Mahan Doğrusöz: The foundational texts of existential philosophy that emerged in Europe—particularly the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whose thought closely parallels existentialism—have always struck me as profoundly pessimistic. In these writings, despite possessing the freedom to choose, human beings appear fundamentally alone, confronting death in complete solitude. Ever since my university years, I have been curious about how this philosophical tradition evolved into existential psychotherapy. In what ways does existential psychotherapy draw upon existential philosophy? Where do the two traditions converge, and where do they begin to diverge?
Erkan Kalem: I think the answer cannot be found solely within existential philosophy itself. To understand its emergence, we must first consider the historical context from which it arose. Existential philosophy is not merely an exploration of the individual’s inner world; it is also a way of understanding how modern human beings came into existence.
Five centuries ago, people in Europe did not experience themselves as autonomous individuals in the modern sense. Medieval cosmology rested upon the religious and philosophical framework known as the Great Chain of Being, a hierarchical vision that organized all forms of existence into a fixed and meaningful order. Society and the universe functioned according to this cosmic hierarchy. Everything—and everyone—had an assigned place within it. Human beings understood themselves as part of a larger order encompassing God, society, and nature. Their identity, way of life, and sense of meaning were, to a great extent, provided by this shared world.
This worldview gradually began to dissolve with the Renaissance and continued to unravel through the Age of Discovery, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and eventually the Industrial Revolution. People left small, tightly knit communities and migrated to rapidly growing cities. Modes of production changed. Family structures were transformed. Everyday life was fundamentally reorganized.
The modern individual was born—but this birth also marked a profound rupture. Modernity did not merely grant human beings greater freedom. It simultaneously severed them from the world to which they had belonged for centuries. I believe this rupture is the true starting point of existential thought.
Interestingly, it was not philosophers who first recognized this loss, but poets and novelists. The English Romantics—Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley—were not simply celebrating nature. They were mourning the disappearance of an entire way of being. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is perhaps one of the most powerful literary expressions of this anxiety. The novel tells the story of humanity’s desire to master nature, only to discover that it cannot live with what it has created. In many ways, today’s debates surrounding artificial intelligence—the fear that we may be creating a force capable of escaping our control—can already be discerned within its pages.
Later, philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger addressed the same transformation from a philosophical perspective. Their primary concern was not simply the human psyche. Rather, they asked a more fundamental question: How can human beings live in a world that has lost its shared sources of meaning?
Freud belonged to this same historical moment. He, too, sought to understand modern humanity, but he approached the question primarily through the individual’s psychic apparatus, employing the positivist scientific model of the nineteenth century. Yet the optimistic faith of positivism largely collapsed with the First World War.
Heidegger then proposed a radically different path. Instead of explaining human beings through a mechanistic model of the psyche, he situated them within their historical, cultural, and ontological existence. Where Freud spoke of the psyche, Heidegger spoke of Dasein.
Existential psychotherapy emerged precisely at the intersection of these two intellectual traditions. Ludwig Binswanger, and later Medard Boss, believed that Heidegger’s understanding of human existence could open an entirely new horizon for psychotherapy. In their view, therapy is not primarily about symptoms or intrapsychic conflicts. Its deeper task is to help people move beyond a mechanistic subject–object relationship with the world and rediscover what Heidegger called a relationship of care (Sorge)—a way of being genuinely engaged with existence itself.
For this reason, I think it would be misleading to define existential psychotherapy simply as a therapy concerned with death, freedom, or anxiety. Its more fundamental aim is to understand the loneliness, alienation, and loss of meaning experienced by modern human beings within the historical process that produced them.
Mahan Doğrusöz: What you’re describing leads me to an important realization. It seems, then, that existential psychotherapy does not interpret human suffering solely through the lens of an individual’s personal history. Instead, it understands the client’s story within the broader transformation humanity has undergone over the last several centuries. From this perspective, how do you understand the pervasive feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and lack of belonging that seem so common today?
Erkan Kalem: I believe these are among the emotions we encounter most frequently in the therapy room today. People tell us, “I don’t feel that I belong anywhere.” “Life seems meaningless.” “There is an emptiness inside me that I cannot explain.”
