Emmy van Deurzen in Dialogue with Mick Cooper: Existential Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Journey to a Sustainable Future

Emmy van Deurzen is a remarkable woman whose life story is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Not only has Emmy led a global renaissance of existential therapy, but she has been figural to the development of psychotherapy in the UK and across Europe. Today, she is at the forefront of the Existential Movement, which strives to bring existential ideas to social and political life.

Emmy's narrative weaves the psychological aftermath of World War II with an unyielding pursuit of understanding and global improvement. Through her lens, we gain invaluable insight into existential philosophy's impact on social activism and how it shapes one's dedication to fostering global change.

Venturing into the therapeutic realms, Emmy  describes phenomenology and its profound potential for psychotherapy and for global wellbeing. By embracing the complexity of each individual's perspective, she highlights how subjective realities converge within the therapeutic community, creating a healing narrative tapestry.

In our final segments, we probe the fluid nature of identity and the urgency of ecological consciousness. Emmy shares her vision for a harmonious coexistence with nature's diversity, advocating for a paradigm shift towards sustainability and interconnectedness.

This episode not only invites reflection on our place within the cosmos but also challenges us to innovate collaboratively across cultures, fostering a global community poised to thrive. Join us as we unravel these compelling conversations, setting the stage for a future that embraces creativity, understanding, and a collective responsibility for our planet.

This Podcast is sponsored by Onlinevents 

Transcript

Mick Cooper: 0:01

It's such a pleasure to have you on our therapy and social change podcast. I don't know how to I was thinking how to introduce you, but you've been such a massive, massive influence, not just really catalyzing and developing the existential world in the UK and internationally. You've been a key figure really over the last 20, 30 years Development of training and psychotherapy in the UK and again internationally and in Europe. You've been a massive figure. So it's a real privilege, delight, pleasure to have you here talking to us and we wanted to talk to you really about your thoughts on existentialism and wider social change and what the existential world can contribute, particularly with the development of the existential movement. That is something that you've initiated. That will come on to. But maybe, emmy, you could start by just telling us a little bit about your own personal journey, if that's okay how you came to existentialism and to see existentialism and existential thinking as having something to contribute to the kind of wider social and political arena.

Emmy van Deurzen: 1:06

Absolutely, because it is a very personal thing and it has always been a very personal thing and a kind of personal vocation, really, and a commitment to something that I was trying to work out from very small child onwards. So I was born not too long after the Second World War in a country, the Netherlands, that had been basically erect by the war. I can go on about that for hours. So, for instance, I had family members who had been taken to camps. My father had been in a German work camp and then he had hidden in a loft because he was in the resistance and he was in very great danger running a radio with the United Kingdom and my mother's family, my mother's parents, my grandfather, worked for government department, which was destroyed in the bombing of the Hague early in the war. So the government department moved to Arnhem, which you may recognize. So Arnhem was bombed to the ground by the Allies at the end of the war. So my grandparents then became refugees and lost each other in the throng because it was mayhem and stuff like that. My mother worked with children in a children's hospital who were starving because the Netherlands was starved by the Germans for the last four or five months. So houses were gone. My parents had to live in very small space.

Emmy van Deurzen: 2:55

I grew up in an apartment which you would now call a studio apartment, where, until I was 17, where I shared a tiny, tiny space, only room really for one bed, but just you could add the other bed at night underneath, pull it out underneath, and I was aware of how terrible people had been to each other. We had well, we lived in flats that had been built specifically for people who had suffered in the war. So I was surrounded by Jewish people who had come out of the camps and who had tattoos on their arms and wouldn't want to talk about that, and a lot of men who had been in the Japanese camps of war because they had been in the war in Indonesia. So we heard them screaming at night because their lives were erect totally. They were so afraid of life and all of this stuff. My father also was very traumatised and had nearly died of double pneumonia and had terrible asthma and I saw him struggling with that a lot and he couldn't stand any kind of noise. So there was a lot of conflict and a lot of pressure from the lack of space, and all around me I could see similar things. And then, of course, we went through the Cold War in the 60s, which was very important to the Netherlands because we were stuck between the Anglo-Saxon world and the Russian world, and it was a very scary situation and then followed by other wars the Biafra, the Vietnam War.

