2 An Existential Psychological Perspective on the Human Essence

Psychology has always been concerned with understanding not only the human essence, but aberrations of that essence—in other words, with the thoughts and behaviors of individuals who have difficulty adapting to everyday social life. Yet how are such problems typically conceived? Consider, for instance, the problem of a person going through depression. A typical clinical psychologist—say, someone trained in cognitive behavioral therapy—would attempt to determine the behaviors, automatic thoughts, and core beliefs contributing to the depression and systematically work to alter them. A typical social psychologist would focus on anomalies in the person’s attributional style—whether they demonstrated “depressive realism” (an absence of positive illusions about self and world) or whether they were prone to rumination.

To what extent do these perspectives do justice to the heterogeneity of individual experiences of depression? Consider some excerpts from narratives provided by depressed patients in Ratcliffe’s (2015) book Experiences of Depression:

[Depression] would feel like I had a large nautical rope threaded through my stomach, with a knot bigger than both my fists together at the front pushing on me under the weight of an anvil behind me (p. 77) . . .

I felt slightly pulled back from reality, as though there were cotton wool between my brain and my senses. A feeling of exhaustion often prevented me from being able to interact with the world (pp. 31–32) . . .

I’m not a proper human being, I am a failed human being. Everything that goes wrong in my life is directly my fault . . . I am a waste of a human life (p. 135).

These vivid examples point to the fact that there is something missing in the typical accounts of depression. Even if these accounts have some accuracy, they seem sanitized and remote when confronted by such stark testimony. We propose that this is because Western scholarship typically breaks the human essence into parts that are studied separately. Often, this essence is dichotomized in some version of mind-body dualism: there is the material world, and then there is human subjectivity, and while these interact in a mediated way (subjectivity “filters” the outside world) they are never fully merged (Dreyfus & Taylor, 2015). Yet in these examples, it is clear that the experience of depression—like any human experience—involves interrelationships among world, body, and mind that can never be truly decomposed.

Mainstream models have achieved improvements in treatment efficacy; nevertheless, the dualistic or mediational views that have accompanied them are inadequate for the movement in thought known as existentialism. In the 19th century several European philosophers commonly surmised that what was lacking in social science was an accurate image of the existing human being in contemporary cultural circumstances (Barrett, 1962; May, Angel, & Ellenberger, 1958). The work of these reactionaries developed into what could be identified as two distinct “schools” of existential thought. The subsequent strains of existential philosophy have produced a certain fracturing of perspectives across disciplinary and methodological lines within existential psychology. In this chapter we hope to make some advance toward integrating existentialist perspectives by illuminating how their different emphases can be united in a core set of themes representing a global existential view of the human essence.

The dialectical-psychological school. In the mid-19th century, Kierkegaard (1954) laid the groundwork for what has been called the “threat dialectic theory” in existentialism (Sullivan, Landau, & Kay, 2012). According to this theory, people oscillate on a regular basis between two opposing “poles” of threat. These poles are, on one hand, the threat that occurs prior to action in the world—associated with abstractness and the emotion of uncertainty-related anxiety—and on the other, the threat that occurs following action in the world—associated with concreteness and the emotion of guilt. Sartre (1943/2001) referred to these poles as the anxiety of transcendence and the guilt of facticity. Sartre further contributed the notion of bad faith: the thesis that people attempt to deny the radical ambiguity of their dialectical nature by defensively oversimplifying their existence (e.g., compensatory investment in social roles or patriotism).

To clarify these ideas, consider an example of the threat dialectic as it might occur in the context of depression. Clinical depression is characterized by repetitive thinking that takes the form of worry or rumination. Businesswoman Sarah’s 40th birthday induces a nagging question as to whether her life has been meaningful (in this case exemplifying a prior, abstract threat). Worry involves searching for concrete problems to give shape to abstract anxieties. Responding to the abstract threat with a concrete defense, Sarah might decide to work overtime to complete an ambitious project. However, Sarah’s long nights at the office then make her wonder whether she should spend more time with family. Rumination over past actions takes the place of worry about the future. The subsequent guilt activates new motivation for abstract defenses, prompting Sarah to re-conceptualize her career as trivial in order to justify more family time. Although such abstract defenses can be temporarily consoling, anxiety may proliferate once again. Sitting on the couch with her family, Sarah may wonder whether her time might be better spent at the office after all. The perseverative thinking characteristic of depression does not stop when solutions to obstacles are achieved, but continues to seek out other obstacles—and then to dialectically avoid them—ad infinitum.

