Beyond Techno-Therapy: Falling Upwards into the Existential Abyss

A Conversation on Existential Therapy with Mo Mandić

Part 1: The Journey into Existential Psychotherapy

Rafi: Dear Mo, it is a privilege to sit down with you tonight. Let’s dive straight into the heart of things: how did a chemist specializing in the rigid structures of polymerization find himself pulled into the fluid, ungrounded waters of existential therapy?

Mo: Well, thank you for inviting me, Rafi. I’m really pleased to have this opportunity to talk to you this evening. How I got into existential therapy can be traced back to a particular period in my mid-twenties. I had only just graduated as a chemist specializing in plastics and polymerization, which is a bit of a technical term, but that was my background. I entered the world of chemicals working for a major oil company, and I quickly realized that this wasn’t very fulfilling, which came as a bit of a shock to me.

The way I would put it today is that it was a breakdown of my way of making sense of life and engaging in everyday living. I suddenly found that something was disjointed, disturbed, or disrupted. This put me in a kind of quandary—not to overdramatize it—questioning if this was really what I wanted. As a young person, I enjoyed the income and the freedom it gave me, but ultimately, it wasn’t satisfying.

So, at about the age of 25, I started reading some introductory, very basic philosophy, and it affected me deeply. It was unsettling and exciting to read an introduction to Heidegger’s thinking and his basic ideas. None of the other philosophers I was introduced to seemed to address something much more fundamental: the human being and the direct attempt to address that question. That stayed with me, and I remember being almost in a fever, as if I had discovered something for the first time.

I remember going to a bookshop in central London and seeing Being and Time. It took me probably about a year before I plucked up the courage to buy it, because every time I looked inside that book, I just couldn’t get past the first page. But I really felt it in my bones that this was a deeply important book. It was almost as if I had been brought back to life through this encounter. I tried to read introductory work about Heidegger and realized that this was the path I wanted to take.

At the same time, I read an article in a Sunday newspaper magazine detailing all the different kinds of therapy, and one of them was existential. I wrote to the contacts and asked to see them , which is how I started experiencing being a client or patient in therapy. My initial motivation was simply curiosity about how it might work. After several sessions, I realized there was something important about it because I was engaging in very different conversations and addressing questions that I hadn’t previously touched on in my life—or perhaps only to myself, but never with someone else. Following that, I studied philosophy for six years at London University while working full-time.

Rafi: A monumental undertaking – working within the corporate machine by day and inhabiting the world of fundamental ontology by night. How did you sustain that double existence?

Mo: Evenings. It was all evening lectures. I would work all day, drive to the university, and attend lectures for three hours. It was quite a full existence in a way, but I felt I was in exactly the right place. There was no question about whether I should be studying philosophy; it was simply my being called to it.

Altogether, I spent six years there doing both undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Along the way, I never went to any lectures given on Heidegger, which is interesting because I never wanted to spoil the experience of reading Heidegger for myself.

Rafi: That is remarkably ambitious.

Mo: Yes, it was ambitious. But the interesting thing is that, some years later, about 2004, I focused purely on reading Being and Time. I went away for a long skiing holiday in Austria entirely on my own. I would go skiing for a few hours during the day, come back, and just work on reading, that was all I did. Somehow, I managed to get through a significant amount of Being and Time so that I could continue when I returned from my holiday. It was a real commitment; once I made that leap, it became a dedicated project.

Later, I studied at Regent’s College, as it was then, existential therapy. That sat well with what I had already managed to do with Being and Time because it was just one day a week. The first semester actually involved reading Being and Time together as a group of students. I felt I had already become acquainted with some of the ideas before we explored them in class, which was a very helpful way to develop.

To answer your original question, I think something happens to each of us in life where we get a lightbulb moment—a moment of illumination or a search for insight.

Rafi: What happened in your life to prompt that?

Mo: I think what happened in my life was this feeling of ennui and dissatisfaction with how I was living. As a chemistry graduate, I was doing okay and had my own apartment, so I could provide myself with a conventional way of life, but it still wasn’t satisfying. This path of inquiry through philosophy and existential therapy became a quest—an opening to a completely different path than the corporate business world of profits and the like.

