The Importance and Limits of Experiential Psychotherapy

Abstract

Experiential therapy focuses on emotions - whether we are talking about negative emotions, such as anger, pain, shame - correlated with past experiences, but also emotions associated with success, self-esteem, or even responsibility. Unlocking already experienced emotions and their subjective experience is the central point of experiential therapy - whether we are talking about the experience of the immediate and the awareness of our own being, or we are talking about "frozen" experiences, to which we have no conscious access outside psychotherapeutic practices. It reconfigures our mental maps by generating behaviors that make sense only in correlation with the understanding of those emotions, that are present in the subconscious but of which we are unaware and are not effectively rationalized. The article aims to analyze the field of application and the therapeutic particularities of experiential psychotherapy as a form of existentialist-humanistic therapy, as well as the limits of the experiential paradigm in a postmodern context.