MIEC - International Institute of Existential Counseling

Existential psychotherapy is defined in the scientific literature as a psychodynamic approach. However, there is a significant difference between existential and analytical psychodynamics. It lies in the fact that existential conflicts and existential anxiety arise due to the inevitable confrontation of people with what a person cannot change. This is death, meaninglessness, freedom and isolation.

Note 1

The main goal of existential psychotherapy is to help a person find himself in life, determine his place, comprehend his life, realize what is important to him, accept the fact that no one except the person himself can be held responsible for his actions.

Existential psychotherapy is similar to the philosophy of existentialism. Both sciences believe that man himself is to blame for the misfortunes that happen around him. If a person does not see the meaning in his existence, he must look for the meaning of life. However, there are many factors that prevent him from doing this. It's all human nature's fault. This comes from an awareness of the indifference of the world, but the need to interact with it; due to the presence of free will, the need to make a choice and the fear of being responsible for this choice; because of the inevitability of death and the natural fear of it.

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Existential psychotherapy views a person's life as a list of conflicts that occur within a person. Resolving these conflicts can help a person change his life, develop his personality, rethink his life values, and find answers to pressing questions.

Existential psychotherapy: techniques and methods

Since the entire life path of a person is a series of increasingly complex internal and external conflicts, independently resolving which, the personality develops, humanistic methods of existential psychotherapy work in the form of respectful psychotherapeutic conversations between peers, in which the patient returns to awareness of his basic existential needs - the meaninglessness of existence and the need to seek the meaning of life, freedom and with it responsibility for what he does or does not do, existential loneliness.

Existential psychodynamics

An effective way to deal with your problems in dynamic psychotherapy is the method of deep personal reflection. Its conditions are simple: solitude, time, silence and freedom from everyday distractions with which every person fills his world. Extreme experiences often serve as catalysts for the process of reflection. This is associated with so-called “borderline” situations, such as, for example, the threat of personal death, making an important irreversible decision, or the collapse of the main system for the formation of feelings.

Death. The most indisputable, most meaningful given is death. Now man exists, but the day will come when he will cease to exist. Death will overtake him, and there is no escape from it. This is a terrible truth that fills a person with “deadly” fear. According to Spinoza, “everything in the world continues to exist”; the confrontation between the awareness of the inevitability of death and the desire to continue to exist is the central existential conflict.
Freedom. Freedom, as a rule, is a positive phenomenon, since every person wants to be free and has strived for it throughout the entire recorded history of mankind. However, freedom as a basic principle gives rise to horror. In an existential sense, “freedom” is the absence of external structure. In everyday life there is the comforting illusion that man is part of a well-ordered universe, formed according to a definite plan (which remains unchanged throughout the existence of the universe). In fact, a person bears full responsibility for his world. In other words, he himself is its creator. From this point of view, "freedom" implies a terrifying thing: a person does not rely on either the earth or the void, which can make a person disappear. Finding this emptiness contradicts its need for soil and structure. This is also a key concept in existential psychodynamics.
Existential isolation. The third ultimate reality is isolation. This is not isolation from people (who can also isolate from others) and not internal isolation (from oneself). This is a fundamental isolation - from other beings and from the world, bringing a greater sense of loneliness. No matter how close a person may be to someone, there is always an unbridgeable gap between them; Each person comes into this world alone and leaves it alone. The existential conflict that arises is the conflict between conscious absolute isolation and the need for contact, protection, belonging to something greater.
Pointlessness. The fourth ultimate reality of existence is meaninglessness. Everyone must die. Every person is alone from birth and lives in an indifferent world. What then is the meaning of existence? Why does a person live? How does he live? If nothing has any meaning in the first place, then why should he create his own life, set goals, make plans and carry them out? The reason for the existential dynamic contradiction is the dilemma facing a person seeking the meaning of life.

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The effectiveness of the existential psychotherapy approach

The existential direction in psychotherapy is also a direction of personal growth, and not just a therapeutic one. For therapeutic purposes, the approach is used for:

depression (which is regarded as obsolescence of life guidelines, and then in therapy the search for and adoption of new ones is carried out);
addiction (as a result of the lack of meaning in life, and then its awareness and implementation is necessary);
anxiety, fears, obsessions (as the need to make a choice, often unconscious or suppressed, the therapist helps to realize this need and take responsibility for the decision).

The list of indications, as well as alternatives, is varied - the final decision is made by the patient in collaboration with the psychotherapist at the first psychotherapeutic session after psychodiagnosis.

