From emptiness to fullness of life
Dear Colleagues, I am pleased to welcome you at the first World Congress for Existential Therapy! Today I would love to share a few observations made from my practical work with the clients. There have been made lots of observations, enough for comprehensive treatise, but as we are limited in time, I am going to present them in thesis report.
In my counseling practice, I am constantly confronting the clients’ complaints on meaninglessness, hopelessness of their existence, boredom, chronic fatigue, depression — loss of «taste of life.» Some of them “run away» from these experiences to addictions, some to diseases and some see the suicide as the only way-out.
This is not a new problem. J.-P. Sartre wrote a lot about it, he proposed us his theory of emptiness. According to Sartre, the emptiness is an existential entity of our being. He is convinced that: “Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself…” That is, man is nothing, a clean sheet which he «writes» his life on. The main feelings of emptiness are anxiety, abandonment and despair. The same was described by Victor Frankl. Let’s remember his existential vacuum which emerges as a result of a man’s denial of important life purposes, unique meanings and personal values. This implies that existential vacuum is only attributed to a personality nature that is more or less mature, it emerges in those who already have their own life purposes, personal values and unique meanings.
However, as practice shows, the life of a modern man could become desolate even before the time when these qualities of real personality are formed and developed. In such depressing cases, the conditions in which these very personal purposes, meanings and values emerge, form and develop, simply do not exist. In other words, such people not only lack their own purposes, values and meanings. Their lives just do not have the basic conditions in which these meanings could appear and strengthen. A healthy childhood is a clear proof of unfeasibility of Sartre’s theory of emptiness.
Pay attention to these children. They are truly overfilled with physical energy, joy, cognitive activity, creative attitude to their lives. These children do not even suspect that their lives are empty, boring and meaningless. They do not want to waste their precious time on sleeping, eating or some other diverting activities, because there is so much interesting, new, unexplored, unknown around! It is quite clear that a child is completely free of emptiness, and existential vacuum, and bankruptcy – his life is fulfilled and absolutely authentic, free of anxiety, desolation, despair, apathy and boredom.
Therefore, based on my counselling experience and stories of my clients, I offer for your consideration a new type of existence – existential bankruptcy.
Unlike Sartre’s emptiness, bankruptcy is not an existential entity. This is a dynamic process with it’s psychological or existential preconditions, with it’s own beginning and «favourable» conditions for formation, anchorage and development. And, unlike the existential vacuum, life can be existentially bankrupt at any age. Moreover, in modern circumstances the human life becomes empty as a result of not being fulfilled with interests, purposes, values, and so on since the early childhood. As an example, let us discuss only three preconditions to the depletion of the life of the modern man.
Firstly, in our modern consumer society, a global trade-off of values and other life bearings and landmarks has taken place. The requests of my clients prove the seriousness of this problem. The evolving situation reminds me of the English fairy tale «The Three Little Pigs.» When Nif-Nif built himself a house of straw and decided that he will make it perfectly through the winter in it. That now he may not be afraid of frosts, or bitter-cold winter winds, or hungry wolves. And so do we, relying on the advocated today consumer values, endeavour to live a full life. But when we face first more or less serious challenge such as failure, crisis and loss – we are stunned to discover that these such amazing values are completely useless for dealing with real life conflicts and overcoming the emerged difficulties. And then we all run at a breakneck pace to Nuf-Nuf, the elder brother-psychotherapist, who built a house of stone, and ask him for protection from the evil wolf, who efortlessly destroyed our ephemeral straw shelter.
Secondly, we come to live in the era of simulacra. We are breaking away from reality further and further, tangling not only in our «necro» footholds and benchmarks, but also in all other spheres of modern life. What is the truth and what is the lie? What is the verity and what’s the illusion? What is «good» and what is «bad?» How to comprehend what is «right» and what is «wrong?» What can you lean upon when facing the challenges of life?…
And finally, thirdly, in our fast-moving age of information, the freedom and mobility have become the core values of a successful person. Now we are free from everything: from family, home, motherland, traditions and from all the cultural and historical heritage of our ancestors. The absolute rootlessness of the modern man is evident. So, like a rolling stone, he roams around the world and, indeed, «… he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself.”
