It is essential to approach global dialogues in psychology with cultural humility.

There are many approaches to existentialism; it is not a singular agreed-upon theory.

Global dialogues can help advance existential therapy and help it remain relevant.

In my opening address at the first International Conference on Existential Psychology held in Nanjing, China, in 2010, I stated, “Existential psychology began in the West, but it does not belong to the West.” Today, I would revise that to state that existential psychology was first labeled in the West, but it does not belong to the West. In my preparation for the Fourth World Congress of Existential Therapy, the question of where existential psychology fits into a global context has again been at the forefront of my thoughts.

While some maintain that existentialism began in the West and that Western views should retain a privileged place, I strongly disagree. Labeling does not equate to ownership. Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are widely considered the first existentialists; however, the first use of the label “existential” in an academic or scholarly context is often attributed to Gabriel Marcel, who first used it in 1943 in a lecture on John Paul Sartre. Later, in 1945, Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” (published as a book in 1946) led to existentialism being applied as a label to a collection of thought or philosophical movement. The development of the first school of existential psychology, Daseinsanalysis, began in the 1930s, before the more formalized label of existentialism was widely applied.

Because the development of existentialism as a school of thought began before the label was formalized, it is easy to debate the origins of the term. What is clear, though, is that the origins of existentialism as a school of thought predate the label by more than half a century. Furthermore, even at these early stages, there was no agreement on what constituted existentialism. For example, some early existentialists,........

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