The French existentialists certainly set the tone for a broader literary movement in Europe and America. But the reach of the movement extended far beyond works of literature (see McBride 2012). In film, for instance, the French ‘New Wave’ was launched in 1960 with the release of Jean-Luc Godard's (b. 1930) film Breathless (Á bout de souffle). At the same time, Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) was making movies like The Seventh Seal (1957) and Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) was making Eclipse (1962) and The Red Desert (1964), all of which explored themes of human finitude, anxiety, and the death of God, themes that would be taken up later and popularized by the American director Woody Allen (b. 1934) in darker films like Interiors (1978), Another Woman (1988), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). And in the world of art, the overlapping movements of cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism keyed into the cultural mood. At the turn of the century, Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's (1863–1944) The Scream captured the sense of existential dread; French Modernist Marcel Duchamp's (1887–1968) controversial painting Nude Descending Staircase, No. 2 (1912) revealed a newly fragmented, dehumanized, and mechanistic portrait of the human body; Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) provided witness to the horror and absurdity of technological warfare with Guernica (1937); the attenuated forms of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) reflected the modern experience of alienation and loneliness; and the American painter Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) cited the influence of existentialism on his convention-defying ‘drip style’ in his effort to express the importance of individual freedom and self-expression.
Outside of Europe and the United States, existentialism also had a significant impact in Latin America. Without question, it was the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset who had the most influential role in introducing existentialist thought to the subcontinent, especially in Argentina, where he periodically taught and attended conferences in Buenos Aires between 1916 and 1940 (Garrido 2010, 145). One of Gasset's influences in Argentina, Carlos Astrada (1894–1970), published two important early works in existentialism, El juego existencial in 1933 and Idealismo fenomenológico y metafisica existencial in 1936. Gasset's Spanish compatriot José Gaos (1900–1969) brought existentialism to Mexico after becoming a citizen in 1941. In addition to the works of Kierkegaard, Gaos provided the definitive Spanish translation of Heidegger's Being and Time in 1951, more than ten years before the work was officially translated into English or French. And in 1939, Peruvian philosopher Wagner de Reyna (1915–2006), who was a student of Heidegger at Freiburg in the 1920s, published La ontología fundamental de Heidegger, one of the first comprehensive studies on the German philosopher (Oliveira 2010). These early pioneers, and many others, drew on the work of existentialists to engage concerns that were unique to the Latin American situation including critiques of totalitarianism, the problem of freedom and self-identity under colonialism, and the possibilities for revolution. And they set the stage for broad institutional developments across Latin America in the form of influential philosophical organizations and research groups devoted to existentialism and phenomenology.
Beyond philosophy, literature, and the arts, existentialism also left its mark on the thought of the most influential theologians of the time. Although already present in the nineteenth-century writings of figures like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, the religious or theistic expression of existentialism had a powerful incarnation in the twentieth century, especially in Protestant Germany, where Karl Barth (1886–1968), Paul Tillich (1886–1965), Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) engaged existential questions regarding the relationship between faith and freedom, the meaning of anxiety in the modern age, and the terrifying incomprehensibility of God. The Jewish philosophers Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) also made important contributions. Buber envisioned the possibility of authentic dialogue between human beings by synthesizing aspects of the Hasidic mystical tradition with existentialism. He was well known for critiquing the alienating ‘I–It’ relations of modernity and offered what he called the ‘I — Thou’ relation as an alternative, one that is open and attentive to the intrinsic vulnerability of the other. And Levinas forwarded a notion of ‘ethics as first philosophy’ that begins from the concrete experience of exposure and openness to ‘the face’ of the other, an experience of vulnerability and suffering that undercuts our ordinary egoistic and objectifying tendencies. Catholic existentialists such as Marcel echoed this call for non-objectifying human relations through acts of charity and the experience of ‘communion’ with others. And from the Eastern Church, figures like Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) used Christianity to attack the increasingly rational and mechanistic structure of modern society for the sake of human freedom and self-expression.
Finally, existentialism made a deep and lasting impression on psychiatry and the developing practice of psychotherapy by challenging the reductive and mechanistic approach of Freudian analysis and biochemical accounts of psychopathology. Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Jaspers all offered critiques of the psychiatric assumption that the human being could be treated as an ‘object’ of scientific investigation. Instead, they argued that the human being could only be understood within a particular social context that provides a background sense of what matters in life. In their view, it is only by being bound up in the world that we can make sense of who we are as persons, and when our sense of belongingness or integration with the world breaks down, psychiatric conditions begin to emerge. The only way for a psychiatrist to properly understand a patient, then, is to try to access, however incompletely, their way of ‘being-in-the-world.’ As Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927–1989) explains: “One has to be able to orientate as a person in the other's scheme of things rather than only to see the other as an object in one's own world” (1960, 26). The existentialist view inspired a diverse group of prominent European and American psychiatrists, including Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1996), Medard Boss (1903–1990), Rollo May (1909–1994), Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), and Irvin Yalom (b. 1931). And it allowed clinicians to reenvision the meaning of psychic suffering. Rather than regarding anxiety and depression in terms of medical pathologies, existential therapists interpreted them as ‘givens,’ as constitutive of the human situation. The aim of therapy, in their view, is not to blunt these feelings through pharmacological intervention or to overcome them by gaining insight into their Oedipal sources, but to have the patient accept and integrate them into his or her life as disclosive of their essential frailty, vulnerability, and impermanence. By facing and owning up to their predicament in this way, the patient can be freed from everyday forms of self-deception and live a deeper and more fulfilling life.