ABSTRACT
The positivist approach in psychotherapy evokes notions of constancy and structure in psychic life through the construct of the self. Psyche emerges in this sense as what can be predicted and evaluated. Existential philosophy aimed, in my view, to refute this notion of self as a referential term. The notion that selfhood inherently contains the dialectic of the structural tension between awareness and the world is therefore refuted by Sartre, as he strives to depict consciousness as a relation with(in) the world, rather than an entity. Human existence is selfless consciousness that is only aware of being aware of itself. The problem of meaning as self-ascribed realization, from an existential position, is that for this relation to exist the person subjected herself to a fixity, similarly to matter. Possibly, the psychotherapeutic process cannot function without the notion of selfhood.
