Malcolm Stern: 0:47

So welcome to my podcast, slay your Dragons With Compassion, done in conjunction with my wonderful friends John and Sandra Wilson, online events, and we have a range of people who are exploring their stories, how they've become who they are as a result of going through adversity, because that's what shapes us and finding their inner core, their inner core. I'm very happy to welcome today Emmy Van Derzen as a prolific psychotherapist, author and the doyen of the existential movement, and I know she's going to have a great story to tell. We met at the Compassionate Mental Health Conference last year and thank you very much for coming on to our show today, emmy. Welcome.

Emmy van Deurzen: 1:30

Pleasure. Thank you.

Malcolm Stern: 1:34

So I thought we'd take a look at how you became a psychotherapist. What happened? That sort of shaped you in your youth? You obviously didn't wake up going I'm going to be a psychotherapist any more than I did, but I'm wondering what led you in that direction.

Emmy van Deurzen: 1:50

Well, in my case it almost was like that, malcolm. From the earliest I can remember, which is very early indeed, like in my first year, it was made very clear to me by my mother that I had been sent to her as her guardian angel and that I was there to help her with all of her troubles. And from very early on she used to speak to me about the difficulty she'd had in the Second World War, the difficulties my father had in the Second World War, and these were very serious difficulties, so they had nearly starved to death. My father had been hidden away in a very cold loft where he got chronic double pneumonia and very bad asthma attacks. He was being sought by the enemy, and so it was a very, very dire time. And it was very clear to me with hindsight, but obviously not at that time, that they were both deeply marked by those experiences. And you know that involved many, many other experiences in the family, such as my uncles having been deported to Germany, people having been shot in the street, my grandparents having first had to move from the Hague to Arnhem because the well my grandfather worked for the government and the building had been bombed in the Hague, so it had to move to Arnhem and then in 1945, as you know, arnhem became the center of an attack by the Allies and so their house got bombed again and they became refugees and lost each other.

Emmy van Deurzen: 3:52

I mean, the stories I grew up with, which came through, filtered through my mother's mind and she shared with me from tiny tiny onwards, were part of my life, and I think I found it very hard to differentiate between what was a story and what was present. So I grew up in the illusion that we still were in this warlike universe and that sort of mixed in with the Cold War that was going on. And in school, you know, we had to do these exercises for basically guarding our lives in case things went wrong. I think I lived the first 10 years of my life under a dark cloud of war and threat and with the absolute certainty that I had come into the world to ease that in some way in my family which, as you can imagine, because there were all these post-war problems, we hadn't been able to find a house. So for the first 17 years of my life I lived in what was essentially a one-bedroom flat where I had to share a tiny space with an older sister who reacted to all this tension in the family in the opposite way by becoming hugely rebellious and acting out, hugely rebellious and acting out.

Emmy van Deurzen: 5:36

And so this became another thing that my mother sought my help to address. So instead of my mother helping me with the bullying and the mocking and the difficulties I received from that, I had to set that aside and think about what it was like for her, and truly it was worse for her than it was for me, because there were daily fights between my mother and my sister. So there was no doubt in my mind from very early on that I was not going to be able to be like other kids. I had this mission in life. I was this guardian angel, and it took me a long time in my 20s to to work with that and to set it aside, you know, to not become kind of kind of enamored of my own role as guardian angel too much I guess it's a danger and I have seen this of course in in in our psychotherapeutic world and also in the sort of the spiritual consciousness world of people believing that they are extraordinary, which of course at one level we all are.

Malcolm Stern: 6:47

Another level, if we let that drive us, the hubris eventually will destroy us.

