Short biography of Dr Owen

Biography

Ian Rory Owen was born with the Dutch family name van Loo in Wellington, New Zealand in 1960. He is of mixed European descent being part English, Welsh, Dutch and Czech. He received his Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1982 and worked briefly in technical journalism and business during the 1980s.

He re-trained in counselling, hypnotherapy and psychotherapy during the 1980s. He began his therapeutic career in 1987 by working on an acute psychiatric admissions ward at Hackney-Homerton Hospital in East London. He gained a Master of Arts degree in Counselling and Psychotherapy from Regents College, London, in 1991. He became a UKCP registered psychotherapist in 1995 and a Graduate Member of the British Psychological Society in 1999. In 1995 he worked as a Senior Lecturer in Counselling Psychology and led a MA/MSc in Counselling at the University of Wolverhampton. He also taught theory and skills on a Doctorate in Counselling Psychology until 2001.

Since 2001, he has worked for Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust where he is currently a Principal Integrative Psychotherapist and provides individual brief therapy for adults. He received his PhD in Counselling and Psychotherapy in 2005. He is the author of 77 papers and four books on the original writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and theory of mind as they apply to the theory and practice of individual psychotherapy. He has drawn on the common influences between Husserl and Heidegger and the work of Aron Gurwitsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Schütz and Paul Ricoeur in producing the intentionality model.

On a more personal level, my passion for therapy is born of the change I received from having therapy in my teens and early twenties. My drive to understand the relation between theory and practice began in 1986. I had previously read Karl Menninger’s Man Against Himself when I was 15 and was horrified at the idea that people could not know themselves.

At this point in my career, I want to provide distance learning through the medium of books and papers, some of which are free in the spirit of open source publishing.  In a nutshell, my interests are all the good bits of Freud’s psycho-analysis as the back bone of all brand name therapies, Bowlby and developmental psychology’s view of attachment, to make a broad-based theoretical and practical integration. Husserl’s phenomenology is the theoretical inspiration. Politically, I am a Chomsky-ite.