ABSTRACT
Existential psychotherapy holds no refuge for the reality of intrapsychic processes. The existential therapeutic process, which begins to develop then in light of a perspective of context, involves the opening up of possibilities. Without internal intrapsychic processes, the search for a “true” reality is meaningless and each phenomenological disclosure speaks to us of the context and the child’s relationships. The most important context for a child is their family, and it is that existential therapists have devoted much of their efforts in understanding the presentations of their clients. The chapter shows, in the pioneering work of Laing and Esterson at the Tavistock clinic, how the family was taken as a starting point for a radical re-evaluation of the understanding of so-called “mental illness”. Laing and Esterson developed a model of engagement with the family as well as the “patient” in an effort to comprehend the circumstances that had led to their current condition or life circumstances.