Emmy van Deurzen: 6:52

So you could have gone down that road yes, although it didn't feel like hubris at all. It felt like I was more like atlas, you know, with the weight of the world on my back. It it didn't feel like, oh, I am this great person. It felt like, no, I'm a servant, you, I need to help this world which is in dire straits. And, of course, in my teenage years I became very aware of the Vietnam War and, well, lots of wars in various places really, and I became very politically aware and felt that, instead of just doing it in a personal way, I needed to use my life to improve the world by becoming engaged much more in a political way. And that's why I chose to study philosophy, because it was philosophy, really that gave me my strength. I was a very sensitive person as will be still blatantly obvious and quite vulnerable, and I was very sincere and quite naive, and it was philosophy that gave me strength. So I did a classical education and I was very fortunate to have a very good Greek teacher who taught me to translate Plato, and Socrates really became my friend and my role model and he showed me that, instead of being a bleeding heart, it was very important to find intellectual strength and clarity to approach everything that was wrong in the world in a much more insightful way and a much more effective way and to really use that to find light in the world that you can then kind of use both for yourself and for other people when they need it. So that was really my path towards psychotherapy.

Emmy van Deurzen: 9:15

So I went to France when I was 18, getting away from this difficulty in the family, a long way away and studied philosophy at the University of Montpellier in the south of France, where I was very, very fortunate to be taught by a very famous philosopher called Michel Henry, and he taught me phenomenology. He's a phenomenologist. He taught me phenomenology and to be very careful in making observations about people, about the world, and formulate things very carefully and define my terms carefully. So all these instruments got me ready for that job. But I had no idea what I was going to do with that until I was drawn into psychiatry by my then boyfriend, who was to become my first husband, who was just finishing his medical studies but going towards a specialization of psychiatry. And I had also become interested in psychoanalysis as part of my philosophy studies and read all of Freud's works very methodically, because Lacan, who was the kind of great French psychoanalytic hero said you know it was all about Freud, but we had to read it for ourselves and reinterpret it. So I took that quite literally cells and reinterpret it. So I took that quite literally and I went to see the teacher at the University of Psychoanalysis and asked him if he could give me an analysis, because I wanted to become an analyst, a psychoanalyst. And the first thing he taught me which was very humbling, the first thing he taught me, which was very humbling, was that I would not be able to do that until I was earning my own living, because I had to absolutely pay for my analysis with money. I had earned myself a sense of the importance of earning one's own keep and of not taking anything that one isn't ready for.

Emmy van Deurzen: 11:37

And then, when I was offered the opportunity to become a social therapist in the hospital of Saint-Albon, where I moved with my then husband, I just blossomed really, because I could see how all my philosophical learning could be put into practice very concretely and very directly. And I worked with large groups of people most of them were schizophrenic or autistic, you know, chronic patients in a hospital in the Massif Santal, which is well known in France as the birthplace of liberal psychiatry and, you know, breaking down the walls and creating a therapeutic community. So then I, as I was finishing my master's degree in philosophy, I wrote about that. I wrote about really really helping people to come out of their lonely difficulties towards each other through what I was learning to do, which was this kind of community therapy and working with large groups and smaller groups and individuals and talking with people and listening to people. And from there I then knew, you know, I had found my path really. So then I knew I had to do it properly and I went back to university, did another first degree in psychology and then did my training in clinical psychology and my psychotherapy training in another hospital and my psychotherapy training in another hospital, where I was also very fortunate to be supervised by François Tosquelles, who was a famous French psychoanalyst who had actually created the hospital of Saint-Albon to start with, and it was not deliberate that he was moving to the hospital I was doing my training in at that point. It was absolutely extraordinary.

Emmy van Deurzen: 14:09

I then started going to lots of places like Gorizia in Italy and Gale in Belgium, and then went to Milan to a conference about new forms of psychoanalysis, community psychotherapy, and met all the Arbor's people, you know Morty Schatzman and Andrea Sabaridi at that time. Anyway, they invited us to come have a look at what they were doing in London and obviously I had read a lot of RD Lange and that seemed very much to me the future, because he spoke about bringing together existential philosophy and psychoanalysis, and it was like this is what I wanted to learn really how to do that. And so we decided to come to London and work with the Arbors and associate ourselves with the Philadelphia Association and Ronnie Lang and lived in a therapeutic community for a year and realized that it was full of contradictions. It wasn't like being in a psychiatric hospital anymore, didn't have a white coat on anymore, I had to be on the same level as the other residents and I didn't have another home to go to. That was my home for a year and it was incredibly humiliating at first to get in touch with what that brought up and to work my way through that in my therapy challenge of not listening to them as if I were more than them, but to listen to them as if they were telling me something that I did not know yet.

