Lecture on Existentialism and Existential Therapy
Lecture on Existentialism and Existential Therapy
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Dr. Stephen Ticktin -Existentialism as a word and philosophy emerges on the Continent in the aftermath of the second world war. No-one knows who coined the word. Some say it was the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel who used the term to describe the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. Others claim it was a French journalist named Jean Wahl who wrote one of the earliest books on the subject. Eventually Jean Paul Sartre adopted the term and in 1946 gave his famous public address Existentialism and Humanism. -The word ‘existentialism’ is a misnomer because it is not an ism. It is not a unified body of thought or a rational systematic metaphysics or ethics in the tradition of Kant or Hegel. In fact it is a reaction against that kind of absolutist philosophy that focuses on the abstract, universal and necessary features of mankind and ignores the particular individual. What makes European existentialism so interesting in contradistinction to the Anglo-American tradition is that it is a philosophy about life. -So existentialism is more a style of philosophising but it does give vent to the metaphysical impulse. It is concerned with a branch of classical philosophy called ontology or the study of being and in particular the nature of human existence. Existentialists do focus on a number of key concepts and themes: anxiety, autonomy, authenticity, freedom and responsibility. However different existentialists place different emphases on them. Some existentialists are religious and others are atheists. Some focus on the individual and others focus on the relational aspects of human existence. -There are 2 philosophers in the 19th century who are considered precursors of modern 20th century existentialism. Both of them were rebels and prophets of their time. The first was Soren Kierkegaard who railed against the Lutheran church but in fact considered being a Christian the highest stage on life’s way. However he stressed that the belief in God was irrational. It cannot be proved. You simply had to take a leap of faith. He focused on the individual and his or her subjective truth. He also emphasized choice and what he called the dizziness of freedom. In contrast Nietzsche was an atheist. He stated that God was dead so there could be no absolute morality. He considered Christianity a slave morality and he valued the master morality of the ancient Greeks. Most of the existentialists were influenced by a German Jewish philosopher by the name of Edmund Husserl. He invented a method, a counterpoint to modern empirical science, called Phenomenology. Its aim was to see the world and the various phenomena within it afresh. This he thought could be accomplished by bracketing out your theoretical assumptions about any particular phenomenon and describing it in infinite detail without trying to explain it. Ultimately Husserl was interested in the essential structures of consciousness. His philosophy was referred to as pure or transcendental phenomenology harking back to Kant, The existentialists, on the other hand, were realists and wrote existential phenomenology or if you like phenomemological ontology. Lecture on Existentialism and Existential Therapy
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Although there are a myriad of existential philosophers I will focus on 2 namely Heidegger and Sartre. HEIDEGGER Martin Heidegger(1889-1976) was from a Catholic working class background and grew up in a small town in southwest Germany called Messkirch. He initially studied theology but switched to philosophy at the University of Freiburg after having read Aristotle’s Metaphysics. He felt that Aristotle had asked the big questions: First why is there something rather than nothing and secondly what is the nature of Being qua Being. So his main interest in philosophy was in ontology, a classical branch of metaphysics. He was not essentially writing ethics but it is possible to derive an ethics from his and Sartre’s writings. Such an attempt was made by Hazel Barnes, an American philosopher and translator of Sartre, who wrote a book called “Toward an Existentialist Ethics. Heidegger was initially a student of Husserl’s who had become the Professor of Philosophy in Freiburg in 1916. Initially he courted Husserl’s favour but by the time he wrote his magnum opus Being and Time in 1927 he had essentially broken from Husserl because he felt that Husserl had made a fundamental error by bracketing out existence. The aim of Being and Time was to demonstrate that the ultimate meaning of human existence which he called Dasein or Being There was time. He never finished his project and what we have in English translation are only the first 2 parts of his book. Dasein is in the world and he calls it Being-in- the- World. We start life by being thrown into a world (he uses the word