Tag: Sartre

On Identity: Erikson, Freud, and Sartre

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

I recently listened to a podcast of Dr. Louis Cozolino, a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, discussing what he would teach if he were training psychotherapists. The first year would be phenomenology:  the power of Carl Rogers’ perspective to train how to develop an alliance through reflective listening while keeping countertransference out of the session. The second year would be physiology: developmental neuroscience and the evolutionary history of brains and bodies. The third year might be called intersectionality: the interpenetration of the spectrum of options that affect clients – brain, mind, family, culture – and a reaction against therapy as a mere opiate to calm the oppressed and exploited. The final year would be on narratives and stories that we live by and on that half second that it takes our brain to construct our experience of the present and feed it back to us.

Cozolino insists that it’s not enough to just sit and listen to people vent. After developing a non-judgmental alliance with the client, therapists need to be “amygdala whisperers,” to be able to down modulate amygdala activation to stop any inhibitory effect on the parietal system that enables problem solving. In other words, they need to soothe anxieties while arousing enough interest for clients to be able to learn new information. Then it’s time to challenge the client’s old system of thinking, slowly and delicately, a little at a time, to help them expand previous conceptualizations of themselves and the world. There’s a necessary plan and a strategy to the sessions.  Read more »

Wrestling With Existence: Social Reality And Modalities Of Untruth

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Actual rain in the actual world outside. Image credit: Suhyeon Choi on Unsplash

A proposition, like “it’s raining outside”, can either be true or false—it might be the case that it actually rains, or not. It is then seductive to think that somebody uttering such a proposition is doing nothing but making a factual claim, and in doing so, either tells the truth, or not. Furthermore, we might surmise that, in the case that the claim fails to actually hold, the utterer, proclaiming a falsehood, is lying. In doing so, however, we would be getting ahead of ourselves: there is both more to making a simple utterance than the mere proclamation of a fact, and to its veracity than lying or truth-telling. Let’s tackle these in turn.

First, when I tell you “it’s raining outside”, I not only make a claim about the world (that it is, in fact, raining outside), but also a claim about my own assertion: that it is, in fact, truthful; and thus, by extension, about myself: that I am a truth-teller. Consequently, you believing me does not just mean you believe something about the world, but also, that you believe something about my own relationship to truth, at least in this particular instance.

All of this means that simple facts about the world are never just simple facts about the world; inasmuch as they come to us indirectly, that is, not as immediately present in our own experience, they are elements of a complex web of beliefs and attitudes. Believing me to be an inveterate liar, you might well rather be inclined to believe that it’s all sunshine outside when you hear me blathering on about the drizzle. If you happen to know I’ve spent the last hour tinkering away in the cellar, you might not attach any particular value to my claim, believing me to be ignorant on the matter. Your judgment regarding the meta-claim of my assertion’s truthfulness affects your belief in its content: the world-picture you create based upon it varies with your assessment of my stance towards truth. Read more »

Frankl’s Logotherapy

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

The second half of Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was added in 1962 to provide greater detail of Logotherapy, in which patients must hear difficult things in contrast to psychoanalysts provoking telling difficult things. It’s less introspective and more focused on our place in the world:

“Logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced . . . the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. . . . Striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term ‘striving for superiority,’ is focused” (98). 

Aside: A bit of history of philosophy here: Schopenhauer wrote about the will-to-live in World as Will and Representation in 1818: our very being is our will, our blind urges towards life, and it’s also the dynamic essence of the world. He was influenced by the Buddhist Four Noble Truths in this respect, although he focused less on the practice of decreasing striving in order to reduce the experience of suffering. He preferred to soothe his misery with art. Read more »

Existential Choice

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

 At the heart of French existentialism – and especially the version associated with its most famous representative, Jean Paul Sartre – was the notion of radical freedom. On this view, when we choose, we choose our values and thus what kind of person we are going to be. Nothing can prescribe to us what we ought to value, and the responsibility of freedom is to accept this fact of the human condition without falling into the ‘bad faith’ which would deny it. The moment of existentialism may have passed, but the view that we are radical choosers of our values persists in many quarters, and so I want to consider how well this idea holds up, and what an alternative to it might look like.

Sartre’s account in Existentialism and Humanism,[1] of the young man who comes to him for advice is well known, but may bear a brief recounting here. Sartre recounts the (he says true) story of a man, one of his students, who, when France falls in 1940 has a dilemma. Should he leave the country to join the Free French forces or stay with his widowed mother? Either course can be represented as the right thing to do. The commandments of the Christian religion are no help in making the decision – love thy neighbour leaves it quite undecided who is the neighbour here: one’s family or one’s fellow patriots. And if the Kantian approach to ethics is to be recommended then it remains unclear how ‘act according to that maxim which you could will as a universal law’ would apply. The maxim ‘protect your mother’ or ‘loyally defend your country’ could both be contenders.

And so the young man comes to his professor for advice. But as Sartre points out, we tend to go to the person whose advice we are already disposed to take. In any case, the responsibility to take advice, to listen to another and follow their advice, is still one’s own. One cannot escape responsibility that goes with choosing to act. Read more »