My name is Matthew Bishop. Philosophical counselling is an unusual practice, so this this page tells you about me, with a focus on how I came to philosophy, then to counselling, and finally to philosophical counselling. In telling my story I seek to clarify what philosophical counselling is.
I view philosophy in the classical way. It is the getting of wisdom. And the cultivation of virtue. Philosophy is primarily a practice for living well. It is for any person who wants to reflect and to strive.
This understanding of philosophy is why I sometimes use the phrase classical philosophy, and sometimes the phrase classical wisdom.
Indeed, philosophy is an ancient Greek word which means love of wisdom. A philosopher loves and so pursues wisdom. We seek to become wise men at the level of the head, but also the heart, and the hands.
"Wisdom is a virtue, and the beginning of all the virtues." Hence, it is even more correct to say that a philosopher loves and pursues wisdom and virtue. That's what it's all about.
We start with reason, which cultivates wisdom, which cultivates virtue, which both leads to, and constitutes, a good and happy life.
Notice that there is another word in that phrase lover of wisdom. That is, a philosopher is also lover. He is a lover of truth, of goodness, of justice, of beauty, of the higher and highest values which transform us and give meaning to life.
One of my greatest influences is the Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita. In his memoir of his boyhood and of his father Rai wrote that "The philosopher Plato said that those who love and seek wisdom are clinging in recollection to things they once saw. On many occasions in my life I have had the need to say, and thankfully have been able to say: I know what a good workman is: I know what an honest man is: I know what friendship is: I know because I remember these things in the person of my father."
How did I come to philosophy? I grew up in a rural, working-class world of tradesmen and farmers, in north-western Victoria. From around the age of 10, if I was not at school then I was doing hard physical work. When that work was alongside older men we would talk about life, trying to make sense of what it is to live meaningfully, of what it is to be a decent human being, how to navigate life's difficulties, and so on. Many of those older men in my life had lived through the great depression, the war, and had built farms in the Mallee dust. Character, decency, and thoughtfulness are the qualities I remember in those "old Australians". They impressed upon me a vision of what a man can be. It was a sense of manhood as something to rise to, involving the demands and rewards of character. The thing that mattered most in life was to be a good man, but also strong and happy.
People are often unaware of the roots of their own thoughts and values. The secular root of our culture's understanding and concern for goodness, is Plato. The primary root of our understanding of the nature of strength and happiness is Aristotle. Those traditions can be traced back, through the lives of the men I knew as a child, to those philosophers in Athens 2500 years ago. This is why the traditon of Plato is often spoken of as a golden thread that runs through the ages. Of course, as Plato and Aristotle would point out, they did not invent these ideas or values, they simply paid deep attention to life, and gave words to what they saw. Probably they did not anticipate that their insights would become a tradition that would shape civilisations and the lives of millions of people.
When, as was more often the case in my childhood, I did that physical work alone, the demands on my body left my mind free to roam under a massive sky and a wide horizon. Without knowing of those philosophers, or having even heard the word philosophy, those conversations and those many days of private reflection amounted to an early training in philosophy. I wondered about the nature of time, and of identity through time, and at the fact of existence. More concretely I wrestled with the nature and demands of truth and goodness, while trying to make sense of hardship, loss, tragedy, humiliation, compassion, strength, happiness, and what life might mean.
Partly to escape an abusive step-father in a tiny, dusty town, I dropped-out of high-school early and moved to Melbourne. A few years later, while working in a factory, I wandered into a bookstore and walked out with a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius--the classic book of Stoic philosophy. From Aurelius I was led to Plato, Aristotle, and the other Stoics--to classical philosophy. I discovered in them the same kind of wisdom that had so impressed me in my youth in the character of certain men, and that same kind of wonder and wrestling with the essential concerns of life, but all of this was taken to a whole other level, by some of the greatest minds who ever lived. They had looked deeply into reality, into life, into human nature, and based on what they saw they created a framework for coping with pain and suffering, for making life good, for cultivating character, and for living at a higher level of purpose and meaning.
It turned out that I had a talent for philosophy and so I made my way into The University of Melbourne, where I studied and eventually taught it.
What I call classical philosophy is very different to academic or university philosophy. If academic philosophy were an animal it would be found in a zoo, while classical philosophy would be found on a farm. I did well, academically, and greatly enjoyed teaching at the university and speaking with so many brilliant people, but it was the wrong place and the wrong approach to philosophy for me. Yet, it was also clear that I would dedicate my life to classical wisdom, and to sharing it with others. So I tried to imagine an alternative way of being a philosopher while also paying the bills: perhaps a kind of private tutoring in philosophy for living well, or even a kind of coaching or counselling. I searched the university libraries for inspiration and, lo and behold, came across a movement that had not reached Australia, but which was quite established in Europe and America: philosophical counselling. I had found my path.
