Philosophers in the Therapy Room

Dr Hora Zabarjadi Sar and Dr Sameema Zahra
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"Philosophers in the Therapy Room" explores the intersection of philosophy and Psychotherapy/Counselling, through insightful discussions led by philosopher-practitioners Dr Hora Zabarjadi Sar and Dr Sameema Zahra. Delving into existential questions, ethical dilemmas, and the human psyche, each episode offers a unique blend of theoretical depth and practical wisdom. Join them on a journey of self-discovery, where philosophical insights illuminate the path to healing and personal growth. To know more about us, please visit our website: www.iasocare.de or contact us: counselling4u@iasocare.de

  1. Episode 23- More Than a Nervous System: Burnout and the Politics of Care

    MAR 3

    Episode 23- More Than a Nervous System: Burnout and the Politics of Care

    There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from overwork alone: It comes from holding a world together. In this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room, we turn to burnout not simply as a stress response, not merely as nervous system depletion but as a lived experience of alienation. Drawing on the thought of Karl Marx, we explore the idea that burnout may not always signal personal fragility, but a deeper structural condition: the reduction of the human being to function. But our focus today is not only on the corporate worker.It is the carer; The mother who has not slept properly in years.The partner caring for a spouse with dementia, the adult child navigating the slow disappearance of a parent. Carers often live in a strange and painful in-between.The loved one is present and yet not fully present.The relationship continues, but not as it once was. To care, in such circumstances, is to inhabit a world where presence and absence coexist.And living in that ambiguity carries an ontological strain. So we ask: When someone comes to therapy burned out, are we treating a nervous system or a political condition? What does therapy risk doing if it simply restores the worker or the carer to the machine of obligation? And how do we differentiate burnout from depression, from moral injury, from existential crisis? This episode is an invitation to think more deeply about exhaustion and to consider whether therapy can become a space not of re-optimisation, but of re-humanisation.

    58 min
  2. Episode 22- Hope and the Courage to Stay with the Not-Yet

    FEB 2

    Episode 22- Hope and the Courage to Stay with the Not-Yet

    Hope is often spoken of as reassurance — a promise that things will improve, that suffering will ease, that the future will be kinder than the present. But in this episode of Philosophers in the Therapy Room, we pause before such promises. We ask instead: what kind of thing is hope, when certainty has already fallen away? Our guest today is Dr Denis O'Hara, whose work invites us to think of hope not as a single feeling, but as something that moves through different layers of human life. In our conversation, Denis describes three modes of hope as they appear in psychology. There is a general form of hope, often rooted in our earliest experiences — a quiet, bodily sense that the world can be met, that life might carry us rather than abandon us. There is also a more particular hope, directed toward tasks and goals, the kind of hope that leans toward outcomes and effort. And then there is transformative hope: a form of hope that does not simply aim for improvement, but gestures toward becoming otherwise. In this episode, I re-enter these three modes through a phenomenological and existential lens, guided by the work of Ernst Bloch and Byung-Chul Han. When seen this way, general hope reveals itself as ontological — not something we possess, but something we find ourselves within. It is an attunement to the world as unfinished, to life as still underway. Bloch names this openness the not-yet, and it is here that hope becomes the condition for the future to appear at all. Goal-oriented hope, then, belongs to lived experience. It is phenomenological. It shows itself not as certainty, but as movement — as motivation, as enthusiasm, as a subtle leaning toward what has not yet taken shape. As Han reminds us, hope does not banish uncertainty; it needs it. Where everything is secured, hope has no breath. Transformative hope moves even deeper. It is existential. It arises when one remains with uncertainty without rushing toward closure — when one finds the courage to stay open to what is still forming. This is not hope as comfort, but hope as exposure. Hope as the willingness to be changed. Throughout this conversation, we reflect on how these different modes of hope appear in the therapy room — and how therapy itself might become a space that protects hope without demanding it, that holds open the future without prescribing its shape. This episode is an invitation to listen for hope where it is quietest:not as a promise of outcomes, but as the courage of the not-yet.

