Emmy van Deurzen was born in the Hague, attended University in France where she gained Masters degrees in philosophy and psychology, and later moved to England. She had some training in psychoanalysis in France, and practiced there as a counselling psychologist. However, she was dissatisfied by the psychoanalytic approach since it did not seem to address the lived experience of the people with chronic psychiatric disorders with whom she was working as a counselling psychologist. She became interested in the work of R D Laing and came to London to live in one of the therapeutic houses created by the Philadelphia Association that Laing founded. She had further training in the Philadelphia Association but realized that the Continental philosophers working in the phenomenological and existential traditions were still not well known in the UK and that there was still a strong admixture of psychoanalytic thinking, even in the Philadelphia Association. She became an active member of the Association of Humanistic Practitioners of Psychotherapy, and was a founder of the British Psychological Society's counselling psychotherapy section (now a division). She created the first Masters level course in existential psychotherapy in the UK, firstly at the Antioch University campus in London, and then moving it to Regent's College, and from there to Schiller International University. In order to create a forum to encourage existential psychotherapy training and practice, Emmy founded the Society of Existential Analysis in 1988. Since then, Emmy has continued to foster psychotherapy by taking a leading role in psychotherapy organizations: she has been the first chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, reht external relations officer of the European Association for Psychotherapy, the chair of the Universities Psychotheapy and Counselling and Psychotherapy, and the chair of the Psychotherapy section of the British Psychological Society.

She has described her approach to existential psychotherapy in Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling in Practice, and puts it into the context of other existential approaches in her chapter in Individual Psychotherapy in the UK. She lectures regularly on this topic, too, and you can find her recent talk to Danish psychologists in Viejle Fjord, Denmark, here.

As well as being a practising psychologist and psychotherapists, Emmy has remained committed to her first professional training, as a philosopher. Look at Paradox and Passion and Everyday Mysteries. Like many other existentially-influenced philosophers before her, she has been concerned about what constitutes a good life. Look a lecture on his subject here.

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One of Emmy's conclusions about our modern world is that we live in a world in which we are becomingly increasingly cushioned from the consequences of our actions, a world of virtuality. However, like Pandora who released the evils of the world from the box in which Prometheus had confined them, our curiosity comes at a price. Click here for her lecture to the European Conference on Psychotherapy, in Dublin.

Other aspects of Emmy's work are described in the Dilemma webpages and in the pages of the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, which she founded, with Digby Tantam

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Emmy's latest lecture in Viejle, Denmark here

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