Members

Professor Simon du Plock is Head of the Faculty of Post-Qualification and Professional Doctorates at the Metanoia Institute, London, UK. He is responsible for a number of research degree programmes, including a PhD in Psychotherapy, a DPsych in Psychotherapy by Professional Studies, a DPsych in Psychotherapy by Public Works, and a DCPsych in Counselling Psychology. Overall, the Faculty hosts approximately 260 research candidates and as many alumni, making it one of the largest concentrations of psychotherapy scholarship in the UK. He is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist, an Associate Fellow of the BPS, and a Founding Member of the BPS Register of Psychologists Specialising in Psychotherapy. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society for Medicine and a UKCP Registered Psychotherapist. He lectures internationally on aspects of existential therapy, and has authored over 80 books, book chapters, and papers in peer-reviewed academic journals. Currently, he is editing a new book, Case Studies in Existential Therapy:Translating theory into practice, which will be published in London by PCCS Books in September 2018. This is a considerably expanded and updated version of a much earlier text with the same title, first published by Sage in 1997. He is also Section Editor of ‘Newly evolving forms of Existential Therapy around the world’ and has contributed a chapter, ‘Overview of geographic development’, for The Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy , due to be published by Wiley Autumn 2018). He has edited Existential Analysis, the Journal of the British Society for Existential Analysis continuously since 1993. In 2006 he became the first Western therapist to be made an Honorary Member of the East European Association for Existential Therapy, in recognition of his contribution to the development of collaboration between East and West European existential psychotherapy. In 2017 he was delighted to be invited to join the Editorial Board of Psichologija, a learned journal published by Vilnius University. As an invited speaker at the IX International Congress, held in Birstonas in 2016, he shared some of his recent thinking about what he has come to term ‘Everyday Existential Therapy’. In the process, he has begun to move away from the medical/scientific approaches which have historically informed psychological health care, and has sought to return to the holistic tradition which, in particular, inspires the profession of counselling psychology and makes it distinctive. He attempted, in his talk, to illustrate how this enables us to attain a philosophical overview which draws its vitality from a wide range of disciplines which seek to address what it means to be human.