The cultural-phenomenological school. Nietzsche’s radical epistemology heralded an end to grand narratives by psychologizing cultural constructs (e.g., religion). It set the stage for re-examination of the subjective position of the individual (i.e., phenomenology) and the importance of culture in shaping conscious experience (Breazeale, 1990). To understand how individuals view and experience the situations they encounter while immersed in the machinery of culture, the thinkers of this school employed three primary concepts: being, world, and horizon.

Heidegger (1962) plumbed the concept of human being not as a static category but as an unfinished action—individuals are not defined by their material positioning in particular places at particular times, but rather by their directedness towards chosen goals and their emotional relatedness to the events and objects around them. Binswanger (1963) elaborated on Heidegger’s foundation by proposing that human being is simultaneously distributed across three distinguishable phenomenological “worlds”: the Umwelt, or culturally-filtered “natural” environment; the Mitwelt, or world of human social relationships; and the Eigenwelt, or inner world of personal history and experience.

The thinkers of this school stressed that the boundaries of our experienced worlds are fluid despite our cultural attempts to contain them—we are constantly oriented towards horizons (Nietzsche, 1874/1997) or limits (Jaspers, 1919). These limit-horizons can be overcome in rare (and anxiety-inducing) moments of self-transcendence, which promise the potential for awe, meaning, and cultural transformation; yet if they are not clearly defined by our culture and adhered to by individuals, experience can spill out of bounds and overwhelm the experiencer. Experiences of psychological despair occurring in an appropriate cultural context may not be seen as ultimately problematic; early Calvinist sects, for instance, emphasized a view of “melancholy” as a form of redemptive suffering indicating providential favor (Gowland, 2006). Outside of such a tightly-spun cultural web, however, an individual may not be able to process or redeem feelings of despair: hence Ehrenberg’s (2010) comment that contemporary, secular depression can be seen as “guilt without an instruction manual.”

The two historical strains of existential thought have been assimilated to contemporary movements in psychology, but not in equivalent ways. The dialectical-psychological school, with its emphasis on polarities of threat and defense, has had a stronger influence on the research-focused tradition of experimental existential psychology. By contrast, the cultural-phenomenological school has made a deeper impression on clinical existential psychology.

We now turn to these two major wings of contemporary existential psychology. We selectively review the large literatures in the clinical existential tradition and in the social psychological subfield of experimental existential psychology. We compare these approaches by examining how they treat problems such as depression in ways that differ from mainstream psychology.

Clinical existential psychology, or existential psychotherapy, has typically characterized the human condition as insusceptible to total apprehension by means of categories and heuristics. Existential psychotherapy thus typically lacks clearly demarcated structural models (Lantz, 2004). This occasionally places the field in conflict with mainstream clinical psychology, where nosology has typically been considered requisite for developing empirically supported treatments. In order to test an intervention for depression, it is considered necessary to have an operationalization of what depression is. Until very recently such operationalization has involved “symptom clusters”—combinations of necessary criteria for something to qualify as the disorder—that define the object of the intervention (out of a set of nine criteria delineated in the DSM-5, if a person qualifies for five she is diagnosable with depression). Etiology is then understood in terms of what contributes to these clusters, and treatment mechanisms are investigated in light of the reduction of such criteria (c.f. Kazdin, 2002). The movement of existential psychotherapy has historically been critical of this paradigm, since the premises of existential psychology hold a view of the person as fundamentally whole, unique, and irreducible to nosological schemata.

