Book Review: Readings in Existential Psychology and Psychiatry (View 1)

Two views of: Readings in Existential Psychology and Psychiatry edited by Keith Hoeller

(A special issue from the Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry). Repr: SEATTLE 1990 362 pp

Some of the offerings in this book of existential allsorts I enjoyed reading - some not. I shall concentrate on the former.

Eugene Gendlin's contribution 'Schizophrenia: Problems and methods in Psychotherapy' particularly caught me. He perspects well the experience of meeting a wall of silence - a silence of emptiness - and sets about describing his way of reaching, indeed tuning-in-to, such isolated and disconnected people. Working with schizophrenics, he says, has taught us a much wider vocabulary of behaviour, leading to the idea that in distinguishing the feelings and concerns "I have for me (as therapist) and those I have for him (the patient)" we will be able to be more expressive, being more of ourselves in the therapeutic relationship and thence be less imposing. This paper is essentially concerned with proposals of how not to interfere with client process.

Existential argument with psycho analysis and Freud runs throughout this book and is highlighted in "Sartre's Refutation of the Freudian Unconscious". Mark Conkling reviews Sartre's contra position to Freud. And notably Sartre's fundamental challenge to Freud's methodology of resistance, suggesting that the censor itself has an awareness of the thing repressed and must be therefore in consciousness of being conscious of the drive to be repressed, and is therefore in bad faith. Conkling suggests that Sartre with his emphasis on pre reflective consciousness and Freud emphasising the unconscious are not talking about the same thing. The dispute, he argues, represent the pitting of theory against theory, tradition against tradition, and phenomenology against determinism. Sartre, he believes, offers an alternative to Freud that purports to be a truer explanation of man and his human condition. Psychoanalysis as a theoretical structure needs to revise. This paper I found worth reading and particularly for one such as I who come from the influences of psychoanalysis and worry about its structural assumptions and deterministic consequence.

The pearl in this oyster however for me, comes from Rollo May - "On the Phenomenological Bases of Therapy". He does not believe in a special school of therapy to be put in the category of "essential" but rather sees existential as referring to an attitude toward human beings and a set of presuppositions about them. He believes we are not yet ready to build a bridge between phenomenology and psychotherapy. He suggests that "we psychotherapists look to phenomenology to give us a way to an understanding of the nature of man. What we need are norms concerning man which have some degree of universality". Illness cannot give us this understanding. Lack of an adequate concept of the nature of man has made the definition of health inevitably empty. May is pre-occupied with the lacking of a concept of encounter. He believes that the phenomenon of encounter very much needs to be studied "for it seems clear that much more is going on than almost any of us has realised". As I understand it, very little has been researched and written on this. May is at pains to include Freud in his scheme - transference is to be understood as the distortion of encounter, and unconscious experience is the potentialities for action and awareness which the person cannot or will not actualise. Awareness is therefore to be distinguished from consciousness.

But so, this book is worth reading particularly for those interested

Readings in Existential Psychology & Psychiatry is a collection of essays that covers the gamut of existential issues, which are part and parcel of human experience. The book's main strength lies in the scope and diversity of the papers it presents such as: existential anxiety, guilt, imagination and myth, the unconscious, schizophrenia, suicide, just to mention a few. The present review's weakness lies in its selectivity. Perhaps of particular interest to readers of this Journal will be the two articles presented on the unconscious - an issue on which there is a paucity of literature within the Existential domain.

One of the articles is by Medard Boss, the other by Mark Conkling - who is presenting Sartre's view on the subject. The two authors strongly argue against Freud's theory of the unconscious.

They suggest that our basic ideas and actions cannot be the result of dark, irrational forces in the unconscious and do not view man as the product of his biological and psychological antecedents as Freud believed. However, their arguments originate from different sources. Boss is engrossed in Heidegger's ontology. It is worth mentioning that without some knowledge of Heidegger's basic concepts the reader might experience some difficulty in understanding or following Boss's argumentation.

Boss has criticised Freud for not having elucidated on the concept of consciousness, but then doesn't do that himself. He views Freud's theory of the unconscious as ambiguous and having originated in self-deception.

By voicing the need for a radically new understanding of human being, Boss is stressing that this cannot be arrived at by "dilettantish" - referring to Freud - but rather only by thinkers such as philosophers. He refers in particular to Heidegger's Phenomenological ontology and argues that whatever we have once perceived is always retained and part of our world (reality) and present in it in different modes. Something to be repressed is equally present in the world-realm of that existence as something perceptible.

Boss concludes that the therapist can help to broaden the patient's openness to the world by tuning into the patient's world: first by accepting

Nicholas Zinovieff.