IJSP Number 2, 2020

49 existentialism, either. Among the only reference papers on existential supervision in psychotherapy are those carried out by van Deurzen and Young [23], which address this issue. There are also different reviews of this work, but unfortunately, the literature is limited to few such works, without a sufficient number of studies on this subject to create a meta-analysis. There is also a very small amount of case studies on this topic, so that they can be approached, illustrated or used as references in future studies. A subjective example of the approach to existentialism in supervision may be submitted even from my personal experience of supervision in integrative psychotherapy. During therapy with a 56-year-old client, an urologist who wanted to start psychotherapy due to depressive states and relational dysfunctions with certain members of his current family, he began to tell about a professional case, in which a friend of his made an appointment for a check-up. My client told him how he could identify some of his friend’s urological problems, and despite his instructions to undergo certain treatments or surgery, his friend decided that his condition was not so serious and he did not want to go through any treatment. Finally, in a few years, my client’s friend died, being eventually diagnosed with cancer. Following this story, my primary impulse has pushed me to ask „what were your friend’s symptoms when he came in?” As a result to the answer to this question, I realized some similarities and some processes have occurred within me that have caused a shock state, mostly because of some rational or just imagined similarities. Finally, I returned to the client’s therapeutic process, realizing that my question had no relation to the client, the client’s problem, or the therapeutic goals for it. In supervision, I approached this incident about my need to ask a question that had no therapeutic purpose for the client. The conclusion of the supervision was that my question was a personal concern for the most important fundamental concern, namely death. My own fear of death has sparked in me the need to find out whether or not I am in danger, and whether or not there is the possibility of an illness or even subjectively speaking, a premature but inevitable death. Following the supervision and reintegration of this event, I followed my first urological medical check-up in order to clarify this aspect of my fundamental concern, the main purpose being to remove the possibility of it disrupting the therapeutic framework. So that in the future, in such instances, my fundamental existential concerns will no longer be able to take control with such ease and will no longer influence psychotherapy thusly. 4. CONCLUSIONS Existential psychotherapy has a very great integrationist-strategic implication, especially because one of the psychological axes highlighted in the model of the self from an integrative-strategic perspective was devoted to existentialism.