Everyone sooner or later asks questions about the meaning of life and its finiteness, this is often accompanied by anxiety and fears of the possible inevitability of accidental misfortunes, everyone experiences stress out of the need to fight, suffers from internal, unexplained loneliness, is tormented by a choice, forthcoming or made, which is accompanied by a sense of indistinct guilt.

All this refers to the so-called existential manifestations of human nature, by knowing and experiencing that, we have the opportunity to deeper and more fully feel the energy of life, developing and unfolding it in the creative world.

To learn how to cope with such conditions, to understand their psychology and causes, let’s get acquainted more closely with the philosophy of existentialism.

So, existentialism, being a certain ideological charge, is a kind of inoculation of human dignity, which helps a person to define himself in life.

The main category of existentialism is existence. In his article “Existentialism Is a Humanism” Jean-Paul Sartre defines existence as the life of a man as an individual being, observed from within, which defines itself here and now, possesses the characteristics of creativity and freedom, based on the self-existence and self-consciousness of the human individual. Having arisen as a response to the rationalistic ideas of the Enlightenment, existentialism tries to solve the problem of overcoming the categorical opposition and conflict of the external and internal worlds in the perception of man by evolving the existence of a third world – a common one.

In addition to existence, the key categories of existentialism are the concept of being and non-being opposed to it (according to Sartre – “nothingness”), as well as the eternal philosophical problem of the relationship between existence and essence.

In order to understand how existentialism sees these problems, let us present its basic concepts schematically. Let us take the antique circle (see Fig.) and imagine that one side of it is the external world (environment), and the second – the internal (organism). Then we bend it, and assume that the person is at the point of bending. We shall call as existence (denoted by arrow) what manifests itself from the environment (the outside world) through the person in the body (his inner world). In other words, through existence, man synchronizes two opposing worlds, creating a third between them – a common one – what Martin Heidegger called the meeting with Being. From this it follows that the existence of man in the world precedes his individual essence.

This theory resembles the so-called contact cycle in Gestalt therapy, which describes the process of human interaction with the environment:

At first there is a certain discomfort arising from the signals of the environment, then this discomfort is transformed into awareness of the need, choice, action and assimilation of the experience.

The sensations of which we spoke at the beginning are the sensation of one’s existence, of being within oneself. And since existence precedes essence, we can call essence everything that constitutes our personality, as assimilation of the experience of our actions into our qualities, knowledge of ourselves in the process of contact with the outside world, as well as defining the person himself as his own support on existence in that irrational being, in which we ask questions of meaning, finiteness, inevitability of chance, the need to fight, etc.

“Dasein” – here is man – a man here and now – is one who knows about himself, says Heidegger, and a man can learn about himself through being, i.e. through awareness of the presence of his sensations that appeal to needs, through eventfulness and interaction with the outer boundless world.

It follows from this that the task of man is to find and feel his limits in the boundless world, which often causes anxiety and fear. Finding boundaries is learning oneself, knowing who I am. Perception is projective. If the world seems frighteningly boundless and plunges into anxiety — it is a consequence of the fact that we do not feel our boundaries, opportunities and limitations, i.e. we feel the lack of knowledge about ourselves in contact with another person, with the same existence as we are. Self-knowledge relieves anxiety and makes active actions possible. This cognition is happening due to speech, Heidegger says. That is why in psychotherapy we learn to recognize our feelings next to another, by living through and being aware of different states. By defining and assigning space to these feelings, our own and of the other close by, we find ourselves on the contact boundary, we can learn what we are, thereby defining our boundaries. Therefore, as an answer to the existentialist question, Gestalt therapy introduces the concept of contact boundary.

Jean-Paul Sartre has a work called ” The flies”. The author refers in it to ancient Greek mythology and the famous myth of Orestes. The flies (the dead or the goddesses of vengeance — the Erinyes) that bite Orestes are that unassimilated in personality knowledge of oneself, when he does not know whether what he did was good or bad. And if his sister Electra repented (realized and accepted her responsibility for the choice), and the flies left her alone, Orestes does not know, and in this case only the flies (the external factor or knowledge about oneself, which is reproduced by pain from the field) with their bites can create a sense of his own boundaries and remind him of the existential responsibility for the choice made. The existentialist concept of freedom as choice very clearly reflects the function of the ego. “I can only get my freedom if I get it for others” – Albert Camus wrote. And so Orestes freed others from the suffering while left with his flies-metaphors, these existential feelings of guilt and loneliness for the choices made by man.

Sartre ends with this, emphasizing the trends of the modern world. But in ancient Greek myths there was a continuation. Orestes is acquitted by the state the court by a vote where the votes are equally split (the first half condemned and the second acquitted). According to those laws, if the opinion was equally split , the person was considered acquitted. This is an evidence that the existence of a single system of generally accepted values, which fills us with a sense of togetherness and the presence of other people nearby, supports the knowledge of a person about himself, is often impossible in the modern world and was soberly experienced in the 20th century during the wars and destruction of Christian doctrine. Nietzsche said that God died, science began to develop at a rapid pace, and this, on the one hand, began to simplify the life of man, but on the other hand, led him away from knowledge about himself, learning himself, since man is excluded from scientific research.

For example, when a person studies salt (and it is very salty for him in itself), he must separate his sense of taste of salt from its properties, otherwise unpleasant sensations will stop the process of studying. What do we see? In scientific research, a living person who feels and senses life is deduced precisely in order to leave room for the conditionality of the phenomena and properties of the studied object. That is why in the 20th century man was “thrown” into the world, as the existentialists say. He was expelled. He has ceased to be a condition of perception, i.e. he has ended up beyond words.

Therefore, in psychotherapy we talk about the need to return to words, speech and communication – to make a person a condition of existence again.

Existentialist Sartre (like Camus and Sisyphus) turned to mythological subjects not only to emphasize the eternity and inviolability of the topic of existence, as is commonly believed. But this is much deeper. They emphasized the difference of eras and intuitively saw a way out in the ancient Greeks, in whose mythology there was a dialogue with the gods (personifying the world and nature, the outside world, the environment), there were classical ideas of art (the vision of man as he can be in his perspective of development), as well as in a single system of values in society, which creates a sense of togetherness.

Sartre’s philosophy is saturated with the concept of closeness and is considered atheistic, where direct dialogue with God is impossible, but there is a possibility of indirect dialogue, through the presence of others, when “everyone is alone like a raindrop”, but we are together and make up the one.

This specifically refers us to people like us, in interaction with whom we recognize ourselves, make choices and accept responsibility, liberate others, thereby reviving dialogue with the world in a sense of separateness and togetherness at the same time.