Authenticity in Existential Analysis

6 The popularity of pharmacotherapy as a form of treatment of psychological disorders may sooner or later make the present discussion moot — but that is the theme of another essay.

8 One of the most eloquent accounts of this approach may be found in a collection of accounts of the therapeutic venture by Ernesto Spinelli, Tales of Un-knowing. Eight Stories of Existential Therapy (New York: New York University Press, 1997). The reader may note that Spinelli has abandoned use of the term 'case'.

10 See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Experience (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), especially the course "Augustine and Neo-Platonism" [1921]. Augustine's starting point could be that of anyone entering into existential analysis: Quaestio mihi factum sum: I have become a question to myself.

13 For a personal account of my encounter with existential analysis, see "The Body I Am: Lived Body and Existential Change," a contribution to Ernesto Spinelli and Sue Marshall (eds.), Embodied Theories (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 81-97, as well a series of earlier papers: "Existential Psychotherapy Today," in Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 25(1-3), 2000, pp. 7-27; "The Background of Contemporary Existential Psychotherapy," in The Humanistic Psychologist 27(1), Spring 1999, pp.15-22; "Existential Therapy on Heideggerian Principles," in Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis 8(1), 1997, pp. 57-75; "Therapeutic Revalidation in Existential Analysis," in Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis 13(1), 2002, pp. 144-158; and "Human Being and Existence. The Beginnings of and Existential Psychology," in Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 22(1-3), 1990-91, pp. 116-140 (published 1995).

16 A fifth edition of the DSM is due in 2010. Stuart Kirk and Herb Kutchins have challenged the statistical validity of the American classificatory scheme of the DSM-III (1980) in The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992). DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315134857

17 Whether, properly speaking, authenticity should be considered a goal of existential analysis will be addressed below.

18 See the author's "Therapeutic Revalidation in Existential Analysis," in Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis 13(1), 2002, pp. 144-158.

19 See, for example, Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

20 It seems to me that Heidegger also understood that the first thoughts are acts, but recognizing the inadequacy of the vocabulary and assumptions of empirical psychology, he had to find another means of saying the same thing. The closest he comes to this is in his last lecture course at the University of Freiburg (1951-52) published in 1954 as Was heisst Denken?, now Gesamtausgabe 8 (2002).

21 One should recall that Piaget experienced psychoanalysis first-hand as an analysand and was strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic model of intrapsychic dynamics in the development of his unique method of research that first combined direct observation with the structured interview.