What is Weird Therapy?
Weird Therapy is an approach to psychotherapy that embraces a vision of reality as weird. What do we mean by ‘weird’? The word first appeared as wyrd in Old English,…
Nature is a Haunted House
Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted. – Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1876 Emily Dickinson first wrote to…
Ekphrasis of the Imaginal
The Greek word ekphrasis signifies the verbal description of a work of art, or of a scene. It’s a rhetorical device, a genre of writing that might seem especially unpromising….
A Grief Ritual
This is the continuation of a story that I related in my talk Transpersonal: Integrative Therapy for Past-Life Trauma. It concerned a tragic accident in which a 17 year old…
Spanda: LeGuin, Woolf and the Wave in the Mind
Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep…
The Labyrinth and the Maze
This post forms the second half of a discussion opened in the previous one, ‘The Weird and the Uncanny‘. As a way to approach the psychotherapeutic implications, I want to…
The Weird and the Uncanny
Here, I would like to examine more deeply the question of the weird, and its relationship to the uncanny, a concept allied to psychotherapy since Freud’s 1919 essay ‘Das Unheimliche’….
One Grief
In an earlier post, on ‘Trauma and Thauma’ I related a dream where I glimpsed a vast ancient structure like a dam, or a weir. Water would soon flood over…
The Infernal Medicine: the Madness of William Blake
“Blake … was … mad!” This was Jonathan Wordsworth’s introduction to William Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. A tall, patrician figure, with an air of amusement and a…
- Field Theory
- Psychedelics
- Reincarnation
- Relationship
- Somatic Experiencing
- Spirits
- Synchronicity
- Trauma / Thauma
Transpersonal: Integrative Therapy for Past-Life Trauma
This is a case study I presented at a Symposium on ‘Counselling the Exceptional Experiencer’ on 20th May 2023. The event was hosted by the Parapsychological Association. In the first…
Cryptozoology
Like a big cat in the Norfolk Fens or a towering simian figure in the American backwoods, a neurosis is a real experience that doesn’t belong. I want to talk…