'Every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held' Maurice Merleau-Ponty
New Paragraph
About
Born and raised in Stockton on Tees, County Durham, and now based in Oxford, my professional practice has spanned both architecture
and psychotherapy, which I see as different ways of making a space for better living.
Active in the student movement and the family squatting and co-operative housing movements in the 1970s, I studied architecture at Kingston College of Art and and modern architectural history at University College London, becoming a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1982. Previous work over 25 years has centred in social architecture and housing, working closely with different communities and local organisations in inner-city neighbourhoods across London on community housing, health and public realm projects, and bridging different disciplines and practice environments . Appointed as a CABE Space enabler, I have contributed to sector-wide design working groups, competition panels, and publications (‘The people who really make architecture happen’ RIBA Journal, October, 2003).
I trained in person-centred counselling at the Institute of Education and in existential-phenomenological psychotherapy at the Philadelphia Association and Regent’s College, London, first accrediting with the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) in 2012. Working in private practice in London and Oxford, offering one-to-one existential therapy and supervision, I have also worked in a number of NHS funded psychotherapy and community counselling settings, including with local Mind services in the London boroughs. I am currently vice-chair and a trustee of The Society for Existential Analysis, an organisational member of the UKCP.
I have published articles on psychotherapy, phenomenology and the arts in the journals Existential Analysis, Hermeneutic Circular, and online Interalia Magazine, with a particular focus on the relationship of space and place to lived experience and creativity.
I have taken (and been taken by) photographs since being a youngster, when given my first camera, and photography and film has been a lifelong enthusiasm. I am presently a board member of The Ultimate Picture Palace community-owned cinema in Oxford.
Articles
'Bringing Creative Attention: John Berger's and our faces, my heart, brief as photos', Hermeneutic Circular , October 2025.
'John Berger regarded himself first and foremost as a storyteller and his book and our faces, my heart, brief as photos (first published in 1984) is a collection of stories meditating on time ('Once') and space ('Here'). And our faces is a short work, just 101 pages, that began, tellingly, as a series of love letters. It is a book to which I have returned many times...'
'Flesh and the Angels', Hermeneutic Circular & Interalia Magazine, October/November 2020.
'I am listening to John Coltrane ablaze with sound. Probing, relentless; beyond now his infamous 'sheets of sound'. In My Favourite Things, a signature tune to which he returned many times, recorded at Temple University on 11 November 1966. His soprano-horn breath searching and soaring. Soaring and then suddenly abandoning into shouts and strange chanting. A bursting of himself...'
'The Unsettled Sense', Interalia Magazine, September 2022 (revised and edited); Existential Analysis, Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 24.1, 2013.
'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 the inherent unsettledness and instability in the phenomenology of seeing...how the phenomenal richness of seeing is, by its nature, in flux and susceptible to disequilibrium; how seeing is therefore also a steadying...'
CONTACT
Please contact me with any inquiries at email:
info@derekbean.net
All Photographs © Derek Bean