Existentialists proceed from the fact that the basis of problems is the difficulties of living life:

search for the meaning of life and the desire to realize it;
recognition of free will, the need to make choices and be responsible for their consequences;
the need for proactive interaction with the world;
coming to terms with the inevitability of physical death - those of loved ones and one’s own - and working with acceptance of it.

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Dynamic psychotherapy

Note 1
Existential therapy is a form of dynamic psychotherapy.

The concept of “dynamic” is often used in the field of science, the object of study of which is human mental health. It can also mean a concept such as “psychodynamics.” It is quite difficult to understand its meaning, so the meaning of the dynamic and fundamental components of the existential approach without a detailed explanation of it will remain incomprehensible.

The word “dynamic” has not only a general, but also a technical meaning. In a general sense, the term "dynamic" refers to energy or motion. The dynamic model of the psyche is Freud's most significant contribution to the concept of personality - a model according to which contradictory forces exist in a person, and thoughts, emotions, and behavior - both adaptive and psychopathological - are the result of their interaction. It is also important that these forces exist at different levels.

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Note 2

Thus, human psychodynamics includes various conscious and unconscious forces, motives and fears operating within him. Dynamic psychotherapy includes forms of psychotherapy based on this dynamic model of mental functioning.

The dynamic approach is implemented primarily through verbalization, including the person's free associations and the therapist's analysis of transference and resistance reactions. Analysis as a psychotherapist's task is facilitated by four specific procedures: confrontation, clarification (clarification), interpretation, and exploration. From the very beginning, the method of free association is the main way the psychotherapist interacts with the “censored” contents of the patient’s consciousness. It serves as the basic procedure for identifying the raw materials on which the analysis is based. Confrontation is aimed at recognition by the patient of specific mental phenomena to be examined; clarification involves placing phenomena into “clear focus” to separate important from unimportant aspects; interpretation follows the received material, determining (in interrogative form) the main meaning or cause of the event; development aims at iterative, incremental and carefully designed research.

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A doctor can rarely observe the initial manifestation of primary conflicts in his patients. The patient presents an incredibly complex picture of symptoms, while the underlying problems are deeply hidden under a multi-layered crust created by repression, denial, displacement and symbolization. Determining primary contradictions requires examining a variety of sources of information: deep thoughts, dreams, nightmares, memories, positive and negative experiences, insights, psychotic statements.

Existential direction of counseling

Existential direction of counseling and its specificity.

Existential trends in psychology and psychotherapy arose as a result of a protest against the absolutization of psychoanalytic approaches of S. Freud. At the same time, many psychotherapists discovered that the softening of moral standards, the lifting of prohibitions, the “sexual revolution,” and the possibility of free personal expression in modern society did not lead, as S. Freud assumed, to a decrease in neurotic disorders and a decrease in the severity of personality crisis states. In the modern world, such personality problems have come to the fore, leading to destructive development, such as loneliness, boredom, dissatisfaction with oneself, and spiritual atrophy. Existentialists call this an existential crisis and see its cause in a person’s loss of the meaning of his existence.

Existentialism (existentia – existence) is a philosophy of life or existence that first emerged as a philosophical concept. The sphere of interest of existentialism is the experienced aspects of the life of a person “thrown” into the world: faith, hope, pain, suffering, care and anxiety, love, passion and other components of the undifferentiated totality of his intellectual, spiritual, moral and emotional-volitional personal structures. These phenomena of “being-in-the-world” (L. Binswanger) or “dasein” (M. Heidegger) are fundamentally unknowable to the experiencing subject himself and, in connection with this, are an individual and unique experience of his everyday experience of life.

Currently, there is no unified theory of existential psychology. This section will indicate only some of its provisions. Just like representatives of humanistic psychology (for example, K. Rogers), existentialists deal with the phenomenological field of man. The most important part of human mental experience is the subjective reality that a person experiences in his consciousness, in which there are perceived objects, images, feelings, thoughts, beliefs. In this subjective picture of the world, existentialists are interested in the individuality of experiencing this world in the human mind.

The sources of existential-humanistic counseling are the ideas of existential philosophy (S. Kierkegaard, K. Jaspers, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, A. Camus), as well as the phenomenological theory of personality and the concept of client-centered psychotherapy by C. Rogers.

The main idea of K. Rogers' personality theory is that human behavior can only be understood in terms of his subjective perception and knowledge of reality. For an individual, what is real is what exists within his internal coordinate system, including everything that is conscious at any given moment in time. Subjective perception and experience form the basis for human actions.

Each person interprets reality in accordance with his subjective perception, and his inner world is completely accessible only to himself (for example, two people who observed the same phenomenon will talk about it differently).

