Existential Dialogue 2025: "Difference" with Dr. Todd DuBose

Description

Sanity is privileged over insanity, which is stigmatized. A therapoet views differences without hierarchy, valuing each unique expression.

We aim to explore the lived experiences on irregular perceptions of reality with an open mind. Each Saturday includes: a live dialogue between Prof. Ernesto Spinelli and an International Existential Therapist; a moment to share your thoughts and feelings with the teachers; and a final integration facilitated by Bárbara Godoy.

This series of ten dialogues set out to explore the multifaceted dimentions and complexities associated with Existential Therapies. It attempts to engage with various interpretations of insanity through the lens of patients often painful, confounding, and deeply unsettling life experiences.

Difference - between Prof. Ernesto Spinelli and Dr. Todd DuBose

"Sanity and insanity have been situated in relation to each other on a hierarchical scale that privileges sanity over, beyond, above, and more than its “less than” subjugated copy, insanity. Framed in this way, insanity can only be stigmatized, devalued and pathologized, while sanity is that to which we are to strive, uphold, and genuflect. The therapoet as a phenomenological hermeneutic horizontalizes a spectrum of “sayings of suffering souls”, or “befallings”, which is the originally meaning of “symptom”, not as a pathogen to be excised. Countering supremacist hierarchies of sanity/insanity, or health/illness, the therapoet sees difference, not as deficient, but just different, anew, and not in relation to any centric norm, but just to other differences. The relation to other differences is a relative gradation, whose incomparability resists any kind of nothing-but-ism any more than a fish can be said to be nothing but a squirrel with fins, or dirt as nothing but dry water. The therapoet, therefore, attends to each showing or saying of the suffering soul, sufficient in itself, as it is, in its own way of presencing, by being with it, letting it be, without why.”

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 of practices of care, ethics, loss and mourning, psychology and spirituality, psychopathology, 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 over thirty-five 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 (no way out, boundary or limited situations), extreme experiences (such as psychosis, nihilism, suicidal and homicidal ideation), and the taboo (the places no one wants to go: the unwanted and unacceptable, unsayable, unforgiveable, forbidden, and irreverent). He regularly presents workshops in several international venues such as the Circulo de Estudios en Psicoterapia Existential, in Mexico City, Mexico, the Zhi Mian International Institute of Existential-Humanistic Psychology in Dali, China, and the Centre for Existential Practice in Melbourne, Australia. He is widely published and has written on caring for others in very difficult situations including traumatic loss, surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, and 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.

Prof. Ernesto Spinelli was 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, supervision, 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 2000, he was the Recipient of 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 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. Living up to the existential dictum that life is absurd, Ernesto is also the author of an on-going series of Private Eye novels.

Date and Time: Saturday 22 March from 2 pm to 3 pm – (UK time)

Individual Dialogue Fee: £70

Venue: Online Zoom

FULL PROGRAMME 2025:

Read the full programme here >

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