Lecture
The system of basic concepts of crisis psychology is intended to describe
the psychological state and behavioural characteristics of a person after
a disaster, a crisis event. Constructing a categorial system requires
a fundamental preliminary caveat, the essence of which lies in
defining the theoretical paradigm that will allow a consistent
system of concepts to be proposed. Since, from the very first pages
of this methodological guide, the author has stated that crisis psychology rests
on the theoretical work of psychologists and philosophers of the existential
orientation, it is entirely logical that the system of concepts should be built within
this paradigm. It is probably necessary to name the scholars whose conceptual
apparatus underlies this system of concepts. M. Bakhtin, L.
Binswanger, M. Buber, M. Mamardashvili, A. Maslow, R. May, P. Tillich, V.
Frankl, E. Fromm, and I. Yalom.
Group dynamics - the totality of intragroup socio-psychological processes and phenomena that characterize the entire life
cycle of a small group and its stages - formation,
functioning, development, stagnation, regression, and disintegration. The
characteristics of group dynamics include: the group's goals and objectives,
group roles and the problem of leadership, group cohesion, tension
within the group, the actualization of emotional experience (projection), the formation
of subgroups, and the phases of group development.
Encounter groups - a type of group work oriented toward providing
psychological support for personal growth (C. Rogers). In the process of
communication, group members freely express their own feelings and accept the feelings
of others, focusing on the search for authenticity and openness in
their relationships with those around them. The leader (facilitator) creates
an atmosphere of safety and trust, encourages the free expression of intimate
thoughts and feelings, avoids running planned procedures,
and orients participants toward the positive acceptance of another person's personality in order to overcome
participants' resistance to disclosing personal attitudes and involving
all members of the group in the group process.
Neurotic guilt - neurotic guilt is rooted in imagined transgressions,
directed, ostensibly, against other people,
against parental commands and accepted social rules
Guilt in ego psychology (guilt) is defined as a sense of one's own
worthlessness and insecurity in children whose parents tend
not to give them the opportunity to act independently. This kind of guilt is sometimes
referred to as age-related guilt.
Authentic guilt (real, normal guilt) - is a call to conscience; it
prompts people to attach greater importance to the ethical aspects of their own
behaviour
Existential guilt (ontological guilt) - “stems from the
fact that a person can regard himself as an individual who is, or is
not, in a position to make a choice” (R. May). Existential
guilt is closely linked to the concept of personal responsibility. Existential
guilt is not in itself neurotic guilt, although it possesses
the potential necessary to turn into neurotic guilt. However,
with the right approach, existential guilt can bring the individual
real benefit: it can foster in a person the capacity
to come to terms with the surrounding world and to empathize with other people, as well as
the development of creative potential.
Child grief - an intense, deep, and prolonged experience of
the loss of, or the death of, loved ones. The death of loved ones usually provokes strong reactions in children and
adolescents. This may include despair, fear,
resentment, sleep problems, a sense of helplessness and danger,
sometimes even depression and an intense feeling of emptiness and abandonment.
Existential isolation - the experience of a deep chasm between
oneself and others, a distance between the individual and the world; this is the valley
of loneliness.
Coping strategies (coping) - strategies of action undertaken
by a person in situations of psychological threat. In particular, in the context
of adapting to illness and to physical, personal, and social
well-being.
Psychosocial crisis - a critical period in the life
of the individual, conditioned by physiological maturation and social
demands; it may end either positively or negatively. “A crisis –
is a situation of emotional and mental stress requiring
a significant change in one's picture of the world and of oneself within a short
period of time” (G. W. Allport)
Crisis (traumatic) event - the basic characteristics
of the concept in question: the suddenness of the event's onset; content of the event that is super-normative for
the given person, for the given situation; the emergence
of an intrapersonal, interpersonal, or intergroup conflict,
requiring urgent resolution and reflecting the person's lack of
experience in resolving a conflict at this level; dynamic, progressive
changes in the situation, in the conditions of daily life, in social roles;
the increasing complexity of the processes of daily life in connection with the appearance of previously unknown
elements of daily life that have no precedent in the person's experience;
the transition of the situation into a phase of instability, reaching
the limits of the person's adaptive resources.
There are people who, dreading traumatic situations,
unconsciously seek them out. According to O. Fenichel, they repeat a childhood
trauma, seeking to work it through. ”The ego desires repetition (of the trauma) in order
to resolve the painful tension, but this repetition brings
suffering. The person finds himself in a vicious circle. He fails to master
the trauma through repetition, because each new attempt brings
with it new traumatic experience”.
Logotherapy - a method of psychotherapy created by V. Frankl (from
the Greek logos - meaning) that is concerned with the meaning of human existence and
with the search for this meaning. The striving to seek and realize
the meaning of one's life is an innate motivational tendency, inherent in all
people and constituting the primary driving force of behaviour and personal development.
Frankl contrasts the striving for meaning with the pleasure principle, on
which psychoanalysis is focused. A person requires not a state of
equilibrium and homeostasis, but rather a struggle for some goal worthy of him.