Our first impulse is often to explain these experiences by looking at the individual’s personal history. Childhood experiences, attachment patterns, and family relationships are, of course, enormously important. I would never minimize their significance.
At the same time, however, we must remember that all of these unfold against a much larger historical backdrop. Many of the difficulties experienced by modern individuals are not merely personal. They are also consequences of the historical era in which we live. Modernization did not simply bring technological progress, new lifestyles, and greater individual freedom. It also uprooted human beings from the networks of relationships that had sustained them for centuries. We became detached from the land. Traditional communities gradually disappeared. Extended families gave way to increasingly isolated nuclear households. Shared systems of meaning began to fragment.
It was inevitable that such transformations would carry profound psychological consequences.
When a client says, “I feel groundless,” perhaps they truly are. When someone says, “I don’t feel that I belong anywhere,” perhaps it is because many of the natural communities to which human beings once belonged have largely disappeared. And when someone says, “I feel lonely all the time,” the explanation may not lie solely in childhood experiences. It may also reflect the civilization within which they now live.
For me, one of the therapist’s first responsibilities is to understand the broader socio-cultural context in which these experiences arise.
There is also an important theoretical distinction that is often overlooked: the distinction between drive and desire. Psychoanalysis teaches us that our instinctual drives can only ever be partially satisfied within the conditions of modern urban life. If I had lived in a village in the fifteenth century, embedded within that cosmological order, my drives would have found a more natural form of satisfaction. I would not have been compelled to pursue complete fulfillment. Modern industrial bourgeois culture, however, produces something different: desire. And desire is insatiable. It continually demands total satisfaction, while the city is structurally incapable of providing it. In that sense, modern urban life creates a permanent gap between what desire promises and what reality can ever deliver.
Mahan Doğrusöz: So the existential therapist listens to the client not only as the author of a personal biography, but also as a witness to the historical moment in which they live.
Erkan Kalem: Exactly. That is something I consider profoundly important.
Human beings are not merely biological or psychological organisms. We are also historical, cultural, and relational beings.
Today, millions of people live only a few metres apart in large cities, yet their lives rarely intersect in any meaningful way. We are physically surrounded by others, but psychologically we may be lonelier than at any other point in history.
Sometimes a person’s suffering is not only the suffering of their family. It is also the suffering of the age in which they live. For that reason, I believe it is insufficient to explain the pervasive sense of emptiness experienced by modern people solely through individual trauma. Childhood matters. Family matters. These remain indispensable. Yet there are times when the pain we encounter belongs not only to an individual life, but to an entire civilization.
One of the greatest contributions of existential psychotherapy, in my view, is that it allows us to see human suffering within this wider horizon.
Mahan Doğrusöz: Today, particularly in the United States, existential psychotherapy is often associated with humanistic psychology. How did these two traditions gradually come together?
Erkan Kalem: In Europe, existential thought developed primarily as a philosophical tradition. In the United States, however, it became much more visible within psychotherapy, largely through the work of Rollo May.
A major milestone was the publication of Existence in 1958, a landmark volume edited by May that introduced existential thought to American clinicians. Later, figures such as Irvin Yalom and Kirk Schneider carried this tradition forward.
Contemporary existential-humanistic psychotherapy in America has become increasingly integrative, particularly under Schneider’s leadership. His book Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy: Guideposts to the Core of Practice reflects this evolution very clearly.
Mahan Doğrusöz: You have emphasized Rollo May’s importance several times. What do you see as his greatest contribution to this tradition?
Erkan Kalem: For me, Rollo May’s greatest achievement was that he successfully brought together the richness of European continental philosophy with the climate of American psychology and interpersonal psychoanalysis.
His ideas did not emerge solely from intellectual reflection. They were deeply rooted in personal suffering. May’s sister struggled with schizophrenia, and he himself spent eighteen months in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis. These experiences profoundly shaped his understanding of the existential dimensions of human life.
His final book, The Cry for Myth, speaks directly to many of the issues we have been discussing. May argues that contemporary people struggle to find meaning because we no longer possess shared myths or a common cosmology capable of orienting our lives. Without these larger frameworks, our existence easily becomes shallow and fragmented.
