The word "existential" is the subject of detailed research in humanistic psychology. It is the central term for this area of scientific and practical discipline, which focuses on the existence of man, the meaning of life, on the time of his life. This area is sometimes called "existential psychology."
For existentialists, one of the most important parameters of human life and psychological activity is the concept of time, a time scale. Human development goes from point to point of this scale. In some periods, the person is faced with the so-called "existential crises." They can be defined as crises of the meaning of life.
Studying Life Crisis Helps Overcome Psychological Difficulties
Existential psychotherapy is considered to be most suitable for psychologically and mentally healthy individuals. Its main task: to help a person to overcome critical vital points correctly and with minimal losses.
Analysis of human life through time periods is a very promising area of psychotherapy.
The existentialist teachings about the personality crisis are rather optimistic. Following the scientists of other areas, they believe that the crisis is not the end of life. This is a turning point that arises in order to bring a person to a new level of existence. Having overcome the crisis, a person makes a sharp leap in his personal development. To do this, he must learn to understand that the word "crisis" means the opening of prospects for a qualitatively higher standard of living.
Work with complex emotional states
Existential psychology is a direction for emotionally confused but healthy and mature individuals.
Existential psychologists, like psychoanalysts or cognitive psychotherapists, can work with complex emotional states. Even a person who is healthy in psychology can “get stuck” in anxiety, apathy, subdepressive and other strong emotional states for a while, which impede adequate action in the world. But if a psychoanalyst also searches for even the smallest manifestations of pathologies in a healthy person, then the existentialist has a different focus of vision. He focuses on healthy and highly developed personality structures, due to which he “corrects” and pulls out those structures that are currently experiencing the destructive effects of time or the environment.