Skills in Existential Counselling & Psychotherapy

Emmy van Deurzen, Martin Adams

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473984882
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

This is the definitive practical introduction to a skills-based approach in existential therapy. Accessible for those without a philosophical background, it describes the concrete and tangible skills, tasks and interactions of existential practice. It covers the theoretical background and history of existential therapy, along with taking a phenomenological approach to practice and individual clients.

This second edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect recent thinking, and expanded to include:

* A new chapter on the applications of existential therapy in wider contexts, such as supervision and coaching.

* A new chapter covering professional issues and challenges, such as working in the NHS, engaging with research and the use of the Internet in existential therapy.

* A companion websitewhich includesvideo content, featuring the authors explaining each chapter's underpinning theory, and demonstrating the principles in practice.

A much needed resource for trainees as well as experienced practitioners keen to expand their knowledge, the authors make the existential approach accessible to all those who wish to find out what it has to offer.

1 The Framework of Existential Therapy

‘In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.’

Friedrich Nietzsche

Theoretical Background and History

Introducing existential therapy

The questions that existential philosophers address are the questions that human beings have always asked themselves but for which they have never found satisfactory answers. This makes them both familiar and problematic. They are questions like:

• ◆ What does it mean to be alive?
• ◆ Why is there something rather than nothing?
• ◆ How should I act and be in relation to other people?
• ◆ How can I live a worthwhile life?
• ◆ What will happen after I die?

These are also the questions which clients are preoccupied with.

In spite of this familiarity there are some good reasons why existential ideas are not well known in psychotherapy. First, existential therapy does not have a single founding author with which it can be identified; it has no Freud, Rogers, Perls or Pavlov.

Second, it has its roots in philosophy, which in spite of its intimate connections to the questions of living and its long history has always been a rather academic discipline.

All therapeutic perspectives have a philosophical basis but this is rarely acknowledged. Because of their practical training, most therapists and counsellors are not used to exploring questions in a philosophical manner. They often focus on psychological and behavioural symptoms or on concrete aspects of professional interaction.

Although all existential thinkers have the philosophical stance in common they can hold quite differing views, and it is this dynamism and diversity that give the existential approach its particular strength and resilience. Nevertheless, it is the family resemblances that allow us to identify the characteristic skills and interventions of existential counselling and therapy that we will describe in these pages. We will be concentrating on how to explore our clients’ human questions philosophically.

As we said in the Introduction, trying to delineate ‘existential skills’ is problematic because systematization and technique have generally been avoided in favour of personal freedom and responsibility. Existential therapists are reluctant to say ‘This is how you do existential therapy’ because one of the central principles of existential therapy is that each therapist has to create her or his own personal way of working. But it is most definitely not a free-for-all. Existential therapy is an enquiry into meaning, and any enquiry that is not systematic will lead to haphazard results and will be influenced by what the researcher wishes to find. Therefore it has characteristic structures, actions, disciplined interventions, methods and specific skills to guide this enquiry, and the task of existential therapists is to make these their own. They are based on the same broad structures that underpin phenomenological research. Indeed, existential philosophy is the result of the application of the phenomenological research method to the study of existence.

Before we go any further, a word of caution is necessary about some specialist words. Many everyday words like ‘choice’ and ‘anxiety’ are used in the existential tradition in a special sense, and this needs to be borne in mind. Conversely, there are many unfamiliar words like ‘being-in-the-world’ or ‘thrownness’ that sound daunting, but which actually refer to familiar experiences. These too will be explained.

What do we mean by ‘philosophical’?

So what does it mean when we describe the existential approach to psychotherapy as philosophical? A wide range of philosophical writing is available to therapists, but not all philosophy is relevant, since it does not all deal with human or moral issues. Much of early Greek philosophy, Eastern philosophy and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy is relevant. Most of analytical philosophy is not so pertinent to therapy.

Counsellors and therapists wishing to work in an existential manner do not necessarily need to have a thorough grounding in this literature and philosophical heritage. But they do have to develop some philosophical method in their thinking about life.

Other therapeutic approaches are primarily biological, psychological, social, intellectual or spiritual in nature and generally neglect philosophy. They also concentrate on what goes on inside an individual or between people and rarely extend to considering the human condition and its wider philosophical and socio-political context.

Most therapies also focus on what is wrong and describe this as pathology and state that their objective is to cure a person of this. They are mostly concerned with intrapsychic or inter-personal factors. While existential therapy may also accommodate these dimensions at different times, its field of vision is wider and reaches beyond individual problems to life itself. Its focus is on the nature of truth and reality rather than on personality, illness or cure, so rather than thinking about function and dysfunction, it prefers to think in terms of a person’s ability to meet the challenges that life inevitably presents us with.

Although the existential approach clearly involves ideas, it is not simply intellectual like a crossword puzzle and is certainly not abstract like mathematics. Understanding life is as crucial to survival as the ability to talk, walk, breathe or eat. It is practical and concrete. It is always life that is the teacher, and ideas are no use unless they can make a positive difference to our lives.

Action based on experience is everyone’s first language. In this sense, existential therapy is the practical application of philosophy to everyday living. It is about coming to understand and therefore live productively and creatively within the constraints and possibilities of life. To engage with existential ideas requires us to have the courage to value diversity over uniformity, concreteness over abstractness, open-ended dilemmas over simplistic answers, and personally discovered and hard-earned authority over pre-existing dogmas and established power.

Fundamentally the skills of the existential therapist begin with the phrase inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, ‘Know Thyself’, because we cannot understand anyone or anything until we first understand ourselves and our relationship to human existence. This means that our primary tool as therapists is the way we are who we are and the way we understand our lives, not theory or technique.

