Phenomenological psychotherapy: existentialist approach

The theme of phenomenological psychotherapies within the existentialist approaches is part of the investigation into clinical psychology from an existentialist perspective, undertaken at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.The main aim of this text is to clarify the phenomenological, hermeneutic and existentialist bases that arise in our clinical practices.To that end, we undertook a narrative review of the literature in order to be able to analyze the elements to be found in the perspectives on psychotherapy classified as phenomenological and existentialist.We arrived at the following conclusions:1- many so-called existentialist psychotherapies are not phenomenological; 2- psychotherapies with a phenomenological approach are built on the maxim of intentionality; 3- phenomenological and existentialist psychotherapies are built on phenomenology and the philosophy of existence; 4- we introduce a clinical perspective we have developed in our practices with a phenomenological, hermeneutic and existentialist base.The relevance of this study, besides being able to position our clinical perspective, is to clear up several doubts that many psychotherapy academics have about this issue.