There were different recommended ways to create a career as a philosophical counsellor, and one was to study counselling and psychotherapy. I chose that path, because I could see that counselling would provide a framework and a set of skills to embody the philosophical help I wanted to offer. Counselling is different to psychotherapy. It is in essence a framework (a format: private conversation, 50 minutes, attentive and empathic, and so on), and a set of conversational skills for eliciting insight, clarity, direction, motivation, emotional improvement, personal growth, and so on. That framework and those skills can be combined with any field of knowledge about life, so as to help with any concern in life. For example, counselling can be combined with knowledge about relationships, or addiction, or personal growth, or careers, or finances, or religious belief, to help people make progress with such concerns. So why not philosophy?
If counselling as a framework and set of skills is somewhat content-neutral, by contrast psychotherapy is content-full. It is full of a theory, it is an embodiment of that theory. A psychotherapy (there are many psychotherapies) can be defined as a particular psychological theory of human nature, including what goes wrong, that is applied as a set of therapeutic practices. The psychotherapies include the many cognitive-behavioural, psychodynamic, and humanistic therapies, each of which embodies a particular theoretical orientation and even a distinct worldview.
A century of such therapy has given us many powerful psychological insights and skills which can be lifted from their theoretical context and used more broadly. I recognised that these would be highly valuable for philosophical counselling. They would serve as a background of psychological insight to guide the understanding, and as many tools to draw on when needed.
This use and integration of psychological insight in philosophy is nothing new. Modernity divides everything into seperate parts, but but in classical philosophy, philosophy and psychology they are integrated. Some of the best psychology you could read, in terms of understanding human nature, yourself, and how to grow and improve, comes from ancient Greece, and from medieval Europe. Modern psychotherapy is full of both errors and of valuable insights, and the insights can be seperated out and then integrated with classical psychology to create something even better than either was on its own.
My path to philosophical counselling thus became a journey that unfolded in chapters. I decided take my time and become an experienced psychotherapist on the way to the final goal, Hence, I developed a whole second career in mainstream therapy which lasted for many years.
I studied counselling and psychotherapy to master's level. I seemed to have a knack for the art, and by the end of my training I had been offered numerous academic and therapeutic roles by my educators. That led me on a fifteen-year journey which included working as a mainstream therapist in a variety of organisations, focused on issues such as bereavement, suicide crisis intervention, rural men's counselling, an Australian Defense Force and a war veteran's counselling service, workplace counselling (EAP), and management coaching for interpersonal skills. In that context I developed experience across many mainstream approaches to therapy within the broad three camps: the humanistic, the psychodynamic, and the cognitive-behavioural. I designed and delivered training to counsellors, and was head-hunted multiple times to teach counselling at tertiary institutions (which I always turned down--my focus was on the practice). I was registered with the Australian Counselling Association at their most senior level.
In 2012 I started a private practice in Carlton, Melbourne, which focused on txistential therapy--a philosophical variant of mainstream psychotherapy. I did ran that practice two days a week, while doing organisational counselling on the other three (as well as teaching philosophy part-time until 2014). Hence, I spent the 2010s developing skills across the many versions of existential therapy. In 2020 I began to step away from organisational work, and I started a private practice in Bendigo focused on men's counselling--another area of passion as you can see above. Both that, and my Carlton office for existential therapy came to an end in March 2020.
During all these years I was exploring and experimenting with the use of philosophy in counselling. This was a slow beginning to my philosophical counselling career, which meant that by the time I got around to philosophical counselling itself--in the 2020s--the concepts, skills, and framework were clear, honed, and ready to go. The quality and depth of the philosophical counselling that I offer to you would be impossible without that long, rich backround in mainstream therapy. For example, I draw constantly on tools from cognitive-behavioural therapy to help people habituate the virtues they need, while psychodynamic therapy helps me to see the defense mechanisms people employ.
Most of a therapist's learning happens less through the formal study, and more through the years of therapeutic work and constant reflection on it. In time therapy becomes less of a technical skill, and more a honed way of seeing and understanding, a kind of wisdom that the therapist has earned, just as a talented mechanic or magistrate slowly becomes wise in their work. I now carry that wisdom with me as a background to my philosophical counselling.
Today that long journey is over and I work purely as a philosophical counsellor, both in the more general way as described on my other website, and through this service focused on men. I draw greatly on insights and tools from mainstream psychotherapy whenever helpful, but this service is not mainstream therapy. I am confident that this approach is actually better for many men. For it connects with something much deeper in us, and draws forth our best.
