Existential Psychotherapy
Since 1987, Dr. Robert Nicholls has been engaged in the practice of existential psychotherapy. For the most part, this practice is restricted to private conversations – so-called "logotherapy" – based on concepts and principles developed in the broader school of existential psychoanalysis.
His approach to such philosophically based counselling is influenced by a number of theoreticians and practitioners, but especially by the work of Ludwig Binswanger and Irvin Yalom. Dr. Nicholls has developed an approach to self-understanding which is grounded significantly in the ideas of autonomy, freedom and authenticity developed in the writings of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.
In addition, he completed extensive research in the work of Carl Jung with the late Professor Paul Seligman, long-time honorary member of the Jungian Society. Further, Dr. Nicholls has completed psychoanalysis with a Freudian practitioner, a former student of Erik Erikson.
The idea of an existential approach to psychotherapy is based upon the conviction that the possibility of well being is inseparable from the project of self-understanding, and that these notions need not be taken up only in the context of pathology where a model of health and disease dominates, but should be pursued in the broader, life long context of the individual's worldview.
Existential psychotherapy is concerned thematically with several aspects of human existence, including death and dying, anxiety, freedom and responsibility, selfhood, willing and resolution, isolation, meaninglessness, sexuality and gender, and transformation.
Robert Nicholls completed his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Waterloo with a dissertation on Heidegger's Being and Time (1988) His Baccalaureate is an honours double major degree in Philosophy and English from Brock University (1975). His Masters was completed at the University of Guelph (1977) with a thesis on Nietzsche. Dr. Nicholls has taught at Wilfrid Laurier University, at the University of Alberta, and for twenty-five years in the university transfer division of Douglas College. He was Chair of Philosophy Department at Douglas for several years and was the principal founder of the Summer Institute for Continental Philosophy. In addition to the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Freud, Jung, Binswanger and Yalom, Dr. Nicholls has studied extensively the writings of Eric Fromm, Rollo May, R.D. Laing, Medard Boss and Jean Laplanche.
A complete CV is available.
Meetings with clients are nominally one hour in duration, although this length is not intractable.
Clients are invited to meet twice a month, although this arrangement too is not fixed. The fee schedule is a client based sliding scale and so to be negotiated.
There is no charge for the first meeting which is limited to introductions. Clients are invited to read a work of literature or philosophy, also to be decided mutually, which serves as a focus for discussion.