Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 8
i. distinguish "world" from naturalism's "objective reality"
pg 117 |
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Definition
"to understand the compulsive," writes Erwin Straus, "we must first understand his world."
For being together means being together in the same world; and knowing means knowing in the context of the same world. The world from this particular patient must be grasped from the inside, be known and seen so far as possible from the angle of the one who exists in it.
Binswanger: "We psychiatrists have paid far too much attention to the deviations of our patients from life in the world which is common to all, instead of focusing primarily upon the patient's own private world, as was first systematically done by freud.
Class Notes:
we must encompass subjectivity (perception) within objectivity.
"world" is an embracing idea.. from naturalism's "objective reality" we bring our "world" wherever we go.
e.g. "when you smile, the world smiles with you"
*** our "world" is immediately affected by our subjectivity.
*** Edmond Husserl-instituted the new thinking of reality.
said that objectivity and subjectivity were mutually influential of each other and implicate that "there is no outside world and our objectivity is based on our subjectivity... each of us is our own "reality" & "world" there is a unity between the two. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 8
ii. 2 chief sources for despair and anxiety
a. a loss of sense of being
b. a loss of world
pg 118 |
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Definition
According to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and other existentialists pointed out the the 2 chief sources of anxiety and despair are the 1- the loss of sense of being and 2- the loss of his world
loss their world and sense of being-- (lost their sense of community) feelings of loneliness, isolation and alienation- these feelings represent a state of the person whose relationship to the world was broken.
3 A's (go along with chief sources)
-anamy (spelling?) loss of law and order
-alienation
-angst |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 8
iii. schizoid type- still true since may's 1983 release?
pg 118 |
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Definition
class def:
dissociated from reality and themselves.
In freud's time, it was problems of persons who are detached, unrelated lacking in affect, tending toward depersonalization, and covering up their problems by means of intellectualization and technical formulations. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 8
iv. alienation from nature and body
pg 120 |
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Definition
a man who is a stranger to his world, a stranger to other people who he seeks or pretends to love; he moves about in a state of homelessness, vagueness, and haze as though he had no direct sense connection with his world but were in a foreign country and doomed to wander in quiet despair, incommunicado, homeless, and a stranger,
Its roots reach below the social levels to an alienation from the natural world as well. It is a particular experience of isolation which has been called the "epistemological loneliness."
an estrangement from nature, and a vague, unarticulated, and half suppressed sense of despair of gaining any real relationship with the natural world, including one's own body. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 8
v. "sensations provide only inferential data"? (ch. School of Cognitive Psychology)
pg 120 |
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Definition
Straus points out that Descartes held that ego and consciousness were separated from the world and from other persons. That is to say that consciousness is cut off and stands alone. 'Sensations do not tell us anything directly about the outside world; they only give us inferential data'.
since descartes, the soul and nature have had nothing to do with each other. Nature belongs exclusively to the realm of 'res extensa' to be understood mathematically. We know the world only indirectly, by inference.
only "unconscious inferences lead to the assumption of the existence of an outside world".
DEF -inference: a conclusion based on evidence and reasoning |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 8
vi. disintegration of Hebrew-Christian values...
true???
pg 121b |
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Definition
first there was the idea that each individual is in a natural harmony with the development of all the others.
The relation between the person and the world was somehow 'preordained'. Descartes held that God- whose existence he believed that he had proved- guaranteed the relation between consciousness and the world. The socio-historical situation in the expanding phases of the modern period were such that the 'faith' worked- (reflected the fact there was still a common world)
But now that God is not only "dead" (Neitzche) but a requiem has been sung over his grave, the stark isolation and alienation inherent in the relation between man and the world has become apparent. To put the matter less poetically, when the humanistic and the Hebrew-Christian values disintegrated the inherent implications of the situation emerged. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 8
vii. "world" supersedes subjectivity and objectivity partitioning. |
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Definition
this refers to the concept that Edmond Husserl says that "each of us are a world in our own...our "world" is our Life Space or our personality + environment.
he also talked about zysygy: All 9 planets in a line in correlation to the sun. They are all in harmony to establish a collective world. Worlds come together or engage with each other to make a group spirit or energy. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 8
viii. definition of existential "world"
pg 122-123 |
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Definition
Existential analysts rediscover world as meaningful to man. They hold that the person and his world are a unitary, structural whole; the phrase "being in the world" expresses precisely that. The two pole, self and world, are always dialectically related. Self implies world and world self; their is neither without the other, and each is understandable only in terms of the other.