Geworfenheit) not of own making but with a given historical and cultural context and the existential challenge is to wake up from our everydayness and not simply immerse ourselves in what he calls Das Man or The They. This he calls the call of conscience whose aim is to assist you in living an authentic life. This does not mean simply being true to yourself but living in full awareness of the ontological givens. What are these ontological givens? First and foremost is that life is finite and that we are all going to die. He calls Dasein Being-Towards-Death and this evokes tremendous anxiety in ourselves. Secondly as beings in the world we are in relation to other beings in the world and other things in the world. For example a hammer, he says, can be Vorhanden i.e. simply present or Zuhanden meaning it has human purpose. Our relation to other beings and things is therefore characterized as being one of care or concern (here he uses the word Sorge). Therefore one has to be courageous and resolute in one’s attempt to live an authentic life and not simply fall back into the state of Das Man, In the 30’s Heidegger unfortunately got swept up in the rise of Hitler and Fascism. His friends including Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, a former student and lover, were dismayed and the question remains how much of his philosophy is linked to the tenets of National Socialism. After the war Heidegger never apologized for his involvement with Fascism. His thoughts on Nazism have recently published as The Black Notebooks. Interestingly enough he was barred from teaching at the university. In the 50’s he gave a series of talks to Medard Boss’ students in Switzerland called The Zollicon Lectures. Boss was one of the first existential therapists and called his approach Daseinanalysis. Lecture on Existentialism and Existential Therapy
JEAN PAUL SARTRE Jean Paul Sartre was a French philosopher who grew up in the countryside of France outside of Paris. He studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superior in Paris but he never held a university post. He was more than a philosopher. He was a novelist and a playwright as well. When Walter Huston made the film about Freud in 1964 he initially invited Sartre to write the screenplay which he did. Huston ultimately rejected it but it has been published as a separate book under the title The Freud Scenario. Sartre was introduced to Husserl’s writings in the early 30’s by his good friend Raymond Aron who had gone to Freiburg in 1931. They were sitting together in the Café Flore, one of Sartre’s regular haunts ( the other being the Aux Deux Maggots on the Left Bank of the Seine) with his constant companion and lover Simone De Beauvoir whom he had met 5 years earlier and who had graduated in philosophy from the Sorbonne. Raymond announced to them that he could make philosophy out of the apricot cocktail they were drinking by using Husserl’s phenomenological method. He suggested that Sartre go to Germany and study phenomenology which he did in 1933 Sartre’s magnum opus was called Being and Nothingness and was subtitled An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. It was published in 1943. Prior to that he had published a novel in 1938 called La Nausee or Nausea in which certain existential themes were already present. But Being and Nothingness was his claim to fame and after the war he became a much sought after person especially by people on the left. The main theses of Being and Nothingness is that existence precedes essence and that man is born radically free. However along with that freedom comes a responsibility to make something out of himself i.e., to create a meaningful life. Lecture on Existentialism and Existential Therapy
As an atheist he believed that there was no given meaning to life, no God to guarantee an absolute morality. In each situation in life one had to choose and typically existential decisions were one’s made in anguish. He made a distinction between human existence or etre-pour-soi and inanimate existence or etre-en- soi. The latter’s essence was given, the former’s was not. After the war Sartre gave his famous lecture called Existentialism is a Humanism. In it he gave the example of a man, a member of the French Resistance, who is faced with a dilemma: should he stay with his mother who is sick and dying or should he return to the front and help fight in the resistance. There is no-one he can turn to help him make this decision. It is simply one that he will have to make on his own with all the attendant anxiety. In the 50’s and 60’s Sartre became more politicized and left-wing. This culminated in the publication of his work entitled The Critique of Dialectical Reasoning in which he tried to marry his earlier existentialism with his surging Marxism. It was virtually an impossibility as the two make very strange bedfellows. Existentialism does not imply any given political philosophy. During these years he also started a journal called Les Temps Moderns with his good friend and fellow existential philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty. For a while they even roped in another existential philosopher Albert Camus whose book
