Full transcript
0:13so we started to talk a little bit about phenomenology last time
0:15and about carl rogers
0:18and, uh, I mentioned that
0:21the phenomenologists
0:23were interested in experiences in some sense
0:26as the ultimate as the ultimate reality, and that's a very complicated
0:29concept to grasp
0:35the existentialists
0:38also adopted that viewpoint. they were concerned with the
0:42the quality of subjective experience,
0:44not that they were ignoring
0:46the reality of the objective experience
0:48but they were concerned with the reality of subjective experience
0:51and they were also more focused action than on
0:54on statement or belief. because
0:57here's something to think aboot
0:58you can think about this for a very long time
1:02if you're trying to understand what someone believes
1:05even if you're trying to analyze their representations of the world
1:09if you should pay attention to how they act or what they say
1:14and that's a profound question, even from a
1:17from a neurological posi-
1:19perspective or a neuropsychological perspective, because
1:23the memory system, that you use to represent
1:26what you say, that you believe, is not the same
1:29memory system that you use to embody
1:32your knowledge about action
1:36so, it's
1:37akin to the distinction between
1:40telling someone how to ride a bike and knowing how to ride a bike
1:43those are not the same things
1:45the descriptions don't even lay very well on top of one another
1:48because you don't actually know how you ride a bike
1:51you just know how to do it. it's built into your physiology, right
1:54it's a skill, and
1:57that's called procedural memory, and procedural memories
1:59are the same kind of memories that
2:00that basically structures your perceptions
2:05it's not that you can't orient
2:08orient your perceptions consciously, you can
2:11but once you've oriented them consciously
2:13let's say, some goal, it's automatic procedures
2:16that take over because you really don't know how that
2:19you organize your senses so that you pay attention
2:21you just know how to do it
2:24now the existentialists believed that
2:28actions spoke louder than words
2:31and that if you were interested in belief
2:33and even if you were interested in
2:35analyzing belief that it was better for you to look at how someone acted
2:39than what they said. Now
2:42one of the things you might think
2:45with regards to rogers
2:48is that
2:49his psychotherapeutic practice
2:51would be predicated on the idea that that you should
2:54bring how you act into alignment with
2:57what you say you believe
3:00so that there is no discontinuity between your
3:03body, that's one way of thinking about it, and your mind
3:07and so that there are fewer paradoxes in your
3:12in the way that you manifest yourself in the world
3:16so the concentration on action is one of the fundamental
3:19characteristics of existentialism
3:24another one is
3:30the insistence upon
3:32trouble and suffering as an intrinsic
3:35element of human experience
3:36So, you could say that we concentrate
3:42Well we could say: "Ok, well built into that is
3:45Trouble, built into that is Chaos, built into that is Anxiety
3:48and Pain; and Disease.
3:53You can fall prey into those things
3:56Without there being something wrong with you. Now, if you pin down a psychoanalyst
3:59like Jung or Freud
4:02They would of course admit that human misery is endemic to
4:05human experience, but Freud in particular
4:08tended to look for
4:11adult psychopathology
4:13in childhood misadventure
4:17in pathological childhood experience
4:20he at least implicitly claimed that
4:23If you hadn't experience childhood trauma
4:26and you had developed properly what would
4:29is that
4:31you would end up healthy, roughly speaking
4:34certainly, mentally sound
4:37but the existentialists don't really buy that belief in the beginning
4:40they basically make a different claim which is
4:42that Life is so full of intrinsic misery, let's say
4:46but suffering is a better way of thinking about it
4:48suffering that
4:50manifests itself as a consequence of your intrinsic
4:53vulnerability, that psychopathology is built
4:55into the human experience
4:59There's no real way of avoiding it or at least...
5:04There's no real reason to look for extra causes
5:07that might be a better way of thinking about it
5:09and
5:11you'd be surprised how often that observation is useful
5:13for clinical clients for example
5:16because one of the things that is quite characteristic
5:19about people, especially if they are introverted and
5:22don't have many friends; they don't have people to talk to
5:24if they are suffering, maybe they are depressed or anxious
5:27or they have some sets of strange symptoms like agoraphobia
5:30or obsessive compulsive disorder
5:33one of the things that they always presume is that
5:36the fact that they are suffering in that manner
5:39means that there is not only something wrong with them
5:42but something uniquely wrong with them so that
5:45it is their fault and no one else is like them
5:48and one of the things that you do
5:50as a diagnostician; you know, you'll hear a lot of
5:53rattling about how labelling is bad for people
5:55and
5:58certainly myth labelling is bad for people
6:01and eve an accurate label can be a box
6:04you can get out of, but it is very frequently the case
6:06that you diagnose someone, it is a relief to them that you can't believe
6:09because they come into you knowing there is something
6:12isn't going properly
6:15but they think well, they are the only person facing it
6:18that it means that they are idiosyncratically strange
6:21in some incomprehensible way that no one else can
6:22possibly understand
6:25and there's no way that they can ever get better
6:28the things you do is that you point out to them
6:30depression and anxiety doesn't really require any explanation
6:34right, there is plenty of reason; I don't remember who said it
6:38"everyone has sufficient justification for suicide".
6:41I think that was the claim, well the point is that
6:44Is that you look through the experiences of the typical person
6:47Unless they are very very fortunate
6:49and they wont be that way forever that certainly is the case
6:52that they can point to traumatic experiences throughout their lives
6:54death and loss and illnesses
6:58and humiliation and all those sorts of things
7:01is sufficient to account for existence
7:03in the state of quasi-pemanent negative emotion
7:06now often
7:08if you see people who are depressed and anxious by nature
7:11they assume that everyone else is the smiling face of
7:14that you see on facebook
7:17and so that alienates themselves from people and from themselves
7:19even more than
7:21certainly far more than necessary
7:24part of the psycho-education that is going on in therapy
7:27is merely
7:29educated people to understand that
7:32a fair bit of misery is the norm and that
7:35there is plenty of genuine reason for it
7:39and so the existentialists basically start from that stance
7:43It's like a 'Fall of Man' stance
7:45you know, because (it) is deeply rooted in
7:51the Western tradition roughly speaking is the idea that
7:54people are divorced from some early
7:56paradisal fate
7:58and that is the emergence of something like self-consciousness
8:01that produced that demolition
8:03of humanity and left us in a damaged state
8:07and people think they don't believe that
8:09but they believe it all the time
8:14and it's frequently how people experience themselves
8:17as if there is something wrong that needs to be rectified
8:21and it seems unique in some sense to human beings
8:24it doesn't seem all that obvious that animals think that way
8:27but people definitely think that way
8:30and so
8:31all the existentialists
8:33basically take that as
8:36a given.
8:37and then, they offer another question
8:40well, given that is your lot
8:43and then, there is ample reason for misery
8:46How is that you should conduct yourself? Because merely say
8:49giving into that misery or multiplying it,
8:53doesn't seem to be
9:01it doesn't seem to be doing anything other than multiply it
9:04it doesn't seem to be doing anything than increase it
9:06"It is bad to begin with it", you might say
9:09well increasing it is something you have to regard as worse
9:12so how do you conduct yourself in the face of misery?
9:15Ok, how do they present that to begin with?
9:18Ok so, this is from Pascal,
9:21and this is an existential statement
9:24that describes the position of the individual in the universe
9:27you might say, or you could say
9:30it explains a deep
9:32characteristic of individual experience,
9:36or existence. Hence, existentialism.
1:14:17All he does is he spends his hole trying to make