PSYC 308 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Existence Precedes Essence, Ludwig Binswanger, Existential Therapy
20 Dec 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Emphasized human strengths/positive goals, conscious experience, free will, fulfilment of human potential, belief in wholeness of human nature. Roots in phenomenology (unbiased descriptions of immediate experience as it occurs) and existentialism (notion of free, self-determining individual): had more influence outside the field than within. Kierkegaard: subjectivity of choice and leap of faith (nothing is objectively right/wrong) Nietzsche: god is dead! , perspectivism and nihilism. Camus: sisyphus and absurdity of human condition. Sartre: existence precedes essence and bad faith (being born precedes what determines you: no predetermined essence: humans are radically free /have authentic choices, clinical roots in ludwig binswanger (1881-1966) Physician who liked heidegger"s brutally dense work. Believed therapy should attend to the whole person. I. e. , not the unconscious, but still he and freud lifelong pals. These psychologists believed existentialism added important dimensions to the field. But disapproved of anti-scientific attitude expressed by many european existentialists. American humanistic psychologists also believed that the europeans were too bleak/pessimistic.