However, this bankruptcy is, above all, an existential problem of the individual. It should not be «justified» by either psychological nor social or health factors. Moreover, we should not «blame» these factors only in one’s life’s depletion.
Existential bankruptcy is not a «life sentence». It is a reversible process. As it has been formed and developed under certain conditions and prerequisites, the modification or elimination of these conditions and reframing the prerequisites for bankruptcy allows to start the reverse process of fulfilling one’s life.
The acquisition, or being more precise, the acceptance of own roots could be the first step of filling one’s life. The most direct way to this is through the discovery of the client’s actual identities. Usually, for this purpose, I invite him to ask himself: «Who am I? ..» There is a sense to answer this question using only nouns; those, which define various identities. The practice shows that after working on this, one gets «footing» and spirit to work further on the reconstruction of his/her being.
The formation of life perspective.
Let’s consider the formation of life perspective as an example of strengthening and calibration of life’s bearings and landmarks. Offering the life perspective as a new existence, we had in mind two major definitions of a word «Perspective». First, life perspective — as some kind of a plan, prospect for the future. However, the existential perspective is not limited only by plans and prospects. The second, more important definition for us, which better defines our understanding of life perspective – is a perspective drawing technique in painting. In the visual arts, volumetric, three-dimensional image is created with the help of using perspective on a two-dimensional plane; a certain depth is being added to the picture with it. Thus, the existential perspective is a sort of life project which, firstly, determines life plans for the future (for the next year, five years, or for a lifetime), and secondly, extends the boundaries of personal space, adds a considerable depth and multidimensionality to the life itself. Therefore, the loss of life perspective or the lack of it deprives man of his future and, as a result, his life is flattened, becomes two or even one-dimensional: empty, monotonous (mainly gray), samely and boring. And life perspective is determined by our hopes, interests, endeavors, dreams and goals.
The resuscitation of hope.
Nowadays, according to Sartre’s testament, hope is a completely meaningless and destructive life phenomenon, because a man has nothing to depend upon, but himself… However, when analysing all known examples of life-affirming role of hope in pursuit of its «driving» force, we find its amazing quality: it is hope that enables humans to achieve «unrealistic» goals, to commit incredible actions, to recover and survive despite the circumstances, doctors’ sentences, «fatal» injuries, or in spite of statistics, common sense, public opinion and other constraints of human capacities. In the context of creating the existential perspective in the therapeutic process, hope, in my opinion, has an essential place. It is a backbone, a foundation, that the life perspective can be built on, and without which the whole process loses all meaning. That’s why we usually start the process of creating the existential perspective with a discussion of a client’s expectations from therapy. Often, being in the state of existential bankruptcy, a client, answering «What do you hope for?», fatalistically replies: «Nothing… no hope.» In this case, the counsellor’s counter question is quite obvious: «And what do you expect from therapy? What results do you hope for?» And if there have not been any hopes in the client’s life up to this point, now, the first, faltering hope is being born, hope for one or another personally significant outcome of therapy. And if hope is not born, then, unfortunately, there are no benefits from such «therapy».
The determination of life’s aspirations.
Aspirations is an activity or a set of sequential actions, which provide the possibility of realising of existentially significant, life-defining meanings, that determine an individual’s way of living. In other words, what is meant here is that a man has something important, significant, something or somebody as a reason for being, for overcoming difficulties, a reason for which he is willing to stand up, to suffer and to devote his life to. As Nietzsche said: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” From this definition it is clear that there can not be many aspirations. For a normal (complete, full and interesting) life man needs one main, life-forming aspirations and one or two additional ones which ensure the implementation of the main one. Thus, the next step in therapy of the existential bankruptcy is the identification or determination of a client’s main and additional aspirations. The following questions are to help to find the Core entity in a client’s life. Of course, this is just an example of questions that could help a client to identify the key entity in his life, something that is his personal aspiration. Obviously, each specific therapeutic case may require other questions, but they should always encourage the client to identify or determine his most important, life-forming lifetime project.
