Existentialism

Abstract

Existentialism, which MeSH classifies under psychological theory, is the philosophical tradition holding that a human being has no fixed essence given in advance but becomes what it is through its own choices, and that this radical freedom, exercised in the face of finitude, is the ground of both anxiety and responsibility. Its founding maxim, Sartre's existence precedes essence, inverts the classical order that would define a person by a prior nature. Carried into psychology through Binswanger's Daseinsanalyse, May's Existence, Frankl's logotherapy and Yalom's four ultimate concerns — death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness — it reframed clinical problems as confrontations with the given conditions of existence. Its constructs were later operationalised: terror management theory, the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, and meta-analyses of meaning-centred therapies. This article states what existentialism is and traces its passage from philosophy into empirical psychology.

Keywords: logotherapy, existential psychotherapy, meaning in life

Existentialism began as a philosophical revolt against systems that would explain the individual away — whether by an eternal human nature, a divine plan, or a deterministic science of behaviour — and insisted instead that a person exists first, encounters the world without a script, and defines what a life amounts to only by living it. Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are its nineteenth-century forerunners; Martin Heidegger's analysis of human existence as Dasein, being-toward-death, and thrownness supplied its twentieth-century vocabulary (Heidegger, 1962); and Jean-Paul Sartre gave it its slogan and its popular form (Sartre, 2007). What made the tradition matter to psychology is that its themes are not abstractions but lived predicaments — the dread of one's own death, the vertigo of a freedom that cannot be refused, the search for a meaning the universe does not supply — and these became the material of a distinctive clinical tradition and, later, of a testable research programme.

What Existentialism Is

Existentialism is less a single doctrine than a family of positions organised around one claim: that for human beings, unlike for artefacts or natural kinds, there is no essence — no fixed set of defining properties — laid down before existence. A paper-knife, in Sartre's example, is made to a prior specification; its essence precedes its existence. A person is not. One first exists, is thrown into a world not of one's choosing, and only afterward, through choices, makes oneself into something definite (Sartre, 2007). Existence precedes essence is the compressed statement of this reversal, and every other existentialist theme follows from it.

Figure 1

The Existentialist Inversion of Essence and Existence

If there is no given nature, then a person is, in Sartre's phrase, condemned to be free: there is no authority — no God, no human nature, no natural law — that can relieve one of the choice of what to do and who to be. Freedom here is not a welcome liberty but an inescapable burden, because with it comes total responsibility and no excuse. The characteristic mood in which this condition is disclosed is anxiety (Heidegger's Angst, Kierkegaard's dread): not fear of a particular object but the groundless unease that arises when one confronts one's own freedom and the nothingness against which it acts (Heidegger, 1962). To evade that anxiety by pretending one's choices are forced — by roles, circumstances, or what one does — is what Sartre called bad faith; to own one's freedom and finitude is authenticity.

Death occupies a special place. For Heidegger, human existence is being-toward-death: mortality is not a distant event but a structural feature of a life that is always running ahead toward its own end, and it is authentic anticipation of death that individualises a person and lends existence its urgency (Heidegger, 1962). This is the philosophical root of the psychological programmes that would later make death an experimental variable. The tradition divides over religion — Sartre's is atheistic, Kierkegaard's and Gabriel Marcel's are theistic — but the structure is shared: a finite being, without guarantees, must make and answer for itself.

From Philosophy to Psychology

Existentialism crossed into psychology when clinicians found that the philosophical analysis of existence described their patients better than the drive theories then available. The bridge was phenomenology: the method, from Edmund Husserl and Heidegger, of describing lived experience as it presents itself rather than reducing it to underlying mechanisms. Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist and correspondent of Freud, built Daseinsanalyse — existential analysis — by applying Heidegger's categories to psychopathology, treating a disorder as a particular way of being-in-the-world rather than a collection of symptoms; his case of Ellen West is its best-known study (May et al., 1958). Rollo May, editing and co-writing the 1958 volume Existence, introduced this European work to American psychology and made anxiety, rather than repression, its central clinical fact (May et al., 1958).

