What Is Existential Therapy? A Practical Guide for People Who've Never Tried It
Existential therapy is an approach that helps you face life's hardest questions — meaning, freedom, isolation and mortality — directly, rather than managing symptoms while avoiding what's actually underneath them. It's not about diagnosing you; it's about helping you build a life that holds up under its own weight.
The question existential therapy actually starts with
Most therapy approaches start with a symptom: anxiety, low mood, a recurring conflict. Existential therapy starts somewhere else — with the conditions of being human that everyone eventually runs into, whether or not they have a diagnosable problem. Those conditions are usually grouped into four areas: mortality (we are finite, and know it), freedom (we are responsible for our choices, which is often more frightening than comforting), isolation (no one can fully enter another person's experience), and meaninglessness (the universe doesn't hand us a purpose — we have to construct one).
This isn't abstract philosophy for its own sake. In practice, most of what brings people to therapy — a burnout that won't lift, a relationship that feels hollow, a life transition that's cracked something open — touches one of these four areas directly. Existential therapy names that connection instead of treating only the surface symptom.
How a session actually works
There's no fixed script, which surprises people expecting a structured programme like CBT. Instead, the therapist listens for where these four themes are showing up in what you're describing, and asks questions that help you look at them directly rather than around them. If you say "I don't know what the point of any of this is," a CBT-oriented therapist might look for the distorted thought underneath. An existential therapist takes the question seriously as a real question — because it is one, and avoiding it rarely makes it go away.
This tends to work well for people who feel like something deeper is being missed by more symptom-focused approaches — often after they've already tried therapy once and found it useful but incomplete.
Who tends to benefit most
- People going through major life transitions — relocation, divorce, career change, becoming a parent, ageing — where old assumptions about identity no longer hold
- People who feel successful but empty — everything looks fine from the outside, but something essential feels missing
- People facing loss or mortality directly — grief, illness, ageing parents, their own health scares
- People who've done other therapy and got practical tools, but still feel an unaddressed question underneath
Existential therapy and logotherapy — how they relate
Logotherapy, developed by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, is one specific branch within the existential tradition. Frankl's central claim, developed partly from his own experience surviving Auschwitz, was that the primary human drive isn't pleasure (as Freud argued) or power (as Adler argued) — it's meaning. Where broader existential therapy asks you to face life's difficult conditions, logotherapy adds a specific orientation: helping you actively find or construct meaning within those conditions, rather than simply confronting them.
I trained in this method at the Viktor Frankl Institut in Vienna, and I draw on it particularly with clients navigating burnout, grief, or a major identity disruption — situations where the question isn't "how do I fix this feeling" but "what do I actually do now, and why."
If this resonates with something you're currently facing, I offer individual sessions combining existential therapy and logotherapy — in English, Russian or Czech, online or in person in Prague.
Learn about individual therapy →Prefer email? katia.tandon@gmail.com
What it isn't
Existential therapy isn't a crisis-only intervention, and it isn't reserved for people in acute distress. Many clients come to it during a quiet, dissatisfied stretch of life rather than a dramatic one — which is often exactly when these deeper questions are easiest to hear, because the noise of crisis isn't drowning them out.
It also isn't a replacement for structured, skills-based approaches when those are what's needed — someone in the middle of a panic disorder often benefits from concrete CBT tools first. The two aren't in competition; many practitioners, myself included, draw on both depending on what the moment calls for.