Despite some diversity, existential psychotherapies are united by two qualities. First, they are concerned with questions of meaning: meaning in the lives of clients, in the work of therapists, and within the social fabric. Second, psychologists practicing in this modality asymptotically seek the values of authenticity, self-knowledge, and genuine encounter for patient and therapist (Correia, Cooper, & Berdondini, 2014; Wong, 2009; Yalom, 1980).

In the wake of the totalitarian movements of the early 20th century, a cadre of European and American psychologists initiated a therapeutic approach that prioritized the individual’s authenticity and autonomy. Influenced by the neo-Freudian work of Otto Rank (Kramer, 1995), these theorists inaugurated the field of humanistic psychology (Fromm, 1994; Maslow, 1998; Rogers, 1965). They employed theories of human flourishing centered on the notion of self-actualization: an authentic apprehension and expression of oneself within one’s circumstances—or, more simply, the fulfillment of one’s potential. The stymying of this potential was theorized to wholly or partly contribute to psychopathology. Viktor Frankl (1986), an Austrian-born psychoanalyst who turned his interest to the role of meaning after his own experiences in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, founded logotherapy. Logotherapy maintains that people are driven by a will to develop three sources of meaning: their labors, relationships, and responses to suffering. This work inspired a clinical examination of the construct of meaning, beginning with Crumbaugh and Maholick’s (1964) development of the Purpose in Life scale, which has consistently predicted a variety of mental health outcomes (Thir & Batthyány, 2016).

One of the distinctive characteristics of most existential psychotherapies is the influence of phenomenology. R. D. Laing (1965) helped solidify this perspective through his emphasis on validating the client’s own account of her experience, taking it at face value rather than applying an interpretive theory that privileges clinical knowledge over a client’s self-understanding. This existential stance does not preclude the possibility of distinct, perhaps conflicting, levels of experience, of which the client may not always be aware. For instance, Binswanger’s (1963) account of the Umwelt, Mitwelt and Eigenwelt posits different layers of being in the world that may invoke conflicting feelings and pressures. Part of the work of existential therapy is to attend to these levels without abnegating one for the sake of another.

These phenomenological influences have led existential psychologists to typically focus on the client as a whole person, and not as a collection of symptoms, events, or specific relationships. Furthermore, existential therapies underscore the intersubjective quality of being (Fuchs, 2013). Considering the phenomenology of depression, many patients express a dramatic shift in their experience of (close) others—other people seem distant or hostile, and the patient is unable to trust or love others (Ratcliffe, 2015). Existential therapists accordingly stress their own intersubjective role as a part of the client’s world. This has engendered attention to attributes such as empathy and therapeutic alliance, which demonstrably affect the client’s outcomes (Vos, Cooper, Correia, & Craig, 2015).

The aspiration toward a holistic approach to the person in therapy has to some extent run counter to the trend in American clinical psychology, especially after the publication of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual-III (Good, 2010; McNally, 2012). This may partially explain why training in existential treatment modalities has been on the decline in America, just as cognitive-behavioral therapies have flourished (Angus et al., 2015). Yet the mainstream perspective also has its detractors. David Goodman (2016) observed that this movement, termed the Empirically Supported Treatment (EST) movement, leads to a homogeneity of therapies that disproportionately disadvantages minority groups (e.g., patients of lower socioeconomic status). Paradoxically, it is partly thanks to the EST movement that clinical psychologists have begun to reassess the utility of symptom clusters, as research has revealed the limitations of this approach to classifying psychopathology. For example, consider the DSM-5’s “five-out-of-nine” diagnostic criteria for depression. According to this standard, two clients can have almost entirely different symptom profiles, with only one overlapping symptom, and still qualify for the same disorder. This has led clinicians to question whether two such clients would benefit from an identical intervention, even though they both “have depression.” The National Institute of Health’s introduction of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) seeks to address these and related difficulties, which may herald a sea change in treatment research. The RDoC emphasizes transdiagnostic approaches to psychopathology, such that each individual client can have a truly unique diagnostic profile and have treatments that cater to their specific concerns. A move away from diagnosis by type, and toward a conceptualization of people as navigating unique constellations of problems, may represent promising opportunities to reapply existential psychological principles to health care for issues such as depression (Ratcliffe, 2015).

