Existential Dialogue 2025: "Invention" with Dr. Betty Cannon

Description

Recognizing the brilliance of someone psychological disturbance normalizes their experience and opens the door to transformative change.

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.

Invention- between Prof. Ernesto Spinelli and Dr. Betty Cannon

“When I first saw the topic of this year’s dialogues, I asked myself whether I had anything to contribute. After all, I told myself, I do not usually work with psychoses or other so-called ‘extreme’ or’ irregular’ states of consciousness. This started me thinking about a series of demonstration videos that I have been making with students and supervisees over the last couple of years as part of a book project. Do those videos display ‘extreme states’? To my surprise, the answer is yes. They are filled with experiences that might be described as hallucinations (positive and negative), dissociative states, paranoia, delusions, manic and depressive states, crippling anxiety, schizoid withdrawal, depersonalization and derealization, and body dysmorphic phenomena. Not to mention the so-called normal neurotic trances that Freud called transference, countertransference and defenses, psychedelically induced extreme states, and those nightly hallucinations, our dreams. So why did I not remember at least some of these states as being ‘extreme’? Perhaps the answer lies in my perspective on therapy, which is largely existential-phenomenological. I think that the following quote, from a letter that Sartre wrote to R.D. Laing, captures the essence of this perspective: “Like you, I believe that one cannot understand psychological disturbances from the outside, on the basis of a positivistic determinism or reconstruct them with a combination of concepts that remain outside the experience as lived and experienced. I also believe that one cannot study, let alone cure, a neurosis without a fundamental respect for the person of the patient, without a constant effort to grasp the basic situation and relive it, without an attempt to rediscover the response of the person to that situation and––like you, I think––I regard mental illness as the ‘way out’ that the free organism, in its total unity, invents in order to be able to live through an intolerable situation.”* When a client and I together are able to appreciate the true brilliance of this invention, my experience is that it not only normalizes the client’s experience, it also opens the doorway to change. It allows us to invent something new.”

Dr. Betty Cannon.

Betty Cannon, PhD, is a licensed psychologist who has taught and practiced in Boulder, Colorado, for over 40 years. She is Professor Emerita of the Colorado School of Mines and president and founder of the Boulder Psychotherapy Institute, which has trained mental health professionals in Applied Existential Psychotherapy since 1989. In addition to existential philosophy, especially the philosophy of Sartre, AEP has roots in Gestalt therapy, classical and contemporary psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology (especially the person-centered therapy of Carl Rogers), and body-oriented psychotherapy. Betty is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal for the Society of Existential Analysis and Sartre Studies International. She is the author of Sartre and Psychoanalysis and numerous articles and chapters on existential therapy. Her mentor was Hazel E. Barnes, who translated Sartre into English and who was the world’s foremost Sartre scholar until her death in 2008. Betty is her literary executor, and her book on Sartre is dedicated to Hazel.

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 25 October 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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