The idea for this collection came from a post-graduate course we taught together at the University of Sussex called The Existential Self. This course studied the relationship between self and society, drawing on theories from philosophy, sociology, psychology, and psychotherapy. We focused on existential sociology (Kotarba & Fontana, 1984), existentialist philosophy (Sartre, 1943) and humanistic psychotherapy (Rogers, 1961), all of which explore fundamental questions about subjective experience or ‘being’. The core text for this course was Irvin Yalom’s (1980) Existential Psychotherapy, which explores what he terms the four ‘givens’ of the human condition: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.