and about carl rogers

and, uh, I mentioned that

the phenomenologists

were interested in experiences in some sense

as the ultimate as the ultimate reality, and that's a very complicated

concept to grasp

the existentialists

also adopted that viewpoint. they were concerned with the

the quality of subjective experience,

not that they were ignoring

the reality of the objective experience

but they were concerned with the reality of subjective experience

and they were also more focused action than on

on statement or belief. because

here's something to think aboot

you can think about this for a very long time

if you're trying to understand what someone believes

even if you're trying to analyze their representations of the world

if you should pay attention to how they act or what they say

and that's a profound question, even from a

from a neurological posi-

perspective or a neuropsychological perspective, because

the memory system, that you use to represent

what you say, that you believe, is not the same

memory system that you use to embody

your knowledge about action

so, it's

akin to the distinction between

telling someone how to ride a bike and knowing how to ride a bike

those are not the same things

the descriptions don't even lay very well on top of one another

because you don't actually know how you ride a bike

you just know how to do it. it's built into your physiology, right

it's a skill, and

that's called procedural memory, and procedural memories

are the same kind of memories that

that basically structures your perceptions

it's not that you can't orient

orient your perceptions consciously, you can

but once you've oriented them consciously

let's say, some goal, it's automatic procedures

that take over because you really don't know how that

you organize your senses so that you pay attention

you just know how to do it

now the existentialists believed that

actions spoke louder than words

and that if you were interested in belief

and even if you were interested in

analyzing belief that it was better for you to look at how someone acted

than what they said. Now

one of the things you might think

with regards to rogers

is that

his psychotherapeutic practice

would be predicated on the idea that that you should

bring how you act into alignment with

what you say you believe

so that there is no discontinuity between your

body, that's one way of thinking about it, and your mind

and so that there are fewer paradoxes in your

in the way that you manifest yourself in the world

so the concentration on action is one of the fundamental

characteristics of existentialism

another one is

the insistence upon

trouble and suffering as an intrinsic

element of human experience

So, you could say that we concentrate

Well we could say: "Ok, well built into that is

Trouble, built into that is Chaos, built into that is Anxiety

and Pain; and Disease.

You can fall prey into those things

Without there being something wrong with you. Now, if you pin down a psychoanalyst

like Jung or Freud

They would of course admit that human misery is endemic to

human experience, but Freud in particular

tended to look for

adult psychopathology

in childhood misadventure

in pathological childhood experience

he at least implicitly claimed that

If you hadn't experience childhood trauma

and you had developed properly what would

is that

you would end up healthy, roughly speaking

certainly, mentally sound

but the existentialists don't really buy that belief in the beginning

they basically make a different claim which is

that Life is so full of intrinsic misery, let's say

but suffering is a better way of thinking about it

suffering that

manifests itself as a consequence of your intrinsic

vulnerability, that psychopathology is built

into the human experience

There's no real way of avoiding it or at least...

There's no real reason to look for extra causes

that might be a better way of thinking about it

and

you'd be surprised how often that observation is useful

for clinical clients for example

because one of the things that is quite characteristic

about people, especially if they are introverted and

don't have many friends; they don't have people to talk to

if they are suffering, maybe they are depressed or anxious

or they have some sets of strange symptoms like agoraphobia

or obsessive compulsive disorder

one of the things that they always presume is that

the fact that they are suffering in that manner

means that there is not only something wrong with them

but something uniquely wrong with them so that

it is their fault and no one else is like them

and one of the things that you do

as a diagnostician; you know, you'll hear a lot of

rattling about how labelling is bad for people

and

certainly myth labelling is bad for people

and eve an accurate label can be a box

you can get out of, but it is very frequently the case

that you diagnose someone, it is a relief to them that you can't believe

because they come into you knowing there is something

isn't going properly

but they think well, they are the only person facing it

that it means that they are idiosyncratically strange

in some incomprehensible way that no one else can

possibly understand

and there's no way that they can ever get better

the things you do is that you point out to them

depression and anxiety doesn't really require any explanation

right, there is plenty of reason; I don't remember who said it

"everyone has sufficient justification for suicide".

I think that was the claim, well the point is that

Is that you look through the experiences of the typical person

Unless they are very very fortunate

and they wont be that way forever that certainly is the case

that they can point to traumatic experiences throughout their lives

death and loss and illnesses

and humiliation and all those sorts of things

is sufficient to account for existence

in the state of quasi-pemanent negative emotion

now often

if you see people who are depressed and anxious by nature

they assume that everyone else is the smiling face of

that you see on facebook

and so that alienates themselves from people and from themselves

even more than

certainly far more than necessary

part of the psycho-education that is going on in therapy

is merely

educated people to understand that

a fair bit of misery is the norm and that

there is plenty of genuine reason for it

and so the existentialists basically start from that stance

It's like a 'Fall of Man' stance

you know, because (it) is deeply rooted in

the Western tradition roughly speaking is the idea that

people are divorced from some early

paradisal fate

and that is the emergence of something like self-consciousness

that produced that demolition

of humanity and left us in a damaged state

and people think they don't believe that

but they believe it all the time

and it's frequently how people experience themselves

as if there is something wrong that needs to be rectified

and it seems unique in some sense to human beings

it doesn't seem all that obvious that animals think that way

but people definitely think that way

and so

all the existentialists

basically take that as

a given.

and then, they offer another question

well, given that is your lot

and then, there is ample reason for misery

How is that you should conduct yourself? Because merely say

giving into that misery or multiplying it,

doesn't seem to be

it doesn't seem to be doing anything other than multiply it

it doesn't seem to be doing anything than increase it

"It is bad to begin with it", you might say

well increasing it is something you have to regard as worse

so how do you conduct yourself in the face of misery?

Ok, how do they present that to begin with?

Ok so, this is from Pascal,

and this is an existential statement

that describes the position of the individual in the universe

you might say, or you could say

it explains a deep

characteristic of individual experience,

or existence. Hence, existentialism.

All he does is he spends his hole trying to make