Existential psychotherapy

My name is Marc, and I offer short-term and open-ended existential psychotherapy face-to-face in Brighton (UK), and online throughout the UK.

Existential psychotherapy focuses on exploring your lived experiences; the contexts and encounters that shape your understanding of your body, sense of self, relationships with others, and the world around you.

My practice primarily focuses on working with people who have:

experienced interpersonal adversity and trauma.
concerns around their families, relationships, social connections and/or sexual lives.
existential concerns and experienced life crises.

Through a collaborative dialogue, we will explore your dilemmas, the challenges you are facing in your life, and your relationships with your past, present and future. Sometimes this can involve confronting, and making sense of, foundations of our human existence.

The foundations of our existence include:

being born (our natality)
into a context and time not of our choosing (our throwness and temporality)
having a body (our embodiment)
being conscious and non-conscious of our own existence (our reflexivity and pre-reflexivity)
living in a relational world (our intercorporeality, interaffectivity, interanimality and interdependence)
interconnected with others (our intersubjectivity)
encountering our sameness and difference from others (our alterity)
moving between worlds of experiencing and experiential states (our liminality)
making mistakes and having misunderstandings (our fallibility)
discovering our ability to grow and change (our becoming)
facing real-world constraints and limitations (our contingencies)
facing threats, attacks and endangerment (our vulnerabilities)
searching for meaning and purpose in our lives (our logos and noetics)
having a personal and collective ability to shape our lives (our agency, choice and freedom)
understanding we, and others, have the potential and capacity for great destruction and construction (our daimonics)
participating and existing in an existence greater than ourselves (our immersion)
eventually dying (our finitude)

In the therapy, we will aim to find greater insight, build the internal resources you need to make the changes you want to see in your life, and build new forms of relationships with others.

Many of my clients are from neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ communities, and I also have a background in working with people who have societal, institutional and interpersonal experiences of trauma, discrimination and prejudice based on their gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.

I am an accredited member of the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (MBACP Senior Accred.), a registered clinical member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP Reg. Accred.), the Universities Psychotherapy and Counselling Association (MUPCA Accred.), and a member of the Society for Existential Analysis (MSEA).

I use the UKCP and BACP Ethical Frameworks to guide my practice, attend regular supervision, and use additional CPD training to continue to develop and deepen my work.

I am an Existential psychotherapist and analyst, drawing on insight from existential-phenomenology, logotherapy and Existential Analysis. I am also informed by object-relations, attachment theory, and analytical psychology.

As well as being an author and educator, I have previously acted as mental health advocate and spokesperson in the UK Parliament, on Independent Reviews, and in the national media.

You can read some of my recent publications here.