Experiential-Existential Therapy with Siebrecht Vanhooren. The Living process with Greg Madison

Dr. Siebrecht is a professor of clinical psychology at Leuven University in Belgium, where he teaches counselling and psychotherapy from a humanistic and experiential-existential perspective. He is the director of various programmes and active in research into existential and meaning-centred issues. Siebrecht is also Co-director of the Meaning and Existence Research Centre at the university. He s well known in the Focusing community and was in fact the first person to receive the Gendlin Research Grant from The International Focusing Institute. We start our conversation by discussing our experiences of the recent Gendlin online symposium where Siebrecht was presenting on the experiential-existential approach that he and I share. We spoke about making space for darker subjects within the Focusing world and how Gendlin did not emphasise these aspects of existence. We explored how Focusing might gain something from the existential emphasis and how existentialism can gain from being experientialised. We touched on issues of optimism and pessimism. Siebrecht briefly introduces the work of Taft and Rank and describes his journey into Focusing and how it resonated with who he is personally. He spoke about his work with prisoners and about interaction first as a therapeutic understanding. Siebrecht outlined their research projects into the therapist’s experience during therapy and how therapists can shy away from working with shared existential concerns. We discussed therapist vulnerability and existential empathy and touched on trust and spirituality and how Gendlin avoided addressing that explicitly.