Emmy van Deurzen: 16:23

And that was revolutionary and it changed my life again utterly and completely, and it broke up that marriage to my French husband, who felt very uncomfortable about it all and just wanted to get back to France and take a job, which he did as head of a therapeutic institution and, you know, build a very different kind of life, but we're still in touch and we still write to each other every year and it's very interesting to see what would have happened if I'd gone back to France and had that kind of life as a clinical psychologist in Bordeaux and what I did, in fact, which was to stay in London and to build something from scratch, which was, I don't know, a very long work of many decades of thoughtful exploration, writing about that, working with people, teaching people, creating movements, creating organizations.

Emmy van Deurzen: 17:38

I mean, looking back, it has been an incredible journey and it has been incredibly hard work every day of my life, quite frankly, seven days a week. But I feel that I've done, you know, what my heart told me I had to do and it's worked out amazingly well and I feel incredibly well surrounded these days because all over the world now there are people actually doing existential therapy and wanting to change the world and all the things that I aspire to doing. I can now see. You know, I didn't need to do. I just needed to light these lights, these fires, and it's everywhere. It's not my doing, it's just creating, I don't know, maybe the conduits for it, the kind of pathways, and often it's been about setting up organizations and then passing them on to other people, or going lecturing in another part of the world and encouraging other people who are already on that same track. It's just about working together with a lot of other people who are already on that same track, or it's just about working together with a lot of other people really.

Malcolm Stern: 18:59

I think what I'm hearing is that you've followed a trail from your very early beginnings. You've followed a trail and it's often very tempting to sort of arrive at a certain point and stop the trail and then sort of ground yourself in where you've arrived. It still feels like you haven't fully arrived. I don't mean that from any sense of being immature. I get it as a sense of of being a seeker till the day you die and to allow life to educate you as you allow yourself to educate others and and I've been inspired by it by seeing your work and and hearing you speak also as, as someone who is actually um has in it's quite a deep state of surrender, and I think there's something there about about that we can allow life to educate us if we choose, and I think you're an exemplar of that.

Emmy van Deurzen: 19:52

Well, that is so very well put. Thank you, malcolm. That is exactly how it feels and you may not realize this, but I have been various points in my life where it looked like everything was lost and I had to start again. And that has been a natural process because it has been like being like a snake. That comes to a point where I have to shed a skin and I realized I was eating myself away on the inside, with all the aggravation of that and all the nastiness that was part of that.

Emmy van Deurzen: 20:42

But also it made me into becoming a person that I didn't want to become. I didn't want to become somebody who had power. People would say, oh, you have a lot of power, and I thought, do I? And I thought that's not how it feels. It felt again like being a child and having the world on my shoulders and I thought I am not going to do this anymore. I do not want to be pushed in this direction. I want to be me and I want to get back in touch with the things that truly matter to me, and it was important for a while to protect psychotherapy in the UK when I thought I was the best person to do that and that was a task I was happy to take on. But when it was done and I could see that it became something else, I wanted out and I stepped out and people didn't understand why I did that, but I stepped out quite suddenly and the weird thing is I totally understand why you would do that.

Malcolm Stern: 21:56

Because there's such a temptation to get stuck somewhere along the way that you've arrived at this great point where you've got kudos, status and all that sort of stuff and actually it feels like, in some ways, it feels like your mother did you an extraordinary favor. You were educated from a very young age oh yeah, into managing um a life full of exploration, the life full of um learning and giving of yourself and now as you get to your 70s, and I hope I'm not revealing any state secrets here 73 73.

Malcolm Stern: 22:30

It's, uh, one year younger than me. So it it's, and it's wonderful. It feels like you're still on the trail, and I'm wondering what the trail is beckoning to you now. Where do you go from here?

