, something which I enact. A wonderful fact about actualising such potentiality within us, is that by being these good qualities, we are participating in forms of goodness, and being nourished by them. My courage nourishes me, it strengthens me, it gives me hope and meaning. Here is the answer to that personal nihilism which people talk about so much today.

​In the above example, we might keep exploring and notice that your anger is partly based in fear, and a reactive habit of cowardice. Rather than face your fears, so that you grow and they diminish, you tend to run away. Hence they grow, and so you feel instinctively the need to prepare for a fight, in all places at all times. Also, because of your cowardice you let people walk over you somewhat, which breeds resentment, which turns into a horrible soup of cowardice and rage. Our conclusion may be that alongside the work of justice, you need to work on your courage, and that this will change many things in your life. As we work on that, we may then discover that your fear is associated in part with a lack of what Aristotle called "the virtue of proper pride." You do not respect and honour yourself as a person should, and so you let yourself be treated badly, and expect it, which is a part of what has led to this tangle of fear, cowardice, and consequent distortion about reality and justice, and that habit of aggression. I am riffing as I make up this example; people are like plants who grow in many directions, including the growth that is a result of the will, of acts and failures to act and poor ways of being active, including with respect to their act of being in the world. 

I am exploring all these things because they are important points in themselves. For example, when I say I am a philosophical counsellor, you can see that this has a distinct meaning which is quite different to what somebody might do, if their philosophical counselling was merely a dumbed-down form of academic philosophical theorising. At the same time, in describing these things, I am also building toward something. In that vein, here is an interesting question: 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 seeks to achieve? Of course, some 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 it happens to include effects at those levels. Rather, much depression is a meaningful rather than mechanical reaction, for example a reaction 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 from the work that gave meaning, et cetera). Anxiety is often fear, which often points to a need for work on a virtrue such as 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, and the meaning of such things needs to be understood, so that we can consciously, meaningfully navigate it. Grief in 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. 

This leads us back into the historical story of how I came to study philosophy, and then moved into philosophical counselling. I was a graduate student, teaching philosophy. One area of interest which increasingly gripped me 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, which analyses and works on, a part of us: the psychological part of our being. (Pyschotherapy does more than that, and is more than that, but I am simplifying, to capture its essence.) I said that philosophy, at least in its core, is by contrast with a cultural technology the enactment of our essential being, a turning of the whole of our being according to a better direction and quality. 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 had taught me to pay careful attention to the difference between what people say, when they are making theoretical claims about life and the world, versus what they show, in terms of how they feel and act, what they expect, and so on. A person tells me that morality is completely relative, and yet many (not all) such people react to terrible acts as if there is something real being violated. And many such people love certain others as if those others have real meaning and value. Of course, when some people express a nihilistic belief they are telling you who they are, and you should pay attention and not trust them. Just as, perhaps less darkly, when some people tell you there is no truth they are telling you that nothing they say is true, and you should believe them. But most people are mindlessly repeating fashionable dogma because it feels clever. People are seduced by cleverness, and by group-think even when its doctrines involve boasts about "being an indepentent thinker." The method of philosophy therefore is to pay close attention to the form of life of another. This is the essential insight and method of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Anglo philosophy, and the phenomenologists in Continental philosophy, and it is perhaps no accident that those insights and practices arose at the same time as psychoanalysis, even if they do not share in Freud's errors. We can learn much about ourselves and reality if we are prepared to pay attention to the form of life of ourselves and others. Importantly, in doing that we might discover much richer, more meaningful, and more wonderful dimensions to ourselves and to reality. This is the work of making the implicit explicit. Our lives are full of important implications which can teach us, and not only that, but which can transform our very experience and way of being. I began to conceive of philosophy as doing this work, a kind of analogue to psychotherapy. I began to focus on developing this way of doing philosophy. 

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 which could 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 relationship forms a third thing: an us, a we, which is more than the mere collection of two different entitities. I was envisioning a philosophical kind of therapy.

