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Published by Dr Hora Zabarjadi Sar and Dr Sameema Zahra
"Philosophers in the Therapy Room" explores the intersection of philosophy and Psychotherapy/Counselling, through insightful discussions led by philosopher-practitioners Dr Hora Zabarjadi Sar and Dr Sameema Zahra. Delving into existential questions, ethical dilemmas, and the human psyche, each episode offers a unique blend of theoretical depth and practical wisdom. Join them on a journey of self-discovery, where philosophical insights illuminate the path to healing and personal growth. To know more about us, please visit our website: www.iasocare.de or contact us: counselling4u@iasocare.de
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In the 26th episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room with Stephan Dietrich, President of the Austrian Daseinsanalytic Institute, we explore what makes Daseinsanalysis distinctive, not simply a different set of techniques, but a different way of meeting another person. In many therapeutic approaches, the therapist enters the room with a framework through which the client’s experience can be assessed, interpreted, or organised. Daseinsanalysis asks for something prior to this. It asks whether the therapist can become open enough to receive the other person before deciding what their experience means. This openness is not passive. It requires a particular kind of discipline: the willingness to suspend judgement, including not only diagnostic or therapeutic judgement, but also what phenomenology would describe as a form of objectifying judgement of knowledge—where experience is approached through logical classification, interpretation, and theoretical explanation, as if what the other person lives could already be fully grasped as an object of knowledge. The therapist is therefore not positioned outside the encounter as a detached observer. They are present within it, affected by it, and made vulnerable through it. To receive another person is to allow their world to reach us without immediately reducing it to a category, symptom, explanation, or theory. This vulnerability does not mean losing clinical responsibility or abandoning professional knowledge. Rather, it means holding knowledge lightly enough that the person before us is not overshadowed by what we think we know about them. In this conversation with Stephan Dietrich, we learn more about this unique therapeutic stance: what it means for the therapist to remain open, to suspend judgement, and to encounter the client not merely as a psychological subject to be understood, but as a human being whose way of existing is gradually disclosed within the therapeutic relationship. Perhaps the distinctive question of Daseinsanalysis is not simply, “What is happening inside this person?” but rather: “How is the world opening or failing to open for this person, and what becomes possible when we are willing to meet them there?”
In contemporary discourse, the term lived experience is present everywhere; it appears in therapy rooms, political spaces, academic institutions, activist movements, and mental health frameworks. It often arrives carrying an ethical demand: to listen to those who have lived through suffering, marginalisation, trauma, displacement, or exclusion. And perhaps rightly so. But what do we actually mean when we speak of lived experience? In this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room , Dr Sammema and I return to the phenomenological roots of the concept through thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Eugene Gendlin: discussing lived experience not as a static identity or personal possession, but as an embodied way of being-in-the-world. For Merleau-Ponty, experience is never detached cognition observing reality from outside. We encounter the world through the lived body through movement, perception, memory, affect, and relation. And for Gendlin, the body is not separate from its world but already intertwined with it, much like the foot that knows the ground as it walks upon it. Experience is not merely inside us; it is the ongoing dialogue between body and world. But we also ask a difficult question: What happens when the language of lived experience becomes institutionalised? Can a concept originally intended to illuminate embodied existence become another mechanism of classification? Another border between those whose experiences are recognised and those whose suffering remains unintelligible? When lived experience hardens into identity categories alone, something of its phenomenological depth may be lost. The fluidity, ambiguity, and openness of existence risk being reduced to administrative labels, social credentials, or fixed positions from which one is permitted or forbidden to speak. In this conversation, we explore the ethical and philosophical tensions surrounding lived experience: as embodiment, as situated existence, as intersubjective meaning, and as a concept vulnerable to appropriation, reduction, and exclusion. Because perhaps lived experience was never meant to close the conversation. Perhaps it was meant to deepen our capacity to encounter the world and one another more carefully.
