Saturday mornings, 0930-1230

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This ten seminar course will explore in detail the emergence of the major varieties of modern psychotherapy, and their philosophical background, which is nowadays not recognised to be, in most cases, more important than the scientific-medical background. The links which will be explored are, of course, not rigid ones. Our main aim will be to raise awareness of, and be able to explore, the way in which implicit core assumptions pervade all our approaches in psychotherapy, often only half recognised within the respective schools.

By giving less time than in the 2009/2010 courses to the period from Descartes up to Nietzsche, and devoting two seminars to each of the major traditions, it will be possible to interweave discussion of philosophical and psychotherapeutic innovators in more detail and we shall also be able to devote attention to how this may all work out in the detail of practice. 

The outline of the ten seminars will be as follows

1. Background to the Modern Period in Philosophy: Descartes to Nietzsche (October 2)

2/3. Philosophies of Will and Drive (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein), and the rise of Psychoanalysis: part I/II (November 20 & December 11)

Freud, Jung, and the subsequent traditions and developments in both analytic traditions will be our focus, in the context of the influence of modern voluntarism and drive and energetic theory, and its modifications through relationality and intersubjectivity theory.

4/5. Analytical Philosophies - Logical, Positivist, and Linguistic - and the rise of Cognitive-Behavioural Psychotherapies: parts I/II (January 15 & February 5)

The tensions between a radical logical empiricism and a broader based commonsense emphasis on language in context in the later analytic tradition, are mirrored in the gradual emergence of varieties of cognitivism from behaviourism in psychotherapy - something which is now converging even with psychoanalytic and integrative-humanistic approaches.

6/7. Phenomenological-Existential-Hermeneutic Philosophies and the rise of Humanistic-Existential and Relational Psychotherapies: parts I/II (March 5 & April 2)

The spectrum of evolution from pure phenomenology (Husserl) to existential-ontological approaches, and modern hermeneutic approaches such as those of Gadamer and Ricoeur, are again mirrored in the immense diversity in approaches in the humanistic-existential psychotherapy world, with some 20 or 30 major approaches in Europe and American.

8/9 Systemic, Field, Structuralist, and Organicist Philosophy and Literary approaches: Systemic, Field and Constructivist Psychotherapies parts I/II (May 7& June 4)

Once again, a great diversity in the philosophical/anthropological/literary background is mirrored in a great variety of constructivist and systemic and field based approaches in psychotherapy.

10. Post-Modernism, the end of philosophy, and the possible supersession of philosophy by science: Radical Experientialist Developments in Psychotherapy (July 2)

We shall be aware of post-modern developments in much of the previous seminars, and we shall use post-modernism in this seminar to survey the relative positions at the present time of philosophy and science, to complete our synopsis of the modern period!