World is the structure of meaningful relationships in which a person exists and in the design of which he participates... For to be aware of one's world means at the same time to be designing it.
World is rather a dynamic pattern which, so long as I possess self-consciousness, I am in the process of forming and designing. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 9
existential analysts: 3 simultaneous modes of world
1- umwelt- "world around"
pg 127 |
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Definition
Umwelt: the environment
Also, the natural world, biological needs, drives, instincts (for humans, what's left over were there no self-consciousness); cathexis (def: the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea or object) * countercathexis, abilities/disabilities; genetic heritage, "thrown world" (beworfenheit). this is the world of "biological determinism" (a correct "determinism") It is a world of adjustment and adaptation.
Class notes:
-body/flesh
-physical environment (immediate to us)
e.g. New Yorkers
Book Notes:
includes biological needs, drives, instincts-- the world one would still exist in if one had no self-consciousness.
It is the world of natural law and natural cycles, of sleep and awakeness, of being born and dying, desire and relief, the world of finiteness and biological determinism the "thrown world" into which each of us was hurled by our birth and to which each of us must in some way adjust. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 9
existential analysts: 3 simultaneous modes of world
2- Mitwelt- "with world" |
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Definition
Mitwelt- world of interrelationships with human beings and the meaning of those relationships. (the essence of relationship is that in the encounter both persons are changed.)
Class: 'social world' (it is needed otherwise the person is neurotic)
*** Discuss what it is not: herd, ecology-balance context; adjustment and adaptation.
Book:
It is not- "the influence of the group on the individual, the collective mind, or the forms of social determinism.
*The distinctive quality of the Mitwelt can be seen when we note the difference between a herd of animals and a community of people. (Howard Liddell says "herd instinct consists ofkeeping the environment constant")
In a group of human beings a vastly more complex interaction goes on, with the meaning of the others in the group partly determined by one's own relationship to them. {animals have an environment, human beings have a world}
*Adjustment and Adaptation are entirely accurate in *Umwelt.
e.g. I adapt to the cold weather and adjust to the periodic needs of my body for sleep; the critical point is that the weather is not change by my adjusting to it nor is it affected at all. In MITWELT* It is a relationship. The essence of a relationship is that in the encounter both persons are changed. (mutual awareness and mutually affected by the encounter) |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 9
existential analysts: 3 simultaneous modes of world
3- Eigenwelt "our world"
pg 128 |
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Definition
The mode which is least adequately dealt with or understood in modern psychology and depth psychology. Eigenwelt presupposes self-awareness, self-relatedness, and is uniquely present in human beings. But it is not merely a subjective, inner experience; it is rather the basis on which we see the real world in its true perspective, the basis to which we relate. 'It is a grasping of what something ing the world means to me'*
Class:
Unique to human beings CF- attitude, soul/spirit, meaning-search |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 9
existential analysts: 3 simultaneous modes of world |
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Definition
1- umwelt "world around"
2-mitwelt "with world"
3- eigenwelt "our world"
It should be clear that these three modes of world are always interrelated and always condition each other. The human being lives in each simultaneously. They are by no means three different world but three simultaneous modes of being in the world.
Class:
" " diddo above*
& also, they are in a state of hyphenation |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 12:
Concerning Therapeutic Technique (of existential psychotherapy)
-Verstehen (understanding) & Erklaren (explanation) distinction |
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Definition
Psychologists and psychiatrists are not so concerned with formulating technique, is that existential analysis is always of understanding human existence rather than a sytem of "how tos"
It is not the explanation of the person in front of us by formulations and technique and it is not how we perceive them, rather it is seeking to understand a patient as a being and as a being in HIS world. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 12:
Concerning Therapeutic Technique (of existential psychotherapy
-existential approach: 151 |
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Definition
the existential approach: "technique follows understanding"
-The central task and responsibility of the therapist is to seek to understand the patient as a being and as a being in his world.