XXP was inaugurated in the mid-1980s with the emergence of terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986). TMT posits that human consciousness is a “rupture” in evolutionary history—humans are temporally self-aware animals, mortal beings who know that they are mortal. The theory proposes that this knowledge is unacceptable and people invest in defense mechanisms—self-esteem and cultural worldviews—that convince them of their literal or symbolic immortality. When people encounter information reminding them of death, a nonconscious potential for anxiety is activated, which results in greater commitment to those belief systems in which the individual has invested as a source of immortality. The theory further highlights the importance of social consensus in supporting the ultimately fragile ideological structures which defend us from death thoughts. Thus, any information suggesting that others criticize or do not share one’s belief system should trigger nonconscious death anxiety—a hypothesis that has been well supported.

There are recent major reviews of TMT and the hundreds of social psychological experiments that have supported its tenets (Hayes, Schimel, Arndt, & Faucher, 2010; Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2015). For our purposes we will highlight the methodological innovations of TMT, without which the contemporary existential movement in social psychology would not have been possible.

First, the primary TMT experimental paradigm—namely, the “mortality salience” procedure—is the seed from which an entire new literature of “threat psychology” has sprung. Briefly, the creators of TMT reasoned that if psychological structures (e.g., religious beliefs) shield the individual from nonconscious death anxiety, then reminders of death (mortality salience) should increase investment in and defense of those structures. Hundreds of studies have indeed shown that, after a death reminder, people tend to be more patriotic, xenophobic, bigoted, self-aggrandizing, etc., compared to those who were reminded of other neutral or aversive conditions. Second, TMT advanced research on psychological defensiveness by developing a “dual defense model” (Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2015). TMT researchers distinguish between proximal defenses—conscious reactions to threat, which involve motivated reasoning (e.g., “Sure death is bad, but I’m not going to die for a long time, so why worry?”)—and distal defenses—compensatory symbolic investments which are not consciously connected to the threat (e.g., attending church more regularly after seeing a terrorist attack on the news). This model elegantly accounts for two frequent observations: (1) people often show more defensiveness when distracted from a threat such as death (i.e., once the threat has moved out of conscious awareness; Martens, Burke, Schimel, & Faucher, 2011); and (2) people “fluidly compensate,” meaning they respond to threats by defending structures which do not directly address the threat (e.g., sun-tanning to increase one’s attractiveness after thinking of death; Pyszczynski, Sullivan, & Greenberg, 2015).

Primarily through these advances, TMT provided a path for researchers to address existential concerns in the context of social psychological hypothesis testing. Researchers have modified the mortality salience paradigm to show that a variety of other psychological threats—including lack of control, uncertainty, meaninglessness, and social isolation (E. Jonas et al., 2014)—can elicit defensive effects parallel to those of death thoughts. Some researchers have offered synthetic views of this proliferating landscape. Sullivan et al. (2012) presented criteria for distinguishing truly existential threats from non-existential forms. An existential threat should (1) directly implicate the self, (2) induce the experience of or potential for negative affect, (3) implicate higher-order meaning structures and goals, and (4) increase the accessibility of death-related thoughts. Hart (2014) provided an integrative review of the XXP literature by proposing a “security system” model wherein a common psychological resource of security is distributed across three major loci of concern: the attachment system and social relationships; cultural worldviews; and self-esteem. Threats to any one of these resources may be compensated for by bolstering one of the other two. This model holds that while people’s defenses and goals are interrelated insofar as they all contribute to underlying security, they also have a certain functional autonomy. People’s needs for interpersonal attachment, for instance, are meaningfully distinct from their need for an orderly conception of their environment.

