The father of existentialism, Saren Kirkegaard, said: “The characteristic of the human being is personal experience. “The existentialist approach cares about the truth of the human being. Existential psychotherapy is a very close to existentialist philosophy born in Europe before World War II.
A little later he came to the United States, where he was specifically joined by renowned psychologists, such as Allport, Roger, Fromm and Maslow.
- On the other hand.
- Existential psychology has had a powerful influence on humanistic psychology.
- So much so that it has taken up some of its basic procedures and themes.
Existential analysis is one of the so-called humanist existential models. The emergence of these models in the North American context of the 1960s is the result of multiple influences; its evolution must be seen in the light of its social and cultural implications first in the United States and then in Europe; thus, its development occurred outside of academic psychology.
On the other hand, while it is considered a third force in the face of conductism and psychoanalysis, it has no paradigmatic vocation; currently, humanist-existent models should be treated as a set of therapeutic procedures, in most cases separated from major academic currents. .
The main ancestors of these models are existentialism and phenomenology; the phenomenological current has its most immediate origin in Franz Brentano’s thinking, due to Brentano’s emphasis on the experience, activity of the psyche and the intentionality of each psychic act. the main representative of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl.
For Husserl, the immediate experience of the act of knowledge is what can reveal the nature of things. To do this, we have to understand what we call, Scared? Or phenomenological attitude. In other words, we must take the pure observation of the phenomenon, without prior prejudice or belief (before the experiment).
The central concept of this approach is existential project. According to JP Sartre, existence precedes gasoline. This means that human beings do not come with a being to develop, they must find it for themselves. Artre considers man radically free and indeterminate, though limited by doom. Without that you can’t understand. Thus, the human being self-determined through the existential project.
“Man is doomed to be free because once he is thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. -JP Sartre-
The central idea of existential analysis could be expressed with a quote from Ortega and Gasset: “To live, you always have to do something (even if it’s just breathing). “The purpose of existential psychotherapy is to analyze the structure of what is done. in life. Biswanger called this structure “Dasein”. Sartre called it an existential project.
Mr. Villegas defined existential psychotherapy as “a method of interpersonal relationships and psychological analysis”, the purpose of which would be to provoke sufficient self-knownness and autonomy to assume and develop one’s existence (Villegas [1998], p. 55).
Existential psychotherapy clarifies and understands the values, meanings and beliefs that the patient has implemented (as strategies) to understand the world, highlights hypotheses about how we live life, as we begin to doubt the appropriation of our existence.
From a psychotherapeutic point of view, the most relevant feature of humanist-existent models is the emphasis placed on immediate experience as a primary phenomenon, implying that theoretical explanations and manifest behavior are subordinate to the experience itself and the meaning that the person gives it.
Another characteristic of these models is their emphasis on the volitive, creative and evaluative aspects of human behavior, in addition to these general traits, it is difficult to talk about basic concepts.
At this end, it is worth referring to the specific theories in which they have meaning, these theories are existential analysis, person-centered approach, Gestalt approach, transactional analysis, psychodrama and bioenergy.
As we have already said, the central concept of existential psychotherapy is that of existential project, the purpose of psychotherapy is to analyze this project and modify it, psychotherapy is not intended to change external, physical or social reality, but the person and his perception of things. It is radically assumed that this is the only thing that depends on itself, where in the end there is a greater capacity for control.
Its goal is to recover the human being, regain his self-control and self-determination. It involves, in a way, confronting him with himself.
The individual is often lost or alienated when trying to solve the problems posed by his radical significance. Therefore, the purpose of analyzing the structures of your world is to discover the forms and points of alienation. Only then can fundamental freedom be restored. In this way an alternative reconstruction of one’s own experience may be possible. According to existential psychotherapy, nothing is real until it has been experienced.
Therefore, since existential psychotherapy, various psychopathological disorders are considered non-authentic forms of existence, they are existential voids. These are defenses or denials of “being-in-the-world”, resignations or loss of freedom (Villegas, 1981).
It is not easy to clearly define existential psychotherapy, but we can have the idea that it tries to promote a personal analysis that motivates the possibility of choosing and building individual patterns of life, as well as diversifying and enriching the daily life of the person through philosophical provocation. .
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