Anxiety and the Existential Tradition: A Conversation with Kirk J. 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 Teachers College, Columbia University, and a cofounder and current president of the Existential-Humanistic Institute (an award-winning psychotherapy training center). He was also a 2022 candidate for president-elect of the American Psychological Association (APA). Dr. Schneider is 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/editor of 15 books. These include The Paradoxical Self, Horror and the Holy, The Psychology of Existence (with Rollo May), Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy, The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology, Existential-Humanistic Therapy (with Orah Krug), Awakening to Awe, The Spirituality of Awe, The Polarized Mind, The Depolarizing of America, and his latest book, Life-Enhancing Anxiety: Key to a Sane World. He is the past editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (2005-2012). For more information on Dr. Schneider’s work, visit https://kirkjschneider.com
Awais Aftab, MD, is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. He is interested in conceptual and philosophical issues in psychiatry and is the author of this Substack newsletter.
This interview is in the context of Dr Schneider’s 2023 book Life-Enhancing Anxiety, which I reviewed for Psychiatric Times here. Readers are encouraged to read the review along with this interview. Schneider makes the case in the book that anxiety of a certain sort enables us to confront the depth and mystery of human existence and is necessary for us to achieve a state of passionate engagement, ethical attunement, and creative enrichment.
Aftab: I’ll confess, I’m not quite fond of the terms “life-enhancing” and “life-destroying,” but I was really captivated by the idea that even though the contemporary world is overwhelmed with negative affect, we do not need less anxiety; we need more anxiety of a certain variety in order to live our best lives. The public messaging all around us is that we collectively are experiencing a mental health crisis. In such a context, negative emotions such as anxiety take on a particular threatening valence. Whether we are advocating exercise, mindfulness, CBT, DBT, SSRIs, or other psychiatric medications as solutions, the goal seems to be to suppress anxiety, to restore some sense of calm. Advocating for more anxiety in such a historical moment requires walking a very tight rope. It’s an alternative to both the old moralism and the contemporary medical mindset. What have you found to be most effective in conveying to people that we don’t have to be scared of anxiety, that we can have a different relationship with it?
Schneider: Thank you for your candor and perceptive question here, Awais. I think the face-to-face dialogues I have been promoting between people of very contrasting cultural and political backgrounds are perhaps the most powerful public example of how we can have a different relationship with our anxiety. Having been a trained moderator for the conflict mediation organization “Braver Angels,” which brings self-identified liberals and conservatives together for “living room” style dialogues, and having been a founder and facilitator of a one-on-one format I call the “Experiential Democracy Dialogue,” I can tell you very personally that though people may be quite uncomfortable with one another’s ideology, once they meet in person, and in a supportive, structured context, they can have a very different relationship with both that initial discomfort and the person or people before them. I can cite several examples where I personally felt significantly less fearful of and estranged from people on “the other side” of a socio-political issue after learning about them as people and not just as labels or stereotypes; and this phenomenon appears to hold true for many people. I have assembled key research in Life-Enhancing Anxiety that upholds this finding, and Braver Angels has also.
Quick question. What is your concern with the terms “life-enhancing anxiety” and “life-destroying anxiety”?
Aftab: My concerns are, I suppose, more aesthetic rather than technical. “Life-destroying” feels rather foreboding, compared to terms like “neurotic anxiety” or “anxiety disorder.” “Life-enhancing” works better, however, for someone who is acutely anxious, the experience may feel at odds with the characterization. Terms like “vital anxiety” and “pernicious anxiety” may possibly be alternatives that offer a balance between folk accessibility and clinical/academic use, but that’s just my personal sentiment.
Schneider: Thank you, you make thoughtful points. I see what you mean about the foreboding quality of “life-destroying” anxiety, although I do think it’s justified perhaps increasingly in a world in which so much divisiveness, hatred, tyranny, and the like is premised on anxiety toward the “other,” and thus becomes unquestionably destructive. I also think many suffer from anxiety, such as that evoked by shame, “not feeling good enough,” feeling helpless, etc. that is implicitly life-destroying, or destructive of quality of life. “Life-denying anxiety” is also a useful phrase that I use and may be more applicable in certain cases. Regarding “life-enhancing anxiety,” for sure it can feel counter-intuitive for some (many?) people, particularly those who experience it as overtly or covertly destructive. It did for me when I was in an acute state of anxiety. However, I use that phrase in part to drive home the point that there is a great deal more to anxiety than being a “nervous wreck” or feeling overwhelmed; it is a complex state that if grappled with, can inspire courage, passion, and new possibilities for living as a whole. That said, I do like your phrase “vital anxiety” and believe, as with “life-enhancing anxiety,” that it can include but also transcend the academic audience to reach laypersons as well.