Emmy van Deurzen: 4:50

All of that I was acutely aware of how bad people behaved with each other, and I was experiencing this for myself in many ways too, and I absolutely wanted to figure out why people were doing that and how we could create a world not just a society, but a whole world that would be based on better principles. So I became interested in philosophy from a very early age and started reading people like Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre and Camus. And a little later on, in sort of teenage years, I became convinced that life was meaningless and that it was all absurd and there was no point in trying to work it out. So there too, you know, there was a lot of literature that I could read, and you know Kafka and I was reading authors like Hemingway and Steinbeck and stuff like that, and very gradually I realised that this is really something I wanted to make my own and that had a very political side to it. I also became involved a little bit with the Revolution in France in 1968 because my boyfriend was involved in it in France. And I became involved a little bit with the hippie movement in the Netherlands, the provos who were suggesting a new way of doing things, and I was very enthusiastic about that, and also a bit with the feminist movement. You know, very much aware of the oppression of women and not wanting to be oppressed by anybody.

Emmy van Deurzen: 6:42

But then, you know, I moved to France when I finished my high school to study. At first I studied French, but then I realised I was able to transfer to the philosophy department and I realised things looked very different suddenly. Because although I had been involved with all these things, when I was in France I suddenly found myself in a very isolated position. You know, 1970 in France there was no communication with the Netherlands at all. You had to sit in a post office for hours to make a phone call and it was extremely expensive. So I was isolated and I had to think it through for myself. And I had to also confront the fact that the person I was was not really welcome in the south of France the way I was. I was too tall, too blonde, too blue-eyed and far too feminist, and I had trouble with the university for simple things like wearing blue jeans to the university when all the other girls wore little skirts and behaved in little French women ways.

Emmy van Deurzen: 8:08

And suddenly I realised that, leaving all this tension in one country, I found myself confronted with a whole other bowl game of other tensions, and more than ever I sought the support of the philosophers, and of course the main philosophers that I had looked to were Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and a little bit of the Stoics in the early days. But I didn't like the way Plato was taught at all, and so I turned towards these other teachers at the University of Montpellier, and the one who stood really out was Michel-Anne Ly, who is now becoming better known in Anglo-Saxon-speaking countries but wasn't for decades. But he was an extraordinary phenomenologist and a very, very well-read, creative person who has written many, many books, and he taught me so much. He made me read Husserl in German because I could, and he made me discuss things with him, and he made me think about how I could apply these things to my work, because I had started to do work in psychiatric hospitals with my then boyfriend and I was using philosophical ideas to do that. But I became aware that I could do that much, much more carefully if I thought things through a little bit more and I didn't just open up the big questions with my clients. But I also had some idea of how to do that.

Emmy van Deurzen: 10:00

So long before I went back to university to study psychology and then to train actually as a psychotherapist and an endometrial clinical psychologist, long before that I was inventing it on my own, with the help of phenomenology, in the mental hospital of Saint-Alban in the Massif-Centrale, which was the hospital in France that created the revolution in mental health, which is, incidentally, also the hospital that Franz Fanon did his training a few decades before me, and it was created by a guy called well, the way the hospital worked was created by a psychiatrist called Tosca yes, franz Tosca, yes, and after having worked in Saint-Alban, where he no longer was, I then worked for several years with Tosca yes, in the southwest of France and was in supervision with him as I was doing this training in psychotherapy. So it was a combination of this phenomenological and existential input and the clinical practice that became my path really.

Mick Cooper: 11:26

I mean you were saying about a kind of real driving force from very early on was about understanding why people did really bad things to other people, and you were saying about the pain that you witnessed and you sat within as a child and then that you also experienced that isolation as you were growing up and phenomenology and existentialism gave you some answers to that and helped you find a way forward. Can you say maybe a bit more about what phenomenology and existentialism means and means for you and how you found some answers there for both yourself and for others and for society as a whole?

Emmy van Deurzen: 12:05

Yes. So both phenomenology and existential philosophies are a myth, a logical search for truth. So they are a very structured way of figuring out what is true and what isn't true by approaching reality in particular ways. Now there's a very big channel between phenomenology and existentialism, in that existentialism is much more of a political way of applying those ideas and a much more intensely personal way of living. So it is a way of life, whereas phenomenology is a method which teaches you to think in a very systematic way, in a very slow way and in a very critical way.

Emmy van Deurzen: 13:05

And I think that was one of the most important things that I learned that made me a different kind of psychotherapist than the other psychotherapists and mainly the psychiatrists around me.

Emmy van Deurzen: 13:18

Because, you know, for five or six years I lived in psychiatric hospitals because my husband was working as an intern and we had a flat inside a hospital and so I lived within that atmosphere.

Emmy van Deurzen: 13:35

And later on I worked for a year in a therapeutic community where I also lived 24-7 with people and to make sense of living with people who have been labeled autistic or psychotic or whatever, 24-7, and to have to find the strength in yourself not to get drawn into that but to be able to approach their questions about life in a way that helps them get clarity, rather than just be pushed into these labels and in a situation where they basically feel lost.

