Philosophical Counseling
Understanding Self and Other Through Dialogue
Maria daVenza Tillmanns gives us her take on Philosophical Counseling
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create
them” – Albert Einstein
T
he philosophical counseling movement started during
the early eighties in Europe and the US. It seemed to
be a zeitgeist phenomenon: the time was ripe, and a
number of people around the world who had a strong interest
in philosophy ‘suddenly’ had the brain wave, why not apply
philosophy to everyday life? Some present-day philosophical
counselors recount how they wanted to study philosophy pre-
cisely for its merits with respect to everyday life, and how dis-
appointed they were to find out that academic philosophy
seemed to have stripped philosophy of its application to lived
reality. Academic philosophy seemed to be only that – acade-
mic. Where did the philosophy of Socrates go – the philoso-
phy of the market place? The idea behind the philosophical
counseling movement was to rescue philosophy from the ivory
tower and let her live in the world of the everyday.
Philosophical counseling is somewhat more established in
Europe and Israel than in the US. Dr Gerd Achenbach in Ger-
many is said to have started what has become the movement of
Philosophical Counseling. Shortly after, Adriaan Hoogendijk in
the Netherlands picked it up. Hoogendijk received a lot of pub-
licity across Europe. Achenbach’s idea came out of the ‘anti-
psychiatry’ movement, whose core notion was that it is not
enough to listen to people for the sole purpose of discovering
symptoms. This may be too narrow an approach by itself, and
fails to do justice to a person’s story. In contrast, philosophical
counselors are interested in people’s stories in order to get a
better idea of the bigger picture. Perhaps the bigger picture
points to life dilemmas around values, loyalties, trust, etc and
does not only indicate psychological traumas.
On a sliding scale of counseling professions, one may think
of psychotherapy as dealing predominantly with a person’s psy-
chological and emotive make-up, R.E.T. (Rational Emotive
Therapy) as combining the rational and emotive aspects of a
person, and philosophical counseling as focusing predominantly on
the rational by concentrating on people’s worldviews – their
conceptual understanding of the world. Right now there are
probably as many interpretations of philosophical counseling as
there are philosophical counselors. Over the years, I have been
developing my own theory of philosophical counseling. I per-
sonally do not understand philosophical counseling to be
mainly focused on the rational. To me, it seems that life is
inherently problematic, and cannot be reduced to a set of iso-
lated problems (whether psychological, emotional, or rational)
which need to be solved and overcome in order to live life more
successfully. I’m not ready to throw the baby out with the bath-
water and discount everything other counseling professions
have achieved in helping people and relieving their suffering;
but life can never be problem-free, and was never meant to be.
Life is not meant to be solved; it is meant to be lived! Philosoph-
ical counseling, therefore, should approach a person’s life as a
10 Philosophy Now ● September/October 2013
whole and not as a series of indi-
vidual problems. For the philo-
sophical counselor, the emphasis
should be on life as lived rather
than on the self’s problems. More-
over, to look at philosophical coun-
seling as I do, from a dialogical per-
spective, as understood by Martin
Buber (in I and Thou, 1923, for
instance) is to focus on the interac-
tion between people rather than
concentrating on what happens Martin Buber
solely within a person (psychologi- 1878-1965
cally, emotionally or rationally).
We think we live in the same world, but that’s hardly true.
We live in a multiverse in which we are so different from one
another that it often seems a miracle that we can understand
each other at all. For Buber the only way to come to an under-
standing of the other is through dialogue, not through already-
existing thought structures steeped in our experience. Buber
refers to this as viewing someone as “content of my experience”
instead of as “other”.
Hermeneutics, which is the art or science of interpretation,
developed quite separately and differently in Germany and the
Netherlands, the countries where philosophical counseling
originated. German hermeneutics originated in Lutheran the-
ology, which was focused on understanding fixed texts, essen-
tially Bible texts, through the experiencing subject. In Holland,
however, a different kind of hermeneutics developed, out of the
Socratic tradition. Roughly speaking, one could postulate that
the German tradition led later to the concept that in order to
gain a deeper understanding of the world we need to overcome
the alienation caused by the limits of our contexts or ‘horizons’
as so-called ‘fixed texts’. The Dutch tradition, on the other
hand, led to the concept of becoming familiar with a forever-
changing world. This approach implied that our contexts were
not quite as fixed as the Germans imagined them to be; and
since horizons are perpetually changing, we need not make our
understanding of the world and others conditional on over-
coming them. It is this second way of coming to understand,
which I have taken up in philosophical counseling, and for
which I have found a solid basis in Buber.
