Integrated LifeCounselling & Therapy

The Thinkers Behind My Work

My approach draws on a range of sources and influences. Among these are:

In addition, through reading and research, I take my guidance from a select group of thinkers and authors: psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, a philosopher and a novelist. Some of them lived through extraordinary hardship, and all of them took the inner life of ordinary people seriously. Below is a short introduction to each: who they are, a few of their books, and what their ideas mean in the therapy process.

You don’t need to know any of this to come to counselling. It is here for anyone who is curious about where my approach comes from, described more fully on my Approach page. If you would like to read further, many of their books are on my recommended reading list.

Rollo May

1909–1994 · American psychologist

Rollo May helped bring existential thinking into mainstream psychology. He wrote about anxiety, love, will and creativity, and about the courage it takes to become yourself in a world that would often rather you didn’t.

Books include The Art of Counselling, The Meaning of Anxiety, Love and Will, The Courage to Create and Freedom and Destiny.

In the therapy process. May saw some anxiety not as a malfunction but as the cost of being free, and of caring about something. In counselling that means anxiety is not only something to remove; it can also point towards what matters. His picture of the person, and the counsellor’s task that follows from it, is set out on my existential counselling page.

Irvin D. Yalom

Born 1931 · American psychiatrist, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Stanford University

Yalom is one of the most influential voices in existential psychotherapy, and a gifted writer of both textbooks and stories. He describes four “givens” of existence that every person has to meet in some way: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness.

Books include Existential Psychotherapy, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Love’s Executioner, When Nietzsche Wept, The Gift of Therapy and Staring at the Sun.

In the therapy process. For Yalom, the relationship itself does much of the healing, and a therapist should find a new therapy for each person rather than apply one method to everyone. He is wary of letting a diagnosis stand in for the whole person. His influence is everywhere in how I work: the honesty of the relationship, the attention to what is happening between us in the room, and the willingness to take life’s big questions seriously.

Viktor Frankl

1905–1997 · Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist, founder of logotherapy

Frankl survived the Holocaust and the concentration camps, and went on to found logotherapy, an approach built on the idea that our deepest drive is a will to meaning. He observed that even when almost everything is taken away, a person can still choose their attitude towards what is happening.

Books include Man’s Search for Meaning, The Doctor and the Soul and The Will to Meaning.

In the therapy process. Frankl described three avenues to meaning: what we create or do, whom and what we love, and the stance we take towards suffering we cannot change. When something in your life cannot be fixed, the work can turn to how you stand in relation to it. His ideas are central to my own story, which I describe on the existential counselling page.

Albert Ellis

1913–2007 · American psychologist, founder of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT)

Ellis developed REBT in the 1950s, one of the forerunners of today’s cognitive behavioural therapies. He was direct, practical and often funny, and he drew openly on the Stoic philosopher Epictetus: we are disturbed less by events than by the views we take of them.

Books include A Guide to Rational Living (with Robert Harper), Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy and How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything.

In the therapy process. Ellis showed how rigid demands, the “I must”, “they should” and “I can’t stand it”, drive much of our distress. Noticing those demands, and testing them gently against reality, can loosen their grip. I use this where it helps, particularly with anxiety, anger and guilt.

Edith Eger

Born 1927 · Hungarian-born American psychologist

Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz at sixteen. She survived, rebuilt her life, and later trained as a clinical psychologist in the United States, where she worked for decades with people living with trauma.

Books include The Choice and The Gift.

In the therapy process. Eger distinguishes between what was done to us and what we go on doing to ourselves, and writes about freeing ourselves from the prisons we build in our own minds. She is honest that healing takes time, and warm about the courage it asks of us. Her work sits close to mine with crisis and trauma.

Simone de Beauvoir

1908–1986 · French philosopher and writer

De Beauvoir was one of the central figures of existentialism, a novelist, and one of the most important feminist thinkers of the twentieth century. She wrote about freedom, about how much of who we are is shaped by others and by society, and about ageing and death.

Books include The Ethics of Ambiguity, The Second Sex, The Mandarins, A Very Easy Death, Old Age and her Letters to Sartre.

In the therapy process. De Beauvoir helps us see which expectations we have absorbed from family, culture and the people around us, and which choices are genuinely our own. That distinction is at the heart of much of the work on identity and on relationships where one person has lost sight of themselves.

Carl Rogers

1902–1987 · American psychologist, founder of person-centred therapy

Rogers was one of the founders of humanistic psychology. He believed that people have within them the capacity to grow and to find their own way forward, given the right kind of relationship.

Books include Client-Centered Therapy, On Becoming a Person and A Way of Being.

In the therapy process. Rogers described the core conditions of a helping relationship: empathic understanding, unconditional positive regard, and congruence, meaning that the therapist is genuine and honest. These form the foundation of how I work. You are the expert on your own life; my task is to offer a relationship in which you can see it more clearly.

James Hollis

Born 1940 · American Jungian analyst

Hollis writes in the tradition of Carl Jung, with unusual clarity for ordinary readers. Much of his work is about the second half of life, and about the parts of ourselves we would rather not see.

Books include The Middle Passage, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Why Good People Do Bad Things and Living an Examined Life.

In the therapy process. Hollis argues that the first half of life is often built on what we inherited and what was expected of us, and that the second half asks who we are apart from our history and our roles. He treats midlife unease as an invitation, not a malfunction. His work is close to what I do with life transitions, meaning and purpose.

M. Scott Peck

1936–2005 · American psychiatrist

Peck’s first book opens with three words that have stayed with millions of readers: “Life is difficult.” He wrote about discipline, love and spiritual growth in a way that brought psychiatry into everyday language.

Books include The Road Less Traveled, People of the Lie, The Different Drum and Further Along the Road Less Traveled.

In the therapy process. Peck’s point is that accepting difficulty is what makes it bearable, and that avoiding pain often causes more of it. He described love as a commitment to another person’s growth, and your own. His work speaks to taking responsibility for your life with compassion, not blame. I quote him on my About page.

Karen Horney

1885–1952 · German-born psychoanalyst, who later worked in the United States

Horney was one of the first psychoanalysts to challenge Freud, arguing that culture and relationships shape us far more than he allowed, and questioning his views on women. She wrote about anxiety, about the idealised self we try to live up to, and about our real self underneath it.

Books include The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, Self-Analysis, Our Inner Conflicts and Neurosis and Human Growth.

In the therapy process. Horney described the “tyranny of the should”: the inner demands about who we ought to be, which leave us feeling we never measure up. She also noticed how people cope with anxiety by moving towards others, against them, or away from them. Recognising these patterns can bring a great deal of relief, particularly in work on self-esteem and identity and anxiety.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

1821–1881 · Russian novelist

Dostoevsky was sentenced to death as a young man, reprieved at the last moment, and sent to years of hard labour in Siberia. He lived with epilepsy, debt and, for a time, a gambling compulsion. Out of that life came some of the most searching novels ever written about the human mind.

Books include Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

In the therapy process. Few writers understand guilt, conscience, freedom and self-deception as deeply. The Gambler draws on his own experience of compulsive gambling; Crime and Punishment follows what guilt does to a person; The Brothers Karamazov shows how family patterns pass from one generation to the next. His novels sit close to my work on guilt, gambling and family relationships.

Getting in touch

If something here has stirred a question you would like to talk about, you are welcome to send me a message.

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