Existential psychoanalysis decodes behavior to reveal each person’s fundamental choice of being.

Evidence

This comparison allows us to understand better what an existential psychoanalysis must be if it is entitled to exist. It is a method destined to bring to light, in a strictly objective form, the subjective choice by which each living person makes himself a person; that is, makes known to himself what he is. Since what the method seeks is a choice of being at the same time as a being, it must reduce particular behavior patterns to fundamental relations—not of sexuality or of the will to power, but of being—which are expressed in this behavior. It is then guided from the start toward a comprehension of being and must not assign itself any other goal than to discover being and the mode of being of the being confronting this being. It is forbidden to stop before attaining this goal. It will utilize the comprehension of being which characterizes the investigator inasmuch as he is himself a human reality; and as it seeks to detach being from its symbolic expressions, it will have to rediscover each time on the basis’ of a comparative study of acts and attitudes, a symbol destined to decipher them. Its criterion of success will be the number of facts which its hypothesis permits it to explain and to unify as well as the self-evident intuition of the irreducibility of the end attained. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1346

Categorization

• XREF: Directly sets up Beauvoir’s use of existential psychoanalysis of the ‘Other’ as a category; also contrasts deliberately with Freud’s sexual-reduction psychoanalysis. — connects to: Freudian and existential analyses both treat acts as symbols of deeper structures; Psychoanalysis converts each behavior’s hidden revelation into conceptual form; Existential psychoanalysis rejects the unconscious and makes psychic acts coextensive with consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1340 (+9 more)
• DEFINE: Full definition of existential psychoanalysis as a method distinct from both Freudian and Adlerian analysis.

Broader Connections

• Existential psychoanalysis remains an unbuilt method with possible future exemplars. #qualifies (0.85)
• Existentialism is by nature applied to real individual lives #expands (0.82) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 687
• Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1025
• Existentialism holds that philosophy grows out of concrete lived experience #expands (0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 54
• Existentialist anxiety is the vertigo of realizing one’s own freedom #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 61