Book Review: The Philosopher's Autobiography: A Qualitative Study

I first met Shlomit in 1998 at the 4^th Annual Conference on Philosophical Practice held by the Society of Consultant Philosophers at Bensberg, Germany. I was very struck then by the passion and erudition of her contribution, and these are aspects of her engagement with philosophy, and with the endeavour to make philosophy of practical significance to the fields of psychology and therapy which shine out of this, her latest offering.

For anyone who has read Tim LeBon's excellent primer, Wise Therapy and who wants to know more about philosophical counselling, I think that her earlier text Philosophy Practice: An Alternative to Counselling and Psychotherapy would provide a thought-provoking and useful next step alongside, perhaps, her paper 'Philosophical Narratives and Philosophical Counselling', which appeared in Existential Analysis 8.2 way back in 1997.

This latest book draws on her now completed PhD thesis 'Philosophical Autobiography: A Commentary on the Practice of Philosophy' in which she analyzed the autobiographies of Augustine, Rousseau and Sartre as 'philosophical self-practices'. This reference to the genesis of the book might suggest an advanced level of scholarship, and this is indeed the case: this is by no means an easy read but it is likely to prove infinitely rewarding for anyone who is interested in learning more about the relationship between autobiography and philosophy – with all this entails for our understanding as existential psychotherapists of self-constructs. With regard to the core of her book, I cannot improve on the account Maurice Friedman gives in his Foreword, where he writes that Schuster '…elaborates on the meeting and "mismeeting" of autobiography and psychoanalysis, offering in the place of the traditional Freudian reductvist approach a psychology of her own that does not remove the reality of the author into the interpsychic or try to demonstrate that the present and the future are determined by childhood upbringing and unconscious complexes. Instead she presents a philosophical and psychological approach, influenced by R.D. Laing and others, that gives ample due to personal decision and the congruence, continuity, and changes of personal existence.'

Schuster's book functions on a number of levels: it provides an erudite survey of the development of recognition of the autobiographies of philosophers as a specific genre; it presents (uniquely, I think) an analysis from the philosopher's personal perspective (as disclosed in their writings) of their lived experience and compares this with the changes which may occur in psychoanalysis; it provides an examination of Sartrean psychoanalysis; and it considers the therapeutic potential of combining 'philosophical psychoanalysis' with narrative writing.

These last two I found especially valuable, since my own research interests centre on the therapeutic function of literature, particularly the novel. Schuster writes very clearly about Sartre's existential psychoanalytic method, and what she has to say provides a useful new perspective on what Betty Cannon, in her valuable text Sartre and Psychoanalysis. An Existentialist Challenge to Clinical Metatheory (1991) presents as Sartrean clinical practice in the case history of Martha the 'Marvellous Mirror'. More, these two chapters provide an excellent and readable introduction to the whole of Sartre's semi-autobiographical oeuvre, including Words and The Idiot of the Family – both of which illumine Sartre's project for psychotherapy, and an overview of his political development, and what Schuster terms his ascension 'from politics to ethics'. She is persuasive in her pursuit of her distinctive approach to the link between an author's life and their work, which she states to be 'different from Existential psychoanalysis in that the objective to be disclosed is not the origin of a life, such as the Sartrean fundamental project, but patterns of philosophical activity: threads of intellectual development, change, continuity, discontinuity, consistency, inconsistency, and conflict', (p. 191).

NB. I have just been informed, and Italian-speaking readers might be interested to know, that Apogeo, an Italian publishing company, are currently planning a collection of papers by the Israeli philosophical counsellor Ran Lahav. Apogeo can be contacted at: Apogeo srl, via Natale Battaglia, 12, 20127 Milano.

Simon du Plock