ABSTRACT
For many years existential psychotherapists – such as van Deurzen (1997), Yalom (1980) or the practitioners cited in Cooper’s (2003) overview of the variety of existential approaches to therapy – have engaged with clients struggling to cope with life’s challenges. It seems that, more often than other approaches to therapy, they have incorporated, within the overarching framework of existentialism, aspects of different disciplines such as humanistic psychology (Bugenthal, 1978) or psycho-analysis (Frankl, 1984). More recently, an increasing number of coaches started to recognise the relevance of existential themes to their clients’ agendas and they adopted existential thought and philosophy into their work in executive coaching (e.g. Hanaway, 2012; or Joplin, 2012), in career coaching (Pullinger, 2012), decision-making models (LeBon and Arnaud, 2012) and in combination with many other approaches such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (Mirea, 2012), Neuro-Linguistic Programming (Reed, 2012), Mindfulness (Nanda, 2012), Transactional Analysis (Lewis, 2012) as well as in conjunction with psychometric assessment tools such as the Myers–Briggs type indicator of personality (Pringle, 2012). These practitioners believe that existential philosophy ‘can add depth and breadth to any form of coaching’ (van Deurzen and Hanaway, 2012, p.xvi).
