Existential psychotherapy

A school of therapy that treats distress as a response to the conditions of being alive rather than as a malfunction to be repaired — the same instruction james-hollis gives about midlife symptoms and francis-weller about grief and uncertainty (grief), from three schools that share no method and cite no evidence for it. irvin-yalom‘s model organises it around four “givens” of the human condition: isolation, meaninglessness, mortality, and freedom (staring-at-the-sun).

The givens are not symptoms and cannot be cured — everyone meets all four. What varies is whether the response is functional or dysfunctional, and the therapy works on the response. A patient’s presenting complaint is read as an answer to one of the four, usually an evasive one.

Where it sits

Third distinct clinical tradition in this wiki, and the middle term between two poles. Yalom shares with analytical-psychology and Hollis an interpretive method that produces meaning rather than measurements, and shares with acceptance-and-commitment-therapy the conviction that avoidance is the mechanism of harm — ACT calls it experiential avoidance and treats it with a manualized protocol and a trial base; Yalom treats it by turning the patient to look at what they are avoiding. The two traditions agree about the disease and differ completely about what counts as showing it works.

Boundary note. Its four givens are philosophy’s subject matter, and the tradition’s ancestry runs through Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger — all ../philosophy-wiki pages or candidates. This spoke takes it by method: therapists treating patients file here, philosophers arguing file there. The same rule that put carl-jung here and keeps the parked Heidegger material there.

Related

irvin-yalom · staring-at-the-sun · acceptance-and-commitment-therapy · analytical-psychology · free-will · synthesis