Derek Bean is an architect, psychotherapist, and photographer based in Oxford. Derek’s work over many years has centred on bridging different disciplines and communities and helping make spaces for better relationships and ways of living. Firstly as an architect working in housing and social architecture with different communities across London on housing and public realm projects in inner-city neighbourhoods, alongside local authorities, NGOs and community organisations. And subsequently as an existential psychotherapist working in NHS funded psychotherapy and counselling settings, including with local Mind services in the London boroughs, and in private practice. Derek is currently focused on new writing and photographic projects. His essay Flesh and the Angels, a short meditation on creativity in life, art and psychotherapy, is previously published in Interalia magazine.
About Derek Bean
Articles with Derek Bean
The Unsettled Sense
The eye is a sense organ and an affective organ. It receives and is moved. We see and we cry. This essay focuses primarily on the eye which sees and, in particular, on seeing as a presence to our experience of the world and others. It considers how there is an inherent unsettledness and instability in the phenomenology of seeing. Drawing on the phenomenological investigations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it explores how the phenomenal richness of seeing is, by its nature, in flux and susceptible to disequilibrium; how seeing is therefore also a steadying and bound up with our experience of spatiality and openness.
Flesh and the Angels
A meditation on creativity in life, art and psychotherapy, its expression as a phenomenology of bursting, and the challenge of keeping going, with John Coltrane, Rainer Maria Rilke and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as companions.
Derek Bean is a practising Existential-Phenomenological Psychotherapist and registered member of the UK Council for Psychotherapy.