The phenomenological notion of existence and psychological clinical practices

Abstract

This essay presents man’s way of being as “existence”, as formulated by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time, as one of the most fundamental contributions of Phenomenology to Clinical Psychology. The notion of “existence”, also related to “being-there” (Dasein) and “being-in-theworld”, is understood as the origin of the essence of beings, i.e., a pre-understanding of being itself, linked to the human condition of ´beingthrown´ into a temporal facticity. It is understood that the heideggerian notion of “existence” defines a clearly distinctive clinical attitude and presents new possibilities for thematizing psychological phenomena and clinical practices. Psychological practices of a phenomenological and existential perspective assume the experience of self and others as an experience of “being-in-the-world-with”. In this way, they should be understood as spaces for taking care of those possibilities of “being-with” rather than taking care of an intrapsychic subject.