Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Existential Themes
in the HEP Tradition
List of Contents
From J. McNamara, lecture notes in mid 1990’s HEP teaching based on the
following:
Existential Psychology, 2nd ed., Ed. Rollo May, (1960/1969, New York, Random
House)
Humanistic, Phenomenological, and Existential Approaches, Hugh B. Urban;
Phenomenological-Existential Psychotherapy, Constance T. Fischer;
both in The Clinical Psychology Handbook, 2nd ed., Ed., M. Hersen, A.E. Kazdan,
A.S. Bellack (1991, Pergamon)
Ordinary Ecstasy: Humanistic Psychology in Action, 2nd ed., John Rowan,
(1976/1988, London, Routledge)
Elements of Human Potential, Neville Drury
Experiential Psychotherapy: Basic Practices, Alvin Mahrer PhD, (1989, Ottawa,
U. Ottawa Press)
Holonomy: A Human Systems Theory, Jeffrey Stamps (1980, Seaside, The
Systems Enquiry Series, Intersystem Publications)
Holistic Experiential Psychotherapy: Toward a Unified Psychotherapy Model,
K. Gordon (1993, A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of Independent Studies BA
Program, U. of Waterloo)
1
Being
May (pg. 19) defines Being as “the individual’s unique pattern of
potentialities”. Urban (pg. 209) defines Being as “what is actual or already
existent” (ie. intrinsic, given, inner nature; unique essential core). Plato,
Aristotle and Parmenides spoke of Being as a kind of changeless
ideational essence. Aquinas spoke of Being and “being this” as distinct.
Similarly Heidegger speaks of the irreducible distinction between Being
and beings.
Heidegger suggests that as Dasein, simply by being there (or being here),
we are hurled (werfen) and fallen (Verlallen), dialectically, into the freedom
of Nothingness.
Becoming
Also known as emergence. Urban (pg. 209) defines becoming as “the
process of things coming into being” that were not available earlier ie.
actualization of potentialities (for Being). Rogers speaks of an “actualizing
tendency” as a “master motive organizer” of person. Maslow speaks of
“self actualization” Thus the existential form of a person’s Being is an
unfolding succession of potentialities transforming into actualities. This is
health and the imposition of “blind consistency” or regularity is ill health.
Becoming as the actualization of potentials has an intrinsic rhythm and
shape of its own - and is also subject to conscious exercise of choice and
will by various practices and disciplines, coupled with motivation to change
and to let go of defensive structures, thus going with the flow of one’s life.
Throughout all this becoming, it is human to retain a sense of unique
individuality and, in fact, for this to evolve into an increasing actualization
of complexity, flexibility, choice, spontaneity, discipline, power, gnosis, life
attunement.
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Potentialities
Urban (pgs. 207 & 209) suggests that the process of manifesting Being
through becoming/emergence is one of realizing inner potentials by
actualization. The inherent/innate tendency to this is called by Maslow “self
actualization” and by Jung “individuation”. When, what and how one
actualizes one’s potential involves some exercise of personal choice. An
act of conscious self aware choice that is authentically self consistent must
fully and expeditiously activate or permit the expression of Being as
realized potential. To realize one’s full potential with
appropriate timing and context is the goal of the humanistic-existential -
phenomenological tradition and what is meant in the Jungian tradition by
individuation. It involves attunement to the small inner voice and full range
of one’s immediate experience in the context of social, ecological and
transpersonal relationships such that one is historically consistent (a
“temporal whole”) and yet open to evolution and change. By historical and
cultural conditioning we can be blocked from realizing our full potential.
Dealing with these blocks, resistance, defenses is the stuff of a lot of
psychodynamic psychotherapy. Humanistic-existential-phenomenological
psychology tends to focus more on creativity, choice, responsibility, goal,
purpose, commitment as agents of self actualization of potential, rather
than trauma and defenses.
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The idea of potentials is the same as “inner nature”. Where does this come
from? There are various levels of nature, from persona (or ego mask,
neurotic) nature, through healthy, alive ego (ego self), to existential self (as
deep inner core of self awareness and responsibility), to transpersonal self
(as embodied collective and archetypal or spiritual elements). One can be
said to have an individual nature, a familial and cultural nature, a human
nature, an animal and biological nature, and an energetic/material nature.
