SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

Of course, Freud never found any evidence that a neurosis was a disease, i.e. a physical
disorder with an observable lesion and an etiology traceable to physiological changes in the
organism. Yet Freud and most psychotherapists who followed him (especially those who began
their training in psychiatry) continued to assume that the medical model could accommodate
what they wanted to describe and treat. In fact, however, the “talking cure” did not need the
medical model, although in this country psychoanalysis needed the medical profession in order
to gain legitimacy.
Orthodox psychoanalysis has diversified. There are now several varieties of
psychoanalysis, not only Jung’s analytical psychology and Adler’s individual psychology, but
versions based, for example, on object relations theory (Fairbairn and Winnicott), ego
psychology (Erikson), or self psychology (Kohut). Moreover, psychoanalysis as such has been
replaced for the most part by one form or another of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, primarily
because of the increasing verbal incompetence of clients and the greater difficulty would-be
practitioners have of learning to do psychoanalysis. As I see it, the decline in the practice of
psychoanalysis is not due primarily to its expense or to the time it takes the analysand, but to the
general educational background of both patient and analyst.
All forms of psychoanalytic psychotherapy differ from ordinary counseling, which
provides support, education or re-education. Certain forms of psychoanalytic psychotherapy
stress the analysis of transference, resistance, andr ego defenses. Others are oriented to the
overriding importance of the symbolic function and very early object relations. Some
psychoanalytic psychotherapists analyze ego functions almost exclusively, while others continue
to consider the fundamental feature of psychoanalysis to be the analysis of repressed childhood
experiences, especially those from the era of the universal oedipal neurosis of early childhood.
Nearly all would admit as one of the cornerstones of their work a conviction about the existence
and efficacy of unconscious thought processes and feelings. It is here, of course, that existential
psychotherapists part company from psychoanalysts.
We contend that there is no need to postulate unconscious mental life and the
dominance of the past, whether permanently repressed or accessible to consciousness through
analysis. The notion of the psyche as a mechanism is not admitted. In fact, the very distinction
between mind and body, which underlies all medical psychology, including psychoanalysis, is
not accepted. In short, existential psychotherapy differs from psychoanalysis in not giving
privileged place to the client's past. We also define the unconscious in a very different way, as
the knowledge others have of us, which they withhold from us.
During the same period that the psychodynamic psychotherapies proliferated, forms of
training and human management which employed techniques of instrumental and operant
conditioning were developed and employed by psychologists, educators and social workers in
a variety of institutions for special populations, including the mentally retarded, institutionalized
psychotics, criminals and, of course, schoolchildren. The techniques employed applied
principles of one of the forms of American behaviorism and had varying degrees of success in
adapting individuals to the routines of the institutions in which they were forced to spend a great
part of their lives – institutions for the mentally defective, mental hospitals, jails and schools.
Outside of the institutional setting, where variables could be controlled to some extent and the
environment could be monitored, behaviorism had very little efficacy, with the possible
exception of its application to certain simple phobias or forms of obsessive thinking.
Behaviorists also deny the dominance of the past, which they nevertheless define as the
psychoanalysts do. Like us, however, they claim that only the present matters, but the present is
defined not as a when or a what, but as a how; namely, the influence of physical events on the
individual's body. Behaviorists may understand experience either as a system of cortical reflexes
built on a few innate spinal reflexes or as a system of adjustments to responses by the
environment which are evoked by emissions of behavior, which B.F. Skinner termed operants.
There is no need for postulating a mind in any of this, since all responses are understood purely
mechanically or physiologically. Psychological life occurs in an ongoing physical present, which