Looking back, experiencing those years and holding that disorienting question was incredibly powerful. It was a breakdown of sorts, as I already mentioned, realizing that my current life wasn’t fulfilling, even though I didn’t yet know what kind of path would show me the way forward. We often talk about choice as if we are walking into a shop to choose what we want to buy; but when it comes to life, I think something chooses us. Philosophy chose me, and being a therapist felt like a calling.

Part 2: A Profession vs. A Calling

Rafi: So it was never a calculated career move, but a genuine vocation?

Mo: Yes, I think so. It’s a calling in the sense that if you are doing it purely by calculating whether it will provide a very good standard of living, it becomes very difficult to work like that. I’m sure there are therapists out there who think that way, but if you treat it strictly as a career path—saying, “Right, this is a very secure or important way that I can live my life” because a careers advisor told you it’s a good career—I don’t think I could do it. I believe something has to grab you; you are pulled in by something that speaks to you and tells you this is truly important. That is how I came into it.

Rafi: Thank you very much. I agree with you completely that it is a calling rather than a profession or a career.

Let us clarify what it really is. First of all, is it “existential psychotherapy” or “existential therapy”? Some people argue that “psychotherapy” is fundamentally an oxymoron because the “psyche” is an artificial conceptualization of something that doesn’t exist. They argue that we engage in therapy with the whole human being and their whole “being-in-the-world,” rather than an artificial internal apparatus. Where do you stand on this linguistic divide?

Mo: Well, I know some practitioners who are more closely affiliated with the Daseinsanalytic school, if I can call it that. But this applies to the broader world of existential therapy as well; many existential therapists would agree with me that they don’t really subscribe to the term “psychotherapy” to describe existential approaches to therapy.

At the same time, though I haven’t explored this to the extent others might have, it is worth noting that “psychotherapy” is a term used in our modern age, and it has a particular meaning. As a word, it established itself out of a tradition of Cartesianism, meaning we naturally understand it through a Cartesian lens.

Personally, I prefer to go back to the ancient Greeks—even pre-Aristotle and pre-Plato—to see how they expressed themselves and the language they used, because I think they were much closer to phenomena, since their language allowed for it. It had a different structure compared to our highly Cartesian modern language. That is a constant struggle for me because I want to challenge the way our embedded language restricts us from articulating what it means to be human because of this Cartesian paradigm.

To return to your question: yes, existential therapy. However, I am always questioning all of these words and terms, because no term has a fixed, final, or definitive status. Language always opens up the possibility to clarify and deepen our understanding of the phenomenon we are trying to address. Even terms like “existence” or “existential” do not settle upon a final understanding; we must remain open to exploring what they actually mean. We would benefit greatly from returning to those ancient Greek terms.

Part 3: The Nature of the Therapeutic Conversation

Rafi: Thank you, that is important. So, what does existential therapy mean to you? If you had to explain it in simple terms to someone who walks in and asks, “What the hell is existential therapy, and what do you do?”

Mo: One way might be to state what it is not, for example, explaining that it isn’t cognitive behavioral therapy or something else—but that doesn’t truly address the question. The question is already framed in a certain way, which is fine, because it helps me to explore it.

When we ask what something is, we are already suggesting there is a static essence we need to uncover and point to: “What is the essence of existential therapy?” But I think a much more fitting question is: when is existential therapy? That points to something very different.

When we speak about the essence of something in a Platonic way, we are asking for a fixed definition, much like Socrates trying to find the essence of justice, piety, or truth. That kind of questioning freezes the topic under investigation to isolate its essence. In doing so, it removes the temporal element. Therapy isn’t something that can fall under a rigid definition; it is inherently temporal. I think of therapy as a conversation.

The question then becomes: what kind of conversation is it, and how do we understand it? If you go to a medical doctor, they will ask where the pain is, how intense it is, and when it occurs. They identify symptoms to establish a cause, provide a diagnosis, and treat you based on that diagnosis.

By contrast, a therapeutic conversation, when attended to closely, carries existential significance because it involves inherent ambiguity and uncertainty. It requires the practitioner to let go of attempts to direct or manipulate the conversation and instead remain fully receptive to how it naturally moves. This invites the client to deepen their exploration, which might mean finding themselves in a space of uncertainty and ambiguity that brings about moments of anxiety.

