Within the overly protocolized landscape of Evidence Based Therapies, anxiety only gets differentiated in her symptomatic form as disturbance. Attempts to understand anxiety from the patients’ life history are not obvious, and require a different approach and greater sensitivity from the therapist. This article uses a case history as the base for an existential phenomenological analysis of the process that leads through the fear. This results in the uncovering of typical phenomenological dynamics by means of five existential structural moments, to which the process of increasing awareness of an existential self is central. Both the rhythm of the process as the awareness itself are not only substantiated from the case description, but also elaborated from an existential and psychodynamic paradigm. And finally, the individual process of increasing awareness is seen in its searching, pulsating and emergent dynamic in which one evolves from a rigid ego identification toward a conscious identity as existential self. The quintessence of this process thus is understood as full disengagement from the ego’s anxiety-averting strategy.
The tPeP (Journal Person-centered experiential Psychotherapy) is the scientific journal for Dutch and Flemish psychotherapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, that work from, or are interested in a client-centered perspective.