Existential Analysis: Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis
The aim of Existential Analysis, the journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, is to provide a forum for the expression of views and the exchange of ideas amongst those interested in existential-phenomenological analysis and its application to therapeutic practice and everyday life. The journal features original articles, theoretical papers, and practice-based reflections, aiming to foster dialogue and knowledge sharing within and beyond the existential psychotherapeutic community.
Book Review: Fascist Yoga: Grifters, occultists, white supremacists and the New Order in wellness
Copyright (c) 2026 Manu Bazzano (Author)
Copyright (c) 2026 Claire Arnold-Baker (Author)
Book Review: Why in the World Not? An introduction to daseinanalysis
Copyright (c) 2026 Kyle C. Glover (Author)
Simone de Beauvoir and the Ethics of Ambiguity: Implications for existential therapy
This paper explores Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity as a framework for existential psychotherapy, using her typology of bad faith to illuminate clinical patterns of avoidance, disconnection and self-deception. It highlights the therapeutic value of ambiguity, freedom and ethical responsibility in fostering authentic, relational engagement.
Existential Analysis and Psychoanalysis: Some points of contact
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrea Sabbadini (Author)
Existential Therapy Across Cultures: Reflections from New Zealand
Mental health services might be commissioned to provide contradictory interventions, such as symptom reduction or the recovery of wellbeing. Culturally sensitive or evidence-based interventions can pose dilemmas. Therapists in New Zealand mental health services face these dilemmas, and a move to existential therapy would align more closely with the worldview of indigenous populations.
Copyright (c) 2026 Simon Wharne (Author)
Metamodernism and Psychedelics: The good, the bad, and the ugly
This paper examines how psychedelic therapy reflects metamodern sensibilities – navigating between scepticism, hope, science and subjectivity. Rather than prescribing outcomes, it explores how patients engage psychedelic experiences as meaning-making processes within complex cultural and psychological landscapes, inviting new perspectives on healing, integration and the role of consciousness in existential therapy.
Copyright (c) 2026 Michael R. Montgomery (Author)
Development of Existential Psychotherapy in Central Asia
This article is about the evolution of existential psychotherapy in Central Asia, from Soviet-era psychiatry to modern practices. It emphasises the approach’s special congruence with the region’s cultural and philosophical traditions. These traditions focus on interconnectedness with nature, spiritual dimensions and trust in natural life processes. So cultural congruence, academic integration and unique challenges all position existential therapy as an authentic response to regional mental health needs.
Copyright (c) 2026 Angelina Demilkhanova (Author)
From Transience to Liberation: An existential-phenomenological arc
This paper examines transience and finitude within existential-phenomenological therapy, tracing their philosophical foundations and therapeutic implications. It proposes an arc of dwelling, will and liberation, exploring whether the therapist's emotional dwelling can provide a temporary home for finitude and open pathways where transience engenders authenticity, existential freedom and renewal.
Copyright (c) 2026 Burcu Tuncel (Author)
Existentialism came into China in the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a time when a galaxy of Chinese reform-minded intellectuals launched the New Culture Movement, which was likened to the Renaissance by Hu Shi, the leader of this revolution. Existential philosophers and writers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky inspired this group of Chinese visionaries. They began to reevaluate the Chinese tradition of culture by exposing how Chinese people had been indoctrinated by feudalistic ideology and tyrannical rule which led to a Chinese mentality twisted into escapism. Lu Xun, a modern Chinese novelist and thinker, exposed this fact and advocated Zhi Mian as the antidote. The term Zhi Mian resonates deeply with existentialism in terms of facing the truth of reality, reflecting on suffering and a focus on the individual.
Sharing Meaning and Nothingness: An existential therapist’s poetic reflections
This paper expands on my presentation at the Society for Existential Analysis Conference 2025, where I shared poems from Meaning and Nothingness: An existential therapist's poetic reflections. Drawing on themes voiced across multiple clinical settings, the paper examines poetry as an existential method that illuminates shared human concerns, bridges self and other, and supports the existentialist's role today in a rapidly shifting world.
