SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

a result, their feelings and behavior change. In behavior modification, change follows from
submission to treatment, which is in effect a form of retraining. In cognitive-behavioral therapy,
change follows from re-education.
By contrast, analysands are discouraged from making major life decisions while in
treatment, but an analyst’s conviction is that in spite of and ultimately thanks to resistance, the
analysand will be a different kind of person as a result of accepting who she has become
through the years. Change in psychoanalysis amounts to acceptance of what previously had
been disavowed or denied and forgotten.
Popular culture and most psychiatrists now believe that chemical agents change
people’s minds. That being the case, we must consider the place of psychoactive drugs in this
discussion of change in psychotherapy. Many clients now entering into a psychotherapeutic
contract will have been prescribed psychotropic drugs in the recent past and a significant
subgroup will be taking medications while in treatment. The ready availability of these
substances from busy primary care physicians and their popularization by the media have
introduced a new variable in the practice of psychotherapy. With advances in
psychopharmacotherapy and as a result of effective marketing strategies and lobbying by the
pharmaceutical industry among physicians, the field of clinical psychology has been
dramatically altered. For a time some, psychoanalysts hesitated to work with clients while they
were being medicated. Now most accept the use of psychoactive medications as a form of
adjunctive treatment along with psychodynamic therapy. The relevance to the present
discussion of this change in outlook among psychotherapists is that the use of drugs as a form of
psychotherapy or as an adjunctive form of therapy in combination with psychotherapy
constitutes a form of intervention that is as potent as the most directive forms of suggestion,
coercion, persuasion, and behavior modification. Biochemical interventions are extremely
powerful. [6]
Following this very brief review of the three best-known forms of psychotherapy–classical
psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, and cognitive-behavioral therapy–and the sequence of
interventions leading to change that each entails, I now want to take a different perspective on
the notion of change in psychotherapy and note how the therapeutic goals of these forms of
psychotherapy differ from the form of human interaction termed existential analysis.
II. Situation, Encounter, Autonomy, Authenticity
Existential analysis is the therapeutic representative of existential-humanistic and existentialphenomenological
psychology, both of which trace their origins to a line of philosophers leading
back, respectively, to Søren Kierkegaard and Edmund Husserl. These lineages have been traced
so often that they do not bear repeated here. In this section I will single out one element of the
existential tradition–authenticity–and explore its place in existential analysis.
I have said that, in general, the goal of all psychotherapy is change, whether what leads
to change has been imposed on the person or is self-initiated. In each form of psychotherapy
discussed, some sort of outside intervention occurs, whether is it blatant and directive, or
indirect, subtle and apparently nonintrusive.
But is there a form of psychotherapy and a way of construing psychotherapeutic work
that bypasses intervention altogether while nevertheless providing the prospect of change?
There is, if we define change as a shift in one’s way of being-in-the-world. Change of this kind
occurs as a result of existential analysis.
Existential analysis is a way of encountering and working with another human being in a
setting of thoroughgoing mutuality where the focus of attention is the authenticity of both
partners in the venture. Its uniqueness among human partnerships lies in the fact that the
situation or world of one member of the pair is highlighted while that of the other remains more
or less in the background, but is still visible. Here there is no place for anonymity (as in