In 1970, Philip Guston walked away from twenty years as a successful artist and showed a body of work no one was expecting.

This episode is about what Guston risked, and what therapy risks when it focuses on predictable outcomes. Heidegger called it das Man — the "they-self," where we hand our agency to the collective to avoid the weight of choosing. Manualized therapies like CBT do something similar: a known process, a predictable outcome, a way around the unknown. But what they miss is what makes life worth living.

The Existential Lens is hosted by Evan Kaufman, a psychotherapist in Eugene, Oregon, working with individuals and couples from an existential-humanistic perspective. More at evankaufman.org.

We do not encounter raw reality. We encounter interpretation.

In this episode, I begin with reports of alien abductions and follow the thread into a deeper philosophical question: how do human beings organize incomplete knowledge into a livable world? Along the way, we explore scientific inquiry, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Buddhist ideas of emptiness, and the recursive nature of meaning.

What emerges is a meditation on myth—not as a falsehood or untruth, but as the narrative structure through which our identity as embodied beings takes shape.

And in therapy, learning to see the limits of those narratives may be one of the most liberating experiences available to us.

The Existential Lens is hosted by Evan Kaufman, a psychotherapist in Eugene, Oregon, working with individuals and couples from an existential-humanistic perspective. More at evankaufman.org.

In this episode, Evan explores“the third actor”, the subtle way artificial intelligence enters our inner lives both in and outside of therapy. Beginning with a reflection on impermanence, the episode moves into clinical observations about AI, electronic stimulation, substance use, and the ways we outsource meaning, understanding, and contact with ourselves.

This episode is not an argument against technology, but rather an inquiry into what AI fails to provide: embodied presence, authentic relationship, and lived encounter with existence itself.

The Existential Lens is hosted by Evan Kaufman, a psychotherapist in Eugene, Oregon, working with individuals and couples from an existential-humanistic perspective. More at evankaufman.org.