IJSP Number 5, 2023

105 recuperate one’s own, individual, and personal, and meaningful life. It is nothing more than, as E. Fromm would have said, “to be”, meaning to get involved in the full feeling of existence driven by the life-force that comes from our innermost self to join every hint or challenge from the external world. If we pass by Existence, without encountering our innermost human core, and consequently, do not realize the permanence of Being – as the sub-stance of life – we will err in the never-ending slums of materialism via the marshes of consumerism, directed by the more or less subliminal suggestions of the omnipresent dictums of collective psychology coupled with an omnipotent social pressure. Anthropologically speaking, modern humans have been derailed from their original path which was designed on the tracks of Being (as it was for all our phylogenetic cousins of the animal kingdom). Society and especially contemporary neoliberal society arrested our fate and directed it into the cheap philosophy of “to have” and consumerism. As such, we – as beings – were ejected from our genuine anthropological nest and human destiny in order to land in the market place where everything is for sell. Consequently, we “bought and sold, as we were told” [24] in a world where values, humans or any other item has been quantified in order to be transformed in money (as they say in the press or media of somebody important: “he/she is worth X millions or billions). If we are satisfied with a number, which displaces a person and says pretty much everything about someone, we are as far as the Moon from the Earth from existence, spirit, higher values or the possibility of ethical attitudes. But, avoidance or ignorance of the realm of Being (as in “to be”), is damaging to any human because it eludes its inherent destiny. The only consequence for us as psychotherapists is that this new “modern man/woman” will come to us for help, not as much because they are suffering, but rather because they are disoriented and cannot find their way in the maze of modern rat-race life. As such, the core problematic addressed to psychotherapists is rather existential than psychological and that means a more complex view of the human reality of today, one that involves anthropological considerations such as fate, destiny, sense and meaning of life, anxiety and the more or less fruitful mechanisms of compensation struggled to be kept in acceptable or tolerable limits. The step involved in such endeavours as we pointed out above is, once we consider systemic inter-connections, for the psychotherapist to include himself/herself in the existential process, the only one that defines the core of our humanness. It is not enough anymore to sit in the therapist’s chair, admittedly a very comfortable one, and to therapeuticize others by patching their superficial psycho-social problems concerning love, (mis)understanding, anxiety, depression or loneliness. Life is more general and inclusive than the problems resulting from work-load or petty familial trivialities (as old as humanity). Once we get a holistic meta-positioned anthropological view and perspective all the pettiness of our lives seems to be at least negligible if not insignificant. From such a perspective, a therapist who sees and fully realises that, can easily put psychotherapy into