The Care of Self and Psychotherapy

This chapter outlines a path that allows us to grasp phenomenological psychotherapy within the framework of the care of self—a tradition that has thematized the relation between one’s way of living and the disclosing and transforming of oneself—as the reappropriation and renewal of this tradition. This itinerary starts from Classical antiquity, passes through the practice of confession in Eastern monasticism, and reaches the Cartesian turn of the self-foundation of the thinking I. Resting on this new basis, which marks the beginning of modern thought, is the link between the truth about oneself and the truth of reason, mediated by the act of reflection and the theory guiding it, which has endured as the foundation of contemporary psychology and psychotherapy. This “Cartesian moment” thus marks the dramatic transition from an original mode of accessing the truth that requires the subject to make some changes to himself, and a different mode, according to which the accessing of the truth about oneself actualized in the act of knowing is fixed by those principles that guide the process of knowledge-acquisition. Within the framework of this contrast, it is possible to appreciate the difference between phenomenological psychotherapy and all forms of theoretically oriented contemporary psychotherapy.