Basic categories of logotherapy: the existential vacuum,
existential frustration, noogenic neurosis, self-transcendence,
and self-detachment.
Life course - the concept of the individual life course
was first put forward by Ch. Bühler. She identified three lines of the life course. The first
line is the objective logic of life, as a sequence of external
events. The second line is the succession of experiences of these events. The third line is
the results of a person's activity. Bühler believed that in life
personality is driven by a striving for self-actualization and creativity.
As the basis for explaining life, she took the concept of “event,” distinguishing
external ones and internal ones.
Almost simultaneously with Ch. Bühler, P. Janet sought to define
the life course as the evolution of the personality itself, as a sequence
of age-related stages of its development, stages of its biography.
The life course of the personality was examined in depth by S. L.
Rubinstein. He believed that the concept of an individual's life course reflects
the essence of the human personality, which finds its ultimate
expression in the fact that it not only develops like any organism, but also
has its own history. A person is a personality only
insofar as he has his own history. In the course of this individual history
there are also its own “events” - nodal points and turning
stages of an individual's life course, when, with the making of one decision or another, on
a longer or shorter timescale, determine the individual's life course.
Meaning of life – an innate motivational tendency,
inherent in all people and constituting the primary driving force of behaviour and
personal development. Frankl draws the conclusion, based on his own
clinical and life observations, that in order to live and act actively,
a person must believe in the meaning possessed by his actions.
Responsibility – fidelity to oneself, trust in the moral
content of one's own feelings, confidence in one's own rightness (S. L.
Rubinstein).
Post-traumatic stress disorder - occurs in people
who have experienced an extremely severe psychological and/or physical
shock that they perceive as especially agonizing. It has
the following features: 1) a threat to life, serious injury, presence as
a witness at the scene of tragic events, evoking a feeling
of intense fear and helplessness; 2) intrusive images of the past,
recurrent memories and emotions, nightmares, illusions,
hallucinations connected with the traumatic events, memories of which
are often repressed from consciousness.
Professional Rescuer - a person who comforts everyone, who
comes to help everyone, even when nobody has asked him to.
The professional rescuer derives benefits from this role; he
is interested not in helping as such, but in obtaining benefits:
underscoring his own importance, eternal gratitude, and the dependence
of the victim on the Rescuer
.
Professional victim - a victim becomes such when the affected
person begins to derive psychological (and sometimes
material) benefits from having been harmed. The role of victim is a role
of irresponsibility. It is more advantageous for the victim to feel unhappy than
happy.
Grief work - an intrapsychic process that occurs following
the loss of an object of attachment; in the course of this process the subject succeeds
in gradually detaching himself from his object.
Grief reaction - a response to the loss of a loved one. It usually
develops, after a phase of shock and stunned disbelief, passes through a phase of depressive
preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased, and gradually concludes with a period
of resolution.
Behavioural regression - a form of defensive reaction on the part of the individual, occurring when
he experiences frustration, and consisting in replacing a task that is significant
for him and difficult to accomplish in the given situation, with an
easier one.
Compensation-seeking attitude - an attitude toward one's own life and suffering after
the trauma, characteristic of the professional victim
Situation - the totality of elements or fragments of the environment at
a given stage of an individual's life activity.
Mourning - the process of experiencing the state of loss, the death of loved
ones. The process of mourning is described as a phenomenon consisting of three stages:
the first stage includes shock and a refusal to believe that the loved one
has died, and is accompanied by weeping and intense distress; the second stage
is characterized by painful yearning for the deceased and thoughts about him; the third
stage is characterized by a diminishing of sorrow and a return to normal
activity.
Event - of the individual's life course.
Personal meaning - an individualized reflection
of an individual's actual relation to those objects for the sake of which
his activity unfolds, experienced as “significance-for-me”,
of impersonal knowledge about the world assimilated by the subject, including concepts,
skills, actions transformed into deeds performed by people, social norms,
roles, values, and ideals.
Meaning-transformation of being. Meaning cannot (and does not want to)
change physical, material, and other phenomena; it cannot act
as a material force. Yet it has no need of this: it is itself stronger than any
force; it changes the total meaning of an event and of reality, without changing
one iota of their actual (ontic) composition - everything remains as it was, but
it acquires a completely different meaning (meaning-transformation of being) (M.
Bakhtin)
Conscience - the ability of the individual to exercise moral
self-control, independently formulate moral
obligations for himself, demand that he fulfil them, and evaluate
the actions he performs; one of the expressions of the moral self-awareness
of the individual.
Socratic dialogue - a distinctive method of intellectual
struggle, in the course of which the patient's inconsistent,
contradictory, and unsubstantiated judgments are corrected. In noogenic
neuroses connected with a loss of the meaning of life, in the course of logotherapy
the technique of Socratic dialogue is used, allowing the patient to be nudged toward discovering
an adequate meaning of life for himself.