Emmy van Deurzen: 22:42

oh yes. Well, the trail has led me to sort of fashioning the existential movement worldwide, with people from all over the globe, you know, and there are various sort of different parts to that. But the existential movement that I'm now involved with is about giving back our therapeutic, our psychological and philosophical wisdom to ordinary people. So it is in some ways back to this therapeutic community idea of not sitting on a throne or being a therapist, but to share with people what I know and to give it away, as it were, because the world needs it. There's no doubt it shouldn't stay in my little head. It goes through my little head in order to go somewhere, and the world, by Jove, needs it so, so badly, because wisdom has been lost. We are so much on the wrong track in this world, it's so obvious in so many ways. So we must. This is, you know, a new calling. I know what I need to do. I must pass it back to the world that has forgotten, and you know, not just me.

Emmy van Deurzen: 24:16

You know I used to quite identify with Joan of Arc sometimes and think of myself, as you know, having to ride my horse and, you know, ahead of the armies and all that. But what I've discovered is that actually there are loads of people everywhere you know, around you, close around you, a bit further away, in other parts of the country, in other countries, in other parts of the world. There are these networks. We really, human beings, really are just like mushrooms, you know, like the mycelium. Like mushrooms, you know like the mycelium. And when you connect, when you find figure out how to connect with the people that are aligned with those ideals or those ideas, it just starts happening by itself and it isn't at all about you anymore. You're just one little light in a whole network of what is lighting up all over the place.

Malcolm Stern: 25:18

You remind me a bit of Richard Powers in the Overstory, where the trees are like this network that connect up and spot each other and look out for each other, and it's very, very low key. And that's what I'm hearing is that you're not waving a sort of cudgel, you're following a trail and you're seeing who's with you on the trail.

Emmy van Deurzen: 25:39

Yeah, exactly right.

Malcolm Stern: 25:42

So, and I'm very much I mean my my thing has been very much since I wrote my book about sangha, about the need for the community of like-minded others, which the buddhists talk of.

Emmy van Deurzen: 25:53

Yeah, like you're establishing sanghas all over the place yeah, but yeah, although I'm not doing you know it's other people doing it but yeah, we, the people, are establishing sanghas all over the world and there is going to be a point where there are more of us than the people who are blindly going for power and profit. It will happen. If we keep working at that, there will be more and more people who want to live that way, and that will be a gentle revolution that, I believe, will save this planet, because this planet is not just in danger physically. It's not just about climate change. It's not just about, you know, over-exploiting all the resources and losing biodiversity. It's that as well, but that's just a symptom. It is that human beings have lost track of what it is that matters and how to live. And when human beings discover that it lights that light inside of them, they know. They know that that is what's been happening to them.

Emmy van Deurzen: 27:17

Some people call it mental illness, some people call it a sickness. Call it mental illness, some people call it a sickness. Some people call it being lost. Some people call it being in crisis. Some people call it being depressed. Some people call it not being themselves or feeling disenfranchised. All of those things are part of the same problem the wisdom has been lost, we're off the track and we got to get back on track.

Malcolm Stern: 27:48

And I think what's touching me deeply about what you're sharing now is this sort of this optimism, which isn't this blind sort of like positivity that ignores the crises that are going on around us, but the inevitability of the slow advance of humanity and the return to finding humanity within ourselves. And it's very easy in these times and I know that many people I've spoken to feel a sense of despair, that there's no point. And what I'm hearing is that you are seeing that there is a point and that you're offering an optimistic viewpoint.

Emmy van Deurzen: 28:24

Well, it's not just that. There is a point. That is the point. That is the point of human life and the meaning of human life articulate life, to align with life and to live in accordance with the principles that so many people over history and worldwide, in different cultures, have known about, have sometimes aligned with and then have gotten lost again. It's not new, it's not something that is amazing or different. It's just so tragic that so many people have gotten disconnected from that wisdom and therefore it is vital that we bring people back in touch with that, because that's all you need to do for them then to know what to do with their lives. And it just grows and grows.

