Existential Therapy Flashcards
What are the timeless and intractable issues that everyone must confront in existential therapy
The ultimate concerns
What is unique about existential therapy
It can be integrated with other approaches, but it’s not an independent school of therapy
What are the ultimate concerns
- Death
- Freedom
- Isolation
- Meaning
How do existentialists regard people
As meaning making beings who are both subjects of experience and objects of self reflection.
What kind of experience do existentialists focus on? Rather than what? Why?
Authentic experiences rather than artificial explanations. Focus on the subjectivity of experience rather than objective because when experiences are moulded I to a model, they lose their authenticity and become disconnected from the individual
What is the existential dilemma
Although we crave to persist in our being, we are finite creatures
Freedom
Idea that we all live in a universe without inherent design in which we are the authors of our lives. This freedom carries with it terrifying responsibility and is always linked to dread. We have a lust for submission. We are scared to be responsible for the decisions we make
What is the complement to responsibility
Will
Bad faith
To abrogate our responsibility, is to live inauthentically in bad faith. Because if the dread of our ultimate freedom, people have a lot if defenses
3 kinds of isolation
- Interpersonal
- Intrapersonal
- Existential
Isolation
Though we are comforted by connections to other humans, we nonetheless enter and leave the world alone and must always manage the tension bw our wish to connect with others and our knowledge of aloneness
What is the difference bw loneliness and aloneness
Loneliness results from geographic, social and cultural factors that support the breakdown of intimacy. Or people may lack the social skills for intimacy
Existential isolation cuts deeper and is a more basic isolation riveted to an unabridgable gulf bw self and others. Most commonly experienced in recognition that ones death is always solitary. Terror of feeling that no one in the world is thinking of them. Accompanying despair of leading an I observed life
According to existentialism, why do many people continue a highly unsatisfying relationship
Crave a life witness, a buffer against the experience of existential isolation
According to Yalom, what is an important milestone in therapy that has to do with existential isolation
Patient’s realization that there is a point beyond which the therapist can offer nothing more. In therapy, as in life, there is an inescapable substrate of lonely work and lovely existence
Meaning
One of our major life tasks is to invent a purpose sturdy enough to support a life. Often throws us into a crisis. Why am I living? I have no passion for anything. If only someone would throw me a stick. Our perceptual psychological organization is such that we instantaneously pattern random stimuli
Death
The awareness of our inevitable demise is the most painful and difficult. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror. Project ourselves into the future through our children, try to grow rich and famous. Our fear of death is a profound dread of nonbeing, the impossibility of further possibility
Therapeutic relationship in existentialism
Fellow traveler’s. Even labels of therapist and patient are inappropriate. We are all in this together. Sharing the essence of the human condition becomes the bedrock
Existentialism vs gestalt
Experience of the therapeutic relationship is of great interest given the assumption that change is based on lived experience.
Existentialism vs analytic therapies
Encourages work with dreams and analyzes them in relation to their existential as well as autobiographical themes
Existentialism vs cognitive therapies
Encourages reflection on belief systems and examination of meaning making with an aim of taking responsibility for one’s choices and grappling with freedom.
Cognitive restructuring techniques that aim at replacing maladaptive beliefs with personally meaningful values are also consistent with existentialism
But existentialism parts ways with therapies aimed solely at behavioural reduction or elimination of symptoms that rely on manualized treatments. Regards symptoms as signals that mark existential crises and necessitate exploration and is unique to each person
The existential focus of a theory of personality concerns what?
Whether people are living as authentically and meaningfully as possible
How is existential therapy a dynamic therapy
Takes from Freud the model of personality as a system of forces in conflict with one another.
When we speak of the psychodynamics of an individual, what do we mean
We refer to that individual’s conflicting conscious and unconscious motives and fears
According to the existential model of personality, what is the basic conflict
Between the individual and the givens
The givens
The ultimate concerns of existence
The existential system replaces the Freudian system if drive –> anxiety –> defense mechanism with what?
Awareness of ultimate concern –> anxiety –> defense mechanism
If we put aside everyday concerns with which we ordinarily full our lives, what happens?
We must confront the dilemmas of he ultimate concerns
According to existentialists, a full understanding of a person involves what
Both knowledge of that person’s circumstances (the objective part) and how that person subjectively structures and values those circumstances (the subjective part)
May attributes anxiety to what
The fundamental clash between being and the great of nonbeing
According to existentialism, is anxiety normal or not? When does it intensify?
A certain amount if anxiety is normal and inevitable.
It intensifies when we choose to boldly assert our inner potentials because it bring a a reminder that spend at we will not
What is the healthy course
To accept nonbeing as an inseparable part of being
Willing
Responsibility –> action
Why can’t affect blocked individuals act spontaneously
Wishing is closely aligned to feeling, and these people can’t feel and this can’t wish
Impulsivity
Avoids wishing by failing to discriminate among wishes. Instead, act promptly on all wishes
Compulsively
Individuals driven by unconscious inner demands that run counter to their consciously held desires
Once an individual fully experiences a wish, he or she is faced with…
Decision
Each individual in the dawn of consciousness creates a primary self by ..
