SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

is or the lived body is the body that moves, exercises, performs, makes love, fights. Transitive
action verbs are used to describe it. The body one is speaks words and announces nonverbally
what the person may not have the words to express. The existential therapist attempts to help
the person become aware of the body he is.
Only others have direct access to the body one is. For ease of exposition, let me put this
in first-person terms. Only an other hasaccess to the body I am. I am barred from it by the body I
have, which dominates my world as the embodiment of my past. To the extent that I have
access to the body I have, I also have access to my lived time. What I do not have access to is
my
existential body or lived body. I regularly come to know about my existence from others, just as I
first had my existence bestowed on me by another, the mothering figure of my infancy. These
fundamental experiences of validation become the focus of existential therapy, in which the
patient comes to recognize the encounters in which his existence was and is bestowed on and
reaffirmed in him and in which he at the same time bestows existence on others.
With respect to what I am, the body I have is the most important thing in my world, but
from the perspective of my existence it may not be. My existence is constantly manifesting itself
as, for example, a religious, political, moral, philosophical, or scientific life. Like a flame, my
existence plays on the surface of things that comprise my world, including the body I am. It
gives these things the meaning they have in consonance with my existence. Existence occurs at
the things that encounter me, including the body I have. Thus, my existence does not occur
“inside” me or my psyche, or “inside” my body. The image of the person as a container for
hidden processes (the word ‘person’ derives from the Latin persona, which means a mask) has
obscured the fact that my existence is out here [da], at the things that encounter me, once
again, including the body I have. A person’s existence occurs between it and another person’s
existence, at the things with which we deal together, including the bodies we are. Existence
occurs between pairs of people, just as it originated for each of us in the dyad of infant and
mothering figure. Existential validation, including its occurrence in the therapeutic setting, as we
will see, is always a two-person phenomenon. As Buber said: “In the beginning was the we.”
The patient’s body eventually betrays the lack of an interior. The hidden parts of the
body he has are, of course, covered by integument and skeletomuscular structure, but this is not
what people have in mind when they talk about what is going on “inside,” “in” their “inner
world” of affects, images and thoughts – the so-called representational world. The introspective
turn is once again the legacy of Descartes. To his great disappointment, the patient finds that
there is nothing “inside” himself except physical organs and empty spaces. While the body I
have (including its hidden parts) is one of the things (and a very important thing at that) at
which my existence takes place, it is not the only thing that confronts me and, most of the time,
it is not the most important site of my existence. When my existence becomes an issue for me,
however, that is to say, in instances of existential pathology, the body I have tends to take
center stage because it has become objectified as the body I have. Rarely is the body one has
not a major focus for the person whose existence is disturbed. Increased interest in the body
one has is a consequence of increasing estrangement from one’s existence. We see this in
extreme instances in so-called hypochondriasis.
Existence also occurs, of course, at many other things, including especially the body the
other has. For each of us, the earliest of these sites is, of course, the mothering figure’s body and,
later, at what the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called transitional objects. The
expanding and contracting world of the older child and of adults encompasses innumerable
sites where one’s existence occurs. These are the things that comprise one’s world, and being in
a world, as Heidegger says, is the essence of existence. What disturbs the patient who seeks
attention is a change in the things that comprise his world. The disturbed world, which is a
correlate of one’s lived time, has changed tout court, and in such a way that the person has
been unable to appreciate the change. Please notice that I did not say “the disturbed person.”