Self-Control and Responsibility: Interfacing Gestalt and Behavioral Frameworks

Existential Psychiatry concerns itself with man's total life experience—the problem of life's meaning, changing seasons, and the significance of suffering and death. Existential Psychiatry regards not only man's relationship to himself, his intrapsychic conflicts, his Eigenwelt, but also man's relation to his fellow men, his Mitwelt, and his environment, his Umwelt.1 What man lives by, his beliefs, life philosophy and his mode of being-in-the-world are also considered. In his search for the divine Thou, for the You of human relationships, the I may relate in a reciprocal manner or may use or abuse the You, the world, reducing them to Its, objects.2

Regarding man neither solely as a biological unit nor a stimulus-response automaton, Existentialists insist that man searches for meaning and higher values and is capable of transcendence. Frankl, pioneer in Existential Psychiatry and Logotherapy, has again documented from his own experience and observations under extreme conditions of suffering, such as those that existed in the Nazi Concentration Camps, that man can choose to transcend his biological determinants.3

Man's relation to the world, to the Universal, implies that he is also bound by moral laws and ethical principles. Fundamentally different from classical psychoanalytical and psychological theories, the Existential view claims that man owes something to the world; he is bound by the bonds of duty to the realities of his destiny. Again diverging from classical theories, which attribute the derivation of the superego to parental influences and social pressures, most Existentialists consider the conscience to be an innate, inherent endowment. Existentialists also insist on the intentionality of man's actions, for which he is responsible. “Man is what he purposes to be and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. There is no reality except in man's actions, these are fundamental principles of Existentialism,”4 writes Sartr