Tribeca Therapy Therapist Jordan Conrad Awarded Ph.D. In Philosophy from Belgium's KU Leuven

We’re excited to announce that Therapist Jordan Conrad was recently awarded his Ph.D. in Philosophy from KU Leuven in Belgium.

At Tribeca Therapy, we not only offer extensive supervision and training for our therapists, but also encourage our therapists to grow in other areas of their expertise outside of the practice. We see the benefits of this for both our patients and the continued expansion of our Downtown group therapy practice. 

As Jordan and Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist examined in a previous conversation, knowledge of philosophy can play a helpful role in the therapy room. Philosophy is a kind of training in carefully reading texts, understanding the structure of arguments, rigorously analyzing views that are tacitly accepted, and precisifying imprecise thoughts. When you direct that to an argument, you get philosophy. When you direct it to another person–their beliefs, desires, emotions, how they form relationships, and so on–you get psychotherapy.

Jordan’s dissertation focused on Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th-century German philosopher who was a part of a group of psychologically minded theorists and is most known for his various inflammatory statements such as “God is dead!” and “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Though his philosophy is associated with change, impermanence, and becoming, aspects of his work are frequently treated as stagnant or inoculated from his commitment to change. Jordan’s dissertation reintroduces this change into his philosophy, arguing that the self and the mind are fundamentally changeable for Nietzsche, and that the will and the intellect, therefore, are as well. 

Beyond the history of philosophy and some big figures like Nietzsche, whose role in the early development of psychology can reveal how later theorists would come to understand the mind and, in turn, how we understand the mind today, Jordan is also interested in bioethics and philosophy of psychiatry/psychology. Most of his published work focuses on issues such as historical disparity in mental health care, what “mental disorder” means, psychiatric overreach and issues in neurodiversity, and effective psychotherapeutic methods and clinical ethics. All of these have a direct impact on his clinical practice.