I believe that a significant part of my professional identity, paradoxically, rests more on a critical analysis of existential therapy — its ambitions, and the place of both the therapist and the client in the therapeutic relationship built in accordance with its fundamental principles — than on personal professional beliefs and philosophical intuitions that, it would seem, originally led me professionally to where I now stand.

It would be fair to say that the inclination toward a research-oriented and critical (and at times even skeptical) stance regarding my own interests, self-evident assumptions, and actions arose in me long before I began my professional activity (and, frankly, caused me far more inconvenience than benefit until relatively recently). However, it was precisely in the therapeutic and educational context that this inclination took on its clearest and most coherent form.

According to my colleagues, the critical analysis of existential therapy practice — to the joint implementation of which I continually invite them within training processes — often proves valuable for them and, at times, even therapeutic in its own way. From them, I also receive the natural and fair counter-position: “If you criticize, then propose something.” This encourages me to continually clarify and revise my own views, which has a noticeable therapeutic effect on me personally and, more importantly, strengthens my engagement and curiosity in my relationships with clients.

If I generalize the results of this exchange over recent years, the following question remains relevant for me:

What actually unites the theoretically and practically diverse field of existential counseling, which is inevitably refracted through the personal worldviews of its representatives, and how can it develop further?

Perhaps the starting point in the search for the most satisfactory answer to this question was the pluralistic approach, which takes into account the relationship between the theoretical legitimacy of various models (or languages) and practices of therapy and the individual characteristics and needs of clients. Importantly, this is not about the formal slogan “let a hundred flowers bloom,” but about a conscious therapeutic position: people need different “flowers” for different tasks (from formally therapeutic to purely aesthetic), and some people may even have an “allergy” to certain flowers. This view can be seen as one of many arguments in favor of developing horizontal, egalitarian relationships (recognized as fundamentally important by all existential schools) between therapists and clients, as well as among therapists themselves within the professional community.

The key tenet of pluralistic therapy tells us that different clients at different times need different therapies. Taking this into account, the therapist works with the client in a collaborative manner, helping them clarify their own expectations from therapy and the possible (if possible) paths to achieving them based on the knowledge and skills available to the therapist. This approach is quite consonant with existential therapy, as it involves respect for the uniqueness of human existence and becoming, as well as every possible support in strengthening the client’s sense of their ability to choose, even under constrained conditions, and, as a result, a deepening of self-understanding.

Transferring this position into the practice of existential therapy is relatively straightforward even without formal integration of assessment sessions and metatherapeutic discussions. To begin with, it is sufficient to occasionally offer the client a choice in how the therapeutic process unfolds and then reflect together with them on their intuitive decisions in response to various existential challenges discovered, among other things, in these very choices.

However, when it comes to the structure of existential therapeutic communities, the application of this principle, in my opinion, presents no less of a challenge.

For a variety of possible reasons (which I do not wish to focus on analyzing at this moment), the Russian-speaking existential community in the post-Soviet space (I allow that this may also be relevant for other communities beyond it) is, in many of its characteristics, far from ideal. It remains relatively small (although noticeable changes have been observed in this direction since the beginning of 2022). But what I consider more important is that it is quite fragmented along the lines of belonging to a particular tradition, school, and/or authoritative figure representing a specific vision of therapeutic practice, its own “philosophy,” and objectives.

The ethical requirements for therapists in such groups, if formulated, tend to serve a normative function of conformity to a quite specific, unified understanding of existential therapy and association with it. This clearly contradicts the understanding of therapeutic ethics as a set of principles that guide the therapist in their personal choice to act in the interests of an individual client and/or the unique relationship with them.

Educational structures around which such groups are typically formed, with rare exceptions, leave, according to my observations, rather little freedom for the development of one’s individual professional identity and for the exploration of the unique relationship between one’s own possibilities and limitations when working with different clients (or even groups of clients).

Taking the above into consideration, the initiative of the Existential Counseling and Care Alliance (ECCA) seems to me a natural attempt to find an alternative to the existing state of affairs by forming an existentially oriented community of representatives from various schools, approaches, and directions — including philosophical counseling — who share a concern with existential issues in the lives of clients, while bypassing the traditional “hierarchical” structure.

In addition to the obvious advantages of belonging to such a community — the opportunity for joint professional development and experience exchange — I particularly value for myself the possibility of substantive discussion and the creation of an environment with unique opportunities for collaboration with one another, including within the natural tension arising from the individual differences among the members of this community.

As my personal foundation for participating in and contributing to the further development of ECCA, I recognize a sincere interest and desire to create conditions for joint inquiry into ourselves, our available possibilities, and our actual limitations through dialogue with one another — a dialogue that may not always be comfortable for our personal worldviews, but one to which we so passionately invite our clients.