The existential therapy movement was not founded by any particular person or group; many streams of thought contributed to it. Drawing from a major orienta-tion in philosophy, existential therapy arose spontaneously in different parts of Eu-rope and among different schools of psychology and psychiatry in the 1940s and 1950s. Many Europeans found that their lives had been devastated by World War II, and they struggled with existential issues including feelings of isolation, aliena-tion, and meaninglessness. Early writers focused on the individual’s experience of being alone in the world and facing the anxiety of this situation. The European existential perspective focused on human limitations and the tragic dimensions of life (Sharp & Bugental, 2001).
The thinking of existential psychologists and psychiatrists was infl uenced by a number of philosophers and writers during the 19th century. To understand the philosophical underpinnings of modern existential psychotherapy, one must have some awareness of such fi gures as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Buber. These major fi gures of existential-ism and existential phenomenology and their cultural, philosophical, and religious writings provided the basis for the formation of existential therapy. Ludwig Bin-swanger and Medard Boss are also included in this section because both were early existential psychoanalysts who contributed key ideas to existential psychotherapy.
s ø r e n k i e r k e g a a r d ( 1 8 1 3 – 1 8 5 5 )
A Danish philosopher and Chris-tian theologian, Kierkegaard was particularly concerned with angst—a Danish and German word whose meaning lies between the English words dread and anxiety—and he addressed the role of anxiety and uncertainty in life. Existential anxiety is associated with making basic decisions about how we want to live, and it is not pathological. Kierkegaard believed that anxiety is the school in which we are educated to be a self. Without the experience of angst, we may go through life as
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sleepwalkers. But many of us, especially in adolescence, are awakened into real life by a terrible uneasiness. Life is one contingency after another, with no guarantees beyond the certainty of death. This is by no means a comfortable state, but it is necessary to our becoming human. Kierkegaard believed that “the sickness unto death” arises when we are not true to ourselves. What is needed is the willingness to risk a leap of faith in making choices. Becoming human is a project, and our task is not so much to discover who we are as to create ourselves.
f r i e d r i c h n i e t z s c h e ( 1 8 4 4 – 1 9 0 0 )
The German philosopher Nietzsche is the iconoclastic counterpart to Kierkegaard, expressing a revolutionary approach to the self, to ethics, and to society. Like Kierkegaard, he emphasized the importance of subjectivity. Nietzsche set out to prove that the ancient defi nition of humans as rational was entirely misleading. We are far more creatures of will than we are impersonal intellects. But where Kierkegaard emphasized the “subjective truth” of an intense concern with God, Nietzsche located values within the individual’s “will to power.” We give up an honest acknowledgment of this source of value when society invites us to rationalize powerlessness by advocating other worldly concerns. If, like sheep, we acquiesce in “herd morality,” we will be nothing but mediocrities. But if we release ourselves by giving free rein to our will to power, we will tap our poten-tiality for creativity and originality. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with their pioneer-ing analyses of anxiety, depression, subjectivity, and the authentic self, together are generally considered to be the originators of the existential perspective (Sharp &Bugental, 2001).
m a r t i n h e i d e g g e r ( 1 8 8 9 – 1 9 7 6 )
Heidegger’s phenomenological exis-tentialism reminds us that we exist “in the world” and should not try to think of ourselves as beings apart from the world into which we are thrown. The way we fi ll our everyday life with superfi cial conversation and routine shows that we often assume we are going to live forever and can afford to waste day after day. Our moods and feelings (including anxiety about death) are a way of understanding whether we are living authentically or whether we are inauthentically constructing our lives around the expectations of others. When we translate this wisdom from vague feeling to explicit awareness, we may develop a more positive resolve about how we want to be. Phenomenological existentialism, as presented by Heidegger, provides a view of human history that does not focus on past events but motivates individuals to look forward to “authentic experiences” that are yet to come.m a r t i n b u b e r ( 1 8 7 8 – 1 9 6 5 )
Leaving Germany to live in the new state of Israel, Buber took a less individualistic stand than most of the other existentialists.He said that we humans live in a kind of betweenness; that is, there is never just an I, but always an other. The I, the person who is the agent, changes depending on whether the other is an it or a Thou. But sometimes we make the serious mistake of reducing another person to the status of a mere object, in which case the rela-tionship becomes I/it. Although Buber recognizes that of necessity we must have many I/it interactions (in everyday life), we are seriously limited if we live only in the world of the I/it. Buber stresses the importance of presence, which has three functions: (1) it enables true I/Thou relationships; (2) it allows for meaning to exist
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in a situation; and (3) it enables an individual to be responsible in the here and now (Gould, 1993). In a famous dialogue with Carl Rogers, Buber argued that the thera-pist and client could never be on the same footing because the latter comes to the former for help. When the relationship is fully mutual, we have become “dialogic,”
a fully human condition.
l u d w i g b i n s w a n g e r ( 1 8 8 1 – 1 9 6 6 )
An existential analyst, Binswanger proposed a holistic model of self that addresses the relationship between the per-son and his or her environment. He used a phenomenological approach to explore signifi cant features of the self, including choice, freedom, and caring. He based his existential approach largely on the ideas of Heidegger and accepted Heidegger’s notion that we are “thrown into the world.” However, this “thrown-ness” does not release us from the responsibility of our choices and for planning for the future (Gould, 1993). Existential analysis (dasein analyse) emphasizes the subjective and spiritual dimensions of human existence. Binswanger (1975) contended that crises in therapy were typically major choice points for the client. Although he originally looked to psychoanalytic theory to shed light on psychosis, he moved toward an exis-tential view of his patients. This perspective enabled him to understand the worldview and immediate experience of his patients, as well as the meaning of their behavior, as opposed to superimposing his view as a therapist on their experience and behavior.m e d a r d b o s s ( 1 9 0 3 – 1 9 9 1 )
Both Binswanger and Boss were early existen-tial psychoanalysts and signifi cant fi gures in the development of existenexisten-tial psycho-therapy. They made reference to dasein or being-in-the-world, which pertains to our ability to refl ect on life events and attribute meaning to these events. They believed that the therapist must enter the client’s subjective world without presuppositions that would get in the way of this experiential understanding. Both Binswanger and Boss were signifi cantly infl uenced by Heidegger’s seminal work, Being and Time (1962), which provided a broad basis for understanding the individual (May, 1958). Boss was deeply infl uenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, but even more so by Heidegger. Boss’s major professional interest was applying Heidegger’s phil-osophical notions to therapeutic practice, and he was especially concerned with integrating Freud’s methods with Heidegger’s concepts, as described in his book Daseinanalysis and Psychoanalysis (1963).j e a n - pa u l s a r t r e ( 1 9 0 5 – 1 9 8 0 )
A philosopher and novelist, Sartre was convinced, in part by his years in the French Resistance in World War II, that humans are even more free than earlier existentialists had believed. The existence of a space—nothingness—between the whole of our past and the now frees us to choose what we will. Our values are what we choose. The failure to acknowledge our freedom and choices results in emotional problems. This freedom is hard to face, so we tend to invent an excuse by saying, “I can’t change now because of my past conditioning.” Sartre called excuses “bad faith.” No matter what we have been, we can make choices now and become something quite different. We are condemned to be free. To choose is to become committed; this is the responsibility that is the other side of freedom. Sartre’s view was that at every moment, by our actions, we are choosing who we are being. Our existence is never fi xed or fi nished.143
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Every one of our actions represents a fresh choice. When we attempt to pin down who we are, we engage in self-deception (Russell, 2007).