The title is a famous saying by phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, encapsulating a profound insight into the role of language in shaping our understanding of existence: that we learn words and connect them into ideas and in this way we articulate our own version of the world in which we live. Therefore by carefully examining our speeches, we can unveil things about our mentalities and our experience of being human that perhaps we did not even know we were conveying. Our words are like poetry. When the poet sends his verses out into the readers’ world, whoever reads them seems to have a slightly different take on them and often times a poet is surprised at what’s been read between his lines. Being has a way of showing itself to us through language and through the discrepancies between what we say and how we say it, or between what we say and what we do. The meeting with one’s being is impressive and often scary, because it shows the fictitious character of the stories we live by, stories we would rather believe are a reliable truth.
In my therapeutic practice I watch speech and contemplate its implications, the assumptions it is built upon and their frailties. When the interlocutor wants me to see him it is often an expectation that I watch his own construction of his image, that I validate it as the truth of who he is and that I appreciate his being as valuable. This is what people think is therapeutic because it makes them feel relieved and rest under the impression that “someone understands them”. Where does the sentiment of relief come from in he who has his constructions validated by another? This is an important deepening question, as we run the risk of ignoring the others’ being when we are too quick to connect with their highly filtered self-designed image, as if it were the truth about who they are.
When our being is obvious, silence and speech about it say the same thing. Many of us often become worried when we are visible, especially when we are so without our readiness and consent. We prefer the show ourselves in the safety and intimacy of specific relationships where we trust that our fellow humans have no problematic intentions with respect to us, they are careful enough not to endanger us and carefree about how we might hurt them by experimenting with the many facets of our being in relationship with them. The therapeutic setting is one of those safe havens where you can be yourself, or you can play hide and seek with the other and when you are found, the game can still be enjoyable and move on to other hide and seek rounds. At the end, we all depart from this interpersonal play site with insights into our beings — the beings beyond our preferred constructions.
I was invited to a discussion within a group consultation by the “Paris Institute de Pratiques Philosophiques” to present the particularities of working with philosophical practice within the process of psychotherapy. I had only twenty minutes and I spoke about a few observations from practice as well as from my MA research that deals precisely with the various dimensions of philosophical practice in psychotherapy, particularly its metaphorical load: the philosophical consultation is a wholesome experience that retrieves certain deeply rooted memories but insists that one remains engaged with here and now, even if one’s mind is tempted to depart into the particular life stories that have not yet found their proper closure for this person.
I am going to make this part of my presentation available to the paying subscribers and it is to them that I also am willing to respond to the follow up questions they raise. I speak about what the philosophical practice addresses in therapy, how it differs from being used in counselling practice, how it helps the therapist and what are some of its limitations.
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