Philosophical Resources for Clinicians

A Nine-Month Seminar with Carol Swanson

Online via: Zoom

Cost: $300

Meeting Time: First Friday of each month, 1:15–2:30 PM PT

• First Meeting: September 5, 2025

• Last Meeting: May 1, 2026

• Text: The Suffering Stranger by Donna Orange (participants should purchase their own copy)

This year-long seminar is designed for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and clinicians who are interested in deepening their work through philosophical reflection and dialogue. We will explore ethical, hermeneutic, and humanistic dimensions of clinical practice by reading Donna Orange’s The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice.

In this profound and accessible text, Orange brings together five influential clinicians—Sándor Ferenczi, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Donald Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, and Bernard Brandchaft—and places them in conversation with two major philosophical figures: Hans-Georg Gadamer, representing the hermeneutic tradition, and Emmanuel Levinas, with his radical ethics of responsibility to the Other.

This book builds on Orange’s earlier work, Thinking for Clinicians, where she invited philosophers into the consulting room. In The Suffering Stranger, the direction is reversed: clinical voices are foregrounded and examined through a rich philosophical lens.

In addition to Orange’s text, we will read short selections from the original works of the thinkers she engages with, allowing us to trace ideas at their source and consider how they live on in contemporary clinical work.

Why read philosophical texts as a clinician?

I’ve been reading philosophical texts for the past fifteen years—always with an eye toward their clinical implications. This kind of inquiry has helped me listen more deeply, work more humanely, and think more expansively. In dialogue with other clinicians who are also wrestling with the complexities of therapeutic work, these texts come alive. They offer resources for thinking about suffering, presence, meaning, relationality, and the difficult but necessary work of ethical responsibility.

If you’re a clinician who finds yourself hungry for deeper reflection, who enjoys rich conversation, and who is curious about how philosophy can illuminate and support your practice—this seminar is for you.