Lecture
Existential psychology is a school of psychology that focuses attention on human existence, the meaning of life, and individual freedom. This psychological school developed on the basis of the philosophical ideas of existentialism. The basic tenets of existential psychology include the following aspects:
Meaning and purpose: Existential psychology is concerned with questions about the meaning of life and the search for meaning. It emphasizes that a person exists in a world devoid of predetermined meaning, and that every individual is called upon to find his or her own meaning and purpose in life.
Freedom and responsibility: Existential psychology recognizes free will as a fundamental aspect of human nature. Along with this freedom comes responsibility for one's own decisions and actions. Individuals are responsible for shaping their own lives and choosing their paths of development.
States of anxiety and angst: Existential psychology recognizes that human existence can be accompanied by states of anxiety and angst, caused by an awareness of the uncertainty of the future and the finitude of human life.
Awareness of death: Death plays an important role in existential psychology. It emphasizes that awareness of one's own mortality can influence many aspects of human life, including values, priorities, and aspirations.
Authenticity and genuineness: Existential psychology calls for authenticity, which means being true to oneself and one's values. It emphasizes the importance of sincerity and openness toward oneself and toward other people.
Personal experience and exploration of the inner world: Existential psychology attaches great importance to personal experience and the exploration of a person's inner world. This school of psychology emphasizes the importance of understanding one's own feelings, thoughts, and lived experiences.
Openness to dialogue: Existential psychology encourages open dialogue between client and therapist. Dialogue allows clients to reflect on the meaning of their lives and to discuss their inner experiences.
At the center of existential psychology’s attention is the category of personality.
This is its fundamental difference from other psychological approaches and theories.
It is well known that behaviorism studies behavior,
psychoanalysis studies instincts, and the psychology of consciousness studies consciousness —
and only existential psychology
takes the whole personality as the object of its inquiry.
Existential psychology is directly connected with the philosophical system of existentialism.
Within existentialism, the psychology of being has acquired (borrowed) not only its conceptual apparatus,
but also the mechanisms of the formation and disintegration of personality.
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Ontological interpretation of consciousness.
Existential psychology attempts to find the a priori characteristics of “pure” consciousness.
These a priori characteristics are understood as innate properties of human being.
Consciousness possesses no lesser essence than being itself.
One cannot raise the question of the primacy of these two fundamental categories.
There is no human being without the being of consciousness.
Thus, within existential psychology consciousness is objectified.
A view of emotions.
Existential psychology regards emotions not as affects akin to fear,
but as characteristics rooted in the ontological nature of the human being.
Guilt is understood as anxiety connected with an unrealized possibility of authentic being.
Freedom as the search for choice, which presupposes anxiety,
is a state of the personality in which it confronts the problem of realizing its life potentials.
Ontological and existential guilt has three modes.
The first mode is connected with the impossibility of complete self-actualization
and pertains to the inner world.
The second mode is connected with the condemnation of human existence to insensitivity,
owing to the impossibility of fully understanding another person, and pertains to the social world.
The third mode of guilt is the most all-encompassing —
it is guilt over the loss of unity with nature, which pertains to the objective world.
The fact that existential psychology emerged from existential philosophy is a scientific fact
that reflects the logic of the development of scientific thought, as the ideas of one science are taken up and developed
within the fold of another, already established science. Representatives of one science often cross boundaries, making it difficult to determine
a scholar’s disciplinary affiliation. There are many examples; for us this is J. - P. Sartre. It may come as a
surprise that Russia, the birthplace of one of the three branches of existential
philosophy (N. Berdyaev, L. Shestov, V. Solovyov), did not react at all at the psychological level. This is
all the more striking, given that a powerful complement to philosophy in Russia was the great existential literature of L.N.
Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky, F. Sologub, and others. The irrationalism of Russian culture is fertile ground
for considering the problems of being and non-being.
Existential psychology is, at its core, pessimistic about the human being.
“Nothingness” is always on one’s path.
“I am free” means, at the same time,
“I am fully responsible for my existence.”
Freedom is always accompanied by responsibility (E. Fromm, “Escape from
Freedom”).
“Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself,” wrote J.-P. Sartre.
Human being is unique and exists at a particular, concrete
moment of time and space. A person lives in the world, grasping his own
existence and his own non-existence (death). We do not exist outside the
world, but our world does not exist without us, has no meaning without us (if we are to be precise).
What is a human being?
Is his essence determined by genetic factors or by the influence of the social environment?
Is there more in him from environment or from heredity?
Existentialists reject this dispute as, in their view,
unproductive and demeaning to the human being.
A person, and our life, is what we make of it.
Not the origin of human being, but the essence of being —
that is the truly human reading of the question.
Here is a theme worthy of reflection. Not where he came from and how he appeared,
but where he is going and why,
what he “makes” of himself and what he does not do, cannot do, does not want to do, betrays.
We came into this world with the purpose of realizing what has been placed within us.
