The Four Ghosts of Existentialism
Ask yourself — if you had to name them — what would number among the deepest, darkest anxieties of the collective human experience? Maybe you come up with the haunting prospect of your life not mattering or of not having “made a difference” as that hallowed line goes. Or perhaps you think of dying, of the immobilizing incomprehensible thought of “being no more”. For others, an abiding anxiety is having their grip on freedom, choice, agency, and personal will broken. Note the visceral sensations crawling through this thought experiment — the loss of freedom, entertained even for a brief moment has a suffocating weight to it, doesn’t it?
Or, suppose you shudder in fear the most about being utterly alone, deprived of the comforts of social belonging, human connection, and emotional consolation. All these fears, in their sweeping universality, are like highways into the underlying makeup of the human soul. The four major fears spelled out here, boiled down to their one-word labels — death, meaninglessness, loss of freedom, and isolation are, in fact, the express interest of existential psychotherapists. Irvin Yalom, arguably the prime modern disciple of this therapeutic orientation heralded these major fears under the banner of the four “Ultimate Concerns”.
Now, existential psychotherapy is not especially popular. That does not mean it occupies fringe status, as it enjoys a long history of practitioners, complete with a roster of arguable philosopher forefathers, including European giants Kierkegaard and Sartre. One reason for this is that the themes existential approaches dwell on can be intimidating and off-putting in their gloomy affect, not to mention their abstract bent. Person-centered therapies reign supreme for a reason; they do not insist on confrontation with mortality for instance. Their affirming nature is comforting, and thus initially more appealing contrasted against the deep dive into human limitation that existentialism necessarily entails.
There is, I believe, is a strong argument to make for the less-obvious (and surprising!) healing properties of the existentialist approach with its knack for hard questions and sage spirit of resignation. Before that reveal, we ought to delve deeper into the four Ultimate Concerns and make an honest attempt at unearthing what about them makes us so squirmy and from…