Suffering - a way of processing an event that is negative and traumatic for a given
individual. Suffering, like any fundamental emotion, plays
an important role in the life of the human personality. The following
functions of suffering are distinguished: informational, motivating,
motivational, unifying, and value-and-meaning-related.
Fear – a primitive, intense emotion that develops in response to
a real or imagined threat and is accompanied
by physiological reactions resulting from the activation
of the autonomic nervous system, and by defensive behaviour in the form of avoidance.
Psychic stress - a mismatch between the demand placed on a person and the resources
available to them, accompanied by such emotions as fear, anger,
dejection, and so on.
Anxiety – a feeling of fear and foreboding arising from the realization
that a construct for explaining events is lacking.
Psychological (psychic) trauma - an event in the life of the subject
that evokes especially intense experiences and the subject's inability to
respond adequately; stable pathological changes and their consequences
in mental life. Here is how S. Freud defines the concept of trauma: ”We
call an experience traumatic if it involves a rapid and sharp increase
in psychic excitation, as a result of which all the usual means of
eliminating or processing it prove ineffective, which leads to
lasting disturbances in the energy system”. The excitation
exceeds the magnitude the psyche can tolerate, and this may be either
a single event or an accumulation of excitations, each of
which, taken separately, is easily borne.
Anxiety - a dark foreboding, evoked by a threat to some
value that the individual considers necessary for his own existence
as a person.
Psychoanalysis more often uses the concept of basic anxiety (K. Horney) —
an all-pervasive feeling of loneliness and isolation in a hostile world.
Neurotic anxiety – an inadequate response to an objective
threat. Neurotic anxiety can be viewed as a subjective
reaction to objective threats, and the nature of the reaction largely
depends on the internal psychological model. Suppression and blocking
of awareness associated with neurotic anxiety make people more
vulnerable to threats. This is explained by the fact that people
lose access to important information that could be used to identify threats
and cope with them.
Psychoanalytic definition. Neurotic anxiety is
an emotional response in the form of fear experienced by the individual when the Ego
is threatened by uncontrollable instinctual desires
(the fear that impulses coming from the id will cause trouble for the Ego).
Existential anxiety (normal) – the experiencing
by a person of various threats to their existence. The source of normal
anxiety is human existential vulnerability in relation
to nature, illness and death. Normal anxiety
is characterized by the following three features. First, the intensity
of normal anxiety corresponds to the severity of the objective threat
present in the most difficult situation. Second, normal anxiety does not
lead to suppression. Third, such anxiety can be used
creatively – to identify the factors causing its
occurrence, and to try to counter these factors.
Existential anxieties:
Death. Small children grasp the essence of death. Yalom believes
that children reject their first knowledge of death, convincing themselves that they
will not die. Coming to terms with the inevitability of death is the main task associated with
development. Vulnerability to death can be either a blessing or a curse
depending on the resources of the Ego, on heredity, and on the nature of the relationships
of the adults around them. However, vulnerability to death can be traumatic
when the factors listed above are present to an insufficient degree.
Freedom. This is largely historical in character. In our time –
a time of transition from the old world to the new, a time of the twilight of a new era (P.
Tillich) – a rapid disintegration of structures and values is taking place. The younger
generation has developed a need to choose, but they have not learned how and what
to choose, and turned out unprepared for freedom, and when confronted with
the existential fact of responsibility for their own life they poorly
understand it. The emphasis has shifted from obligation to desire. Hence
the problem of modern upbringing: many people have not managed to learn how
to want, how to exercise will, how to make decisions and remain true to them.
Isolation. A distinction is made between interpersonal isolation, which is expressed in
the destruction of communal ties.
The emergence of intrapersonal isolation
is caused by difficulties and frustration that occur at
the initial stage of life and threaten some important life
aspect of the individual's emerging sense of “I”.
Existential isolation is closely linked to interpersonal isolation.
Many people are unable to develop inner strength, a sense of self-confidence and of their own
individuality, which would allow them to withstand existential
isolation. Having never received genuine, growth-promoting love, they do not know how to offer it to others.
Meaninglessness. Modern civilization contributes to the weakening
of people's sense of meaning. Justification of the thesis. First, in the past meaning
in life was provided by religion. Second, urbanization and industrialization
contribute to the weakening of the sense of meaning in life, which used to
be sustained through contact with nature. Third, people no longer
belong to rural communities, but live in impersonal urban communities. Fourth, modern man is alienated from the results of his labor. Fifth, the attention of modern man is less occupied by basic
needs (food, water, shelter). Being in greater safety and having
more free time, people increasingly encounter the abyss
of meaninglessness. Sixth, modern people face the possibility
of nuclear annihilation and global destruction of the environment. If
the world is not going to last, why bother.
Existential vacuum – a state that arises in a
person in the absence of meaning in existence. It is precisely the absence of meaning
that is the cause giving rise on a broad scale to specific
“noogenic neuroses”.
Existential frustration – arises when
a person's striving to find meaning remains unrealized.
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