The Concept of Existential Maturation

This paper introduces the concept of Existential Maturation as a developmental process that is initiated by confrontations, both small and large, with the reality of death. We describe how the concept is rooted in foundational concepts of psychoanalysis and how it evolved during a systematic clinical case analysis project. The resulting description of these existential maturation processes is a ten-feature model that starts (1) with a person’s baseline capacity to metabolize the mortality salient reality; that reality transmits through a person’s semi-permeable boundary (2) and then depends on a containing environment or relationship/s (3) that bring receiving capacities (4) to take in the reality (5) and its consequent raw sensation (6) and to engage an initiating step (7) of recognition. That then triggers a reiterative, interactive process (8) of listening, finding, exploring, re-narrating, and changing until structures of meaning (9) get made and integrated (10). The paper proposes that living and dying well enough entails an engagement of these steps of mortality metabolism, and it also describes how some failures to engage them may manifest.