What Is Existential Psychiatry?
CLEMENS E. BENDA M.D.1
1 Assistant Psychiatrist, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston; Instructor, Harvard Medical School; and Affiliate Professor, Clark University, Worcester, Mass.
Existentialism, as it has evolved over the past 50 years, contains much that is relevant for contemporary psychiatry. It offers a new orientation toward man in health and disease, focusing on the central problems of modern man-the relationship between the self and its body, the realm of emotions as the attunement of the personality to the world of encounter, and language as the mold of the experienced world.
