ABSTRACT
The Parisian existentialist and the Viennese psychoanalyst have often served as proxies in a larger philosophical debate involving freedom versus determinism. The popularity of existential psychotherapy has certainly dimmed along with that of existentialism in general, and only a small number of psychologists would identify themselves exclusively as existential psychotherapists. In addition to revisionist psychoanalytic and humanistic/existential approaches, additional therapeutic models were splitting off in other directions. J. P. Sartre suggested that psychoanalysis as a therapy could only work if the different elements of consciousness could be brought together rather than explained with a mechanistic metapsychology that Sartre found “coarse and suspect”. Sartre’s main interest in existential psychoanalysis was never really directed toward the clinical practice of psychotherapy, about which he had experience neither as a clinician nor as a client, though he had once asked Pontalis to psychoanalyze him. Sartre offered his own alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis in the form of what he termed “existential psychoanalysis.”
