The Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy

Erik Craig, Alfried Laengle, Kirk J. Schneider, Digby Tantam, Simon du Plock, Erik Craig, Alfried Laengle, Kirk J. Schneider, Digby Tantam, Simon du Plock

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119167174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychothérapie

An existential therapy handbook from those in the field, with its broad scope covering key texts, theories, practice, and research

The Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy is a work representing the collaboration of existential psychotherapists, teachers, and researchers. It's a book to guide readers in understanding human life better through the exploration of aspects and applications of existential therapy. The book presents the therapy as a way for clients to explore their experiences and make the most of their lives. Its contributors offer an accurate and in-depth view of the field. An introduction of existential therapy is provided, along with a summary of its historical foundations. Chapters are organized into sections that cover: daseinsanalysis; existential-phenomenonological, -humanistic, and -integrative therapies; and existential group therapy. International developments in theory, practice and research are also examined.

Part I
Daseinsanalysis

Introduction

We humans have always been an issue for ourselves. Whether looking up at the night sky or gazing at a landscape; hungry, cold, and in need of food or shelter; shopping, dancing, playing a game, or fighting traffic; watching other human beings or nature; interacting with friends or loved ones; witnessing a birth or death; waking from a dream; brushing our teeth or making love; or simply feeling or wanting something without knowing what or why; we are always concerned with ourselves, our world, and even being itself, especially the fact that we now are, once were not, and, sooner than we might wish, once again won’t be.

What is this world? Who am I to it? What does it matter? Does anything matter? Freud, like Plato, would say such questions arise from the healthy redirection of our more primitive erotic urges to more sublime activities like science and philosophy. The American existential psychologist Rollo May might say they come from a search for a sense of one’s own being, an “I am experience.” I suspect the humanistic integrative existentialist, Kirk J. Schneider, might suggest our wonderings arise from a sheer sense of awe. Frankl would likely find the source in the human being’s search for meaning. Neuroscientists claim such questions are a product of what they call the human brain’s “seeking system.” Daseinsanalysts might suggest it is from our shadowy awareness of what it means to be and our anxiety about not‐being. But do not be misled, for existentialists as a whole, the primary concern is not to explain our everyday life but, first and foremost, to live it, to be oneself, to be human. Along with these most basic of questions, every day existential therapists also wonder and engage others in wondering what it means to flourish and to suffer, to be limited or free, false or true. These are just some of the fundamentally human concerns that preoccupy existential psychotherapists, albeit each with their own unique language, focus, and aim that are in turn grounded in their own particular assumptions, theories, practices, and, most important, life experiences.

While all forms of existential therapy require more than the usual amount of study, focus, and life experience, Daseinsanalysis is particularly daunting, especially for students and aspiring practitioners whose first and often only language is English. Every major original text central to Daseinsanalysis was originally written in German by three men, one philosopher and two psychiatrists, all of whom lived within less than 100 km of one another as the crow flies. The philosopher Martin Heidegger spent virtually his entire life in southeastern Germany. His one Swiss psychiatrist devotee, Ludwig Binswanger, was born and lived most of his life in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland on the shores of Lake Constance. The other Swiss psychiatrist, Medard Boss, spent all but two years of his life in Zurich. These three daseinsanalytic thinkers lived less than two hours away by today’s standards, and enjoyed not only regular visits but a rich and long‐lasting correspondence. Deprived of access to this relatively small central European world, the majority of anglophiles are left without an experience of the historical, geographical, cultural, and relational context from which Daseinsanalysis arose. Even more challenging is the fact that exclusively English‐speaking readers are only able to access the most important original texts through inadequate English translations replete with already obscure Heideggerian German rendered in even more off‐putting hyphenated English translations.

However, all is not lost. In spite of their characteristic impenetrability, the translations also include many brilliantly clarifying passages that can suddenly remove, as Binswanger once put it, “the cataracts” of habitual thought and light up what we have never once thought before or, perhaps, thought but had neither the words nor daring to say. Many of these illuminating passages stay with one for the rest of one’s life, altering forever the way one sees, lives, practices, and thinks. The genuinely striking thing about daseinsanalytic thought is that it so often turns everything of which we have remained so confident completely on its head, opening our eyes to a cosmos we could never have anticipated like those chained individuals of Plato’s Cave who dared to leave the confines of the familiar and stare the sun in the face.

Adding to this more promising view, we have made a conscientious effort, wherever possible, to minimize the use of typically bewildering terminology of Heideggerese and write in the language of concrete everyday life. Whenever the use of German daseinsanalytic terms was necessary, we have done our best to voice them in clear English with the idea that accessible communication takes precedence over philosophical purity, a position also firmly maintained by Gion Condrau, Boss’s analysand and most productive student.

