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The scope of this paper is the clarification of basic existential or phenomenologic concepts that are relevant to psychotherapy. At first these concepts may appear obscure and abstract. There are several reasons for this. Our everyday world view is predominantly shaped by the implication or bias of the natural sciences to the effect that only what is measurable is to be considered real. This implication, when applied to psychology, leads to an extreme limitation of admissible data. Phenomenology, as developed by the mathematician-philosopher Edmund Husserl, tries to focus upon the presuppositions or prejudices that underlie our conventional world view (Husserl's “natural attitude”), to give proper credit to their usefulness in various fields of human endeavor, and to open up vistas that are obscured by them.10 Yet, since language itself is molded by a civilization's basic world views, this opening up of vistas obscured by our prejudices often fails to find verbal formulations that are both accurate and understandable. Different authors are likely to use different expressions for essentially identical views, or different translators of a foreign author may choose different terms to convey some of his concepts. All this can create considerable confusion. Furthermore, any genuine questioning of culturally accepted presuppositions or prejudices is always more than a mere intellectual feat, since it may change the person's entire orientation in the world, his feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Such changes are associated with an initial experience that one's identity is weakening or threatened, and thus there is commonly a strong reluctance to accept the relativity of one's presuppositions.
To present the philosophical justification of the existential or phenomenologic concepts we, are taking under consideration would exceed the scope of this paper. However, these concepts may prove of essential value in providing the backdrop against which divergent, and often