Authenticity in Existential Analysis (Essay‪)‬

I. Diagnosis, Intervention, Treatment, Cure In its brief history the goal of psychotherapy has changed dramatically several times. When only a century ago the Viennese neurologist, Sigmund Freud, first decided to intervene with words instead of available medical procedures to treat his patients' "neurotic" complaints, as a physician he still had in mind, first and foremost, the cure of a patient. A psychoneurosis was still, for Freud, a disease of the nervous system and a presumed lesion was responsible for its symptoms. More than a few steps, however, lay between the doctor's small examining room and his study in the apartment on Berggasse where psychoanalysis was first practiced at the end of the nineteenth century. While it is unclear whether Freud ever ceased to see his referrals as patients (each of them an instance of the living corpse every physician is trained to envision presenting itself to him for care) his use of words rather than scalpel and drugs (forgetting for a moment his early prescription of cocaine for "depression") marked a departure from the traditional medical model on which the physician's approach is based.