Forthcoming and recent events
Living and Working with Neurodivergence: Mental Health & Wellbeing Conference 2025
10th October 2025
Neuro-Alterity
The workshop explores existential and phenomenological differences across our experience of neurodivergencies and provides some introductory exercises to hold our differences in our experiences of time, space, self, sociality and the world around us. Marc will talk through ideas that emerged from a recent Wellcome Trust funded project, and participants will be invited to explore their own experiences through creative activity, movement and discussion.
Existential Academy workshop
10th March 2026
Daimonics in existential psychotherapy
Existential daimonics refer to our human capacity to bring about both great destruction/devastation and construction/creation in our own lives, the lives of others, and the world around us. In this workshop, Marc builds upon and critiques the conceptualisations offered by Rollo May and Stephen Diamond. In doing so, he moves away from explorations of human ‘evil’ and towards everyday expressions of destructiveness and devastation. He then turns to provide a more detailed phenomenological description of the dynamic in the lives of people who have experienced sexual violence and resulting experiences of humiliation.
IMAGE: © Ian Hodgson (2022)
In this unique workshop participants will be guided through PlayFight – a practice of relational movement that explores the shifting boundaries between play, assertion, and aggression.
Drawing on existential somatic inquiry and community-based PlayFight traditions across Europe, this workshop invites you into individual, partner, and group explorations of emotions such as joy, rage, anticipation, threat, and curiosity. Together, we will experiment with new, embodied ways of responding to these experiences.
PlayFight is not a self-defence class, martial art, or contact improvisation workshop. Instead, it offers a safe, structured space to move, connect, and encounter others – always within your own limits – through physical presence and proximity. No prior experience is required.
Into the Wild Woods: Existential Responses to Turbulent Times
Existential Movement Conference 2025
February 2025
Encountering our daimonics
In order to understand the turbulence of our times, we must first turn to understand our own daimonics. Existential daimonics refers to our human capacity to bring about both great destruction/devastation and construction/creation in our own lives, and the world around us. There is no us and them when it comes to daimonic destructiveness and constructiveness; what divides us is ethical and reflexive. Extending and reformulating the work of Rollo May, and drawing on the reflexions of James Baldwin, I will suggest that understanding and holding the existential tensions that arise from dynamic relationship within our personal and collective daimonics can cultivate the ground for hope, understanding and healing.
A Pluralistic Approach to Trauma
7th International Conference on Pluralistic Counselling and Psychotherapy
November 2024
Trauma and existence
The paper provides an overview of prominent approaches to trauma in existential-humanistic psychology focused on ideas of existential shattering of worldviews. These will be critiqued and built upon using existential analytic and phenomenological approaches considering the ways trauma de-anchors our existence and leads to an incomprehensibility of existence. Finally, it will delve into three specific methods of working with experiences of trauma from an existential-phenomenological perspective and demonstrate how these can have trans-modality applications. It would be of interest to delegates seeking to understand what existence is confronted through interpersonal traumas. It will end with a discussion of ontography, reflexivity and daimonics. Ontography is the therapeutic mapping and exploration of the existential structures the world the person lives in, what was confronted through trauma, and how this has been incorporated into modes of existing (or the ways in which we exist in the world). Reflexivity focuses on how we can come to understand the existential questions, dilemmas, and tensions we live out in relation to a traumatic confrontation with existence. Finally, the daimonic explores the destructive and constructive forces we encounter in ourselves and others through trauma and how these can be approached to support growth and healing.
Global Existential Summit #4
6-10th January 2025
A philosophy of trauma, neurodivergence and dehumanisation
A dialogue between Dr Natalie Fraser and Dr Marc Boaz exploring existential ideas around trauma, neurodivergence and lived experiences of dehumanisation.
UK Trauma Council Insight Series
26th September 2024
Complex Trauma: contextuality and systemic factors
Join our next webinar from the UK Trauma Council where Professor Claudia Bernard and Dr. Marc Boaz will explore contextuality and systemic factors relating to complex trauma.
We'll delve into the contextuality of a child, young person or family's needs and experiences, and how these intersect with wider systemic factors such as poverty, injustice, prejudice and parental or household experience of trauma.