ABSTRACT
In reaction to the dehumanizing forces prominent in the scientic, industrial, psychiatric, and political arenas of the nineteenth century, a series of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers and writers developed existentialism. Most sources place the genesis of the existential movement at the end of World Wars I and II. However, Allers (1961) indicated that existentialism arose out of a prewar society that emphasized compartmentalization-family separated from work, religion as a lofty ideal far above the drudgery of daily existence, gender roles rigidly stratied, and industrial work involving humans as tools of production. Many people believed that such compartmentalization led individuals to surrender self-awareness, to be estranged from self, and to what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche termed herd mentality. The seeds of discontent that several thinkers sowed before the war blossomed in the postwar environment of Europe. The prominent psychological theory of the time, Freud’s psychoanalysis, represented a deterministic, humans-as-driven-automatons perspective, as did the theory that displaced it in the postwar decades: behaviorism. Both served as springboards of reaction for the growing existential movement.
