Psychoanalysis has always been and is even today about truth, about disclosing what we dare about ourselves to another person. In fact, it is concerned with no other question. Not the truth of science or jurisprudence, but the truth (even the law) of the jungle, and of the price we invariably pay when we suppress it. This is why psychoanalysis was always supposed to be radical from the start, because it championed the act of lifting the veil and giving voice to what lurks beneath our protestations to the contrary. Despite all the talk about the parameters of effective treatment methodology, or the emergence of cutting edge theories into practice, we are still, a century after trying, more or less at sea with the patients we encounter each day. We are still, no matter how much we protest to the contrary, no matter how many years of experience we have accrued, flying by the seat of our pants. There is nothing wrong with this because that was always as it should be, as in looking through a glass darkly. How effective, skilled, or adept any of us are or may eventually become as practitioners is just as difficult or impossible to assess today as it was a century ago, no matter how much supervision, oversight, or scrutiny we are subjected to. All that we have to go on, as a beacon in the darkness ahead, are what we had in our discipline's infancy: a set of first principles that, if sufficiently elastic, guide us in that necessarily isolated, unremittingly lonely, universe of the treatment situation.

My work over the past thirty years has been devoted to showing how the essential, albeit unpopular, features of psychoanalysis are in danger of being forgotten, overlooked, and suppressed by successive generations of therapists who, ironically, have the most invested in its survival. In this endeavor I hope to counter the common wisdom that characterizes psychoanalysis as the epitome of what is erroneously depicted as aloof and disengaged, whose real purpose bears little, if any, relation to so-called analytic orthodoxy.

The context of therapeutic work and its objectives is and always will be the problem of what a human being suffers and what, if anything, the relationship between two people can do about it. With these observations in mind, I hope I have succeeded in depicting what existential psychoanalysis is by speaking to its essential latency, stripped of conceptual baggage that are burdened by a disproportionate reliance on psychodiagnositc speculation. By returning to the thing of psychotherapy itself, the what and wherefore from whence it came, I hope I have encouraged you to take a small step toward reclaiming the possibility of enjoying your own experience with it, as it moves around, within, and potentially between us.

References

Edie J. (1962) Introduction. In Thevanaz, P., What is phenomenology? And other essays.
    Chicago. Quadrangle Books, 1962.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) Phenomenology of perception. (trans. Colin Smith) London:
   Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Safranski (1998) Martin Heidegger: Between good and evil. Cambridge, MA:
    Harvard University Press.