Various existential-phenomenological thinkers (including Giorgi and
Stamps in Holonomy) postulate an MOH model of human nature. M stands
for mechanistic or material (atomic, energetic, molecular); 0 stands for
organismic (biological, entity based such that there is an organismic self
function); and H stands for human (with self consciousness, intentionality
sense of spirit and death etc.). What of all this is one’s inner nature? It
depends where one’s level of self awareness or consciousness is at. All
else is inner. Paradoxically as one evolves in awareness toward full self
realization of potential one tends to progress also down in and back
through organismic, biological, elemental, material atomic nature to a
sense of one’s self as pure unconditioned energetic self awareness with a
capacity for choice and initiation of action. Guenther says our inner nature
is a “deep dynamic invariance” and we are its “playful self experimentation”
as an “unfolding path of self realization”. The Sufi, Neoplatonic and
esoteric Christian traditions see our deepest inner nature as an experience
of holism, unity oneness, ontology, essence through the diverse
phenomenal manifestation of the one as the many.
May says that within limits of given world there is no truth for a person
apart from conscious participation and relationship. (This, however, denies
the mystical transpersonal idea of knowing beyond personness and
humanness ie. transcendent experience). The problem with a model
involving forces, drives, conditioning is that it tends to abstractions, and
minimizes individuality and choice. HEP sees both, ie. paradoxical
interplay ie. experientially, existence precedes essence while essence
grounds experience in the transpersonal (providing context to content/text
and authorial meaning to chaotic flow of character’s life). In this
transpersonal model essence must be apprehended, seen, known by an
individual but the method is aperceptive, eg. Tilopa (non-doing) and Wu
Wei (non-intention) forms of experience. Existence involves exercise of
individual choice in permitting and calling specific experiences out of
potentialities. Essence involves surrender of choice into what is given,
received. In doing this the unique individual human dies as ego self and is
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Phenomenology
May (pg. 20) says that phenomenology is the endeavor to take the
phenomena as given, by clearing presuppositions and thus to experience
things as they present themselves, by openness and readiness to hear.
Thus experience rather than observe. Thus words, body, gestures,
feelings, subtle communications, psychic phenomena. Various terms are
used to define/describe phenomenological attitude eg. Stack Sullivan
“participant observer”; eg. Binswanger “presence”; eg. McLeod “attitude of
disciplined naiveté” eg. Wellech “ability to experience critically”; eg. May
“know your own constructs and be flexible so that you may listen in terms
of patient’s constructs and language”.
Thus individuals, and therefore human behavior, must be studied from the
vantage point of the behaving individual (producing eg. phenomenological
research. See “Methodology in the Human Sciences”, pg. 203, D.
Polkinghorne). Thus a method of empathic understanding and self
disclosure re research perspective are important as is ideographic method
(ie. intensive studies of individual cases).
See also Husserl and Phenomenological Method (pg. 537 Fischer) and
Methodology in the Human Sciences (pg. 203, D. Polkinghorne)
Freedom
According to May (pg. 19), every human exercises freedom in
actualizing potentialities and thus takes responsibility for self. This self
expressive freedom is deeper than drives, forces and conditioning. It is the
“pattern of potentialities” of the individual, of whom the mechanisms and
drives are but one expression. In this sense, it has a transpersonal
dimension, as it is in some way beyond personal conditioning. It could be
said to be a basis of human nature eg. Nietzche’s description of humans
who define themselves by choosing certain values (eg. power, love) over
basic drives, such as pleasure, or even survival. Urban (pg. 213) suggests
that freedom is the premier human feature for existentialists. Freedom is
the conscious exercise of volition and choice in permitting and facilitating
the inherent enfoldment of inborn potentialities through the individual’s
lived life. Freedom is especially the power to exercise regulatory control
without outside interference. In this sense, all life is conditional and therapy
is then directed toward minimizing conditioning (“false self’ of Laing and
Janov) and maximizing authentic (“real”) self expression, through taking
responsibility for one’s life, by making choices in the “centre of our being”
(Tillich 1952). This freedom especially focuses on envisioning and
acknowledging the future as well as taking a stand against conditioning -
thus the anti authoritarian self referencing theme in humanistic psychology
(especially primal therapy) and the socio/political focus of eg. feminism,
‘60’s and ‘70’s counterculture, human rights groups, environmentalists etc.
‘~
Nothingness
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Sartre (1905-1980) says that humans and the world are merely given. The
radical freedom of this formlessness calls forth the creative power of
humanness which invents a nature for itself and gives meaning to
individual existence. Thus “existence precedes essence” and humanity is a
“noughting nought” such that humans negate the nothingness of the world.
In this sense humans are now seen to be what was seen to be divine, that
which creates the world. This creation by perception is contained in the
Biblical phrases “in the beginning was the word” and “the word was made
flesh”. It is elaborated in existential-phenomenological tradition especially
by Merleau-Ponty, but also gestaltists, in a sense. It is part of
postmodernism in its literary form. It is also part of the modern subatomic
physics paradigm. Neurophysiological research supports this (eg. we
neurophysiologically and psychologically “decide” what to see by
comparing sense data to what we have seen and what we expect to see)
as does the holographic paradigm. Sartre sees no inherent stable state of
being. Rather, for humans, life is “a project” of self creation out of
nothingness. Humans are not “en-soi” (existing in itself, as things are).
