TY - BOOK ID - 145697532 TI - Values and personality : an existential psychology of crisis PY - 1950 PB - New York : Grune & Stratton, DB - UniCat KW - Psychology, Pathological. KW - Psychoanalysis. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:145697532 AB - Since the beginning of this century, the crisis of our time has been discussed again and again in its philosophical implications, cultural aspects, sociological consequences, and psychological impact. Since the discovery of the unconscious the individual has been somewhat relieved from his conscious responsibility, the deities of hostile fate have been dethroned, and instead of hopeless chance predictable rules are revealed. It is the conflict between his unconscious drives and his conscious goals, between his desires and accomplishments, between imagination and reality, which more and more splits man's structure and turns one part of him against the other. This is the crisis of personality, which is not a product of the time we live in, nor a product of upbringing and experience; it is a product of our very existence. Crisis in this sense puts at stake the meaning and position which man gives to his life. Man must recognize the challenge to his existence. This demands a new orientation of concepts, which is here suggested by a theory called existential psychology. Existential psychology, an interpretation of data in terms of an individual's value system, has its application in existential psychotherapy by focusing the therapist's attention upon the area in which the patient's values are challenged. In a nondirective method, the patient not only relives his basic conflicts but the crisis that at a deep symbolic level threatens his total personality organization and thus his existence. This successive rediscovery of the self is a creative process and, as such, mobilizes all creative resources of the individual. Instead of destructiveness, creativeness becomes the center of man's personality; a creativeness turned inwards which, if the personality is filled by it, will find its way outwards into creative activity and challenge his environment. Man as questioner of his existence is the theme of existential psychology, and man as creator is the goal of existential psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved). ER -