Chair

The word, he says, is connected to the word throne and relates therapy to chair... the chair is intimately involved in our image of therapy. The chair suggests reflection, conversation, stillness, interiority, support, and ordinariness.

Hillman argues etymologically that 'therapy' is structurally linked to 'throne' and 'chair,' making the chair an archetypal emblem of the healing relationship and the therapist a figure who elicits numinous projection.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

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I tried out a technique from Gestalt therapy involving multiple chairs. Basically, a client sits in one chair and talks to an empty chair across from them... I ended up with an office full of chairs.

Schwartz describes the multi-chair technique as the clinical origin of IFS externalisation practice, in which chairs serve as spatial containers for distinct parts of the psyche in therapeutic dialogue.

Schwartz, Richard C, No Bad Parts, 2021thesis

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pulling in a third, cushioned chair from across the room, and positioning it opposite to Susan... I begin by placing her mother in a chair that symbolically 'comforts' this ill

Neimeyer uses the physical placement of a third chair to materialise the deceased mother within the therapeutic space, rendering the absent present and enabling unfinished relational work.

Neimeyer, Robert A, Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Lossthesis

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When we look at a chair, we see the wood, but we fail to observe the tree, the forest, the carpenter, or our own mind. When we meditate on it, we can see the entire universe in all its interwoven and interdependent relations in the chair.

Nhat Hanh presents the chair as the paradigmatic object for Buddhist meditation on interdependence, arguing that true perception dissolves the chair's apparent separateness into the whole of living reality.

Nhat Hanh, Thich, The Sun My Heart, 1988supporting

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It can feel like we are Goldilocks, knowing papa's chair is too big, baby's chair is too small, but the only version of 'just right' is when we can see, without a doubt, that no one else wants our chair.

Clayton employs the fairy-tale chair as a metaphor for the fawning person's deep sense of unworthiness — the traumatic conviction that one has no legitimate claim to one's own space, validation, or self.

Clayton, Ingrid, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves--and How to Find Our Way Back, 2025supporting

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we directed her to a particular chair — a fuzzy red one with a picture of Elmo from Sesame Street — as her special place for calming down... By inventing and sharing the concepts 'Cranky Fairy' and 'Elmo Chair' with Sophia, we created tools to help her calm herself.

Barrett shows how a designated chair, imbued with shared social meaning, functions as an affective regulatory object that scaffolds a child's developing capacity for emotional self-management.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017supporting

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The University decided to found a Chair in mathematical physics which, keeping to local tradition they decided to name the Tait Chair of Natural Philosophy.

The passage uses 'chair' in its academic-institutional sense (a named professorship), incidentally illustrating the term's authority-conferring function outside the clinical domain.

Pauli, Wolfgang, Writings on Physics and Philosophy, 1994aside

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