Psychotherapist as Poet

If the philosopher is a poet, what does that make the therapist?

In this episode, I work through insights from Richard Rorty’s Philosophy as Poetry and begin to trace their implications for psychotherapy, arriving at a shift that feels both subtle and profound—therapy not as a process of uncovering truth, but as a collaborative act of creation.

Moving away from the idea of a fixed self waiting to be discovered, I explore a Rortyan approach where identity is continuously constructed through language, relationship, and imagination, and where the therapist is no longer the one who knows, but a curious partner in the process of redescription.

What matters is not whether something is true, but whether it opens up new ways of living.

This is a conversation about agency, experimentation, and the quiet but radical idea that therapy is not about finding yourself…

…but about helping to write what comes next.