Compassion is one of the most familiar words in our moral vocabulary. We are encouraged to practise it, to cultivate it, to extend it—to others, and to ourselves. And yet, in the therapy room, compassion often arrives… confused. In this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room , we turn to compassion not as a moral ideal, but as a lived experience . Drawing on phenomenology and the philosophy of moral emotions, we explore compassion as a movement of the heart —a response that emerges when another’s suffering is no longer neutral to us. But what happens when this movement cannot find its way into action? When we cannot fix, cannot relieve, cannot change what we witness? In the therapy room, in caregiving, and in our shared world, we are often confronted with suffering that resists intervention.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from overwork alone: It comes from holding a world together. In this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room , we turn to burnout not simply as a stress response, not merely as nervous system depletion but as a lived experience of alienation. Drawing on the thought of Karl Marx, we explore the idea that burnout may not always signal personal fragility, but a deeper structural condition: the reduction of the human being to function. But our focus today is not only on the corporate worker. It is the carer; The mother who has not slept properly in years.The partner caring for a spouse with dementia, the adult child navigating the slow disappearance of a parent. Carers often live in a strange and painful in-between. The loved one is present and yet not fully present. The relationship continues, but not as it once was. To care, in such circumstances, is to inhabit a world where presence and absence coexist. And living in that ambiguity carries an ontological strain. So we ask: When someone comes to therapy burned out, are we treating a nervous system or a political condition? What does therapy risk doing if it simply restores the worker or the carer to the machine of obligation? And how do we differentiate burnout from depression, from moral injury, from existential crisis? This episode is an invitation to think more deeply about exhaustion and to consider whether therapy can become a space not of re-optimisation, but of re-humanisation.
Hope is often spoken of as reassurance — a promise that things will improve, that suffering will ease, that the future will be kinder than the present. But in this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room , we pause before such promises. We ask instead: what kind of thing is hope, when certainty has already fallen away? Our guest today is Dr Denis O'Hara , whose work invites us to think of hope not as a single feeling, but as something that moves through different layers of human life. In our conversation, Denis describes three modes of hope as they appear in psychology. There is a general form of hope, often rooted in our earliest experiences — a quiet, bodily sense that the world can be met, that life might carry us rather than abandon us. There is also a more particular hope, directed toward tasks and goals, the kind of hope that leans toward outcomes and effort. And then there is transformative hope: a form of hope that does not simply aim for improvement, but gestures toward becoming otherwise. In this episode, I re-enter these three modes through a phenomenological and existential lens, guided by the work of Ernst Bloch and Byung-Chul Han . When seen this way, general hope reveals itself as ontological — not something we possess, but something we find ourselves within. It is an attunement to the world as unfinished, to life as still underway. Bloch names this openness the not-yet , and it is here that hope becomes the condition for the future to appear at all. Goal-oriented hope, then, belongs to lived experience. It is phenomenological. It shows itself not as certainty, but as movement — as motivation, as enthusiasm, as a subtle leaning toward what has not yet taken shape. As Han reminds us, hope does not banish uncertainty; it needs it. Where everything is secured, hope has no breath. Transformative hope moves even deeper. It is existential. It arises when one remains with uncertainty without rushing toward closure — when one finds the courage to stay open to what is still forming. This is not hope as comfort, but hope as exposure. Hope as the willingness to be changed. Throughout this conversation, we reflect on how these different modes of hope appear in the therapy room — and how therapy itself might become a space that protects hope without demanding it, that holds open the future without prescribing its shape. This episode is an invitation to listen for hope where it is quietest: not as a promise of outcomes, but as the courage of the not-yet.
There are moments in life when laughter feels impossible and those that laughter becomes the only way to breathe. In this last episode of 2025, we linger at that fragile edge between laughter and gravity. Between jokes whispered in the dark, and a seriousness that refuses to look away from suffering. Some laugh when language collapses when words imposed by power no longer hold, and truth leaks out through irony, absurdity, and dark humour. Others carry misery with silence and dignity, believing that pain deserves to be met without dilution, without disguise. We move through Freud’s insight that humour can soften the unbearable, and Lacan’s deeper claim that laughter appears when language itself cracks when the Symbolic falters and something unsayable briefly shows itself. From the shadows of Iranian history, where humour became a way of surviving the unspeakable, to homes where laughter had no place because seriousness was an ethic, a form of care, a way of bearing witness this episode is not about jokes; It is about truth, about what we do when words fail, about the strange places where suffering finds breath, sometimes through laughter, sometimes through silence. Welcome to Episode 21 of Philosophers in the Therapy Room.
