Emmy van Deurzen

• 1. Introduction

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  Emmy van Deurzen sang soprano in the school choir at the Dalton Lyceum in The Hague. She also performed her own compositions on guitar at school events throughout the 1960s. Her Gymnasium Alpha exams in 1970 covered eight subjects: Greek, Latin, Dutch, English, French, German, history, and algebra. She published poetry in the school newsletter and played small parts in plays. Few who knew her then could have anticipated what she would go on to build.

  Van Deurzen moved from the Netherlands through the psychiatric hospitals of rural France. She then joined the therapeutic communities of London, and her work eventually reached every continent where psychotherapy is seriously practised. She built a philosophical therapy grounded in phenomenology. That therapy was offered not just to individual clients but to an entire profession still finding its own shape. How a Dutch classicist became the institutional architect of a worldwide therapeutic movement is one question. What it means for human suffering to be understood philosophically is another.

• 2. The French Formation

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  Phenomenologist Michel Henry supervised van Deurzen's master's dissertation at the University of Montpellier. She had come to Montpellier first to study French, earning a Diplôme Supérieur d'Etudes Françaises. Her philosophy dissertation examined the relationship between phenomenology and psychiatry through the problem of solitude and solipsism. The direction she chose was her own.

  From Montpellier, she moved to the University of Bordeaux for a second degree in psychology and then a master's in clinical psychology. She was invited to work as an assistant and tutor in the psychophysiology laboratory there. Her final clinical dissertation was grounded in research with young women who had attempted suicide. She was not studying suffering from a distance. She was building a method for engaging with it directly.

  In 1971, van Deurzen and her first husband Jean Pierre Fabre began voluntary work at Font D'Aurelle, the Psychiatric Hospital of Montpellier, in the children's and outpatient departments. Two years later, they moved to Saint Alban, a psychiatric hospital in the Lozère region of the Massif Central. That hospital had originated institutional psychotherapy. François Tosquelles had transformed it. Frantz Fanon had worked in its wards.

  Van Deurzen held a full-time post in the social therapy department. She ran psychodrama and systems therapy groups. She helped manage the weekly patient group connected to the hospital newsletter, Trait d'Union, and directed plays. From 1975 to 1977, the couple moved to the Psychotherapeutic Centre La Candelie in Agen. There they worked under the supervision of Lacanian analyst Dr. François Tosquelles. In 1977, Joseph H. Berke and Morton Schatzman invited them to come work in London.

• 3. London and California

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  Van Deurzen joined the Arbours Association therapeutic community in London. She also assisted at the Crisis Centre and worked with R. D. Laing and his colleagues at the Philadelphia Association. She began teaching existential therapy in the Arbours training programme. It was during this period that she entered into a lifelong friendship with Hungarian psychiatrist Thomas Stephen Szasz.

  In 1978, van Deurzen and Fabre made a three-month work study trip to California. They were guests of Richard Price at the Esalen Institute, where they trained in Gestalt therapy and body therapy. Van Deurzen met Gregory Bateson at Esalen. She met Hubert Lederer Dreyfus at Berkeley University. Together, she and Fabre met with John Weir Perry to talk about madness. They visited several members of the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute. They also saw the Soteria model halfway house run by Loren Richard Mosher in San Jose.

  From 1978, van Deurzen taught at Antioch University's London centre. She added this to her existing teaching for the Arbours Association and South West London College. The range of institutions was broadening, but the underlying purpose was becoming more specific. Within four years, that clarity would produce a training programme entirely her own.

• 4. Building the Profession

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  In 1982, van Deurzen created the first master's programme in existential psychotherapy at Antioch University's London centre. Three years later, that programme moved to Regent's University London, and she joined the faculty as Head of the Psychology Department. She was made a professor in psychotherapy and counselling. She co-founded the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling at Regent's in 1990 with the then-president of Regent's College, John Payne. She was appointed Dean of that school.

  In 1988, van Deurzen founded the Society for Existential Analysis and launched its Journal of Existential Analysis. Five years later, she became the first elected Chair of the UK Council for Psychotherapy. She also represented psychotherapists in Europe at the European Commission and the Council of Europe, serving as external relations officer of the European Association for Psychotherapy.

