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The word ‘existential’, increasingly used to characterise an approach to psychotherapy different from or even opposed to the psychodynamic model, can mean many things.
At times it only gives an emotional colouring to whatever it describes: if it is ‘existential’, it is ‘profound’ or ‘ultimate’. At others it implies that the concern is ‘man's existence’-but in such a general sense, is this not the concern of any kind of psychotherapy?
It is frequently forgotten that there is a philosophical orientation, existentialism (or more correctly, existential phenomenology), represented particularly by the philosophers, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In their writings ‘existence’ has a specific meaning, describing the way in which human beings are ‘in the world’, a world that defines them as it is defined by them. Exploration of the phenomenon ‘existence’ reveals its temporal limitation, the fact that a great deal of it is outside our control, is given, but that we have the freedom to choose our response to what there is though the outcome of our choices is never certain. This freedom is double-faced: it is a threat and a potentiality. Anxiety is an inevitable aspect of this uncertainty.
These are the basic existential themes. There is also a history and tradition of existential psychotherapy which is essentially Central European. The Swiss psychoanalyst Medard Boss, in spite of a great admiration for Freud's therapeutic methods, found the physicalistic theory underlying them unsatisfactory. The Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger drew Boss's attention to the writings of Heidegger. Both Binswanger and Boss rethought their ideas about psychological disturbance in the light of Heidegger's philosophy. Boss became a friend of Heidegger, and the extensive discussion of psychotherapeutic concepts between a psychoanalyst and one of the originators of existential philosophy led to the development of a school of existential psychotherapy called Daseinsanalyse (analysis of being-