so we started to talk a little bit about phenomenology last time
and about carl rogers
and, uh, I mentioned that
the phenomenologists
were interested in experiences in some sense
as the ultimate as the ultimate reality, and that's a very complicated
concept to grasp
the existentialists
also adopted that viewpoint. they were concerned with the
the quality of subjective experience,
not that they were ignoring
the reality of the objective experience
but they were concerned with the reality of subjective experience
and they were also more focused action than on
on statement or belief. because
here's something to think aboot
you can think about this for a very long time
if you're trying to understand what someone believes
even if you're trying to analyze their representations of the world
if you should pay attention to how they act or what they say
and that's a profound question, even from a
from a neurological posi-
perspective or a neuropsychological perspective, because
the memory system, that you use to represent
what you say, that you believe, is not the same
memory system that you use to embody
your knowledge about action
so, it's
akin to the distinction between
telling someone how to ride a bike and knowing how to ride a bike
those are not the same things
the descriptions don't even lay very well on top of one another
because you don't actually know how you ride a bike
you just know how to do it. it's built into your physiology, right
it's a skill, and
that's called procedural memory, and procedural memories
are the same kind of memories that
that basically structures your perceptions
it's not that you can't orient
orient your perceptions consciously, you can
but once you've oriented them consciously
let's say, some goal, it's automatic procedures
that take over because you really don't know how that
you organize your senses so that you pay attention
you just know how to do it
now the existentialists believed that
actions spoke louder than words
and that if you were interested in belief
and even if you were interested in
analyzing belief that it was better for you to look at how someone acted
than what they said. Now
one of the things you might think
with regards to rogers
is that
his psychotherapeutic practice
would be predicated on the idea that that you should
bring how you act into alignment with
what you say you believe
so that there is no discontinuity between your
body, that's one way of thinking about it, and your mind
and so that there are fewer paradoxes in your
in the way that you manifest yourself in the world
so the concentration on action is one of the fundamental
characteristics of existentialism
another one is
the insistence upon
trouble and suffering as an intrinsic
element of human experience
So, you could say that we concentrate
Well we could say: "Ok, well built into that is
Trouble, built into that is Chaos, built into that is Anxiety
and Pain; and Disease.
You can fall prey into those things
Without there being something wrong with you. Now, if you pin down a psychoanalyst
like Jung or Freud
They would of course admit that human misery is endemic to
human experience, but Freud in particular
tended to look for
adult psychopathology
in childhood misadventure
in pathological childhood experience
he at least implicitly claimed that
If you hadn't experience childhood trauma
and you had developed properly what would
is that
you would end up healthy, roughly speaking
certainly, mentally sound
but the existentialists don't really buy that belief in the beginning
they basically make a different claim which is
that Life is so full of intrinsic misery, let's say
but suffering is a better way of thinking about it
suffering that
manifests itself as a consequence of your intrinsic
vulnerability, that psychopathology is built
into the human experience
There's no real way of avoiding it or at least...
There's no real reason to look for extra causes
that might be a better way of thinking about it
and
you'd be surprised how often that observation is useful
for clinical clients for example
because one of the things that is quite characteristic
about people, especially if they are introverted and
don't have many friends; they don't have people to talk to
if they are suffering, maybe they are depressed or anxious
or they have some sets of strange symptoms like agoraphobia
or obsessive compulsive disorder
one of the things that they always presume is that
the fact that they are suffering in that manner
means that there is not only something wrong with them
but something uniquely wrong with them so that
it is their fault and no one else is like them
and one of the things that you do
as a diagnostician; you know, you'll hear a lot of
rattling about how labelling is bad for people
and
certainly myth labelling is bad for people
and eve an accurate label can be a box
you can get out of, but it is very frequently the case
that you diagnose someone, it is a relief to them that you can't believe
because they come into you knowing there is something
isn't going properly
but they think well, they are the only person facing it
that it means that they are idiosyncratically strange
in some incomprehensible way that no one else can
possibly understand
and there's no way that they can ever get better
the things you do is that you point out to them
depression and anxiety doesn't really require any explanation
right, there is plenty of reason; I don't remember who said it
"everyone has sufficient justification for suicide".
I think that was the claim, well the point is that
Is that you look through the experiences of the typical person
Unless they are very very fortunate
and they wont be that way forever that certainly is the case
that they can point to traumatic experiences throughout their lives
death and loss and illnesses
and humiliation and all those sorts of things
is sufficient to account for existence
in the state of quasi-pemanent negative emotion
now often
if you see people who are depressed and anxious by nature
they assume that everyone else is the smiling face of
that you see on facebook
and so that alienates themselves from people and from themselves
even more than
certainly far more than necessary
part of the psycho-education that is going on in therapy
is merely
educated people to understand that
a fair bit of misery is the norm and that
there is plenty of genuine reason for it
and so the existentialists basically start from that stance
It's like a 'Fall of Man' stance
you know, because (it) is deeply rooted in
the Western tradition roughly speaking is the idea that
people are divorced from some early
paradisal fate
and that is the emergence of something like self-consciousness
that produced that demolition
of humanity and left us in a damaged state
and people think they don't believe that
but they believe it all the time
and it's frequently how people experience themselves
as if there is something wrong that needs to be rectified
and it seems unique in some sense to human beings
it doesn't seem all that obvious that animals think that way
but people definitely think that way
and so
all the existentialists
basically take that as
a given.
and then, they offer another question
well, given that is your lot
and then, there is ample reason for misery
How is that you should conduct yourself? Because merely say
giving into that misery or multiplying it,
doesn't seem to be
it doesn't seem to be doing anything other than multiply it
it doesn't seem to be doing anything than increase it
"It is bad to begin with it", you might say
well increasing it is something you have to regard as worse
so how do you conduct yourself in the face of misery?
Ok, how do they present that to begin with?
Ok so, this is from Pascal,
and this is an existential statement
that describes the position of the individual in the universe
you might say, or you could say
it explains a deep
characteristic of individual experience,
or existence. Hence, existentialism.
All he does is he spends his hole trying to make