Malcolm Freeman

I have worked as a psychotherapist for over ten years now and have experience not only from my private practice, but also from other clinical settings such as the NHS, mental health charities, and Employee Assistance Programs.  During this time I have worked with a broad spectrum of dilemmas people face in their lives: depression; anxiety; shame; guilt; work; relationships; trauma; divorce; bereavement; identity, and so on.In addition to this I have continued to reflect on my practice both through the process of professional supervision, and through Continued Professional Development (CPD)

My approach is an existential-phenomenological one.  This involves employing ideas from existential philosophy to a therapeutic setting.  Key themes amongst these ideas are: freedom; guilt; shame; anxiety; meaning; authentic/inauthentic ways of being; ethics; the body; and spirituality.  Phenomenology is a way to break down what material you bring to sessions and examine them and how they are affecting the way you are living.  I am also influenced by some ideas outside of existential philosophy e.g. psychoanalysis, and integrative psychotherapies, and some other ways of thinking about psychotherapy.  However, research in talking therapies suggests it is less the modality that affects positive outcome, but more the relationship between client and therapist.  To acknowledge this relationship is also to acknowledge that we have the possibility to engage in a meaningful reflection of what it is to be human, and to live in a particular time, and historical context, whilst also to accept the inescapable ontological givens that we have to contend with: embodiment; mortality; choice etc;