The most influential clinical descendant is Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, the third Viennese school after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology. Frankl, who survived the concentration camps, held that the primary human motivation is neither pleasure nor power but a will to meaning, and that meaning can be found even in unavoidable suffering by the attitude one takes toward it (Frankl, 2006). Irvin Yalom systematised the field in Existential Psychotherapy, organising it around four ultimate concerns that therapy must confront directly: death, freedom (and its attendant responsibility), existential isolation, and meaninglessness (Yalom, 1980). Where classical psychodynamic therapy traces conflict to the past, existential therapy locates it in the patient's present relation to these given conditions of existence — a stance that also shaped the humanistic and person-centred traditions with which it overlaps. Table 1 sets out Yalom's four ultimate concerns and the confrontation each names.

The move from philosophy to psychology reaches its empirical form in terror management theory, developed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszczynski from the anthropology of Ernest Becker. The theory takes Heidegger's being-toward-death as a testable premise: because humans alone foresee their own mortality, they are motivated to buffer the resulting potential for terror by investing in cultural worldviews and self-esteem that confer symbolic permanence. Its signature manipulation is mortality salience — a brief reminder of death — and its dual-process refinement holds that conscious, proximal defences suppress death thoughts immediately, while the distal worldview-defending effects emerge only after a delay, once the thought has left focal attention (Pyszczynski et al., 1999). The demo above traces that dissociation: accessibility is low right after the reminder and rises as the delay grows.

Measuring Existential Constructs

A recurring criticism of existential psychology was that its constructs, however profound, resisted measurement. Much of the modern work answers that charge by building validated instruments. The most widely used is Michael Steger's Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ), which makes the decisive move of splitting meaning into two orthogonal dimensions: the presence of meaning — the degree to which one feels one's life already makes sense — and the search for meaning — the degree to which one is actively seeking it. Ten items on a seven-point scale load onto the two five-item subscales, with one negatively worded item reverse-scored; the two correlate only weakly, so a person may be high on both, low on both, or any combination (Steger et al., 2006). The demo below scores both subscales live.

The measurement programme extends beyond meaning. The Existential Concerns Questionnaire provides a validated self-report scale of existential anxiety — the dread attached to death, meaninglessness and the other givens — in both clinical and non-clinical samples, turning a philosophical mood into a psychometric variable that can be correlated with outcomes and tracked over treatment (van Bruggen et al., 2017). Paul Wong's meaning therapy and his second-wave positive psychology draw on this apparatus to reincorporate suffering and meaning into a field that had emphasised positive affect, integrating logotherapy with an empirical measurement tradition (Wong, 2010) (Wong, 2011).

Worked Example

Consider a respondent completing the MLQ. On the five Presence items she answers 6, 5, 6, 5 to items 1, 4, 5 and 6, and 2 to item 9, My life has no clear purpose. Because item 9 is negatively worded it is reverse-scored on the seven-point scale as 8 − 2 = 6, so it adds to the presence total rather than subtracting from it. Her Presence subscale is therefore 6 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 6 = 28. On the five Search items she answers 5, 4, 5, 4, 5 to items 2, 3, 7, 8 and 10, giving a Search subscale of 5 + 4 + 5 + 4 + 5 = 23. Both subscales range from 5 to 35, so 28 is a high presence score and 23 a moderate-to-high search score.

The interpretive point is that the two are read together, not summed. This respondent already feels her life is meaningful (high presence) yet continues actively to seek meaning (moderate-high search) — a profile that is common and not contradictory, since searching is not merely a response to a deficit. Had item 9 instead been answered 6 (strongly agrees her life has no clear purpose), its reverse score would be 8 − 6 = 2, dropping Presence to 6 + 5 + 6 + 5 + 2 = 24 and materially changing the clinical picture. The reverse-scoring of the single negatively worded item is thus not a bookkeeping detail but the hinge on which one item's contribution turns, which is why the demo displays both the raw response and its scored value.

Discussion

Existentialism's contribution to psychology is best understood as a reframing rather than a set of discoveries. It insists that certain problems — the fear of death, the paralysis of choice, the sense of a meaningless life — are not disorders to be cured but conditions of existence to be confronted, and that a psychology which explains them away by drives, conditioning or brain states misses what they are about. That stance was a deliberate counter to the two dominant systems of its era: against psychoanalysis it denied that the past determines the present, and against behaviorism it denied that a person is the product of a reinforcement history. Its emphasis on subjective experience also made it a natural ally of the humanistic movement and, more distantly, of the cognitive turn toward inner states.

