Short answers, pulled from the story.
Emmy van Deurzen is known as a foundational figure in existential therapy and for giving the discipline its first institutional structure in the English-speaking world. She founded the Society for Existential Analysis in 1988, organized the first World Congress for Existential Therapy in 2015, and published more than twenty academic books translated into over two dozen languages.
Emmy van Deurzen was born on the 13th of December 1951 in The Hague, Netherlands. She completed her classical education at the Dalton Lyceum before studying philosophy at the University of Montpellier under phenomenologist Michel Henry and clinical psychology at the University of Bordeaux.
Emmy van Deurzen's four-world model divides human existence into four dimensions: the physical world (Umwelt), the social world (Mitwelt), the personal inner world (Eigenwelt), and the spiritual dimension (Überwelt). She developed the model in the 1970s drawing on the work of Ludwig Binswanger, and it forms the basis of her method of Structural Existential Analysis.
Emmy van Deurzen founded the Society for Existential Analysis in 1988, co-founded the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling at Regent's University London in 1990, and launched the New School for Psychotherapy and Counselling in 1996. She and Digby Tantam created the Existential Academy at Fortune Green in West Hampstead in 2014, which now runs five masters programmes and two doctoral programmes with Middlesex University.
After the 2016 Brexit referendum, Emmy van Deurzen founded the Voices for Europe initiative and served as Vice Chair of the New Europeans. She organized free counselling services for EU citizens in the United Kingdom and delivered public speeches at protests in Parliament Square.
Emmy van Deurzen's first book, published in 1988 by Sage, introduced her existential approach to psychotherapy and has remained a bestseller through multiple editions. She also served as senior editor of The Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy in 2019, bringing together major figures including Irvin Yalom, Alfried Laengle, and Kirk Schneider.