Copyright (c) 2026 Tavan Thomas (Author)
What Can Existential Therapists Offer in a Time of Climate Crisis?
Based on a workshop given at this year's conference, this paper opens an enquiry into how existential therapy might respond to the climate crisis. The silence of our community on this topic is noticed and reflected upon. I take a sounding of how the psy-disciplines are conceiving of climate-related distress (for example, 'climate anxiety' or 'ecoanxiety'), before offering starting points on how a distinctively existential voice may enter this chorus.
Copyright (c) 2026 Emma Neville (Author)
The Psychosis of Existential Training: Towards an inclusive and equitable therapeutic practice
This paper calls for decolonising existential psychotherapy by integrating Black existentialist thought. Challenging Eurocentric frameworks and epistemological bias, it repositions Black narratives as central to understanding human existence. Drawing on Fanon, hooks and Gordon, it promotes intersectional, anti-racist training that restores existential practice as a universal, inclusive approach to freedom, meaning and cultural identity.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sheba Boakye-Duah (Author)
All Those Useless Passions: On Sartre, love and the sacred
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes the human being as a 'useless passion', a passion that has no justification for existence. Starting from this premise, I will draw connections between 'uselessness' and the sacred. Could one of the uses of these useless passions be Sartrean choice – the courage of freedom, responsibility and self-determination? Could choice be the antidote to the implicit passivity of the present?
Therapy for the Revolution: Lessons from the front line
When the world is on fire, therapists increasingly meet clients shaped by uprising, collapse and uncertainty. These forces are not outside the therapeutic frame, they constitute it. Drawing on my lived experience and frontline work, this paper offers seven lessons for revolutionary practice rooted in courage, intimacy and collective liberation.
Book Review: Dialogues on Madness and Wisdom: In Conversation with R. D. Laing
Copyright (c) 2025 Claire Phoenix (Author)
Breaching and Bridging: The journey from the tragicomedy of existence to the therapeutic encounter and back
This article explores the tragicomic nature of human existence, emphasising the interplay between rupture and repair within life's unpredictable narrative. Drawing from philosophical reflections, it attempts to describe the constant cycle of breaching and bridging, within the therapeutic encounter as well.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Kourtis (Author)
Neglected Existential Thinkers: Lou Andreas-Salomé
Copyright (c) 2025 Digby Tantam (Author)
The Anxiety of Strangers: A Heideggerian approach to leadership, therapy and transformation
This paper explores existential anxiety as a transformative site in psychotherapy and leadership, using Heidegger's phenomenology. Through a case study of a European manager in Japan, it examines the breakdown of conventions, the anxiety of encountering strangers and the potential for renewal through resolute engagement with uncertainty and difference.
Copyright (c) 2025 Steven Segal (Author)
Back to Me: Conversational narcissism and its amelioration in couples therapy
Conversational narcissism, or self-oriented and other-neglecting habits of speaking and listening are common in intimate relationships, with deleterious effects. The same can be said about communication style mismatches, where partners normalize their own expressive habits and abnormalise those of their mate. The task in couples therapy is to help partners fine tune speaking with a listener in mind, and listening with a speaker in mind.
Copyright (c) 2025 Enrico Gnaulati (Author)
Writing Myself Home: A phenomenological enquiry
'Home' and unheimlichkeit are phenomena that invite exploration of the complexity of human existence. Through a phenomenological enquiry into my own relationship with home, I explore the potential for finding a new home in meeting with clients in the therapy space.
Copyright (c) 2025 Hermione Ruck Keene (Author)
Encountering Our Daimonics: Existential dynamics within experiences trauma and humiliation
In order to understand the turbulence of our times, we must first turn to understand our own daimonics. Existential daimonics refers to our human capacity to bring about both great destruction/devastation and construction/creation in our own lives, the lives of others and the world around us. There is no 'us and them' when it comes to daimonic destructiveness and constructiveness that divides us is ethical and reflexive. Extending and reformulating the work of Rollo May and Stephen Diamond, and drawing on contemporary phenomenological psychotherapy, I suggest that understanding and holding the existential tensions that arise from the dynamic relationship within our personal daimonics can cultivate the ground for hope, understanding and healing.
