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Bob created The Institute for Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy in 1985 in order to articulate a certain vision of living, loving, thinking and practicing psychotherapy. The Institute represents the confluence of existential-phenomenological and contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to psychotherapy. The philosophies of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleu-Ponty are the entryways into thinking about existential therapy.
Bob studied psychology and philosophy with Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago and then went on to study philosophy with the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch and the existential philosophers Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1975, while at Smith College, he was fortunate to study with Paul Russell of the Boston Society and Institute of Psychoanalysis. Russell explored the repetition compulsion concept and made it the centerpiece of his understanding of human being and psychotherapy. The final piece of the puzzle was added when Bob read the works of Fairbairn and Winnicott in the early 1980s. He was persuaded that the British School of object relations theory has a profound affinity with existential thinking. Fairbairn, Winnicott and Russell are the three psychoanalytic thinkers most emphasized at the Institute.
Bob has been working on integrating existential, phenomenological, systemic, object relations and Paul Russell’s repetition compulsion concepts into his thinking, teaching and practice consistently over the years.
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