Emmy van Deurzen: 14:23

So one of the ways in which phenomenology does that is by looking at everything we see or experience again and again and again, to do what I like to call going around the houses. So you look at everything from different aspects, from different angles, physically as it were, and you ask yourself but what was that like for this person or what was that like for that person, and how can you put all of that together, which is not a competition about truth, but it is about the realisation that no one person can have truth, but that we can look for truth by adding more and more facets of reality, rather like you do in a scientific research project, where you look at things from as many angles as you can until you get a kind of saturation and you begin to see that some things are just like this and other things are just like that.

Mick Cooper: 15:38

So let me just to pause you there a sec. So, in terms of using that to understand the people you were working with, how did that help, that idea of seeing it from all those different perspectives?

Emmy van Deurzen: 15:50

Well, because I learned to work with groups from very early on.

Emmy van Deurzen: 15:56

When I started working in Saint-Alban, the people who used to run the big groups in the hospital had just left and I was asked would I like to take over their place?

Emmy van Deurzen: 16:10

And naively I was 21, I think, naively I said, oh, yes, sure, I've done a lot of drama and drama therapy and all that sort of thing.

Emmy van Deurzen: 16:21

I was very at ease with that, so I was plunged in at the deep end. But I learned the hard way, really, that when you have a discussion between many different people in a therapeutic group, you have to pay attention to each of them in the most intense possible way, without saying this is how it is, and then help them do that too, pay attention to what the others say as well, and so you're basically teaching people how to make sense of their reality in the hospital with each other in a new way, in a much more quiet way, in a much slower way, by learning not to fear other people but listen to them, relate to them and learn from them, and also to learn that what they have experienced and what they have to say themselves is equally taken seriously and important. It is something about learning to give emphasis and importance to people's every experience, whilst at the same time pulling it all together.

Mick Cooper: 17:51

Sorry, amy. Is the aim of it in that view of understanding phenomenology? Is the aim for people to recognise and validate their own experiences, or is it something about being able to transcend that and see some truth that is in between everyone?

Emmy van Deurzen: 18:08

Well, very well said, it's both those things. So Husserl spoke about bringing objectivity and subjectivity together, because he was a mathematician and he was a logician and he had come to the realization that mathematics and logic alone could not grasp the whole truth about the universe and human reality, that only if we were able to go into the subjective experience as well as the objective one could we come to formulate something that would hold water. And so he really got himself into this whole different area, and the same was true with Michelangui. So in the beginning, when I was studying with him, he was kind of working this out. He had written a book called the Essence of Manifestation, but that was really all about the materialistic kind of phenomenology, the phenomenology of the things in the world, and he was just on the edge of this. This is why he took a shine to me, because I was actually working in psychiatry and we talked about these things. How can you translate the phenomenology of the things in the world to an internal, an interior of phenomenology which still takes the facts into account but which validates human experience fully and completely, and that will include people's dreams and fantasies and their hopes and all these intangible things that may not be real but that nevertheless have a reality value for people. And I came to realise that, of course, most people actually are determined not so much by their physical circumstances and material things, but they live in a certain way with throwing a certain light on everything they encounter and everything they do, creating certain atmospheres as soon as they step into a room or are with other people, because all of our lives are coloured by our emotional and our imaginary lives and we take that with us. As you know, gestalt psychology was derived from phenomenology and those ideas of Gestalt psychology I'm not talking about Gestalt therapy so much as Gestalt psychology.

Emmy van Deurzen: 21:07

All those psychologists were really interested in this idea of a perception, which is how we got the projective tests, because those were ways of finding out, in kind of measured ways, how each individual was actually perceiving the world and was actually relating to the world and was therefore also modelling their world and modelling themselves and from an existential perspective.

Emmy van Deurzen: 21:37

I would add to that they were making certain choices all the time, but those choices may have been to keep repeating the same things again and again and again. And this is indeed what you find, that once people are on a certain track they will tend to repeat that over and over again, because even if it's unsatisfactory, that's all they know. They find it very much harder to go out on a limb and discover new territory and new ways of looking at things. They also find it very hard to learn from the past. So that's the other part of phenomenology, that everything has to be seen in a temporal way. So a thing is not the same yesterday as it is today or it will be tomorrow. Everything is in change and in flux all the time, and if you don't take that into account, it becomes very tempting to put people in boxes or for people themselves to shut themselves down.

Mick Cooper: 22:47

So that's again that multiple perspectives, multiple temporal perspectives, but all coalescing around some truth. But I mean, what I wanted to ask you is because you're talking, then, about existentialism. So if we understand phenomenology as holding that kind of tension between the individual subjective experiences, circulating some reality and some truth, where does existentialism come into it and what does that add to the phenomenology?