What might this practice look like, where psychotherapy is married to philosophy, to create a third activity which integrates both different disciplines without reducing one to the other. We can think about it this way. Philosophy is the effort to become more fully what we are in our potentiality: more fully conscious, more fully wise and virtuous, which is to say more fully alive according to the wonderful potentiality of our being. The goal is to become this way on the road to Athens or in the marketplace, to reference Socrates vision of philosophy. The problem we encounter in daily life, however, is our failure to rise to our better potentiality, to our capacity for virtue. Why does this happen? For many important reasons. An important one, though, regards the mechanisms of our psychology. For 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, in part by equipping us to confront them, but also through protecting us from them. The main form of that protection is psychological: the function of our psychology is to protect us from overwhelming anxiety. Thus, our defensive psychology (our "defense mechanisms") shape what we perceive, and how we feel, to protect us at the felt level. Protection is often prioritised over truth and our better potential. Our defenses can be quite primitive and fantastical, especially insofar as we have not matured, whether by natural means, or later through good therapy. So we distort things, we blind or delude ourselves. For example, any emotion which is a threat to our 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.

Our "defenses mechanisms," or better, our "defenses," often diminish us, for example by making us blind and more selfish. They turn us into shallow animals of fight, flight and freeze, in ways that distort our mind, heart, and life. The anger in the earlier paragraph is an example of a defense. I am scared, and defend myself through a habit of anger, and in time I become an jerk. But I cannot see that, indeed I believe earnestly that I am in the right, even a victim, and that 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, of wisdom, of virtue, of fulfilling our potential for goodness, creativity, meaning, happiness, love, and so forth, which I have been describing and calling the work of philosophy. Here is the significant, practical complementarity relationship between philosophy and psychotherapy. Psychotherapy deals with our psychological life, the dynamic patterns of our psychology, including our blind, instinctual defenses, enlightening us about them, and somewhat freeing us from the cage or the fog that is them, which means freeing us from the fate they are setting up for us, so that we are more free and able to step foward into our better self and our better life.

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 as I have been describing on this page, I had a radically different vision of philosophy, which I had learned from taking Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle seriously, while also looking to modern philosophers. This vision, as well perhaps as my working class background from a tradesmen family, led me to want to do 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. If I had asked an academic philospher, they may have suggested that I become a psychologist or 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. I was unsure of how to proceed, especially in a world where one needs to pay the rent. Was this idea of therapeutic philosophy some kind of fantasy? How would I practice it? I had been musing on that idea for some time, when I came across the idea of philosophical counselling. In that idea, which a handful of people in Europe and America were practicing, 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 due to a range of reasons. For one thing, 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" and abandoning it for the sake of feeling better is not only a corruption of who we are, it is also guaranteed to backfire. 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 the rationalism and technocratics of academic philosophy. And as I said above when I quoted G. K. Chesterton about "the mad man," 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 I realised I would have to develop my own approach to philosophical counselling.

The idea of a marriage between philosophy and psychotherapy appealed to me. It appealed also to my synthesising temperament--my both/and mindset as opposed to an either/or mindset. I could see that while philosophy offered more, psychotherapy offered much, indeed a great deal, to people seeking a better life. That was not least because of what the celebrated therapist Irvin Yalom had claimed: the role of psychotherapy is to clear away obstacles, as I mentioned above. I began forming a vision of what philosophical counselling might be, and developing a practical plan for how to enact it: while continuing in my work as a philospher I would (1) study counselling to masters level, (2) work as a mainstream therapist within counselling organisations, and 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, but I am constantly worked in philosophy, whether formally or in terms of constant personal study and writing, and I now work solely in private practice, purely as a philosophical counsellor. I believe I am the first and only person in Australia to do this work, or at least, to make it my sole career and income.

The study of counselling and psychotherapy as a formal profession, is different to the study of psychology as a formal profession. This gets confusing because these disciplines all share various words which they use in a looser sense as well, such as "counselling" and "psychology." I work with people's psychology, but I am not a psychologist, and psychologists often do a form of counselling, but they are not counsellors in this strict sense. A professional psychologist is typically trained in a clinical paradigm, or what is sometimes called "the medical model." Many of their concepts are drawn from psychiatry. Whenever I speak of "psychology" I do not mean "clinical psychology." It is important to recognise that in using these concepts we are not distinguishing a set of objects in the world--the category of purely psychological objects versus clinical psychological objects--rather we are distinguishing different ways of interpreting the same phenomena. There is a clinical lens of interpretation, and there are other lenses which are different. I am not a clinical professional, rather I am a personal growth professional. I interpret life's challenges not in clinical terms, but rather as challenges in living, to be met with the deeper resources of one's own humanity, which I have been calling the virtues: reason, courage, curiosity, et cetera. That is a more accurate and beneficial way of understanding many of our challenges. In that context we can certainly use a variety of lenses in the pursuit of wisdom: a psychological analysis, a sociological analysis, alongside of course a philosophical focus. I am trained not in the humanistic and the existential and the depth psychotherapies. There are of course certain challenges which are perhaps best understood through a clinical lens, whether for pragmatic reasons or because that lens is simply a better representation; I think for example of many cases of psychosis. However, I reject the growing conceptual totalitarianism in our culture which increases reduces more and more of life to a clinical lens, so that our fundamental vision of ourselves is a clinical psychological one. I believe that is doing great harm to individuals, including in terms of their experience of themselves and life, but also in terms of their character, and it is doing great damage to our society as a whole. At the heart of my approach is the free, mysterious, creative, unique, valuable human being, who is part of a world which is more than mechanical, which is likewise mysterious and rich, and surprisingly meaningful--insofar as we engage deeply with those elements of it.