  Van Deurzen left Regent's in 1996 to found the New School for Psychotherapy and Counselling in London. The school was initially based at the London centre of Schiller International University, where she was made an honorary professor. She and Digby Tantam co-founded the Centre for the Study of Conflict and Reconciliation at the University of Sheffield in 1999. By 2005, she was an honorary professor at Sheffield too, working with Tantam on four large European-funded research projects. Those projects brought together colleagues from Ireland, Poland, Austria, Romania, France, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, and Czechia.

  The New School moved in 2010 to the old Decca Recording Studios on Belsize Road. Four years later, it settled into purpose-built accommodation at Fortune Green in West Hampstead and became the Existential Academy. Darwin College at Cambridge University awarded both van Deurzen and Tantam visiting associate status in 2007. In 2015, van Deurzen organized the first World Congress for Existential Therapy. That event led directly to the founding of the Federation for Existential Therapy in Europe.

• 5. The Four Worlds

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  Ludwig Binswanger's work gave van Deurzen a structural starting point. Drawing on Binswanger's philosophy and her own clinical observations in France, she developed a four-world model of human existence in the 1970s. The physical world she named Umwelt. The social world was Mitwelt. The personal inner world was Eigenwelt. The spiritual dimension was Überwelt. Each world carried its own paradoxes and its own inevitable tensions between opposing forces. Together, the four worlds formed the basis of what she called Structural Existential Analysis.

  Her first published chapter on existential therapy appeared in 1984, in Windy Dryden's Handbook on Individual Psychotherapy. Her first full book appeared in 1988, published by Sage, and introduced her therapeutic approach in accessible terms. It went on to become a long-running bestseller, appearing in multiple editions. She also developed what she called an emotional compass. This was a tool for mapping emotions across the four existential dimensions and connecting them to human values. Everyday Mysteries, published by Routledge in 1997, presented a comprehensive synthesis of existential philosophy and clinical practice in pragmatic terms. Paradox and Passion in Psychotherapy, from 1998, explored emotional tensions in the therapeutic relationship, including van Deurzen's own early experiences with suicidality.

  The Dictionary of Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling, co-authored with Raymond Kenward, came out in 2005. Skills in Existential Counselling and Psychotherapy, co-authored with Martin Adams, followed in 2011. The Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy appeared in 2019, with van Deurzen as senior editor. It brought together leading figures including Irvin Yalom, Alfried Laengle, and Kirk Schneider. The 2022 volume Structural Existential Analysis, co-authored with Claire Arnold-Baker, formalized a research method. That method was built on five existential lenses: Space, Time, Purpose, Paradox, and Passion. The volume also introduced the Existential Research Dialogue, a dialogical interview technique for clinical research. Across all formats, van Deurzen's published output runs to twenty academic books, seventy book chapters, and well over one hundred journal papers. In 2022, she signed with Penguin for Beginning to Live: The Art of Existential Freedom. The book offered an accessible guide to her therapeutic ideas for a general audience.

• 6. A Public Voice

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  After the 2016 Brexit referendum, van Deurzen founded an initiative called Voices for Europe. Its purpose was to defend the rights of EU citizens living in the United Kingdom. She served as Vice Chair of the New Europeans and organized free counselling services for affected populations. She also delivered public speeches at protests in Parliament Square. The Existential Academy provided free emotional support for Ukrainians who took refuge in the United Kingdom during the conflict with Russia. It extended similar support to those affected by the war between Israel and Gaza.

  Psychotherapy and the Quest for Happiness, published in 2009, had laid out van Deurzen's position on one of the central preoccupations of contemporary life. She critiqued both the pathologizing tendency of mainstream psychotherapy and the shallow optimism of popular positive psychology. She called instead for a more honest reckoning with difficulty. Rising from Existential Crisis, published in 2021, extended that argument to the specific psychological effects of sociopolitical trauma and immigration. In 2023, van Deurzen wrote and produced a documentary called Bringing Wisdom to the World. The film promoted the Existential Movement, an organization van Deurzen had founded and led as its first president. Its aim was to bring philosophical thinking into broader public conversation.

  The British Psychological Society honoured van Deurzen in 2024 with a lifelong honorary fellowship for services to psychology and psychotherapy. She had received a lifetime achievement award from the International Network of Meaning in Toronto in 2012. In 2023, van Deurzen and Tantam semi-retired from day-to-day management of the Existential Academy. Dr. Arnold-Baker became principal and Danny van Deurzen-Smith became deputy principal. The five masters programmes and two doctoral programmes at the Academy, offered in conjunction with Middlesex University, continue under their leadership.