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EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOTHERAPIES

EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOTHERAPY.

The emergence of existential psychotherapy.
This arises when psychoanalysis, with all its theoretical components (catharsis,
transference, free association, resistance and repression), together with behavior therapy
including both its techniques as forms of intervention were already present.
However, because, on the one hand, psychoanalytic authors consider that both models
do not give an adequate response to understanding people, and, on the other hand, both
approaches ignore important basic qualities such as love, free choice, etc. This is why
you want to come together and create this "third force" called humanistic psychology.
Historical and conceptual framework of existential psychotherapy.
The reasons why Humanist Psychology arises are the following:
● Dissatisfaction with what is offered by the prevailing models.
● Purpose of promoting a psychology that transcends the proposals of these
prevailing models.
● Need to develop a new, more comprehensive psychology.
Within this model arises the American Association of Humanistic Psychology, and a
journal called the Journal of Humanistic Psychology.
Existentialist psychotherapy, because its first authors were trained in psychoanalytic
therapy, preserves Freud's basic dynamic structure, although it radically modifies its
content, considering that there are elements that help to understand the person, but also
consider that it is a vision very deterministic, as they would thus consider that trauma is
what conditions your discomfort.
From psychoanalysis, the impulse or drive is what creates anguish, and as a result of
this, defense mechanisms arise.
From humanism, consciousness and fear (uncertainty) create that anguish, thus
generating defense mechanisms. For this reason, they do not consider defense
mechanisms as something pathological, but as a defense response, being the best
response that the person gives to the resources they have at the moment.
From psychoanalysis, they will focus on the past, while, from the humanist perspective,
they will focus on the present, because according to them, the past cannot be changed,
although it will be necessary to know what moves the person to make your decisions.
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With regard to vocabulary, in humanistic psychology it becomes different, using terms

such as: choice, responsibility, freedom, voluntariness, life purpose, etc., which will give
a more positive and less conditioned vision.
Existentialist psychology arises within the European tradition of Existentialism and
phenomenology, that is, a philosophical tradition, together with Franco-German
psychiatry with the method comprehensive. They give importance to traumatic events
and to the limits of people and their resistance to give answers.
It is the emigration of these psychologists and psychiatrists to the United States, which
allows Humanist Psychology to begin to have a great boom there, characterized by
optimism and the unlimited vision of the human being, in a more practical and
functional way (pragmatism and psychological functionalism ), as well as more focused
on positive experiences, unlike the European one.
Thus, he argues that self-realization (state of congruence like Rogers), occurs in the
interpersonal encounter (= therapy, people who help our knowledge).
This vision is shared by many authors of diverse origins and diverse visions, from
Evolutionary Psychology with Bülher, to Humanist Psychoanalysis with Fromm
Horney and Reich, Organicism with Goldstein, Personality with Murphy, Allport,
Murray and Kelly, to behaviorism with Maslow. , existentialism with May, and Rogers'
client-centered therapy. It was these last three that had the most influence on this new
model.
Many authors consider that humanistic psychology is a way of understanding the person
from the different forms of study that occur at that time.
Essential concerns.
While philosophy tried to give a universal answer to the following questions, from
humanistic psychology, they deal with individual compression (individual meanings for
present concerns), and it is when we face this understanding, when we have existential
concerns divided into:
● Death: The conflict between continuing to be and knowing that we will cease to
be. Fear and uncertainty of what is after death.
● Liberta: Conflict between the lack of a base and the need for it. This implies
responsibility for our actions.
● Isolation: We are alone vs. need for contact. We have the need to be independent,
to have privacy, but also desires for contact, not to be alone, to be integrated into
a group or society.
● Vital meaning: What is the meaning of life?
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Conception of man maintained by humanistic psychology.