Human life is the constant work of realizing one’s own potential
possibilities of becoming a human being. This is difficult, never
fully attainable, and it cannot help but provoke anxiety about
the possibility of finding meaning in this endless struggle, in this
meaningless world. A person accepts responsibility for finding
meaning in this absurd, meaningless world. A person is a being,
who feels, who must feel, responsibility for his own fate. In
a person there is as much of the human as there is a sense of responsibility for his own fate.
The poet Alexander Blok described this state very precisely as
a “sense of the path.” Together with this responsibility for one’s own fate, a person
is always on the verge of despair, loneliness, anxiety.
Loneliness and anxiety follow both from the impossibility of getting help in the search for one’s path, and from the impossibility of following that path all the way to the end. Despite such absurdity and ambiguity of the world, a person is responsible for choosing his own path. A person can say, characterizing the essence of himself — “I am my choice” (J.-P. Sartre).
The becoming of a human being is a complex project
and few manage to accomplish it (psychological death in childhood — A.B. Orlov, K. Chukovsky).
The concept of becoming is the most important one in existential psychology.
Existence is not static; it is always a process.
The goal is to become fully human (or, according to Sartre, to become a god),
i.e., to fulfill all the possibilities of Dasein∗.
It must be admitted that this is a hopeless project, since choosing one possibility means renouncing the others.
Becoming presupposes a direction, which can change,
and a continuity, which can break down.
A person is always in the dynamic of becoming;
a person is responsible for realizing as many possibilities as possible.
Authentic life is the realization of this condition.
Authentic existence requires more than the satisfaction of biological needs
and sexual and aggressive drives.
At every moment of his time, a person is obligated (before himself) to bring out his abilities to the fullest.
A person must accept the challenge and create a life full of meaning.
The other path is the path of betrayal.
It turns out to be easier to betray one’s fate, one’s life path.
What then?
Unnoticed by the person, psychic death sets in, which can overtake him even in childhood.
“Secret psychic death in childhood” — that is how the psychologist A.B. Orlov describes this state, quoting an anonymous author.
My life has meaning only when I can realize my human nature.
The search for an authentic and fully meaningful life is not easy.
The search is especially difficult in an era of cultural change and conflict,
in an era of decline (of the modern age, for example).
In such eras, external, traditional values and beliefs are no longer adequate landmarks
for life and for finding the meaning of existence.
In particular cases, in crisis situations, the same psychological mechanism operates.
Tried-and-tested ways of responding stop working,
and a shaking, a partial loss of life’s meaning, occurs.
Not everyone has enough courage “to be.”
Human being presupposes moving away from old patterns and stereotypes,
the ability to stand one’s ground, and the desire to seek new and effective paths to self-actualization.
It is precisely at
critical moments of life, the presence of “the courage to be” is tested,
the capacity for self-actualization in spite of everything.
A person is responsible, fully responsible, for one single
life — his own.
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Dasein — being, as inclusion within some other being, as presence, “there-being”, here-being”,
“being-in-the-world”.
To avoid responsibility, freedom, choice — means to betray
oneself and to live in a state of despair, hopelessness, to be not
authentic, inauthentic.
The connection between the being of the human and the being of the world.
The becoming of the human being and the becoming of the world are always linked (M. Buber,
M.M. Bakhtin). This is co-becoming (Erwin Straus), I and Thou (M. Buber),
dialogue (M.M. Bakhtin).
A person discloses the possibilities of his own existence through the world
of the other (M. Buber), while the world, the other, in turn, is disclosed by the person
who is within it. As one grows and expands, the other inevitably grows and
expands as well. If one stops growing, the other stops
too. Crisis events express various possibilities —
and impossibilities of human existence.
The only reality that the psychology of existentialism affirms as knowable to anyone
is subjective, personal reality, not an objective one.
The significance of subjective experience lies in the fact that this experience
is the basic phenomenon of a person’s connection with the world. After the Copernican
revolution brought about by I. Kant in epistemology: thinking
is constitutive of its objects, it creates them by knowing them,
psychologists were able to rely on experience in constructing their
psychological models. It is only in experience that one can discover both the world and
the human “I”, the task being to rise above it and see experience in the process of
reflexive analysis.
Theoretical constructions are secondary in relation to
direct experience.
It is precisely for this reason that the methods of existential psychology are built essentially
on self-reports, returning psychology to subjectivism.
Existential research is subordinated to a single task: to find the project
or the fundamental relations to which all
behavioral manifestations can be reduced. It is assumed that the structure of a person’s world
is revealed through his life history, character, and the content of his language,
his dreams. Existential psychology integrates the whole
of psychological experience in its immediate givenness to consciousness; it
focuses attention on lived experience. Experimental methods,
as accepted in psychology, existential psychology regards as a consequence
of dehumanization and fundamentally rejects them.
Existential psychology is often used in clinical practice, as well as in various fields of psychology, to help people better understand themselves, the meaning of their lives, and how to cope with life crises.
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