Existential Assessment

Present day psychological assessment stems from a philosophy of sicence that values objectivity but fails to comprehend the existence of the person being evaluated. A humanistic-existential model shifts the focus from omnipotence to encounter and encourages client responsibility. The vehicle for this conceptualization is the nature and meaning of the encounter between clinician and client. New questions are posed for the assessor by altering the assessment goals, the stance toward interpretation, and the criterion for validation.     

The Essence of Psycho-Analysis as Opposed to What Is Secondary

This paper's purpose is to differentiate what is essential to psycho-analysis to what is actually not part of psycho-analysis at all but something peripheral that has become associated with it. The paper makes therefore a differentiation between what is secondary to psycho-analysis and what is primary.     

Pragmatic Existential Therapy

A pragmatic model of existential therapy is offered to support the thesis that brief, solution focused therapy is a clinical application of existential psychology. Superseding pioneering existential therapies more concerned with insight than with clinical technique, pragmatic existential therapy is a dynamic clinical intervention facilitating in patients, decision, choice, self-commitment, and concrete action, the goal of which is movement toward the future and fulfillment of patients' latent potentials. In addition to clarifying the model's theoretical focus on (a) lived experience, (b) self-creation, and (c) existential anxiety, practical guides to brief existential treatment are offered. Sources from existential philosophy and psychology, as well as brief solution focused treatment, are used to evidence core elements of an existential therapy that is not contemplative and insight-focused, but pragmatic and action-based.     

Existential Confrontation and Religiosity

Recent research suggests that religious intrinsicness should predict a failure to confront existential problems whereas an interactional orientation should promote the opposite influence. This study, however, demonstrated that intrinsicness is associated only with traditional religious resolutions of such difficulties and that the interactional approach is essentially unrelated to confrontation with existential realities. These data therefore failed to support claims that orthodox, intrinsic individuals are rigid in their approach to the basic existential questions of life; the data also illustrated the importance of differentiating thought content from thought process in analyzing religious influences on psychological functioning.     

Existential Sexuality and Intimacy

This article will discuss sexuality from an existentialist and constructivist point of view. Constructivism will be used as a means to grasp a dynamic understanding of sexual existence and intimate life. In fact, the author believes there is genetic character of intimacy that informs the passive and active existential choices that constitute our sexual identity. The goal of the article is to show how the social constructions that define human sexual existence are remodeled continuously by the fluid nature of intimacy.     

Existential Family Trauma Therapy

In this article the process of existential family trauma therapy is outlined and described. This process includes the treatment elements of holding, telling, mastering and honoring the family's trauma experiences and trauma pain. Case illustrations are provided and previous research is reviewed.     

Existential perspectives on death anxiety

Construct validity is the hallmark of Templer's Death Anxiety Scale (1970), which has generated a healthy stream of research of paramount importance in the USA and all over the world. This paper contends that scores on this scale provide valuable scientific knowledge on group norms. To expand the concept of death anxiety it is necessary to supplement empirical with qualitative research. Persons with the same scores may show qualitatively different fears of death, and vice versa. Total reliance on empirical scales may not disclose the depth of bipolar meaning in a "life-death anxiety." Templer's scale is a mixture of fears, phobias, and obsessions with thoughts of illness, cancer, heart disease, and wars. A bipolar "life-death anxiety" continuum requires phenomenology to reach beyond the 15 items to the process of "experiencing." The scale addresses "thoughts" about the death of others even though its items are cast in the first person singular. This provides group norms of a "cognitive-affective" construct, with limited generality cross-culturally. Means do not disclose fully meaningful comparisons between persons or cultures. Death Anxiety as an existential anticipatory mode of "being-in-the-world" is embedded in a personal/genetic/cultural matrix that may vary individually and culturally.     

Existential Import in Cartesian Semantics

The paper explores the existential import of universal affirmative in Descartes, Arnauld and Malebranche. Descartes holds, inconsistently, that eternal truths are true even if the subject term is empty but that a proposition with a false idea as subject is false. Malebranche extends Descartes’ truth-conditions for eternal truths, which lack existential import, to all knowledge, allowing only for non-propositional knowledge of contingent existence. Malebranche's rather implausible Neoplatonic semantics is detailed as consisting of three key semantic relations: illumination by which God's ideas cause mental terms, creation by which God's ideas cause material substances by a kind of ‘ontic privation’, and sensation in which brain events occasion states of mental awareness. In contrast, Arnauld distinguishes two types of propositions – necessary and contingent – with distinct truth-conditions, one with and one without existential import. Arnauld's more modern semantics is laid out as a theory of reference that substitutes earlier causal accounts with one that adapts the medieval notion of objective being. His version anticipates modern notions of intentional content and appeals in its ontology only to substances and their modes.     

皮尔士存在图研究

存在图是现代逻辑草创时期皮尔士在其关系演算和谓词逻辑的基础上发展起来的、表示逻辑句子和推理的图式系统,是皮尔士用来证明其形而上学的工具,它的重要性直到计算机表示的图示推理得到发展后才得以确认。本文首先以经典逻辑为背景研究存在图的各个部分,然后讨论存在图在当代许多学科领域的回应和应用以及它在逻辑史上的地位,最后考察存在图对于皮尔士形而上学的意义。