In nearly every moment of every day, people around the world grapple with the fundamental issues of “being” and “becoming” that come along with human existence. The science of existential psychology is focused on better understanding the many important ways those key existential concerns impact everyday life. Here, we briefly trace the emergence of the underlying philosophical ideas and their development into a thriving research area with contributors around the world.
Philosophical Seeds: Existence Precedes Essence
For ages, people have tried to understand the nature of human existence. Since the days of Plato and Aristotle, a common way of approaching the topic is to think about our essence—our essential purpose—as the reason for our existence. For example, the essence of a musical instrument is that it can produce sound; it doesn’t need to have strings, reeds, or brass, specifically, but if it can’t emit sound then it isn’t really a musical instrument. Likewise, essentialism assumes that the universe has meaning and everything in it, including you, has an essential purpose. From that approach, one goal for psychology might be to identify each person’s essence and learn about the extent to which people are recognizing and living up to their predefined essence.
Although such essentialist conceptions of human nature remain popular today, the modern age cast a shadow on the idea that humans exist to participate in some predefined meaning system or to fulfill some mysterious essential purpose. Instead, philosophers began to argue that neither the universe, nor us humans in it, are imbued with any inherent meaning, and that any essence or purpose we perceive exists purely because we created it for ourselves. This position—that existence precedes essence—became the basis of the branch of philosophy known as existentialism. In other words, existentialism argues that we exist first, and then it’s up to us to fashion our own sense of life’s meaning and purpose. To live such an examined and self-determined life, however, requires each of us to continually grapple with the fragile nature of our existence, the absurdity of reality, and our fundamental freedom to determine what to do, who to be, how, and why.
The Road to Science: A Brief History
In the 1840s, just a few years prior to Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species (1859), Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was the first to put these existentialist ideas to paper. His work was then followed in the late 1800s by the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche, and in the 1900s by the works of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus. The central ideas of existentialism spread quickly, and were further developed and applied across a variety of academic domains and scientific disciplines.
Throughout the early- and mid-1900s, existentialism enabled new insights in theology (e.g., Paul Tillich; Martin Buber), sociology (e.g., Emile Durkheim; Berger & Luckmann), cultural anthropology (e.g., Ernest Becker), and psychology (e.g., William James; Otto Rank; Erich Fromm), and thinkers developed a wide variety of applications of existentialism to neurology (e.g., Viktor Frankl), psychiatry (e.g., Karl Jaspers), and psychotherapy (e.g., Ludwig Binswanger; Rollo May; Irvin Yalom).
Prior to the start of the cognitive revolution in the 1950s and ‘60s, however, the dominant view (Behaviorism) was that internal mental experiences—such as our cognitive and emotional handling of existential concerns—were simply beyond the reach of scientific study. But eventually, by the 1970s and ‘80s, the cognitive revolution had successfully developed techniques to systematically and quantitatively study inner mental processes and their external behavioral indicators and outcomes. Equipped with the emerging methods of the time, researchers in the ‘70s and ‘80s began conducting and publishing some of the first scientific tests of existentialist ideas. That early work established that it was indeed possible to apply the scientific method to study the psychological impact of existential concerns in everyday life.
As interest in the science of existential psychology spread throughout the 1990s and 2000s, researchers began developing novel theoretical perspectives and innovative research methods to assess the roles of various existential concerns in an increasingly broad range of the human experience.
In 2001, researchers held an International Conference on Experimental Existential Psychology in Amsterdam, which led to a Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology (2004) and a paper giving an introduction and overview of the field in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science (Koole, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2006), each of which helped establish existential psychology as a distinct and vital subfield of psychological science.
The Science of Existential Psychology: Emerging Trends
Since then, interest in the research, communication, and application of the science of existential psychology has continued to grow. Around the world, researchers are using diverse methods—from controlled laboratory experiments to analyses of large data sets—to rigorously test ideas about the roles of various existential concerns. This trend is popping up in almost every domain of contemporary psychological science, including cognition and neuroscience, social and personality psychology, clinical and counseling psychology, and more.
A growing number of major peer-reviewed research journals, such as Personality and Social Psychology Review (2010), Religion, Brain, & Behavior (2016), Review of General Psychology (2018), and Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology (2020), have been hosting “Special Issues” focused exclusively on existential psychology topics. A growing number of new handbooks and edited volumes cover research on topics in and across the domains touched by the science of existential psychology. And, beginning in 2019, researchers have organized an annual Existential Psychology Conference attached to the annual meeting of the largest society of personality and social psychologists in the world. This preconference has proven to be a premier outlet for researchers and students to learn about exciting developments in the field, face to face.
Additionally, academics and other professionals and experts have been communicating the major ideas, critical findings, and unresolved issues in the field to students and the public by teaching courses, publishing textbooks and popular books, holding workshops and webinars, contributing to documentary films, appearing on TV programs, and penning op-eds to news outlets. And, as experts in the field, they also help to apply the science of existential psychology to a variety of domains, from business and industry to sports and recreation, community social issues, and public policy.
Together, these and other exciting trends are part of what makes the science of existential psychology such a productive, insightful, and useful area of psychological science!