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the insistence upon Trouble and suffering as an intrinsic element of human experience So you could say we could concentrate on subjective experience. What’s your life like to you? How do you experience it? And we could say well built into that is trouble built into that is chaos built into that is anxiety and pain and disease and and That you can fall prey to those things without there being something wrong with you now You know 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 tend to look tended to look for adult psychopathology in childhood misadventure in childhood in pathological childhood experience, and he at least implicitly claimed that if you hadn’t experienced Childhood trauma, and you had developed properly that what would happen is that you would end up healthy Roughly speaking certainly mentally sound but the existentialists They don’t really buy that perspective right from the beginning they 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 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 reason to look for extra causes that might be a better way of thinking about it and You’d be surprised how often that sort of observation is useful for for clinical clients for example because one of the things that’s quite Characteristic about people especially if they’re introverted, and they don’t have very many friends They don’t have people to talk to if they’re suffering maybe they’re depressed or anxious or they have some sets of strange Symptoms like agoraphobia or obsessive compulsive disorder one of the things they always presume that is that The fact that they’re suffering in that manner means that there’s something not only something wrong with them But something uniquely wrong with them so that it’s their fault and no one else is like them and One of the things you do as a diagnostician. You know you’ll hear a lot of rattling about how labeling is bad for people and Certainly mislabeling is bad for people and even an accurate label can be a box that you can’t get out of but it’s very very frequently the case That if you diagnose someone it’s a relief to them like you can’t believe because they come in to see you knowing that something isn’t Going properly, but they think well. They’re the only person facing it and that means they’re idiosyncratically Strange in some incomprehensible way that no one else could possibly understand And there’s no way they could ever get better and one of the things you do is point out to them is like Depression and anxiety doesn’t really require any explanation Right there’s plenty of reason. I don’t remember who said it everyone has sufficient justification for suicide I think that was the claim well but the point is is that if you look through the experiences of the typical person unless they’re very very fortunate and And they won’t be that way forever That’s certainly the case that they can point to traumatic experiences in their life death and loss and illness and and humiliation and all those sorts of things that are sufficient to account for existence in a state of Quasi permanent negative emotion now often if you see as I said if you see people who are depressed and anxious by nature They assume that everyone else is the smiling face that you see on Facebook And so that that alienates them from other people and themselves even more than Then then then certainly far more than necessary and part of the psycho education that glows along with therapy is merely educating people to understand that a Fair bit of misery is the norm and that there’s plenty of genuine reason for it And so the existentialists basically start from that stance It’s like a fall of man’s stance in some sense you know because deeply rooted in in in in The Western tradition roughly speaking is the idea that people are divorced from some early Paradisal state and that it was the emergence of something like self-consciousness that produced that demolition of humanity and left us in a damaged state and I Mean people think they don’t believe that but they believe it all the time And it’s frequently how people experience themselves you know as if there’s 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 big basically take that as a given and Then they they they offer another question Which is well given that that’s your lot and that there’s ample reason for misery How is it 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 do anything, but multiply it it doesn’t seem to do anything It doesn’t seem to do anything, but multiply it it doesn’t seem to do anything, but increase it No, so it’s bad to begin with you might say well increasing it is definitely going to be Increasing it is something that you have to regard as worse, so how do you conduct yourself in the face of misery? Okay, so how do they how do they present that to begin with well? this is from Pascal and and this is a existential statement that describes the position of the individual in the universe you might say or Or you could say that it explains the Deep deep characteristic of individual experience or existence hence existentialism When I consider the brief span of my life Swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it The small space that I fill or even see engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not And which know not me I am afraid and wonder to see myself here rather than there for there’s no reason why I should Be here rather than there or now rather than then and so that’s an element of Existential thinking that is shared with the phenomenologists called throne-ness, and that’s a term that Heidegger Originated if I remember correctly and what it means is it’s an analysis of a certain characteristic of