Existential Psychoanalysis and Modern Psychoanalysis

Mrs. Zabriskie: And now we're privileged to hear from Dr. Herbert Holt. Dr. Holt is director of the New York Institute of Existential Analysis, founding president of the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis, formerly chief training psychiatrist of the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, the medical director and training psychiatrist for the Hudson River Counseling Service. He has also been editor of The Journal for Modern Psychotherapy. In the past Dr. Holt has been Dean of the Westchester Institute for Training and Counseling in Psychotherapy, assistant attending neurologist at Bellevue Hospital, and an assistant attending psychiatrist at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center at the Vanderbilt Clinic. He also has many publications to his credit. He is a contributor to the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry and also he is the author of a book entitled Free to Be Good or Bad: A Choice.

Existential psychoanalysis was born in the 1920's and 30's in Middle Europe. At that time, the main representative of existential psychoanalysis was Ludwig Binswanger, a late pupil of Sigmund Freud. Being a Swiss and two generations after Freud, he had no desire or need to break his personal relationship with him. In 1936, Binswanger, in his address in commemoration of Freud's eightieth birthday, felt that Freud's conception of man is an oversimplification and constricts a full human, realistic understanding of man in his world. He felt that Freud's scientific psychology must be based on and include the ontological problem of man's total being. Freud and he carried on a famous correspondence in which Freud pointed out that the ideas which occupied Binswanger about the human being in the world could only be discussed now because he