Finally, we have not only tried to present the essential concepts, principles and practices of daseinsanalytic therapy but, where possible, to tell the stories of the circumstances and individuals behind them, hoping the stories will make the ideas themselves come alive for the reader.

Chapter 1 presents a detailed account of the birth and development of Daseinsanalysis as the first systematic approach to existential psychotherapy along with many less well known stories and perspectives of its two extraordinary “sleep‐waking” twentieth‐century progenitors, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, before turning to the lives and works of the psychiatric Daseinsanalyst, Ludwig Binswanger, and the psychotherapeutic Daseinsanalyst, Medard Boss. In Chapter 2, the hermeneutic Daseinsanalyst Alice Holzhey‐Kunz presents her exceptional historical and philosophical grasp of the theory and philosophy of Daseinsanalysis, reviewing the perspectives of both Binswanger and Boss before going on to present her own new third approach grounded in a fresh hermeneutic understanding of the meaning of psychic suffering. In Chapter 3 the reader will find a critical review of the early history of training in daseinsanalytic psychotherapy and a brief summary of the contributions of three senior practicing Daseinsanalysts who worked with Medard Boss in person and who have made significant contributions to the English pedagogy and literature in the field. In Chapter 4, Perikles Kastrinidis presents two fascinating case studies with one individual presenting with serious psychiatric symptoms and the other with the quintessentially existential concern of his own mortality. Chapter 5 presents an annotated bibliography of selective daseinsanalytic works and an extensive list of references for readers wanting to continue study on their own. Finally, Chapter 6 reviews the historical daseinsanalytic events occurring over the last 20 years of Medard Boss’s life and going on to offer brief biographies of five major contributors to English daseinsanalytic literature. This is followed with an extensive discussion of the International Federation of Daseinsanalysis (IFDA), standards of training and education for becoming a Daseinsanalyst and basic issues facing the field today. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of present and future challenges for the field.

One of the difficulties of producing this part has been finding experienced English‐speaking daseinsanalytic therapists, especially those personally acquainted with the Zurich school of Daseinsanalysis and Medard Boss, to make cogent contributions. I am most grateful to the Zurich Daseinsanalysts Alice Holzhey‐Kunz and Perikles Kastrinidis for their intrepid commitment from the beginning. I am also uniquely appreciative to the Canadian psychoanalyst, Loray Daws, who unexpectedly appeared and took on much of the work required for the last two chapters, and, finally, for the generous, critical contributions of Thanasis Georgas from Greece and Robert Stolorow from the United States.

To close, in today’s impatient, ambitious, and goal‐oriented therapeutic climate the long, deep listening of talk therapy is often frowned upon, most often by those espousing rigidly defined evidenced‐based practice. Daseinsanalysts take issue with such a perspective recalling not only Heidegger’s remark that “language is the house of being” but also Freud’s admonition of his similarly critical interlocutor in The Question of Lay Analysis questioning the value of mere words:

Do not let us despise the word; it is the means by which we convey our feelings to one another, our method of influencing other people. Words can do unspeakable good and cause terrible wounds. No doubt ‘in the beginning was the deed’ and the word came later; in some circumstances it meant an advance in civilization when deeds were softened into words. But originally the word was magic – a magical act; and it has retained much of its ancient power. (Freud, 1926/1959, pp. 187–188)

Daseinsanalysts thus remind us in two ways not to disparage “mere conversation” for where there are words there is feeling and meaning, a life waiting to be born, if only we have the patience to listen and wait.

Reference

1. Freud, S. (1959). The Question of Lay Analysis. New York: Norton. (Original work published 1926.)

1
The History of Daseinsanalysis

Erik Craig

Initially appearing in the early 1940s, Daseinsanalysis was the first systematic approach to existential psychotherapy and arguably remains the most comprehensive, decidedly ontological approach in today’s community of existential thinkers and practitioners. The original architects of Daseinsanalysis were two Swiss psychiatrists, Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966) and Medard Boss (1903–1990), both of whom who were p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• The Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: What is Existential Therapy?
• Part I: Daseinsanalysis
• Part II: Existential‐Phenomenological Therapy
• Part III: Existential‐Humanistic and Existential‐Integrative Therapy
• Part IV: Logotherapy and Existential Analysis
• Part V: Existential Group Therapy
• Part VI: International Developments: Theory, Practice, and Research
• Index
• End User License Agreement