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Existential
Therapy
The basis for the Existential approach to therapy
is the desire for authenticity where an individual finds and
pursues a meaning for life. Individuals seek to fully
experience their existence developing meaning and purpose in
the events that touch their lives. Viktor Frankl is a
primary contributor for this model, resulting from his
experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the 1940’s.
Although Frankl had already begun to develop his approach
prior to his traumatic events, it was through sharing his
personal experience and applying this to the theory that
this therapy developed.
A second major contributor to Existential theory
is Rollo May who, like Frankl, developed his approach
through extreme experience. He had developed tuberculosis
and spent two years in a sanitarium. His writings reflect a
personal testimony of how he resolved and worked through
resulting anxiety. The existential approach emphasizes an
individual’s ability to have freedom of choice when
determining the purpose of their circumstances. This is
contrary to and rejects the deterministic view of human
nature that comprises the fundamental basis of
psychoanalytic therapy.
While there are a number of contributors that
continue to develop this modality of therapy, some specific
forms of existential therapy have developed. Frankl, for
example, developed logo-therapy with a philosophical model
that looks to understand what it means to be fully alive and
find meaning through suffering.
During an assessment, therapists look for themes
of isolation, meaninglessness, responsibility, and
mortality. Therapists also want to ensure individuals are
able to face life honestly, as they look at experiences and
integrate meaning and purpose into their worldview. As a
means to help individuals, dreams, objective tests, and
projective tests are useful to assist individuals to
interpret and find meaning to the challenges and anxiety
they face. In this process, the concept and meaning of
death as it results to a client’s subjective experience
becomes an important component in the quest to obtain
purpose in life.
The existential approach looks at six basic
dimensions of the human condition when developing awareness
and finding meaning in pain and suffering. The first of
these is the individual’s capacity for self-awareness
through the understanding that the ability to choose a
potential action or not to make a decision is active and not
passive. As individuals understand that the direction of
their life is in their own hands, how they engage life and
view the events around them becomes more personal, rather
than simply a victimized state of helplessness, the result
of merely reacting to a life that is beyond control.
In
developing this level of awareness, therapy with an
existential view helps individuals acknowledge the freedom
and responsibility they have for choices and decisions.
Identity and relationships with others develop, eventually
leading to authenticity that creates the foundation for
health. As individuals work through these aspects of
living, the fourth aspect of this therapy, the search for
meaning, becomes relevant as pain and suffering integrates
itself into the overall purpose for an individual’s life.
Through this process, new meaning may be ascribed
and old traditions that were imposed may be discarded to
determine the authentic self. Anxiety that is experienced
is determined to arise from one’s need to survive and to
maintain one’s self. It is through this attempt to create a
stable self that anxiety is experienced. The final
component of existential therapy is an awareness of death
and nonbeing. Death is not viewed as negative; rather, it
is seen as a way to give significance to living and to take
full advantage of life.
Existential therapy seeks to help clients live
with freedom and to remove the limitations that are
self-imposed. By challenging clients about rigid beliefs
and thought patterns, therapists work to provide an
environment where individuals are safe to consider their
belief systems and adopt new views. Therapists focus on
current life situations the client is dealing with rather
than resolving past issues. Through this focus on the here
and now, individuals address their beliefs and look at
enjoying life more fully and with greater satisfaction for
the future.
A major concern of this therapeutic modality is
the lack of systematic process for practicing and applying
to various situations. Due to the lack of precision,
confusion on how to lead an individual into the process of
challenging beliefs and awareness of the freedom of choice
she has is unclear. Additionally, philosophical insight is
not appropriate for all clients, which further limits the
opportunity to effectively utilize this method.
Personal
Evaluation
“Life is
suffering.” This is the primary tenet of the religion of
Buddhism and from this philosophy Siddhartha Guatama two
thousand years ago developed a way of life which has led to
a worldwide religion. This form of eastern thought
permeates the existential model of therapy. The emphasis on
subjective, self-determinism and the inherent supposition
that by default, life is void of meaning is a dangerous
point of view for a Christian therapist. To postulate that
fulfillment and purpose can ultimately be achieved solely
from within is a futile endeavor. To put simply, either
humans have real value or they don’t. Either
someone has a purpose for existing in this universe, or he
does not. Self-inflicted purpose in a universe governed
only by hapless chance is nothing more than a delusion.
Being composed of protons, electrons, and neutrons, a human
being is made up of exactly the same mass and energy as a
brick, or a floating cloud of hydrogen drifting in the upper
stratosphere on a lifeless moon circling around an unknown
planet in a distant galaxy. If a human is to have more
value than a brick or a gas cloud, and I am talking about
real value, not made-up value, then that value must come
from without, not within.
Existential
thought places a great deal of importance on such concepts
as death, meaning, and purpose. For this reason, I
compliment this form of therapy for touching on critical
issues that are at the core of human existence that other
systems completely overlook. How many clients wander into a
counseling office with day-to-day issues, yet in their core,
they have no purpose, the thing they want the most. They
may spend months in counseling and eventually leave, the
counselor having never touched that realm that they longed
for the deepest. While I admire existential therapy for its
bravery in emphasizing the primary importance of finding
meaning in life, and coming to terms with the concept of
death, I also feel pity because it falls short of taking the
next logical step; that the subjective self is not
sufficient to obtain actual purpose for existence.
The individual is doomed to a self-deluded feeling of
purpose, and possibly even more a sense of emptiness than
when he first began therapy.
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