relatedness. He also favored hermeneutics, an old philosophical method of investigation, which is the art of interpretation. Unlike interpretation as practiced in psychoanalysis (which consists of referring a person's experience to a pre-established theoretical framework), this kind of interpretation seeks to understand how the person himself/herself subjectively experiences something. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) contributed many other strands of existential exploration, particularly regarding emotions, imagination, and the person's insertion into a social and political world. The philosophy of existence, on the contrary, is carried by a wide-ranging literature, which includes many authors, such as Karl Jaspers (1951, 1963), Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and Hans-Georg Gadamer within the Germanic tradition and Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Lévinas within the French tradition (see for instance Spiegelberg, 1972, Kearney, 1986 or van Deurzen-Smith, 1997). Others From the start of the 20th century, some psychotherapists were, however, inspired by phenomenology and its possibilities for working with people. Otto Rank (1884–1939), an Austrian psychoanalyst who broke with Freud in the mid-1920s, was the first existential therapist. Ludwig Binswanger, in Switzerland, also attempted to bring existential insights to his work with patients, in the Kreuzlingen sanatorium where he was a psychiatrist. Much of his work was translated into English during the 1940s and 1950s and, together with the immigration to the USA of Paul Tillich (1886–1965) (Tillich, 1952) and others, this had a considerable effect on the popularization of existential ideas as a basis for therapy (Valle and King, 1978; Cooper, 2003). Rollo May (1909–1994) played an important role in this, and his writing (1969, 1983; May et al., 1958) kept the existential influence alive in America, leading eventually to a specific formulation of therapy (Bugental, 1981; May and Yalom, 1985; Yalom, 1980). Humanistic psychology was directly influenced by these ideas. Irvin Yalom (1931-) continued, revitalized and augmented the existential phylosophical tradition in psychotherapy. His book "Existential Psychotheraphy" became a classical work in the field. He organized and described in depth the "four givens" (Yalom, 1980). He also wrote several teaching novels (e.g. "When Nietzsche wept") which were based on existential issues. Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was possibly the individual most responsible for spreading existential psychology throughout the world. He was invited by over 200 universities worldwide and accomplished over 80 journeys to North America alone, first invited by Gordon Allport at Harvard University. In Europe, after Otto