‘One of the most profound encounters of my life’: could existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen change the way you think?

Her philosophical approach to therapy has become a global phenomenon, and inspired a new book. Could a session with her change Sophie McBain’s life? The existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen moved to the UK inspired by RD Laing, the Scottish anti-psychiatrist who said insanity is a “perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”. It was 1977 and Van Deurzen, who is Dutch and had studied philosophy and psychology in France, found work with the Arbours Association in London, a therapeutic community based on Laing’s ideas, in which people in crisis, psychiatrists and therapists lived together as equals. Arbours aimed to create space for people to “explore their madness”.

Van Deurzen came to believe that anti-psychiatry had “lost courage”: it had proposed a different way of thinking about madness, but having released people from asylums and taken them off neuroleptic drugs, it was “kind of leaving them to it”. Interview Sophie McBain Her philosophical approach to therapy has become a global phenomenon, and inspired a new book. Could a session with her change Sophie McBain’s life? T he existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen moved to the UK inspired by RD Laing, the Scottish anti-psychiatrist who said insanity is a “perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”. It was 1977 and Van Deurzen, who is Dutch and had studied philosophy and psychology in France, found work with the Arbours Association in London, a therapeutic community based on Laing’s ideas, in which people in crisis, psychiatrists and therapists lived together as equals.

Arbours aimed to create space for people to “explore their madness”. Van Deurzen came to believe that anti-psychiatry had “lost courage”: it had proposed a different way of thinking about madness, but having released people from asylums and taken them off neuroleptic drugs, it was “kind of leaving them to it”. Existential therapy is “a philosophical approach to therapy and how to live your life in a better way,” Van Deurzen explains, “it is about working with life, rather than just with the psyche”. In 2015, Van Deurzen organised the first ever international congress for existential therapy in London, which was attended by almost 700 people from all over the world. At 15, Van Deurzen fell wildly in love with a 20-year-old Frenchman she met on a camping holiday in Portugal.

Van Deurzen found a renewed sense of purpose, and ultimately a vocation. Van Deurzen worked as a psychoanalyst and began to develop her “philosophical method” of talking with patients. Van Deurzen also studied for a master’s in clinical psychology. Van Deurzen opened her first private practice in 1978. Could a session with her change Sophie McBain’s life?

The existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen moved to the UK inspired by RD Laing, the Scottish anti-psychiatrist who said insanity is a “perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”. It was 1977 and Van Deurzen, who is Dutch and had studied philosophy and psychology in France, found work with the Arbours Association in London, a therapeutic community based on Laing’s ideas, in which people in crisis, psychiatrists and therapists lived together as equals. Arbours aimed to create space for people to “explore their madness”. Van Deurzen came to believe that anti-psychiatry had “lost courage”: it had proposed a different way of thinking about madness, but having released people from asylums and taken them off neuroleptic drugs, it was “kind of leaving them to it”. ‘One of the most profound encounters of my life’: could existential therapist Emmy van Deurzen change the way you think?