The third force movement, grounded in the principles of existential philosophy, focuses on the individual in quest of identity, values, and authenticity. The nineteenth century writings of such figures as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dilthey formed the background for the view of the person as alone and dehumanized. The twentieth century works of Sartre, Camus, and Jaspers offered further expression to the basic state of anxiety and absurdity. The personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and Karol Wojtyła reintroduced the person within psychology. The methodological writings of Husserl and Heidegger contributed to the development of phenomenology as a means of investigating the holistic character of human experience. The combined existential–phenomenological psychology was an application of a new orientation in clinical settings, by such psychologists as Merleau-Ponty and Binswanger. In America, the humanistic viewpoints of Allport, Bühler, Maslow, May, and Rogers agreed generally with the European movement, and a center of existential-phenomenological psychology emerged at Duquesne University. Although it did not generate a comprehensive alternative to behaviorist formulations, the third force movement has exerted an impact on clinical applications, especially in therapeutic efforts.

On one interpretation, Jaspers’ discussion of imaginative understanding explains how we know causal relations between psychological states. Cognitive neuroscience models of delusions typically aim at characterizing the organic disturbance that underlies the ‘primary delusion’; then, it’s assumed, mentalistic causation takes over and generates the other symptoms. No account is given of the biological underpinning of psychological causation. Imaginative understanding is not well-described by ‘simulation’ models. Simulation theory is predictive and does not attempt to find causation. Imagination here is best understood as correlative with the idea of a psychological process; imaginative understanding of psychological processes drives our ordinary conception of mental causation. We know roughly what a psychological process is and what a biological process is.But there seems to be no presumption we can map one onto the other. I review the options here and something of their implications for how we think about mind and brain in psychiatry.

The first chapter, following the path of Arendt’s work throughout her life, shows how her questions arose from her own experiences, and how her thinking responded to events that eluded or exceeded traditional forms of thought. It argues that the question of the political was an implicit but central concern in all of her writing. Totalitarianism was essentially an anti-political form of government, in her view, which had to be opposed in part through an affirmation of political life. But such an affirmation was difficult, Arendt thought, because Western philosophy had never had a pure concept of the political. So an overarching aim of her thought was to work out a new approach to political theory, an approach that would let her see politics “with eyes unclouded by philosophy.”