The second part of the review article presents a continuation of the analysis of the fundamental topics and key ideas of the international Routledge Handbook on existential humanities for an audience of humanities researchers. The emphasis is placed on key ideas and narratives containing scientific and ideological patterns and attitudes in three analytical chapters – on the origin, evolution and deployment of various formats of existential anthropology, psychology and psychiatry. This process is part of the historical process during which philosophy was transferred to the specified subject areas. While existential clinical psychology, since its origins in Jaspers and Binswanger, has been the result of direct import, existential anthropology and psychology have found common fields of interaction based on the uniqueness of the human species and the individual; each person is regarded here as an eternal system of socio-psychological tension, as a receptacle of contradictory drives, motives and passions. In psychology as an existential study, philosophy achieved its affirmation largely indirectly through the work of humanists such as Ernest Becker and Erich Fromm. Speaking of psychiatry, the very idea of “treatment” has become anathema to many existentially focused practicing psychologists and psychiatrists, since it involves a special medicalized type of intervention. This rigid context poses serious challenges to alternative traditions of psychology and psychiatry, which seek to offer something different beyond the prevailing therapeutic ideologies. The second part of this review highlights the strengths and comparative weaknesses of scientific research, reflecting the processes of origin, formation and development of subdisciplines of existential humanities, analyzes possible directions for the deployment of new ideas and approaches both in the near and distant future.
existential science; existential anthropology; existential psychology; existential psychiatry.