Randolph W Severson

I practice an Existential Counseling and Analysis. One of the core tenets of Existentialism is that all knowledge is personal and situated — ‘rooted’ one might say. The best way to better specify my orientation might be to be to personalize and situate it in my education training. My first exposure was to Existential Thomism from which I absorbed the idea that ‘existence precedes essence’, meaning that we are always free. Then came Gabriel Marcel who emphasized that life is not a set of ‘problems’ to be solved but a Mystery to appreciate and deepen. Next, Edmund Husserl of the Crisis from whom I learned to practice the ‘epoche’, to put aside all preconceptions in the encounter with persons and phenomena to describe and meet them as they present themselves. From Merleau-Ponty I learned how complicated and contextualized everything is; from Paul Tillich, the truth that this context is always cultural and mediated by language. From Tillich too I learned to speak and writ