Episode 20 engages with the most overused and yet least understood words of our time: authenticity . But instead of treating it as a destination or a perfected state of being, we follow the existential tradition with Beauvoir, Sartre, and Charles Taylor to approach authenticity as a process , a practice of becoming attuned to one’s own freedom. Through Beauvoir’s portraits of the “types of man”—the sub-man who flees freedom, the serious man who hides behind absolutes, the adventurer and the passionate man who risk dissolving themselves in intensity, authenticity appears not as a heroic posture but as a subtle ethical practice: refusing self-deception, resisting the temptation to dissolve into ready-made roles, and taking responsibility for the meanings we bring into the world. Weaving then to Sartre’s insight, authenticity will not rebel for its own sake. To be authentic is not to swim against every stream, but to discern which currents are ours to follow. It is to acknowledge that even in constraint , we remain the authors of our actions. We choose, and we answer for those choices. With Charles Taylor, authenticity becomes deeply situated. Our choices gain weight only against a “horizon of significance” that is background values, histories, relationships, and inherited meanings that make anything matter at all. Authenticity, then, is never purely inward; it unfolds within a world that already speaks to us. Against this background, the self comes to the fore only through an endless dialogue with the Other , maintaining what we might call a dialectical posture . This dialectic is not a clash but a movement: a continual back-and-forth between self and world, self and Other, familiarity and strangeness. It is the recognition that I discover who I am not in isolation but in the shifting interplay of perspectives, where the Other disrupts me, challenges me, reflects me back to myself, and opens new possibilities of becoming. Authenticity emerges from staying with this movement without collapsing into either pole: neither dissolving into the Other’s expectations nor retreating into a closed and self-certain interiority. In this conversation, we explore authenticity not as purity, stubborn resistance, or a polished ideal, but as a way of inhabiting this dialectical space—a way of encountering one’s freedom openly, responsibly, and in relation. A way of asking, again and again: How do I become someone who can answer for the life I am shaping, in the presence of others who are shaping theirs?
In this World Philosophy Day special, we return to the heartbeat of philosophy not as a set of doctrines, but as a way of being. To think philosophically is to inhabit the world with a certain openness, a readiness to question the obvious, to slow down the rush of everyday assumptions, and to let new meanings take shape. It is a discipline of perspective-taking, a gentle but radical shift in how we see ourselves and others. Drawing on Socrates’ striking claim that to practice philosophy is to practice dying, we explore what it means to loosen our attachment to the self we think we are. Philosophical thinking asks us to let certain certainties fall away: to die to our rigid beliefs, to the illusions we cling to, to the habits that numb our sensitivity to the world. But in this symbolic dying, something else becomes possible: a more spacious relation to truth, a deeper form of freedom, a more responsive way of living. In this episode, Sameema & I reflect on how philosophy equips us to meet the world with curiosity rather than fear, with courage rather than defensiveness. We consider how questioning becomes an ethical act, and how perspective-shifting can be a source of care for oneself and for others. On this day dedicated to philosophy, we invite you to step with us into that threshold space where thinking is not just an activity, but a transformation of the one who thinks.
Motherhood is not a static role, but a Relational Field; a living space where two freedoms meet and take shape together. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that “to will oneself free is also to will others free,” we can think of the mother as the one who delivers not only a body into the world but another freedom . Yet this act of giving life is not unilateral. The mother and child co-constitute the relational space in which both must learn to live their freedom through the encounter with the Other's. In this sense, motherhood is not reducible to biological or social function. It is an existential relation that constantly negotiates the tension between dependence and autonomy, attachment and separation. The child’s emergence as a free being presupposes the mother’s own capacity to experience herself as a free subject rather than as an instrument of another’s life. Only when the mother has come to recognise her own subjectivity, her right to desire, to limit, to say no and yes from her own ground can she create a relational field where the child’s freedom may unfold without threat. Thus, motherhood becomes a site of reciprocal becoming : a dynamic interplay of presence and withdrawal, care and letting-be. It invites us to rethink freedom not as independence, but as co-constituted as an event that arises in the fragile, evolving field between selves.
This episode focuses on attachment theory and its place in philosophy and therapy. Although attachment has been central to psychology, it has received little attention in philosophical discussions, largely because philosophy has traditionally focused on adulthood rather than childhood. We look at how attachment theory can help therapists understand clients, but also at its limitations, particularly the way it often blames caregivers without recognising their own humanity and the social contexts in which they live. We then consider the moral responsibility of the therapist in relation to the caregiver, and how this responsibility extends beyond the immediate client. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir, we frame adulthood as the development of responsibility, for oneself, for others, and for the wider networks of care that shape human life. The episode connects these ideas to the everyday realities of therapy and the ethical complexities of care.
