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M. Guy Thompson's Existential Psychoanalysis is a pleasure to read and a distinct contribution to the field—one I find essential on multiple levels. Two aspects stood out to me immediately. The first is personal: Thompson and I both came of intellectual age in the 1960s, deeply captivated by psychoanalysis and existentialism. The second is that I feel a kinship with his insistence that psychoanalysis is existential—an understanding I also arrived at early in my teaching career. When I began teaching theory courses to graduate psychology students in the early 1980s, I found myself not comparing the two approaches but demonstrating the existential foundations of psychoanalysis. Thompson does the same, showing convincingly that psychoanalysis already embodies existential therapy, rather than arguing for a synthesis.
The first chapter offers delightful personal history, tracing Thompson's path to existential psychoanalysis. Like me, he was a precocious teenager fascinated by philosophy and psychology, but his intellectual formation was shaped in part by training with R. D. Laing in the early 1970s. Readers familiar with Thompson's previous work on Laing will recognize this influence. For my own part, Laing's (1965) The Divided Self was one of two books that most shaped my understanding of existential therapy in the early 1960s. The other was May's (1958) edited volume Existence—which included Binswanger's outline of Daseinsanalysis—recasting Freudian theory through the lens of Heidegger's Being and Time. May's clarity welcomes the reader in; Laing's intensity hurls one headlong into the work. Both are indispensable.
Thompson's affinity for Laing aligns with his high regard for Jean-Paul Sartre. Laing's notion of the “schizoid” parallels Sartrean characters in Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 1956) and his plays, reframing the concept from object relations theory in ontological terms. Unsurprisingly, Thompson opens his first substantive chapter with Sartre. My own trajectory