That anxiety points directly to the core existential aspects of their unique human existence. On an everyday level, having a secure, predictable job where you can plan out your month or year feels very grounded. But when you truly open up to exploring life, circumstances change and things are fundamentally unpredictable. Questioning core aspects of being human opens up unsettling questions: Who am I? Does the way I am living make sense to me, or am I just meandering?

Exploring this means letting go of the comfortable anchors we rely on to tell ourselves everything is fine and working well. On an everyday level, we might have nothing to complain about and think of ourselves as flourishing. But when I confront the fact that I am mortal, I naturally become anxious and think about what that means for how I live my life in the face of my mortality. Do I embrace every day when I wake up? Working as a therapist, I try to affirm my existence through that daily repetition.

Rafi: An echo of Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return?

Mo: Yes, exactly. Whether you interpret the eternal return as a test or something else, there is something vital about it. It ties into Kierkegaard as well—the idea of repetition and being a “knight of faith,” as he puts it. We can draw on these ideas to understand that we are temporal, mortal beings, and in the face of that, we must wake up to our own responsibility for how we live. All of this is deeply relevant to how I think when I work existentially.

Part 4: Existential Therapy and Mental Health Disorders

Rafi: Thank you. That is beautifully put. But tell me, does this have anything to do with healing or treating disorders? As an existential practitioner, how do you position yourself against the diagnostic architecture of the DSM, the ICD, and the broader institutional drive to classify human suffering?

Mo: This is a topic that frequently comes up when I supervise students in small groups across different institutions. Students on the path of learning understandably look for concrete ways to support their clients and make a meaningful difference. Some students find that referencing diagnostic systems like the DSM or ICD helps them orient themselves to a client, or perhaps the client arrives saying they have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. As a therapist, the student is immediately faced with the issue of how to engage with this label.

When discussing this, I don’t think it’s helpful to simply dismiss it and say, “Well, that’s not how we work as existential practitioners”. That diagnostic starting point is an important part of their journey in questioning how to be a therapist. It highlights how difficult it is to go through the path of becoming a practitioner.

Many therapeutic training courses are structured around rigid modules with strict “learning outcomes”. They promise that once you complete a module on existential, psychodynamic, or humanistic theory, you will achieve specific competencies outlined in ten bullet points. This makes me question the entire framework of how we become therapists; I don’t think it happens like that. You don’t just complete a ten-week semester and suddenly possess the knowledge to be a therapist.

It comes about differently. To answer your question: we start wherever the student or client starts, and then we try to open up the discussion. We bring to light the specific tensions, difficulties, or struggles the client is facing in establishing a ground for themselves in their own existence or in their relations with others. By opening up the inquiry this way, the student experiences a living, thinking process rather than immediately jumping to a calculative question like, “It’s borderline personality disorder, so what is the protocol?”

We undertake a process of questioning where we start to see the actual human being in the client, rather than just a classification. So, the short answer is that I do not tend to draw on clinical disorders or classifications. There are other, seldom-explored elements of what happens in therapy that I find far more vital, and Heidegger’s later philosophy is incredibly important in that regard.

Part 5: Becoming a Therapist and Writing the Book

Rafi: Listening to you, I find myself wishing I could sit in your lecture halls. What you’ve just said raises further questions, such as: what truly makes an existential therapist, and how do you become one if not through these predefined modules? That is the first question. The second would be about the ultimate goals of these therapeutic encounters. And the third would be about your book. That should structure the rest of our time together.

Mo: Great. Where would you like to start?

Rafi: Perhaps with becoming an existential therapist.

Mo: Yes. I think there is a kind of preoccupation that takes over. Becoming a therapist isn’t like conducting a standard piece of research; it is a way of life meeting life. What is absolutely central to it is the question: What does it mean, and what sense do we have of being human? I am certainly not the first to ask this—it has been going on for a long time —but I feel that this question often fails to stay at the forefront of a therapist’s awareness. Various therapeutic approaches tend to overlook it because they treat the answer as already settled.

For instance, if you are a psychoanalyst, the nature of the human being seems obvious. You look to Freud, the neo-Freudians, or relational analysts, to understand ourselves through the established frameworks laid out in their work. Because of that, the fundamental question isn’t truly alive for you. Other approaches similarly assume that the school’s founder has already established a definitive understanding of the human being, inviting followers to simply embrace it.