Schneider: There is a great deal more to anxiety than being a “nervous wreck” or feeling overwhelmed; it is a complex state that if grappled with, can inspire courage, passion, and new possibilities for living as a whole.
Aftab: Ever since reading your book, I have been thinking about what determines whether anxiety would acquire a life-enhancing or life-destroying character. And it is something acquired, or perhaps co-created, right? If I understand correctly, the life-enhancing character of anxiety is not something fixed or inbuilt; it emerges from a particular process of engagement. Can you say more about this process of engagement?
Schneider: Yes, what I call “life-enhancing anxiety,” which is the capacity to live with and make the best of the depth and mystery of existence, depends largely on what the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott called our “holding environment.” A supportive and understanding holding environment is pivotal, not only for the well-being of the neonate, but for our society and indeed world. Support and understanding as distinct from a fear-based orientation is crucial if we are to get along with and indeed become enriched by one another, and become enriched by differences within ourselves. In sum, we need abilities to deal with differences, otherness, and that which is radically unknown. We need skills to manage the helplessness and groundlessness with which we all enter the world, and this means internalizing parental and cultural role models who have made substantial gains in cultivating these skills themselves. Tragically, our society—as with many societies today and in the past—are rather poor at emphasizing these experiential skills. They are much better at stressing external and mechanical skills (like rules and regulations, technical advances) that may temporarily distract people from these larger existential challenges, but don’t sustainably address them. The result is that we’re paying a great price for that negligence, and that price is manifest in such reactionary stances as prejudice, ideological extremes, and disturbed personalities.
Aftab: Would it be correct to say that the difference between life-enhancing and life-destroying anxiety is not merely one of conceptualization? That if we conceptualized a particular state of anxiety differently, it would not be sufficient to imbue the anxiety with life-enhancing properties? The person also needs to have the ability to assimilate and accommodate anxiety, and such ability may need to be cultivated over time.
Schneider: Certainly there are different types of anxiety, and different degrees of time and circumstances that impact it. There’s signal anxiety, which warns us of immediate physical threat, e.g., from a tiger in the woods, and prompts us to fight or flee. This is a very basic evolutionary anxiety that is typically not associated with life-enhancing anxiety because when you are directly and mortally threatened “all bets are off” and you are not likely—unless you are an incredibly centered (or unwitting) human being—to hover on the edge of wonder and discovery. Then there’s symbolic anxiety, which is the type many of us experience in the contemporary world. Symbolic anxiety is localized outside of the radius of immediate threat but still arouses many of the same symptoms as signal anxiety, such as sweaty palms, racing heart, narrowing of perception etc. But unlike signal anxiety, symbolic anxiety is reflective and appears to conjure up more than the fear of physical threat, e.g., physical death, but an existential anxiety that I call the “groundlessness” and “helplessness” of the human condition. This groundlessness and helplessness associates with our expulsion into the world and echoes directly what Rank called the “trauma of birth” and Ernest Becker, his foremost expositor, termed the “complex symbol” of death. These conceptions are of course subject to ongoing existential and phenomenological investigation but they have been shown to be quite salient in the realms of Terror Management Theory and the existential-phenomenological depth research that I have assembled in books like The Polarized Mind and Life-Enhancing Anxiety.
Schneider: I side with theorists such as Rollo May who posit that anxiety resides on a spectrum of severity and self-reflection and that both signal and symbolic anxiety are intermixed, but it’s a matter of degree.