As per my other website, I enjoy working with men and women in general. So why do I specialise, here, in men?
I wrote an essay here on therapeutic culture as the embodiment of Carl Jung's archetype of the Devouring Mother. I did not address the issue of how therapy has a tendency to favour feminine psychology, but that is a related problem which many educated critics have pointed out. When Aristotle referred to women as "defective men" he was wrong; Socrates and Plato had already proved so. Now, 2500 years later, we are treating men as defective women. Therapy has a history of pathologising masculine psychology, but the problem has only increased since 2015.
Even if some people make too much of them, gender differences are real. Across the main part of the distribution curve, masculine psychology differs from feminine psychology. When therapy pathologises masculine ways of coping and masculine ways of flourishing, and forces all people into a feminine mode of being, then it undermines men's strength, well-being, goodness, and happiness. There is a real need for men's counselling by counsellors who understand men's psychology. We are seeing more of that in private practice in the last five to ten years, and we need more of it.
The positive reason is that I am offering this service, is because it is what I wanted, when I was young. Many young men want a tradition of objective wisdom that will guide them. In the West, classical philosophy is our tradition. It speaks especially to our masculine psychology, and so much so, that it is often more effective, and in wider and deeper ways, than mainstream therapy. It does not undermine us, on the contrary, it calls forth our best: our potentiality for strength, for goodness (which is the truest mental health), for happiness, and for living at a higher level of meaning. See what you think: as you read the ideas on the website, do they speak to you, do they touch on a deeper instinct in you?
An older man who embodies a deep, ancient, masculine tradition has something to offer younger men. I want to share this wisdom-tradition of the West with men, especially younger men, and to guide them in it. That is what motivated this service. I am a philosopher. I live this path. It is who and what I am.
I speak of younger men because they are who motivated this service, but of course this is for all men. My oldest client is almost 90.
I provide more detail about the specifics of this tradition--classical wisdom, classical philosophy, and my philosophical counselling as the embodiment of it--on my blog.
That's enough about me. I live on the western edge of central Victoria, and outside of philosophical counselling I spend my time restoring and riding old motorcycles, doing other mechanical and trade work at home, and otherwise reading philosophy and walking a lot in the bush. I have bigger plans for a movement of classical philosophical counselling, and spend much unpaid time working on that, though it is something that will publicly emerge only slowly, in the coming decades.
I view philosophy in the classical way. It is the getting of wisdom. And the cultivation of virtue. Philosophy is primarily a practice for living well. It is for any person who wants to reflect and to strive.
This understanding of philosophy is why I sometimes use the phrase classical philosophy, and sometimes the phrase classical wisdom.
Indeed, philosophy is an ancient Greek word which means love of wisdom. A philosopher loves and so pursues wisdom. We seek to become wise men at the level of the head, but also the heart, and the hands.
"Wisdom is a virtue, and the beginning of all the virtues." Hence, it is even more correct to say that a philosopher loves and pursues wisdom and virtue. That's what it's all about.
We start with reason, which cultivates wisdom, which cultivates virtue, which both leads to, and constitutes, a good and happy life.
Notice that there is another word in that phrase lover of wisdom. That is, a philosopher is also lover. He is a lover of truth, of goodness, of justice, of beauty, of the higher and highest values which transform us and give meaning to life.
One of my greatest influences is the Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita. In his memoir of his boyhood and of his father Rai wrote that "The philosopher Plato said that those who love and seek wisdom are clinging in recollection to things they once saw. On many occasions in my life I have had the need to say, and thankfully have been able to say: I know what a good workman is: I know what an honest man is: I know what friendship is: I know because I remember these things in the person of my father."
How did I come to philosophy? I grew up in a rural, working-class world of tradesmen and farmers, in north-western Victoria. From around the age of 10, if I was not at school then I was doing hard physical work. When that work was alongside older men we would talk about life, trying to make sense of what it is to live meaningfully, of what it is to be a decent human being, how to navigate life's difficulties, and so on. Many of those older men in my life had lived through the great depression, the war, and had built farms in the Mallee dust. Character, decency, and thoughtfulness are the qualities I remember in those "old Australians". They impressed upon me a vision of what a man can be. It was a sense of manhood as something to rise to, involving the demands and rewards of character. The thing that mattered most in life was to be a good man, but also strong and happy.