Another important postulate of K. Rogers’ theory is the recognition of the need for positive attention as the leading need for every person. This need, according to K. Rogers, is universal, stable, appears in infancy and accompanies a person throughout his life. Frustration of this need, especially if it occurs in early childhood, leads to an increase in anxiety, alienation from other people, and maladaptive disorders. Based on this, K. Rogers suggested that providing psychological assistance to a client is possible only through non-directive methods.

This is explained, firstly, by the fact that any client has the ability to self-directed personality change. Secondly, only an atmosphere of unconditional positive acceptance on the part of the consultant, a non-judgmental attitude towards the client, allows the latter to immerse himself, express his true feelings, without fear of reproach, which ultimately leads to overcoming the feeling of alienation, awareness and realization of personal potential.

K. Rogers' client-centered approach became the basis for the development of numerous psychotherapeutic strategies that form the existential direction in psychotherapy and psychological counseling (R. May, I. Yalom, D. Bugental, etc.).

The main goal of existentially-oriented counseling is to help the client find and realize the meaning that he wants to give to his life, realize personal freedom and responsibility, actualize his personal resource, and feel like “having a choice where previously he experienced forcedness.” Consulting objectives:

- promote the client’s understanding of his own capabilities and his freedom as an individual;

to form and maintain the client’s belief that he is able to help himself;

— identify factors blocking the client’s freedom and help overcome or change them;

- encourage the client to take responsibility for what happens to him.

The range of problems considered in the field of existential counseling: feelings of loneliness; guilt; misunderstanding or loss of the meaning of life; fear of death; experience of loss; feelings of melancholy and anxiety; depression.

Features of the consultant-client relationship. The relationship between a consultant and a client is understood as the interaction of two equal people. The counselor strives to understand and perceive the client in terms of his own life world, self-image and reality, to be fully present in the counseling process, and to establish an authentic connection with the client.

At the same time, the consultant must be able to combine understanding of the client and the ability to confront him in the event of a contradiction in his behavior, thoughts, feelings or between thoughts and feelings, intentions and behavior, etc. The client, in contact with the consultant, reveals to him his uniqueness. The consultant encourages openness and spontaneous activity in the client, the ability to respond to deep interest in oneself.

An important place in the consultant-client relationship is occupied by the delimitation of responsibilities of both parties: the consultant is responsible for organizing the consultative process and his professionalism, but does not give advice to the client and does not make decisions for him; the client himself is responsible for his choices and his decisions.

Basic methods of influence of existential counseling. The main method of this type of counseling is dialogue between the consultant and the client. The consultant uses techniques such as questions, reflection of content, reflection of feelings, confrontation; the use of interpretations is allowed only in rare cases, as they can relieve the client of responsibility for explaining his behavior; therefore, the consultant, in most cases, encourages the client to interpret personal experience.

3. Postmodern direction of counseling.

Narrative therapy is a fascinating and dynamically developing postmodern direction of counseling throughout the world, based on the idea that people's lives and relationships are formed in the process of social interaction. The narrative approach to psychotherapy appeared in the 80s of the 20th century, when Australian Michael White and New Zealander David Epston published the book “Narrative means to therapeutic ends.” Since then, it has become known to professionals in different countries of the world, and since 2000 it has been developing in Russia. This approach is based on the idea that we make sense of and build our lives through the stories we tell each other and ourselves. Personal narratives fit within the context of the larger stories of our culture. People who come to therapy are often at the mercy of social stereotypes that create problems and close off opportunities to solve them. In the second half of the twentieth century. In Western countries, an intellectual movement is developing, which received its name in the late 1970s. the name of postmodernism.

Modernist worldview:

· Single-linearity, single-variant development of the world.

· Hierarchy of cultures with identification of reference ones. The desire for cultural universalization, assimilation, etc.

· Faith in a bright future, unconditional optimism.

Unconditional faith in progress

· Belief in the knowability of the world, in the omnipotence of science.

· Trust in the state as the hand of progress, based on the achievements of science.

· The idea of a unified culture of society

· Mass production of identical things

· Production is the basis of society

· The basis of the economy is the national market

· Each country is a special cultural reality. To get acquainted with even its individual parts, you need to go on a trip.

· Consumption is primarily an instrumental activity aimed at satisfying natural human needs.

Postmodern worldview:

— Multivariate development of the world.

— Equality of cultures, doubt about the superiority of cultures considered standard. The idea of cultural pluralism as the basis of society.

