CHILD ABUSE: AN EXISTENTIAL PROCESS.

This paper discusses child abuse as an existential crisis. It describes existential counseling as an approach to helping abusive parents to become more responsible and better able to cope with this particular crisis of their existence. Three types of crises are identified: developmental or maturational, acute, and chronic. Each appears receptive to existential counseling within a framework of crisis intervention. Themes and the basic philosophy of existentialism are discussed. A case example provides an illustration of existential counseling in child abuse. Suffering is viewed as a dynamic concept within the framework of the existential psychotherapy of Victor Frankl, called Logotherapy, which is the primary one employed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]