SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

current revival of existential psychotherapy will do just that. While we may not become wealthy,
we will have restored our integrity and legitimacy. And there is a population of clients who will
welcome this.
There is an even broader question, however, than that of the image of the clinical
psychologist and that has to do with the serious question of the effectiveness of psychotherapy
as it is practiced today. For quite a few years now, the efficacy of clinical psychology as such
(including psychoanalysis) has been strongly challenged, even within the profession. More than
twenty years ago, the Jungian psychologist James Hillman's Re-visioning Psychology appeared.
It was complemented in 1999 by Re-envisioning Psychology: Moral Dimensions of Theory and
Practice, by Frank C. Richardson, Blaine J. Flowers, both practicing psychotherapists, and
Charles B. Guignon, a philosopher. Both volumes seriously question the philosophical basis of
psychotherapy as it is currently practiced in this country. Hillman's 1992 dialogue with Michael
Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World's Getting Worse, very
seriously challenges the effectiveness of psychotherapy as it is currently practiced. These critics
agree that something is faulty about how psychotherapy is conceptualized in modern
psychology, especially in its commitment to individualism.
Psychotherapy must be understood as a moral, not a scientific, enterprise. In fact, the
unacknowledged assumptions that guide psychotherapy today may be seen to work against
the very project of clinical treatment as it is defined by its best practitioners. As a result,
psychotherapists often encourage in her patients the very behavior that has produced
psychological distress in them and brought them for psychotherapy. How do things stand with
psychotherapy in its several forms?
Because of its cost, psychoanalysis is rarely undertaken any longer except by candidates
in psychoanalytic institutes or programs that prepare psychoanalytic psychotherapists. It
remains the province of the medical profession, even though lay institutes continue to train
many candidates. Their practitioners continue to try to gain status that is equivalent to their
psychiatrist counterparts. Most will agree that it will never happen.
For the most part, what passes for psychotherapy (psychoanalytic or otherwise) today is
a form of social engineering, retraining, or adjusting the patient to his social role. Here
psychotherapists, who in public institutions or hospitals are overseen by psychiatrists, follow the
lead of psychiatry and social work. Sometimes psychotherapy is a punishment, for example, for
those who are forced to attend a mental health clinic by court order as part of their
rehabilitation.
Most psychotherapists now are women who have trained initially as social workers.
Sometimes they have had further training at an institute or training center for psychoanalytic
psychotherapy or in one of the several hundred programs of psychotherapy now recognized.
Psychiatrists seldom perform psychotherapy these days, limiting themselves to prescribing
medications and supervising the in-patient treatment of patients. Licensed clinical psychologists
with the Ph.D. or Psy.D. often work in research hospitals and other large institutions, where they
are guaranteed a salary that exceeds what they might earn in private practice.
Where do existential psychotherapists fit in this picture? We are a minority within an
increasingly beleaguered profession who have often spent many years proving our
competence in areas of study that contradict the phenomenon we have in view, the human
way of be-ing. In fact, the crisis of psychology as a whole (and in particular clinical psychology)
is epitomized by the crisis among existential psychotherapists.
We have been marginalized by medicalized and professionalized clinical psychology,
and we are sometimes wrongly compared to gurus or spiritual advisers. More important,
grouped together with our medical counterparts, our client may expect us to "find something
wrong," when in fact our aim is to find the something right in him. Given the prevailing view of
what psychotherapy is supposed to do, clients are impatient. They want the equivalent of a
fast-acting medication. In addition to being told what is wrong, they want to be told who they