Emmy van Deurzen: 23:16

Well, that's a whole other ball game, of course, and it's a bit of a Pandora's box. So existentialism was actually the name given to Sartre and the Beauvoir and Camus and Merleau-Ponty and people like that. But that is only one little slice of existential philosophy. So existential philosophy in a broader sense is any philosophy that looks at ontology, that looks at the basic givens of human existence and beyond that, as Heidegger for instance, did, at the givens of being itself, at the givens in the universe for as much as we know about it. So there are many layers of existentialism.

Emmy van Deurzen: 24:07

I have long fought and said I'm not an existentialist because I'm interested in all these existential philosophers, which is basically what people in Britain call continental philosophy rather than existentialism. But it isn't true, because not all continental philosophy is about human existence. Some of it is, like you know is empirical and very knowledge based, and you know very much about figuring out how to know something or how language directs you in the world, and things like that. Those things I am not as interested in, although you know they are interesting. What I'm interested in is what theories have people come up with, not just in the west over centuries and millennia, but all over the world ever since there were human beings. What theories have they come up with in order to live their lives in better, more satisfactory ways?

Emmy van Deurzen: 25:14

And it is astonishing, when you look at that, how similar it all is. The pre-socratics or socracies, or the post-socratics, or the stoics or the epicurians, the Buddhists, the Taoists all of them are after the same sorts of things and struggle with the same ideas and principles. But then there are sometimes suddenly people who cause our knowledge and understanding of that to move forward and explode, and I do think that existentialism did that to some extent. But I also think that one of my favourite philosophers, which is Baruch Spinoza, also did that, and he is not at all well known, but I think there is a lot of wisdom in his thinking that we need in psychotherapy and in politics.

Mick Cooper: 26:13

Emi, I want to explore more about existential philosophy in a minute, but I just want to bring you back to the question, then, of how does this relate to what we are saying about phenomenology? Because if phenomenology is that idea of understanding different perspectives and, as well as that, reality, how does that relate to what you are describing as existential philosophy, which is about how we live life better? Are they completely separate, or is one a method for the other one, or does it explain the relationship?

Emmy van Deurzen: 26:42

Yes, so phenomenology is the method of choice for existential philosophy. I would say, though, obviously Socratic Dialogue is also a very important method of choice for understanding that, and all of those tools are incredibly important, as are the hermeneutic tools or the heuristic tools. Those all come from the history of existential philosophy, and they are all helpful in us asking the right questions and going about the analysis and the synthesis of what we perceive in a careful enough way to be able to come up with some valid conclusions.

Mick Cooper: 27:33

So phenomenology, by looking at it from different perspectives, acknowledging that subjectivity but also bringing it together, allows us and is a really effective way of being able to ask these questions about how to live a better life. What kind of? I mean for you, that question about how to live a better life, and you mentioned spinosa what kind of answers do you feel maybe using that method, particularly that emerged from that method?

Emmy van Deurzen: 28:01

Well, for me it is what I have called in my book Everyday Mysteries, the Copernican Revolution. That is much needed in human affairs. So you may be aware of what a Copernican Revolution was, which is when Copernicus was able to prove that the earth turns around the sun, rather than the sun around the earth, as everybody believed at that time. And you may also be aware that Galileo Galilei did a lot of the measurements to prove Copernicus theory wrong and he came up with all the facts and data. But his life was under threat. So Rome wanted to kill him because his theories, the heliocentric universe theory, went against what the Catholic Church taught at that time. So he had to deny what he had found in order to save his life, and Giordano Bruno, who also went along with this heliocentric worldview, was burned at the stake for it. Now, this is a very interesting situation. So these were people who were doing the exact sciences that got us to progress and discover what is actually going on in the universe and of course, we still only know a fragment of what there is to know about that. But this very important revolution to stop thinking that the earth was the center of the universe and to come to realize that the earth and other planets were circling around the sun was fabulously important, and it opened the door to all the research that came after, which has shown us that not only is the earth not the center of the universe, but it is a tiny speck in a huge universe which has amazing billions of galaxies, which is something that is still very hard to even imagine Now. I think that, as human beings, we are currently still stuck in a worldview that is anthropocentric, that is humanist and that believes that human beings are the most intelligent creatures in the world and that we're sort of on our own as these amazing creatures who have such intelligence and who can do with the earth what they want and the universe what they want. And I think this is a fundamental, huge mistake and the same thing you will find in each of our lives.