We need to remind ourselves that individuals like Freud or Fritz Perls made profound attempts to articulate what it means to be human based on their own path of thinking—predominantly within a Cartesian framework. Their theories didn’t drop out of the heavens; they were human attempts to clarify a question and provide an answer. The danger arises when followers turn these insights into a closed system.

For example—and I am open to being corrected here—my suspicion is that Gestalt therapy has firmly established a set way of working. While certain practitioners might elaborate on it, it generally remains confined within the established Gestalt framework. To my mind, that is an abnegation of responsibility. It avoids the anxiety of opening up fundamental questions where there is no guarantee that the path you take will lead to a secure or predictable answer. That uncertainty is exactly what we need to embrace more. Relying blindly on books, concepts, and stable theories gives us a comfortable sense of identity as therapists and keeps our world stable. But we must open that up and question whichever approach we embrace—and I certainly feel this lack of deep questioning is an issue even within the existential approach itself.

Mo: I think it was a gradual realization that unfolded as I explored Heidegger’s work, Being and Time, and what his ideas truly meant to me. I was reading widely, and various philosophers studying Heidegger introduced understandings that felt deeply relevant to therapy. Heidegger was the source that was always there because he asked the most fundamental questions. He was pursuing what he called “fundamental ontology,” whereas fields like psychology or anthropology operate as “regional ontologies”, they are asking fundamentally different questions.

That contrast made me realize that the world of therapy generally doesn’t go deeply enough into its own questions. While others asked, “What is the human being?”, he asked: “What is the sense that we have of what it is to be Dasein—to be a certain way of being?” That line of inquiry yielded deep insights, particularly his identification of the basic, essential features of human existence.

He used these “existentials” to show that the human being is inherently “being-in-the-world”. Human existence is distinctive because we possess a vague, pre-ontological understanding of what it means to be, whereas a chair, a table, a bottle, or a lizard does not. All of this built into something significant for me, and these existentials became central.

Working with clients and teaching, I noticed the profound tensions expressed in clients’ lives—the struggle to find a sense of belonging with others while simultaneously being gripped by specific moods that limit or disorient them. Being-with, the sense of conforming to society, the particular moods that overtake us, and how we relate to possibility are all vital existentials. We are possibility, but how do we either enact or avoid that possibility matters deeply. For instance, a mood of resignation acknowledges possibilities but completely shuts them out from consideration.

A picture began to form of what it means to exist as temporal beings, though we rarely attune ourselves to this temporality unless we experience a profound awakening. I wanted to explore this deeply and bring the richness of Heidegger’s contributions to the awareness of students who hadn’t yet seen it. Furthermore, I wanted to address how Heidegger reframes “breakdowns” in a way no Cartesian approach does. In a Cartesian framework, if you feel alienated, it is treated as an internal defect—something broken in you that needs to be repaired or brought back into resonance with the world. In contrast, the integration of existentials and breakdowns is central to an existential approach, and the work built around that.

As for the actual writing, it was my very first experience writing a book. I learned an immense amount, largely because I started running out of time and began to panic. I remember pleading with the publishers for an extension so I could bring it up to a satisfactory standard, because I had left the actual writing quite late. But ultimately, it conveyed exactly what I wanted it to say.

Part 6: Linguistic Rebellion — Verbs vs. Nouns

Rafi: Let’s talk now about your upcoming book. To start, I want to quote a beautiful passage you wrote:

In many ways, your writing feels like a linguistic rebellion. You consistently refuse to let living human concepts freeze into static nouns, choosing instead active, fluid, hyphenated gerunds like throwing, dwelling, and caring. Why do you think modern psychology and mainstream therapy are so utterly terrified of verbs?

Mo: I believe this fear traces back remarkably far. In my own work, I have been trying to stay very close to the historical trajectory of metaphysics. Metaphysics is an incredibly vital area of study. If we look at it through a temporal lens—as Heidegger does—we can see that our entire Western intellectual history is deeply immersed in a tradition that seeks to fix things firmly into place. By rigidifying concepts, we provide ourselves with a false sense of stability, predictability, and totalized knowledge.

This underlying metaphysical drive was set in motion from Plato onwards, and it has become so deeply ingrained and rooted in our cultural psyche that we struggle to envision any alternative. We are very much like a fish in water; the fish is entirely oblivious to the very medium in which it lives its life.