The gaze isn’t just eyes on me; it’s the moment my activity is caught in another’s look and I’m flipped from subject to object . A second ago, I was absorbed with my project, interested, even quietly joyful, in what I was doing. Then the look lands. In Sartre’s terms, I become being-for-others : visible, exposed, available to be judged, evaluated, negated, and abandoned. The look doesn’t merely observe; it rearranges my self-experience, interrupting the flow of self-constituting action and returning me to myself as seen . In this episode, Dr Zahra and I discuss shame from an existential and phenomenological perspective. Shame is not something inherently destructive but a fundamental part of the human condition that reveals important existential truths about the self, relationships, and the world. Referring to Tomkins and Affect Theory, we'd been able to name the affective pivot inside that instant: shame ignites when interest/joy is abruptly impeded, especially under a look . The warmth of engagement cools, agency reverses, and the body registers exposure before any story forms. That’s the existential core we’re tracking: shame as the first flash of being perceived as an object . Only after this rupture do the familiar aftershocks organise scripts in which other emotions latch onto shame (withdrawal, attack self, avoidance, attack other).
There are losses that break us loudly, while others pass unnoticed, unnamed, unwept. In this episode, we turn toward those quieter sorrows that never found language, the ones that never received permission to exist. We begin with Freud’s notion of melancholia: grief that doesn’t know its object, mourning that turns inward, as the self becomes the site of absence. Then we enter a phenomenological space, where sorrow is not simply a mood, rather a way the world appears: no longer as a horizon of “I can,” but as a closing down, a withdrawal, a silent “I cannot" . We reflect on the losses we never named, the parts of ourselves we lost with others, and the strange, beautiful moments when we are full of sorrow without knowing why. In a world shaped by the modern happiness project, a world that demands productivity, cheerfulness, and emotional clarity, Sadness becomes suspect. But perhaps sadness is not weakness; perhaps it is a form of truth-telling . In the therapy room, we are invited to stop smiling. To grieve what was silenced. To honour what was lost before we even knew it was ours. In episode 16 of Philosophers in the Therapy Room, we invite you to listen to the silence beneath the smile.
There are wounds that do not bleed, only burn. In this episode, we turn toward the slow fire of embitterment; that heavy mood that settles in when justice is denied, when betrayal is met with silence, and when the soul, unwilling to forget, takes its stand in protest. Embitterment is not simply a feeling. It is a way the world shows itself as dimmed, distorted, and coiled with grievance. Heidegger called these attunements moods [Stimmung], not because they are fleeting, but because they shape the very sky under which we live. Here, we dwell in the mood of defiant despair, as Kierkegaard would name it, where care [Sorge] has turned in on itself, where the ethical wound cannot heal because the world has refused to listen. And yet, embitterment holds something sacred: a memory of dignity, a refusal to call injustice normal. What does it mean to remain faithful to this bitterness without letting it close the future? We invite you into a conversation that does not seek easy relief but rather recognition of the mood, the wound, and the protest that still burns at the heart of the embittered soul.
In this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room , we turn toward the unsettling terrain of anxiety, not as a clinical symptom to be corrected, but as a fundamental mode of human existence. Drawing from existential and phenomenological thinkers, we ask: what does anxiety reveal about our being in the world? We begin with Heidegger’s notion of Angst , that strange and unsettling mood which exposes the raw fact of our thrownness into existence. From there, we enter the clinical space of Daseinsanalysis , where Ludwig Binswanger’s analysis of Ellen West offers a haunting portrayal of a person whose entire world—bodily, social, temporal—has collapsed under the weight of unbearable freedom. But anxiety does not only speak in words. It shakes the body and preempts language. With Julia Kristeva , we explore the bodily reaction of abjection , the nauseating boundary-collapse between self and other, subject and object—where anxiety takes on a visceral, almost pre-symbolic intensity. This is not an episode about overcoming anxiety—but about encountering it as a revelatory mood : one that speaks to our vulnerability, our potential, and our longing to make meaning where none is guaranteed.
Tension is not the obstacle—it is the terrain. In this episode, we explore the charged space where individuation takes shape within relationship, not outside of it. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of generosity, we reflect on how boundaries, far from walls, can be expressions of care—for self and other alike. With echoes of Jung’s Red Book and the dynamic oppositions it reveals, we consider how the “dance of individuation” unfolds when we resist collapsing tension into rupture or fusion. Instead, we listen to it as a kind of pulse: a rhythm calling us to become. Through a therapeutic lens, we ask: how can we hold the paradox of being for the other without losing ourselves ? How do we remain open and giving in relationships without losing ourselves? Can generosity become a mask for self-abandonment, or a pathway to deeper connection? What happens when generosity is wielded without the grounding of a differentiated self? What does it mean to remain open in the face of conflict, dissonance, and the intimate risk of love? This episode is an invitation to enter the fertile in-between, where transformation lives.
