Existentialism
Key Terms:
Transcendence Being Alienation Authenticity
Will-to-power Nothingness Activity Bad Faith Anxiety/Dread/Despair Absurd Being-in-the-world Umwelt Miltwelt Eigenwelt Atemporality
Death Freedom Responsibility Willingness
Impulsivity Compulsivity Decision Isolation Meaninglessness

Thought Questions:
1. Existentialism comes from the writings of Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard. What problems may have surfaced in translating philosophy into a system of therapy?
2. If the responsibility is to “be oneself” then can we have legitimate moral understanding beyond “Do whatever is true to you?”
3. What about the assumption that our feelings of the truthfulness of our behavior are “absurd”? What about the assumption that our being is itself absurd?
4. What about existentialist’s assumptions about love? Is that an adequate definition? Are you comfortable with the implications?
5. Are death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness really existential realities potent enough to cause disorders in mood, thought, or personality? Why or why not?
6. What do you think of the idea that there is no truth, and that everything is subjective, yet schizophrenics are viewed as “irresponsible” because they are denying their existential freedom and refuse even to be responsible to themselves? Do you see the conflict between “no truth” and “irresponsible”?
7. How do you feel about Yalom using “Betty” to confront his own issues? Is this an ethical reason to engage in therapy?
8. What are existential theorists’ primary assumptions in terms of causality?
9. What are existential theorist’s primary assumptions in terms of epistemology?
10. What are existential theorist’s primary assumptions in terms of morality?

Fundamental assumption 1: People have choice about who they are, what they do, and what they mean.
Assumption 2: People can transcend their past, present, and future assuming normalcy.
Assumption 2: We both learn the meanings of society, and can use those meanings in new ways.
Assumption 3: Because we learn and further these meanings and can use them in our own ways, we are responsible for what we do and what we create.
Assumption 4: There is no absolute truth.

Philosophy: (From the Rychlak text)
Being: Being is the subjective realization of one’s experience, one’s experience of being alive. This is a core idea in existentialism, positing that we exist, we are, and we are beings.
To whit: Alienation. Alienation is the process by which the ideas we create become foreign to us, and lose their legitimate power over us. For example, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche criticized religious dogma, because people mindlessly nod their heads at dogmatic principles in agreement to religious principles they never understood. The religion ceases to be a living force in their lives, and they are alienated from it.
There is an extension to this: Any time we parrot the thinking of others (like psychological theorists) without doing the hard thinking we need to do, we are alienated from our own capacity to reason.
This alienation can also be demonstrated in how we twist words.
Man in a gang-rape trial “I’m not a rapist”
Authenticity: We are inauthentic if we let the group or culture define who we are, without doing the hard work of finding out who we are and expressing it. In other philosopher’s eyes, authenticity is also fulfilling one’s possibilities. Some posit that because we can never be free of group pressures we need to find out the way of being that is most accurate to who we are, given the constraints of society/family/group.
Will-to-power: The human person’s fundamental capacity to be self-creative and hence authentic. We must base our lives on what we are, the entirety of our being.
The consequence to this is that guilt occurs, not when we do something wrong, but when we do not assume our responsibility for being but let others define who we are.
Nothingness: Approaching human beings objectively, like objects of scientific study, takes the subjectivity out of life. When we treat ourselves and others objectively we rob them of their subjectivity, so everything they are and everything they think they’re doing becomes nothing. We’re mindless ants on the treadmill of life. (Something-ness requires meaning, the rich affect-laden inherently subjective process of being human. If you take away that meaning, you take away the very thing that makes humans human.)
Activity: A fundamental characteristic of human beings is activity. It takes deliberate and constant effort to become a subjective self. When we face the fact of becoming human is when we feel alive. It is a hot and risky endeavor. Merely being without becoming is a dead, flavorless existence. (This echoes a little bit of Adler. Who you are is more important than who you were, who you will become is more important than who you are.) Never have an end-spot for becoming. If you become what you have planned and hope for nothing else, you will be disappointed when you arrive at your destination.
Bad Faith: This is a way of living by which we let ourselves down by not really fulfilling the possibilities open to us in life. If we choose to do nothing or to blame another’s behavior we are acting in bad faith because we have already chosen. The individual is responsible for their activity, and if they act in bad faith they are not living up to their responsibility. “There is no escaping the existential predicament of having to be.”
Anxiety/Dread/Despair: These are all the consequences of ceasing to be active, of failing to be authentic. Anxiety is “sickness unto death” resulting from alienation and in- authenticity, of failing in one’s will-to-power. Sometimes rather than depression or anxiety an inauthentic life manifests as boredom. We demand that life entertain us rather than going forward and creating the world we want. We are not malleable to the world, the world is malleable to us. We can latch on to other things in an effort to escape the emptiness and confusion in our own lives (clubs, organizations, religions), but we only further our anxiety and dread if we fail to face the emptiness of our lives head-on (which may explain why some people join then jettison religions, clubs, organizations or breathlessly preach the word of the religion while failing to live the principles).
Absurd: Two notions of absurd, the positive and the negative.
Absurd put positively: We have to believe something as true in order to have rational reasons for doing and thinking as we do. But, because everything is ultimately subjective and relative, our adherence to truth is absurd.
Absurd put negatively: Human life and existence is and of itself absurd. Our death, the destruction of the highest creation of nature, the wars people fight in the name of “right” and “wrong”, the absurdities of the partitioning of wealth, etc.