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. As a philosopher, with that kind of historical and cultural understanding, I have a certain perspective on what Rogers was doing, which is not captured in most brief expositions. Rogers was psychological in outlook, but he came from a deeply Christian background, even though he became increasingly secular in himself. A plant which grew in one soil can--perhaps--be transplanted into another. Roger's therapy is the application of an ideal which grew out of that Christian background, and which he seeks to plant in a secular, psychological worldview and practice. We could frame it as a question: What happens if we seek to offer unconditional love to another, insofar as we are capable, within the boundaries of a therapeutic context? This should not be confused with permissiveness, or with naive moral relativism, or a pollyanna or saccharine attitude, which are common misunderstandings of Roger's approach. Yet, this approach is radically different to the judgementalism in which we spend most of our lives. It is radically committed to speaking the truth of our inner experience, and our experience of each other. This approach is known variously as "Rogerian" or "client-centred" or "person-centred" therapy. It stands in contrast to therapy-as-usual, which is typically a cultural technology, the application of a technology of analysis and manipulation.

Rogers' therapy is the enactment of the virtues. There are different ways of organising the virtues, dependent on which ones are considered most important. Rogers' virtues are arranged in a heirarchy focused on the unconditional value of each individual person, with the virtue of unconditional love as its north star, which is embodied in a context of a radical commitment to speaking the truth of one's experience. Rogers recognised that much healing and growth can be achieved through a therapeutic relationship that embodies these virtues. I think he was right. Person-centred therapy is so powerful precisely because we are all deeply judgemental, toward ourselves and toward each other, far more than we realise. I think often of Lacan's psychoanalytic joke that "The Christian injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself must be ironic...because people hate themselves!" I find that the main work of therapy is often the dimishment of this "fat, relentless ego" which shows itself as much in self-hate as in arrogance.

I think here also of the insight of the philosopher Simone Weil, expressed in a single sentence from her notebooks: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." Person-centred therapy is, to quote more Weil, "a just and loving gaze." That is indeed too rare a gift in this life. The ideal of this therapy is that you are more fully seen and heard. And that you come to see and hear yourself more justly, lovingly, deeply. And that in turn you do that for others, you become that for others. To the degree that we stop secretly hating ourselves, and each other, and reality, and instead exercise wisdom, virtue, and love in a more complete way within ourselves, the effect is utterly transformative. 

That is my intepretation of Rogers, which focuses on his "core conditions" of therapy and takes them as definitive of his approach. I disagree with many other claims in Rogers' specific theory, as I do with psychotherapists in general, whose writing I find so insightful, and yet also narrow. When it comes to a deeper, wider, more wholistic understanding even of our psychology, I find myself repeatedly frustrated with the narrow made-up theories of the competing 20th century psychologists with their partial theories, and their tendency to generalise from their own time or even from their sub-culture, and so I look to much older, classical philosophical sources. 

When I say that philosophical counselling is the combination of philosophy and counselling (or psychotherapy), I am speaking of Carl Roger's form of counselling. That is enough in itself, that is a great achievement, and more than we can fully achieve. Rogers has come to shape the wider therapeutic world, even as most therapy continues to be more a technology than a way of being. That influence is far from complete, indeed much that goes for therapeutic help is more and more technocratic, especially in the clinical domain. The problem here is one of primacy: if we treat something like Roger's ideal way of being as primary in therapy, we are nonetheless free to draw on many technologies. Person-centred therapy used to be more puritanical about its distinction from technological practices, but many of its theorists have come to see that this puritanism is counter-productive to the spirit of the approach. Later in my studies, during my masters in counselling, I started to explore psychodynamic therapy, which is traditionally a technology, but a very powerful one. 