Emmy van Deurzen: 29:32

Look, I started doing YouTube videos 17 years ago, innocently thinking, oh, I'll record some of my songs. You know, I'm a singer, songwriter, I play the guitar. I thought, ok, I'll put some things on there. And then gradually, I started thinking, oh well, I gave this talk, I could give a little talk to YouTube. It grew and I now have nearly 70,000 subscribers to my channel.

Emmy van Deurzen: 30:08

And these are not psychotherapists, these are not clients, these are ordinary people, again, from all over the world, who recognize this, they know there is something in what I'm saying something about the community I'm creating on YouTube with these tens of thousands of people that says no, we're not going to say that person is narcissistic and that person is traumatized and this is bad and that is bad and we need to fight each other. No, we're going to be more thoughtful than that. We have much more knowledge and wisdom than that. We don't need to label, we don't need to despair, we don't need to be separated. There are lots of us who want to understand life. There are lots of us who have goodwill. There are lots of us who know we can do better, so let bloody do it.

Malcolm Stern: 31:13

That's great and I love the fact it feels like you're not beset with despair. I think for many of us who are involved in wanting to make a better world, there's often a sort of sense of this Atlas figure that you've set up, of carrying the world on your shoulders, but the world is so vile and you look back. I mean for me it's like looking. I've been relentlessly researching the Holocaust and I read everything I can around the Holocaust. Researching the Holocaust and I read everything I can around the Holocaust and it's sort of it's almost unbelievable man's inhumanity to man and and that seems to have not changed so much over the years. And yet there has to be hope for a different world and that's what I'm hearing that you are holding the flag for yeah, well, you know, this is my childhood and my teenage years.

Emmy van Deurzen: 32:05

I read the story of Anne Frank when I was like eight or nine years old and it became identified with it so much I really believed I'd been through that too. I used to play concentration camp with my soft toys when I was six or seven years old because I heard all these stories. These flats we lived in had been built very quickly for people who had survived the Holocaust and people who had survived the war camps. So I was surrounded by Holocaust survivors as I grew up and also by men who had been in the Japanese war camps, because there were a lot of Dutch people who had been, you know, in the war in Indonesia and who had been taken into the prison camps by the Japanese who won the war there in Indonesia. So there are lots of Dutch men who were having nightmares and I could hear, because these flats were very badly built. I could hear them screaming at night and I had terrible night terrors as a child because I was confronted with all this stuff.

Emmy van Deurzen: 33:27

So I had to work my way through that and it wasn't easy and at 17, I twice attempted to take my life because I just couldn't do it. I had kind of put all my affections onto somebody who then abandoned me very cruelly and I just didn't think that I could live in that world. It's exactly what you say. I thought it's so negative. You know what was happening in various countries that I had been to with my parents because they took us traveling every summer for four weeks we went traveling around Europe. They wanted us to see and join with other people. They educated us very well that way. But I could see what was happening, you know, in the Czech Republic, czechoslovakia, and my heart bled for what was happening in the world. I took it all in so seriously. It was part of me and I thought I cannot live with this pain. I cannot do it. I have to die. I was so convinced of it for a while, and so I had to find my reasons for living.

Malcolm Stern: 34:53

I think that's very profound, because there's sort of the sense that you have to know what the bottom feels like in order to really find your way through. And so you know, you sort of mentioned you had two probably serious suicide attempts when you were 17. They weren't to cry for help from the sound of it.

Emmy van Deurzen: 35:22

Well, I didn't on the ceiling. And the ceiling came down as soon as I jumped off the chair. The well, you know, it was a flimsy ceiling and it came down and I got a bollocking from my father for what have you done? You know, with that light and look the ceiling, you have been doing something. I didn't tell them. So no, it was not a cry for help. I was utterly serious about wanting to die and not be part of the evil in the world.