- Doubt that tomorrow will be better than today, fears, predictions of the end of the world, history, etc. Z. Bauman: “The favorite call of every state with engineering claims has lost its force: endure today in the name of a happy future” (1994: 74).

— Denial of progress, especially moral. Skeptical attitude towards the long-term consequences of scientific and technological progress. Z. Bauman: “People do not expect something completely different from the future compared to the present” (1994:73).

— Doubt about the capabilities of the natural and social sciences, a sharp narrowing of the range of their functions.

— Distrust of the state, denial of its right to invade many spheres of social life, desire for denationalization of society.

Z. Bauman: “It is not this or that specific state that has lost authority, but the state as such, power as such...” (1994: 74).

— The idea of fragmentation of culture

— The transition from mass production to flexible production and the replacement of the mass market with micro-markets and market niches

— Postmodern society is a consumer society

— Formation of a global market covering the whole world. Under these conditions, production designed for a narrow circle of consumers, specific and even extravagant tastes, can be mass-produced, cheap and profitable.

— The emergence of hyperreality (Thomas: 55). All over the world, areas of a different cultural reality are emerging. For example, Disney Lands, McDonald's, Chinese, French, Italian, etc. restaurants.

— In a postmodern society, consumption is primarily the consumption of symbols, and not an instrumental activity

Social constructionism is a sociological theory of knowledge developed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their book The Social Construction of Reality (1966). The goal of social constructionism is to identify the ways in which individuals and groups of people participate in the creation of their perceived reality. This theory examines the ways in which people create social phenomena that become institutionalized and become traditions. Socially constructed reality is an ongoing, dynamic process; reality is recreated by people under the influence of its interpretation and knowledge about it. Berger and Luckman argue that all knowledge, including basic knowledge such as common sense perception of reality, is derived from and maintained through social relationships. In communication, people proceed from their belief about the similarity of perceptions of reality, basing their activity on this belief; their general ideas and knowledge of the reality of everyday life are reinforced. Since everyday knowledge is a product of people’s agreement, as a result, any human typologies, value systems and social formations appear to people as part of objective reality. Thus, we can say that reality is constructed by society itself.

One of the tasks of social constructionism is to study the processes through which a person forms, institutionalizes, recognizes and integrates social phenomena into tradition. The social construction of reality is a continuous, dynamic process that is reproduced by people in their interpretations and knowledge. Since social constructs, like interpretations of reality and objects of knowledge, are not predetermined by “nature,” they must be constantly supported and confirmed in order to exist.

According to social constructionism, a social construct is an idea that is perceived as natural and obvious by those who accept it, while it remains an invention or artificially created cultural artifact belonging to a particular culture or community. It is understood that a person is selective in relation to social constructs, accepting some and rejecting others. Social constructs, in turn, are not laws sent down from above or laws of nature. However, such an approach usually does not imply radical anti-determinism.

Social constructionism is dialectically opposed to essentialism - the idea that social reality is determined by ahistorical entities independent of human consciousness.

4. Integration of approaches and methods.

At the same time as the branching and differentiation of various psychological theories and methods of psychological influence occurs, the movement towards integration in counseling and psychotherapy, the movement towards the synthesis of psychological knowledge, also begins to intensify. According to Judith Todd and Arthur C. Bogart (2001), theoretically there are three main approaches to integration.

The first, the principle of common factors, is to look for common features found in almost all psychotherapeutic approaches. For example, all types of therapy are assumed to instill hope in the client, provide information, develop effective communication skills, and all good psychotherapists have psychological characteristics such as warmth and empathy.

The second approach to the integration of psychotherapy—methodological eclecticism—involves a pragmatic selection from all directions, as exemplified by Arnold Lazarus’ “multimodal therapy.”

The third approach, theoretical integration, involves combining theories. An example in this case is the attempt by Dollard and Miller (1950) to transform psychoanalysis within the framework of learning theory. Some integration theorists are trying to solve the difficult task of developing a new, comprehensive theory that could unify and replace all other psychotherapeutic theories (Todd J., Bogart A.K., 2001).

In our opinion, a fourth option is also possible: integration can be carried out on the basis of the similarity of methodological principles underlying a variety of psychotherapeutic technologies.

The methodological basis for conducting experimental psychological research in counseling can be methodological principles that relate to the most fundamental, most general principles of research - principles borrowed by psychological science at the stage of its transformation into an independent scientific discipline from philosophy. These are provisions such as the principle of determinism, the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity, the principle of the formation of consciousness in activity, the development of the psyche in the process of the direct process of communication and activity, the principle of modeling, the systematic approach used in the description of complex objects, which, undoubtedly, includes human mental activity.