Intro Flashcards
Give an easily understandable definition of EA, which can explain the goal of EA
to the general public
EA helps people find the ‘yes’ to life or give one’s inner consent to the conditions of existence.
What is the scientific definition of EA?
EA is a phenomenological and person-oriented psychotherapy, with the aim of guiding a person to a free experience of their mental and emotional life, to make authentic decisions and to discover a truly responsible way of dealing with life and the world (Längle, 1997).
What is an experiential definition of EA?
It’s an experientially oriented psychotherapy in the sense that EA asks how you experience something (e.g., when you smoke a cigarette). In the experience there is all the relevant information. The experience is the concrete and the whole in which everything is contained.
What is the relationship between dedication (giving of myself) and fulfillment?
A fulfilled existence implies commitment, dedication, and devotion, being able to live fully, to open oneself and to engage in living, to make my life mine.
Each person searches for opportunities to give inner consent and to dedicate one’s self to something/someone beyond oneself.
Existential ground rule: Without devotion, there is no fulfillment
When there is lack of fulfillment, there is discontent in various areas of one’s life, and there is a lack of devotion
Can you describe a fundamental existential attitude, which could be seen as a key
to fulfilled existence?
Openness:
Makes dedication possible. Life is meaningful when it can be lived with inner consent, even though some things remain open and messy.
What does the existence-scale measure?
Self-report measure that assesses the ability to find meaning in life.
The test has four dimensions or subscales reflecting four specific capacities or activities required to find meaning with respect to the four conditions of existence:
1) Realistic perception connected with the capacity for self-distancing (SD scale)
2) Free emotionality related to self-transcendence (ST scale)
3) Decision-making ability connected with freedom (F scale)
4) Activity related to responsibility (R scale)
What are the (4) fundamental motivations for fulfilled existence according to
EA?
1) To be able to be in the world
2) To like being alive
3) To feel free to be oneself
4) To be intent on meaning
Describe the EA dialogical relationship
The dialogical relationship to the inner and outer world is the basis of existence. Hence, EA aims to bring the human beings into dialogue with the inner & outer world.
What is the experience of inner consent?
A felt, inward “Yes”; feeling that it is right, that it resonates with my person.In inner consent, there is an experiential quality or the felt sense of the whole situation which speaks within me.
To live with inner consent means giving a four-fold consent: to the world, to life, to one’s self as person, and to the future & horizon of meaning.
How does the noetic (spiritual) dimension of a person relate to the other two dimensions described by Frankl?
The 3 dimensions (body, mind, and spirit) are not additive and the human being is not the sum of these elements. For example, the spiritual can be at odds with either the body or the psychological tendencies.
For human beings, the unity can be formulated as:
- If it is corporeal, it is also psychological;
- If it is psychological, it is also spiritual,
- If it is spiritual, it is also corporeal and psychological
- Cognitive is not spiritual. The absence of appropriate cognitive capacities (e.g., dementia) does not take away from the Person; one is no less of a Person because of cognitive deficits
What is the noetic dimension of a person?
It is the spiritual part of Frankl’s tridimensional model of the human being, which is divided into body, mind, and spirit. It is the personal aspect that involves freedom, will, decision, responsibility, and intuition.
What is the psychological dimension of a person.
It is the mind part of Frankl’s tridimensional model of the human being, which is divided into body, mind, and spirit. It is the psyche aspect that involves impulses, reactions (fear, anger, depression); personality characteristics, emotions, coping reactions.
How do we understand “true helping”?
True help means to invest one’s self in order to make something possible that the other at the time cannot do himself/herself.
What is meant by the term inner consent?
Core elements of inner consent:
Freedom
Feeling that it is right/it resonates with my person
Active involvement which makes devotion/dedication possible
Ground of fulfillment in life
Mobilizes power, increases the efficiency, focuses the person’s motivational power
It is a four-fold consent (to world, life, oneself, and context/becoming/ meaning)
Brings forward our inner relationship/closeness to one’s self
Opens up one’s self and allows a personal engagement
Allows oneself to stand behind one’s values with the readiness to invest the necessary labour or to deal with potential anxiety
What is the Copernican Turn and how does it relate to the dialogical relationship?
Kant’s paradigm shift is the “Copernican Turn,” which abandons study of (unknowable) reality-in-itself in favor of inquiry into the world-of-appearances and the innate structures of the mind that determine the nature of experience.
Just as Copernicus moved from the supposition of heavenly bodies revolving around a stationary spectator to a moving spectator, so metaphysics, “proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis”, should move from assuming that “knowledge must conform to objects” to the supposition that “objects must conform to our [a priori] knowledge”.
The dialogical relationship to the inner and outer world is the basis of existence. Hence, EA aims to bring the human beings into dialogue with the inner & outer world.
The key to understanding the existential dynamic of the person is that to be human means to be in a constant flux of being questioned by experiences and felt values (relationships, tasks, what matters to me). This is the basis for the existential turn: to see oneself as the one who is questioned by life and not as the one who is questioning or demands. In the existential understanding, it is the ‘task’ of the human beings to respond to life’s questions with the best possible answer in a particular situation. Through these answers the human beings become responsible for their life.