The tradition's persistent difficulty is empirical. Its central claims are about meaning and freedom, which are hard to operationalise without flattening them, and its clinical writing often prefers depth of description to controlled comparison. The modern response has been to build measurable proxies — mortality salience for the confrontation with death, the MLQ for meaning, existential-anxiety scales for dread — and to subject the therapies to trial. This buys testability at the cost of some richness, and a fair reading holds both facts at once: the operational constructs are genuine scientific gains, and they capture only part of what the philosophical tradition meant. A wrong-headed criticism is that existential therapy is merely pessimistic; in practice it is closer to the opposite, treating the confrontation with limits as the precondition for meaning and engaged action.

Current Directions

The most active empirical front is outcome research. A meta-analysis of existential therapies across psychological outcomes found significant effects on meaning and reductions in psychopathology, the first quantitative synthesis to put the clinical tradition on a comparable footing with other therapies (Vos et al., 2015). A second meta-analysis, focused on meaning-centred interventions, found improvements in quality of life and reductions in psychological stress that were largest in palliative and cancer populations — precisely the settings in which a confrontation with finitude is unavoidable (Vos & Vitali, 2018). A randomised controlled trial of meaning-centred group psychotherapy for cancer survivors, derived directly from Frankl's logotherapy, has since demonstrated that these benefits are sustained over long-term follow-up (Holtmaat et al., 2020).

A parallel current is the consolidation of logotherapy's own evidence base. A systematic review of empirical research on logotherapy and existential analysis catalogued the controlled outcome studies now available and mapped where the evidence remains thin, marking the field's transition from a largely testimonial literature to a cumulative one (Thir & Batthyany, 2016). Open questions concern mechanism — whether meaning-centred therapies work through the presence of meaning specifically or through common therapeutic factors — and the durability and cultural generality of terror management effects, some of which have been scrutinised in the wider debate over replication.

Common Misconceptions

Existentialism is a philosophy of despair.

The confrontation with death, freedom and meaninglessness is the tradition's starting point, not its conclusion. Frankl, Yalom and May treat that confrontation as the precondition for authentic, meaningful engagement; the aim is responsibility and lived meaning, not resignation (Yalom, 1980).

Meaning is a single thing one either has or lacks.

The MLQ's central finding is that the presence of meaning and the search for it are separable, weakly correlated dimensions. A person can actively search while already feeling life is meaningful, so meaning is not a one-dimensional quantity (Steger et al., 2006).

Reminding people of death simply makes them anxious.

Terror management's dual-process model shows the effect is time-dependent: conscious death thoughts are suppressed immediately by proximal defences, and the worldview-defending, distal effects emerge only after a delay, once the thought is outside focal attention (Pyszczynski et al., 1999).

Glossary

Anxiety (existential)

The groundless unease, distinct from fear of a definite object, in which one's freedom and finitude are disclosed; for Heidegger and Kierkegaard a fundamental mood rather than a mere symptom.

Authenticity

Owning one's freedom, finitude and responsibility rather than fleeing them; living from one's own choices rather than from inherited roles or public opinion.

Bad faith

Sartre's term for the self-deception by which a person denies their own freedom, treating chosen conduct as if it were forced by role, nature or circumstance.

Being-toward-death

Heidegger's claim that human existence is structurally oriented toward its own end, so that authentic anticipation of death individualises a life and lends it urgency.

Dasein

Heidegger's word (literally being-there) for the specifically human way of existing, characterised by self-interpretation, thrownness and being-toward-death.

Daseinsanalyse

Existential analysis; Binswanger's psychiatry, which describes a disorder as a distinctive way of being-in-the-world rather than as a set of symptoms over a hidden mechanism.

Existence precedes essence

Sartre's maxim that a human being has no predetermined nature but first exists and then defines itself through action, reversing the classical order of essence before existence.

Freedom (existential)

The inescapable capacity and burden of choice; on Sartre's account one is condemned to be free, and freedom carries total responsibility with no external excuse.

Logotherapy

Frankl's meaning-centred therapy, the third Viennese school, holding that the primary human motivation is a will to meaning findable even in unavoidable suffering.

Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ)

Steger's ten-item instrument scoring the presence of and search for meaning as two separate, weakly correlated subscales.