-With this understanding the groundwork is laid for the therapist's being able to help the patient recognizes and experience his own existence, and this is the central process of therapy. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 12:
Concerning Therapeutic Technique (of existential psychotherapy)
-The six therapeutic implications of existential psychotherapy
1-the variability of techniques among existential therapists have flexibility and versatility
153 |
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Definition
existential therapy is distinguished by a sense of reality and concreteness. I would phrase the above point positively as follows: existential technique should have flexibility and varying in patient cases, and case phase shifts.
Technique should be decided on the basis of...
1-What will best reveal the existence of this particular patient at this moment in history?
2-What will best illuminate his being in the world? |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 12:
Concerning Therapeutic Technique (of existential psychotherapy)
-The six therapeutic implications of existential psychotherapy
2- psychological dynamisms always take their meaning from the existential situation of the patient's own immediate life.
154 |
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Definition
The problem is to be understood in terms of perception and relatedness to the world.
Existential therapists see the conflict more basically in the area of the patient's acceptance or rejection of his own postulates.
Keep in Mind: What keeps the patient from accepting in freedom his potentialities?
(To repress is precisely to make one's self unaware of freedom)
(social conformity is a general form of resistance in life)
They see each dynamism on an ontological basis.
Each way of behaving is understood in the light of existence of the human being and so forth his drives are in terms of potentialities for existence. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 12:
Concerning Therapeutic Technique (of existential psychotherapy)
-The six therapeutic implications of existential psychotherapy
3- emphasis on the presence
&
3 caveats |
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Definition
By this we mean that the relationship of the therapist and patient is taken as a real one, the therapist being not merely a shadowy reflector but an alive human being who happens to be concerned with understanding and experience of the being of the patient.
3 Caveats:
1-relationship emphasis involves discipline... this emphasis is not an oversimplification
2-Freud's "transference" still has validity... the therapist must let the patient experience what her or she is doing until the experience really grasps him/her. Then and only then will an explanation of why actually help.
3-presence is not therapist imposition on client... The therapist is what socrates named the "midwife"- completely real in "being there," but being there with the specific purpose of helping the other person to bring to birth something from within himself. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 12:
Concerning Therapeutic Technique (of existential psychotherapy)
-The six therapeutic implications of existential psychotherapy
4- Therapy will attempt to "analyze out" the ways of behaving which destroy presence |
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Definition
The therapist will need to be aware of whatever in him (technique or otherwise) blocks his full presence.
Must not use the technical view of the other person as an anxiety-reducing device. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 12:
Concerning Therapeutic Technique (of existential psychotherapy)
-The six therapeutic implications of existential psychotherapy
5- The goal or aim of the existential psychotherapy |
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Definition
The patient experience his existence as real
(v. Frankl's understanding of "meaning" & Carl Rogers' concept of "congruence")
The purpose is that he become aware of his existence fully as possible, which includes becoming aware of his potentialities and becoming able to act on the basis of them.
The task of therapy is to illuminate the existence and be there while the patient finds and learns to live out his own eigenwelt. |
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Term
Rollo May's "The Discovery of Being"
CHAPTER 12:
Concerning Therapeutic Technique (of existential psychotherapy)
-The six therapeutic implications of existential psychotherapy
6- important- commitment
&
2 Final caveats |
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Definition
The importance of commitment distinguishes the process of existential therapy.
Kierkegaard "Truth exists only as the individual himself produces it in action.
***It is a necessary prerequisite for seeing truth... decision proceeds knowledge.
(The patient cannot permit himself to get insight or knowledge until he is ready to decide, until he takes a decisive orientation to life and has made the preliminary decisions along the way) (*Decision: decisive attitude toward existence in which knowledge and insight follow)
2 caveats:
1- a danger that lies in existential approach: generality
(The logos must be made flesh, the important thing is to be existential)
2-existential attitude toward the conscious and the unconscious. (they believe that the two can not be divided in a person, they are indivisible from the core) |
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