Dutch Philosophers Pull Up a Couch : Counseling: Clients pay up to $50 an hour to exchange thoughts on whatever they wish--be it the meaning of life or a career change.

Taking a page from psychotherapists, Dutch philosophers are opening private practices and charging clients up to $50 an hour to kick around ideas.

“There’s a new generation of philosophers who want to take part in society, not just work in an ivory tower. We are making use of philosophical tradition to exchange thoughts with clients over whatever subject they want,” explained Ad Hoogendijk, who in 1987 became one of the first Dutch philosophers to set up a practice.

Hoogendijk has been joined by a dozen others who talk with clients about everything from the meaning of life to a career change. He predicted that the number would jump to about 100 in three years.

Unlike some psychologists, practicing philosophers do not try to probe deep into the past of the individual to understand childhood-ingrained behavior or subconscious actions and suggest modifications.

Rather, they try to bring the wisdom of their discipline to help people see their problems from a new perspective.

“I try to help people answer very basic questions like: Who are you? What do you want? It’s a kind of reorientation to structure their desires,” Hoogendijk explained in an interview.

“I don’t try and fit a person into a pre-existing theory but take what they say about themselves at face value and try to act as a midwife to let them articulate what they have inside,” he explained in his Amsterdam office.

About 80% of his clients are at some type of major emotional crossroads--businessmen worried about approaching retirement, women upset when their grown children leave home and youths unsure what to study at universities.

“I ask people to make up a life plan of their desires and ideals that can be the basis of a revitalization plan. Often people have made choices in life on the basis of what they think is available, not on their ideals,” Hoogendijk said.

He usually meets a client for about four or five sessions.

While a psychologist faced with a depressed patient might recommend months or years of treatment, Hoogendijk takes another tack.

Faced with just such a client, he tries to offer him a perspective on his views, engaging in discussion about the high value modern culture places on happiness and how thinkers in the past have put a high value on melancholia.

He does not talk about the fine points of Aristotelian logic or Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism.

But he said his philosophical training had helped turn asking questions into his key tool and his thinking has been enriched by the sages he has read.

“There is a famous saying that Plato and Aristotle said it all, and it’s true,” he noted. But his reading of Spinoza, Marcuse, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt have also informed his counseling, he said.

Hoogendijk came to the idea of starting a philosophical practice from his contact with a colleague, Gerd Achenbach, who first set up an office in 1981 in the Cologne suburb of Refrath in West Germany.

But the idea has caught on more in the Netherlands than in West Germany, he said.

One of his colleagues, Eite Veening, said he began his practice in the northern city of Groningen in 1987 because he was disturbed by “how much sloppy thinking there was around.”

He said he was not interested in “curing” patients by helping them sort out their emotions but in helping them intellectually puzzle out their values and thought processes.

“I try to get people to understand their own ethics and what the best choice would be for them in a situation,” said Veening.