Existential Therapy: History and Concepts

EXISTENTIAL THERAPY

• Described as a philosophical approach influencing a counselor's therapeutic process.
• Emphasizes freedom and responsibility in choices.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

• Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855): A Danish philosopher interested in angst, which is a deep anxiety or dread about the human condition or the state of the world.
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): Emphasized Subjectivity and will power to potentiality and creativity.
• Martin Heidegger (1889-1976): Focused on Phenomenological Experience.
• Jean-Paul Sarte (1905-1980): Believed our values are what we choose, and introduced the concept of Bad Faith.
• Martin Buber (1878-1965): Focused on Betweenness and that there is no I, always the Other.
• Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966): Focused on The Self.
• Medard Boss (1975): An Early Existential Psychotherapist focused on Being-in-the-world.
• Irvin Yalom (1980): Introduced Givens of Existence.

VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE

• Bases therapeutic practice on understanding what it means to be human.
• Poses questions: Who am I? What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope for?

BASIC DIMENSIONS OF THE HUMAN CONDITION

• Capacity for self-awareness.
• Freedom and responsibility.
• Creating identity and establishing meaningful relationships.
• Searching for meaning, purpose, values, and goals.
• Anxiety as a condition of living.
• Awareness of death and nonbeing.

CAPACITY FOR SELF-AWARENESS

• Increasing capacity to live fully includes recognizing finite time, potential for action, choosing our actions, and understanding that meaning comes from being thrown into the world.
• Increasing capacity to live fully also involves increasing awareness and sense of responsibility.
• Humans are subject to loneliness, meaninglessness, and emptiness, and are basically alone.
• People see how they trade the security of dependence for anxiety when choosing themselves.

FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

• Bad Faith is highlighted.
• "Since that's the way I am made, I couldn't help what I did. Naturally, I am this way because I grew up in a dysfunctional family".
• Sarte said we are our choices.
• Rather than losing oneself in a crowd, recognizing uniqueness and striving to become what one inherently is important.
• Assuming responsibility is a condition for change.
• Clients who refuse to accept responsibility by blaming others will not profit from therapy.

STRIVING FOR IDENTITY AND RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHERS

• Preserving uniqueness and interest in going outside.
• The experience of aloneness.
• The experience of relatedness.
• Struggling to keep our identity.

THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

• Posing questions such as: Why am I here? What do I want from life? What gives my life purpose? Where is the source of meaning for me in life?
• Problem of discarding old values.
• Meaninglessness.
• Creating new meaning.

ANXIETY AS A CONDITION OF LIVING

• Confrontation with givens of existence.
• Listening to the message of anxiety can contribute to self-growth.
• Normal Anxiety – is an appropriate response to an event being faced
• Neurotic Anxiety – is out of proportion to the situation, out of awareness and tends to immobilize.

AWARENESS OF DEATH AND NON-BEING

• Death is not a threat.
• Grasping the reality of death strengthens.
• Death can be viewed as a positive motivation to give life significant meaning.

PERSON-CENTERED THERAPY

• Reaction against directive and psychoanalytic approaches.
• Challenges the assumption that "the counselor knows best."
• Questions the validity of advice, suggestion, persuasion, teaching, diagnosis, and interpretation.
• Questions the belief that clients cannot understand and resolve their own problems without direct help.
• Questions the focus on problems over persons.

OVERVIEW OF PERSON-CENTERED THERAPY

• Founder: Carl Rogers
• Born in Oak Park, IL, 1902.
• Trained at the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University.
• Educational background was in agriculture, science, philosophy, theology, education, and psychology.
• There was a fundamental shift in theory from helper-to-client to person-to-person.

EMPHASIZES

• Therapy as a journey shared by two fallible people.
• A person's innate striving for self-actualization.
• The personal characteristics of the therapist and the quality of the therapeutic relationship are important.
• The counselor's creation of a permissive, “growth promoting" climate.
• People are capable of self-directed growth if involved in a therapeutic relationship

MAJOR PHILOSOPHIES AND NATURE OF HUMANS

• Human beings are essentially rational, constructive, positive, independent, realistic, cooperative, trustworthy, accepting, forward moving, and full of potential.

ROGERIAN THEORY

• Experience is important, because each person's perception of his or her own experience is unique.
• The client is the only expert on his or her own life.

