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 is to help the individual learn how to live. Why not leave death for the dying?" (Yalom 29). Then Yalom (29) answers his own questions in just one statement, "death itches all the time...our attitudes toward death influence the way we live and grow and the way we falter and fall ill." He adds that life and death exist at the same time, "not consecutively," so they are interdependent (Yalom 29). Moreover, because death is "a primordial source of anxiety," it is "th...