ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the concept of existential psychoanalysis by situating it at the interface between the existential philosophical tradition and postmodernism. To this end, I compare and contrast some of the themes from the existential tradition that were incorporated into the relational perspective, with one glaring omission: the role of freedom in the psychoanalytic endeavor. To this end, I have relied on Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of Freud, thereby exposing the inherent problematic of the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious: the problem of a lie without a liar. The specifically clinical innovation of Sartre’s “existential psychoanalysis” is situated in the existential conception of freedom, which deconstructs the conventional conception of the unconscious process by personalizing it, which is to say, replacing the unconscious with the concept of intentionality. The chapter concludes with a critique of the concept of change, replacing it with the notion of becoming.