Western assumptions regarding self tend to isolate each self such that it appears to us and can be defined as separate and distinct to other selves. Existential phenomenology proposes a view of self that is always and inevitably in relation. This interplay between “I” and “not-I” provides a very different view and understanding of self.

Clock time is a measure of the linear sense of time. Lived time, as phenomenology describes it, is a vertical spiral in which every present moment carries a creative capacity to remember the past in light of imagining a future and vice versa. This capacity is the foundation of human freedom with implications for psychotherapy.