Assumption: The human world is the structure of meaningful relationships in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates (from the Corsini chapter). Because we are part of the world we are already and always constituting the world, designing it, being-in-the-world. We are part of the world and it is part of us in a way that is inseparable.

From the Corsini text:

Three types of world:
Umwelt: The objects around, the natural world. This is the world of our being to which we must adjust, the natural environment around us and the natural environment that constitutes us. We all have biology, we all have genes, hormones, hunger, the need to breathe. We all live, we will all die. These are all aspects of being that we must deal with every day, a deterministic aspect of our creation we must take into consideration, but understand it as a finite and limited aspect of our being that does not determine the whole of our being.
Eigenwelt: This is our “own world”, our self-relatedness and our self-awareness. It is the “for me-ness” of reality. Our subjective experience of our own thoughts, world, meaning.
Love: Now we have a model of love wherein people can intend and to mean their love for another. However, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche assume that the only real love is the love that is unfettered by the outside world in order for it to be true. You must be a fully authentic being for love to be real.
Miltwelt: This is our being with one another, the world of social engagement, social understanding, social contact. This is the world of culture, a world of words, touch, conversation, and engagement.
Atemporality: One of the big things that the existentialists put on our plate is freedom from “clock time”. So much of what goes on in our lives that is meaningful has nothing at all to do with time, or does not fit in with a model of linear time. The power and strength of my love, the depth of my devotion, the strength of my courage, the passion of my beliefs can in no way be adequately captured by linear assumptions of time; the brief instant of intense feeling for another, the split-second sacrifice of self for another, all are powerfully meaningful events that escape linear time. The image of a loved one framed in the sun can have a powerful influence on us years after they were standing in a sunbeam. When we lose ourselves in a conversation, a movie, or a therapy session, this is atemporality in action. We transcend time, as it is understood by our limited thinking.

Thinking in terms of therapy:
Death: We are all living unto death, and we are terrified of it. Death is the ultimate end of being, the end of everything we are and everything we could have been. Because death is so terrifying, we erect defenses. A big defense is to deny our fear of death. Many personality disorders have their roots in the fear of non-being, the fear of death.
Freedom: The human being is responsible for, and the author of his or her own world, own life design, and own choices and actions (from the Corsini text). There is no one to blame our behavior on but us. We must confront the limits of our existence, and accept the limitations of our being. Freedom is terrifying because we need structure in life, a reason to be, and there is nothing authentic out there that will provide it for us. We are forced, due to existential freedom, to construct a world for ourselves, to determine our own subjectivity.
Responsibility: Because we are ontologically free, we are also responsible for what we make out of life. We cannot blame our feelings or behavior on anyone else. Even thought disorders are seen in responsible terms, in the sense that schizophrenics are overwhelmed by the terrible freedom of existence and retreat into psychoses as to avoid being responsible even to themselves.
Willingness: To be willing is to move from knowledge of responsibility to action, to see that we can change and to actually take steps to make the change a reality. However, facing the freedom to choose is terrifying, so many people suffering from symptoms lose the ability to even wish for change.
Impulsivity: Impulsivity avoids wishing by failing to discriminate among wishes, instead the individual acts on all wishes in a disorganized way, irresponsibly failing to make a consistent change.
Compulsivity: Compulsiveness is characterized by not acting proactively, instead one is trapped by internalized standards that are exacting and absolute. They irresponsibly fail to change because they hold to outside standards.
Decision: Once faced with the reality of a wish, and once the wish is felt, the person is faced with a decision. They can either choose to act on the wish they feel so clearly, or they can choose to do nothing. The second the wish is known, a choice is made. They may try to abdicate the responsibility to choose by having their therapist, parent, spouse, friend choose for them. It can create a great deal of anxiety to make a decision to change.
Isolation: Isolation is the reality that we constitute others and that we can never fully share a consciousness with another. This is a terrifying experience because everything we are, everything we feel, and everything we think we do so alone. We fundamentally have a wish to be connected to another, to the larger whole of reality, but we are instead isolated specks on the backside of reality. We are fundamentally alone, and we can panic and latch onto others in hurtful ways, using them for their companionship, sex, protection, or comfort, without relating to them as an individual being. Only when we face the dread of isolation can we truly relate to one another in a healthy way.
Implication for counseling: Dissociative disorders occur when individuals are experiencing overwhelming existential isolation. They have are unmerged with another, so they “check out” and must feel something to bring them back into their bodies. Many of these people also attempt to fuse with another human being, to become part of them, so that the terrible feeling of isolation is ameliorated. This fusion occurs in an inappropriate, non-consensual way. Fusion can also happen in a more healthy way when two people honestly love each other when we have faced the existential reality of isolation. Regardless, nothing protects us from the fact of isolation.
Meaninglessness: We construct our own being, or own realities. There is no purpose for being other than what we create. Under the thin veneer of our subjectivity is the abyss of meaninglessness. Unfortunately, humans appear to require meaning, contrary to the fact of their existence. We arbitrarily adopt values to give us a blueprint for life to tell us why and how to live, but ultimately we must embrace the meaninglessness of reality and accept our values as ironic or absurd.