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 do not see. Or see but do not understand. Our seemingly intentional patterns of behaviour whose intention we do not recognise. These are the patterns that make our lives, including the unhappy patterns and repetitions of our lives. At the root of these patterns are often the psychological defenses I spoke of above, which began as reasonable forms of protection when we were immature children, but which now twist and distort who we are and how our lives go. Psychodynamic therapy is incredibly effective because it helps us to see these defenses and their purposes. That liberates us to make choices about how we want to be instead, and it provides guidance in habituating those new patterns.
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Finally we come to existential therapy, which is the title for a range of therapies, including the different approaches of Emmy van Deurzen, Irvin Yalom, and Viktor Frankl. While my formal therapeutic training was Rogerian, this is the psychotherapeutic approach to which I have given most attention in my own personal study. You might notice the URL of this website. For a decade I spent half the week counselling in those organisations mentioned above, and half a week in private practice honing my ability to draw on all these psychotherapies, with a particular and explicit focus on existential therapy. 

Existential therapy is often defined as a philosophical approach to counselling and psychotherapy. Hence I draw deeply on this approach. I do not ultimately identify with it, because I find that in this approach the philosophical is often subordinated to the psychological, which makes it different to philosophical counselling. Philosophy speaks to, and enlivens, who and what we are as conscious beings, while psychology focuses on and even reduces us to a blind or, as it were, mechanical part of us. Hence I am a philosopher first of all, and a therapist secondly. Also, as a philosopher I do not limit myself to existentialism and phenomenology, whereas this therapeutic approach tends to do that, such that it subscribes to some problematic assumptions.

Existentalism is a form of modernity, in the sense that it accepts--indeed it assumes--modernity's deeply questionable reduction of life to mechanisms, which renders life meaningless and without value. Existentialism accepts that reductive, nihilistic ideology, and sees its task countering the nihilism that it generates, but in a way that assumes the basic truth of that nihilism, of that ideology. Existential therapy is often the therapeutic version of that philosophy. Hence, existential therapists can be quite unthinkingly dogmatic about these things, treating modernity's nihilism not as an ideology but rather assuming it as a piece of wisdom. Then, based on some now incoherent use of the notion that the truth will set you free, existential therapists push their clients to accept his nihilism as the truth, and then encourage them to enact the existentialist answer: superficial creativity or rebellion--the assertion of a personal meaning regardless of the fact of the void. There is a sense in which modernity provides a certain purification, forcing us to reduce our assumptions of what is real, instead of inflating reality through fantasy and wish-fulfillment. At the same time, given it claims to present the truth of reality and so of our situation, as a philosopher I find this dimension of existential therapy incredibly vacuous. Nonetheless, despite that considerable vice, I have taken much from the virtues of this collection of approaches, and those virtues have an important presence in my philosophical counselling. So with this critical caveat out of the way, let us look at the nature of existential therapy and what I find helpful in it. 

Existential therapy draws fundamentally on existential philosophy, and its associated way of doing philosophy called phenomenology. This is an important movement in philosophy, which achieved its cultural height during the middle of the 20th century, and whose big names include Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. Such philosophy, and the therapy based on it, helps us to better understand our human condition. For example, 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 with them in particular, and it enables a whole different way of understanding themselves and of approaching their problems. This "way" is essentially, again, the way of the virtues: based on that existential wisdom about life and myself, I arouse and so face life through my capacities for courage, creativity, passion, strength, and so on.

​Philosophers can be somewhat divided between the extroverts and the introverts, between those who seek an objective understanding of things as dynamic objects, and those who seek to map the dynamic life of our subjective world, our inner life. The two types often badly misunderstand each other and accuse the other of nonsense or blindness. (This is one reason why, when it comes to the use of empirical psychology in my work, I pay serious attention to personality trait research, and its lessons for the differences in how people experience and see reality, which enables us to understand, respond, act, and feel differently in the world with all the threatening otherness of other people.) Phenomenology represents the introverted dimension of philosophy, the tradition of Augustine, of Descartes, of the Romantics. Phenomenological analysis guides people to explore and better understand their subjective experience and way of being. Of course, psychoanalysis was already doing that, and many existential philosophers were greatly impressed by that, especially Sartre. Phenomenology is, however, in my opinion a better way of doing such an exploration, for it describes without reducing things to some favoured causal theory. It seeks to "bracket off" explanation and such assumptions, to see more clearly what is there. Phenomenology had a great influence on Rogers. Indeed it has radically transformed therapy in general across the last century, so that we have on the one hand the extroverted or objectifying approaches of the behavioural psychology and of clinical therapy, and on the other therapy which is relational, focused on our way of being together and its effects, and on deep attention to one's experience and to the inner life. Indeed, a primary goal of such therapy is the happiness and enrichment of the inner life. 

