Existential Psychoanalysis and Metaphysics

TL;DR: In this article, the authors stress the philosophical maturity of the existentialist psychotherapists' approach to psychoanalytic theory and their ability to test empirically the specula tive theories of existentialist philosophers.

Abstract: JLjxistential psychoanalysis represents one of the most natural marriages of theory to practice that one could possibly find. It seeks, in the first place, to make psychoanalytic theory philo sophically respectable by providing it with a sound metaphysical foundation and, in the second place, to test empirically the specula tive theories of existentialist philosophers. Metaphysics stands to gain on both counts. Whether or not one is willing to accept without qualification the categories and doctrines of existentialist metaphysics, one cannot help feeling, on reading the case analyses of the existentialist psychotherapists, that he has encountered a new and highly interesting world?a world at once more complex and more profound than he would ever have dreamed of from reading Freud and his disciples. I say this not to belittle Freud, for whom I have the greatest admiration, but to stress the philosophical maturity of this new way in psychoanalysis. Several new dimensions in the analysis of human personality have been added, and the resulting picture of man is sufficiently inclusive that if any thing important has been left out, its absence is by no means conspicuous. It is empiricism with a difference, and the difference is salutary. Having indicated my own enthusiasm for the project, I must hasten to add that it is precisely the explicit philosophical concern of existential psychoanalysis which constitutes its greatest vul nerability. No matter how strong one's interest in metaphysics may be and, hence, his initial sympathy with the metaphysical component in existential psychoanalysis, if one is critical and honest he cannot long avoid the question: what will be the results for psychoanalysis as a science? Two considerations are bound to give the philosopher pause: (1) Modern experimental science deliberately and willfully cut itself free from metaphysical specula tion; up to the point where it failed to take this step, its progress was minimal. There are, I think, obvious dangers involved in