Permitting consciousness to curl back on itself and differentiate the self from the remainder of the world
Only after the individual becomes ___ can he it she constitute other selves
Self conscious
Only after the individual becomes self conscious can heh or she begin to constitute other selves. Yet the individual can’t escape the knowledge of what 2 things?
- He or she constitutes others
2. He or she can never fully share this consciousness with others
Awareness of our fundamental isolation may invoke an unfulfillable wish to…
Be protected, to merge, to be part of a larger whole
Bugental points out that all relationships are poised on the poles of being ____ and ____, the twin perils of isolation
A part of
Apart from
Many attempt to deal with isolation through…
Fusion
Fusion
The way in which many people attempt to deal with isolation. They soften their ego boundaries and become part of another individual. Avoid personal growth and the sense of isolation that accompanies growth
Fusion underlies the experience of…
Being in love
Compulsive sexuality is a common response to…
Terrifying isolation
What is the third internal conflict
How does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that had no meaning
In addition to naturally patterning random stimuli, why else is meaning of life necessary
Helps us generate a hierarchy of values. Provides us with a blueprint for life conduct. Values tell us not only why we live but how we live
Discuss the role of meaning for personal growth
To grow as a person, one must constantly challenge ones structure of meaning, which is the core of ones existence, which causes anxiety. Growth, and with it normal anxiety, consists of giving up of immediate security for the sake of more extensive goals
Specialness
People have deep, powerful beliefs in personal invoidability, invulnerability and immortality. Although we recognize the foolishness of these beliefs, we nonetheless believe at an unconscious level, that the ordinary laws of biology do not apply to us
What psychotherapists might label narcissism or entitlement may actually be what? According to existentialists
Subterfuge for the belief that specialness is the antidote to death.
How would existentialists explain workaholism or preoccupation with getting ahead
Compulsive ways of unconsciously trying to ensure immortality
The belief in the existence of an ultimate rescuer
Belief in someone watching over them in an indifferent world. To keep the spectre of death at bay, people unconsciously create belief of personal omnipotent saviour who guards and protects them
An excess of the ultimate rescuer defense mechanism results in what
A character structure displaying passivity, dependency and obsequiousness
Name the 2 denial systems against death
- Specialness
2. Belief in the existence of a divine rescuer
Whose book is the oh one to present a systematic, comprehensive view of the existential therapeutic approach
Yalom’s book
What is unique about existential therapy
It’s not a comprehensive psychotherapeutic system. It is a frame of reference. A paradigm by which one views and understands a patient’s suffering in a particular manner. Therapist begins with presuppositions about the sources of a patient’s anguish and views patient in human rather than behavioural or mechanistic terms
Briefly describe the basic approach in existential therapy
Strategically similar to other dynamic therapies. The therapist assumes that patient experiences anxiety that issues from some problems in being. Patient is handling this with a series of maladaptive defense mechanisms. Therapist helps patient embark on a course of self investigation in which the goals are to understand the unconscious conflict, identify defense mechanisms, discover their destructive influence, diminish secondary anxiety by correcting restrictive modes of dealing with the self
Although the basic strategy of existential therapy is similar to other dynamic psychotherapies, the content is different. How
Doesn’t spend a lot of time helping patient get over past.
Nature of client therapist relationship is fundamental. But accent not on transference but on relationship as fundamentally important in itself, leading to engagement and connection
What is unique about the existentialist interpretation of the word deep
Deep means the most fundamental concerns facing the individual at e moment. Not a conflict that extends to the past
Existential therapy and freedom in therapy
Therapist must identify methods and instances of responsibility avoidance and make these known to the patient.
When patients say they can’t do something, say they won’t do it.
Encourage patients to own their feelings, statements and actions. When patient laments, ask how the patient created that situation
Keep patient’s initial complaints in mind and juxtapose these initial complains with patient’s therapy behaviour
The role of decision in existential psychotherapy
Decision is the bridge bw wishing and action. Deciding is hard because every yes involves a no. Patient must come to terms with the unalterable fact that alternatives exclude
Patient’s must realize that they themselves must generate and choose among options. Own their feelings.
Useful to ask patient to consider entire scenario of each what if and fantasize it happening, experiencing and analyzing the emerging feelings
What is the existential therapist’s task for the client’s decision making
Disencumber it. Remove the obstacles to the person’s decision making. Once that’s done, the person will naturally move to a move autonomous position
Guilt
Neuritic guilt. Take responsibility for things we aren’t responsible for
Guilt feelings
Normal guilt. It’s normal to be kind to other people and feeling guilty when we’re cruel and mean
Forgetting being
Type of guilt that refers to forgetting who I am. You have characteristics of yourself that feel important for you. Circumstances are such that these aspects of yourself don’t fit well, so you deny them
3 types of guilt
- Guilt
- Guilt feelings
- Forgetting being
4 mechanisms of psychotherapy in existentialism
- Death as an awakening experience
- Death as a boundary situation
- Death as a primary source of anxiety
- Existential isolation and psychotherapy
Death as an awakening experience
Appreciate things. Put things in perspective
Death as a boundary situation
Neuritic individual rarely lives in the present
Normal anxiety vs neurotic anxiety
Normal anxiety is proportionate to the situation, doesn’t require repression, and can be used creatively.
Neuritic anxiety isn’t proportionate to the situation, we repress it, and it’s destructive rather than constructive