Emmy van Deurzen: 31:07

As we are born, we learn to think of ourselves as the center of something, and we all become rather self-centered, and sometimes, with our professions, we encourage this. We encourage people to think that they are the most important thing. As I said, I like to do group work and I've done a great deal of couple work and family work over the years, and it's always very mind-blowing to me how things shift for people when they can actually learn to listen to each other and they can learn to see that they weren't really experiencing what the others meant. They were experiencing what they were experiencing and they were kind of stuck in a claustrophobic little space of their own, rather than being in touch with reality in some way. And that is like a Copernican revolution when that happens, when a person reaches out of themselves and begin to realise that, well, you know, maybe it doesn't matter who said what or who can do what.

Emmy van Deurzen: 32:31

Maybe really we are all just little cells of some bigger movement in the universe, where we contribute our part and we need to take responsibility for it, but we need to do it together, in a communal kind of way. And this is where that theory comes back to the political scene, you know, where we can't just say, oh, people just have to learn to be more compassionate and more understanding of each other. We have to look at it from a slightly different angle, an angle that makes it more clear what is needed, which is that each of us has to be able to contribute something to a future in which things can actually change, completely change, because they're going to have to because we're wearing out our resources, and this is really much, much more dramatic than we think it is. You know, we can't continue to live on the planet as we are. We have to realise that things have to change.

Mick Cooper: 33:58

I mean I'm very struck because I guess a lot of people, when they think about existential philosophy, think about maybe freedom, maybe choice, maybe individuality. But what you're describing there is that the learning that's come to you through that existential and that phenomenological method of seeing it from multiple perspectives takes you to a place of moving beyond the kind of anthropocentrism, if I can say that, towards kind of universal recognition, and I guess that's there in many different kind of religions and cultures. But we are the centre of the universe, that recognising that our place in relationships and our decentedness is actually perhaps the most important learning for us at an individual level, but also at a planetary and a global level. That that is the kind of key thing to take forward, which obviously has a very social and political meaning and resonance.

Emmy van Deurzen: 34:54

Yeah, very, absolutely true, and this is why I used to make a big deal about not being an existentialist, because people were just narrowing down the idea of existential philosophy to that one philosophy that flourished in the 50s and 60s, which was all about freedom and choice and post-war enthusiasm, but also about absurdity and meaninglessness and kind of spleen. You know, it wasn't a very positive kind of philosophy and also I think it wasn't a very truthful philosophy. It was what people needed at that time and it did allow you to challenge various ideas, like the whole idea of bad faith is a wonderful thing that came out of that philosophy, which I believe was magic, and that actually goes in that direction, because when Sartre talks about people living in bad faith, it's exactly that. It is that we all learn to define ourselves, our identity, by certain things, certain objects, certain jobs, certain labels, certain things. We like or dislike, certain people we're with or not, and we end up believing that that's all we are and we end up believing that we're terribly different to other people. We're constantly individualizing and we're constantly claiming our difference and we forget to look at all the ways in which we're completely the same and existentialism does help us with that the fact that we're all born and we will all die, and one set of bones is the same as another set of bones, pretty much that you might be able to figure out whether it was a male or a female. You certainly wouldn't know which culture they came from or which religion they had or which job they did. So to come back together requires us to begin to see that human life is being polarized, as our friend Kirchneider likes to say, because actually human existence and everything else I think that we know about all energy is something that happens between two poles or opposite. But in between those two poles there is a huge spectrum and each of us is actually part of those tensions and is also capable of everything on that spectrum. But we opt for certain ways of being and then we dam ourselves wisdom and we become stuck, and so this is a very helpful background theory to feel able to work with your clients in helping them explore that whole spectrum and helping them look at themselves from different angles and helping them remember how they were different at different times in their lives and how they are different in relation to different people and in different relationship, and it can be quite shocking. I'm sure, mick, you know about this how we can change. I mean, I lived in the Netherlands the first 18 years of my life and I spoke Dutch and I spent my life with Dutch people.

Emmy van Deurzen: 38:45

And then I lived in the south of France for the next seven years and I spoke French and I actually had a French name.

Emmy van Deurzen: 38:53

And then I moved to the UK and I spoke English and I, you know, sort of tried to anglicise myself and I became aware that my voice was even different.

Emmy van Deurzen: 39:08

If I recorded myself speaking Dutch, I sounded like a different person to when I recorded myself speaking French or speaking English. Because and here my Lacanian background comes out a bit because the words you use and the structure of the language you use does influence the choices you have and the ways you look at the world and it affects your tone of voice and the way you hold yourself and your gestures and the way you are in the world. And it is extraordinary, and you know, this is why I used to like doing psycho drama with people, because it is a method that allows people to experiment with different ways of being and to discover that they they are not as shy as they thought that when they are on that stage, by Jove. They and they put a different coat on, or a pair of glasses or something, and you give them a line, they can become a totally different person, and it is mind blowing, eye opening.

