«Psychotherapy, in all its various forms, has been determined by the way in which psychology has thematized human life. Starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, psychology has conceived man on the basis of the suggestions provided by the natural sciences, using the conceptual tools and categories favored by them. The definition of the psyche as a natural entity, a thing among other things, is what has determined the limits and horizons of the field of inquiry, as well as of all praxis and research; it has fixed the boundaries of the subject matter and hence the way in which the fundamental structures related to it are to be investigated. […]

It is therefore possible to look at one’s psyche (or that of another person) as though it were an object […] Different schools of psychology are distinguished by different focuses of observation, more or less articulated within given heuristic models […] Ultimately, however, they all share the same ontological foundation and the same method of inquiry.

[…]

From being a science of the spirit, psychology therefore becomes a science of psychic phenomena to be investigated in the light of the knowledge which distinguishes the natural sciences. Natural-scientific psychology thus irrupts with its methodology into the sphere of awareness: while searching for invariants, it devitalizes lived experience and dehistoricizes factical experience.»

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy

«Socrates makes an explicit suggestion to him [Alcibiades]. Most men, he explains, believe that taking care of oneself means taking care of one’s business; but the art by which we take care of ourselves is not the same as that by which we take care of what belongs to us. In order to know what art (techne) makes us better, we must first know ourselves, which is to say, our soul. This notion is reflected by the famous saying gnothi seauton, the injunction which the Delphic oracle would always address to those who consulted her.

If the soul must know itself, what must it turn toward in order to see at the same time itself and what it really is? To answer this question, the well-known metaphor of reflexiveness is introduced. Just as an eye gazing at itself in the pupil of another eye facing it can see, in addition to this pupil and reflected within it, the part in which its own visual capacity (arete) lies, so the soul, in order to know itself, must reflect itself in the brightest part of another soul, the part where the virtue of the soul lies: its sophia. […] This means that the act of reflexion, by which the soul can simultaneously know itself and what it is, only takes place provided one’s gaze is turned toward another soul engaged in the same quest. […] the movement by which the soul knows itself, while at the same time gaining access to the being of things— what endures in an unbroken present—is necessarily associated with a constant questioning, jointly conducted with others engaged in the same quest. The care of self, therefore, entails the establishment of a relationship with another person. In Greek Antiquity, this person was one’s philosophical master; in early Christianity, one’s spiritual father. Then, in the modern age, the idea emerged that access to the truth could be ensured by acts of conscience alone (Foucault 2001).»

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy

«Socrates’ advice to Alcibiades, who seeks to administer the city and therefore claim responsibility for the public good, is that, in order to correctly and honestly engage in politics, he must first of all be capable of seeing things for what they really are, rather than what they appear to be. “And you will act with your eyes turned on the divine light,” Socrates states (134d). By following the divine light, the soul finds stable guidance in its relations with things, people, and the ever-changing affairs of the world. Only by looking to what is bright and divine can the person wishing to take care of the common good act according to justice and wisdom. Besides, self-knowledge corresponds to a way of living that acknowledges the value of truth above all, and entails a constant attempt to cultivate one’s relationship with it, and therefore a constant testing of our capacity to gain access to things in them- selves. The difference between men emerges and takes shape starting from a different care of the soul. The practice of self-knowledge as the contemplation of the being of things, theorein, is thus connected to the knowledge of the care of self and hence to a tendency to question one’s own opinions, to the suspension of judgment, and to the ongoing quest to uncover the meaning of the famous Socratic notion of “knowing that you know nothing.»

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy

«as Hadot notes—while conceiving wisdom in different terms, Hellenistic schools all share the (ancient) view of philosophy as the pursuit of perfect tranquility. Hence, philosophy is envisaged as a “remedy for human worries, anguish, and misery brought about for the Cynics, by social constraints and conventions; for the Epicureans, by the quest for false pleasures; for the Stoics, by the pursuit of pleasure and egoistic self-interest; and for the skeptics, by false opinions”»

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy

«It is death, therefore, which reveals life through its no longer being there, through its being complete. Existence means presence: an incomplete presence which remains unchanged with respect to all possible transformations and which reaches completion with its end.

Setting the theme in relation to a much broader historical perspective—which first emerged in the context of the Orphic religion and was then incorporated within Christian and Gnostic conceptions—Jonas (1967) brilliantly shows that one of the defining features of the modern age is submission “to the ontological dominance of death.” Modern thought strives to reveal the laws of inert matter governing life as though the living organism were nothing but “a ludibrium materiae, a subtle hoax of matter” (p. 12). Thus death, which determines the perfection of existence, at the same time, annihilates it.»

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy

«self-recognition takes shape not as a reflective mirroring within the psyche but rather in the light of what we do or do not do, through the way in which the world reveals itself to us».

— Giampiero Arciero, Guido Bondolfi, Viridiana Mazzola. The Foundations of Phenomenological Psychotherapy

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«A person cannot know what he really is until he has made of himself an external reality by producing a text, and then reflecting upon it. With Jaspers (1919/ 1960) we could say that a person can only understand herself in a situation. Self-knowledge is not to be achieved through abstract self-reflection, but in the act of self-recognition in the mirror of one’s action.»

— Stanghellini. Lost in dialogue

«An analysis must be painful, not because there is necessarily any value in pain, but because an analysis in which pain is not observed and discussed cannot be regarded as dealing with one of the central reasons for the patient's presence. […] the need, more obvious in some cases than in others, for the analytic experience to increase the patient's capacity for suffering even though patient and analyst may hope to decrease pain itself.»

— W. R. Bion. Elements of Psycho-Analysis

«Я становлюсь ясен самому себе только в итоге внутренней деятельности, которая изменяет также и меня самого. Чисто внешние признаки откровенности, бесстыдное выворачивание наизнанку глубин собственного существа, многословные исповеди, самоанализы и описания внутреннего состояния, упоенность наблюдениями за событиями своей внутренней жизни – все это, как правило, используется для вуалирования всяческих попыток скрыть собственное «Я», не дать ему проявиться вовне. Самопрояснение – это не объективное событие, подобное научному открытию; это скорее форма внутреннего, скрытого от постороннего взгляда поведения, это постижение, выбор, ассимиляция собственного «Я». Ничем не сковываемое выражение того, что будто бы представляет собой жестокую правду, есть лишь имитация настоящей искренности; фиксированный, не подверженный изменчивости характер такого выражения свидетельствует о его несоответствии внутренней правде индивида. Истинное самопрояснение сочетает в себе смирение и глубину, простоту и действенность.»

— Карл Ясперс. Общая психопатология

как жить и что делать

В IEP появилась хорошая обзорная статья про энактивизм: https://iep.utm.edu/enactivism/

«…many modern writers following Kant and earlier usage introduced by Berkeley and muddied (though in constructive ways) by Hume — urge that a central task of philosophy is to "answer the skeptic": to show, presumably, that what the skeptic denies to be possible is in fact not only possible, but actual. To adopt a later medical metaphor, this endeavor strikes me as a form of philosophical resistance in the psychoanalytic sense, a consequence of the very disease of which the skeptic intends to cure philosophers. It is more appropriate, I will argue, not to resist skeptical arguments, but to attend carefully to them. In particular, I will argue that resistance to skepticism rests on a confusion of skepticism with one of its extreme targets — typically what I follow the Buddhist skeptics in calling "nihilism." Such a confusion mistakes the point of skeptical arguments, the conclusions of the critical portions of the skeptical enterprise, and, most importantly, the skeptical solutions[…]»

— Jay L. Garfield. Epoche and Śūnyatā: Skepticism East and West