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A Philosophical Background to the Psychotherapies
To be held on one evening per month for four and a half hours per meeting, over eleven months. (44 hours CPD)
Led by Dr. Heward Wilkinson
Invitation to expression of interest to: [email protected]
This course would introduce key moments, involving key figures in post-Renaissance Western philosophy, in relation to core psychotherapy theories. The assumption behind this is that psychotherapy is, among much else, a theory field, based on multiple modalities or approaches. These draw upon some differentiated potential or mode of human emotion (primarily), as a form of intervention, to articulate the specific causal processes of such modalities. The course would not attempt a fully comprehensive account of philosophy, but would seek to be rigorous for the parts of the philosophers from whom it draws.
I shall make it as accessible as I can and seek to give clear responses to challenges and questions, but philosophy is a genuinely puzzling and challenging subject, and is likely to feel daunting at times, not to be lightly undertaken. It will not require specialist knowledge, as we reflect on matters of which we all have experience, but it will require creative thinking ‘out of the box’. I am looking to a likely start in September.
Apart from the introductory survey of the whole course, each two session phase of the course would consist of:
Discussion of a key passage or passages of a pivotal philosopher, or philosophers, from the 17th or 18th Centuries, correlated with related figures from the 20th Century.
These would be, in turn, deeply connected with major meta-modalities of the field of psychotherapy, upon a ‘best fit’ (not necessarily perfect fit) basis, - a relationship of congruence.
Psychotherapy, assuming its aims to be both remedial of human suffering, and enabling of human well being, would be defined by the spectrum of the differences of the modalities.
One of the recognitions we would explore is that the differences and major clusterings are not sharp or definitive or fully consensual.
So we would also seek within the course for the cumulative generic conceptual core constituting the spectrum of the field as a whole.
Naturally, also, there is both more overlap and continuity of definition between approaches, and less agreed location of them, than can be indicated in a rough sketch, such as now follows.
The course would be delivered in 11 monthly evening sessions of four and a half hours, with a half hour break in the middle, consisting of presentation of theory in the first two hour part and open-ended experiential discussion and exploration in the second part. It would be online. Members would need to be committed to the whole sequence, on a closed group basis. The cost would be £60.00 per member for each monthly evening session or £600.00 if paid in advance for the whole sequence. Outline material and recommended reading would be provided for each session in advance.
Subject to the impact of the explorations of psychotherapy itself, the sessions would run roughly as follows:
Session One
Survey of the whole field as below
Session Two and Three
Humanistic Psychotherapy and Phenomenology
Rene Descartes (Meditations on First Philosophy) as the inaugurator of modern philosophy - and implicit pioneer of what became Phenomenology
Modern Philosophy: Correlated with the Intentionality based Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and the Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas
Phenomenology provides the fullest knowledge base of Humanistic Psychotherapy, including the Person-Centred tradition, and Integrative-Humanistic Psychotherapy
Session Four and Five
Empiricism as Philosophy and Data Based Programmatic Approaches in Psychotherapy
David Hume as the supreme British Empiricist Philosopher and pioneer of empiricist Anthropological (secular human centred) Philosophy
Modern Philosophy: Correlated with the Logical Empiricism of Bertrand Russell, the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle, AJ Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic, and the earlier work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Empiricism and Logical Empiricism are the best fit modern background to modern scientific forms of personal psychotherapeutic change grounded in data-focussed self-enquiry, self-injunction, and self-motivation, such as Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, Rational-Emotive Therapy, Personal Construct Psychology, Ericksonian Hypno-psychotherapy, NLP, and arguably Transactional Analysis
Session Six and Seven
Psychodynamic - Phase 1
Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, J Wakefield Freud and Philosophy of Mind
These connect with the earlier Freud and Psychoanalysis, Jung of Symbols of Transformation, Para-Analytic Approaches such as Gestalt, Psychosynthesis, and Psychodrama, which overlap into Phase 2
Session Eight and Nine
Psychodynamic Phase 2
Hegel, Whitehead, Derrida, Systems Based and Post-Modernist Contextualism -
These connect with the later Freud and Object Relations, and Jung Archetypal/Alchemical period, Matte Blanco The Unconscious as Infinite Sets, Lacan’s Seminars, and Psychodynamic variants of Integrative Psychotherapy
I discuss these two phases as one complex movement. There is great overlap between the two psychodynamic phases, which nevertheless differ deeply in emphasis.
The first phase is broadly volitional, a function of will and drive, mediated by consciousness as dualistic, but grounded in wider unconscious systems and implicities.
