Hope is often spoken of as reassurance — a promise that things will improve, that suffering will ease, that the future will be kinder than the present. But in this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room, we pause before such promises. We ask instead: what kind of thing is hope, when certainty has already fallen away?

Our guest today is Dr Denis O'Hara, whose work invites us to think of hope not as a single feeling, but as something that moves through different layers of human life. In our conversation, Denis describes three modes of hope as they appear in psychology. There is a general form of hope, often rooted in our earliest experiences — a quiet, bodily sense that the world can be met, that life might carry us rather than abandon us. There is also a more particular hope, directed toward tasks and goals, the kind of hope that leans toward outcomes and effort. And then there is transformative hope: a form of hope that does not simply aim for improvement, but gestures toward becoming otherwise.

In this episode, I re-enter these three modes through a phenomenological and existential lens, guided by the work of Ernst Bloch and Byung-Chul Han. When seen this way, general hope reveals itself as ontological — not something we possess, but something we find ourselves within. It is an attunement to the world as unfinished, to life as still underway. Bloch names this openness the not-yet, and it is here that hope becomes the condition for the future to appear at all.

Goal-oriented hope, then, belongs to lived experience. It is phenomenological. It shows itself not as certainty, but as movement — as motivation, as enthusiasm, as a subtle leaning toward what has not yet taken shape. As Han reminds us, hope does not banish uncertainty; it needs it. Where everything is secured, hope has no breath.

Transformative hope moves even deeper. It is existential. It arises when one remains with uncertainty without rushing toward closure — when one finds the courage to stay open to what is still forming. This is not hope as comfort, but hope as exposure. Hope as the willingness to be changed.

Throughout this conversation, we reflect on how these different modes of hope appear in the therapy room — and how therapy itself might become a space that protects hope without demanding it, that holds open the future without prescribing its shape.

This episode is an invitation to listen for hope where it is quietest:
not as a promise of outcomes, but as the courage of the not-yet.

There are moments in life when laughter feels impossible
and those that laughter becomes the only way to breathe.

In this last episode of 2025, we linger at that fragile edge between laughter and gravity. Between jokes whispered in the dark,
and a seriousness that refuses to look away from suffering.

Some laugh when language collapses when words imposed by power no longer hold, and truth leaks out through irony, absurdity, and dark humour. Others carry misery with silence and dignity, believing that pain deserves to be met without dilution, without disguise.

We move through Freud’s insight that humour can soften the unbearable, and Lacan’s deeper claim that laughter appears when language itself cracks when the Symbolic falters and something unsayable briefly shows itself.

From the shadows of Iranian history, where humour became a way of surviving the unspeakable, to homes where laughter had no place because seriousness was an ethic, a form of care, a way of bearing witness this episode is not about jokes; It is about truth, about what we do when words fail, about the strange places where suffering finds breath, sometimes through laughter, sometimes through silence.

Welcome to Episode 21 of Philosophers in the Therapy Room.

Episode 20 engages with the most overused and yet least understood words of our time: authenticity. But instead of treating it as a destination or a perfected state of being, we follow the existential tradition with Beauvoir, Sartre, and Charles Taylor to approach authenticity as a process, a practice of becoming attuned to one’s own freedom.

Through Beauvoir’s portraits of the “types of man”—the sub-man who flees freedom, the serious man who hides behind absolutes, the adventurer and the passionate man who risk dissolving themselves in intensity, authenticity appears not as a heroic posture but as a subtle ethical practice: refusing self-deception, resisting the temptation to dissolve into ready-made roles, and taking responsibility for the meanings we bring into the world.

Weaving then to Sartre’s insight, authenticity will not rebel for its own sake. To be authentic is not to swim against every stream, but to discern which currents are ours to follow. It is to acknowledge that even in constraint, we remain the authors of our actions. We choose, and we answer for those choices.

