Editorial

An ever recurring question for existential therapists is: What is existential therapy? How may it be best expressed?

In this issue there are many different attempts to answer this. Some favour a sort of scientific model, that ideally there should be a paradigm, others that it is a philosophy, possibly following Eastern schools of thought, or the Husserlian approach, or a natural history, or perhaps it is best expressed as poetry.

Perhaps Socrates can enlighten us. Central to him was that he knew that he did not know and that he was a master of erotics. A philosopher is erotic because he is in the middle between wisdom and ignorance. He is neither wise as are the gods nor fully ignorant, for if he were he would not pursue wisdom because he would not know that he needs it - being self-satisfied and unaware of the difference between knowledge and opinion.

Eros is love in regard to the beautiful, it does not possess it but is a desire that pushes towards completeness, it is awareness of a lack and so is linked to the knowledge of ignorance. This awareness is aroused when we fall into a perplexity, that is a position where we do not know where to turn.

This is the uneasy position of the philosopher and, we might suggest, of the existential therapist.

Simon du Plock