Ep.1 - Existential Psychotherapy, Inner Consent & Phenomenology
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Wiley World Handbook of Existential Psychotherapy: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Wiley+World+Handbook+of+Existential+Therapy-p-9781119167150
Existential Analysis: https://www.existentialanalysis.ca/
Topics discussed in this episode:
· Existential psychotherapy
· Existential Analysis
· Inner consent
· Authenticity
· Dialogue
· Phenomenology
Existential psychotherapy deals with what it means to be a human being and how to live a good life. It addresses the perennial questions of humanity such as: “Who am I?”, “What am I living for?”, “What is a good life?”, “How to face suffering, aloneness and death?”. Instead of engaging in an abstract, philosophical dialogue about these topics, existential therapy pays deliberate and caring attention to uncover and understand client’s lived experiences as they unfold in the “here and now” of the therapeutic relationship. A core purpose of existential therapy is to support clients to become themselves, to take themselves and their lives seriously, to live their freedom by making choices attuned to their existential conditions, to assume responsibility for these choices, and to find meaning in their lives. If you’d like to read more about existential psychotherapy, check out the following resource: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Wiley+World+Handbook+of+Existential+Therapy-p-9781119167150
Existential Analysis (EA) is a European school of existential psychotherapy developed in Vienna by Dr. Alfried Laengle based on Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy. EA is defined as a phenomenological and person-oriented psychotherapy, with the aim of guiding a person to a free experience of their mental and emotional life, to make authentic decisions, and to discover a truly responsible way of dealing with life and the world. You can read more about EA at: https://www.existentialanalysis.ca/
Living an existentially attuned life involves giving our free, felt “yes” to life, and to the various actions and situations in which we find ourselves. This means living with inner consent, an ongoing and dynamic process of personal attunement to both the outer world and to one’s own inwardness, in order to affirm one’s existence within the myriad of concrete situations encountered in one’s life. According to Existential Analysis, human beings are asked to give their inner consent to the four inescapable realities or conditions of existence: the world, life, personhood, and the future with its unfolding horizons of meaning. These four conditions represent the structure of existence and pose us some fundamental challenges or questions: “Can I be here in this existence?”, “Do I like life?”, “May I be myself?” and “For what am I living?” These questions motivate human beings to engage in dialogue with these conditions of their world and with themselves to provide a personal response to the challenges of one’s existence. As Existential Analysis reminds us, to be human is to be questioned, and to live is to give one’s free answer to these existential questions.
This fundamental human dialogical capacity is supported by remaining open to what is in front of us and within us, and by cultivating an attitude of phenomenological openness. The phenomenological attitude represents an existential stance of encountering the world by reclaiming one’s “noetic virginity”, or the purity of one’s way of looking at the world and oneself. Adopting a phenomenological attitude invites us to look anew in order to see the essential in our everydayness. Caring, sustained attention and stripping down our presuppositions about whatever we may come across in our lives are important prerequisites for phenomenological seeing.
Phenomenology represents the key method of existential psychotherapy and it is implemented via a rigorous process that starts with rich descriptions of client’s lived experience, moves on to gathering and elaborating client’s subjective impressions (i.e. feelings, impulses and phenomenological content), supports the client to find their personal position towards a given life situation, and concludes by helping the client find and implement the free, authentic response in their specific situation.