    1h 5m
  3. Episode 21- On Humour: Laughter and Cracks of Suffering

    12/29/2025

    Episode 21- On Humour: Laughter and Cracks of Suffering

    There are moments in life when laughter feels impossible and those that laughter becomes the only way to breathe. In this last episode of 2025, we linger at that fragile edge between laughter and gravity. Between jokes whispered in the dark,and a seriousness that refuses to look away from suffering. Some laugh when language collapses when words imposed by power no longer hold, and truth leaks out through irony, absurdity, and dark humour. Others carry misery with silence and dignity, believing that pain deserves to be met without dilution, without disguise. We move through Freud’s insight that humour can soften the unbearable, and Lacan’s deeper claim that laughter appears when language itself cracks when the Symbolic falters and something unsayable briefly shows itself. From the shadows of Iranian history, where humour became a way of surviving the unspeakable, to homes where laughter had no place because seriousness was an ethic, a form of care, a way of bearing witness this episode is not about jokes; It is about truth, about what we do when words fail, about the strange places where suffering finds breath, sometimes through laughter, sometimes through silence. Welcome to Episode 21 of Philosophers in the Therapy Room.

    1h 3m
  4. Episode 20- On Authenticity & Living an Authentic Life

    11/30/2025

    Episode 20- On Authenticity & Living an Authentic Life

    Episode 20 engages with the most overused and yet least understood words of our time: authenticity. But instead of treating it as a destination or a perfected state of being, we follow the existential tradition with Beauvoir, Sartre, and Charles Taylor to approach authenticity as a process, a practice of becoming attuned to one’s own freedom. Through Beauvoir’s portraits of the “types of man”—the sub-man who flees freedom, the serious man who hides behind absolutes, the adventurer and the passionate man who risk dissolving themselves in intensity, authenticity appears not as a heroic posture but as a subtle ethical practice: refusing self-deception, resisting the temptation to dissolve into ready-made roles, and taking responsibility for the meanings we bring into the world. Weaving then to Sartre’s insight, authenticity will not rebel for its own sake. To be authentic is not to swim against every stream, but to discern which currents are ours to follow. It is to acknowledge that even in constraint, we remain the authors of our actions. We choose, and we answer for those choices. With Charles Taylor, authenticity becomes deeply situated. Our choices gain weight only against a “horizon of significance” that is background values, histories, relationships, and inherited meanings that make anything matter at all. Authenticity, then, is never purely inward; it unfolds within a world that already speaks to us. Against this background, the self comes to the fore only through an endless dialogue with the Other, maintaining what we might call a dialectical posture. This dialectic is not a clash but a movement: a continual back-and-forth between self and world, self and Other, familiarity and strangeness. It is the recognition that I discover who I am not in isolation but in the shifting interplay of perspectives, where the Other disrupts me, challenges me, reflects me back to myself, and opens new possibilities of becoming. Authenticity emerges from staying with this movement without collapsing into either pole: neither dissolving into the Other’s expectations nor retreating into a closed and self-certain interiority. In this conversation, we explore authenticity not as purity, stubborn resistance, or a polished ideal, but as a way of inhabiting this dialectical space—a way of encountering one’s freedom openly, responsibly, and in relation. A way of asking, again and again: How do I become someone who can answer for the life I am shaping, in the presence of others who are shaping theirs?

    1h 14m
  5. Special Episode- World Philosophy Day 2025

    11/19/2025

    Special Episode- World Philosophy Day 2025

    In this World Philosophy Day special, we return to the heartbeat of philosophy not as a set of doctrines, but as a way of being. To think philosophically is to inhabit the world with a certain openness, a readiness to question the obvious, to slow down the rush of everyday assumptions, and to let new meanings take shape. It is a discipline of perspective-taking, a gentle but radical shift in how we see ourselves and others. Drawing on Socrates’ striking claim that to practice philosophy is to practice dying, we explore what it means to loosen our attachment to the self we think we are. Philosophical thinking asks us to let certain certainties fall away: to die to our rigid beliefs, to the illusions we cling to, to the habits that numb our sensitivity to the world. But in this symbolic dying, something else becomes possible: a more spacious relation to truth, a deeper form of freedom, a more responsive way of living. In this episode, Sameema & I reflect on how philosophy equips us to meet the world with curiosity rather than fear, with courage rather than defensiveness. We consider how questioning becomes an ethical act, and how perspective-shifting can be a source of care for oneself and for others. On this day dedicated to philosophy, we invite you to step with us into that threshold space where thinking is not just an activity, but a transformation of the one who thinks.