Heidegger frequently pointed toward the possibility of another “inception” or a new beginning. Even though we cannot fully grasp what such a beginning would look like, we can discern how deeply our current language is structured to anchor everything rigidly into place. In doing so, we have completely lost the dynamic essence that the early Greek thinkers—like Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaximander, and Empedocles—were immersed in.

The early Greeks understood the world through physis, which refers to a dynamic force of something emerging, ‘whooshing up’, lingering for a while, and then disappearing back into concealment. That is a profoundly dynamic and ongoing way to understand how phenomena manifest and show up to us.

Mainstream disciplines—all the various “ologies” like psychology, anthropology, and sociology—are undeniably fascinating areas to explore. However, their ultimate starting point is almost always to claim a definitive logos that transfixes ideas into a static position. They do this so we can have a solid, tangible object to draw upon, giving us the illusion of absolute knowledge over ourselves, our world, and others.

Part 7: The Threat of “Techno-Therapy”

Rafi: In your book, you observe that through this rigid submission to theory and clinical technique, modern therapy rapidly veers toward what you phenomenally term ‘techno-therapy’. Mainstream practice has become fundamentally technological, drawing on operational thinking and a strictly scientific attitude.

Given that our current institutional frameworks are constantly screaming at us to optimize a human being in a few brief, flat sessions, do you believe that a true therapy of letting-be and holding open the clearing is possible within institutions at all?

Mo: Exactly—and that is the monumental challenge we face. It is a tension I encounter constantly when facilitating supervision groups or speaking with students. In the early stages of their development, students are already completely inundated with operational theories historically set in stone by the major exponents of various therapeutic orientations.

Even though changing this institutionalized momentum looks almost impossible, the challenge is profoundly worth undertaking. We must try to see if we can help people discern an entirely different path of thinking that they can engage in. I cannot control or foresee how the wider field will go, but my hope is that when people pick up these books, they will feel a deeper resonance. I want them to realize that this approach goes significantly deeper and makes far more sense to them than the abstract theories they are forced to read elsewhere.

In my forthcoming book, I wanted to strip away all our habitual, layered ways of conceptualizing therapy. I want to look directly at what is actually occurring in the raw unfolding of the therapeutic encounter as it happens. When we do this, there is no abstract theorizing layered over the top. If I am truly listening to you, I am simply listening. There is no complex theory about listening required, unless you intentionally choose to invent one. It is about staying strictly within a descriptively-oriented phenomenological approach and attitude. My hope is that this will spark genuine dialogue, conversation, and challenge.

Rafi: That distinction is tricky, isn’t it? Dialogue versus conversation.

Mo: It absolutely is. Hans-Georg Gadamer described conversation beautifully as a form of play. But in therapy, you also have to bear with the profound weight of the dialogue. I hold closely to the specific German distinction of Gespräch, which Heidegger uses. It literally implies a gathering to speak together, a shared speaking and listening.

Part 8: Cultivating the Stamina for Silence

Rafi: Speaking of listening, you wrote a striking passage about the nature of “gossiping” or idle chatter in therapy, noting that it fills the room with endless speaking while actually saying nothing at all. If you were to advise modern practitioners, how can they cultivate the internal stamina required to sit in absolute silence and resist the desperate urge to throw clever words into the clearing?

Mo: It requires a profound refraining. True listening means stopping ourselves from “leaping in”. It means resisting the way a therapist’s listening is often pre-captured by what they assume or believe the client is saying.

As we talk about this, the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his concept of the “Face” comes to mind. The Face of the Other radically informs me and constantly reminds me that I am not them. I cannot assume or claim to fully encompass the other person’s reality. True listening requires putting aside the trivial, everyday way of relating to a client through superficial talk.

Rafi: I am incredibly glad you are highlighting this, for two distinct reasons. First, young therapists in particular have an intense desire to feel “professional” and competent. If they can quickly throw out a clinical theory, offer an interpretation, or perform an intervention, it makes them feel secure in their competence. Yet, the far more difficult and desired competency is the capacity to sit entirely still and stay with the phenomenon as it naturally unfolds.

Mo: You are entirely right. In my experience supervising students, they frequently come to me saying, “I have this difficult client issue, and I am trying so hard to find a way to help them, but I feel completely blocked and frustrated.”

