What is Existential Psychotherapy?

I actually stumbled into the world of Existential Psychotherapy without even knowing it. It wasn’t until I was in grad school learning about different types of therapy that I realized that a lot of the reading I had done since I was a teenager had a name connecting it all together: “existentialism”.

The idea that I could practice therapy from this perspective was really exciting to me and started my own exploration of what that meant, an exploration that will likely be career-long.

So what does Existential Psychotherapy mean?

Let’s start with “existential”. First the short definition. It basically just means - interested in what it’s like to exist. Existentialists ask questions about things like freedom, authenticity, death, meaning, relationship, and being itself - fundamental things that come with existing.

The longer definition is that “Existentialism” was a specific movement in philosophy, literature, art, psychology and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. It started in Europe and spread throughout the world from there. It’s hard to get much more specific than that, as it seems like existentialists don’t have a whole lot more in common other than the kinds of topics they’re interested in. 

Moving on to the psychotherapy side of things, the early roots of Existentialism were building right alongside the early roots of psychotherapy. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Sigmund Freud was developing his ideas and practice of therapy, focusing on our internal drives and conflicts, the anxiety that comes from those conflicts, and the defenses we develop in response. 

Existential Psychotherapy also looks at our inner conflicts, and our resulting anxieties and defenses. The big difference from Freud’s approach, though, is that where Freud was interested in conflicts coming from our drives toward aggression and sexuality, Existential Psychotherapy is interested in the internal conflicts coming from facing things like freedom, authenticity, death, meaning, relationship, and being itself.

In other words, part of existing means making choices, trying to live authentically, knowing we will die, trying to find or create meaning, having relationship, and dealing with the general strangeness of just being in the first place. All these things create anxiety in us, and so we develop ways to cope with that anxiety.

Though Existential Psychotherapy has gotten both more diverse and more specific over the past 100 years, this comparison with Freud’s approach gives us a decent starting point and basic definition to begin with.

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