What is Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy?

Let's have an existential moment...

Life... What's it all about?  Eat? Survive? Reproduce? Is that all?

Us, humans are forever cursed by the ability to ask such a question for this is a question without any satisfying answer, this is where even logic and reason fail us. Why do we exist? For what do we live? Many before us have fought long and hard to make sense of human existence. One philosophical approach to understanding human existence is existentialism.

    

Existential philosophy 

As with many terms, there is no general agreement on the definition of existentialism. Perhaps, existentialism is best understood as a philosophical movement embracing the views and work of various 19th- and 20th- century philosophers who, despite their differences, all considered the nature of the human condition as a key philosophical problem. At the heart of existentialism is the shared view that "existence precedes essence", wherein existence refers to the concrete reality of being as it is immediately encountered while essence refers to the general nature or set of attributes that characterize what an entity fundamentally is. This view is in sharp contrast to Platonian's and Aristotlean's belief that "essence precedes existence". In short, from an existentialist's perspective, while the essence of an object e.g. knife is predefined and comes before existence (for an object to be identified as a knife, it has to have a blade that cuts by necessity), the reverse is true for human beings. For us, our essence is not predefined, all that is given is that we are, not what we are. In this sense, a basic given of the human predicament is that we are forced to choose what we will become, to define ourselves by our choice of action:

     

Existential psychology and psychotherapy

It is from this philosophical approach to understanding human existence and the writings of thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzche, Sartre, Heidegger, Camus, Kafka, and others that existential psychology and psychotherapy have originated. In essence, existential psychology is a postmodern approach to psychology that is based on the philosophy that the essence of humans is their existence and is therefore concerned with the understanding of individuals in relationship to the world that they live in and their search for what it means to be alive. Reacting against the prevailing tendency to view therapy as a system of well-defined techniques, existential psychotherapy arose during the mid-twentieth century to empower and place the person as well as his/her existential choices back at the center of the therapeutic process (Diamond, 2011). It is an integrated approach to therapy that revolves around the basic givens of human existence such as those of death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness... 

Upcoming...

Let's look at the lives of the first existentialists next and their ideas that continue to influence existential psychology and psychotherapy...