Psychology for Dummies (86 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
So we’re all striving to realize our truest sense of being, our truest sense of
ontological existence.
Ontology is a branch of philosophy that concerns itself with determining what is real in our universe. I feel real. Hopefully, you feel real, too. If we’re both real, we’re both able to speak about our sense of ontological existence, our sense of being.
There’s always a catch though. If there’s going to be being, there has to be not-being. The ultimate not-being experience is death. When we face death, our own or someone else’s death, we experience anxiety over the thought of not-being, of not being around anymore.
Existential therapists tend to focus on the differences between a patient’s normal or healthy anxiety and what they call
neurotic anxiety.
Normal anxiety
comes from striving to be and facing threats to our being. Wait a minute, normal anxiety? Before I started learning about the existential approach, I always thought that anxiety was pretty much a bad thing. It feels pretty bad, and it can get in the way of doing a lot of things.
Healthy anxiety is anxiety that is proportionate to the situation and not out of control. Therefore, healthy anxiety doesn’t need to be repressed because it’s manageable and realistic. It’s also constructive and helpful. If I’m appropriately anxious about my test, I may just sit down and study in order to pass it. My anxiety can motivate me. Many of us can relate to anxiety being at the core of a lot of what we do. “No problem,” say the existentialists, as long as your anxiety is working for you, and it’s not overblown.
Neurotic anxi
ety has two qualities that work against our realization of being and cut us off from fully engaging the world around us.
•
It’s disproportionate to the situation at hand.
Fearing that they may fail, a lot of college students get worked up and anxious about taking big exams. For many people, failing an exam is a big deal, but being anxious about the exam is fine, as long as they don’t get carried away. Anxiety becomes a problem when it becomes disproportionate to the situation. If I’m so anxious that I think I’m going to die if I fail, the anxiety has definitely become a problem, and existentially speaking, it’s out of whack.
•
It’s destructive.
Staying with the exam example, all that anxiety may make students physically ill. If they’re sick, they can’t study. If they don’t study, they fail. Their anxiety was counterproductive. Neurotic anxiety should be tolerated as it comes up, but it should be eliminated to the greatest extent possible. We also tend to repress, or “stuff,” our neurotic anxiety into our unconscious in an attempt to cope with it. The anxiety is painful, and when something is painful, a lot of us try to forget it exists.
Guilt
is another key existential phenomenon. Guilt is an important concept in our society and, I guess, in most others as well. The existentialists aren’t priests who seek to absolve their patients of guilt, but instead, they help their patients focus on issues of guilt as they relate to the full experience of being. There are two types of guilt:
Normal guilt
arises from two situations:
•
Failing to properly engage in ethical behavior.
This type of guilt comes up when you actually do something wrong according to your own and your social group’s ethical and morals standards. Guilt is a normal and healthy emotion.
•
Failing to live up to our own expectations.
I find that this one is often downplayed in psychotherapy. Individuals often talk about letting other people down. A lot of people actually come to therapy because they’ve let someone down through infidelity, physical abuse, and so on. But what about my own standards for myself? How am I supposed to feel when I let myself down? Guilty!
Neurotic guilt
is guilt that comes from our fearful fantasies of having done someone harm when we actually didn’t. Are you afraid to tell someone what you really think for fear of hurting his or her feelings? That’s nice. But, are you afraid that you’ve hurt someone’s feelings even when you’re sure that you didn’t? That’s a
fantasized transgression
— a created or imagined trespass that never occurred.
So far, a bunch anxious and guilty people are running around getting in touch with their being. That sounds kind of existential, doesn’t it? When I think of the concept of “being,” I always think of smoke-filled coffee shops with beatnik poets, sporting goatees, berets, and sunglasses and spouting poetry about the nobility of a cockroach. “They’re alive man! Their legs are so short that they can’t help but be down to earth. They scurry around with zest and zeal, never worrying about money or pride; they’re just looking for their next meal man.” Sorry, I couldn’t help it, but my little existential poem does illustrate the idea that there’s a genuineness in the simplicity of the cockroach. They seem focused on what really matters; to them, it’s food. They’re not distracted by neurotic guilt or anxiety. They are what the existential therapists call
being-in-the-world.
Existential therapists try hard to understand the experience of their patients and how they “be-in-the-world.” There are three important levels of this being:
Umwelt:
Being among or within one’s environment and the external world of objects and things
Mitwelt:
Being within one’s social world
Eigenwelt:
Relating to oneself
Being is maximized when we’re in touch with each of these levels to a sufficient degree, engaging with each level without the experience of neurotic anxiety or guilt. Remember the cockroach — he ain’t guilty man!
Being-in-the-world includes our experience of time.
Time
is an absolute fact in all our lives. It’s an existential given. Time goes on whether or not we try to resist it. The key for the existentialists was for each of us to learn to live in the present and the immediate future. We shouldn’t waste our time worrying about the past. We should commit to the present, realizing that time only moves us closer to our inevitable deaths and that life is what one makes of it. Make life, or it will make you I guess.
A final important existential issue that serves as background for the actual practice of existential psychotherapy is the concept of
transcendence.
If you weren’t depressed before you started reading this chapter, you may be now. All this talk about death, time, anxiety, and guilt isn’t much fun. It’s not all hopeless though. The existentialists see a way out. Transcendence involves trying to realize our being. It’s the act of living one’s life without being overly anxious or ill and striving to transcend the past and grow toward the future.
The human imagination and our ability to think abstractly are powerful tools in this cosmic struggle. To “abstract” something is to remove it or extract it. We can take ourselves beyond the limits of our immediate situation with the ability to think of or imagine ourselves as outside of these limits. Our ability to separate ourselves by thinking creatively creates a psychological space of sorts. We can envision possibilities. As long as we’re able to imagine alternatives and other possibilities, we can continue to strive toward being. This power is crucial to the existential concept of freedom. It also sounds like hope to me.
In addition to addressing anxiety and guilt, at the center of all existential therapy is the patient’s struggle with these four existential issues:
Death
Freedom
Isolation
Meaninglessness
Just when you thought you’ve gotten away from a discussion of
death,
it comes right back. I’ve often wondered if the existentialists were obsessed with death. In therapy, they emphasize that psychopathology and problems in living are the result of a patient’s inability to transcend the idea of death. There’s no escaping it. We’re conflicted — we want to live, but we know we’re going to die. Knowing that I’m going to die may lead to despair. I might think, “If I’m going to die, why should I even try?” Existential therapy helps patients face the fact of death without despair.
After working in jails and prisons, I’ve come to really cherish one thing — my freedom. Existential psychologists emphasize the importance of the concept of
freedom
in a patient’s life. They don’t believe that some absolute structure to the universe is waiting to be discovered. We all make up the structure as we go along. For some of us, freedom seems like a burden. Freedom requires that we take responsibility for all our actions, and it means that we’ve got nobody but ourselves to blame when things go wrong. The good part: We can take full credit when things go right.
Just in case you thought you may catch a break from the existentialists and not have to face every single crappy fact of life, they throw in
isolation
for good measure. A lot of people find shelter from the harshness of the world in companionship. At our core, we realize that we’re essentially alone and that we’ll die alone. We try to overcome this fact by attempting to
merge
with others. When we seek a merger in the extreme, we engage in disingenuous relating, using other people as a means to our end (ending isolation). When our identities are so dependent on others, we may find ourselves feeling as if we don’t exist without the other person. We long for recognition. Get over it! You’re alone, and there’s nothing you can do about it!