SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

4. The word 'other' is shorthand for "another existence." I use the word 'validate' to describe the
unique experience of encounter between two existences. Validation of existence occurs, for
example, in nursing an infant, making love, undergoing ritual and sacrament, and making a
psychiatric diagnosis.
5. The following observations are based on twenty-five years of clinical practice. My observations
come from work with outpatients seen in a suburban community mental health clinic, college
students at a small liberal arts college's seen in a walk-in counseling center, students attending a
private school for emotionally disturbed adolescents, young adult criminals from innercity
neighborhoods of a large metropolitan center who were seen while on special training leave at
a non-residential state- and city-subsidized school for educational and vocational rehabilitation,
adults seen in two out-patient clinics in a large city, and individuals seen in private practice in
existential psychotherapy.
6. Thomas Szasz has written repeatedly and eloquently about ! autonomous psychotherapy.
7. Should what is termed schizophrenia, bipolar disorders and the like ever be found to have a
physiological etiology, which many psychiatrists have predicated will happen, the conditions
would then be the province of medicine, not psychology. Currently, the other psychological
disorders that include primarily "physical symptoms" are somatoform disorders. See the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), Fourth Edition (Text Revision),
Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 445 ff.
8. Nor will the term 'counseling' work for what the existential therapist does, since one of the
immediate effects of existential therapy is insight, while the primary tasks of counseling are to
provide support, inform, and give advice.
9. See "Existence and Being: The Beginnings of an Existential Psychology," p. 119.
10. As first outlined by Heidegger, the structure of existence comprises the categories or
existentialia of existence. They also limn the scope of human possibilities. There are important
ontological questions here that are beyond the scope of this paper; for example, the question
about how to understand the duality of be-ing and existence in the human kind of be-ing.
Briefly, the duality is only virtual or perspectival, while, the unity of the person (existence) is real.
11. The Concept of Time (1992) London: Blackwell, pp. 13-14. "Das Dasein . . . ist die Zeit selbst,
nicht in die Zeit." This is a bilingual edition, with a translation by William McNeill, of Heidegger's
address to the Marburg University theology faculty in July 1924, first published in 1989 as Der
Begriff der Zeit, Niemeyer: Tübingen.
12. I borrow the term, of course, from Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time [I933], Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1970.
13. These experiences are important to study in order to better understand existential validation,
which is their prototype.
14. The face of the traditional clock is deceptive in this regard. A temporal cycle is not a closed
line, as defined by geometry, which the circumference of a clock's face suggests. Another
image may be helpful. A human cycle of lived time can be thought of as one of many possible
closed circuits across the surface a sphere, and our several existences may be likened to such
circles that run across the same sphere.