Philosophical Reflections and Insights for Psychotherapists – A Workshop Series by Dr Steven Segal – Third Workshop – Kierkegaard’s understanding of anxiety as an adventure provides a framework through which to consider the relation between action, insight and reflection in therapy – 2 July 2025 @ 10 am to 12 pm GMT

Philosophical Reflections and Insights for Psychotherapists

How Can We Use the Combination of Philosophy and Psychotherapy to Enhance Our Therapeutic Wisdom?

Philosophy offers a rich understanding of the role of emotions in responding to mental health challenges. Moods such as anxiety, perplexity, despair, confusion, curiosity, and wonder are triggers that sustain both philosophical reflection and psychotherapy. Philosophical reflection adds to the modules, skills, wisdom, and attunement of psychotherapeutic approaches. It provides frameworks for enabling clients to turn moods into opportunities to see, do, and be in the world in much more fulfilling ways. Each philosopher provides a process for working with healing and transformation. For example, Socratic questioning is a process of dealing with perplexity, while Martin Heidegger shows how phenomenology and hermeneutics provide processes for working with questions of meaning, anxiety, and the point of existence.

This workshop series will provide psychologists and psychotherapists with a set of philosophical frameworks and skills to work effectively with disruptive moods that clients bring into therapy. This series will explore the therapeutic dimension of each philosophy by appreciating the lived experience of the moods of disruption.

Philosophy offers additional ways of understanding and responding to them. It does so by providing frameworks that help clients work with their experiences in ways that lead to greater psychological flexibility, insight, and change. Each philosophical tradition provides different ways of engaging with emotions and disruption:

1. Socratic questioning helps clients develop insight by working through perplexity
2. Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom provides a framework within which to embrace the uncertainties, complexities and contingencies of the lived experience of therapy
3. Kierkegaard’s understanding of anxiety as an adventure provides a framework through which to consider the relation between action, insight and reflection in therapy
4. Nietzsche provides a framework in which to overcome and become ourselves by embracing moods of nihilism
5. Heidegger allows us to see existential anxiety as an opportunity to transform our ways of being-in-the-world.

The series will introduce psychologists and psychotherapists to the therapeutic dimension of different philosophical traditions by focusing on how they engage with the lived experience of moods of disruption. Rather than treating philosophy as an abstract discipline, we will explore how it can enrich therapeutic practice by providing additional ways of helping clients engage with their experiences and find new possibilities for action, meaning, and self-understanding.

Format of sessions: Each 2-hour session will begin with an overview of the therapeutic importance of the philosopher under consideration. A case history of s client or therapist will then be presented. This will be followed by a discussion of the case history. Finally, the discussion will be integrated into a deeper understanding of the therapeutic significance of the philosopher.

Dr Steven Segal is a psychotherapist and academic consultant. He has a PhD in Philosophy of Education which allows him to bring a depth and breadth of philosophy into his practices. He has published two books, edited two books and has written over 30 peer reviewed articles in a diverse range of disciplines including leadership, education, philosophy, psychotherapy and research. He was an associate professor at Macquarie University where he spent twenty-two years joyfully engaging MBA students in the delights of philosophy and psychotherapy.

A Certificate of Attendance will be emailed to participants.

If you think you have a new and interesting topic to share with us and would like to be our next speaker please, don’t hesitate to contact our events organiser on events@existentialanalysis.org.uK.