Reviewing Existential Freedom in Therapeutic Practice

In 2027, The Existential Dialogues will revisit the question of freedom at the heart of existential therapeutic practice. While existential philosophy has long understood freedom as a fundamental condition of human existence, contemporary therapeutic culture increasingly confronts us with questions of performance, adaptation, optimisation, and disconnection. What does freedom mean in a time where human experience risks being reduced to functionality, self-management, and endless choice?

Across ten Saturdays, Professor Ernesto Spinelli will once again enter into dialogue with guest teachers from around the world, each offering a distinct existential, phenomenological, or therapeutic perspective on freedom. Each dialogue will unfold through a favourite quote chosen by the guest from among our existential and philosophical forefathers and practitioners—a quote that opens a particular window into the many meanings, tensions, burdens, and possibilities of freedom in our time.

Through philosophical dialogue, clinical reflection, and experiential exploration, the series will consider freedom not only as responsibility or choice, but also as relation, uncertainty, embodiment, creativity, vulnerability, and encounter. In doing so, this programme asks whether existential practice might help us recover forms of aliveness, feeling, and human connection that resist the increasing pressures of performance and fragmentation in contemporary life.

TIMES AND DATES

23 Jan. with Dr. Todd DuBose
27 Feb. with Dr. Michael Guy Thompson
20 Mar. with Dr. Manu Bazzano
24 Apr. with Dr. Betty Cannon
15 May. with Dr. Miles Groth
19 Jun. with Prof. Kirk Schneider
17 Jul. In-person with Prof. Spinelli & Bárbara Godoy
16 Oct. with Dr. Yaqui Martinez
13 Nov. with Prof. Simon du Plock
4 Dec. with Prof. Spinelli & Bárbara Godoy

Full course – All 10 Dialogues & Experiential Study Group:
£1260 (2 pm to 5 pm – UK Time)

Only Dialogues:
£630 (2 pm to 3 pm – UK Time)

Venue: Online Zoom

Existential Dialogues 2027 – Programme

23rd January
with Dr. Todd DuBose

Dr. Todd DuBose is a world-renowned, Distinguished Full Professor at The Chicago School’s College of Professional Psychology. He teaches philosophical foundations and practices of therapeutic care; ethics; loss and mourning; psychology and spirituality;  suffering, meaning, and ideological critiques of practices of care; psychopathology as speech of the suffering soul, among other courses, all from a human science perspective, and with a particular focus on therapoetic care. He is a licensed psychologist, supervisor, consultant, and former chaplain, with thirty-eight years of experience. He holds degrees in continental and comparative philosophy of religion and existential-hermeneutical-phenomenological human science clinical psychology and integrates these approaches as a way of caring for such experiences as the impossible (e.g., no way out, irreversible, incurable, inescapable), the extreme (e.g., psychosis, nihilism, suicidality, homicidality, the anomalous, the uncanny, and the paranormal), and the taboo (e.g.,  unwanted, unacceptable, unsayable, unforgivable, forbidden, and irreverent). He regularly presents workshops, presentations, or supervises in several international venues such as the Círculo de Estudios en Psicoterapia Existential, in Mexico City, Mexico, the Zhi Mian International Institute of Existential-Humanistic Psychology in Dali, China, the Centre for Existential Practice in Sydney, Australia, and Therapy Harley Street in London. He is widely published and has written on caring for others in very difficult situations including traumatic loss, surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, and the meaning of meaninglessness. He has also written a short dialogue with Miles Groth, edited by Loray Daws, called, Dialogues on The Soul of Existential Therapy, published by The Society for Existential Analysis. Most of all, he considers himself simply a fellow human being.

