It focuses on the psychological experience revolving around universal human truths of existence such as death, freedom, isolation and the search for the meaning of life.
Rather, symptoms such as anxiety, alienation and depression arise because of attempts to deny or avoid the givens of existence, often resulting in an existential crisis.
Existential therapists also draw heavily from the methods of phenomenology, a philosophical approach developed by Edmund Husserl and later expanded on by Martin Heidegger that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.
The starting point of existential philosophy (see Warnock 1970; Macquarrie 1972; Mace 1999; van Deurzen and Kenward 2005) can be traced back to the nineteenth century and the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Their works conflicted with the predominant ideologies of their time and committed to the exploration of reality as it can be experienced in a passionate and personal manner.
This involved a constant struggle between the finite and infinite aspects of our nature as part of the difficult task of creating a self and finding meaning.
Nietzsche exerted a significant impact upon the development of psychology in general, but he specifically influenced an approach which emphasized an understanding of life from a personal perspective.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) contributed many other strands of existential exploration, particularly regarding emotions, imagination, and the person's insertion into a social and political world.
The philosophy of existence, on the contrary, is carried by a wide-ranging literature, which includes many authors, such as Karl Jaspers (1951, 1963), Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and Hans-Georg Gadamer within the Germanic tradition and Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Lévinas within the French tradition (see for instance Spiegelberg, 1972, Kearney, 1986 or van Deurzen-Smith, 1997).
[full citation needed] Throughout the 20th century, psychotherapists began incorporating both the themes of existentialism as well as the phenomenological methods of describing experience into their theraputic practice: Otto Rank (1884–1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst who broke with Freud in the mid-1920s.
In it, Yalom identifies four existential concerns, or "givens", of life that underlie human experience - death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.
Yalom argues that the role of the therapist in existential therapy is not to provide solutions or answers, but to guide the client in exploring and confronting these challenges.
[7][8] Daseinsanalysis is a psychotherapeutic system developed upon the ideas of Martin Heidegger, as well as the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, that seeks to help the individual find autonomy and meaning in their "being in the world" (a rough translation of "Dasein").
In the late 1960s, they established an experimental therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall in the East End of London, where people could come to live through their 'madness' without the usual medical treatment.
There are now many other, mostly academic, centers in Britain that provide training in existential counseling and psychotherapy and a rapidly growing interest in the approach in the voluntary sector and the National Health Service.
It was founded in 2006 by Emmy van Deurzen and Digby Tantam and is called the International Community of Existential Counsellors and Therapists (ICECAP).
MT not only appeals to people's natural desires for happiness and significance but also makes skillful use of their innate capacity for meaning-seeking and meaning-making.
At the outset of therapy, clients are informed of the use of meaning-centered interventions appropriate for their predicaments because of the empirical evidence for the vital role of meaning in healing and thriving.
Clients can benefit from MT in two ways: (1) a custom-tailored treatment to solve their presenting problems, and (2) a collaborative journey to create a preferred better future.
This represents the tension between the fact that humans are inherently social creatures, and long to be connected to others - Yet at the same time no one can fully share or take on another’s subjective experience, pain, or death.
Existential therapy helps clients confront their aloneness by building authentic relationships, where connections with others are based on mutual respect rather than an avoidance of isolation.
Existential therapists guide clients to reflect on their values, choices, and patterns of behavior to identify areas whether they may be living inauthentically.
By helping clients confront existential anxiety, clarify their values, and find areas where they can exercise their freedom, therapists support them in creating a life that feels true, meaningful, and fully their own.
For theorists aligned with Yalom, psychological dysfunction results from the individual's refusal or inability to deal with the normal existential anxiety that comes from confronting life's "givens": death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.
Existential counsellors stress the importance of the examined life, and of preparatory work on oneself, in paving the way for effective counselling.
[22] The strictly Sartrean perspective of existential psychotherapy is generally unconcerned with the client's past, but instead, the emphasis is on the choices to be made in the present and future.
The way in which a person is in the world at a particular stage can be charted on this general map of human existence (Binswanger, 1963; Yalom, 1980; van Deurzen, 1984).
In line with the view taken by van Deurzen,[23] one can distinguish four basic dimensions of human existence: the physical, the social, the psychological, and the spiritual;[24] some only believe in the first three.
On the spiritual dimension (Überwelt) (van Deurzen, 1984), individuals relate to the unknown and thus create a sense of an ideal world, an ideology, and a philosophical outlook.
[27] In the debate on evidence-based research in counselling, existential counsellors tend to stress the dangers of over-simplification, and the importance of qualitative as well as quantitative measurements of outcome.