This biography of the author of The Wind in the Willows is a contribution to the field of existential psychobiography made famous by Sartre. The mood of The Wind in the Willows is blithe on the surface, but there are darker references to the many adversities in the life of its author, known to many people firstly as a man about town, and the secretary of the Bank of England. The book is an example of how creativity can detoxify the pain of loss, at least up to a limit: in Grahame’s case, the loss of a child by suicide.
Existential Courage and the Fairy Tale of Little Red Riding Hood
The theme of existential courage is one that has always attracted my attention. In this article, I will discuss existential courage and its relationship to a few other existential givens, such as freedom, authenticity, meaning and finitude in order to highlight its importance. It will also explore the relationship of courage to will and love, and the possible connection of childhood experiences for its development.
Copyright (c) 2025 Evgenia Georganda (Author)
Into the Wild Mind: Life-enhancing anxiety and the experiential democracy dialogue
Drawing on the 2024 film Conclave and related examples as background, I will describe life-enhancing anxiety and its implications for the bridge-building dialogue process I call the ‘experiential democracy dialogue’. Life-enhancing anxiety is the capacity to live with and make the best of the depth and mystery of existence; it is also a capacity to live more on the edge of wonder and discovery than terror and overwhelm; and it is a profoundly needed skill in this era of anxiety-driven polarisation and certitude. I will describe a one-on-one format that aims to humanise starkly contrasting cultural and political positions. I will elaborate the structure of this format, including the six phases that comprise it, my experience facilitating it and research that backs it. I will conclude my talk with a plea for integrating experiential democracy principles into peoples’ day-to-day lives, thus expanding and deepening our encounters with differences, ‘otherness’ and the radically unknown. Viewing of Conclave is highly recommended.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kirk Schneider (Author)
Existential Responses to Wildness: The joy of making
What is our relationship with the material world around us? Do we passively consume it or do we engage with it and make something with it? This paper will examine the existential meaning of our relationship with the material world and how our relationship with it can have a dramatic effect on how we are, how we can be and how we can effect change in the world around us.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martin Adams (Author)
We have each been inspired by the Conference title to take different ways into the topic, but the theme which unites our presentations is a focus on what we as existential practitioners can bring to an understanding of our relationship with whatever we mean when we use the term ‘wildness’. I have taken the Conference title quite literally as an invitation to reflect on how we can go into ‘the Wild Woods’, and the therapeutic value of doing so. And bearing in mind this is the ‘Existential Movement’ conference, I will begin by focusing on what some of the existential founding philosophers have written about the importance of movement, and specifically physical exercise such as walking, and then I will go on to consider how this can impact on our relationship to our meaning world. In the course of this I will draw on the Four Worlds model, initially with regard to our relationship with the Umwelt, or physical dimension, but I will also briefly consider how a change in one dimension has more far-reaching implications for our relationship with all four dimensions of human living.
Copyright (c) 2025 Simon du Plock (Author)
Aggression – how we defend ourselves: An existential-phenomenological understanding
The way in which humans defend themselves can be either a deliberate action or an automatic coping reaction. Both forms are briefly described before the focus shifts to the structure of coping reactions in general. A preliminary distinction between power and violence provides a basis for understanding the role of aggression. The main part of the paper describes typical forms of aggression and their corresponding existential themes, which relate to the four fundamental existential motivations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alfried Längle (Author)
The concept of existential shattering was introduced by Tom Greening before being developed by several of his former students and colleagues. Initially, it was defined as a sudden dismantling of one's meaning systems in worldview. In this article, we further develop and expand the definition of existential shattering, adding further nuance to its definition.
Copyright (c) 2025 Louis Hoffman (Author)
This paper invites the reader to engage with the topic of roots - philosophical, embodied and familial, as we look to our future. With concrete, experiential examples and firmly grounded in existential philosophy, the author will bring insights from body-focused therapy and systemic constellations and offer her present personal perspective on Existential Therapy in an evolving world.
Copyright (c) 2024 Laura Barnett (Author)