As for the conception of anxiety being divisible into disparate categories, I don’t think that’s quite the case. Although there are certainly differences between severe anxiety (which would include signal anxiety, panic, and certain forms of psychotic anxiety) and symbolic anxiety, I don’t believe these are differences in kind. To the contrary, I side with theorists such as Rollo May, who wrote the landmark Meaning of Anxiety, who posit that anxiety resides on a spectrum of severity and self-reflection and that both signal and symbolic anxiety are intermixed, but it’s a matter of degree. This is why I appreciate the classic Yerkes-Dodson framework which holds that anxiety and performance lie along a spectrum of intensity and are not separate dimensions. I speculate that something of this order is also true of the impact of anxiety on life generally, and that what one person experiences as severe, whether of the signal variety or the symbolic, another might experience as tolerable or even life-enhancing. The issue is not the anxiety level per se, but the capability of the person (and circumstance) to impact that anxiety. That is why we see some remarkable examples of resilience, such as Viktor Frankl in the Nazi Death Camps or survivors of psychosis, as demonstrated by R.D. Laing and associates, in the face of what appears on the surface to be a completely inflexible dimension of stress and anxiety. And that is precisely why we should do our best to approach each person, patient, etc. with some degree of wonder and hope, along with realistic expectations about their so-called diagnosis. That is the heart of good science.
Aftab: The parts of the book that left the deepest impression on me were the parts where you shared the story of your own experiences with anxiety and psychotherapy. It was very powerful. I want to ask you a question related to that. You wrote:
“I could easily have been diagnosed with an “anxiety disorder” accompanied by features of panic and distorted perceptions, but such a diagnosis would hardly illuminate what I was grappling with. This was a coming-of-age battle and a deep gnawing reactivation of “unfinished business” stemming from childhood fears. My therapist–analyst, Ann G., recognized the complexity of my malady. She conveyed a sense of confidence that I was going through a kind of “dark night of the soul,” and that there was more, so much more, that I could discover from this time. Just this perspective alone was helpful to me.” (p 27)
When I read that, it left me a bit uncomfortable, because I can’t imagine evaluating someone as a psychiatric clinician with the sort of significant anxiety symptoms that you describe and feeling confident that this represents a kind of “dark night of the soul.” I could entertain the possibility and explore it with the patient, but I would lack confidence in the explanation at the outset. How can anyone know that with any degree of confidence? Do you think Ann G. thought of all anxiety in this manner, or was there something particular in what you were experiencing that led Ann G. to suggest that? There is likely more to the story that I am missing.
Schneider: Thank you for the concern you share in this question, Awais. I think that my therapist Ann was an extremely seasoned and intuitive practitioner. She may have been and at times seemed to be tormented herself, but this never overtook her, at least with me. She consistently remained centered and deeply empathic—I had the distinct sense that she “knew” me and was not thrown by my flailing. My hunch is that she had seen or experienced states very similar to mine, and probably much worse. On that point, I believe she had spent much time working with very disturbed patients at some very challenging psychiatric facilities. That being said, I believe Ann recognized that as terrified as I was at the start of our work together, I was also a pretty determined guy. I was a guy who had grappled with and was able to overcome to a notable degree the untimely death of my seven-year-old brother, my parents’ divorce, and the trials of relocating to a very remote town and a wonderfully illuminating yet unconventional graduate program (West Georgia College in Carrollton, GA). So the best answer I can give you is that Ann drew from her own hard won experience, engaged with the totality of me, not just the debilitated sides, and had confidence that we could see my anguish through together.
Aftab: I have been interested in the narratives we offer to the public and patients, and the ways in which these narratives go awry. In one of the first posts on this newsletter (Diagnosis as Self-Understanding & Self-Alienation), I presented a list of conceptual and scientific aspects of mental health and psychopathology that I felt were important to highlight to the public. I wonder if you see any of the items on that list differently than I do, and if there is anything you’d like to add to the list.
Schneider: I basically agree with what you say in this article, Awais. I have maintained for a long time—and I do have some background here having worked with severely disturbed, hospitalized patients as well as many distressed folks in my private practice—that the DSM articulates patterns of human experience that have been grappled with and elucidated for over a century. These are not just arbitrary or whimsical patterns that have been generated to demean, although I would argue they have been misused that way, both in psychiatry/psychology and in the general lay public. But they are patterns that capture notable aspects of the phenomenology that clinicians have observed repeatedly over the years and settings of therapeutic care. Therefore, I agree with you that this is not an “either/or” evil/good guy issue. It is an issue of thoughtful discernment and of weeding out the wheat from the chaff.
Schneider: The DSM articulates patterns of human experience that have been grappled with and elucidated for over a century. These are not just arbitrary or whimsical… The problem as you well point out is when patterns get turned into doctrines that no longer inform clinical work but predominate it.