When I hear that, I often tell them: “Why don’t you try stepping back and just really listen to them? Perhaps you are trying far too hard. Just sit and listen to what it is actually like to be them. Spend your time purely listening.”

Invariably, they come back the following week astonished, saying, “I did exactly that, and it completely transformed the session and our entire experience of being with each other.” It is these seemingly simple, basic things that get completely overlooked because therapists are trained to leap immediately into technical theories. Mainstream training teaches them that the theory has already decided what it means to be human.

Getting back to these basics and challenging how students view theory is a difficult balance for me as an educator. Technical theory is all they know, and they feel a terrifying sense of emptiness if they aren’t actively doing something therapeutic. But that exact moment of emptiness is the opportunity to say: “This is fundamentally different from everything you have ever known. This is precisely why we are not practicing standard psychology, anthropology, or sociology. We are not sitting in a corporate business meeting.”

Rafi: Exactly! And yet, university students in their second year are literally asking their professors to help them write corporate business plans for their private therapy practices.

I am also deeply glad you brought up Levinas, because I firmly believe that his understanding of the Face of the Other must be implemented directly into the core of Daseinsanalysis. Without explicitly seeing the face of the concrete other, terrible things can happen.

This will actually form a central chapter of the book I intend to write. I am focusing on the high existential risk of using the traditional psychoanalytic couch. When a therapist believes they are interacting with an abstract concept of Dasein rather than the concrete, lived actualization of that unique human being in front of them, they completely lose the Face. History shows us just how incredibly risky that abstraction is.

Mo: Yes, absolutely. I have an immense appreciation for Levinas’s work. However, I still feel a strong internal need to clarify the deep philosophical tensions that exist between Heidegger’s position and Levinas’s position. I want to be entirely clear within myself on how one can responsibly take insights from Levinas and adapt them into a broader Heideggerian understanding of existence. It is a highly complex task, and I need to investigate it much further.

Rafi: Regardless, I am profoundly impressed by the work you have already achieved. In my humble opinion, you have quietly and softly created an entirely new, unified school of thought within therapy. It is a remarkably coherent approach. Personally, I despise the word integrative because it usually just implies a messy, random mixture of disconnected techniques. What you have built is a truly complete approach.

Mo: Well, thank you. This is simply the profound impact that Heidegger’s ideas have on me. When I read his later works, it is incredibly slow and difficult going. Right now, I am reading his writings on the “inception,” and it is easily the most challenging text I have ever encountered. Yet, I always have the feeling that even the tiny fragments I can fully absorb make a massive difference to my life and practice.

I never reach a point where I say, “Well, that’s enough, I know everything I need to know now.” It always feels as though something is missing, driving me to understand Heidegger even deeper. That constant questioning is what keeps these therapeutic ideas generating. I owe an enormous intellectual debt to both Heidegger and Alfred. Alfred has been a pivotal influence on my development; his insights have opened up dimensions of thought that he himself may not even fully realize.

Rafi: Recently, me and Alfred have initiated an official collaboration between his European Center for Heidegger Studies and my independent project, Daseinsanalysis Beyond Institutions. Together, we are organizing an international conference in Spain this coming autumn. It will take place from November 13th to 15th, which is a beautiful, warm time to visit Spain. The event will be fully hybrid—accessible both in-person and online—and it would be absolutely wonderful if you could come.

Part 9: The Paradox of Falling Upwards

Rafi: Returning to your text, I have a burning question regarding your poetic paradox of falling upwards. I am certain you will recognize this specific piece of your writing:

“If we let ourselves fall into the abyss, we do not go tumbling into emptiness. We fall upwards to a height.”

When a person’s life completely collapses—whether they are undergoing a devastating divorce or enduring the sudden death of a loved one—they feel as though they are plunging headfirst into a terrifying, groundless void. You offer this incredible, counter-intuitive paradox.

Can you explain to our readers how a therapist can practically guide a deeply anxious person to understand that staring directly into the nothingness of a collapsed world is actually the exact birthplace of authentic human freedom?

