Book Review: Existential Therapies

Existential Therapies

Mick Cooper. (2003). London: Sage.

'Existential therapies, not therapy', this is Mick Cooper's reason for writing this book. As an overview of a number of different existential therapies the book is extremely welcome and manages in a relatively short space to cover a wide arena. Thus, Cooper delivers a chapter on Daseinanalysis, Logotherapy, American humanistic-existentialism, R.D. Laing, the British School of Existentialism and Brief existential therapies. In addition he provides an overview of existential philosophy, a chapter on existential therapeutic practice and a rather useful section on how to contact the different existential societies.

Cooper identifies four aims of the book. 'First to introduce readers to the rich tapestry of existential therapies; second to provide readers with ideas and practices that they can incorporate into their own work; third to help readers identify – and follow up – areas of existential therapy that are of particular interest to them; and fourth, to contribute to a range of debates within the existential therapy field.'

His introduction of new ideas is particularly highlighted in the chapter on existential philosophy where Cooper presents a box comprising key existential philosophers and a couple of slightly curious figures on the relationship between existence and essence. Far more effective for me was his technique of using the reader's lived experience of reading the book to highlight this relationship. This first chapter ends as do the majority of others with a section entitled critical perspectives. I have to say this part of the book was simply too brief to do justice to the complexity of the arguments and I was left totally unconvinced by Cooper's response to the criticisms that he himself levelled. I have no doubt that Cooper would be able to provide far more substantial arguments, but one paragraph each to deal with whether existentialism is essentialist, whether it is directive, whether it is amoral (I remain absolutely unconvinced that existentialism is moral simply because Sartre and Camus took an active stance against fascism), whether it is overly-morbid (Cooper's one line definition that 'it's similar to person-centred therapy…only more miserable' says far more than a paragraph on existential philosophers flirtations with positive moods can ever do), that it is irrationalist and that it is not post-modern enough is not sufficient. The problem as I see it is that students are likely to take these brief responses as actual arguments against the very valid criticisms raised. By being more tentative and stating that these responses are some out of many and are not presented as arguments would, I think, remove this danger.

Each of the remaining chapters have both strengths and weaknesses and I would like to draw the readers attention to two of these in particular. The chapter on Daseinanalysis is essentially a chapter on the work of Medard Boss. This is something that Cooper acknowledges in his critical section of the book. It is also where he notes that writings "such as Binswanger's on the dual mode of love - have fallen by the wayside." Interestingly, Cooper devotes just one paragraph to Binswanger at the beginning of the chapter and then curiously misses an opportunity to redress the balance that he identifies in his critique. A minor irritation for me was that Cooper begins to mix up his genders, so that on page 44 he moves from an example of a male client and his boyfriend to a female client. As these are exemplifying general points and are in the same paragraph, consistency of gender would be less distracting.

On the positive side Cooper does a very good job of demystifying the work of Daseinanalysis. The description of Daseinanalytic dream work left me wondering about the real value of therapy when dream content is essentially transparent. However, as Cooper points out such transparency can be more illusory than real, with therapists re-introducing bracketed assumptions while holding to a philosophy that suspends such interpretation.

The chapter on Logotherapy was extremely interesting but brief (12 pages) and this may very well explain some of my concerns. Cooper quite rightly notes the importance of Scheler to Frankl's work and I was hoping for an interesting exposition on the relationship between the two sets of ideas. Unfortunately, Cooper simply mentions two aspects of Scheler's work that were of particular importance to Frankl, and then moves on. Thus the relationship between Scheler's ideas and their influence on Frankl is covered in three sentences.

Other parts of the chapter could also have been usefully expanded. For example, a paragraph on de-reflection does not mention Kierkegaard's work, particularly the Two Ages, on how we reflect ourselves into inaction. A small criticism but one that is important for therapists, is the role of paradoxical intention for social phobia. The reference for this is 1983 and all of the work in this area since about 1986 has highlighted the particular importance of cognitions and the difficulty of disproving these through paradoxical intention in social phobia. This raises a more general issue relating to the question of evidence and empirical support. Logotherapy, is, in my view, an area in which reasonably well validated scales such as the Purpose in Life Test and The Life Regards Index are genuinely helpful and it would have been useful to have mentioned these.

I had far fewer concerns about the other chapters and found them both well written and comprehensive. The chapter on The British School of Existential Analysis was particularly illuminating and would serve as a useful guide to non-existential clinicians concerning the relevance of contemporary existential therapy in the UK.

The chapter on R D Laing was also extremely clear, although some mention of 'Reason and Violence' with David Cooper would be useful for those who wanted to understand Laing's relationship to Sartre's philosophy.

Overall I rate this book highly. To pull together a large and somewhat disparate literature then make sense of it and finally retain the reader's interest is difficult. Cooper has also managed, although this was not one of his aims, to present 'Existential Therapies' not as a disparate set of competing therapies but as a nascent form of social unity. Undoubtedly, every reader of this journal will find particular areas of disagreement and particular areas in which more was required, but Cooper as an ex-journalist knows the importance of writing for his audience – his audience in this case being those readers who require an introduction to existential therapies.

R.G. Hill