Irvin Yalom later brought many of these existential concerns directly into clinical practice, making themes such as death, freedom, isolation, and meaning central topics within everyday psychotherapy.
I would also like to make a point that is sometimes overlooked. Both in Europe and in the United States, nearly all of the clinicians who developed the various schools of existential psychotherapy were originally trained as psychoanalysts. This is, I believe, highly significant.
Ludwig Binswanger, one of the founders of Daseinsanalysis, received his psychiatric and psychoanalytic training at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zurich, where he worked alongside Carl Gustav Jung and Eugen Bleuler. Although he began within the classical Freudian tradition and was closely associated with Freud during the early years of psychoanalysis, he gradually became dissatisfied with what he regarded as the reductionistic and mechanistic assumptions of orthodox psychoanalysis. Drawing upon the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, he went on to develop Daseinsanalysis as an alternative existential approach.
Medard Boss, the other major founder of Daseinsanalysis, also completed formal psychoanalytic training and studied with leading psychoanalysts of his time, including Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, Otto Fenichel, and Hans Sachs. Although his roots lay firmly within Freudian psychoanalysis, he later integrated Heidegger’s philosophy into clinical work and became one of the principal architects of existential analysis.
Viktor Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy, was likewise shaped by both Freudian and Adlerian traditions before developing his own distinctive existential approach.
Ronald D. Laing, one of the pioneers of British existential psychiatry, trained at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the Tavistock Clinic in London. His clinical foundations lay in Freudian and Object Relations theory before he moved toward existential psychiatry and the anti-psychiatry movement.
Similarly, Emmy van Deurzen, one of today’s leading representatives of the British existential tradition, initially studied philosophy and psychoanalysis in France before developing her own influential model of existential-phenomenological therapy.
Rollo May himself completed psychoanalytic training at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, where he later served as both training and supervising analyst. His psychoanalytic background was rooted in the Neo-Freudian and Interpersonal traditions, and early in his career he was also deeply influenced by Alfred Adler.
Irvin Yalom, too, received orthodox psychoanalytic training during his psychiatric residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Only later did he move beyond classical psychoanalysis to develop existential psychotherapy as an independent clinical approach.
When we look at this history, one fact becomes unmistakably clear. Nearly all of the major architects of existential psychotherapy possessed a remarkably solid psychoanalytic education. They understood the deep structure of personality before they attempted to expand psychotherapy in new directions. For that reason, I find it difficult to imagine a purely existential psychotherapy entirely detached from a theory of personality.
A therapist needs a coherent understanding of how the human mind develops and functions. I sometimes wish these pioneers had emphasized this point more explicitly.
Mahan Doğrusöz: In recent years, relational psychoanalysis and Integrative Psychotherapy have increasingly emphasized that human beings are relational by nature. Richard Erskine, for example, argues that the therapeutic relationship itself is the primary agent of healing. Yet when people think of existential psychotherapy, they often associate it with loneliness, freedom, death, and Heidegger’s notion of human beings as “thrown” into the world. Do these two approaches represent fundamentally different conceptions of human nature?
Erkan Kalem: I don’t believe they do. Contemporary psychodynamic thinking has largely moved beyond the idea of a one-person psychology. Today we speak of a relational field that is co-created by therapist and client. The therapist is no longer regarded as a detached observer, nor is the client merely the object of observation. Together they continuously shape the therapeutic process through their interaction.
A similar shift can be found within existential psychotherapy. Whether we look at the British existential-phenomenological tradition, Kirk Schneider’s existential-integrative model in the United States, or Irvin Yalom’s emphasis on the here-and-now, all of these approaches move beyond the classical subject-object distinction. They emphasize what Heidegger described as a relationship of care—a mode of genuinely being with another person rather than simply observing them.
For that reason, I find the relational perspective immensely valuable. Human beings develop in relationships. They are wounded in relationships. And, more often than not, they begin to heal in relationships.
I therefore see no fundamental contradiction between existential psychotherapy and relational psychotherapy.
Mahan Doğrusöz: So you also place great emphasis on the healing power of the therapeutic relationship.