Mick Cooper: 40:20

I mean you are talking about the kind of fluidity and the way that we can move and the kind of things that share between us. There is a lot of movement today, perhaps more among young people, to kind of identify themselves with particular groups, like forms of neurodiversity that for many young people, older people, are important sexual gender identities. I kind of wanted to ask you, as you have been talking about that, do you have a kind of view on that, about the kind of value of those kind of ways of people seeing themselves?

Emmy van Deurzen: 40:55

It is a very interesting new phenomenon that, you know, takes these things much further than my generation did. So people are claiming a kind of freedom of being for themselves. They are saying well, I am most interested in the non binary part of that which I have been confronted with very, very actively but which is very natural to me because it is familiar. Okay, identifying both with male and female is something I have had to do in my life, you know, being the main breadwinner and having to learn to fight for a business and, you know, make myself much more male in some ways than my sensitive, feminine little self that I was before that. So that experiment which is, by the way, the theme of a Brecht play called the Good Man's man of Saint-Juain where, which is a play I staged with psychiatric patients in Saint-Albonne, and it helped me to really own that distinction between those gender roles and to know that I did not want to be pushed inside of one thing or another. But I have always interpreted in a slightly different way. I have not felt that I had to change gender or identify with another gender to do that.

Emmy van Deurzen: 42:31

I always took the view that as a woman I can perfectly well have some of that. Maybe not. You know as much as you have Mick as a man, but I know that you as a man have also extended yourself to finding out some of your feminine sides, because I know that you worked with John Rowan and I know that was a big deal for him too. So this is nothing new in a way, it's just that this new generation does it. They act it out in an actual way in the world, which is a little bit terrifying to me at times because they're kind of missing with things. You know, but that is how the world has become. It's much more about changing things and materially altering things. People have become much more impactful on the world, and this is something that worries me in a way. I think that is something we need to take awareness of what we're actually doing to the material world by being so materialistic.

Mick Cooper: 43:43

Say a bit more about that, Amy. What does it worry you?

Emmy van Deurzen: 43:46

Well, simply because we have used up the world's resources and are currently using I think the WHO website says 1.6 times the resources that are available every year, and basically it leads to a world that is very unfair and very unbalanced and not sustainable. So this is part of the plight of many people we work with, that they realize that there is kind of exploitation in the world rather than fairness, and that profit and productivity are favored over creativity, and you know, it's all about consumption and it's all about achievement and it's all about short-term results and competition, and these things do not lead to a good atmosphere in which human beings thrive and they also destroy the environment. So clearly these things have to change.

Mick Cooper: 45:00

So, amy, sorry to just go back. So it's not the diversity, it's not that bit that scares you. It sounds like what you're saying is that you really welcome that and it's interesting how maybe the younger generation are doing it and kind of articulating and expressing it. But there's something about the actions on the world of all of us that that's the scary bit in terms of exploiting the world and overusing the resources and the kind of contemporary lifestyle that we need to reflect on.

Emmy van Deurzen: 45:32

Yeah, absolutely so. You know, I'm very politically engaged and I'm very aware that biodiversity is being messed with to such an extent that we're going to be losing so many species, not just of animals, but of vegetation, of everything, at every level, and that we hardly have any forests, clean air and water left. And so we need to face up to these ecological problems, because without a thriving planet, we will never be able to have a thriving population of that planet, and without people understanding how everything they do and everything they commit to makes a difference, we won't be able to change that.

Mick Cooper: 46:29

So, amy, what's your vision of what would a thriving world look like to you? You know, taking account what you're saying about kind of moving away from an anthropocentric model, celebrating and embracing diversity in that, yeah, well, that means first of all, looking at the survival of the planet and everything on and off it, and that should be central.

Emmy van Deurzen: 46:53

That should come first, because we are reliant on this planet and we owe it a debt of gratitude for our own existence and we're, you know, living in ways that are completely absurd. So that's point number one. Point number two is that I would like us to create a different kind of smaller way of living in community, instead of living in these sprawling cities where cars dominate and where pollution dominate and where there is no sense of, you know, community anymore. I mean, it's shocking when you look at all the resources that have been removed, and not just in the UK, but in many countries. You know resources for kids, resources for the elderly, resources for teenagers. These things are few and far between.

Emmy van Deurzen: 47:51

We know how to get people to thrive, if you know about this too. I know this for a fact. You've worked with other lessons a lot and you know what they need. They need bloody space to be able to explore things in and to be with one another and to learn interesting skills. You teach them to sail and to row and to build something and to garden and to God knows all these basic skills. If you teach them those and you give them materials to do these things, they will thrive and they will not stab each other to death with knives.

