Principle of totality in existential psychoanalysis

The Principle of totality in existential psychoanalysis states that a person is a whole, not a collection of traits, and that even a seemingly minor act can express that whole. It grounds existential psychoanalysis in the task of interpreting concrete conduct: the aim is not to assemble a personality from separate tendencies, but to disclose the fundamental project that each tendency embodies from a different angle.

The Person as a Whole

The principle rejects reconstruction by addition or by organizing a catalogue of empirically observed drives. In each inclination and attitude, the person expresses himself completely, though from a particular angle. A tendency is therefore not merely one component among others; its meaning can exceed its immediate appearance and disclose the subject’s relation to the world.

A particular episode of jealousy, for example, may reveal how a subject constitutes himself in relation to a woman and, more broadly, his way of being-in-the-world. The act does not first occur as a surface sign of a hidden, independently formed character. Rather, its intelligible meaning exists as the transcendent significance of the empirical choice itself. A person rowing on a river is, in that circumstance, nothing other than the concrete project of rowing; yet the project expresses the choice of himself as a totality in those circumstances.

From Conduct to Fundamental Project

Because every act expresses the person as a whole, inquiry must interpret conduct rather than simply list it. A desire to write, swim, or seek adventure, or an instance of jealousy, may look like a self-contained trait. Such empirical descriptions can produce only catalogues and apparent irreducibles unless they are questioned and deciphered. Existential psychoanalysis names the method directed at that interpretive task.

The analyst compares a subject’s different empirical drives and tendencies to find the fundamental project they share. This is not a summation: each tendency already expresses the entire person, and comparison seeks the common meaning through their differences. The aim is to detach the fundamental significance admitted by a concrete project—the individual secret of the subject’s being-in-the-world—without treating that significance as a separate, prior pattern concealed behind conduct.

Method and Limits

The method begins from experience and relies on the fundamental, preontological comprehension people have of the human person. A gesture, word, sign, mannerism, or apparently superficial act can carry revelatory meaning, even when people overlook or scorn what it indicates. The task is hermeneutic: to decipher such manifestations, determine their meaning, and make it conceptually clear. Existential psychoanalysis thus seeks neither a chance discovery nor an abstract deduction from ontology; ontology establishes that such investigation of human reality is possible, while the particular inquiry and its results lie beyond ontology’s scope.

The inquiry must stop only at evident irreducibility: it should not claim to have reached an initial project until the projected end appears to be the very being of the subject under consideration. This standard also requires moving beyond classifications that mistake a derivative attitude for a fundamental project. Flight from anguish before death and resolute acceptance of that anguish, for instance, are both intelligible on the basis of an original project of living: each presupposes a wish to hold on to life. Neither, by itself, reaches the more fundamental choice of being that existential psychoanalysis seeks.