Buber’s notion of the other (person) is diametrically opposed
to the postmodern notion of other. In postmodernism, ‘other-
ness’ refers to that which has been exiled and excluded from
the I; it refers to that which is the denial of ‘I’. For Buber, the
‘other’ simply refers to that which is ‘not-I’. The difference lies
in the fact that Buber’s notion of the ‘not-I’ (or ‘Thou’) is
rooted in trust, whereas the postmodern notion is rooted in dis-
trust. With the widespread collapse of belief in modernity and
its grand narratives of progress, distrust prevailed, and the
notion of ‘otherness’ was contaminated by distrust. In contrast,
Buber’s notion of the dialogical implies acknowledging the
other’s otherness, not trying to overcome it. Buber emphasizes
the need to enter into dialogue with the other, for in the
process of engaging the other we can meet him or her in the
“between.” We need not try to understand the other’s context
prior to interacting with them. That would, in fact, be an act
of distrust.
So Buber’s notion of the ‘not-I’ maintains trust. Trust
means accepting the claim the other has on me (the ‘I’) and
responding to that claim. For Buber, this notion of having a
claim on each other is the basis for human interaction. Here, a
‘claim’ does not refer to a sense of demand or expectation that
one has to live up to; it refers to a response because of our
humanity. It’s important to realize that a claim in this sense is
something that can only be understood implicitly. For an anal-
ogy, take the messages of oracles, which are scrambled, and on
face value incoherent. Their meaning lies beyond rational
analysis. They can only be understood implicitly. Importantly,
how the message will be understood and interpreted is depen-
dent on the uniqueness of the listener, and on the interaction
between the message and the listener. Trust based solely on
what is proved to be true is not true trust. In that case, instead
of a person’s own commitment and decision to take it upon
herself to trust, and to engage herself in building a trust rela-
tionship, proof becomes the basis for trust. But you cannot
make trust conditional on categories of thought that have to
deliver ‘proof’.
Trust is established on the basis of what is implicitly under-
stood by two people. It’s a two-way knowing. To distrust the
other, however, means to distrust the claim the other has on
you. Distrust distrusts the gap between self and other. So it
robs one of the distance necessary for any true relating to take
place. It also uses rationality as a means to bridge the gap.
Rationally, one tries to make sense of the other, so that one can
now safely trust him: I trust him because… Here, instead of
struggling to establish trust as a result of dialogue, we appeal
to rationality to establish it for us. But life cannot be reduced
to what can be rationally understood. Reason and rationality
are of great importance in our lives, but they cannot be used to
bridge the void between people.
This is where phronesis (which in Ancient Greek means
understanding, and also deciding) comes into play. Phronesis is
being able to implicitly understand the meaning and claim a
certain message coming from another person may have. These
messages have no single meaning which may be rationally
understood by everyone, and instead rely on personal response.
Buber’s method flies in the face of much psychology and soci-
ology, which stress the importance of developing structures for
understanding. Philosophy, on the other hand, develops struc-
tures of understanding (which are themselves constantly subject
to change) as a result of engagement. For Buber also, the emphasis
is on engaging life directly, rather than trying to interpret life
through fixed categories of thought. Therefore, the approach to
philosophical counseling he inspires is in complete contrast to
psychiatric counseling, where counselors will assess their clients
through relatively fixed structures of thought, such as the diag-
nostic system of DSM IV (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorder, the main reference work for the classification of
psychiatric disorders). Philosophical counselors are more inter-
ested in the whole story as a story, as an eyewitness account of
life: what does this person’s account tell us about life?

Case Study
Mrs S., a retired M.D. who specialized in asthma and who was very well respected in her field, came to visit my private practice in
Holland after she had attended one of my presentations on philosophical counseling, where she made an appointment to see me.
Before Mrs S. retired, her time was pretty much organized around her private life on the one hand and her professional role on the
other. She would wear her two hats alternatively, depending on whether she was in the office or at home. Yet, now that she was
retired, it was no longer clear to her when and how to wear her separate hats. Her life, which had seemed so well organized, was
suddenly in disarray, and she felt lost. She also mentioned that she was having the same dream repeatedly. In the dream there was a
closet which, once she opened it, she could no longer close, because it was such a mess and everything kept falling out.
We philosophized on the meaning this dream could have for her, playing around with a number of different interpretations, and we
concluded that her strictly scientific worldview had made it very difficult for her to deal with her present chaotic reality. She was used
to fixing things in other peoples’ lives, and was now left feeling quite powerless trying to fix things in her own life. This is what we
thought her dream seemed to imply.