    44 min
  6. Episode 19- Motherhood as Relational Field

    10/19/2025

    Episode 19- Motherhood as Relational Field

    Motherhood is not a static role, but a Relational Field; a living space where two freedoms meet and take shape together. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that “to will oneself free is also to will others free,” we can think of the mother as the one who delivers not only a body into the world but another freedom. Yet this act of giving life is not unilateral. The mother and child co-constitute the relational space in which both must learn to live their freedom through the encounter with the Other's. In this sense, motherhood is not reducible to biological or social function. It is an existential relation that constantly negotiates the tension between dependence and autonomy, attachment and separation. The child’s emergence as a free being presupposes the mother’s own capacity to experience herself as a free subject rather than as an instrument of another’s life. Only when the mother has come to recognise her own subjectivity, her right to desire, to limit, to say no and yes from her own ground can she create a relational field where the child’s freedom may unfold without threat. Thus, motherhood becomes a site of reciprocal becoming: a dynamic interplay of presence and withdrawal, care and letting-be. It invites us to rethink freedom not as independence, but as co-constituted as an event that arises in the fragile, evolving field between selves.

    1h 9m
  7. Episode 18- Attachment Analysis & The Other: A Moral Inquiry

    09/02/2025

    Episode 18- Attachment Analysis & The Other: A Moral Inquiry

    This episode focuses on attachment theory and its place in philosophy and therapy. Although attachment has been central to psychology, it has received little attention in philosophical discussions, largely because philosophy has traditionally focused on adulthood rather than childhood. We look at how attachment theory can help therapists understand clients, but also at its limitations, particularly the way it often blames caregivers without recognising their own humanity and the social contexts in which they live. We then consider the moral responsibility of the therapist in relation to the caregiver, and how this responsibility extends beyond the immediate client. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir, we frame adulthood as the development of responsibility, for oneself, for others, and for the wider networks of care that shape human life. The episode connects these ideas to the everyday realities of therapy and the ethical complexities of care.

    1h 9m
  8. Episode 17: Shame and Its Aftershocks: A phenomenology of Gaze

    08/10/2025

    Episode 17: Shame and Its Aftershocks: A phenomenology of Gaze

    The gaze isn’t just eyes on me; it’s the moment my activity is caught in another’s look and I’m flipped from subject to object. A second ago, I was absorbed with my project, interested, even quietly joyful, in what I was doing. Then the look lands. In Sartre’s terms, I become being-for-others: visible, exposed, available to be judged, evaluated, negated, and abandoned. The look doesn’t merely observe; it rearranges my self-experience, interrupting the flow of self-constituting action and returning me to myself as seen. In this episode, Dr Zahra and I discuss shame from an existential and phenomenological perspective. Shame is not something inherently destructive but a fundamental part of the human condition that reveals important existential truths about the self, relationships, and the world. Referring to Tomkins and Affect Theory, we'd been able to name the affective pivot inside that instant: shame ignites when interest/joy is abruptly impeded, especially under a look. The warmth of engagement cools, agency reverses, and the body registers exposure before any story forms. That’s the existential core we’re tracking: shame as the first flash of being perceived as an object. Only after this rupture do the familiar aftershocks organise scripts in which other emotions latch onto shame (withdrawal, attack self, avoidance, attack other).

    1h 11m
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About

"Philosophers in the Therapy Room" explores the intersection of philosophy and Psychotherapy/Counselling, through insightful discussions led by philosopher-practitioners Dr Hora Zabarjadi Sar and Dr Sameema Zahra. Delving into existential questions, ethical dilemmas, and the human psyche, each episode offers a unique blend of theoretical depth and practical wisdom. Join them on a journey of self-discovery, where philosophical insights illuminate the path to healing and personal growth. To know more about us, please visit our website: www.iasocare.de or contact us: counselling4u@iasocare.de

Information

  • Creator
    Dr Hora Zabarjadi Sar and Dr Sameema Zahra
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    24
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Dr Hora Zabarjadi Sar and Dr Sameema Zahra
  • Show Website
    Philosophers in the Therapy Room