How do we understand our clients without reducing them to a diagnosis? How can case formulation help us encounter the person more fully rather than placing them into categories? And what might case formulation look like if it were grounded in collaboration, relationship, and liberation rather than in the authority of the therapist as the expert on the client?

These questions are at the heart of the book, *Case Formulation in Existential-Humanistic Psychology*, and they are what inspire this workshop. Too often, case formulation begins with identifying symptoms, assigning diagnoses, and explaining clients through the lens of a particular theory. While diagnosis can sometimes be useful or necessary, it can also obscure the complexity of the person sitting across from us. Existential-humanistic case formulation begins somewhere different: with curiosity about the client’s lived experience and an effort to understand their concerns as they experience and make meaning of them.

Together, we will explore a collaborative and liberatory approach to case formulation. Rather than constructing a formulation *about* the client, we will consider how understandings can emerge *with* the client through dialogue and therapeutic encounter. We will explore ways of attending to meaning, relationships, culture, identity, values, choices, and limitations, as well as the protective strategies clients have developed as they have navigated their lives and worlds. This includes remaining attentive to social and cultural contexts and to the ways that power, oppression, and marginalisation can shape both suffering and the therapeutic relationship.

What makes this approach distinctive is that case formulation is not primarily about finding the correct explanation for the client. It is about developing an evolving understanding that helps therapist and client engage more deeply with what matters. The formulation remains tentative and open to revision, including correction by the client. We will consider how therapists can recognise patterns without turning them into pathology, hold theory lightly rather than imposing it, and draw upon research and clinical knowledge without privileging professional expertise over the client’s own ways of knowing.

Throughout the workshop, we will bring these ideas into clinical practice through reflection, dialogue, and case examples. The aim is not to provide another template for putting clients into boxes, but to explore how case formulation itself can become part of a deeply human therapeutic process—one that honours complexity, supports agency, deepens relationship, and opens possibilities for clients to engage more fully and authentically with their lives.

Description supplied by the event organiser.