What role does “I like” play in existential fulfillment?
Saying or knowing “I like” something can move us toward that which may be existentially fulfilling.
Describe the four basic movements of the coping reactions for FM2.
Basic Movement: Regression
Paradoxical Movement (overactivity): Overprotection, Devaluation
Specific Aggression: rage, shakes and awakens
Freezing Reflex: Feigning Death reflex, apathy, numbness
What is the existential analytical way of dealing with Rage?
Enlarging the gap of freedom around rage by:
Three-Fold Process to Illuminate Rage
- Outer pole: who is the actual intended recipient:
What exactly is it that enrages me so? At whom is my rage directed? → Finding the intended
(‘true’) recipient and preventing an impulsive abreaction. - Inner pole: understanding my rage:
Why does this situation enrage me? What is valuable in my life that is lost? What does this
situation mean for my life? Is it so important? What is it that is painful for me? What is the
essence of my suffering here? Is this situation really as taxing for my life as I how am
experiencing it? - Seeing the means: constructive expression: Implementing my rage and standing with it, and
thereby standing with my relationship to life. Constructively expressing rage by understanding
it and connecting with the intended recipient, asking: “Where can I deploy my mobilised power
best?” “What is the value that I attempt to achieve?”
Result: I will take ownership of the (life) suffering contained in my rage. It will not be pushed
to the outside, kept at distance, but it is felt. This removes the diffuse, difficult to grasp
aspects which often accompany suffering, and which make rage float.
Describe the EA concept of “turning towards”.
Turning towards is a benevolent presence with feeling. The attitude is: “I am ready to be
reached and moved by you.”
Turning towards = emotional focusing of attention, bringing motion into my life (and possibly into the life of the other).
Definition of turning towards as attitude:
Turning towards is the active readiness to be impacted.
Turning towards → active engagement of closeness, with the readiness to let me be moved.
What is the main existential activity of grieving?
Existential activity of grieving = dealing with myself; a turning towards myself in my sorrow, in my loss; turning towards and staying close to myself and with myself.
What is the significance of tears?
Being touched and closeness to oneself + turning towards brings up grief
At first, there is only powerlessness. But one thing is possible in this powerlessness: I can remain
with myself, come close to myself (= closeness, letting myself be touched), and this will be
rewarded:
→ I am touched by life → tears show up and break through the hard walls of my coping
reactions
What is the difference between Feeling and Sensing?
Both are feelings in the wider sense.
Feeling in the stricter sense relates to inner perception while sensing relates to outer perception.
Feeling has a physical basis, is close to the body; is sensations; revolves around experience; is subjective; is a situational condition; is a reference to my life (2nd FM); → indicator function to the significance for my
Life (→ detects life relevance); and finds counter-transference.
Sensing has a basis in temporal or geographical distance; is intuitions; questions how it is; is objective (meaning object-related); is a phenomenology of the situation; is a reference to the inherent value of the thing or self-worth as a property of the person (3rd FM); → orientation function (→ detects situation relevance); and finds transference.
What is the Fundamental Relationship?
The ultimate and deepest form of being touched by life itself, which encounters us in the everydayness. Everything that touches us has to do with this ultimate and deepest being-touched.
It concerns itself with the relationship with life itself, with our dealing with the fact of being alive.
Fundamental Relationship = the feeling of life that emerges from turning towards life itself
→ lived experience: “I like living”
What is the Fundamental Value in EA? Give at least one definition.
Fundamental Value = The value of (one’s own) life
→ lived experience: “It is good that I’m alive”
- Short Definition: the experienced intrinsic value of life itself, which can be felt subjectively through the establishment of a relationship to life (“FR”).
• Intrinsic value: the value that emerges in life itself, the value belonging to life.
• Relationship: essential for grasping FV → the relationship that I take to this value.
Like all values, FV can only be accessed through the channel of “relationship.” - Practical Definition: a positive FV is the sense, feeling, or hunch that in the final analysis it is good to be.
• This felt value of life is the actual reason why one can give consent to one’s own life. - Operational Definition: (Complete this operation and what you receive experientially is the definition):
• When I ask the following question “How is it for me to live?” and operate with the theme → whatever the result is, this is our definition.
• This definition does not give a content but only an operation, which reveals how we can arrive at the content. - Scientific Definition: The deepest, emotionally-graspable quality of one’s own life.
• This quality is understood through one’s own (biographical) experiences of life, and through the observed and felt biographies of other people.
• FR thereby serves as the connecting bridge between the person and experiences.
• FV influences one’s personal experience of life (feeling of life), values, and the willingness and ability for relationships.
What is a value in EA? And what are its subjective and objective components?
Value = objective correlate to the subjectively experienced feeling = the intentional object of a feeling
Value Perception Contains Three Elements:
1. Objective pole: Something that is there and has a quality, a constitution, that belongs to itself and is not made by me.
2. Interference: How something affects the subject, and what it is able to mobilize in it (=what emotion it generates).
o The type of relationship is also an essential element of value creation. Harmony or disharmony!
3. Subjective pole: The distinctive manner of the subject with its perceptive capacity. It requires the subject in order to enliven the quality matrix in the first place.
o Inner scale is the basic relationship, which measures what value an object has for me as a subject
What is the difference between a utilitarian value and an existential value?
Intrinsic value derives value from the way of
being (one’s essence). Meaning.
Utility value derives value from usefulness. Purpose.