The second phase is broadly internalised relational-structural modes, but still grounded in variant forms of unconscious dynamics and process
Session Ten and Eleven
Existential, Commonsense, and Fideistic Philosophies - Commonsense, Fideistic, Existential, and Generic Psychotherapeutics approaches
This is a less well identified body of conceptions but is perhaps also less doctrinaire and offers ways of thinking about the whole field. It is defined less sharply by several figures, earlier and recent.
Pascal, Rousseau, Reid, Austin, Moore, Strawson, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre – Commonsense, Linguistic Analysis, and Fideism in Newman, Austin, and the later Wittgenstein, and some Christian theology (Barth, Tillich, Pannenberg) – correlated with Transpersonal, Existential Commonsense, Body, Integrative Understanding as Generic, Attachment based work
Synopsis of the Psychotherapy Field as Generic Meta-Theory underpinning the whole Modality Spectrum
Useful though challenging introductory material
https://hewardwilkinson.co.uk/sites/default/files/Freud-Hegel-and-Dialectics2.pdf
https://hewardwilkinson.co.uk/docs/Towards-Theory-of-Metamodality-of-Psychotherapy-2025.pdf
Heward Wilkinson
My academic degree background is in English, Theology, Religious Studies, and Psychotherapy. At Cambridge University I attended FR Leavis’s literary critical seminars, which had a powerful philosophical critique implicit in them. And I became increasingly absorbed in the Philosophy of Religion, and those philosophers most relevant to it, such as Hume, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida. At Cambridge I was also in scholarly dialogue with Professor John Wisdom, author of Other Minds, and Professor Donald McKinnon, deliverer of the Gifford Lectures 1965-6, which became The Problem of Metaphysics, and my tutor was Professor John Hick, author of Faith and Knowledge and Evil and the God of Love, whose doctoral supervisor was the philosopher Professor HH Price, who had written a powerful commentary on Hume’s Theory of the External World.
My tutor in the MA in Religious Studies at Lancaster University was Professor Ninian Smart, another Gifford Lecturer, whose doctoral supervisor, for the book published as Reasons and Faiths, was Professor J.L. Austin. I wrote my MA Dissertation at Lancaster on Kant’s Doctrine of Time, in which I set out to reconcile Strawson’s and Heidegger’s analyses of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, in relation to possible thinking about the relation of time and eternity. I recognised the Kantian quasi-philosophical dimensions of both Freud and Jung quite early and this, pursued more widely, now motivates my intentionality to map the field of the psychotherapies as a whole philosophically.
A Philosophical Background to the Psychotherapies
To be held on one evening per month for four and a half hours per meeting, over eleven months. (44 hours CPD)
Led by Dr. Heward Wilkinson
Invitation to expression of interest to: [email protected]
This course would introduce key moments, involving key figures in post-Renaissance Western philosophy, in relation to core psychotherapy theories. The assumption behind this is that psychotherapy is, among much else, a theory field, based on multiple modalities or approaches. These draw upon some differentiated potential or mode of human emotion (primarily), as a form of intervention, to articulate the specific causal processes of such modalities. The course would not attempt a fully comprehensive account of philosophy, but would seek to be rigorous for the parts of the philosophers from whom it draws.
I shall make it as accessible as I can and seek to give clear responses to challenges and questions, but philosophy is a genuinely puzzling and challenging subject, and is likely to feel daunting at times, not to be lightly undertaken. It will not require specialist knowledge, as we reflect on matters of which we all have experience, but it will require creative thinking ‘out of the box’. I am looking to a likely start in September.
Apart from the introductory survey of the whole course, each two session phase of the course would consist of:
Discussion of a key passage or passages of a pivotal philosopher, or philosophers, from the 17th or 18th Centuries, correlated with related figures from the 20th Century.
These would be, in turn, deeply connected with major meta-modalities of the field of psychotherapy, upon a ‘best fit’ (not necessarily perfect fit) basis, - a relationship of congruence.
Psychotherapy, assuming its aims to be both remedial of human suffering, and enabling of human well being, would be defined by the spectrum of the differences of the modalities.
One of the recognitions we would explore is that the differences and major clusterings are not sharp or definitive or fully consensual.
So we would also seek within the course for the cumulative generic conceptual core constituting the spectrum of the field as a whole.
Naturally, also, there is both more overlap and continuity of definition between approaches, and less agreed location of them, than can be indicated in a rough sketch, such as now follows.
The course would be delivered in 11 monthly evening sessions of four and a half hours, with a half hour break in the middle, consisting of presentation of theory in the first two hour part and open-ended experiential discussion and exploration in the second part. It would be online. Members would need to be committed to the whole sequence, on a closed group basis. The cost would be £60.00 per member for each monthly evening session or £600.00 if paid in advance for the whole sequence. Outline material and recommended reading would be provided for each session in advance.
