The word "existential" is the subject of detailed research in humanistic psychology. It is the central term for this direction of scientific and practical discipline, which focuses on the existence of a person, the meaning of life, on the time of his life. This direction is sometimes called "existential psychology".
For existentialists, one of the most important parameters of human life and psychological activity is the concept of time, a timeline. Human development goes from point to point on this scale. In some periods, the personality is faced with the so-called "existential crises." They can be defined as crises of the meaning of life.
Learning Life Crises Helps Overcome Psychological Difficulties
Existential psychotherapy is considered to be most suitable for psychologically and mentally healthy individuals. Its main task: to help a person to overcome critical life points correctly and with minimal losses.
The analysis of a person's life through time intervals is a very promising area of psychotherapy.
The existentialist doctrine of personality crisis is rather optimistic. Following scientists in other directions, they believe that a crisis is not the end of life. This is a turning point that arises in order to bring a person to a new level of existence. Having overcome the crisis, a person makes a sharp leap in his personal development. To do this, he must learn to understand that the word "crisis" means opening up prospects for a qualitatively higher standard of living.
Dealing with complex emotional states
Existential psychology is a direction for emotionally confused, but healthy and mature individuals.
Existential psychologists, like psychoanalysts or cognitive psychotherapists, can work with complex emotional states. Even a mentally healthy person can temporarily "get stuck" in anxiety, apathy, subdepressive and other strong emotional states that interfere with adequately acting in the world. But if the psychoanalyst looks for even the slightest manifestations of pathologies in a healthy person, then the existentialist's focus of vision is different. He focuses on healthy and highly developed personality structures, due to which he "corrects" and pulls out those structures that are currently experiencing the destructive effects of time or environment.
Who is the existential approach for?
Existential psychotherapy or counseling from an existential psychologist works best in a life crisis situation. Sometimes a person is paralyzed by thoughts about how to rethink his life, what to change in it, where to move on. And like a "Buridan's donkey" between two armfuls of hay, such a person is lost between the choices of alternatives. In this case, it is the existential psychologist who will help him more quickly than others to analyze his choices in the light of the prospects of his life and taking into account past achievements. And make a decision that he will not regret later.
