HISTORY

Precursors
There are two streams in the history of human thought. One is of essences, seen most clearly in Platos
belief that there are perfect forms of everything and that things such as a specific chair are imperfect
copies. These essences are clearest if we imagine mathematics: a perfect circle and a perfect square
exist in heaven, of which our human circles and squares are imperfect copies. This requires an
abstraction that leaves the existence of the individual thing out of the picture. A proposition can be true
without being real. Perhaps just because this approach has worked in certain areas of science, we tend
to forget that it omits the living individual.
But there is another stream of thought coming down through history: namely, existence. This viewpoint
holds that truth depends upon the existing person, existing in a given situation (world) at that time.
Hence the term existential. This is what Sartre meant in his famous statement, Existence precedes
essence. The human beings awareness (i.e., his or her existence) precedes everything he or she has to
say about the surrounding world.
Down through history, the existential tradition is exemplified by many thinkers. These include
Augustine, who held that Truth dwells in the inner man; Duns Scotus, who argued against Thomas
Aquinass rational essences and insisted that human will must be taken as basic to any statement; and
Blaise Pascal, as in his famous statement, The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
There remains in our day the chasm between truth and reality. And the crucial question that confronts
us in psychology is precisely this chasm between what is abstractly true and what is existentially real
for the given living person.

Beginnings
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and those existentialists who followed them foresaw this growing split
between truth and reality in Western culture, and they opposed the delusion that reality can be
comprehended in an abstracted, detached way. Though they protested vehemently against arid
intellectualism, they were by no means simple activists, nor were they antirational. Anti-intellectualism
and other movements that make thinking subordinate to feeling must not be confused with
existentialism. Either alternativemaking a human being entirely subject or objectresults in losing
the living, existing person. Kierkegaard and the existential thinkers appealed to a reality underlying
both subjectivity and objectivity. We must not only study a persons experience as such, they held, but
even more, we must study the one who is doing the experiencing.
It is by no means accidental that the greatest existentialists in the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche, happen also to be among the most remarkable psychologists of all time. A contemporary
leader of existential philosophy, Karl Jaspers, originally a psychiatrist, wrote a notable text on
psychopathology. When one reads Kierkegaards profound analyses of anxiety and despair or
Nietzsches amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility that
accompany repressed emotional powers, it is difficult to realize that one is reading works written more
than 100 years ago and not a contemporary psychological analysis.

Existential therapists are centrally concerned with rediscovering the living person amid the
dehumanization of modern culture, and in order to do this they engage in in-depth psychological
analysis. Their concern is not with isolated psychological reactions in themselves but rather with the
psychological being of the living person doing the experiencing. They use psychological terms with an
ontological meaning.
Existential therapy sprang up spontaneously in different parts of Europe and among different schools
and has a diverse body of researchers and creative thinkers. There were psychiatristsEugene
Minkowski in Paris, Erwin Straus in Germany and then in America, V E. von Gebsattel in Germany
who represent chiefly the first, phenomenological stage of this movement. Ludwig Binswanger, A.
Storch, Medard Boss, G. Bally, Roland Kuhn in Switzerland and J. H. Van Den Berg and F J.
Buytendijk in Holland represented the second, or existential, stage.

Current Status
Existential psychotherapy was introduced to the United States in 1958 with the publication of
Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, edited by Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and
Henri Ellenberger. The main presentation and summary of existential therapy was in the first two
chapters, written by May: The Origins of the Existential Movement in Psychology and
Contributions of Existential Psychology. The remainder of the book is made up of essays and case
studies by Henri Ellenberger, Eugene Minkowski, Erwin Straus, V E. von Gebsattel, Ludwig
Binswanger, and Ronald Kuhn. The first comprehensive textbook in existential psychiatry was written
by Irvin Yalom (1981) and entitled Existential Psychotherapy.
The spirit of existential psychotherapy has never supported the formation of specific institutes because
it deals with the presuppositions underlying therapy of any kind. Its concern was with concepts about
human beings and not with specific techniques. This leads to the dilemma that existential therapy has
been quite influential, but there are very few adequate training courses in this kind of therapy simply
because it is not a specific training in technique.
The founders of the existential movement always stated that specific training in techniques of therapy
could be obtained at any number of schools of therapy, and that the student was responsible for
molding his or her own presuppositions in existential form.
Rollo May, an existentialist before he knew the word, found that the existing person was the important
consideration, and not a theory about this person. He had argued in his Ph.D. dissertation, published
under the title The Meaning of Anxiety in 1950, for a concept of normal anxiety as the basis for a theory
of human beings. He had already, before his training in the William Alanson White Institute,
experienced the futility of going to analysis five times a week for two years. He was trained as a
psychoanalyst in the William Alanson White Institute, the neo-Freudian institute in New York, and was
already a practicing analyst when he read in the early 1950s about existential therapies in Europe. He
felt these new concepts in existential psychology were the ones he needed but had never been able to
formulate.
The founders of existential psychotherapy believe that its contributions will be absorbed into other
schools. Fritz Perls, in the foreword of Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (1969), states quite accurately that
gestalt therapy is a form of existential psychotherapy. Therapists trained in different schools can
legitimately call themselves existential if their assumptions are similar to those described in this
chapter. Irvin Yalom was trained in the neo-Freudian tradition. Even such an erstwhile behavior

therapist as Arnold Lazarus uses some existential presuppositions in his multimodal psychotherapy. All
of this is possible because existential psychotherapy is a way of conceiving the human being. It goes
deeper than the other forms of psychotherapy to emphasize the assumptions underlying all systems of
psychotherapy.
Major works include Mays The Meaning of Anxiety (1977), Mans Search for Himself (1953), and
Existential Psychology (1961). Others are James Bugentals The Search for Existential Identity (1976),
Medard Bosss The Analysis of Dreams (1957a) and Psychoanalysis and Daseinanalysis (1982), and
Viktor Frankls Mans Search for Meaning (1963). Helmut Kaiser has written valuably on existential
therapy in his Effective Psychotherapy (1965). Leslie Farber (1966, 1976), Avery Weisman (1965), and
Lester Havens (1974) have also contributed significantly to the existential literature.