Overview

Acknowledging that storying the self is a more powerful and wholistic way of describing personal identity than the more theoretical and structural approaches offered by mainline therapies from psychodynamic and behaviourist to the more humanistic schools of thought and practice, this dissertation sets out to establish that there is a far deeper reality underpinning the Self. That deeper reality, I argue in these pages is an enlivening spiritual foundation which is all too often unacknowledged and cursorily dismissed. Existential Therapy, I contend, is by far the most profound therapy as it faces head-on the presence of evil in the world at large and in the lives of both therapist and client as well as the more common presenting problems encountered in therapy. Focussing on the clinical work and existential theory of the American psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, this dissertation presents the case that, while his approach is at the cutting edge of existential therapy, his work is lacking in its acknowledgement that to do therapy in the most healing way possible involves a spiritual dimension or foundation that can be best approximated through story. It is here that I engage with an analysis of what I argue is the more powerful and effective storying of the Self offered by the nineteenth century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. The storying used by Irvin Yalom is immanent and bounded within the human concerns of the patient while the storying employed by Fyodor Dostoevsky is unbounded, open-ended and open to the transcendent. My argument is that this latter unbounded and transcendent-focused writing therapy effects a greater healing than that offered by the immanent therapy provided by Yalom. This dissertation is a detailed examination, then, of the shared existential space between Talk (Yalom) and Text (Dostoevsky) which will result in the fullest healing of the client when at last a spiritual foundation has been acknowledged.

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9781835206607

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