What is existential psychology?

Introduction

Existential psychology was inspired by the original insights of the philosophy of existentialism. By examining situations of great horror (such as the concentration camps of the Nazis) and of great beauty or joy (such as a father seeing his little girl happily skipping down the sidewalk), existentialism posited that human existence is without absolutes: There are no limits either to human cruelty or to human love. Existentialism removes all presuppositions, abstractions, and universal rules. It attacks the conformity and complacency caused by the illusion that a human is only a predetermined cog in a completely ordered, mechanical universe.

Modern culture can be alienating, with its huge bureaucratic and technological structures that do not recognize one’s concrete existence. In spite of the pervasiveness of this alienation, existentialism holds that the possibility of existing as an authentic individual is never lost. Existentialism depicts the “absurdity” (the sense that there is no inherent basis for conferring meaning to life) of the lack of preestablished systems of meaning, but it rejects the artificiality of schemes that try to account for meaning as somehow produced by systems “out there,” beyond the individual. Instead, existentialism returns to concretely lived situations as the birthplace of whatever meaning may be found in life. In that sense, life is an adventure that unfolds as one lives it. As William Barrett has said, “Life is not handed to us on a platter but involves our own act of self-determination.”

Mainstream psychology has not, for the most part, addressed this existentialist outlook. Instead, it has borrowed from natural science the viewpoint that human life is essentially mechanistic and causally determined—that personal life can be reduced to a bundle of drives, stimuli, or biochemical reactions. The problem with those approaches, notes existential psychologist Rollo May, is that “the man disappears; we can no longer find 'the one’ to whom this or that experience has happened.” Thus, the crucial innovation offered by existential psychology is its aim to understand the personal, experienced reality of one’s free and meaningful involvement in one’s world. This is accomplished by analyzing the experiential situations and concerns of persons as the most fundamental dimension of their existence. This approach has been especially evident in the areas of personality theory and psychotherapy. It is in those areas that psychologists are most directly confronted with real human problems and are therefore unable to settle for abstract laboratory experiments as a basis for knowledge.

Emergence of Study

Psychologists began to turn to existentialism in the 1940s. The pioneers of existential analysis were psychoanalysts originally influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud. As analysts, they already stood outside mainstream experimental psychology and so were not as influenced by its presumptions. Furthermore, as therapists, their overriding purpose was to assist people who were experiencing real distress, anxiety, and conflict. Abstract theories and dogmas about stimuli and responses were more easily recognized as insufficient in that context, and an approach that focused on patients’ actual existence was welcome.

The first practitioners were the Swiss psychiatrists Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss, whose early writings date from the late 1940s. They were inspired by the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger’s key book Sein und Zeit (1927;
Being and Time
, 1962). They believed that analysis needed to be broadened beyond the limits that Freud had established. In place of Freud’s psychoanalysis—the aim of which was to understand an interior mental apparatus—they developed existential analysis, with the aim of understanding the person’s existence, that is, the person’s “being-in-the-world.” This term, developed by Heidegger, was meant by its hyphens to indicate that the relation of person and world is not merely one of the person being located “in” the world (as a pencil is located in a drawer). Rather, the person is always “worlded” in the sense that one’s existence is a network of meaningful involvements—relationships that are specifically and uniquely one’s own. Heidegger had called this the “care” structure, and he saw it as the very core of what it means to be a human being: that people care and that the people, places, and things with which one is involved inevitably matter.

Being-in-the-world as involvement is revealed by the ways in which such basic dimensions of the world as time and space are experienced. Time is not lived as a clock would record it, in equal minutes and hours. Rather, some hours drag on and on, whereas others zip by, depending on one’s involvements. Similarly, the space of a strange place looms differently when it has become familiar. Even one’s own body reflects this understanding of existence as being-in-the-world. A great variety of symptoms, from cold feet to high blood pressure, disclose one’s involvements, as do gestures, both habitual and spontaneous.

Other continental European psychiatrists who advanced the development of existential psychology include Karl Jaspers, Eugene Minkowski, Henri Ey, Erwin Straus, Frederik Jacobus Buytendijk, and Viktor Frankl. In England, R. D. Laing, a brilliant young psychiatrist originally influenced by the British “object relations” school of psychoanalysis, developed an existential account of schizophrenic
persons, beginning around 1960. He sought to show “that it was far more possible than is generally supposed to understand people diagnosed as psychotic.” He proceeded to do so by examining their “existential context.” In books such as The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1965), Laing attempted to unravel the mystery of schizophrenic speaking and symptoms by revealing how their apparently nonsensical quality does have a sense when seen in terms of the person’s own experience of the totality of his or her relationships and existence.

Existential analysis came to the United States at the end of the 1950s mainly through the influence of May, who introduced the writings of the European analysts. May provided both a scholarly background to the approach and an examination of its role in psychotherapy. His later books, such as Man’s Search for Himself (1953), Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), and Love and Will (1969), did much to popularize existential psychology in the United States without trivializing its philosophical depth.

Appreciating Personhood

Existential therapists, such as May, have generally argued that they are not seeking to establish a new type of therapy with new techniques. Rather, they have developed a different approach, one that can be used with any specific therapeutic system. They developed a different way for the therapist to “be present” for the patient or client. This distinctive way of being present is well illustrated in Laing’s therapeutic work; it hinges on the type of relationship that exists between the therapist and the patient. Laing pointed out the difference between two ways of relating to a patient: as a biochemical organism (and a diseased organism at that) or as a person. He cited, as an example, the difference between listening to another’s speaking as evidence of certain neurological processes and trying to understand what the person is talking about. When a therapist sees a patient as an “it,” the therapist cannot really understand that patient’s desire, fear, hope, or despair. Seeing the patient as a person, however, implies seeing the patient “as responsible, as capable of choice, in short, as a self-acting agent.”