XXP examines issues such as depression from a different vantage compared to both mainstream perspectives and the clinical existential tradition. Existential clinicians are generally interested in how depression reflects a blockage of a personal quest for meaning in a particular individual. Adopting a more nomothetic view, XXP research suggests that depression may partly reflect a compromised anxiety buffer—in other words, the depressed individual is unable to mobilize resources of self-esteem and cultural meaning to a normative degree (Maxfield, John, & Pyszczynski, 2014). This may be the developmental outcome of repeated failures to bolster feelings of self-worth as a defense against death anxiety. Supporting this perspective, a recent experiment (Hayes, Ward, & McGregor, 2016) demonstrated that individuals with prior low levels of life satisfaction responded to the combinatorial experience of mortality salience and thoughts of personal failure with elevated state depression. Tragically, this process seems to increase susceptibility to the negative effects of death anxiety, as mildly depressed individuals show more exaggerated xenophobia toward outgroup members under mortality salience compared to non-depressed controls (Simon et al., 1996).

Although the dialectical-psychological and cultural-phenomenological schools stressed different themes, which have been mirrored in the differential emphases of social and clinical existential psychology, we nevertheless propose that three motifs arise repeatedly in existential views of the human essence.

Existential philosophers (e.g., Heidegger, 1946/1998) often insist on the uniqueness of the human species, stressing the importance of the will, that is, the person’s radical freedom to make choices in any situation and to interpret that situation in any way. At the same time, many theorists (e.g., Kierkegaard) insist also on the unique nature of each individual, an insistence echoed in contemporary existential psychologists’ call to understand the personal meaning of illness for the patient (Schneider, 2012). Indeed, Sartre (1965) proposed that for humans, existence precedes essence—in other words, from an existentialist vantage, it may be paradoxical to assert that there is any human essence at all.

These arguments have fundamental implications for methodology and practice. If symbolic cognition makes humanity unique as a species, then many of the methods appropriate for understanding the behavior of other species (e.g., neurocognitive or behaviorist approaches) may not give a full account of human behavior. Consider the limitations of the learned-helplessness theory of depression, which was initially grounded in animal learning models but has required repeated reformulation to account for symbolic appraisal processes in humans (e.g., Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978, c.f. Willner, 1984). Furthermore, if each person is in an idiosyncratic life-situation, then one-size-fits-all approaches to therapy will not permit individuals to reach their fullest potential.

Self and world are coextensive in experience, implying the unity of motivation, cognition, and affect. As a consequence, human cognition is characterized by affective intentionality—we perceive and are emotionally attuned to objects and environments in terms of their affordances for meaningful, goal-related activity. And human action occurs on the intersecting planes of the Umwelt, Mitwelt, and Eigenwelt—whatever we are doing, we are “always already” in a symbolically-laden situation of languages and meanings which shape our behavior.

To understand human action, we must take account of the person’s temporal and spatial experience of their situation, heavily filtered as it is by processes of symbolic cognition. Consider yet another depression narrative: “I feel hopeless and useless, and my self-confidence drops so low that sometimes I cannot even leave the house to buy food as I don’t feel worthy to be taking up any space and time” (Ratcliffe, 2015, p. 113). This statement shows not only that depression involves the individual’s physical relationship with his or her surrounding environment. It further points to the fact that that environment is culturally filtered—in this case, by a postindustrial culture that sees time and space as commodities to be purchased and used wisely, generating a feeling of uselessness in the patient who is merely “taking up” these resources.

Contemporary existential psychology has elaborated our understanding of the person’s encounter with the situation. XXP has demonstrated that people often construe situations in defensively motivated ways, as a result of affective factors operating largely outside their focal awareness. And existential psychotherapy has provided an alternative to more deterministic approaches by individualizing and localizing therapy, even focusing on the concrete situation of the therapeutic session as a way to connect to the patient’s affective-motivational experience (Yalom, 1980).