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the Myth of Sisyphus emphasized the ultimate absurdity and meaninglessness of life and that the only serious question in philosophy is that of suicide: To be or not to be. EXISTENTIAL THERAPY Existential therapy likewise grew up in the 40’s. Its aim can be summed up in a nutshell. It is the exploration of a person’s life along 4 existential dimensions: The umwelt or natural world, the mitwelt or social world, the eigenwelt or personal world and finally the spiritual world, with the aim of clarifying where the person has come from, where the person is now, and where they hope to be in the future. Unlike psychoanalysis it does not try to explain the person’s present in terms of the past, and it does not work with psychoanalytic concepts such as The Unconscious or transference. According to Mick Cooper’s book “Existential Therapies” there are a number of different schools which I will now describe. The Swiss School The first existential therapist was Ludwig Binswanger. He had worked at the famous Burgholzli Hospital in Zurich whose director was Eugen Bleuler, the man who coined the term schizophrenia, and he also had a correspondence with Freud. He had read Heidegger and invented a therapy, based on his ideas, which he called “Daseinanalyze”. Lecture on Existentialism and Existential Therapy
However Heidegger felt that Binswanger had misunderstood his work. The second existential therapist was Medard Boss who was originally a psychoanalyst but felt it was constraining in some ways. He too read Heidegger and developed a therapeutic approach which he called Daseinanalysis. He stressed an openess to Being. He was the one who invited Heidegger to come and teach his students. Daseinanalysis still exists and there is a Daseinanalytic Society here in Toronto that is run by, ironically enough, Anna Binswanger-Healy. The Viennese School This school revolves around the work of Viktor Frankl who lived in Vienna but eventually came to the States. He was a concentration camp survivor and wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. He called his approach Logotherapy and said that the aim of life is to find meaning in it. Paul Wong who lives here in Toronto is a Franklian and runs something called the Meaning Network, He hosts biannual conferences. The British School It was R.D.Laing, David Cooper, and Aaron Esterson who were the first proponents in the 60’s of an existential approach to therapy. Laing’s first book “The Divided Self”, published in 1960, was subtitled An Existential Approach to Madness. Laing and Cooper went on to publish a book called Reason and Violence” in 1964 which was a précis of some of the writings of Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre wrote a favourable foreward to the book. All three were critical of psychiatry and in fact Cooper coined the word anti-psychiatry which became a movement against psychiatry in the 60’s and 70’s. In 1965 they set up The Philadelphia Association which sponsored therapeutic households where people in distress could go as an alternative to hospitalization.
Mike Thompson, a former American student of Laing’s now hosts annual conferences on Laing at the Esalen Institute in California. The second wave of existential therapy in England began in the 80”s at Regent’s College in London which housed the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling. It was run by Emmy van Deurzen, a Dutch philosopher and psychologist who set up an Advanced Diploma in Existential therapy. Ernesto Spinelli and Hans Cohn were two of the prominent lecturers there. All three have published books on existential therapy. Emmy now runs her own school in London called The New School of Psychotherapy. The American School This is a much more eclectic existential approach which shows a rapprochement with both Psychoanalytic and Humanistic therapies. In fact existential therapy in America grew up alongside the development of the humanistic therapies which were spawned by the Esalen Institute in California.
The father of American existential therapy was Rollo May who had studied with the existential theologian Paul Tillich. He was good friends with Laing and also Carl Rogers who invented Person-Centred Psychotherapy. Fritz Perls who was resident at the Esalen Institute for some year called his therapy Gestalt Therapy and said it was the third school of existential therapy harking back to Binswanger and Boss. The American School is oriented more toward the individual and is not averse to using certain techniques unlike the British School. It has something of the American pioneering spirit. Other American existential therapists are James Bugenthal and Kirk Schneider who was a student of Rollo May’s. Lecture on Existentialism and Existential Therapy
