Existential Therapy

In 2012 I started a private practice in Carlton, Melbourne, which ran for a decade alongside my organisational counselling work, and focused on existential therapy. My philosophical counselling includes my sophisticated understanding and practice of existential therapy.

Existential therapy is a philosophical form of psychotherapy. Across those years of private practice I took deep dives into the approaches of Irvin Yalom, Betty Cannon, Viktor Frankl, and various others. Above all, I was influenced by Emmy van Deurzen. I will summarise some of these approaches.

Irvin Yalom's existential therapy is essentially psychodynamic psychotherapy structured around existential concerns. For classical psychodynamic (or psychoanalytic) therapy, we have intrapsychic conflicts, which arouse anxiety, and that anxiety arouses psychological defenses such as those mentoined above. For Yalom, the structure is the same except that rather than intrapsychic conflict (e.g. a desire that clashes with an internalised social norm) what arouses anxiety are the existential conditions of life.

Yalom focuses on four such existential challenges: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. His therapy involves recognising one's defenses, and how they are responses to anxiety that is aroused by these existential conditions. The cure is to learn to make peace with these existential facts of life, and so to diminish the anxiety they arouse—to live wisely and courageously with the inevitability of such anxiety, and to find more beneficial ways of responding to it, abandoning your older disfunctional defenses. 

Moving to another form of existential therapy, it is little known that the most famous existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, was fascinated by Freud and psychoanalysis. He was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, and wrote numerous brilliant books that explored analysis from an existential perspective. Sartre developed the seeds of an "existential psychoanalysis." Betty Cannon brought those seeds to fruition. It focuses on Sartre's idea that as children we encounter the world, with all its challenges. Or rather, we encounter a particular world, shaped by our family, with all the problems and expectations that brings. In response to that world, including especially the challenges we experience, we embark on a "life project" which unfolds across the rest of our life. At least, it continues until we become aware of it, and make adult choices about it. You encounter vulnerability and fear in your family, and decide you will become heroic. In adulthood you live in a way that enables you to see yourself as heroic, and invites others to do the same. If that is an expression of a genuine, deep passion, then wonderful. But what if it turns out to be a mask?

If it turns out that our life project is a form of inauthentic life, that restricts life, that diminishes it, then we may want to abandon it. To do that, you need to see it, and this is what Sartre's and Cannon's existential psychoanalysis helps you to do. You also need for formulate a new life project, and this therapy helps you do that, and enact it.

Irvin Yalom, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Betty Cannon offer brilliant syntheses of some of the best aspects of pschodynamic psychotherapy, and of existential philosophy. Viktor Frankl developed an approach that is more focused on the conscious cultivation of wisdom, meaning, and purpose. Not only an existential therapist, but a Holocaust survivor, Frankl observed that the person who can find a Why can bear almost any How. I have seen this repeatedly in my own work: people are remarkably resourceful...when they are motivated. The malaise of our culture is not a lack of tools or techniques but a lack of a deep Why. Frankl tested this thesis in the laboratories of Auschwitz and Dachau.

​The power of Frankl's existential therapy, which he called Logotherapy, lies in its capacity to explore the potential meaning in people's struggles, and to thus help them cultivate a stronger sense of value, purpose, and motivation. Logotherapy is helpful beyond the kind of terrible struggles Frankl recounted in his memoir Man's Search for Meaning. Indeed, the premise of his approach is that life is a struggle, at an existential level, for most people. Nihilism threatens. So does boredom, or the pull of addiction, or rage, or loss and grief. All of us need to clarify and create our deeper purpose, so as to possess the clarity and energy to tolerate the many challenges of living, and not only that, but in order to live well, to live deeply and richly. 

Above all, I was influenced by the work of Emmy van Deurzen. Her Existential Therapy draws more directly on the philosophical tradition than either Yalom's or Frankl's. Where Yalom adapts existential themes to a psychodynamic framework, van Deurzen grounds her practice in the phenomenological method as developed by Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, and in the existential analysis of thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Her approach begins not with a set of predetermined existential concerns such as per Yalom's four conditions, but with a rigorous attempt to understand the client's world as it is lived—the particular way this person experiences and makes sense of existence. She maps the human condition across four dimensions: the physical world of nature and embodiment, the social world of others, the personal world of self, and the spiritual world of ideals, values, and meaning. A flourishing life requires something like balance across these dimensions, and therapy is an exploration of where that balance has been lost, and how it might be recovered.

Emmy van Deurzen emphasises that the therapist is not a technician applying a method, but a fellow traveller, accompanying the client into the difficult, rewarding work of facing existence honestly and, we might say, heroically. For the philosophical counsellor, van Deurzen offers a model of how to integrate phenomenological depth with existential courage—how to help a person not only see their life more clearly, but to take responsibility for it, to choose, to commit, to live with the anxiety that comes from freedom rather than fleeing. Her work stands as a bridge between the therapeutic and the philosophical. It was an excellent bridge into my final goal of Philosophical Counselling.