The problem as you well point out is when patterns get turned into doctrines that no longer inform clinical work but predominate it. As May used to say, we need to see the person in the formulation and not the other way around. That being said, I also see another great problem with the traditional use of diagnoses; the virtual absence of attunement to social maladies. This is why I proposed a major overhaul of the DSM in my Journal of Humanistic Psychology article “The Chief Peril is not a DSM Diagnosis but the Polarized Mind.” We need narratives and diagnostic nomenclature to characterize the sociopathy, paranoia, narcissism and the like that are wedded to our social institutions, families and leaders. Descriptions of psychological disturbance should not be confined to those who show up in clinics, but extended to systems and ideologies that promote the fixation on single points of view to the utter exclusion of competing points of view—which is my definition of the polarized mind. Expanding diagnoses (or just plain clinical observations) to institutions and societies is very much a work in progress, but essential I believe if our profession is to be honest about the destructiveness of psychological disturbance.
Aftab: Working in the existential tradition on the topic of anxiety, you are an intellectual successor to Rollo May. Are there any substantial points relevant to existential and psychological understanding of anxiety on which you disagree with May?
Schneider: Great question and it is true that we share a great deal of resonance, particularly regarding life’s paradoxes, which was true from the start of our relationship. I would say that the main area of disagreement I have with Rollo is that despite his radical openness and call for existential psychology to be an integrative psychology in his landmark book Existence (1958), he was curiously rigid in some ways. For example, in the interview (available at Psychotherapy.net) that I and two colleagues, John Galvin and Ilene Serlin, had the privilege to conduct with him, he intimated that he had little tolerance for patients who were not willing (or able?) to work intensively with their anxieties. He elaborated that he would send such a patient down the street to another therapist who would be willing to work with them in a more superficial manner. While I relate to Rollo’s frustration here and his stance of challenging patients to a more rigorous standard than many in the profession would hold, I thought it was unduly restrictive and presumptive. My feeling was that Rollo was making rather rash judgments about people who may or may not eventually be able to work more deeply, and even if they wouldn’t or felt they couldn’t this was still not a reason to dismiss them in such a preemptory fashion. Upon much reflection, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that given Rollo’s status as a pioneer who brought existential-humanistic psychology to America, he was operating from a place of some impatience toward those (colleagues and even patients) who adopted what he perceived as a cosmetic view of therapy.
Aftab: I want to ask you a very basic question. What do you think is the goal of psychotherapy? What kind of a thing is psychotherapy?
Schneider: That’s a really complex question but to cut to the chase, I view the basic goal of psychotherapy as helping people to feel more free, alive, and whole. Now there is a wide spectrum of benchmarks toward this goal depending on the type of therapy offered, the environment the therapy is conducted in, and the patient’s desire and capacity for deeper transformation. In existential-depth psychotherapy, the goal is to support patients to feel maximally free, alive, and whole, which generally means a capacity to both access and express one’s deepest vulnerabilities as well as one’s loftiest capacities to transcend those vulnerabilities, to venture out and to take risks. Such “paradoxical wholeness” leads to the well lived life in my view; the kind of life that alerts people to what deeply matters both within themselves and between themselves and the world. This “whole-bodied” sensibility often leads to the attainment of meaningful goals such as an intimate relationship, a creative project, or a notable contribution to society; but it can also in its optimal states lead to a sense of awe— humility and wonder, adventure—toward living as a whole. It can spur an entirely new attitude toward life itself that lifts people out of the narrow and debilitating identifications of despair, to the larger and more gratifying identifications of freedom, choice, and responsibility. By responsibility I mean the ability to respond to (reflect and deliberate upon) rather than merely react against the everyday challenges of life. I would also add that we would be a lot better off as a society and indeed world if people could develop these abilities from an early age. If this indeed could be the case, I doubt that we’d see the dehumanization that’s rampant today because people would be far more comfortable in their own skin, more reconciled to otherness and differences, and more capable of sensitive, discerning acts.
Schneider: In existential-depth psychotherapy, the goal is to support patients to feel maximally free, alive, and whole, which generally means a capacity to both access and express one’s deepest vulnerabilities as well as one’s loftiest capacities to transcend those vulnerabilities, to venture out and to take risks.