Malcolm Stern: 35:58

Yes, and I think that that's actually a profound thing, that we go to the bottom and then we find our way through the adversity into becoming a standard bearer for what is possible. You genuinely believe there is an evolutionary march that will eventually work its way to a different world, but it's eventual and it's evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Emmy van Deurzen: 36:30

And there's lots of evidence for it. There are lots and lots of movements and people who do these things to try and bring this to fruition. There are lots of people who invest all their efforts in doing that and, well, you know, everyone who's done science at any point has also seriously committed to finding out what nature is like and what the world is like and what we can know about it all. There are lots of good people everywhere in the world, but they all feel marginalized. That's the weird thing. And I discovered this at 17, after my suicide attempt. So the second suicide attempt, I took tablets and my parents found me in the morning. I took them in the evening and I just slept for hours and hours and I woke up, but very groggy, in the morning and they realized what had happened and my father went to the head of my school and the head of my school, who was very enlightened, brought me in and I had a very long two-hour conversation with him telling him exactly what I thought was wrong with the world. And he said to me but we need your understanding because we all know this, but nobody is saying it. Emmy, we need your understanding, you're so clear about it. And he said publish your poems in the school journal, find a way to sing your songs, and you will see that there are many other children in the school who feel the same as you.

Emmy van Deurzen: 38:26

And I took up the challenge and I did, and I found that, yes, there were suddenly people coming out of the woodwork, coming to me and saying you are very brave for talking about all this. And I didn't get bullied. I didn't get bullied at all. I was invited to go sing my songs in other schools and for a while I thought I would become a singer, songwriter, and I would share my life and my ideas with the world in that way, deals with the world in that way. But that wasn't to be, because, you know, I knew that I didn't want to go down that path, really, because I could see that, you know, the world of pop music was wrong and it would have destroyed me.

Emmy van Deurzen: 39:21

And so I thought, no, let's give it a rest. I got to get out of here, I got to start again. I'll go to France, I'll study philosophy and I'll still, you know, sing my songs in restaurants. And I did that to earn a bit of money. But you know, I got never discovered or anything. So lately in the last two years I have been recording all my songs in my 70s and people actually listen to them on YouTube and say nice things about them, so that's been amazing. It's like you know this old thing that I decided not to do. I am sort of doing now as part of my YouTube life.

Malcolm Stern: 40:10

I did not to do it as a way of life yeah but it feels like that you found your way of life.

Malcolm Stern: 40:16

I think the thing I'm most struck with is that you have a vulnerability about you and yet that vulnerability is also a part of your strength and without that vulnerability, what you have is is iron or rock, and I don't see that. I see more like willow or flow, and and actually it's. It's inspiring to listen to you because it it feeds the part in me that knows the potential for us as human beings that I've been exploring all my conscious life as well, since my 20s. So we're coming towards the end of I mean, I could talk to you for hours and I'm so grateful for you to to come and bring your wisdom here to this program. Um, the question I always ask at the end is what's the particular dragon you've had to slay in order to be who you are? What is the hurdle you've had to overcome in order to be who you are?

Emmy van Deurzen: 41:10

Lots and lots of dragons.

Emmy van Deurzen: 41:12

Honestly, I think the dragon that I am still slaying in some ways is that vulnerability, and that vulnerability comes from the deep desire to be seen, heard, acknowledged and supported rather than fought, ridiculed or dismissed.

Emmy van Deurzen: 41:43

So whenever people do this old thing you know that my older sister did, which was mocking and torturing, really whenever I recognize that still around me, that still frightens me, and when I feel that fear, then I say to myself you know already that this is good for you, because it keeps you grounded, it stops you from flying away, it makes you aware that it isn't all going to be wonderful and easy.

Emmy van Deurzen: 42:25

There are always going to be naysayers as well as yaysayers and you just have to keep your eyes on the ball and you have to just keep doing what is right. And it is not about you, it is about keeping doing what needs doing. Let it be, but I still have to do that because that's always been my Achilles heel and you know, over the years I mean, some people have totally gotten the better of me and, you know, pushed me around and bullied me and done all sorts of things to me. I won't tell you the sob story because I try to say to myself. Those are the moments when I have had to renew myself and think again, and they have always, always done me a favor without realizing it.

Malcolm Stern: 43:25

That's a wonderful way of looking at it and that's a great way to finish our podcast. So I'm really happy to have seen you here and to have engaged with you, and I feel uplifted, and that's always a good sign for me as well. So, emma Evanderz, and thank you so much for being with us today.