Emmy van Deurzen: 48:35

So what I'm saying is you can approach mental health problems from trying to repair a person's internal world when actually that internal world has become destroyed, and destroyed by this person not being related to existence in the ways they need to be related to existence.

Emmy van Deurzen: 49:02

They need to be able to experiment and have freedom and have skills to be in the right way with the material world, to be productive in some way and to trust their own crafts and their own art and their own creativity. And they need to learn that they can be loved and they can love rather than having to compete and kill each other. And the more there are wars and the more we see armament in the world and the more we see violent games that teach you how to stand up for yourself and how to kill them all, and the more the movies are like that too, and the less people remember these things. And I am stunned at how little of that wisdom remains in the world sometimes, how embattled people get and how competitive they are and how they just misunderstand. When you want to collaborate with them and you want to be generous and give things away, what will happen is that they'll steal from you or they'll compete with you, or they'll try to do you down.

Mick Cooper: 50:24

So, amy, so politically, policy wise, where would you start from? What would be some of the things that you would want to see?

Emmy van Deurzen: 50:31

Well, now you're getting me back. I've been speaking at various political conferences, both Labour and Liberal. Well, the Liberal Greens. There's biodiversity, protecting the planet. It's non-proliferation of fossil fuels no doubt about it.

Emmy van Deurzen: 50:52

Creating safe public transport, which means much more natural power cycle lanes, not petty cycle lanes as we see in the UK, but proper cycle lanes, as you see in Denmark or in the Netherlands, where people actually will use their bicycles. Make smaller communities where people spend some years of their adolescence learning these physical skills. Have allotments. Have proper health care for everybody. Have proper childcare so that young people can do work where old people are looking after children, you know. Is proper education for everybody available? Have people educated about morality, about different ways of living your life, about thinking about the big questions. Have them think about diversity and respect and self-respect and freedom and lack of freedom and responsibility and dignity and truth and love and freedom and all of that.

Emmy van Deurzen: 52:02

And I'm afraid I'm a bit of a revolutionary.

Emmy van Deurzen: 52:05

I definitely would eliminate extreme wealth by extreme taxes and eliminate poverty by minimum income for all, because we know it can be done, and I think that these are basic things that we need to do in order to get mental health and emotional health back for people, absolutely essential.

Emmy van Deurzen: 52:32

So in terms of wars, of course, I think we should have councils that are much more active than the United Nations, which is, you know, not powerful enough in its interventions and which doesn't use it uses diplomacy, but it doesn't use these new methods of dialoguing and, you know, actually pausing and seeing how to work out difficulties and conflicts by debate, and that debate might have to carry on for a year before you get solutions or propositions about how you're going to factually sort it out.

Emmy van Deurzen: 53:16

Dick B and I used to be co-directors of the Centre for the Study of Conflict and Reconciliation at the University of Sheffield, as you may remember, and one of our colleagues was involved with the Good Friday talks and we talked a lot with him about that, and you know those Good Friday talks. We should think about them a great deal more, because it was a wonderful blueprint on how to overcome decades of murder and mayhem and actually coming up with a solution that people were accepting. And I cannot, for the life of me, understand why we are not applying what we know about groups and about group interventions and dialogue and what they did there in Northern Ireland. Why are we not applying this across the globe in all these conflicts. It drives me batty to see how people are just messing up left, right and centre all the time, when we know better.

Mick Cooper: 54:29

I mean.

Mick Cooper: 54:30

What I sense, just to try and pull it together in terms of how I understand it, is that your journey has really begun with kind of being in experiencing the suffering and struggles of people and that phenomenology became a method for you as a way of understanding that and seeing these multiple perspectives and asking this question, through existentialism, of how can we live a better life.

Mick Cooper: 54:56

And as you're taking that forward alongside your therapeutic work, I get a sense that that's kind of opened up more and more and where is people maybe have identified your work more with kind of individual questions. It's become more and more journey towards a kind of political global understanding of the global issues that are out there. And living a better life is not a question about me, just about me and my life and how do I make my life better, but it's a question about how is the society, what do we need to change? And the changes that you've been talking about me are all at a kind of political and a social level in terms of environmental issues and transport I don't know. You've been very involved around Brexit as well as well as kind of issues of equity. I guess it's fascinating and I'm kind of well listening to that whole journey and just the kind of steps that you've taken and the distance you've travelled. Do you think where do you see individual coming back to individual therapy and think about therapies? Listening to this.

Emmy van Deurzen: 55:55

Thank you. Thank you, do you think?

Mick Cooper: 55:56

therapy has a place or oh?