Erkan Kalem: Absolutely. For me, the relationship is what makes psychotherapy possible in the first place. Theories matter. Techniques matter. But ultimately they derive their meaning from the relationship established between two people. Today, the questions we ask are no longer simply “What is wrong with the client?” Instead, we ask: “What is happening between us?”, “What is the client evoking in me?”, “How am I responding?”. This is where psychotherapy truly unfolds.
People often begin to change because they experience, perhaps for the first time, a fundamentally different kind of relationship. For this reason, I believe psychotherapy is becoming increasingly integrative. It is difficult today to argue that any single theoretical school can fully explain the complexity of human beings. Psychodynamic theory has given us an extraordinary understanding of the human mind. Existential philosophy offers a broader framework for understanding the human condition. EMDR, mindfulness, and other contemporary approaches provide effective ways of responding to different clinical needs. The challenge is not to choose one school over another. The real challenge is to integrate them into a coherent and meaningful whole.
Mahan Doğrusöz: Then perhaps the central question today is no longer, “Which school of psychotherapy is correct?”
Erkan Kalem: Exactly. The more important question is: “Which combination of theoretical perspectives will help me understand the person sitting in front of me?” That, I believe, is where psychotherapy is heading. At the same time, I would make one important distinction. Being technically integrative is not the same as possessing a coherent understanding of how the human mind functions.
I still believe that psychotherapy requires a solid theory of personality. The psychodynamic tradition has accumulated an extraordinary body of knowledge about personality development. Without that foundation, merely combining different techniques is not enough.
For me, effective psychotherapy rests upon three interconnected pillars: a rich understanding of the human condition, a coherent theory of personality, and a flexible repertoire of clinical methods that can be adapted to the unique needs of each individual.
Only when these three elements come together can psychotherapy truly become an integrated clinical practice.
Mahan Doğrusöz: One theme that has consistently emerged throughout our conversation is that you never treat existential thought as something separate from psychodynamic theory. Today these traditions are sometimes presented as entirely different schools of psychotherapy. Why do you believe they should be understood together?
Erkan Kalem: Because I don’t see them as competing paradigms. I see them as complementary perspectives. Psychodynamic theory has given us an exceptionally sophisticated understanding of personality development, early relationships, transference, countertransference, and the unconscious dynamics that shape psychological life. Existential thought contributes something equally important.
It reminds us that human beings cannot be understood solely through the workings of the psyche. We also exist within history, culture, society, and the fundamental conditions of existence itself. That is why I believe these two traditions enrich one another rather than compete with one another.
I would even argue that psychoanalysis has always contained an existential dimension, although this has often been overlooked because Freud formulated his ideas within the scientific language of nineteenth-century biology. Freud famously described psychoanalysis as “the pursuit of truth.” The truth he referred to, I believe, is not objective scientific truth alone, but the subjective truth that Kierkegaard regarded as central to human existence.
At the same time, we must also acknowledge an important limitation. Even a profound and long-term psychoanalytic process—conducted several times a week over many years—may not, by itself, resolve the deeper existential crisis faced by people living in the modern world. A person may enjoy financial security. They may live comfortably. They may provide their children with every educational opportunity. Yet they may still carry within themselves an unquiet fire—a sense of rootlessness, restlessness, and insatiable longing. The therapeutic relationship, insightful interpretations, and years of careful clinical work can alleviate this suffering. But they cannot entirely replace the larger world that modernity has taken away. Because the problem is not only psychological. It is also civilizational.
Mahan Doğrusöz: Throughout our conversation, you have spoken about the modern individual’s loneliness, the loss of belonging, and the historical transformation that has shaped contemporary life. This inevitably brings me to the following question: if the difficulties people experience are not only the result of their personal life histories but also of the age in which they live, what can psychotherapy actually change?
Erkan Kalem: I think this is one of the most fundamental questions in psychotherapy. As therapists, we sometimes find it difficult to evaluate both our strengths and our limitations realistically.
Of course, psychotherapy can bring about profound change. People can begin to understand their own stories more deeply. They can learn to regulate their emotions, transform their relationships, and lighten burdens they may have carried for years. These are all significant achievements. At the same time, however, we must acknowledge something else. The client is not merely a product of childhood. The client is also a product of the age in which they live. Today, many people have become disconnected from the land they once belonged to. They have become disconnected from their communities, from their extended families, and from the shared worlds of meaning that once sustained them.