After a few weeks she reported that she wasn't having the dream anymore. She was quite relieved, because the dream had made
her quite anxious.
At some point, Mrs S. told me about her sister's meaningless suicide, and how she could never forgive her sister for the grief this
had caused their parents. At this point I suddenly shifted from being understanding to almost accusing my client of not recognizing her
sister's pain and screams for help. My client was shocked. However, later she told me how grateful she was to me for "waking her up."
As I interpret these events from a dialogical perspective, I see I had succeeded in shaking some meaning into a world which had
appeared meaningless to her. She had glimpsed the otherness of the world of the ‘meaningless’ other – enough to know that it too
existed, and had a unique meaning of its own. Through "imagining the real" (Buber), I tried to imagine her sister's suicide. Through the
dialogical relationship I had with my client, I tried to convey to her the sister's position as I had "imagined" it. My client, who was able
to hear me, was now also able to hear her sister for the first time through me. She moved from being caught in an I-It understanding
of her sister's suicide, to one in which her sister had again become a Thou. The sister's scream was finally heard. As a result, the sui-
cide no longer appeared meaningless, for it had not been meaningless for her sister. Their realities were incompatible and incommu-
nicable, yet through entering into an I-Thou relation with her sister, my client was now also able to "imagine the real", and so "meet"
her sister for the first time.
Shortly after, we terminated the sessions. Maria DaVenza Tillmanns

September/October 2013 ● Philosophy Now 11

 The difference between Buber’s approach to the other and currently teaches philosophy peripatetically in California, including as
the postmodern approach is of great importance to fields like the Philosopher-in-Residence at La Jolla Country Day School.
counseling. Counseling cannot exist without trust as the basis
for the counseling to occur in the first place. It is the trust to • This topic was considered in a different form in the IJPP, the on-line jour-
engage the other, without knowing them first on the basis of nal of the ASPCP (now the National Philosophical Counseling Association).
what we can know about them through a pre-extant system of
thought. In counseling, it is important to be able to acknowl-
edge the other as other, and to be able to ‘meet’ the other
while holding one’s own ground (terms Buber uses to describe
the dialogical). Yet one can only do so when one can trust the
other’s otherness through implicitly understanding his other-
ness. Otherness in Buber’s terms is not something we can
know explicitly. I believe this is why much of our research in
the fields of counseling and education has gone astray: the
need to make explicit creates the need for categorizing people.
It creates an I-It relation, and in the process the true nature of
their otherness is sacrificed, because the other person is not a
fixed thing to be categorized. For Buber, to know the other
person explicitly is to objectify them. Otherness cannot be classi-
fied or categorized without sacrificing otherness in the process.
Buber argues that the other can only be understood
through the I-Thou relationship. We need to learn how to
engage the other directly through trust, and understanding
will develop out of this engagement. Understanding cannot be
achieved through developing ever-more sophisticated cate-
gories of thought by which to categorise people. Yet that’s pre-
cisely what we are doing when we categorize people in terms
of gender, ethnicity, language or culture. These categories are
facts of life, but they cannot be all that we can say about life. In
fact, we have to swing back and forth between the I-It and I-
Thou. We need both the skills of knowing explicitly (I-It) and
understanding implicitly (I-Thou).
In the Western world, in which reason has dominated, it is
important to restore the element of trust towards others. It is
also important to view the gap between self and other as the
distance needed for relating, and not as a void which needs to
be bridged. Philosophy as an art (and not as an ivory tower dis-
cipline), can help us restore the trust Buber talks about, by
virtue of the fact that it engages with the world, but not
through preconceived categories of thought (which is also a
weakness of ivory tower philosophy).
Philosophical counseling tries to set free thought that’s oth-
erwise trapped in its own fabrications. Like all philosophy, it
questions taken-for-granted assumptions – presuppositions
about life, beliefs and values, both as uniquely our own and as
part of the world in which we live. In this way philosophical
counseling can come as a breath of fresh air, and can be very
useful to people within the context of their home and work
life. It depends above all on the desire to be reflective, to
become mindful of one’s thoughts and actions and mindful of
life in general. To live one’s life as an answer is to accept one’s
life’s circumstances. But the foundations of philosophical coun-
seling are the idea of living one’s life as a question, not an
answer. To live one’s life fully means to live in open response to
life as we both encounter it and create it.
© DR MARIA DAVENZA TILLMANNS 2013
Maria daVenza Tillmanns is a former President of the American
Society for Philosophy, Counseling and Psychotherapy (ASPCP), and

12 Philosophy Now ● September/October 2013