ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the Existentialist enterprise and its application to Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. It offers a kind of philosophical history of the Existentialist movement beginning with Kierkegaard and reaching to the mid-20th century. In French philosophy, the Existentialism of the mid-20th century gave way to Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and the wider disciplines of Postmodernism. If French Existentialism percolated through the cafes of 1930s Paris, its first major writings were published during the German occupation years of World War II, somehow slipping past the collaborationist Vichy censors. Existentialism became a cultural movement in a way that Phenomenology never could or did. The Phenomenologists and the Existentialists have been interested in a particular subset of ontology: the Being of Human Beings. The interests of contemporary philosophers shifted gradually in the latter half of the 20th century to epistemology, the study of the various groups of rules governing knowledge and knowability.