Awakening of interest.
As we already know, one of the main features of depletion is a loss of interest in life. Therefore, it is evident, that one of the primary purposes of psychotherapy is to awaken this interest in the client. In most cases it can be done by addressing his past experience, his childhood or adolescent dreams, which, for one reason or another, became displaced, supressed or blocked by pseudo-needs and desires, commonly imposed by his environment. It follows that the first step to awakening of interest should be reviewing and reassessing of the present needs, desires and goals, “interests” and “endeavours” of the client with relation to their authenticity, relatedness to his values, beliefs and true aspirations and interests.
The rehabilitation of a dream.
In this question I am once again confronting Satre, who affirmed that “dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes and futile expectations; in other words, they define him negatively, not positively.” But a dream is also a cherished wish, an idealised goal, which promises happiness. And in the existential-humanistic view, this makes dreams a crucial part of effective, real and active life of any person. This is because, firstly, the dream is a fertile ground for germination, growing and ripening of our goals. Secondly, dreams become important life landmarks, which allow us to move in a certain direction and not to go astray in our life journey. But even now one can see a tendency to depreciation, lessening and increasing practicality of human dreams. The dreams of the most of our contemporaries are defined by the boundaries of only two dimensions: physical and social. Nowadays not many of us “look at the sky”, dream about romantic adventures, dangerous travels, new discoveries and achievements, traveling to space and other planets – everybody “dreams” of comfort, safety and stability. Therefore it becomes evident, that the next step on the way of forming a life perspective of our clients should be the rehabilitation of dreams as a life-affirming phenomenon of their life. This will give space in their imagination for more significant dreams, expanding existential horizons, lifting them up above purely every-day, trivial life problems, overcoming the boundaries of materialistic and social needs.
Existential setting of goals.
An important task in the process of existential goal setting is separating the client’s own, individually significant goals from the ones that were socially imposed by his environment and mass media. For existential understanding of goals, it is important to distinguish them from simple wishes, wants of a person that normally originate from the outside. The goal is not something I passionately want, but it is something, without which I cannot live and feel my integrity, my wholeness. In other words, a goal or purpose is that part of me or my life, which is still lack. It follows from this understanding, that to achieve one or another goal means to achieve integrity. Apart from that, according to the existential view, only a person with integrity can have goals, which we are talking about. And if there is no integrity, then there are no such goals. There is simply constant vain flouncing about between satisfying one’s needs and attractions from one side and pursuit of desired benefits on the other side. In this case a person is practically torn between these pseudo-goals, achieving which does not bring satisfaction. Working on the formation of the life perspective, I suggest to clients to do a kind of stocktaking of their needs, wants and desires in relation to their authenticity, connectedness with their personal aspirations, interests, dreams, values and significant identities, in order to clarify their real goals and to separate them from the fake ones.
The Acquisition.
In conclusion I’d like to emphasize, that in the process of constructing of the life perspective we need to pay special attention to it’s uniqueness, authenticity and realness. Not only the goals and purposes but all the other components of the existential perspective: hopes, aspirations, interests, dreams must be personally significant, they should be defined and experienced by the client as his Own, and not as estranged or imposed from the outside. Otherwise all the preparatory work, as well as the actual formed perspective will turn out futile with time. When this fakeness and incongruity are clarified, the client will experience a “setback”, the reverse process of his life’s emptiness. And as we know, the “setback” as normally more painful and traumatic then the primary psychological state in which the client seeks help. If the acquisition is to take place, then the therapy of depletion turns out effective and helps the client to begin a fulfilled, fruitful and interesting life.