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Several years ago I wrote a piece called “The Existential Use of the Self” (Havens, 1974). In it I tried to describe and develop the existential way of working psychotherapeutically. After its publication I received half-a-dozen letters which made the same point. The authors of the letters had had two or three “analyses.” All had good things to say about each of their analyses but what they said differed, depending on the type of analysis. After existential analyses (which were mostly Rogerian) the correspondents reported feeling better about themselves, growing and facing life with more courage. After psychoanalyses they reported knowing themselves better, facing up to their conflicts. After what I would term Sullivanian treatments, their relationships with other people improved: They could better see how they affected other people; sometimes they felt more out-going.
I was not althogether surprised by the letters. Still earlier I had written a book, Approaches to the Mind (Havens, 1973), reviewing the principal psychiatric schools and had come to a similar conclusion. The conclusion was that the schools represented different perspectives—they looked out on different facets of mental life and did so through strikingly different methods or instruments or tools of psychological work. The whole book is meant to be a series of illustrations of that thesis, but one illustration may be helpful. Each of the schools has its own geography, we can say, its own way of sitting with the patient. In traditional medical psychology — the objective-descriptive school — one sits in front of the patient with instruments of objectivity in between, a notebook to record what is said, a desk for professional distance, or whatever. Of course, in psychoanalysis the therapist literally disappears; he sits behind the patient. Existential workers try to be “close.”