Intention

My intention with this blog is threefold; to challenge the thinking of existing therapists from traditional modalities; to let those who, like me, want something else from therapy – something more Nietzschean, and lastly to invite a conversation about what it means to become a Nietzschean Psychotherapist.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Friedrich Nietzsche

To ‘be’ a Nietzschean Psychotherapist is a contradiction. For Nietzsche there is no thing-in-itself: there is no being, there is only becoming. To become Nietzschean is to not know who or what you are becoming: it is the innocence of becoming.

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Becoming Nietzschean certainly entails a going-down, a going-under and a self over-coming. It would not require affiliation, observance or commitment to a particular creed. It could not be doctrinaire or dogmatic, and it would not entail values being turned into a system.

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Nietzsche died in 1900, he rightly intuited that his first students were not yet born: he described himself as being born posthumously; he was, as it were, born before his time, Nietzsche was also accurate insofar as the current interest in his work is immense and continues to be so. Nietzsche saw himself first as a psychologist before being a philosopher.

There are a great many books written about Nietzsche’s philosophy and fewer about his psychology. The vast majority of these are academic; there is very little written about the application of his thought in psychotherapy.

To get a sense of my approach besides reading the blog, I recently wrote a chapter called Learn to Forget: a Nietzschean Revaluation of Forgetting in Psychotherapy (see menu) It is based on a conversation I had with someone I worked with, it demonstrates Nietzsche’s ‘active forgetting’. I describe the process I undertook which allowed me to forget, and the therapeutic value of such an intervention for both of us. The chapter offers a clinical example of forgetting as an intervention. It was not an accident, it is part of the process of becoming what Nietzsche called the ‘sovereign individual’.

I am currently writing two books, the first is near completion and is based on my blog, it is entitled, A Nietzschean Celebration of the Death of Psychotherapy. The second entitled, The Joy of Ethics describes what clinical ethics might look like for a Nietzschean psychotherapist.

As a qualified teacher I’ve been training therapists for nearly twenty years, and so I have an interest in whether a Nietzschean Psychotherapy training might be possible, and what it would entail. If there are to be physicians of the soul à la Nietzsche, where are they?