Existential Psychotherapy

Clinical therapist specializing in existential-humanism, psychoanalysis, group psychotherapy, nature-based therapy/ecopsychology, and neuroscience.

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“We welcome illusions because they spare us unpleasurable feelings, and enable us to enjoy satisfactions instead. We must not complain, then, if now and again they come into collision with some sort of reality, and are shattered against it.”

–Sigmund Freud (1915, p. 280)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“Despite its best efforts, few pursuits are more human than science. Forever falling short of certain knowledge, its products are never more certifiably scientific than when they are overturned.”

– Mark Solms: The Only Cure
(p. 63, 2026)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“Psychotherapists who only know about their clients do well to stay with behavior modification and similar objective approaches. If one seeks to truly know one’s clients, one is inexorably drawn into the subjectivity of that person.”

–James F. Bugental
(1987, p. 269)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“Love is watching someone die. So who’s gonna watch you die?”

–Ben Gibbard

Gibbard, B. (2005) What Sarah said. On Plans. Atlantic Records.

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“I didn’t want to just consume beauty. I wanted it to consume me.”
(In reference to awe)

–Florence Williams (2022, p. 178)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“The only solution I can see to the suffering of finitude, far from a perfect one, is for us to soften its impact through the bonds of love we established with one another.”

–Robert D. Stolorow: The Power of Phenomenology (2019, p. 103)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“[T]he central construct in a theorist’s account of human nature and the human condition mirrors his personal solution to the nuclear crises of his own life history.”

–George E. Atwood: The Intersubjective Perspective (1997, p. 157)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“The idea of a shifting boundary forming within an intersubjective field contrasts sharply with the traditional notion of the repression barrier as a fixed intrapsychic structure permanently separating conscious and unconscious contents.”

-Robert Stolorow (1994, p. 6)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“The unconscious is my abode, my past, and my destiny converged so that ‘I,’ the one for whom the unconscious comes into Being, am simply the experience of this tri-partite intersection.”

–M. Guy Thompson (2023, p. 201)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

@danlevitin

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“Music can’t be real, or represent the real–it has to suggest the real in a way that is artful, pregnant, pointing toward an eternal beauty, while remaining rooted in this world, this world of sounds, vibrations, notes, and neurons.”

–Daniel J. Levitin
(2024, pg. 240)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.”

–John Dewey
(Your Brain on Art, p. 161)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

(Your Brain on Art, p. 135)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
–Kurt Vonnegut (2006)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

(2025, p. 228)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“Hope is fuel to get you there, nothing more, and it pushes us forward by encouraging us to believe perfection might be out there instead of reality, which is corporal, and therefore finite and lesser. Hope is the glory of maybe.”

–Michael E. Long: Taming the Molecule of More

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“Artists gain creativity by growing their capacity with quantitative reasoning, and logic-minded people gain creativity when they apply reason to what seems subjective. There is often exquisite order within chaos, and intricate beauty within order.” –Michael E. Long

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“Human beings are neither angels nor demons. Given the same circumstances, we do not know what we would do. When we recognize this, it becomes easier to offer compassion and forgiveness.”

–Scott Barry Kaufman: Rise Above
(2025, p. 249)

@sbkaufman

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“When we suppress (consciously) or repress (unconsciously) our darkest thoughts, these may find their way to ‘erupt’ into our lives, like a volcano, when we are not prepared, frequently with grave consequences.”

–Scott Barry Kaufman: Choose Growth (2022, p. 85)

[Existential Psychotherapy @javanderhoff]

“The way to be good when you don’t know how to be good is by learning. You should do everything in such a way as to be learning what the right thing to do is, and this means getting other people to show you when you are wrong.”

Agnes Collard – Open Socrates (2025, p. 16)