How do we remember what we never lived? How does trauma reverberate across generations, shaping identities and ways of being in the world? In this episode, we explore intergenerational trauma as a lived phenomenon, one that transcends individual experience and persists in the silence, gaps, and embodied traces of history. Building on generative phenomenology , we consider trauma not merely as an individual affliction but as something embedded in intersubjective and historical structures. The “generational exiled”, carry histories that remain unspoken yet deeply felt. Trauma, in this sense, is not just passed down biologically or psychologically but through the very structures of experience, shaping how descendants of trauma survivors relate to time, self, and others. Yet, if trauma extends beyond the individual, so too must healing. Generative phenomenology suggests that reconnecting with the past does not mean merely remembering but transforming our relationship with it . Uncovering the implicit narratives, gestures, and silences through which trauma endures opens possibilities for re-living history differently, not by erasing suffering but through reorienting it toward meaning, recognition, and ethical responsibility . How can we think about healing when what needs to be healed is not entirely our own? What does it mean to bear witness to a past that still insists on being acknowledged? Join us as we navigate these questions, tracing the invisible threads that bind past and present, self and other, rupture and restoration.
What happens when time itself breaks? When trauma strikes, it is not merely an event but a rupture in self-temporalization —a fracture in the very way we experience time. In this episode, we turn to phenomenology and Bergsonian philosophy to explore how trauma shatters the flow of lived time , leaving the past piled into an everlasting present . Drawing on Husserl’s internal time-consciousness , we examine how trauma fixates the past on a moment that refuses to recede , freezing the subject in an unassimilable past. Meanwhile, Bergson’s notion of pure memory and habitual memory helps us understand why traumatic experience resists integration: instead of passing into the virtual reservoir of memory , it remains actualized, replayed, and embodied as raw sensations. Through this lens, we ask: How does trauma distort the horizon of possibilities , severing one’s ability to anticipate the future? What does it mean to live trapped within the broken hourglass of time , where experience no longer flows but solidifies into an eternal now ? And can phenomenology offer a way to restore movement to time , allowing the self to re-engage with the world beyond the moment of rupture?
What drives our action: the intellect or the passions? For Spinoza, this question lies at the heart of understanding human flourishing. In this episode, we explore Spinoza's profound insight that intellect, while essential for understanding, lacks the intrinsic power to provoke action. Instead, it is the passions that move us. But not all passions are equal. Passive affects, which are those we endure rather than direct, can leave us vulnerable and disempowered. Spinoza argues that transformation does not arise from suppressing or intellectualizing these passive affects but from deeply engaging with them. Through this engagement, we internalize the affect, journeying through it rather than avoiding it. This process involves uncovering the possibilities each affect holds, allowing a passive affect to give way to an active one. Active affects emerge when we align our emotions with an understanding of what enhances our power to act and our connection to the world. This is not a simple matter of rationality overriding emotion; rather, it is about reshaping our emotional landscape from within, creating a harmony that leads us closer to the good life. Join us as we unpack Spinoza's radical vision of emotion regulation, where the interplay of passion and intellect reveals new ways to navigate our inner worlds and move toward empowerment and freedom.
In this episode, Dr. Sameema Zahra and I bring the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza into the session to explore his fascinating ideas on affect and the distinction between passive and active states of being. By ' affect' , Spinoza refers to the body's capacity to act, be acted upon, and experience changes in its power to exist and persevere. Affects are not just fleeting emotions; they encompass the entire spectrum of how we respond to the world. They shape our moods, motivations, and overall ability to engage with life. Spinoza helps us see how these responses are not neutral—they either enhance or diminish our power to act. We also delve into Spinoza’s distinction between passive affects—those that happen to us and diminish our autonomy—and active affects, which arise when we fully understand and align ourselves with the causes of our emotions. This distinction offers a profound lens for understanding how clients might feel stuck in cycles of passivity or, alternatively, how they might find empowerment and freedom through greater awareness and agency. Join us as we unpack these ideas and consider their implications for therapy. How can understanding Spinoza’s theory of affect help us guide clients toward active engagement with their lives? And how might this philosophical framework illuminate our own practices as therapists? Stay with us as we journey through Spinoza’s thought and its relevance in the therapy room.
In this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room , Dr Sameema Zahra and I engage with the Heideggerian concept of Sörge (care) and explore its profound implications for understanding our relationship with the world. We suggest that care is not only a fundamental condition of being but also an existential imperative that binds us to the political realities around us. This connection underscores why we cannot afford indifference to global events. We also discuss anger as a moral emotion—a vital signal alerting us to threats against our values. If we fail to heed these signals, we risk allowing harm to our "house of being," potentially leading to moral injury. This episode invites listeners to consider care not just as an individual experience but as an ethical call to remain engaged with the world
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