27th February
with Dr. Michael Guy Thompson

Michael Guy Thompson, PhD, received his psychoanalytic training from R. D. Laing and associates at the Philadelphia Association in London, and served as the organization’s administrator from 1973–1980. He is Personal and Supervising Analyst and Faculty Member, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, San Francisco, and former Adjunct Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology, San Francisco, and the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. He is the author of over 100 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, as well as numerous books, including The Death of Desire: A Study in Psychopathology (1985),  The Truth About Freud’s Technique (1994), The Ethic of Honesty (2004), The Death of Desire: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (2017, 2nd edition), Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity (2024), Existential Psychoanalysis: A Contemporary Introduction (2025), and most recently, R. D. Laing in the Twenty-First Century: Sanity, Therapy, Love (2025; with Fritjof Capra and Douglas Kirsner). Most recently, Dr. Thompson is founder and director of New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, a certificate-based virtual training program modeled on his work with R. D. Laing in London, based in San Francisco. He founded Free Association, Inc. in 1988 in San Francisco to further the legacy of R. D. Laing, and inaugurated the annual R. D. LAING IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY symposium at Esalen Institute in 2015, to further the legacy and relevance of Laing’s contribution to contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapy. He lives in Berkeley, California. www.mguythompson.com

20th March
with Dr. Manu Bazzano

Dr Manu Bazzanois an author, psychotherapist/supervisor in private practice and an internationally recognised lecturer and facilitator. His background is philosophy and rock music. He studied Eastern contemplative practices since 1980 and in 2004 was ordained in the Soto and Rinzai tradition of Zen Buddhism. Among his books: Re-Visioning Existential Therapy: (Routledge,2020) Nietzsche and Psychotherapy (Routledge, 2019); Re-visioning Person-centred Therapy (2018); Zen and Therapy: Heretical Perspectives (2017) Therapy and the Counter-tradition (2016); After Mindfulness (2014); Spectre of the Stranger: towards a Phenomenology of Hospitality (Sussex, 2012); Buddha is Dead (Sussex, 2006).

24th April
with Dr. Betty Cannon

Betty Cannon, PhD, is a licensed psychologist who has taught and practiced in Boulder, Colorado, for over 40 years. She is Professor Emerita of the Colorado School of Mines and president and founder of the Boulder Psychotherapy Institute, which trains mental health professionals in Applied Existential Psychotherapy. In addition to existential philosophy, especially the philosophy of Sartre, AEP has roots in Gestalt therapy, classical and contemporary psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology (especially the person-centered therapy of Carl Rogers), and body-oriented psychotherapy. Betty is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal for the Society of Existential Analysis and Sartre Studies International. She is the author of Sartre and Psychoanalysis and numerous articles and chapters on existential therapy. Her mentor was Hazel E. Barnes, who translated Sartre into English and who was the world’s foremost Sartre scholar until her death in 2008. Betty is her literary executor, and her book on Sartre is dedicated to Hazel. She is presently working on another book with the working title: In the Spirit of Play: Applied Existential Psychotherapy.

15th May
with Dr. Miles Groth

Miles Groth, PhD (philosophy) trained both as an orthodox psychoanalyst and as a daseinanalyst. He taught psychology and philosophy for twenty-five years at Wagner College. He has been in practice since 1972, first in Pittsburgh and since 1981 in New York City. He is the author of eight books and the co-author of four books, the editor of three books, fourteen chapters in edited books, forty-five articles and more about forty book reviews in scholarly journals. He co-founded the American Daseinsanalytic Institute in 2021 with Tamás Fazekas. He has been an invited lecturer in Australia, Canada, and throughout Europe (including Germany, Hungary, and Italy). He has privately published two volumes of translations of texts of Martin Heidegger. His work has been translated into French, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.

19th June
with Prof. Kirk Schneider

Kirk J. Schneider, Ph.D. is a leading spokesperson for existential-humanistic and existential-integrative psychology, an adjunct faculty member at Saybrook University and  formerly, Teachers College, Columbia University, and a cofounder and current president of the Existential-Humanistic Institute. Dr. Schneider is a Fellow in seven Divisions of the APA, the recipient of the Rollo May Award from Division 32 of the APA for “Outstanding and Independent Pursuit of New Frontiers in Humanistic Psychology,” and the author/coauthor of 15 books. Among these are The Psychology of Existence (with Rollo May), Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy, Existential-Humanistic Therapy (with Orah Krug), Awakening to Awe, and Life-Enhancing Anxiety. 

