Randolph W. Severson

All of my work — my dissertation on Adler, Alfred Adler and the Will to Power, published decades later, as Dance Steps with Alfred Adler, with its account of Adlerian Psychology as the Psychology of Thymos, my writings on Adoption and AdoptionTherapy, my books on Therapy — as I understand it now, have been an ongoing attempt to explicate a Therapy based on a vision of the human condition as being inescapeably situated, World-Involved oriented towards others and the common good (Adler’s Gemeinschaftsgeful, a feeling-with and feeling-for others) which undergirds a practice of Therapy as ‘Phronetics’, that is, Therapy as the collaborative exercise of practical wisdom through which in dialogue ripening meanings emerge with fruitful, propagating effects. In all my writing the style, reflecting my antecedents in life and formative reading, has always been that of what the great poet and critic Allen Tate called the rhetorical Southern style of language, that is, grounded in address to a concrete other or specific audience.