Mo: That is a monumental question, and it lies at the absolute heart of my next book. The working title is Existential Therapy: Transcending Norms, Breakdowns, the Nothing, and Care. I am actively trying to think through “the nothing” and how we navigate trauma and profound loss. It is an existential question that preoccupies me constantly: how do human beings actually make it through these devastating, groundless experiences that can easily deconstruct their lives for a year or two?

I don’t think there is a neat, calculative formula to explain exactly how this happens, and it cannot be forced into shallow language. Rather, it has everything to do with the nature of being-with. It depends entirely on the therapist being deeply, sensitively attuned to the client’s current mood and their unique disposition as they slowly attempt to lay out and express the full weight of what they are experiencing.

Over a significant period of time, a tiny glimmer of awareness or radical acceptance begins to emerge in the dialogue. The client takes a conscious stance on their situation, which opens up a minimal, alternate possibility for them. They might leave a session, and over the passing days and weeks, something entirely new slowly begins to manifest outside the therapy room.

This transformation happens because they are actively reflecting on their own existence, their history, and their temporality. They are forced to confront the deep meaning and value of whatever it is that is now permanently gone from their lives. Gradually, an authentic future orientation begins to take root. They find the capacity to project themselves into a future that looks fundamentally different from the heavy void they just crawled through. This is the slow, unnamable movement upwards out of the abyss. It genuinely happens.

To speak personally, there have been times in my own life where I have been completely trapped inside that exact abyss. When I was in my early 40s, a deeply significant seven-year relationship came to an end. I was entirely devastated. I would spend every single day talking about it to friends and colleagues at work. I am certain I bored them to tears, but I simply could not get past it.

That profound sense of abyss lasted for about two solid years. I felt completely empty of energy, and found it nearly impossible to live in a way that felt meaningful. I remember thinking, “Well, I’ve had my time in life. It’s over and gone.”

During that time, people would constantly say silly, but well-meaning things to try and be helpful, but none of it helped at all. It was an incredibly difficult process to endure. But slowly, circumstances and events began to reconfigure themselves. Crucially, I didn’t try to frantically leap into a new relationship to distract myself from the pain. I stayed with the breakdown until a completely new world configured itself—a world that eventually absorbed me and gave me an entirely new way of relating to myself. I was finally able to let go.

This is the fundamental challenge of being a human being. The immense danger of mainstream frameworks—like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief or contemporary models like The Body Keeps the Score—is that they try to compartmentalize raw human suffering into neat, predictable boxes.

We must resist this. We need to stay strictly with the descriptive, phenomenological reality of what it means to live through a breakdown. It is a process where a human being eventually comes into their own; instead of existing as a scattered, dispersed entity, their existence slowly gathers itself back together.

Profound loss naturally disperses us into despair. It reminds me of Soren Kierkegaard’s insights: you simply cannot transition from the aesthetic stage of life, to the ethical, to the religious through clean, digital steps. For example, as Kierkegaard presents the young promiscuous man in several texts, he comes to a shattering realization: “My God, look at how I have been living my life up until now. I have been living like a teenager, and it is no longer working.” It is a radical form of growing up. And you only grow up by facing the nothingness directly, enduring it, and discovering that you are deeply resourceful enough to come through to the ‘other side’.

Part 10: The Future of Therapy and Institutional Rebellion

Rafi: You wrote that the worrying direction being taken by the professional bodies that regulate counseling and psychotherapy reflects an urgent need to return to these forgotten, foundational questions. Given this corporate climate, what are your thoughts on the actual future of therapy? Do you see any genuine hope?

Mo: I believe hope exists if practitioners are willing to intentionally revisit what is truly occurring in the therapeutic encounter. I often talk to experienced therapists who tell me, “I originally trained as a rigid psychodynamic clinician, but over years of practice, I have learned to work in a way that refuses to label, categorize, or box my clients in.”

While they don’t always articulate it philosophically, my guess is that they have discovered a deeply relational truth: the healing occurs within a conversation that is far deeper than mere adherence to clinical theory. Unfortunately, this truth is rarely articulated in mainstream spaces.

The institutional reality in the UK is dominated by massive regulatory bodies like the UKCP (United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy) and the BACP (British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy). I am a member of the UKCP myself, but when I read the periodical magazines they send out, I am consistently struck by their absolute shallowness. The articles focus on superficial topics like “How to work with X symptom,” while completely bypassing the deep existential questions of human existence. It is incumbent upon us to think far more deeply about what actually makes therapy therapy, and where the boundary line lies between existential therapy and standard psychology.