Humans are a “pour-soi” (for itself) in which the project of life involves
restless movement to something one is not, thus defining and creating
one’s nature. This is an endless project requiring constant exercise of
choice and thus angst. Humans long to be a pour-soi-en-soi. This is a
human ideal of the monotheistic God an awareness which is not a project
and is not threatened from without. Satre places Nothingness alongside
Being as a basic category in human existence.
Rowan (pg. 13) relates authenticity to Laing’s idea of the “real self”, with its
focus on clearing illusion and conditioning (historical and social) so that
true, full, deep, self awareness and responsibility is possible. In this real
self there is the irreducible angst of freedom to be and choose what one is
in any given moment, including the choice to act and express in relation to
the world, and to actualize potential. This existential freedom is a basic
defining part of humanness. Wood (1971) says authenticity consists of “self
respect (awareness of subjectivity and freedom together with acceptance
of responsibility) and self enactment (one acts consistently with one’s
beliefs and owns one’s actions”. Thus we are “originators and subjects as
well as the source of meaning”. Alienation from the real self, from
existential angst and from the acceptance of responsibility for one’s world
is an existential definition of neurosis, and is the antithesis of authenticity.
In the process of self expression and the ensuing self evolution, one
becomes more authentic, culminating in Maslow’s peak experiences and
fully realized sell actualization, such that an individual becomes what
Rogers calls “a fully functioning person” characterized by spontaneity and
actualized potential. This is not like a journey with an end however. The
accomplishment is not reaching the end of evolution but accepting the
emergent nature of humanness, such that the individual is one with the
process. It can also be said that the further one moves along this
evolutionary spiral into full humanness, the more one realizes a sense of
changelessness and an unfolding of ‘what is’ such that the goal of
evolution is to accept one’s fate and become what one already is. In order
to accomplish this, however, one must go through the ego annihilation
experience of death and resurrection, in which it is impossible to endure
and achieve. Only by a ‘miracle’ does the ‘individual’ survive. The miracle
is accomplished by authentic full participation in the suffering of core
transformation, and creating something new out of nothing - thus to
surrender into, and return from, Sunyata as home dei.
Authenticity requires the taking of full responsibility for the choice one
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exercises in one’s life. May (pg. 13) agrees with Satire “we are our choices
within the limits of our given world” and in relation to our essence (inner
nature) as well as drives and forces. However existentialism insists that
ultimately “the mechanism has meaning (only) in terms of the person”.
Thus it is by our choices that we activate our potential, define perceived
reality and create or attribute meaning.
Rowan (pg. 13) quotes May (1967) and Mahrer (1978) saying there is no
inevitable process of growth, there is only choice.
Rowan (pg. 18) says the experience of contacting the “real” self involves a
sense of responsibility for self expression and self existence.
Rowan (pg. 22) says in a paradoxical manner, letting go into the surrender
of total presence [as in Wu Wei (non doing) and Six Precepts of Tilopa
(non intention)] and listening without preconceptions, invites the self arising
nature of unfolding reality as it emerges from sunyata (the fertile void). If
one can accept responsibility for this, one embraces one’s fate ie. this
unfolding story is my story, my life, my Iebenswelt, my world - the life I find
myself in. Again, paradoxically, full surrender to the received nature of
one’s life as of a character in a story leads to the transformational
experience of identification with the author of the story ie. through the
received nature of character to the originating, patterning nature of author.
Drury (pg. 44) speaks of the idea of taking responsibility for one’s actions
as a key gestalt precept. It has been popularized in the gestalt prayer “I do
my thing and you do yours, if by chance we find each other it is beautiful”.
The essential point in gestalt is to be aware of what and how one
experience one’s existence in the moment, and taking responsibility for
this. One’s self awareness and honesty are cornerstones of responsibility.
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Infants are born into a duality - into a world of “booming confusion” and yet
required by humanness and ego development to create constancy,
certitude, order and stability. This is predicated on an inherent drive, plus
affective and instrumental relationships, initially with mother, but continuing
throughout “a lifetime of personality development” (E. Erikson). The
inherent drive has been called the tendency to “self actualization” (Maslow)
or “individuation” (Jung), and results in a fully conscious entity, capable of
functioning ecstatically in the paradox of this duality as it becomes
dialectical ie. recognition of the complementarity in this dualistic struggle is
achieved. A characteristics of the self actualized person, whose
accomplishment of full human consciousness, is marked by mystical or
peak experience, with its key focus of experience of divinity.