Aftab: Why do you think the field of clinical psychology is so divided?
Schneider: Well, there are many forces that contributed to this state of affairs but the main ones center on fear—fear of wholeness, of broadening and deepening the scope of our inquiries. You have probably heard of the old adage that psychology has long been plagued by “physics envy,” and it still labors under that burden. We’ve long been entranced by the remarkable advances in medicine and in understanding the material world. The problem is that things don’t operate so mechanically in psychology, and in actuality, they don’t really operate that mechanically in the broader physical world either, as folks like Heisenberg have pointed out. But the mystery of subtle physics is not that much of an obstacle in the day-to-day world that most of us operate in, and the structures of that world are much more known and accessible than they are in psychology.
So, the long and the short of it is that we have major divisions within clinical psychology largely because practitioners do not want to embrace the whole—it’s too messy and complicated and its very distressing to third party payors such as insurance companies and government agencies, who demand measurable and too often expedient results. Attunements to the long term or in depth, even if they are wiser and more sustainable, are simply in short supply in many quarters of clinical psychology. Now that said, I do think there are other reasons that the field is divided, such as the obsession with one’s “turf,” the lack of training in holistic approaches to therapy, and the varying perspectives on evidence-based treatments. Yet all of these problems can and should be better addressed in my view, and that is why I support an existential-integrative approach and integrative approaches in general. They are much more tolerant and even appreciative of the many facets of clinical knowledge, and that is the surest way to optimize the breadth and depth of the therapeutic enterprise.
Aftab: I imagine you probably encounter psychology colleagues who look at the rich body of work on existential psychotherapy and say, “This looks interesting but is this even science?” What does this say about popular notions of “science,” and the odd way in which we privilege scientific quantification and formalization, even when such formalization is in a premature state?
Schneider: Yes, for sure there are such colleagues and there have been since the inception of the existential purview when it was first introduced. This bias has shifted some in recent years with the influence of the relational-contextual factors research by leading investigators such as Bruce Wampold and John Norcross. This research has demonstrated consistently that existential-humanistic factors such as the therapeutic alliance, empathy, genuineness, and the willingness to collaborate are by far more closely associated with therapeutic effectiveness than more technical factors, such as cognitive restructuring or psychodynamic interpretation. In his review of my edited book Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy, Bruce Wampold (in PsycCritiques, 2008) contended that the EI approach was as scientific as any other bona fide therapeutic approach and that its principles of practice just might be foundational for effective psychotherapy in general. This was a very bold statement for a leading mainstream researcher at the time and it has been reconfirmed since by such leading researchers as Shahar and Schiller (2016) and Wolfe (2016) in a special issue of the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration.
Schneider: This bias has shifted some in recent years with the influence of the relational-contextual factors research by leading investigators such as Bruce Wampold and John Norcross. This research has demonstrated consistently that existential-humanistic factors such as the therapeutic alliance, empathy, genuineness, and the willingness to collaborate are by far more closely associated with therapeutic effectiveness than more technical factors, such as cognitive restructuring or psychodynamic interpretation.
The American Psychological Association’s publishing arm has also increasingly recognized the scientific merit of existential psychology with books I coauthored or contributed chapters to such as Existential-Humanistic Therapy (with Orah Krug) and Supervision Essentials of Existential-Humanistic Therapy (also with Orah Krug) as well as video series such as Existential-Humanistic Therapy Over Time and Handbooks such as the forthcoming Handbook of Humanistic and Existential Psychology edited by Louis Hoffman. However, APA accredited training programs are another matter, as with the general membership of APA, many of whom are recipients of those programs. The data regarding these institutions and practitioners are unequivocal: they are overwhelmingly cognitive-behavioral and rely on quantitative-experimental research—Randomized Controlled Trials in particular—for their evidence base.
This is all indeed very odd and reflects a field that is in notable flux if not disarray. It also reflects a field that—in many ways understandably—is wedded to the “bean counters” of federal and corporate funding agencies. These are agencies that again, rely on technical protocols, even if those devices run directly counter to the vast preponderance of evidence that upholds personal and relational factors (e.g., those which tend to be tacit and nonquantifiable) as the most therapeutically salient.
It is clear that in the long run we will need a genuinely human science that cleaves faithfully to the complexities of human experience, both quantitative and qualitative.