MAJOR CONSTRUCTS

• Actualizing Tendency: The inherent tendency of the person to develop in ways that serve to maintain or promote growth.
• Conditions of Worth: A person's worth is conditional based on significant others' valuation of experience
• Congruence: The state of consonance among the person's acting, thinking and feeling states.

MORE CONSTRUCTS

• Empathic Understanding: One perceives as if one were the other person but without ever losing the “as if” condition.
• Experience (noun): All the cognitive and affective events within the person that are available or potentially available to his or her awareness.
• Experience (verb): To receive the impact of all the sensory or physiological events happening at the present moment.
• Genuineness: The state where there is no difference between the real and the perceived selves.
• Organismic Valuing Process: The process whereby experiences are accurately perceived, constantly updated, and valued based on the satisfaction experienced.
• Positive regard: The perception of the self-experience of another person that leads the individual to feel warmth, liking, and respect for the acceptance of that person.
• Positive self-regard: A positive attitude toward the self that is not dependent on the perceptions of significant others.
• Self-actualization tendency: The tendency of the person to move toward achieving his or her full potential.
• Self-concept: The person's total internal view of self in relation to experiences of being and functioning within the environment.
• Self-Experience: Any event in the individual's perceptual field that he or she sees as relating to the "self," "me," or "I."
• Unconditional Positive Regard: The individual's perception of another person without ascription of greater or lesser worthiness.
• Unconditional Self-Regard: The perception of the self in such a way that no self-experience can be discriminated as being more or less worthy of positive regard than any other self-experience.

THE SELF

• According to Rogers, the Self is organized and consistent.
• Includes one's perceptions of all that compromises "I" or "me."
• Includes relationships among I or me and other people and features of life.
• It is available to consciousness but not always at any given moment.
• The shape of the self is constantly changing, yet always recognizable.

A SELF-ACTUALIZED PERSON

• Open to experience.
• Aware of all experience.
• Deals with change in creative ways.
• Socially effective.
• Lives existentially.
• Lives in the here and now.
• Trusts self.
• Requires the need for positive regard from others and the need for positive self-regard.

NATURE OF “MALADAPTIVITY”

• Rogerian theory speaks primarily of “incongruence” as the primary maladaptivity.
• Maladaptivity relates to blocks to actualization (Gilliland & James, 1998).
• Also, external locus of control and looking to others for worth are seen as maladaptive.

MAJOR GOAL OF COUNSELING

• The central focus of counseling is the client's experiencing feelings.

GROWTH-PROMOTING CLIMATE

• Congruence – genuineness or realness.
• Unconditional Positive Regard – acceptance and caring, but not approval of all behavior.
• Accurate Emphatic Understanding – an ability to deeply grasp the client's subjective world.
• Helper attitudes are more important than knowledge.

MAJOR TECHNIQUES/STRATEGIES

• The most important technique in person-centered counseling is the establishment of the relationship between client and counselor as one of mutual trust and safety.
• The counselor deals directly with the client's feelings and experiences in the here and now, rather than intellectualizing.
• Person-centered theory is a phenomenological approach that is individual to each person.

SIX CONDITIONS

• Necessary and sufficient for personality changes to occur.
• Two persons are in psychological contact.
• The first, the client, is experiencing incongruency.
• The second person, the therapist, is congruent or integrated in the relationship.
• The therapist experiences unconditional positive regard or real caring for the client.
• The therapist experiences empathy for the client's internal frame of reference.
• The communication to the client is, to a minimal degree, achieved.

MAJOR ROLES OF COUNSELOR AND CLIENT

• The major role of counselor is to create an atmosphere of genuineness, unconditional positive regard, and emphatic understanding.
• The reflection may include the counselor's own feelings so long as they are genuine.
• The challenges for the counselor lie in their willingness to be changed by and grow through the counseling relationship and to be open and transparent.
• The client's role is to do, think, say, or feel whatever they are experiencing in the moment.

THE THERAPIST

• Focuses on the quality of the therapeutic relationship.
• Serves as a model of a human being struggling toward greater realness.
• Is genuine, integrated, and authentic, without a false front.
• They can openly express feelings and attitudes that are present in the relationship with the client.