Existential Psychotherapy

Although assisting people in the process of living with greater expertise and ease is a noble undertaking, it is not the goal of existential psychotherapy. Rather, the goal of existential psychotherapy has been defined as setting clients on "the hard road" of freedom's constant struggle ("Existential Perspectives on Personality"). Existential psychotherapy forces clients to face what they would otherwise try to avoid-"existential guilt and anguish"-and encourages them to assume responsibility for their symptoms by demonstrating that they have chosen their own way and are "free...to choose better ways of coping; ways that will give meaning to their lives" ("Existential Perspectives on Personality"). Existential psychotherapy is not an approach associated with ease in any manner of speaking; it is instead the "boot camp" of psychotherapy.

Arguments against the tough perspective of existential psychotherapy abound. At the beginning of his chapter on death, Yalom (29) recalls Adolph Meyer's counsel to a generation of student psychiatrists, "Don't scratch where it doesn't itch." Yalom plays devil's advocate, asking, "Do not patients have enough fear and quite enough dread without the therapist reminding them of the grimmest of life's horrors?" "Why focus on bitter and immutable reality?" he asks, "If the goal of therapy is to instill hope, why invoke hope-defeating death?" (Yalom 29). He caps his pretend speech with a final question: "The aim of therapy

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world where anything can be right and anything can be wrong, how can he know what is right for him to do? Existential psychotherapy comprises five major themes, each of which is a duo: freedom and responsibility, death and human limitation, isolation and connectedness, meaning versus meaninglessness, and emotions and experience (Hoffman, "Existential Psychotherapy - A General Overview"). Each of these duos offers two concepts that are inextricably linked; neither concept can exist without the other in the existential mind. Freedom, for example, does not exist without responsibility, because a lack of responsibility destroys the benefits of freedom. Isolation and connectedness, too, exist together and must be considered together. We all exist on a continuum between isolation and connectedness, so we are never wholly removed from either. Jones (1982) cites research indicating that "lonely people do not spend less time in relationships than other people, but rather [that their] types of social interactions are different," noting that they merely spend more time with strangers and with a larger number of people than those that are not lonely (Hoffman, "Isolation v. Connectedness"). Therefore, lonely people are not l

Category: Psychology - E