Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity

In this brilliant and revolutionary collection of 14 major essays that draw from more than 25 years of painstaking research, M. Guy Thompson regales us with a stunning revisioning of conventional psychoanalysis that deepens our understanding of the human condition.

Integrating the most seminal existentialist philosophers, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, with the most forward-thinking psychoanalysts over the past century, including Freud, Laing, Bion, Winnicott, and Lacan, Thompson offers a profound yet deeply personal vision of what psychoanalysis can be in the 21st century. In this fascinating volume, Thompson explores such concepts as experience, authenticity, will, happiness, and agency by utilizing a wide range of thinkers, including the ancient Greeks, but always in his singular voice. Exquisitely lucid and engaging to read, Thompson deftly lures us into thoughtful and enlightening territory typically inaccessible to the general reader.

This compelling integration of continental philosophy and psychoanalysis will be of interest not only to psychoanalytic practitioners of all persuasions, but to psychotherapists generally and their patients, as well as philosophers, social scientists, and any student of the human condition.

M. Guy Thompson, PhD, is Founder and Director of the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis and a Personal and Supervising Analyst and Faculty Member at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, San Francisco. His two most recent books, The Legacy of R. D. Laing (2015, editor) and The Death of Desire (2017, 2nd ed.), are also published by Routledge. Dr. Thompson is the author of numerous books and journal articles on psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and psychosis. He lives in Berkeley, California.