With Charles Taylor, authenticity becomes deeply situated. Our choices gain weight only against a “horizon of significance” that is background values, histories, relationships, and inherited meanings that make anything matter at all. Authenticity, then, is never purely inward; it unfolds within a world that already speaks to us.

Against this background, the self comes to the fore only through an endless dialogue with the Other, maintaining what we might call a dialectical posture. This dialectic is not a clash but a movement: a continual back-and-forth between self and world, self and Other, familiarity and strangeness. It is the recognition that I discover who I am not in isolation but in the shifting interplay of perspectives, where the Other disrupts me, challenges me, reflects me back to myself, and opens new possibilities of becoming. Authenticity emerges from staying with this movement without collapsing into either pole: neither dissolving into the Other’s expectations nor retreating into a closed and self-certain interiority.

In this conversation, we explore authenticity not as purity, stubborn resistance, or a polished ideal, but as a way of inhabiting this dialectical space—a way of encountering one’s freedom openly, responsibly, and in relation. A way of asking, again and again: How do I become someone who can answer for the life I am shaping, in the presence of others who are shaping theirs?

In this World Philosophy Day special, we return to the heartbeat of philosophy not as a set of doctrines, but as a way of being. To think philosophically is to inhabit the world with a certain openness, a readiness to question the obvious, to slow down the rush of everyday assumptions, and to let new meanings take shape. It is a discipline of perspective-taking, a gentle but radical shift in how we see ourselves and others.

Drawing on Socrates’ striking claim that to practice philosophy is to practice dying, we explore what it means to loosen our attachment to the self we think we are. Philosophical thinking asks us to let certain certainties fall away: to die to our rigid beliefs, to the illusions we cling to, to the habits that numb our sensitivity to the world. But in this symbolic dying, something else becomes possible: a more spacious relation to truth, a deeper form of freedom, a more responsive way of living.

In this episode, Sameema & I reflect on how philosophy equips us to meet the world with curiosity rather than fear, with courage rather than defensiveness. We consider how questioning becomes an ethical act, and how perspective-shifting can be a source of care for oneself and for others. On this day dedicated to philosophy, we invite you to step with us into that threshold space where thinking is not just an activity, but a transformation of the one who thinks.

Motherhood is not a static role, but a Relational Field; a living space where two freedoms meet and take shape together. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that “to will oneself free is also to will others free,” we can think of the mother as the one who delivers not only a body into the world but another freedom. Yet this act of giving life is not unilateral. The mother and child co-constitute the relational space in which both must learn to live their freedom through the encounter with the Other's.

In this sense, motherhood is not reducible to biological or social function. It is an existential relation that constantly negotiates the tension between dependence and autonomy, attachment and separation. The child’s emergence as a free being presupposes the mother’s own capacity to experience herself as a free subject rather than as an instrument of another’s life. Only when the mother has come to recognise her own subjectivity, her right to desire, to limit, to say no and yes from her own ground can she create a relational field where the child’s freedom may unfold without threat.

Thus, motherhood becomes a site of reciprocal becoming: a dynamic interplay of presence and withdrawal, care and letting-be. It invites us to rethink freedom not as independence, but as co-constituted as an event that arises in the fragile, evolving field between selves.

This episode focuses on attachment theory and its place in philosophy and therapy. Although attachment has been central to psychology, it has received little attention in philosophical discussions, largely because philosophy has traditionally focused on adulthood rather than childhood. We look at how attachment theory can help therapists understand clients, but also at its limitations, particularly the way it often blames caregivers without recognising their own humanity and the social contexts in which they live.

We then consider the moral responsibility of the therapist in relation to the caregiver, and how this responsibility extends beyond the immediate client. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir, we frame adulthood as the development of responsibility, for oneself, for others, and for the wider networks of care that shape human life. The episode connects these ideas to the everyday realities of therapy and the ethical complexities of care.

