SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

a role to play (“B”) while she looked for “better parts” in the “real world” of a television
series or a film.
B is well-informed about psychoanalytic determinism and looks for “reasons” for
her attitudes and motivations in early childhood experiences. She has little confidence in
the example set for her by her parents, who were separated for 18 years but did not
divorce, and recently have been living together again.
She reports that her teachers at university disappointed her, although given her
excellent verbal skills, she says she was able to “fool” them into believing she was
interested in what they wanted her to “have”: a degree, a teaching position, a career in
academe, and tenure at an “important” college or university.
She does not feel close to anyone, is critical of her appearance, and resentful of
how others dictate how she should look, even while pursuing a “career” that is based on
the creation of personae. Men have also disappointed her by what B perceives as their
being either stupid and weak or exploitative and dangerous, with nothing in between. A
woman had been interested in her sexually, but she could not respond. On the whole,
she does not like the company of women. The advantages afforded B by scholarships,
grants for study, and the privileges of an upper middle-class family income have all
disappointed her, as have Los Angeles and New York, both of which she sees as merely
offering her distraction and entertainment, a “set” or stage on which to enact her life as
“B”.
The existential gap between B and “B” was a measure of the distance of this
young woman’s experience from her existential authenticity. Since the gap is inevitable,
my stance as an existential analyst was fundamentally one of “no blame.” Given B’s
recognition of the gap, a therapeutic partnership was both possible and desirable. To
put it somewhat schematically and artificially: the partnership did not aim at intervening
in “B”’s existence on behalf of B, but rather in allowing B’s self-realization to play itself out.
There was no lost version of B to be found, restored and reinstated, and no incomplete
version of B to be “finished” (as the psychoanalytic view might propose).
“B” was not an improperly constructed or deformed version of B in need of being
refashioned or “straightened out” (as a behaviorist might see her), nor was it merely a
matter of B’s thinking about herself differently that would allow “B” and B to coincide. B
was unacknowledged possibility.
In existential analysis, the most a therapeutic partnership can provide is recognition of
possibilities that have heretofore been seen as problems. It is not a matter of re-cognition, but of
seeing afresh. I saw B’s so-called “disturbances” not as perturbations of some imagined
“normal” state, but rather unformulated questions about how she can be, which means
precisely how she already is (as B) if only she were free to be in that way and not have to create
the role “B”.
A therapeutic partnership in existential analysis does not have an outcome, whether it be
set in terms of the short run (as adjustment) or envisioned as the culmination of a long voyage of
self-rediscovery leading to insight (as in psychoanalysis). Authenticity, then, may be best
understood as a new beginning in the fullness of inauthentic existence (in this case “B”).
Authenticity is an option for someone only because she has embraced her inauthenticity. The
story of B illustrates this especially well. The freedom that is engaged or “put in gear” is not an
escape from inauthenticity but rather the reappearance of a capacity for self-authorship in the
unavoidable context of inauthenticity. “B” continued to play her role, but B was granted
disclosure as the underlying possibility that made had permitted “B” to be created and invested
with social salience.
The therapeutic partnership affords someone the experience of this paradox of
existence. The pleasure of work as an existential analyst is witnessing the unexpected
emergence of human freedom.