3 Quotes Tagged: existential-psychology

We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,

“We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether.”

Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide.

Anxiety (loneliness or “abandonment anxiety” being its most painful form) overcomes the person to the extent that he loses orientation in the objective world. To lose the world is to lose one's self, and vice versa; self and world are correlates. The function of anxiety is to destroy the self-world relationship, i.e., to disorient the victim in space and time and, so long as this disorientation lasts, the person remains in the state of anxiety. Anxiety overwhelms the person precisely because of the preservation of this disorientation. Now if the person can reorient himself — as happens, one hopes, in psychotherapy — and again relate himself to the world directly, experientially, with his senses alive, he overcomes the anxiety. My slightly anthropomorphic terminology comes out of my work as a therapist and is not out of place here. Though the patient and I are entirely aware of the symbolic nature of this (anxiety doesn’t do anything, just as libido or sex drives don’t), it is often helpful for the patient to see himself as struggling against an “adversary.” For then, instead of waiting forever for the therapy to analyze away the anxiety, he can help in his own treatment by taking practical steps when he experiences anxiety such as stopping and asking just what it was that occurred in reality or in his fantasies that preceded the disorientation which cued off the anxiety. He is not only opening the doors of his closet where the ghosts hide, but he often can also then take steps to reorient himself in his practical life by making new human relationships and finding new work which interests him.

The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.”

This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts — “I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” — eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by — also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt.

Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which o