There is also a stoic element to much of existentialism, though it is shaped by other movements such as romanticism, which means that existentialism combines that stoicism with a strong aesthetic aliveness and commitment to passion. One faces the hardness of life with courage and determination, but also creativity and passion, while also drinking in the beauty of the world. I think here of Albert Camus' essays collected under the title Summer in Algiers. Emmy van Deurzen articulates this romantic-stoic-existentialism well: life is tough, and her form of therapy helps people to look at how life works, while becoming also more capable of standing up to its challenges, while also creating the happiness of which we are capable.

Another great existential therapist is Viktor Frankl, whose approach is more simple but perhaps also more profound than its siblings. There is an incoherency in Frankl's writing between modernity's reductivism and so nihilism--meaning and value are not real, they are merely assertions of preference--versus an apprehension that there is more going on here in reality, even if that is ultimately myterious. Nonetheless, this mystery is radically transformative. Frankl's training was a little different to other existential therapists. Whereas Yalom, for example, developed his insights through his work in private practice with his Californian clients, Frankl spent three years as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps, beaten, starving, and humiliated, while his wife and parents were murdered. This shows itself in his work. Much of existentialism could be accused of being, to use Iris Murdoch's description of Sartre, "romantic rationalism." Sartre also invites the word "bourgeois." When people get too comfortable they seem to take pleasure in nihilism, and to cultivate it as a philosophy, as the truth. By contrast Frankl, suffering in that extreme laboratory of human suffering and the human spirit, lacked the luxury to swallow such ideologies or to indulge in such romanticism or existentialist heroism.

In Frankl's writing we find a more sobre sense of the mystery of reality, and so of the mysterious reality of meaning and value, and the difference which such recognition and alignment makes. I am reminded here of the Soviet gulag prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and what he said about the difference that is made to one's philosophy of life, at the first blow of the guard's truncheon. Frankl's notion of meaning is creative, certainly, indeed importantly, 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 vision of reality is grounded in the annihilation of the Faustian intellect through radical affliction, which at least opens the mind to truth, and so wisdom. I believe that Frankl's is a much truer picture, and one that is more wonderful. This is why people read his memoir Man's Search for Meaning. As I say, there is an incoherency, a prevarication in Frankl's writing regarding this issue--a tension between the modernist way of thinking he has been raised in, and what he came to see through his suffering and response to it. The philosophers I have focused throughout my life--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and modern philosophers like Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Christopher Cordner, and Raimond Gaita--provide the articulation that Frankl was reaching for. In short, Frankl's work provides a profound paradigm for existential therapy, however he is a trained as a psychiatrist and not a philosopher, and his limitations show themselves as half-formed, somewhat incoherent statements, sliding between relativism and dogmatism, but pointing in a direction which creates a radically powerful form of therapy.

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. Consciousness is ethical: it sees reality, but also meaning, value, indeed to quote Weil again it is "a thirst for the good." At the same time, we are form in matter, we are embodied, and so our wider being is a composition of various elements. That includes our psychology, which can benefit our consciousness, or which can hinder it. Hence the need for psychological psychotherapy. As a philosophical counsellor I am a philosopher first and foremost, but I draw 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.

I have over-simplified things throughout this reflection, for example if person-centred therapy is a way of being, how it is to be distinguished from philosophy as a way of being. In my defense I will simply say that clarity often requires simplification, and that it is encumbent on each person to understand this need and to include the caveat that substantial and material realities are much more interwoven and complicated. Life is organic. It is a wild and secret garden, growing in many directions. It is possible and good to pay attention to the individuals within that garden, and to explore the distinctions--which often reflect a difference in substances--but also to see the way that things blend. 

When it comes to seeing clients, I work part-time, for my profession is fully that of a philosopher, or more specifically a philosophical counsellor. So I live out a passion and commitment to full-time work on the continuous development of myself philosophically, through reading and writing. I continue to read therapy, though above all I read philosophy, including that which addresses my personal concerns, but above all that which serves my work as a philosophical counsellor. That is philosophy that helps us to make sense of life and to live well. That is enough about me. In 2020 I left my office in Carlton, Melbourne, and began working purely from home by phone and video. I live in central Victoria, in an old home by the forest. Beyond my work, I am a busily gigging a jazz drummer, and I have a passion for restoring and (moreso) riding vintage motorcycles.