This undiluted respect for the personhood of the patient is well exhibited in Laing’s work with schizophrenic persons. In place of the usual medical model, Laing offered them a “hospital” in the original sense of that word: a place of refuge, of shelter and rest for a traveler. Their experience was respected there, however different it appeared. They were allowed to complete their journey through madness, accompanied by another person (Laing) who was always respectful that it was real.

May similarly asserted that “the central task and responsibility of the therapist is to seek to understand the patient as a being and as being-in-his-world.” That understanding does not deny the validity of any psychodynamic insights; rather, it holds that any such dynamics “can be understood only in the context of the structure of existence of the person.” Indeed, the very aim of existential therapy is to help the patient experience his or her existence as real. What makes it possible for the patient to change, said May, is ultimately this experience of being treated, in the moment, as the real person that the person is. That is why existential therapy emphasizes a sense of reality and concreteness above a set of techniques.

Being-in-the-World Dilemmas

While each person’s reality is unique, there are certain basic dilemmas that arise by virtue of one’s being-in-the-world. Because existence is fundamentally a relationship with a world, the givens of existing provide what Irvin D. Yalom
has called the “ultimate concerns of life.” He has identified four: death, freedom, existential isolation, and meaninglessness. Yalom notes that the confrontation with any of these existential issues can become a serious conflict for a person. Specifically, to the extent that a person begins to become aware of these conflicts without yet facing them fully, that person will experience anxiety and so will seek to defend against the experience by turning away from the underlying concern. The task of the existential therapist is to use that experience of anxiety as a clue to help the patient find a way back to the ultimate concern and then, by fully facing it, discover the positive transformation it offers for authentic living. The first two of these ultimate concerns, death and freedom, can serve as illustrative examples.

The first of these conflicts is that one’s life will end in death even though one wishes it could continue. Death therefore holds a terror that may leave one anxious. One may even try to evade any awareness of death, living as though one would live forever. For the existential therapist, however, this awareness of death can be used to propel the patient to live his or her life authentically. Because life’s preciousness is most evident when one is aware that one will lose it, becoming authentically aware of one’s mortality can give one a powerful commitment not to waste one’s life. In that sense, the anxiety of trying to evade death can be turned around and transformed into a clue to help patients discover what it is that they would be most anxious about dying without having experienced.

The second of these conflicts has to do with freedom. Though it seems to be a positive value, realizing one’s freedom fully can be terrifying, for it entails accepting responsibility for one’s life. One is responsible for actualizing one’s own true self. Experiences such as anxiety, guilt, and despair reveal the dilemma of trying to hide from oneself the fact that one was not willing to be true to oneself. They then provide the basic clue by which the patient can uncover the self.

Roots of Existentialism

Existentialism arose in the mid-nineteenth century with Søren Kierkegaard. He opposed the Hegelian philosophy dominant during his time with the criticism that its formalism and abstractness omitted the individual. He insisted that the existing person was the most basic starting point for philosophy, that the authentic acceptance of being an individual is the basic task of one’s life, and that “the purpose of life is to be the self which one truly is.” Through analyses of such experiences as passion and commitment, Kierkegaard showed the important truths of subjective life.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl
established phenomenology
as a philosophical method by which to investigate actual experience. This provided a powerful boost to existentialism, especially evident in Heidegger’s subsequent analysis of the “care structure” as the meaning of being human. The next developments in existentialism arose in France, during and immediately after World War II. In a country occupied by the Nazis for five years, people who worked in the French Resistance movement became intimately acquainted with their own mortality. Death awaited around every corner; one never could know that this day was not the last. Such direct experience had a powerful impact on the French existential philosophers who participated in the Resistance movement, of whom Jean-Paul Sartre
, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are the best known.

While Merleau-Ponty wrote books of particular relevance for a psychology of perception and behavior, it was Sartre who most fully depicted the foibles of human life that are relevant to the psychotherapist. In philosophical books such as L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1956), as well as in plays and novels, Sartre lucidly revealed the ways people dodge rather than face their own freedom and their own responsibility to choose. For him, this living as if one were not really free (inauthentic living) was “bad faith.” Sartre contrasted his “existential analysis” of phenomena such as bad faith with the Freudian psychoanalysis of the unconscious. In doing so, he replaced Freud’s conceptions of a theoretical construct (the unconscious) with descriptions of experiences of living inauthentically.

These developments in France led to a burst of expanded interest in existentialism throughout the 1950s, in both Europe and the United States. By the 1960s, many new books, journals, and even graduate programs began to emphasize existential philosophy and psychology. Graduate programs that focused on existential psychology appeared at Duquesne University, West Georgia College, and Sonoma State University.

Existentialism became one of the primary sources of inspiration for an alternative to the dominant psychoanalytic and behavioristic psychologies that began to gather momentum in the 1960s under the name “ humanistic psychology.” By offering the perspective that people’s experiences of their own situations are vitally important to an understanding of their behavior, this view posed a central challenge to mainstream experimental psychology. This existential insight did not sway most psychologists, however; instead, the rise of cognitive psychology in the 1970s and 1980s established a new paradigm. It, too, offered the key notion that a person’s involvement was crucial to understanding behavior, but cognitive psychology defined that involvement in terms of a computational model: The person “takes in” the world by “processing information.” That model preserved the mechanistic assumption so important to mainstream psychology—the very assumption that existential psychology most decisively disputed. As a result, existential psychology remains a lively critic on psychology’s periphery rather than being an equal partner with more traditional approaches.

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