Psychotherapy cannot recreate those worlds. In the therapy room, we can work through a person’s childhood wounds. But we cannot restore an entire way of life that has been lost. That is where the limits of psychotherapy begin.
Mahan Doğrusöz: Nevertheless, many contemporary approaches place considerable emphasis on the healing power of the therapeutic relationship.
Erkan Kalem: I agree completely. It is immensely valuable. But I do not believe that it is sufficient on its own. Sometimes I think of it this way. It is like giving a small bottle of water to someone dying of thirst in the middle of the desert. That bottle of water is precious. It may even keep the person alive for another day. But what they truly need is much more than that small bottle. The relational hunger of modern human beings has become so immense that one hour—or even five hours—of therapy each week cannot fully satisfy it.
For years, some of my clients have said to me, “If I hadn’t been able to talk to you, I don’t think I could have survived.” Naturally, those words move me. But they also make me think. Because outside the therapy room, there is often no socio-cultural network capable of sustaining them. And when we add the extraordinary fragility of human relationships in today’s post-truth era, the picture becomes even more difficult.
People cannot live on psychotherapy alone. For that reason, therapists should know the value of what they do. But they should never forget its limits.
Mahan Doğrusöz: What you are describing strikes me as a remarkably modest, yet at the same time deeply realistic, understanding of psychotherapy.
Erkan Kalem: Perhaps it is. I think therapists can sometimes fall into the illusion that they are capable of solving everything. In reality, we can change many things in a person’s life. But we cannot change the civilization in which they live. Today’s human beings live with far greater loneliness, alienation, and loss of meaning than previous generations. To imagine that all of this can be resolved within the therapy room would be unrealistic. That does not mean, however, that what we do is insignificant. Sometimes therapy becomes the first truly trustworthy relationship a person has ever experienced. Sometimes it is the first place where they genuinely feel understood. These are not small contributions.
That is why I do not describe myself simply as an existential therapist. A more accurate description would be that I try to think with an existential sensibility. I draw upon psychodynamic theory. I pay close attention to transference and countertransference. But at the same time, I also try to understand the historical, cultural, and social context in which my clients live.
Mahan Doğrusöz: Throughout our conversation, we have spoken about the impact of modernization on human beings. However, Turkey’s story of modernization is quite different from that of Europe. Do you think this difference also influences the kinds of problems we encounter in the therapy room?
Erkan Kalem: Very much so. Turkey’s modernization took place within a very short period of time. Until quite recently, the majority of the population lived in villages. Within only a few generations, millions of people migrated to large cities. Physically, we moved into cities, but our mental and cultural transformation did not occur at the same pace. As a result, many people today live between two different worlds. On the one hand, traditional forms of belonging are dissolving. On the other hand, new communities capable of replacing them have not emerged. I think we see the psychological consequences of this very frequently in the therapy room.
Mahan Doğrusöz: What you are describing sounds to me like a kind of “void of belonging.”
Erkan Kalem: Yes, in a way it is. A few days ago, I was in my hometown, Uşak. We visited a family who grow lavender in a small village. As the conversation continued, something remarkable happened. My mother remembered everyone’s grandmother, grandfather, brothers and sisters, one by one. She knew who was related to whom, who had grown up in which house, and who had worked in which field. At that moment I thought: human beings do not live only with an individual identity. They live within a story. They live within a community. They live within a shared memory.
Today, however, we may live in the same apartment building in a large city for years without even knowing the names of our neighbours. This represents a profound change for the needs of the human psyche. People want to be seen. They want to be remembered. They want to feel that they belong somewhere. When these needs remain unmet, I think it is insufficient to explain the resulting loneliness solely in terms of individual psychology.
Mahan Doğrusöz: Then the psychotherapist cannot ignore the society in which the client lives.
Erkan Kalem: Absolutely. If I try to understand the client only through childhood experiences, I will miss something essential. At the most fundamental level, I see existentialism as a form of socio-cultural analysis, and I ask questions such as: In which city does this person live? Within what kind of culture did they grow up? To which generation do they belong? Have they experienced migration? Have they moved from a village to a city? All of these are part of psychological life.