People are often unaware of the roots of their own thoughts and values. The secular root of our culture's understanding and concern for goodness, is Plato. The primary root of our understanding of the nature of strength and happiness is Aristotle. Those traditions can be traced back, through the lives of the men I knew as a child, to those philosophers in Athens 2500 years ago. This is why the traditon of Plato is often spoken of as a golden thread that runs through the ages. Of course, as Plato and Aristotle would point out, they did not invent these ideas or values, they simply paid deep attention to life, and gave words to what they saw. Probably they did not anticipate that their insights would become a tradition that would shape civilisations and the lives of millions of people.
When, as was more often the case in my childhood, I did that physical work alone, the demands on my body left my mind free to roam under a massive sky and a wide horizon. Without knowing of those philosophers, or having even heard the word philosophy, those conversations and those many days of private reflection amounted to an early training in philosophy. I wondered about the nature of time, and of identity through time, and at the fact of existence. More concretely I wrestled with the nature and demands of truth and goodness, while trying to make sense of hardship, loss, tragedy, humiliation, compassion, strength, happiness, and what life might mean.
Partly to escape an abusive step-father in a tiny, dusty town, I dropped-out of high-school early and moved to Melbourne. A few years later, while working in a factory, I wandered into a bookstore and walked out with a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius--the classic book of Stoic philosophy. From Aurelius I was led to Plato, Aristotle, and the other Stoics--to classical philosophy. I discovered in them the same kind of wisdom that had so impressed me in my youth in the character of certain men, and that same kind of wonder and wrestling with the essential concerns of life, but all of this was taken to a whole other level, by some of the greatest minds who ever lived. They had looked deeply into reality, into life, into human nature, and based on what they saw they created a framework for coping with pain and suffering, for making life good, for cultivating character, and for living at a higher level of purpose and meaning.
It turned out that I had a talent for philosophy and so I made my way into The University of Melbourne, where I studied and eventually taught it.
What I call classical philosophy is very different to academic or university philosophy. If academic philosophy were an animal it would be found in a zoo, while classical philosophy would be found on a farm. I did well, academically, and greatly enjoyed teaching at the university and speaking with so many brilliant people, but it was the wrong place and the wrong approach to philosophy for me. Yet, it was also clear that I would dedicate my life to classical wisdom, and to sharing it with others. So I tried to imagine an alternative way of being a philosopher while also paying the bills: perhaps a kind of private tutoring in philosophy for living well, or even a kind of coaching or counselling. I searched the university libraries for inspiration and, lo and behold, came across a movement that had not reached Australia, but which was quite established in Europe and America: philosophical counselling. I had found my path.
There were different recommended ways to create a career as a philosophical counsellor, and one was to study counselling and psychotherapy. I chose that path, because I could see that counselling would provide a framework and a set of skills to embody the philosophical help I wanted to offer. Counselling is different to psychotherapy. It is in essence a framework (a format: private conversation, 50 minutes, attentive and empathic, and so on), and a set of conversational skills for eliciting insight, clarity, direction, motivation, emotional improvement, personal growth, and so on. That framework and those skills can be combined with any field of knowledge about life, so as to help with any concern in life. For example, counselling can be combined with knowledge about relationships, or addiction, or personal growth, or careers, or finances, or religious belief, to help people make progress with such concerns. So why not philosophy?
If counselling as a framework and set of skills is somewhat content-neutral, by contrast psychotherapy is content-full. It is full of a theory, it is an embodiment of that theory. A psychotherapy (there are many psychotherapies) can be defined as a particular psychological theory of human nature, including what goes wrong, that is applied as a set of therapeutic practices. The psychotherapies include the many cognitive-behavioural, psychodynamic, and humanistic therapies, each of which embodies a particular theoretical orientation and even a distinct worldview.
A century of such therapy has given us many powerful psychological insights and skills which can be lifted from their theoretical context and used more broadly. I recognised that these would be highly valuable for philosophical counselling. They would serve as a background of psychological insight to guide the understanding, and as many tools to draw on when needed.
This use and integration of psychological insight in philosophy is nothing new. Modernity divides everything into seperate parts, but but in classical philosophy, philosophy and psychology they are integrated. Some of the best psychology you could read, in terms of understanding human nature, yourself, and how to grow and improve, comes from ancient Greece, and from medieval Europe. Modern psychotherapy is full of both errors and of valuable insights, and the insights can be seperated out and then integrated with classical psychology to create something even better than either was on its own.
My path to philosophical counselling thus became a journey that unfolded in chapters. I decided take my time and become an experienced psychotherapist on the way to the final goal, Hence, I developed a whole second career in mainstream therapy which lasted for many years.
