SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

Talk about existential pathology is talk about the things in someone's world, including the
body he has. Existential pathology refers to the experience of the things that comprise a person's
world, which are indistinguishable from that world, and of his lived time. Thus, the site of
existential pathology is the patient's world, not inside the patient's psyche. It is impossible to
separate his experience of things from his world and lived time.
When my world changes, not only does my face change, but so also does the face
(facies) of all of the things at which my existence occurs. The existential therapist helps the
patient see that “things have changed” and how these things have changed. The disorder is at
the things, not in the patient.
The Aims of Existential Therapy
The primary goal of existential therapy is to reveal the patient's existence. In view of what has
been said, the patient's body (the body he has) becomes the initial focus, since the patient has
turned back to it and away from the body he is, although he does not know this. The therapist
observes how the patient lives (makes) his time and reveals what he sees to the patient. The
body becomes an object of importance in the patient's world as a site of the patient's existence,
and as something in the patient's world, the therapist also becomes a site of the patient's
existence. While the importance of the patient's body as a site of his existence cannot be
overlooked, too little attention has been paid to the non-human things in a patient's world. These
are equally revealing sites of the patient's world, so that the therapist learns a great deal about
the patient's world from observing how the patient experiences inanimate objects, including
clothing and myriad things a patient handles in the course of a day, including a therapy session.
A person, I have suggested, is the site or topos of a world. The patient comes to therapy
to become familiar with his world. He complains that nothing is the same any more. Things do
not feel right. Everything is wrong. Nothing is working. Nothing makes sense. Only gradually does
the patient begin to focus on the seemingly trivial things that make up his world, and as these
little things come into view, the outlines and then the details of his world as a whole become
discernible to him.
The therapeutic situation is unique in allowing the patient's world leeway and room to
become discernible. The therapeutic "space" allows "distance" among things and lights them up,
so that they become distinguishable. The patient has also become estranged from his lived time,
an outsider in his own time, an étranger. He comes to the therapist for an understanding of his
time, and perhaps for a different time. As we have seen, he does not come to be changed. He
has already changed and wants to find out what has happened. The patient comes to an
existential therapist for a different time, one which allows him to discover his own lived time. He
does not want to be treated, advised, trained, re-educated, tamed, informed, or corrected. For
this, he may turn to teachers, attorneys and physicians. He comes to existential therapy to be
taken seriously, to be seen and heard again in his own time and world. In part, we see that he
has been silenced and made invisible by having lost the validation of his existence and this is
one reason why he has become a patient.
In a sense, every patient's problem is the same: his existence is not being validated, but
he does not realize that the reason for this is his own failure to validate the existence of others.
Since validation is always mutual, when the patient loses sight of the existence of others, he
himself becomes invisible. When, as a result, his own existence is not met and validated by that
of others, he ceases to speak about things, and in this sense he is silenced. What then does he
speak about instead? He talks for the most part about what others are and what he is. He has
also become preoccupied with trying to make his personal past remain the same, which takes a
great deal of effort, since the past his always changing. The existential therapist encourages the
patient to focus on the existence of the therapist, so that the patient can (perhaps for the first
time) indirectly become aware of his own existence.