Existentialism portrays the person as a site of becoming, a work-in-progress whose incompleteness is both tragic and redemptive. Sartre (see D. G. Cooper, 1971) described human existence as the continual enactment of a “progressive-regressive method.” Persons are continually involved in the pursuit and actualization of projects (meaningful goals). The person is defined by what they can and cannot do in relation to a project at a given moment. All activity is, at one and the same time, progression toward an as-yet unrealized (but envisioned) prospect, and a simultaneous regression to a pre-existing “field of possibilities” set by one’s cultural and material circumstances. It is in this sense that the concept of freedom in existentialism is vital but tragic; it is always accompanied by the shadow of threat. This is why Sartre said we are “condemned to be free”: freedom binds us to the experience of anguish and responsibility even if our options are in fact constrained by cultural-material circumstances outside our influence.

Reflecting on depression, despite the apparent externally imposed quality of this experience, people are “free” to interpret it in a variety of unique ways. In line with the dialectical-psychological school, some patients associate depression with anxiety and the chaos of possibility: “Insane whirling repetitive thinking which is completely incapable of finding a solution and over-complicates and throws up road blocks at every turn. Can’t focus or read, sometimes can’t even watch TV as requires too much concentration” (Ratcliffe, 2015, p. 152). However, other patients primarily experience depression through a narrative of personal guilt: “I know depression is an illness but at the same time I feel like I caused it . . . I feel like I am to blame for the violence caused by my biological [dad] towards me and my mum, which started when she was pregnant with me” (Ratcliffe, 2015, p. 154). Yet these diverse interpretations of depression are, when seen from a broader perspective, culturally constrained. Research shows that individualist cultures encourage manifestations of depression that largely consist of negative evaluations of the self or the world; yet depression in collectivist cultures is often experienced in a more somatic or other-oriented fashion (Sullivan, 2016).

The issue of the cultural boundedness of existential phenomena points toward several themes which deserve further attention. Consider the claim, Humanity is a unique species.

As a philosopher once responded to a statement about human cognition based on research with flies: there is mounting evidence that humans are not flies. Just as rat models in cancer research are limited by important biological differences between humans and rodents, behavioral and evolutionary models rooted in animal research speak only narrowly about humans living in a symbolic world. The claim of human uniqueness helps prevent unfounded generalization, especially from animals without the advantages and problems that metacognition entails.

Yet the exact boundaries between human and animal cognition are murky (H. Jonas, 1966), and positing uniqueness takes an unnecessary hostage in an argument whose aim is ostensibly pragmatic and epistemic: to understand people, it is important to examine metacognitive self-awareness, as well as to acknowledge that every person’s phenomenology is unique. To make human species uniqueness a requisite for this position may be unnecessary and potentially harmful (insofar as elevating humanity’s ontological status can support ongoing mistreatment of other animals; Esposito, 2012).

Delineating the human condition as distinct from other animals’ facilitates universalistic statements about humans in toto. For example, existential psychologists (Becker, 1973; Pyszcczynski et al., 2015) hold that culture universally provides people with tools to defend against the dread associated with mortality. To cast the net so wide that it applies to everyone is to risk losing the situated uniqueness of the individual’s attempts at these obstacles. A telling critique of the existential movement is that it too easily ignores the realities of oppression, applying dread as a constant, rather than as a dynamic and culturally influenced variable (Maldonado-Torres, 2007).

Moreover, it can be difficult to separate the methods one uses—and therefore the findings one generates with those methods—from the encultured assumptions that led to the methods’ production. In this way, seemingly universal characteristics may in fact be artifacts of one’s own instruments. Consider the cultural boundedness of depression, mentioned in the preceding section. Since Kierkegaard, existentialists have been inclined to interpret despair as a profoundly cognitive experience involving nihilistic beliefs. Yet this seemingly universal conception may have arisen because in Western culture experiences like depression are primarily experienced and studied through individual speech and writing (Sullivan, 2016). Religious confession, therapy, and the self-report survey—which all involve the individual self-disclosing in relative isolation—have had a profound impact on psychological experience in European-American culture. Cultures where such methods have had less impact seem to produce different experiences of depression and other existential phenomena.

