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Nowadays it seems as though existential ideas and psychoanalytic therapeutics have always been entwined. The quest to help oneself and others achieve a sense of authenticity and to live a life that matters are made explicit in existential philosophy but have been more implicitly touted in most psychoanalytic schools of thought. Whether the theoretical inclination of an individual clinician includes teasing apart unconscious conflict, putting to rest or exorcising so-called “bad” introjects, thwarting a punitive superego, enhancing capacities to think one’s own thoughts (e.g., promoting ego strength, mentalization) or empathically resonating as an essential selfobject to stymie self-fragmentation, helping a patient gain new powers to make healthier decisions have been cornerstones of psychodynamic care since its inception.
In times of personal and clinical dilemmas, each of us returns to the received wisdom of our now internalized analyst or supervisors or seeks out in the here and now a trusted colleague for support to be reminded of some basic life principles: What options or choices are still possible, even necessary, that one may be blind to at the moment? How might one wrestle more development of the self (i.e., enhanced individuality) given life’s exigencies and personal limitations? What are the particular catastrophic fantasies (e.g., success neuroses) or unmourned losses that must be worked on to embrace vitality
and live fully and meaningfully, knowing that there are no guarantees beyond the present moment? Each clinician has been taught to think through these questions since the first days of our training, believing that they were essential parts of psychoanalytic theory, which, indeed, they are. Little did most of us know how much psychoanalysis was leaning on, even borrowing from and developing alongside of, the existential philosophies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietsche, or even Jean-Paul Sartre might be m