Adler (1927), Rogers (1959), Sullivan (1953) and others identify conscious
experience as the capacity for attention and awareness; perception and its
categorization into described identified experiences; thought (including
abstract conceptualizing, memory and anticipation or foresight);
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Existential writers such as May, Engel, Ellenberger (1958) and Von Uexkull
speak of modes of being in the world as patterns of interaction developed
by people to organize the complexity of their experience. These modes are
umwelt (“world around” = biological); mitwelt (“with world” = relational); and
eigenwelt (“own world” = self awareness and self relatedness). It is
eigenwelt that uniquely characterizes humans, though in the MOH model,
all modes are part of human experience.
This model of individuals as temporal wholes with unity of self and life over
time, involves the notion of Being and becoming, such that the individual’s
self actualizing tendency provides for the emergence of innate potentials of
inner nature, in a way that manifests both a continual unfolding self
transcendence, while yet retaining an unchanging unique sense of self.
Even through the midlife mystical death and resurrection experience, the
change can be said to be one of state not place, form of existence not
essence. Similarly through puberty. The ego self that dies in the mystical
death and resurrection experience is in fact, in retrospect, a false, illusory,
unreal, conditioned self that peels away like a chrysalis revealing the true
self. Similarly, according to Campbell quoting Schopenhauer, upon
reviewing one’s life through all the changes, complexity and chaos that has
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This human capacity for self awareness led James (early 20th century) to
propose the self as “a stream of thought derived from conscious
experience, comprised of those experiences related to one’s self as
perceptually differentiated from externals, thus giving rise to personal
identity”. Rogers (1951, 1959) “self concept” refers to the awareness of “an
organized configuration of perceptions (experiences) of one’s being and
functioning”. This is a frame of reference for all other observations. This
existential perspective says that in this sense the self is not only a product
but also a producer of experience, because is serves as the framework for
seeking opportunities and future experience ie. the self as definer of
personal reality. There are many variations on this theme [idealized
(Rogers 1951); stable (Snygy & Combs 1949); mutable (Zurchen 1972);
social (Arkoff 1968); real and unreal (or alienated) (Laing ‘60’s and Janov
‘70’s)].
Rowan (pgs. 13-15 and 18) says the key element of self for humanistic-
existential-phenomenological psychology is self awareness and capacity to
differentiate self from other. This implies consciousness and intact ego
functioning. The experience of authentic or real self is a goal of this
tradition. The real self is not conditioned by neurotic historical distortion,
psychodynamic defense, or social mores imposing artificial, unnatural
codes of conduct.
Drury (pg. 33) quotes Maslow’s idea of self actualization as the culminating
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Note:
Heidegger’s and Von Uexkull’s welts - umwelt, mitwelt, eigenwelt;
life-world and being-in-the-world.
Relation of being and becoming to self.
Jung’s self/ego axis as the engine of individuation of self.
Brookes phenomenological Jungian ideas of self.
Archetypal psychologies’ deconstruction of self as a monotheistic
limitation to the essentially polytheistic nature of human
consciousness.
Urban (pg. 206, 207, 208), Fischer (pg. 539) and Drury (pg. 36) speak of
humanness, human nature and of being human. The key point made is
regarding the distinctiveness of humans. Distinguising characteristics are
variously listed, with self awareness and freedom to choose what one will
become as the leading edge.
Human consciousness contains three levels in the MOH model - with (H)
human (species specific) (0) organismic (biological) and (M) mechanistic
(energetic) characteristics created by the holonomic, morphic, evolutionary
tendency in life, such that all levels of evolutionary order contain within
them characteristics of preceding levels. Within this generic, basic model,
however, a key defining characteristic of humanness is the unique,
invariably personal nature of human consciousness.
All this is contained within a sense of (unique) self - the basic frame of
reference for experiencing life and creating meaning, thus being not only a
product but a producer of experience, This self has both an ongoing
stability and a heterostatic tendency to change and evolve toward full self
actualization. In this sense, humans are said to be self regulatory by the
capacity to exercise choice and take action in relation to inborn
potentialities and environmental opportunities. Thus humans are said to be
especially proactive and self initiatory, rather than reactive and conditioned.
Thus humans are said to possess directiveness and goal orientation, with
purpose and intention based on a sense of future possibilities
PHENOMENOLOGY
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HEIDEGGER OVERVIEW
Focus: Human Existence (Dasein) (Being There)
DYNAMICS
The development of ontology and phenomenology as played out in the
human evolutionary process is the subject of much of holistic experiential
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