Patients present themselves to a psychiatrist with complaints that may be anywhere in the range between the most apparently localized difficulty (‘I have a reluctance for jumping from a plane’), to the most diffuse difficulty possible (‘I can’t say why I’ve come really. I suppose it is just me that’s not right’). However, no matter how circumscribed or diffuse the initial complaint may be, one knows that the patient is bringing into the treatment situation, whether intentionally or unintentionally, his existence, his whole being-in-his-world. One knows also that every aspect of his being is related in some way to every other aspect, although the manner in which these aspects are articulated may be by no means clear. It is the task of existential phenomenology to articulate what the other’s ‘world’ is and his way of being in it.
- The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. By R. D. Laing
There is another aspect of man’s being which is the crucial one in psychotherapy as contrasted with other treatments. This is that each and every man is at the same time separate from his fellows and related to them. Such separateness and relatedness are mutually necessary postulates. Personal relatedness can exist only between beings who are separate but who are not isolates. We are not isolates and we are not parts of the same physical body. Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.