CH11: Rollo May's Existential Psychology Theory

• Existentialism - Against the increasing trend in postindustrial societies toward the dehumanization of people (people as objects).
• Emphasize a balance between freedom and responsibility. As people realize that, ultimately, they are in charge of their own destiny, they experience the burden of freedom and the pain of responsibility.
• Dasein (Being-in-the-World)• Basic unity of person and environment• Implies oneness of subject and object, of person and world• Covers the totality of human experience
• World 1: Umwelt (world of objects and things)
• World 2: Mitwelt (world with people)
• World 3: Eigenwelt (relationship with oneself)
• Basic Concepts - Healthy people live simultaneously in Umwelt, Mitwelt, and Eigenwelt.
• Nonbeing (or Nothingness)• Dread of not being as a result of awareness of self as a living,emerging being• Most obvious avenue of nonbeing is death. others, alcoholism, addiction, blind conformity
• Existential psychology is concerned with the individual’s struggle to work through life’s experiences and to grow toward becoming more fully human.
• The failure to confront death serves as a temporary escape fromthe anxiety or dread of nonbeing. People experience anxiety when they become aware that their existence can be destroyed.
• 1. Normal Anxiety: Proportionate to threat, does not involverepression, and can be confronted constructively on theconscious leve
• 2. Neurotic Anxiety: Disproportionate to threat, involvesrepression and other forms of intrapsychic conflict, and ismanaged by various kinds of blocking-off of activity andawareness
• If people experience anxiety when faced with problems of fulfilling their potentialities, guilt arises when people deny their potentialities, fail to accurately perceive the needs of fellow humans, or remain oblivious to their dependence on the natural world.
• Both anxiety and guilt are ontological (refer to the nature of being, not to feelings arising from specific situations).
• Intentionality - Refers to the structure that gives meaning to experienceand allows people to make decisions about the future
• Action implies intentionality, just as intentionality implies action.
• Care - an active process, the opposite of apathy; a state inwhich something does matter
• Love - delight in the presence of the other person and anaffirming of that person’s value and development as much asone’s own
• Will - capacity to organize one’s self so that movement in acertain direction or toward a certain goal may take place
• Form of love 1: sex, sexual intercourse
• Form of love 2: eros, procreation through a union
• Form 3: Philia, intimate nonsexual relationship
• Form 4: Agape, spiritual, undeserved and unconditional
• Healthy individuals can both assume their freedom and face their destiny.
• Freedom comes from an understanding of our destiny, an understanding that death is a possibility at any moment.
• 1. Existential Freedom: Freedom of action (doing)
• 2. Essential Freedom: Freedom of being (“inner freedom”)
• Within the boundaries of our destiny, we have the power to choose, and this power allows us to confront and challenge our destiny.
• The Power of Myth: Are not falsehoods but are conscious and unconscious belief systems that provide explanations for personal and social problems
• Myths are stories that unify a society (“They are essential to the process of keeping our souls alive and bringing us new meaning in a difficult and often meaningless world”)
• Apathy and emptiness, not anxiety and guilt, are the malaise of modern times.
• Lack of communication, or inability to know others and to share oneself with them, results in psychopathology.