Psychotherapy is not merely a discipline that examines the individual’s inner world. It also seeks to understand the world in which that individual lives. In my opinion, a good therapist is someone who is curious not only about the client’s past but also about the society in which the client lives.
Mahan Doğrusöz: One thing has stood out throughout our conversation. We constantly move beyond psychology itself. Sometimes we speak about history, sometimes philosophy, sometimes literature. This leads me to ask: is an education in psychology alone sufficient to become a good psychotherapist?
Erkan Kalem: In my opinion, it is not. In fact, I would put it even more strongly: psychotherapy is not the domain of psychology alone. The person who enters the therapy room does not bring only childhood experiences. They also bring the age in which they live. They bring the culture in which they were raised. They bring their family, their social class, and their history of migration. If the therapist knows only psychology, a great many of these layers will remain invisible.
Mahan Doğrusöz: Then could we say that psychotherapy is an attempt to understand the human being in all of his or her dimensions?
Erkan Kalem: Absolutely. I have never regarded psychotherapy as merely a collection of techniques. EMDR, cognitive therapy, psychodynamic therapy, existential therapy—they are all valuable. But each of them is searching for the answer to a much larger question: Who is the human being? This is not a question that psychology alone can answer.
That is why therapists should read philosophy. They should study history. They should read literature. They should cultivate a relationship with art. Because sometimes it is not scientific articles but great novels, poems, or films that reveal the deepest truths about human beings.
Mahan Doğrusöz: Finally, what advice would you give to young people who are just beginning their journey as psychotherapists?
Erkan Kalem: First, they should learn to understand the people who come before them within the context of the great historical rupture of the last five hundred years that has shaped the world of 2025–2026. They should open their minds to socio-cultural analysis and to philosophy.
Second, in their clinical work they should commit themselves to a coherent theory of personality—whether psychodynamic object relations theory, cognitive schema therapy, Transactional Analysis, or another well-developed framework—and build their practice upon it.
Finally, they should enrich their clinical toolbox by learning contemporary methods such as EMDR and mindfulness. But above all, they should never neglect to undergo their own in-depth psychotherapy and supervision.
If the next generation of therapists fails to understand the broader socio-cultural and historical context of the last five hundred years—for example, the extraordinary perspective Christopher Bollas presents in Meaning and Melancholia—their theories will remain incomplete, and so will the help they can offer the individual sitting in front of them.
Existentialism, feminist therapy, Marxist analysis… whatever perspective one adopts, therapists need a strong instrument of socio-cultural analysis. Because sometimes it is not scientific articles that tell us most about human beings, but Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, George Eliot’s novels on the Industrial Revolution, or the unforgettable characters created by Charles Dickens.
Mahan Doğrusöz: Thank you very much for this thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating conversation.
Erkan Kalem: Thank you. It was my pleasure.
Dr. Erkan Kalem graduated from Kadıköy Anadolu High School in 1985. He completed his M.A. in Clinical Psychology between 1996 and 1999, and his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology between 2011 and 2018, both at the Department of Psychology, Istanbul University.
His clinical approach is grounded in existential psychodynamic theory. He is the Turkish translator of the second edition of Nancy McWilliams’ Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process (2020) and a co-author of The Rorschach Coding Manual 3: Elderly Norms (2013).
Between 1997 and 1999, and again between 2010 and 2018, he worked at İçgörü Psychotherapy Center. He was affiliated with the Institute of Behavioral Sciences between 2000 and 2001, and with the Institute of Psychometric Research between 2002 and 2009. He currently practices at Verba Mea Consulting, which he founded, providing psychotherapy, professional training, and psychological consultation for adults.
Following his training between 2014 and 2016, he was awarded the title Diplomate Clinician in Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy, including international trainer certification, by the Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy in Texas, USA.
Since 2020, he has served as the Co-Founder, Co-President, and Trainer of the Valueİstanbul Institute of Logotherapy, accredited by the Viktor Frankl Institute Vienna.
Dr. Kalem is a member of the Turkish Psychological Association (TPD), the Rorschach and Projective Tests Association, and the International Association of Logotherapy and Existential Analysis at the Viktor Frankl Institute Vienna.
