Depth Therapy & Philosophy: A Reading List

Those interested in learning more about the relationship between depth psychotherapy and philosophy can find a continually updated and refined catalogue of resources below. I include everything from popular-level texts to academic classics in the field—anything I have found helpful, or anticipate finding helpful, that I think would also benefit those who want to develop their own understanding. As with all my reading lists, this is an idiosyncratic list of books or other resources I have found helpful in my own learning, rather than any attempt at an exhaustive or fully representative catalogue of work relevant to the topic. That said, peruse at your leisure and, with any luck, find something that may be helpful to you too!

  • Richard Chessick, “The Silence of Socrates,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 58.4 (2004), pp. 406-419. Online.

  • Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics. Holt & Company, 1990.

  • J. M. Heaton, “Insight in Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 3.2 (1972), pp. 135-145.

  • Daniel Helminiak, The Human Core of Spirituality: Mind as Psyche and Spirit. SUNY Press, 1996.

  • Eliot Dole Hutchinson, “The Nature of Insight,” Psychiatry 77.3 (2014), pp. 215-229.

  • Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009.

  • Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living. Notre Dame Press, 2020.

  • Jonathan Lear, Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Harvard University Press, 2017.

  • _____, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Harvard University Press, 1999.

  • _____, Therapeutic Action: An Earnest Plea for Irony. Routledge, 2018.

  • _____, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis. Yale University Press, 1999.

  • Bernard Lonergan. Insight: An Essay in Human Understanding. University of Toronto Press, 1992.

  • _____, Understanding and Being: The Halifax Lectures on Insight. University of Toronto Press, 1990.

  • Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. Routledge, 2004.

  • Donna Orange, Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies. Routledge, 2010.

  • Plato, Complete Works. Hackett, 1997. Especially Gorgias, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, Charmides, and Alcibiades I.

  • John Riker, Ethics and the Discovery of the Unconscious. SUNY Press, 1997.

  • _______, Exploring the Life of the Soul: Philosophical Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Self Psychology. Lexington Books, 2018.

  • Eric Voeglin, “Reason: The Classical Experience,” The Southern Review 10.2 (1974), pp. 237-264.

  • Eugene Webb, Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard. University of Washington Press, 2014.