2006: Des Kennedy “The Importance of Being Authentic”

Des writes: “This lecture is essentially about our experience of the claim of truth upon us.
Our embodied existence is, in many respects, an incomplete and highly unsatisfactory condition. Yet, if we attend to it respectfully it tends to anchor us sanely in the earth and effectively punctures our inflated grandiosity; and, paradoxically, it is that very irksome limitation which opens our hearts to the sacred claim of Truth and enables us to live in the Truth which is to be authentic.”

Des Kennedy BA Ph.D. Dip. GPTI is a Teaching and Supervising Member of the Gestalt Psychotherapy Training Institute. Following an Irish Jesuit and academic background, he now works in private practice as a Gestalt psychotherapist, specialising in couples work. He has been a guest trainer at several different psychotherapy training institutes and has published and lectured extensively. Des is currently preparing a book on the application of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to gestalt therapy theory, the subject of his recent Ph.D thesis.

Text of Des Kennedy’s lecture.


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