Philosophers in the Therapy Room

About Philosophers in the Therapy Room

"Philosophers in the Therapy Room" explores the intersection of philosophy and Psychotherapy/Counselling, through insightful discussions led by philosopher-practitioners Dr Hora Zabarjadi Sar and Dr Sameema Zahra. Delving into existential questions, ethical dilemmas, and the human psyche, each episode offers a unique blend of theoretical depth and practical wisdom. Join them on a journey of self-discovery, where philosophical insights illuminate the path to healing and personal growth. To know more about us, please visit our website: www.iasocare.de or contact us: counselling4u@iasocare.de

Publisher

Dr Hora Zabarjadi Sar and Dr Sameema Zahra

Category

health & fitness

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

6 May 2024

Latest episode

29 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

27 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   29 Jul 2026

   Episode 26- Letting the Other Appear: The Practice of Daseinsanalysis

   In the 26th episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room with Stephan Dietrich, President of the Austrian Daseinsanalytic Institute, we explore what makes Daseinsanalysis distinctive, not simply a different set of techniques, but a different way of meeting another person. In many therapeutic approaches, the therapist enters the room with a framework through which the client’s experience can be assessed, interpreted, or organised. Daseinsanalysis asks for something prior to this. It asks whether the therapist can become open enough to receive the other person before deciding what their experience means. This openness is not passive. It requires a particular kind of discipline: the willingness to suspend judgement, including not only diagnostic or therapeutic judgement, but also what phenomenology would describe as a form of objectifying judgement of knowledge—where experience is approached through logical classification, interpretation, and theoretical explanation, as if what the other person lives could already be fully grasped as an object of knowledge. The therapist is therefore not positioned outside the encounter as a detached observer. They are present within it, affected by it, and made vulnerable through it. To receive another person is to allow their world to reach us without immediately reducing it to a category, symptom, explanation, or theory. This vulnerability does not mean losing clinical responsibility or abandoning professional knowledge. Rather, it means holding knowledge lightly enough that the person before us is not overshadowed by what we think we know about them. In this conversation with Stephan Dietrich, we learn more about this unique therapeutic stance: what it means for the therapist to remain open, to suspend judgement, and to encounter the client not merely as a psychological subject to be understood, but as a human being whose way of existing is gradually disclosed within the therapeutic relationship. Perhaps the distinctive question of Daseinsanalysis is not simply, “What is happening inside this person?” but rather: “How is the world opening or failing to open for this person, and what becomes possible when we are willing to meet them there?”

2. 

   24 May 2026

   Episode 25-More than a Story: The Phenomenology of Lived Experience

   In contemporary discourse, the term lived experience is present everywhere; it appears in therapy rooms, political spaces, academic institutions, activist movements, and mental health frameworks. It often arrives carrying an ethical demand: to listen to those who have lived through suffering, marginalisation, trauma, displacement, or exclusion. And perhaps rightly so. But what do we actually mean when we speak of lived experience? In this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room, Dr Sammema and I return to the phenomenological roots of the concept through thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Eugene Gendlin: discussing lived experience not as a static identity or personal possession, but as an embodied way of being-in-the-world. For Merleau-Ponty, experience is never detached cognition observing reality from outside. We encounter the world through the lived body through movement, perception, memory, affect, and relation. And for Gendlin, the body is not separate from its world but already intertwined with it, much like the foot that knows the ground as it walks upon it. Experience is not merely inside us; it is the ongoing dialogue between body and world. But we also ask a difficult question: What happens when the language of lived experience becomes institutionalised? Can a concept originally intended to illuminate embodied existence become another mechanism of classification? Another border between those whose experiences are recognised and those whose suffering remains unintelligible? When lived experience hardens into identity categories alone, something of its phenomenological depth may be lost. The fluidity, ambiguity, and openness of existence risk being reduced to administrative labels, social credentials, or fixed positions from which one is permitted or forbidden to speak. In this conversation, we explore the ethical and philosophical tensions surrounding lived experience: as embodiment, as situated existence, as intersubjective meaning, and as a concept vulnerable to appropriation, reduction, and exclusion. Because perhaps lived experience was never meant to close the conversation. Perhaps it was meant to deepen our capacity to encounter the world and one another more carefully.

3. 

   10 Apr 2026

   Episode 24- The Movement of the Heart: Compassion and the Call to Respond

   Compassion is one of the most familiar words in our moral vocabulary. We are encouraged to practise it, to cultivate it, to extend it—to others, and to ourselves. And yet, in the therapy room, compassion often arrives… confused. In this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room, we turn to compassion not as a moral ideal, but as a lived experience. Drawing on phenomenology and the philosophy of moral emotions, we explore compassion as a movement of the heart—a response that emerges when another’s suffering is no longer neutral to us. But what happens when this movement cannot find its way into action? When we cannot fix, cannot relieve, cannot change what we witness? In the therapy room, in caregiving, and in our shared world, we are often confronted with suffering that resists intervention.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

297

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Spotify

5.0 / 5

6 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 56 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

72

Social presence

0

YouTube

66

Engagement

32

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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