SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

V. Therapeutic Validation in Existential Analysis (2002)
first published in Existential Analysis 13(1), 2002, pp. 144-158.
Note: This article is a discussion of the principal goal of existential analysis: revalidation of the
analysand’s existence and its relation to change. The case study of a 19-year old male college
student is presented.
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The Goal of Existential Analysis
Remarkably, little has been written about technique in psychotherapy and what is there is
uniformly disappointing. There may be a good reason for this, namely, that there is no such thing
as psychotherapy technique (1). For now, I will not go that far, although there may be good
reasons for doing so.
Apart from what to avoid doing, which traditionally has been an important theme of the
so-called supervision process in clinical training, the psychotherapist is given little guidance
about how to proceed in his work with clients. Offering the client unconditional positive regard
(Carl Rogers) is more about the personality of the therapist than about his technique. After all,
full attentive engagement with the client must be as much a matter of manners as anything.
Evenly suspended attention (Freud) is probably equivalent to such attentiveness. It speaks to the
conditions of effective work with analysands but says nothing about what to do.
In part, the absence of technical recommendations is due to the fact that the outcome
of psychotherapy is not easily defined. If one applies a technique, it must be to some end, but if
the end is not clear, how can one rationally make technical recommendations? On the other
hand, if as Freud says, the result of psychoanalysis is the capacity for love and work, or as Jung
says, the goal of analytical psychology is individuation, the meaning of these goals is so general
that, when considering what to do, the therapist has little to envision at the horizon of
therapeutic work with a client. Other forms of counseling and psychotherapy claim that
adjustment is their goal, but, surely, if that means the absence of all conflict, it is not desirable as
a goal, as the elimination of anxiety is not, since anxiety in moderation is an essential feature of
human life. In the final analysis, we must also ask: Are any of these goals assessable and
measurable? Probably not. And what scientific sense can be given to patient satisfaction?
In contrast with other therapeutic modalities, existential analysis holds that its goal is the
freedom of the existential analysand (2). While this is also an outcome that is difficult to assess, it
is not more difficult to assess than the broad outcomes of Freudian or Jungian analysis, but unlike
these forms of psychotherapy, it may be possible to identify a concrete therapeutic intervention
within the practice of existential analysis that is at the same its primary therapeutic goal. I will call
this intervention the reinvestiture of existence, which I define as a moment modeled on a
fundamental experience of human development, the conferral of existence during infancy.
While the latter is basic for becoming human, in existential analysis, therapeutic efficacy
results from reaffirming in the patient the clearing nature of being human. For the existential
analyst, a person seeks therapy usually because her world has dimmed The reinvestiture of her
existence permits things to once again speak to the analysand. Her world regains some of the
luminance of childhood, in which there is more to be seen than at any other time in life. In the
course of passage through adolescence and adulthood, sectors of the world systematically
darken. Or, to use another metaphor, things say less or speak more quietly to us as the demands
of socialization grip us ever more tightly. As a result of cultural indoctrination, the child's
fascination with the world is systematically replaced by limiting ways of looking at the world,
most of them the result of the dominance of language, which permits things to be seen only as