What is philosophical counseling?

Philosophische Praxis — or philosophical counseling — is an alternative to psychotherapy. Its purpose is not to replace or compete with therapeutic methods, but rather to recover an aspect of philosophical practice whose origins go back some 2,500 years. The history of modern psychotherapy certainly represents progress compared to earlier psychiatric procedures, but it is not a creation unique to our time. Treating the ailments of the soul through dialogue — instead of resorting, for example, to electroshock — is indeed a civilizational advance, yet this very practice already had its forerunners in Antiquity.

In the city of Corinth, around the 5th century BCE, there existed a space analogous to what we might today call a clinic or a counseling office — though it would be anachronistic to describe it in strictly modern terms. The Greek historian Plutarch recounts, in his Lives of the Ten Orators, that Antiphon (480–411 BCE) invented a method to heal the anxieties and disturbances of the soul in the same way that a physician heals illnesses of the body. He acquired a small house near the Agora and placed an inscription on the door declaring that he could “cure through words those who were distressed.” By asking questions of those who came to him, he discovered the causes of their unease and offered them comfort.

It is striking to note that millennia later, a young woman named Anna O. — patient of Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer at the dawn of psychoanalysis — would call precisely the talking cure the method used in her treatment. She realized that by speaking about certain traumatic experiences, she experienced relief. Thus, when we speak of a philosopher providing comfort and guidance to an individual in a session of philosophical counseling, we are referring to a practice whose roots reach back nearly five centuries before Christ.

We find a similar position in Socrates. In Plato’s Charmides, Socrates tells his interlocutor of something he had learned from the Thracians: that certain afflictions of both body and mind have their origin in the psyché — a term generally translated as “soul” — and that it must be treated by a particular kind of discourse. Socrates explains that through this philosophical discourse we cultivate temperance, and when we develop this virtue within ourselves, it becomes easier to bring health not only to the head but also to the whole body. Already in Socrates, therefore, we find the idea that philosophy fulfills a therapeutic role.

For this reason, philosophical counseling is sometimes described as a “therapy for the sane.” This expression was even the title of a book by Lou Marinoff, one of the main proponents of philosophical counseling in the United States. In his Therapy for the Sane: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life, the professor from the City College of New York distinguishes between illnesses and the ordinary discomforts of the soul. In English, he plays with the word disease (illness) by separating it with a hyphen into dis-ease — a state of difficulty, imbalance, or unrest. Philosophical counseling, in this sense, is a therapy for those who are not sick, but who nevertheless struggle with the dilemmas of existence.

If you have ever read the works of Seneca, then you already have some idea of what philosophical counseling is. When the Roman philosopher writes his letters to Lucilius, for example, his aim is therapeutic: he seeks not only to uncover the causes of his friend’s suffering, but also to show that emotions often arise from errors of reason — errors that can be corrected by adopting a new perspective, one that is usually aligned with nature. We cannot always change our perspectives on our own, which is why the guidance of a philosopher can be so valuable.

This therapeutic understanding of philosophy is also evident in Epicurus, who insisted that just as medicine is useless if it does not heal the body, so too philosophy is worthless if it does not heal the soul.