Emmy van Deurzen: 55:58

yes, yes, yes, of course it has a place, because there are many people that do get messed up along the way and they need therapy. They need a space, a safe space and somebody who can understand them, to unpack it all and to fit all the pieces back into a way that makes sense to them so that they can live their lives again. Yeah, that's very important.

Mick Cooper: 56:23

Do you think the therapeutic world, the therapeutic movement, has been active or involved enough in these wider social concerns?

Emmy van Deurzen: 56:33

Not at all, mick. We should be much more active in that. But there's also an intermediate thing, which is what I'm also very involved in at the moment, which is between psychotherapy and political work, which is really popular psychology and popular philosophy. It is about giving these ideas to people for them to use in their own lives, and I have a book that will come out with Penguin, called the Art of Freedom, a Guide to a Wiser Life, which seeks to do that. And oh, it's so hard to write it, mick, because you realise how difficult it is to explain these things in really quite simple terms but in effective ways, so that people can actually do this on their own and they can make sense of it and they can see how much better they could live if they were able to be more free physically, socially, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, in all those ways.

Mick Cooper: 57:45

I mean, how do people who are therapists and who maybe haven't got the writing experience that you have or kind of that experience of writing in clear ways, how do they get involved in something like that? What can they do?

Emmy van Deurzen: 58:00

Ah well, we have the existential movement we have just set up, which is the same thing. It is about bringing wisdom to the world, and I would very much like to see initiatives for the existential movement to pick up. I mean, we just talking to with John actually John Wilson and Kirk about starting a series of demonstrations by Kirk Schneider of this democratic dialogue that he's involved with experiential democratic dialogue, which is one way of bringing psychotherapy and politics together, and I look very much forward to seeing how that goes, because I think that is something a lot of people would be interested in.

Mick Cooper: 58:52

Can you say a bit more about it? Democratic dialogue.

Emmy van Deurzen: 58:55

Well, it is about bringing opposing parties together and teaching them to listen to each other, exactly as you would in couple therapy, where you would enable a person to get out from behind their shields and actually being with the other person and actually feeling with the other person and actually beginning to like and love the other person again. And so opinions begin to melt together and you begin to see new ideas coming out of those dialogues, ideas that are amenable to both parties. It's not imposing your will on the other. It's about both of you being willing to allow the other to give you a gift, to give you something of what you do not yet know, something new. And this is what we're so averse to so often. We see the other so often as a competitor or an enemy or an opponent, rather than as another human being who is part of the same system and who has some experiences that are unique and wonderful, that can trigger something new for you. We have so much to give to each other, each of us.

Mick Cooper: 1:00:33

And that goes back to your description of phenomenology, doesn't it? And how it's about?

Emmy van Deurzen: 1:00:38

you see it, you see it how that framework of phenomenology holds all these things in place and reminds you of how to go about these things and how to stay centered with that rather than get into your own stuff. How to keep your eye on the whole thing all the time whilst feeling it deeply inside of you, the subjective and the objective structures. That's why I call my thing structural existential analysis.

Mick Cooper: 1:01:15

If people want to find out about the existential movement or get involved, what should they?

Emmy van Deurzen: 1:01:19

do Go to the website existentialmovementworld, and we're just in the first stages of this movement, but we hope to do so many, so many interesting things. Get the media involved, get politicians interested. Disguise the limit. Honestly, it should be relevant to anyone and everyone, and it's wonderful to see that so many people on the advisory board from all over the world are putting so much effort into it. It's wonderful to work with Saifu Wang in China and to see how hard he's working to bring all these ideas into the Chinese mind. And the Chinese mind, of course, pays us back huge dividends because it shows us that we haven't fully understood it, because they have different angles on it. And the same happens when you go to Israel or when you go to Russia, or when you go to Ukraine, or when you go to Canada or when you Australia. It's always slightly new and slightly different and it changes you. And the more we weave this together with each other, the more we create a fertile ground for all of us to thrive on and bloom with. That's what I believe.

Mick Cooper: 1:02:52

Yeah, Thank you so much, Emmy. I mean I can just listening and talking to you. I can really feel that different perspective has given me so much to go away and think about and hoping for people listening as well. I'm sure that it will have kind of broadened, expanded, creatively, started new thinking and new ideas and to broaden that and then to come back also into, as you say, your existential movement and to be able to link with others. Thanks again, Emmy, for wonderful, wonderful, wonderful opportunity to talk to you.

Emmy van Deurzen: 1:03:24

It's a great pleasure and a great opportunity for me to test some of those ideas and to stop being too wild about it and stay concrete and practical about it. Thank you Mick Very much and thanks John for the opportunity.

Mick Cooper: 1:03:42

Thanks, John.