Existential Psychology

Existential psychology is a method of psychological research and psychotherapy that has existentialism and phenomenological philosophy as its theoretical foundation, psychoanalysis as its technical precondition, and psychotherapy as the means. It is also known as existential psychoanalysis.

Existential psychology rose in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and developed in America and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. The early representatives of existential psychology were the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss and the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, while the later ones included the American psychologist Rollo May and James Bugental as well as British psychologist Ronald Laing. Existential psychology is a product of the combination of existentialist philosophy and psychoanalysis. Strictly speaking, it is only a common orientation of psychological research, rather than a rigorously structured school. Existential psychology, like phenomenological psychology and humanistic psychology, is part of the “third force” of Western psychology.

The main characteristics of existential psychology are as follows:

• 1. On the object of study, it adheres to the existential analysis approach. First, on the question of human existence, it insists on the viewpoint of being-in-the-world, i.e., it believes that human beings exist in the world and that human beings are inseparable from the world, constituting a whole together and displaying their richness in the process of generating and changing. Second, on the basis of insisting on the viewpoint of being-in-the-world, existential psychology further examines the way of human existence. On the basis of Martin Heidegger’s distinction between three kinds of worlds, Binswanger proposed that people exist in the surrounding world, the common world, and the self-world. Building on Binswanger’s theory, Rollo May proposed that human beings’ being-in-the-world has three kinds of modes: human beings’ relation to the environment, human beings’ relation to human beings, and human beings’ relation to the self.

• 2. On the research themes, it focuses on themes such as the real existence of human beings, the pursuit of meaning and value in life, anxiety, and conflict.

• 3. On the research method, it mainly uses the phenomenological method, but does not regard it as the only way to get to the goal and is open to other methods too, so there is an openness in the use of methods. There are two tendencies in the use of phenomenological methods in psychology. The first tendency, represented by German psychiatrist Karl Theodor Jaspers, is the detailed description of experience under the slogan “oriented towards reality itself.” The second tendency, represented by the German mathematician Eugène Minkowski, is the use of phenomenological methods to discover the essential structure of experience.

• 4. On the principle of psychotherapy, it takes stock in the heart-to-heart communication between the therapist and patient and the patient’s experience here and now, with the goal of helping the patient experience his/her own real existence. Specifically, existential psychology does not confine the therapeutic methods to specialized analytical techniques, but advocates the transformation and development of psychoanalysis. Existential psychologists also use classic psychoanalytic techniques such as free association and dream interpretation in therapy but place more emphasis on the patient’s experience in the here and now and on inspiring the patient to recognize their current existential reality and undesirable interpersonal relationships. They emphasize that existential psychotherapy is about inspiring patient to have a deep inner experience of their own existence, so that they can eventually become people who have the ability to make free choices and responsible self-determination. Thus, existential psychotherapy sees the patient’s ability to make decisions freely as the key to treatment, and making decisions must be predicated on the patient’s own practice.