1. Holistic and totalizing conception, where they considered that the empirical
approach would never know the real meaning of the person because the study or
explanation of the parts could never give a close, realistic or comprehensive
vision.
2. Consummate human existence within relationships, attending to interindividual
experiences that are what give us resistance and the possibility of change.
3. Awareness of the difficulties that the person may have.
4. Freedom and responsibility to change, that is, the person can always choose,
unless he delegates his ability to choose to others, which is in turn a choice.
5. Orientation to a goal because everything that is done has an intention.
Based on these elements, it is suggested that the intervention, known as self-realization
or personal growth, is what is going to allow the person to connect with what they really
want, with their sense of life and their freedom.
However, they consider that we have different conditioning factors such as the body,
time ... and that, if we only focus on one of these, we would have a one-dimensional
vision, giving rise to the pathology (if we focus only on space, we will have agoraphobia
pathology). Therefore, if we have a broader, multidimensional vision, the person is more
fulfilled.
In therapy, the person is helped to have the totality of her existence available to make
decisions.
Pragmatic Principles of the American Association for Humanistic Psychology.
1. Attention to the person who experiences, singular and only → Ideographic
vision, that is, vision of the person independent of the rest, without taking into
account what the therapist himself may think.
2. Accentuation of the capacities for choice, creativity, assessment and self-
realization → An attempt is made to find links to explain meaning for that person
in their personal experiences and in their existential world, that is, everything that
can help these people to connect with themselves, beyond understanding, but also
understanding what are the things that help that person to have the capacity to
achieve self-realization.
3. Intrinsic significance as a priority criterion for the selection of research problems
and procedures → Find out what the person's real problem is and how they feel
motivated to change.
4. Commitment to human dignity and values → On the part of the therapist.
In this way, psychotherapy focuses on the specific person from a contentive vision of
their phenomenon and its meaning, that is, understood and encompassed, in a respectful
way, in addition to being primarily interested in those capacities and potentialities that
they do not have. a systematized place ..., such as: love, creativity, self-development,
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gratification of basic needs, self-realization, the highest values, being, spontaneity, play,
humor, affection, naturalness, transcendence of the self, autonomy, responsibility,
meaning , transcendental experience, psychological health and other related concepts.
Studying this empirically is impossible since this is found when the person is well, with
which, it is sought that the person connects with these values, feelings and emotions so
that they can be able to feel healthy, thus achieving a state of harmony n which many of
these elements can find. However, pathology is existential discrepancy (what you do or
feel is not coherent), the fruit of alloy, failure or frustration.
For this reason, Humanist Psychology does not consider that any behavior is
pathological in itself, but rather that you have to look at the behavior within the personal
existential framework, because there may be a behavior that you do not understand or
that seems illogical, but that does have a meaning. for the person who performs it.
The behavior makes sense from the one who does it, so we cannot understand the
behavior externally or objectively. Existential therapy is a dynamic approach that
focuses on the concerns rooted in the existence of the individual, and whose concern is
based on freedom, uncertainty and anguish.
It also determines that the human being is biologically and genetically determined,
socially and historically determined, but is free and indeterminate from an individual
point of view, since our body, space and time limit us, and at the same time give us
possibilities. From this comes freedom and with it responsibility, and pathology.
The latter is due to the fact that this freedom can create uncertainty in decision-making,
which enables the existence of pathology, and that is why neurosis is the pathology of
freedom according to these, and the result of the very condition of human existence.
EXISTENTIAL THERAPY
It aims to:
o Facilitate the process of growth and choice based on the accompaniment
for decision making.
o Understand that my existence depends on me, that is, making decisions
implies freedom, which in turn implies responsibility.
o Attention to social pressures as they determine us, but they do not
condition us.
Methodology.
It is characterized by its own methodology despite the fact that its techniques are not
exclusive, since for these it is not the techniques that determine existence, but the
methodology or way of putting them into practice.
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Its objective is the understanding of the experiential world of people, which they manage
to achieve through of the phenomenological method and structuring of meaning, based
on:
a) Reconstructing the internal experience of the subject → We must approach the
patient from empathy or emotional resonance, that is, have the ability to try to
reach the subjective world of the person to help us understand it.
b) Reorganize the subject's sense of experience → Once we know what he wants,
we will try to find out where he has failed and where he has lost it in order to
understand and seek to regain that connection with his existential project.
c) Change of the existence of the choices → Reorient / Change to be able to connect
with what really makes us be in harmony.
d) Non-directive therapeutic relationship (the other is free) → These therapists
should try to understand the private world of the patient before concentrating on
the deviations that he presents according to the norms.
Therapeutic procedure.
The analysis of the existential project can be worked in different ways:
1. Obtain a biographical account (diaries, life stories, account made in an interview
...) with a historical and emotional evolution.
2. Identify the themes that structure existence and the way in which they limit
freedom.
3. Study the evolutionary course of these subjects.
4. Evolutionarily concretize the existential project into a historical project.
5. Detect turning points.
6. Evaluate the consequences of the resignation to the historical project.
7. Recover and reorient the historical project and see how that person can connect
with those things that they want or that motivate them to regain the meaning of
their life, making decisions from their own perspective.
8. Introduce factual modifications.
9. Replant the meaning of the symptoms.
10. Reorganize the meaning of existential emptiness to prevent that person from
finding the existential emptiness again for the same reasons.
Characteristics.
o Technical (psychoanalytic) eclecticism. It starts from premises such as the ones
we observe below and which are also defined as characteristics of these humanist-
existentialist models.
o Dynamic psychological mechanisms (defense, anguish ...), but with a totally
different vision.
o Relationship-encounter and understanding of the patient → one of the
fundamental differences is the relationship with the patient in psychoanalysis, it
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is that in these there is a relationship of encounter and not cold, being similar to
that of Rogers.
o Elimination of behaviors that avoid the relationship-encounter.
o Objective = To achieve basic self-confidence to make decisions.
o Here and now (Daseis) which is the fundamental element, having to assume the
consequences and our responsibility for the moment.
Logotherapy. Victor Frankl.
Speech therapy is a therapy through meaning, and with which V. Frankl, a Viennese
psychiatrist who spent 3 years in a concentration camp, gave name to his therapeutic
theory, as a variant of existential therapy.
Even recognizing the unitary and totalitarian character of the human being, it
distinguishes between three dimensions: physical, psychic and spiritual, as constitutive
parts of this unity. However, taking into account an etiological classification of diseases,
he proposes that the three dimensions mentioned above can cause illness, giving three
types of diseases:
o Somatogenic disease: Those that originate in the physical dimension (eg,
psychosis).
o Psychogenic diseases: Those that originate in the psychic dimension (eg,
neurosis).
o Nonogenic diseases: They originate in the spiritual dimension → Related
to values. Spiritual problem, moral conflict or an existential crisis
originate a neurosis that will develop and express itself in the psychic or
somatic dimension.
As we can see, all of them allude to an etiological character, regardless of their
development or symptoms, in which course both the physical and psychic dimensions
are usually involved, but never the spiritual, that is, we can speak of a spiritual etiology,
but never of a symptomatology or spiritual disease, since the spirit cannot get sick (eg, a
mania for celotypy is a psychic reaction to a somatic process, that is, a psychic symptom
developed within a psychosis (= somatogenic disease), but different people before the
same delusions of jealousy can adopt different attitudes, whose ability to choose between
one attitude or another in the face of a limiting situation comes from the spiritual
dimension).
This indicates that existential frustration, defined as the loss of the will to sense, can be
pathogenic (although not always) when it is interspersed with a somatopsychic
condition, referring then to a noogenic neurosis, but it is never pathological → In
existential therapies this Frustration focuses on the meaning of existence.
Among the specifically human characteristics, and therefore inscribed within the
spiritual dimension, we highlight:
o Sense of humor and sense of life.
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o Self-distancing, responsibility and freedom.

