Existential Concerns in Families with Huntington's Disease

Abstract

This article takes its point of departure from a qualitative study of the personal conduct of everyday life in Danish families at risk for Huntington's Disease (HD). The study focused on how awareness and understanding of the personal implications of HD arise in everyday life and among family members and how concrete life conditions and personal relations unfold and change over time in the context of present-day genetic knowledge and technology. In this article theoretical insights from existential psychology shed light on how existential concerns arise in lives marked by HD. A critique is directed at clinically orientated and psychoanalytically inspired existential psychology for staging specific existential concerns as ontological preconditions. These theories tend to decontextualize and individualize the understanding of the person in opposition to theoretical positions within the broader tradition of existential philosophy, and other constructivist and research-orientated areas of existential psychology. As a consequence, existential concerns are likely to be understood and handled as `inner-self' projects, particularly in the context of psychotherapy, rather than as relational concerns that arise in concrete circumstances.