But even this is not so simple since we are always changing and we are also permanently and fundamentally in relationship with others. What this means is that we can never ignore the needs of others when making personal decisions, but neither can we allow others to entirely determine us even when alone. This is a paradox.

What do we mean by ‘existential’?

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre both agreed that existence comes before essence. What this means is that the fact that we are is more basic than what we are. We are first and then we define ourselves later. Through our existing our essence is gradually shaped.

Moreover, we are always in a process of becoming something else. A person is first and foremost dynamic, alive, self-reflective and changing and this is the most important characteristic: that we exist, that we are alive and that we can transform ourselves, be aware and learn. For example, the essence of this book is that it is about the skills involved in existential therapy. But this book will always be this book; it will never change and also will not be able to change itself. A person, on the contrary, is different at different times.

We are dynamic, responsive and interactive. In one sense a person’s essence is their chemical composition (e.g. as 85 per cent water). In another sense, a person is her or his genetic constitution, made up of half of each parent’s gene pool. In yet another sense we can be said to be the result of our early experiences and education. Or we can say the bio-chemical processes in our brains define us. Existentially, a person is clearly far more than any and all of this.

Let’s consider the following incomplete sentence:

Fundamentally people are …

If we were to say that essence is more fundamental than existence, it could be completed in many different ways depending on one’s view of human nature, for example:

• Fundamentally, people are their DNA, or
• Fundamentally, people are out for their own survival, or
• Fundamentally, people are social beings, or
• Fundamentally, people are made in the likeness of a god.

The fact that we can talk about the human essence in so many different ways explains why there are so many different theories of psychotherapy, because they all consider essence to be prior to existence and they all have different views of what constitutes this essence.

But if it is true that existence precedes essence, the above sentence can only be completed with a full stop:

Fundamentally, people are.

That we exist and how we exist determine the essence that emerges, not the other way round. This is the first principle that all existential philosophers share: that their primary concern is the existence of human beings. It is also the most significant defining characteristic of existential therapy. A therapeutic approach can be described as existential if it accepts this premise.

This is of course not the end of the matter by any means. If people are primarily without a fixed essence, then their life becomes a matter of personal interpretation, responsibility and choice. What we take to be our essence, our nature, our sense of self, in fact evolves over time and is a consequence of the way we interpret the fundamental givens, the boundaries, of existence. We only see it as fixed because it evokes too much anxiety, existential anxiety, to acknowledge its innate flexibility and fluidity.

It is the capacity for thinking and reflecting on the constraints of our existence and on our particular way of being that creates a sense of self and it is this reflection that plays the major role in what we are and become.

It is our understanding of these matters that allows us to choose whether we let ourselves be defined by circumstance or find a way to meet life’s challenges.

This unique ability of human beings to reflect on existence and on ourselves makes us different from other animals and objects, but it comes at a price: that of personal responsibility.

Exercise

Make a list of six different identities, characteristics or talents you think you have. For example:

• parent
• gardener
• bi-lingual
• son/daughter
• therapist
• student.

Make your own list and then order the items in your list from least significant to most significant. Starting with the least significant, go through each item and imagine how your life would be without that characteristic. Don’t move on to the next one until you’ve dealt completely with the previous one. The chances are that it will be difficult, though not impossible, to imagine, but that it will also evoke some strong feelings.

We get very attached to these identities; in fact, we often imagine that they are all that we are. We are, however, more (or perhaps more aptly less) than this, and even without these characteristics we still are. We still exist. You may find that at the end of the exercise you have a sudden sense of the being that remains when all your special identities have been temporarily suspended!

Some of the Major Existential Philosophers

The following short biographies, presented in chronological order, give an idea of the diversity of existential thinking.

• Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish philosopher who is sometimes called ‘the father of existential thinking’. He wrote in an indirect manner often using pseudonyms and took issue with what he saw as the conformity of nineteenth-century bourgeois society and particularly with its hypocritical way of interpreting Christianity. He advocated learning from anxiety (angst) and despair and he valued subjective truth over given truth. He believed that we all have to learn to live aesthetically first, then ethically, but that in order to learn to think for ourselves we need to dare to doubt, until we are able to make a leap of faith to find our own personal sense of and relationship to God.
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher who wrote in a poetic and rhetorical manner and criticized what he called the ‘herd mentality’ of his fellow citizens. An accomplished iconoclast, he opposed all systems especially value-laden ones. He is famous for stating that ‘God is dead’ (nihilism). He said that each person must relentlessly question in order to aspire to a sense of truth and reality which goes beyond established values. We have to re-evaluate right and wrong and aspire to become what he called the Übermensch: the autonomous superhuman who creates her or his own values and morality, and lives a life of passion and personal affirmative power.
• Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was a logician and mathematician who designed a new method for describing and understanding all objects and acts of consciousness, including consciousness itself. He called this process ‘phenomenology’: the science of how things appear. He said that consciousness is always consciousness of something and can never be separated from its object. This is known as ‘the principle of intentionality’. Phenomenology is a procedure for allowing us to become more aware o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Table List
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Companion Website
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• 1 The Framework of Existential Therapy
• 2 The Person of the Therapist
• 3 WORKING PHENOMENOLOGICALLY: The Centre of Existential Therapy
• 4 Developing an Existential Attitude
• 5 From Theory into Practice
• 6 What Really Matters to the Client
• 7 The Process of Existential Therapy
• 8 Applications of Existential Counselling and Psychotherapy
• 9 Professional Issues and Challenges
• 10 SUMMING UP: Putting it all Together
• Appendix Further Reading, Fiction and Film
• Glossary of Existential Terms
• References
• Index