Existentialism was never only an academic philosophy. It shaped how many people think about therapy, art and their own lives, and it drew sharp criticism from several directions. This level looks at both.
Influence on psychotherapy
The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) survived Auschwitz and other Nazi camps and wrote Man's Search for Meaning (1946). His approach, logotherapy, holds that the search for meaning is the primary human drive, and that meaning can be found even in unavoidable suffering through the attitude one takes toward it. In the United States, Rollo May brought existential ideas into psychology. Irvin Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy (1980) organized the field around four ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. Many therapists who would not call themselves existentialists now ask clients what they value and what they are avoiding.
Literature and theater
Existentialists claimed literary ancestors, especially Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose Notes from Underground (1864) gives voice to a spiteful man who insists on his freedom even against his own interest, and Franz Kafka, whose The Trial (1925) follows a man accused by an authority he can never reach. After the war, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (first staged in 1953) became a classic of what the critic Martin Esslin later called the theater of the absurd. Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus all wrote novels and plays themselves. Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, explaining that a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.
The relativism charge
The most common objection is that if we invent our values, anything seems permitted. Sartre's 1945 lecture was itself a reply to Catholic critics who said this, and to Communist critics who called existentialism a philosophy of despair. Sartre answered that in choosing we choose for all humanity; de Beauvoir answered that willing one's own freedom means willing the freedom of others. Critics reply that neither argument clearly follows from radical freedom: a person could consistently invent cruel values.
Too individualistic?
Marxist critics argued that existentialism reflected the isolation of middle-class intellectuals and ignored how class and economic conditions limit freedom. Telling an exhausted factory worker that she is wholly free can sound like blaming her for her situation. Sartre took this seriously. In later life he moved toward Marxism and stressed how situations constrain freedom, notably in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). Feminist and anticolonial writers, building partly on de Beauvoir, similarly stressed that freedom is shaped by how others treat us.
Analytic objections
Philosophers in the analytic tradition often found existentialist writing obscure. In a 1932 essay, the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap singled out Heidegger's sentences about “the nothing” as meaningless pseudo-statements, grammatical in form but saying nothing that could be true or false. Others complained that existentialists offered vivid descriptions instead of clear arguments, and that later psychology shows our choices are shaped by unconscious influences more than radical freedom allows.
What lasts
Defenders reply that existentialism never claimed to be a complete ethics or science. Its lasting contribution is a set of questions and warnings: notice when you hide behind roles, take responsibility for what you can change, face death and uncertainty honestly, and remember that your freedom is bound up with the freedom of others. Even readers who reject its atheism or its individualism often find that these questions sharpen their own views, which is one reason existentialist ideas still turn up in classrooms, clinics and novels today.
Worked example: an existential check-up
Ruth is a retired nurse, sixty-eight, trying to think about the next stage of her life. She uses this course as a set of questions.
- Where am I in bad faith? Ruth notices she keeps saying “I'm too old to start anything new.” She realizes this is a way of treating herself as a fixed thing.
- What would I affirm if I had to live it again? Nietzsche's test reminds her that her years of nursing, though exhausting, were full of moments she would gladly repeat.
- What does my death clarify? Facing the limited time ahead, she sees that she wants to spend it teaching young nurses and with her grandchildren, not on obligations she never chose.
- Whose freedom is bound up with mine? Following de Beauvoir, she thinks about her neighbor, a widower who rarely leaves the house, and begins inviting him on her walks.
Now apply a critique. A Marxist reader would remind Ruth that her options depend heavily on her pension, her health and where she lives; another person with the same courage but less money would have fewer choices. That is fair, and it keeps existentialist language about freedom honest. An analytic critic might ask Ruth to state her values clearly and check them for consistency, which is also good advice.
The check-up does not hand Ruth answers. It helps her ask better questions, which is what existentialism, at its best, has always tried to do.