Rafi: It is completely outrageous when you look at it seriously. You see mainstream headlines screaming: “How to work with Personality Disorders.” I don’t work with personality disorders; I encounter the living human beings!

In my practice, I see an influx of highly psychologically educated clients. They have spent years in various modern therapies and can pathologize every member of their family as a “narcissist,” blame their parents flawlessly, and recognize every mental illness label around them. Yet, they have never once experienced true phenomenological therapy. It is the disaster of modern psychology.

Mo: You are entirely right. These circle right back to the problem of metaphysics, this desperate drive to label and fix things into place to feel in control. We have to firmly insist on a deeper approach through our articles, our books, and our conferences. We must keep asking: What is the essence of therapy? Mainstream practitioners want a quick, rigid definition so they can easily consume it and feel they know exactly what therapy is, but our task is to open up the thinking process rather than provide cheap answers.

Every single therapeutic approach across the board inevitably spawns a tribe of uncritical followers. For instance, within existential circles, you have factions who blindly worship every single grain of technical nourishment from figures like Emmy van Deurzen. Therapists must think for themselves: “What are we actually doing? Are we letting someone else do the radical thinking for us just so we can claim a secure identity?” To be quite frank, it makes me incredibly angry, because people use these systems merely to give themselves an institutional grounding.

Rafi: I am entirely on your side; I believe we should actively rebel against this commercialization! We can do it elegantly and quietly, but we must rebel against what we do not believe in.

Speaking of Emmy – to give you a concrete example: the British Daseinsanalytic Institute recently held its inaugural conference at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. What disturbed me was not simply the choice of an attractive venue, but the way the event was marketed. The promotional imagery foregrounded Oxford’s centuries of academic tradition in a manner that, in my view, risked creating a misleading impression of historical continuity, academic standing, or institutional affiliation. This was a newly established institute hiring a prestigious Oxford venue, not a Daseinsanalytic tradition rooted within the University of Oxford.

The organizers themselves may have acted in good faith, but good faith does not make this kind of institutional framing unproblematic. To me, it represented an attempt to borrow an authority and tradition that the organization had not itself established.

The choice of Emmy van Deurzen as a keynote voice on the future of Daseinsanalysis intensified this concern. I respect her enormous contribution to existential therapy, but she represents a distinct intellectual tradition. Presenting her as a leading authority on the future of Daseinsanalysis risks further blurring precisely those philosophical and historical distinctions that a serious Daseinsanalytic conference should be examining.

Mo: It seems like a classic case of pumping up professional egos. On a personal level, the absolute moment I sense that kind of ego-driven posturing is involved, I turn and run as fast as I can in the exact opposite direction. It is profoundly unappealing.

I understand the underlying ambition to widen public awareness of Daseinsanalysis, but it becomes entirely hollow if it tries to lazily emulate the marketing models of mainstream commercial schools. This is exactly why I confine my institutional work strictly to supervising students at the New School and Regents. I tell them exactly what is on my mind and with what I hope is taken as honesty. If they decide they no longer want me to teach there because of my critique, that is completely fine by me. I have reached a point in my life where I can stand firmly in that independence.

Rafi: I am deeply grateful for your time, your radical honesty, and the immense value of your books.

Mo: Thank you for this dialogue. I must admit, I didn’t expect to spend our time so deep in an interview about my life and books, but this has been thoroughly interesting and enjoyable. I will wrap up with a news: I have just received another contract acceptance from Routledge to write my next book, so I will be diving into that any day now. It is fascinating how these ideas suddenly spark; something comes up and you realize, “I absolutely have to write about this.” Thankfully, the publishers accepted the proposal. With time moving on, I found myself thinking: if not now, when?

Rafi: The privilege was entirely mine, Mo. And I must say, hearing of your new contract with Routledge is absolutely magnificent news. Given the institutional shallowness and commercialization we have been discussing, a text that directly confronts the raw phenomenological realities of breakdowns, care, and the nothingness is precisely what the field needs. Your sense of existential urgency is deeply inspiring—if not now, then when indeed?

Mo: Thank you, you have been absolutely great. Take care of yourself, and I look forward to seeing you again in London. Bye-bye.