I studied counselling and psychotherapy to master's level. I seemed to have a knack for the art, and by the end of my training I had been offered numerous academic and therapeutic roles by my educators. That led me on a fifteen-year journey which included working as a mainstream therapist in a variety of organisations, focused on issues such as bereavement, suicide crisis intervention, rural men's counselling, an Australian Defense Force and a war veteran's counselling service, workplace counselling (EAP), and management coaching for interpersonal skills. In that context I developed experience across many mainstream approaches to therapy within the broad three camps: the humanistic, the psychodynamic, and the cognitive-behavioural. I designed and delivered training to counsellors, and was head-hunted multiple times to teach counselling at tertiary institutions (which I always turned down--my focus was on the practice). I was registered with the Australian Counselling Association at their most senior level.
In 2012 I started a private practice in Carlton, Melbourne, which focused on txistential therapy--a philosophical variant of mainstream psychotherapy. I did ran that practice two days a week, while doing organisational counselling on the other three (as well as teaching philosophy part-time until 2014). Hence, I spent the 2010s developing skills across the many versions of existential therapy. In 2020 I began to step away from organisational work, and I started a private practice in Bendigo focused on men's counselling--another area of passion as you can see above. Both that, and my Carlton office for existential therapy came to an end in March 2020.
During all these years I was exploring and experimenting with the use of philosophy in counselling. This was a slow beginning to my philosophical counselling career, which meant that by the time I got around to philosophical counselling itself--in the 2020s--the concepts, skills, and framework were clear, honed, and ready to go. The quality and depth of the philosophical counselling that I offer to you would be impossible without that long, rich backround in mainstream therapy. For example, I draw constantly on tools from cognitive-behavioural therapy to help people habituate the virtues they need, while psychodynamic therapy helps me to see the defense mechanisms people employ.
Most of a therapist's learning happens less through the formal study, and more through the years of therapeutic work and constant reflection on it. In time therapy becomes less of a technical skill, and more a honed way of seeing and understanding, a kind of wisdom that the therapist has earned, just as a talented mechanic or magistrate slowly becomes wise in their work. I now carry that wisdom with me as a background to my philosophical counselling.
Today that long journey is over and I work purely as a philosophical counsellor, both in the more general way as described on my other website, and through this service focused on men. I draw greatly on insights and tools from mainstream psychotherapy whenever helpful, but this service is not mainstream therapy. I am confident that this approach is actually better for many men. For it connects with something much deeper in us, and draws forth our best.
As per my other website, I enjoy working with men and women in general. So why do I specialise, here, in men?
I wrote an essay here on therapeutic culture as the embodiment of Carl Jung's archetype of the Devouring Mother. I did not address the issue of how therapy has a tendency to favour feminine psychology, but that is a related problem which many educated critics have pointed out. When Aristotle referred to women as "defective men" he was wrong; Socrates and Plato had already proved so. Now, 2500 years later, we are treating men as defective women. Therapy has a history of pathologising masculine psychology, but the problem has only increased since 2015.
Even if some people make too much of them, gender differences are real. Across the main part of the distribution curve, masculine psychology differs from feminine psychology. When therapy pathologises masculine ways of coping and masculine ways of flourishing, and forces all people into a feminine mode of being, then it undermines men's strength, well-being, goodness, and happiness. There is a real need for men's counselling by counsellors who understand men's psychology. We are seeing more of that in private practice in the last five to ten years, and we need more of it.
The positive reason is that I am offering this service, is because it is what I wanted, when I was young. Many young men want a tradition of objective wisdom that will guide them. In the West, classical philosophy is our tradition. It speaks especially to our masculine psychology, and so much so, that it is often more effective, and in wider and deeper ways, than mainstream therapy. It does not undermine us, on the contrary, it calls forth our best: our potentiality for strength, for goodness (which is the truest mental health), for happiness, and for living at a higher level of meaning. See what you think: as you read the ideas on the website, do they speak to you, do they touch on a deeper instinct in you?
An older man who embodies a deep, ancient, masculine tradition has something to offer younger men. I want to share this wisdom-tradition of the West with men, especially younger men, and to guide them in it. That is what motivated this service. I am a philosopher. I live this path. It is who and what I am.
I speak of younger men because they are who motivated this service, but of course this is for all men. My oldest client is almost 90.
I provide more detail about the specifics of this tradition--classical wisdom, classical philosophy, and my philosophical counselling as the embodiment of it--on my blog.
That's enough about me. I live on the western edge of central Victoria, and outside of philosophical counselling I spend my time restoring and riding old motorcycles, doing other mechanical and trade work at home, and otherwise reading philosophy and walking a lot in the bush. I have bigger plans for a movement of classical philosophical counselling, and spend much unpaid time working on that, though it is something that will publicly emerge only slowly, in the coming decades.
