Existential Therapy

The existential approach is first and foremost philosophical. It is concerned with the understanding of people’s position in the world and with the clarification of what it means to be alive.  It is also committed to exploring these questions with a receptive attitude, rather than a dogmatic one: the search for truth with an open mind and an attitude of wonder is the aim, not the fitting of the client into pre-established categories and interpretations.

The existential approach considers human nature to be open-ended, flexible and capable of an enormous range of experience. The person is in a constant process of becoming.  I create myself as I exist.  There is no essential, solid self, no given definition of one’s personality and abilities.

Existential thinkers avoid restrictive models that categorise or label people.  Instead they look for the universals that can be observed transculturally. There is no existential personality theory which divides humanity up into types or reduces people to part components. Instead there is a description of the different levels of experience and existence that people are inevitably confronted with.