One attempt to preserve the broad reach of the existentialist project while addressing these epistemological and ethical questions has been carried out by anthropologists such as Michael Jackson (2005), Thomas Csordas (1997), and Michael Taussig (1992). Existential and phenomenological anthropology draws the hermeneutic circle back upon the writer, placing the subjectivity of the author at the heart of the narrative (Jackson, 2005). The implication of totality is lost because the account comes through the incomplete subjectivity of a narrator. Not insignificantly, similar techniques can be found in the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. These approaches contrast with the “view from nowhere,” which marks much of psychological discourse (Billig, 2011). How can psychologists follow suit?

Part of the reason for the gap between the clinical and experimental existential psychology movements lies in their historically different answers to this question. Clinical existential psychologists typically make clear that their observations are acquired through intersubjective encounters. For them theory is indeed biography, and the writer is inextricable from what she produces (Spinelli, 2014). However, this approach is not considered appropriate to the empirical methods of social psychologists. An experiment must yield reproducible results regardless of the researcher’s characteristics. Nevertheless, a possible route toward embracing the existentialist vision for social psychologists may be the increased use of mixed methods. Qualitative case studies provide a much more nuanced vision of the individual’s experience of threat (Sullivan, 2016). Such bridging efforts have gone both ways, as existential clinicians have for their part begun to take up experimental and quantitative research methods.

There have now been numerous studies and several meta-analyses of existential therapy as an empirically supported treatment modality, including a number of randomized controlled trials (Angus et al., 2015; Vos et al., 2015). This has expanded the methodological arsenal of clinical existential psychology and contributed to its greater relevance in the clinical community. In a similar vein, therapies that apply the findings of XXP to clinical interventions in a scripted, modular way have been proposed. For example, TMT-integrated existential therapy integrates aspects of exposure therapy with the mortality salience methods of TMT research to foster greater tolerance for mortality awareness (Lewis, 2014). The role of mortality, meaning, and purpose is likewise undergoing renewed exploration among populations such as bereaved adults (Neimeyer, Klass, & Dennis, 2014), cancer patients (Spiegel, 2015), and people with a range of mental disorders (Grosz, 2015; Iverach, Menzies, & Menzies, 2014). As the clinical psychology field weighs the merits of moving away from symptom cluster models of psychopathology, new opportunities are opened up for integrating the contributions of existential psychotherapy.

A number of existential psychologists sit uneasily with this rapprochement, at least in its current form. Spinelli (2014) doubts whether quantitative methods and prescriptive therapies can sedulously follow through on the premises of existentialism. Just as the numeric mean can erase the individual, prescriptive therapies risk ignoring those aspects of individuals that are not susceptible to the therapeutic method. The stakes are high. No doubt, psychology as a whole would benefit from the recombination of the clinical and experimental variants of existential psychology. As the field transforms, its conception of what it means to be human may become enriched, or lost, in the process.

With existentialism’s emphasis on threat, that conception is certainly a troubled one. Yet there is another side to existentialism’s dialectical approach. Recognizing the importance of threat and limit in human experience allows the psychologist to see the marvel of expansion and transcendence. People are not only defensively reactive, but often ingeniously creative in their attempts to come to terms with the limits of self-aware existence, be it through religion, art, or empathetic prosociality. Existential-humanistic perspectives like self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) celebrate the many ways in which individuals create spaces of autonomy despite the constraints in their lives. Developmental studies of generativity (McAdams, 2006) document how, spurred by their ongoing quest for meaning in the face of mortality, many individuals work selflessly to improve the world for future humankind.

By identifying those themes shared by clinical and experimental existential psychology—the uniqueness of humanity and the individual, the indissolubility of the person and the situation, and the ubiquity of freedom and threat—we may be able to foster understanding not only of human suffering, but of human flourishing as well. It should be observed that many individuals have been able to derive not only despair but “strength and beauty from depression” (Solomon, 2016). If there is a final lesson from existentialism, it may be that the human essence and its apparent aberrations are what we make of them.