17th July
IN-PERSON with Prof. Ernesto Spinelli & Bárbara Godoy

Bárbara Godoy M.A., Adv. Dip. Exi. Psy. Existential Psychotherapist Group Leader, Counsellour, Lecturer and Supervisor, UKCP accredited, SEA Professional Member, Founder Director of Therapy Harley Street, where she currently leads a team of over 40 professional practitioners in the area of Psychological Services and Wellbeing consultancy. Bárbara is also the founder-director of the ICTEPP Training and CPD Programme at Therapy Harley Street.

Bárbara’s academic contributions in London since 2008 includes lecturing and researching on the theory and practice of Phenomenological Existential Therapy on Doctorate, MA and professional courses at the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling Psychology, Regent’s University and the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling.

Bárbara has facilitated and designed therapeutic Group Work since 1997. She brought her earliest workshop: “Experiences” to large groups in The Netherlands, Italy, France, UK and Argentina. These awareness-intensive processes are a legacy of the human potential movement (HPM) of 1960s, with techniques such as AUM Meditation Marathons, Psychodrama, Bioenergetics and Primal Feelings work.

16th October
with Dr. Yaqui Martinez

Dr. Yaqui A. Martínez-Robles is a psychologist with Masters, PhD and PsyD in Psychotherapy. He has training in Gestalt Therapy; Music Therapy; Transpersonal Psychology and Holotropic Breathwork (with the Grof Transpersonal Training Association); Narrative and postmodern therapies and Social Constructionism; and in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy (with the Integrative Psychiatry Institute and MAPS-Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). He is the author of four books, and co-author of another four, focused on the existential perspective. He has participated with chapters in several books and with articles in several journals. Yaqui is the founder of the Circle of Studies in Existential Therapy, in Mexico City and in Medellin, Colombia,. He teaches existential-phenomenological psychology and therapy in Mexico and different countries of South America. He is honorary president of the Latin American Association of Existential Psychotherapy (ALPE). He works in private practice as an existential-phenomenological therapist, in modalities one-on-one, couples and groups

13th November
with Prof. Simon du Plock

Prof. Simon du Plock was Head of the Faculty of Post-Qualification and Professional Doctorates at the Metanoia Institute, London from 2007 to 2020, in which role he directed counselling psychology and psychotherapy research doctorates jointly with Middlesex University. In 2020 he was appointed as the Institute’s Senior Research Fellow.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Medicine, a Foundation Member with Senior Practitioner Status of the BPS Register of Psychologists Specialising in Psychotherapy, and a Member of the BPS Register of Applied Psychology Practice Supervisors. He has been a BPS Chartered Counselling Psychologist and UKCP Registered Psychotherapist since 1994.
He has authored nearly one hundred journal papers and book chapters on existential therapy, and he has co-edited Existential Analysis, the Journal of the British Society for Existential Analysis, since 1993. He was an editor of the 2019 Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy. He has lectured and trained internationally, and in 2006 he was made an Honorary Member of the East European Association for Existential Therapy in recognition of his contribution to cooperation between West and East Europe in the development of existential psychotherapy.
His clinical and research interests include phenomenological research methodology, clinical and research supervision, existential pedagogy, and working with issues of  dependency.

4th December
with Prof. Ernesto Spinelli & Bárbara Godoy

Prof. Ernesto Spinelliwas Chair of the Society for Existential Analysis between 1993 and 1999 and is a Life Member of the Society. His writings, lectures and seminars focus on the application of existential phenomenology to the arenas of therapy, psychology, and executive coaching. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS) as well as an APECS accredited executive coach and coaching supervisor. In 1999, Ernesto was awarded a Personal Chair as Professor of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Counselling Psychology. In 2000, he was the Recipient of the BPS Division of Counselling Psychology Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Profession. And in 2019, Ernesto received the BPS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Practice. His most recent therapy book, Practising Existential Therapy: The Relational World 2nd edition (Sage, 2015) has been widely praised as a major contribution to the advancement of existential theory and practice. His previous books include: The Interpreted World: an introduction to phenomenological psychology, 2nd ed (Sage, 2005); Demystifying Therapy (PCCS, 2006); Tales of Un-Knowing (PCCS, 2006); and The Mirror and The Hammer: Challenging therapeutic orthodoxies (Sage, 2001). Living up to the existential dictum that life is absurd, Ernesto is also the author of an on-going series of Private Eye novels. His most recent standalone novel, Moments – A Greek Island Tale, will be published in 2025.