Emmy van Deurzen Took Existential Therapy Global
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- Emmy van Deurzen moved to the UK in 1977 to work at the Arbours Association in London, inspired by RD Laing, before co-founding the country's first existential therapy centre there after concluding anti-psychiatry had "lost courage" by leaving people "to it" after deinstitutionalisation.
- There are now 350-plus existential therapists accredited by the UK Council for Psychotherapy, many trained at schools she established, and the source notes "all of them will be familiar with her writing and textbooks."
- In 2015 Van Deurzen organised the first international congress for existential therapy in London, attended by almost 700 people from around the world, marking the movement's emergence as a global force.
- Her new book, Beginning to Live, is her first written for a general readership and draws on canonical existentialists (Sartre, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir) alongside Viktor Frankl and Rumi, whom she quotes on choosing one's attitude in any circumstances.
- Van Deurzen now runs Dilemma Consultancy, the Existential Academy and the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling with her third husband, psychiatrist Digby Tantam, while continuing to treat people with psychosis as part of a wider care team.
- She frames depression as "really a form of oppression" and meets clients "at their greatest point of pain," using a Socratic-dialogue method that asks how they have been thwarted so they can move from feeling like victims to understanding their situation.
Why it matters: The profile traces how one practitioner's break with the 1970s anti-psychiatry movement produced an entire therapeutic tradition: 350-plus UK-accredited practitioners, a 700-attendee international congress, and a training infrastructure spanning multiple schools. For clients seeking meaning-based rather than medication-first support, Van Deurzen's model offers a clinically established alternative now codified for general readers in Beginning to Live.
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