o Self-transcendence: focus on the other and ignore yourself.
o The will to meaning: it constitutes a primary and independent force and
motivation for the human being, with survival value, meaning by which
to live, enabling the person to endure other deficiencies, or any other
element that has nothing to do with one same. It is not a search for
pleasure, but an existential search (love, art, religion).
The values that human existence can provide meaning is classified into three types:
● Creative values: Creative vocational activities.
● Values of experiences or experiences: Justice, love ... (Eg, living for a cause or a
person).
● Attitudinal values: Choosing an attitude with which to fit in and overcome
traumatic situations.
Logotherapy has a positive vision of suffering, which makes the person react to noogenic
neuroses or their conflicts between existential and moral principles ... Suffering is a
situation in which a different attitude to fight is manifested.
The final objective of this study would be to help find the meaning of MY existence,
capture the meaning of my choices, therefore, for those patients with suicidal tendencies,
I asked them “what did you not do it?
Logotherapeutic techniques.
These techniques are not directed at the symptom, but at the individual's attitude to their
symptoms. We find two:
A. Paradoxical intention → Technique practiced by Frankl, which can be defined as a
process by which the patient is encouraged to do, or to wish for it to happen, precisely
what they fear, replacing the pathogenic fear with a paradoxical wish that blocks it. It
works when there is anticipatory anxiety.
The objective is to mobilize the capacity for self-distancing (that does not experience this
symptom in a close way, using the sense of humor (and does not see it impossible to
perform the exercise), that is, predisposing the patient to ironize his neurosis.
B. De-Reflection → Based on a specifically human quality such as self-transcendence,
ignoring oneself and existing with an orientation towards something other than oneself.
It is used when excessive attention or hyper-reflection hinders or obstructs a spontaneous
and fluid relationship (eg, difficulties in sexual relations because the person is very
focused on achieving pleasure, or not having a premature ejaculation, and therefore does
not achieve it) . With this, it is proposed to decentralize the attention on oneself to fix it
on the other (eg, fix it on the partner), and the patient is trained to ignore the symptom.