The gaze isn’t just eyes on me; it’s the moment my activity is caught in another’s look and I’m flipped from subject to object. A second ago, I was absorbed with my project, interested, even quietly joyful, in what I was doing. Then the look lands. In Sartre’s terms, I become being-for-others: visible, exposed, available to be judged, evaluated, negated, and abandoned. The look doesn’t merely observe; it rearranges my self-experience, interrupting the flow of self-constituting action and returning me to myself as seen.

In this episode, Dr Zahra and I discuss shame from an existential and phenomenological perspective. Shame is not something inherently destructive but a fundamental part of the human condition that reveals important existential truths about the self, relationships, and the world. Referring to Tomkins and Affect Theory, we'd been able to name the affective pivot inside that instant: shame ignites when interest/joy is abruptly impeded, especially under a look. The warmth of engagement cools, agency reverses, and the body registers exposure before any story forms. That’s the existential core we’re tracking: shame as the first flash of being perceived as an object. Only after this rupture do the familiar aftershocks organise scripts in which other emotions latch onto shame (withdrawal, attack self, avoidance, attack other).

There are losses that break us loudly, while others pass unnoticed, unnamed, unwept.

In this episode, we turn toward those quieter sorrows that never found language, the ones that never received permission to exist. We begin with Freud’s notion of melancholia: grief that doesn’t know its object, mourning that turns inward, as the self becomes the site of absence.

Then we enter a phenomenological space, where sorrow is not simply a mood, rather a way the world appears: no longer as a horizon of “I can,” but as a closing down, a withdrawal, a silent “I cannot" .

We reflect on the losses we never named, the parts of ourselves we lost with others, and the strange, beautiful moments when we are full of sorrow without knowing why.

In a world shaped by the modern happiness project, a world that demands productivity, cheerfulness, and emotional clarity, Sadness becomes suspect.

But perhaps sadness is not weakness; perhaps it is a form of truth-telling. In the therapy room, we are invited to stop smiling. To grieve what was silenced. To honour what was lost before we even knew it was ours.

In episode 16 of Philosophers in the Therapy Room, we invite you to listen to the silence beneath the smile.

There are wounds that do not bleed, only burn.

In this episode, we turn toward the slow fire of embitterment; that heavy mood that settles in when justice is denied, when betrayal is met with silence, and when the soul, unwilling to forget, takes its stand in protest.

Embitterment is not simply a feeling. It is a way the world shows itself as dimmed, distorted, and coiled with grievance. Heidegger called these attunements moods [Stimmung], not because they are fleeting, but because they shape the very sky under which we live.

Here, we dwell in the mood of defiant despair, as Kierkegaard would name it, where care [Sorge] has turned in on itself, where the ethical wound cannot heal because the world has refused to listen.

And yet, embitterment holds something sacred: a memory of dignity, a refusal to call injustice normal. What does it mean to remain faithful to this bitterness without letting it close the future? We invite you into a conversation that does not seek easy relief but rather recognition of the mood, the wound, and the protest that still burns at the heart of the embittered soul.

In this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room, we turn toward the unsettling terrain of anxiety, not as a clinical symptom to be corrected, but as a fundamental mode of human existence. Drawing from existential and phenomenological thinkers, we ask: what does anxiety reveal about our being in the world?

We begin with Heidegger’s notion of Angst, that strange and unsettling mood which exposes the raw fact of our thrownness into existence. From there, we enter the clinical space of Daseinsanalysis, where Ludwig Binswanger’s analysis of Ellen West offers a haunting portrayal of a person whose entire world—bodily, social, temporal—has collapsed under the weight of unbearable freedom.

But anxiety does not only speak in words. It shakes the body and preempts language. With Julia Kristeva, we explore the bodily reaction of abjection, the nauseating boundary-collapse between self and other, subject and object—where anxiety takes on a visceral, almost pre-symbolic intensity.

This is not an episode about overcoming anxiety—but about encountering it as a revelatory mood: one that speaks to our vulnerability, our potential, and our longing to make meaning where none is guaranteed.