The Existential Lens

In 1970, Philip Guston walked away from twenty years as a successful artist and showed a body of work no one was expecting. This episode is about what Guston risked, and what therapy risks when it focuses on predictable outcomes. Heidegger called it das Man — the "they-self," where we hand our agency to the collective to avoid the weight of choosing. Manualized therapies like CBT do some...

We do not encounter raw reality. We encounter interpretation. In this episode, I begin with reports of alien abductions and follow the thread into a deeper philosophical question: how do human beings organize incomplete knowledge into a livable world? Along the way, we explore scientific inquiry, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Buddhist ideas of emptiness, and the recursive nature of meaning....

In this episode, Evan explores “the third actor”,  the subtle way artificial intelligence enters our inner lives both in and outside of therapy. Beginning with a reflection on impermanence, the episode moves into clinical observations about AI, electronic stimulation, substance use, and the ways we outsource meaning, understanding, and contact with ourselves. This episode is not an argument agains...

Anxiety is often treated as something to eliminate, overcome or master. But what if it is pointing toward something deeper within us? In this episode, I explore the relationship between anxiety and freedom through an existential lens. We look at anxiety as an encounter with the unknown, one that arises not only from fear or conflict, but from choice, responsibility, and the realities of being huma...

This episode sits with the lived experience of loneliness, loss of meaning, and the sense that there is no clear way to navigate life—a feeling of living without a map. While the reflection looks closely at the inner lives of men and how these struggles often show up, the conversation is intentionally offered for all identities. Many of the themes explored speak to deeply human experiences that ev...

What does it mean to be a self? In this episode of The Existential Lens , psychotherapist Evan Kaufman explores the evolving nature of identity—how who we are is not a fixed object to uncover, but an ongoing process we enact moment by moment. Drawing on existential therapy, phenomenology, and enactivist psychology, Evan examines why our sense of self shifts across contexts, why we contain multiple...

In this episode, Evan examines the paradox of free will in therapy—why all psychotherapy assumes that human beings can choose differently, and how that assumption becomes tangled in a culture marked by technological overwhelm, economic constraint, and a growing sense of powerlessness. Drawing on existential-humanistic therapy, Viktor Frankl’s insights, and critiques of hard determinism such as tho...