Subject to the impact of the explorations of psychotherapy itself, the sessions would run roughly as follows:
Session One
Survey of the whole field as below
Session Two and Three
Humanistic Psychotherapy and Phenomenology
Rene Descartes (Meditations on First Philosophy) as the inaugurator of modern philosophy - and implicit pioneer of what became Phenomenology
Modern Philosophy: Correlated with the Intentionality based Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and the Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas
Phenomenology provides the fullest knowledge base of Humanistic Psychotherapy, including the Person-Centred tradition, and Integrative-Humanistic Psychotherapy
Session Four and Five
Empiricism as Philosophy and Data Based Programmatic Approaches in Psychotherapy
David Hume as the supreme British Empiricist Philosopher and pioneer of empiricist Anthropological (secular human centred) Philosophy
Modern Philosophy: Correlated with the Logical Empiricism of Bertrand Russell, the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle, AJ Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic, and the earlier work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Empiricism and Logical Empiricism are the best fit modern background to modern scientific forms of personal psychotherapeutic change grounded in data-focussed self-enquiry, self-injunction, and self-motivation, such as Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, Rational-Emotive Therapy, Personal Construct Psychology, Ericksonian Hypno-psychotherapy, NLP, and arguably Transactional Analysis
Session Six and Seven
Psychodynamic - Phase 1
Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, J Wakefield Freud and Philosophy of Mind
These connect with the earlier Freud and Psychoanalysis, Jung of Symbols of Transformation, Para-Analytic Approaches such as Gestalt, Psychosynthesis, and Psychodrama, which overlap into Phase 2
Session Eight and Nine
Psychodynamic Phase 2
Hegel, Whitehead, Derrida, Systems Based and Post-Modernist Contextualism -
These connect with the later Freud and Object Relations, and Jung Archetypal/Alchemical period, Matte Blanco The Unconscious as Infinite Sets, Lacan’s Seminars, and Psychodynamic variants of Integrative Psychotherapy
I discuss these two phases as one complex movement. There is great overlap between the two psychodynamic phases, which nevertheless differ deeply in emphasis.
The first phase is broadly volitional, a function of will and drive, mediated by consciousness as dualistic, but grounded in wider unconscious systems and implicities.
The second phase is broadly internalised relational-structural modes, but still grounded in variant forms of unconscious dynamics and process
Session Ten and Eleven
Existential, Commonsense, and Fideistic Philosophies - Commonsense, Fideistic, Existential, and Generic Psychotherapeutics approaches
This is a less well identified body of conceptions but is perhaps also less doctrinaire and offers ways of thinking about the whole field. It is defined less sharply by several figures, earlier and recent.
Pascal, Rousseau, Reid, Austin, Moore, Strawson, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre – Commonsense, Linguistic Analysis, and Fideism in Newman, Austin, and the later Wittgenstein, and some Christian theology (Barth, Tillich, Pannenberg) – correlated with Transpersonal, Existential Commonsense, Body, Integrative Understanding as Generic, Attachment based work
Synopsis of the Psychotherapy Field as Generic Meta-Theory underpinning the whole Modality Spectrum
Useful though challenging introductory material
https://hewardwilkinson.co.uk/sites/default/files/Freud-Hegel-and-Dialectics2.pdf
https://hewardwilkinson.co.uk/docs/Towards-Theory-of-Metamodality-of-Psychotherapy-2025.pdf
Heward Wilkinson
My academic degree background is in English, Theology, Religious Studies, and Psychotherapy. At Cambridge University I attended FR Leavis’s literary critical seminars, which had a powerful philosophical critique implicit in them. And I became increasingly absorbed in the Philosophy of Religion, and those philosophers most relevant to it, such as Hume, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida. At Cambridge I was also in scholarly dialogue with Professor John Wisdom, author of Other Minds, and Professor Donald McKinnon, deliverer of the Gifford Lectures 1965-6, which became The Problem of Metaphysics, and my tutor was Professor John Hick, author of Faith and Knowledge and Evil and the God of Love, whose doctoral supervisor was the philosopher Professor HH Price, who had written a powerful commentary on Hume’s Theory of the External World.
My tutor in the MA in Religious Studies at Lancaster University was Professor Ninian Smart, another Gifford Lecturer, whose doctoral supervisor, for the book published as Reasons and Faiths, was Professor J.L. Austin. I wrote my MA Dissertation at Lancaster on Kant’s Doctrine of Time, in which I set out to reconcile Strawson’s and Heidegger’s analyses of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, in relation to possible thinking about the relation of time and eternity. I recognised the Kantian quasi-philosophical dimensions of both Freud and Jung quite early and this, pursued more widely, now motivates my intentionality to map the field of the psychotherapies as a whole philosophically.