01/12/202501/12/2025

Bound and Free: Claire Arnold-Baker on Paradox, Responsibility & Existential Therapy

In this episode of Becoming Existential, I sit down with Dr Claire Arnold-Baker — Principal of the New School of Psychotherapy & Counselling (NSPC), existential psychotherapist, psychologist, researcher and current Chair of the Federation for Existential Therapy in Europe (FETE).

Claire is one of the course leaders on my training programme and someone whose clinical, academic and organisational work continues to shape how existential psychotherapy is practiced today. Speaking with her offered a way to come back to the foundations of our approach through the lens of her own lived path into existential work.

Our dialogue travelled widely.

From the tensions and contradictions that characterise human existence to liberty and restriction, togetherness and solitude, accountability for ourselves and, at times, unavoidably, for others.

We explored the question of why existential therapy feels as particularly significant in a current fast-paced, anxiety-driven, and technology-dominated world.

An important part of our conversation was on Structural Existential Analysis (SEA) and the book on that Claire co-authored with Emmy van Deurzen: a structured way of exploring life as it is lived, through five interwoven dimensions:

Space, Time, Emotion & Value, Paradox and Purpose

We also spent time with Claire’s longstanding clinical and research work on motherhood, as a profound, ambiguous, identity-shaping experience — one marked by freedom and boundaries, care and responsibility, possibility and constraint.

And inevitably we arrived at the contemporary themes of human connection in an age of technology and AI. What shifts and what remains essential in the therapeutic encounter and beyond the therapy room.

Regardless of whether you’re a psychologist, therapist, researcher, or just someone interested in understanding how we interpret our experiences, I encourage you to engage with this insightful, meaningful conversation featuring a prominent figure in contemporary existential therapy.

0:00 – Why this series? Introducing the project & Claire

1:56 – Claire’s path into existential therapy (childhood death experiments, family philosophy, choosing psychology)

8:16 – NSPC as the “home of existential training” & what existential training feels like

13:10 – Structure, regulation & uncertainty: freedom within limits in professional practice

16:48 – Motherhood, feminism & giving voice to mothers’ existential crises

20:28 – Bound and free: the paradox of motherhood and responsibility for another life

23:09 – Structural Existential Analysis (SEA): researching life with four dimensions, time, paradox, emotion & purpose

29:12 – Clients turning to AI chatbots: human contact, disconnection & the tension of technology

34:55 – Existential therapy today: FETE, public discourse & why it’s “in its ascendancy”

39:41 – Who existential training is for & Claire’s advice on approaching philosophy and the journey

About Dr.Claire Arnold-Baker

Claire Arnold-Baker is Principal of the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling (NSPC) in London, and also the Course Leader for the DCPsych Programme. She is UKCP-registered existential psychotherapist, HCPC-registered Counselling Psychologist, supervisor, trainer, lecturer and Chair of the Federation for Existential Therapy in Europe (FETE).