Aftab: There is a lot of discussion in mental health fields about the need to assess and monitor psychotherapy outcomes in clinical practice. There is a sense that many people receiving care are getting suboptimal psychotherapy, and there is an emerging mindset among healthcare administrators that psychotherapists need to be more “accountable.” However, existing proposals to ensure accountability generally rely on either insisting that the therapy used be among the list of therapies deemed “evidence-based” for that particular condition or that progress be monitored using some crude symptom rating instrument like PHQ-9 and GAD-7. What do you make of this? What do you think would be a better way for psychotherapists to demonstrate the virtue of accountability?
Schneider: I would say that people are receiving suboptimal care because the major funding sources and the culture as a whole are overlooking the powerful outcome data that privileges emotionally restorative relationships, which often means longer term, life-changing relationships, over the short-term manually-driven relationships. The best way to evaluate the effectiveness of therapeutic relationships is to ask the recipients of those relationships, and don’t just ask them through rating scales and checklists, but through in-depth, qualitative inquiry over substantial periods of time. This is in fact what Seligman did in a Consumer Reports study in the mid-1990s, and the results were strikingly favorable toward the longer term, life-changing relationships. Some of the best results of psychotherapy are profoundly idiosyncratic and occur months or even years after therapy has terminated.
Schneider: Some of the best results of psychotherapy are profoundly idiosyncratic and occur months or even years after therapy has terminated.
Aftab: You’ve expressed in the past that the U.S. needs a mental health czar, a psychologist general, on par with the surgeon general. I thought it was a wonderful idea. Did it garner much support when you proposed it? Any signs that this proposal is being considered seriously by people in power?
Schneider: Thank you. Yes, it stirred a great deal of support when I first proposed it to fellow APA Council Members. We had some 60 generally favorable email responses on Council listserv in response to the article I wrote on the topic in Scientific American. That said, it was not well received by various Boards within the APA because they felt it was duplicating what the APA was doing and could retard the progress APA as an organization was making in the halls of the U.S. Congress. And this had a strong dampening effect as I view it on the initial enthusiasm of Council Members. So a resolution I and 18 others proposed calling merely for a task force to investigate the merit of such an Office failed to pass. This did not and does not today make sense to me, given that the AMA for example has no such concerns about the Office of the Surgeon General or NIH, so why can’t the APA have a similar relationship with an Office of Psychological Advisors? It seems to me that a private organization such as the APA can do only so much to represent its cause to the greater public; whereas a governmental department could focus on psychological advocacy to the public and government full time, and likely complement rather than take away from the advocacy efforts of the APA.
The idea has not gone away, and I continue to advocate for it in different forms. For example, one of my current interests that was also part of the platform I ran on for APA president a couple years back, is the formation of a “National Corps of Mental Health Providers.” Such a Corps could be akin to the Peace Corps, which is voluntary and subsidized by the U.S. government, or it could be partly subsidized by private donors. Whichever the case, the aim of the Corps is substantial: to mobilize mental health practitioners to provide affordable and accessible “emotionally restorative relationships,” particularly in underserved communities. Emotionally restorative relationships are those that help people to feel seen and heard, and that get at the roots of their problems. Such relationships could include but not be limited to longer-term, in-depth psychotherapy, intensive life-coaching, mentoring and crisis intervention services, and services such as bridge-building dialogues between people of divergent cultural and political backgrounds. Much of my focus recently has in fact been on fostering a supportive, structured format called the Experiential Democracy Dialogue, which is a one-on-one approach to such conflict mediation. Some of these services have begun to gain traction, particularly the latter, which is becoming increasingly sought by schools and institutions experiencing widening cultural and political divisions. As for the idea of a National Corps, I have created a prototype for it in the form of a YouTube channel called the “Corps of Depth Healers.” This channel is a resource for practitioners to learn from leaders in their field about how to apply depth principles of practice to current social crises; and it contains seeds for a larger national movement.
Aftab: Thank you!
This post is part of a series featuring in-depth interviews and discussions intended to foster a re-examination of philosophical and scientific debates in the psy-sciences. See prior discussions with Diane O’Leary, Richard Gipps, David Mordecai, Emily Deans, Nicole Rust, Rob Wipond, Martin Plöderl, and Peter Kramer.
What an interesting read, thank you!