Philosophical Counseling and Loneliness: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

As individuals, the universal fear of loneliness and the desire to secure intimacy has consumed our thoughts and passions. Ever since the Old Testament and Plato’s dialogues, mankind has searched to gain understanding and insights into the dynamics of loneliness. Traditionally, Western thought has assumed, both theologically and philosophically, that the soul or self is a substance, an independent reality secure in-itself in distinction to an external material world. But following the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, science began systematically to question and even reject the “doctrine” of a personal identity. The roots of science are now steadfastly gaining ground in materialism, mechanism, determinism, empiricism, phenomenalism (as opposed to phenomenology), cognitive behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and the current neurosciences, which sciences assume that the lonely and passive patient is best “aided” and “treated” by the active agency and interventions of the clinical “specialist, which often requires pharmacological medications. By contrast, the article contends that philosophical and humanistic therapy and counseling offers a partnered alliance with the subject through interdisciplinary learning. Again, the learning is mutual. The subject controls the issues addressed; it is not a student-teacher relationship.