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This book deserves praise for portraying an existential therapist's conception of his work and life and how he actually conducts his clinical work. Far too few practitioners are truly familiar with this perspective. Existentialism concerns itself with the daunting and inescapable conditions of human existence that each of us daily experiences, but is apt to push to the margins of awareness. It rejects the widespread view that people are governed by abstract forces of nature, as, for example, objects in the inanimate and animate infrahuman world are, or, for that matter, by abstract sociological influences operating in human communities. Rather, it asserts, we are unique in being able (and obliged) to acknowledge the brute conditions of our being that neither have we consented to nor are within our control. Some of these are stark universale. Each of us is born into an unanswering cosmos, lives and dies alone. Others, such as our particular parentage, bodily integrity or deformity, and inherited economic privilege or privation are personally idiosyncratic.
By virtue of being aware of these generic and particular givens—existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger termed them our “thrownness”—we gain freedom with regard to how we experience, interpret, and give meaning to them and, accordingly, conduct