human experience Which is that well there was an immense span of time in which you could have been born? But you weren’t born then you were born 20 years ago And there was an immense span of time in the future that you could have been born And you weren’t born then either you were born when you were born and you’re who you are and you have exactly the Characteristics that you have and there’s something tremendously arbitrary about that It’s as if you were thrown into experience, and that’s what throne-ness means it means that you were randomly placed in a place in time And there’s something fundamentally irrational about that meaning that there’s no real way of understanding it It’s something you have to deal with and you might say well. Why was I born poor or why was I born? Less attractive than I might be or why was I born less intelligent than I might be or maybe why I was? Why was I born to these terrible parents at this particular horrible moment in time and in some sense? There’s no answer to questions like that. It’s just how it is and you have to deal with it So the question is for the existentialists. How do you deal with that? This is Walter Kaufman if I remember well, rarely has the existential question been put more simply or beautifully in this passage We see first the profound realization of the contingency of human life with the which the existentialists call throne-ness Second we see Pascal flinch facing unflinchingly unflinchingly the question of being there or more accurately being where Third we see the realization that you cannot take refuge in some superficial explanation of time and space Which Pascal scientist that he was could well know and lastly the deep-shaking anxiety arising from this stark awareness of existence in such a universe There’s a Fairly well developed line of social psychological theorizing known as terror management theory and the the basic premise of terror management theory is that human beings have belief systems and What the belief systems do is serve to protect them against death anxiety and that now I have that that’s derived from the work of Ernest Becker by the way who wrote a great book called the denial of death and His theories in the denial of death have been put to the test by the terror management theorists with I would say some success But I think the theory is flawed because I Don’t believe that I Becker phrased the issue properly I think it’s deeper than a fear of death and that’s what the existentialists are attempting to to To communicate it’s more like it’s more like terror at ice. It’s more like terror of isolated being You know it’s not only that you’re pro that you’re mortal. You know that you have a border a Temporal border you’re born and you die but also that during that time you’re vulnerable to all sorts of things and all sorts of Contingencies one of which of course is death, but it’s by no means the only one that is horrifying I Think you can certainly make a case like the existentialists do that the mere fact that you’re you’re Limited in the face of infinite complexity is also a primary existential problem It’s a problem that human beings have been dealing with ever since they started to understand They started to make sense of concepts that were beyond their immediate experience No Millions of years ago or tens of millions of years ago when our ancestors lived in trees You could be sure that They were frightened of what surrounded them They were frightened of when they were little they were frightened of birds that might pick them out of a tree or they were afraid of cats that might climb a tree and eat them they were afraid of snakes that would come slithering along and bite them and They were they existed in a space that was safe surrounded by a space that wasn’t safe that was full of predatory Predatory entities and those were primarily birds of prey and and cats and and snakes or other reptiles and then what seemed to have happened as we evolved was that The way we construed the world you can think of the world as a safe place surrounded by the possibility of predation But you can also think of the world as the known surrounded by the unknown it’s the same idea except put up one level of abstraction and The unknown has the same relationship to us in some sense that the territory of predators has Relationship to us and we use the same circuitry to represent the absolute unknown that that we used So many millions of years ago to represent predators now It’s calm more complicated for human beings because first of all we’re not just prey animals We’re also predators and so we’re not only targets But we’re the thing that makes other thing targets And we’re also something that isn’t only shaking in the face of the unknown because of its predatory element Maybe like a rabbit, but something that can explore the unknown and garner something of value as a consequence And so we have this very paradoxical wiring you might say that unknown is partly terror and That’s the pre potent element of the unknown So negative emotion for human beings is more powerful than positive emotion is sort of dose for dose And that’s I think that’s because you can be completely and utterly dead But you can only be so much happier and so it makes much more sense to be tilted to some degree Towards sensitivity to negative emotion than it does to be tilted towards sensitivity for positive emotion but it’s also another one of those things that makes life rather intrinsically difficult because Negative emotions are commonplace, and they’re powerful and they need to be because otherwise You’d wander stupidly into something that would kill you and it’s better to be anxious than to be in pain or dead Even though it’s not so good to be anxious You