Mortality salience

The experimental manipulation, central to terror management theory, of briefly reminding participants of their own death in order to observe its downstream effects on judgement and behaviour.

Phenomenology

The philosophical method, from Husserl and Heidegger, of describing lived experience as it presents itself to consciousness rather than explaining it by underlying causes; the bridge from existential philosophy into clinical psychology.

Terror management theory

The social-psychological research programme holding that awareness of mortality motivates investment in cultural worldviews and self-esteem, which buffer the potential for existential terror.

Thrownness

Heidegger's Geworfenheit: the condition of finding oneself already in a particular world, body and history one did not choose, the given background against which free choice is exercised.

Ultimate concerns

Yalom's four givens that existential therapy addresses directly: death, freedom (with its responsibility), existential isolation, and meaninglessness.

Will to meaning

Frankl's thesis that the search for meaning, rather than pleasure or power, is the fundamental human motivation.

Key Researchers

Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966). Swiss psychiatrist who founded Daseinsanalyse, applying Heidegger's phenomenology to psychopathology; author of the case of Ellen West. Wikipedia · Wikidata

Mick Cooper. Counselling psychologist at the University of Roehampton and co-author of the first meta-analysis of existential therapies; author of Existential Therapies. ORCID · Google Scholar · Faculty page

Emmy van Deurzen (b. 1951). Dutch-British psychotherapist who systematised the British school of existential therapy; author of Existential Counselling and Psychotherapy in Practice. Wikipedia · Wikidata · Google Scholar

Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997). Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, founder of logotherapy and author of Man's Search for Meaning, holding the will to meaning to be the primary human motivation. Wikipedia · Wikidata

Rollo May (1909–1994). American psychologist who introduced European existential analysis to the United States; lead editor of Existence and author of The Meaning of Anxiety. Wikipedia · Wikidata

Paul T. P. Wong (1937–2024). Chinese-Canadian psychologist who developed meaning therapy and second-wave positive psychology, integrating logotherapy with existential concerns. Wikipedia · Wikidata · Google Scholar

Irvin D. Yalom (b. 1931). American existential psychiatrist, emeritus at Stanford, who organised existential psychotherapy around four ultimate concerns; author of Existential Psychotherapy. Wikipedia · Wikidata

Frequently Asked Questions

What is existentialism in simple terms?
It is the view that a person is not born with a fixed purpose or nature but must create meaning and identity through their own free choices, and is fully responsible for the result. Sartre summed it up as existence precedes essence (Sartre, 2007).

How is existentialism different from existential psychology?
Existentialism is the philosophical tradition; existential psychology and psychotherapy apply its analysis of freedom, death, isolation and meaning to understanding and treating psychological distress, chiefly through Binswanger, May, Frankl and Yalom (Yalom, 1980).

What are Yalom's four ultimate concerns?
Death, freedom (with the responsibility it entails), existential isolation, and meaninglessness. Yalom argued that these givens of existence, rather than repressed drives, are the deep source of much psychological conflict (Yalom, 1980).

What is logotherapy?
Viktor Frankl's meaning-centred therapy, sometimes called the third Viennese school, which holds that the primary human motivation is a will to meaning and that meaning can be found even in unavoidable suffering (Frankl, 2006).

Can meaning in life be measured?
Yes. The Meaning in Life Questionnaire scores two separate dimensions, the presence of meaning and the search for it, and validated scales such as the Existential Concerns Questionnaire measure existential anxiety (Steger et al., 2006) (van Bruggen et al., 2017).

What is terror management theory?
A research programme proposing that awareness of one's own death motivates investment in cultural worldviews and self-esteem, which buffer the resulting potential for terror; it is tested by reminding people of death and observing the effects (Pyszczynski et al., 1999).

Does existential therapy actually work?
Meta-analyses report reliable gains. Existential therapies show significant effects on meaning and psychopathology, and meaning-centred interventions improve quality of life and reduce distress, with the largest effects in palliative and cancer care (Vos et al., 2015) (Vos & Vitali, 2018).

Is existentialism pessimistic?
Not in practice. Although it begins by confronting death and meaninglessness, the tradition treats that confrontation as the precondition for authenticity and engaged, meaningful action rather than as a counsel of despair (Frankl, 2006).

References