In this lecture, Dr. Jordan Peterson discusses the giants of existentialism: Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard. He discusses existentialism as a philosophically grounded psychological position positing that psychopathology, or mental illness, is built into being itself, and that the adoption of responsibility through action is the appropriate response. Dr. Peterson provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. This episode is brought to you by Thinker.org, which summarizes key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form. Books from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers like "How To Win Friends And Influence People" by Chris Voss, which is out in a couple of weeks. Go to thinker.org/Thinker to start a free trial today! To start a FREE trial today, you can use code MP for 15% off that's great for New Year's resolutions too! That's code MP! And his Understand Myself.com personality test is also 15% OFF right now with code MP. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Thanks to Thinker, which gives you the gist of it in a matter of minutes! This is a great gift to start thinking about this episode of Season 3 of The Jordan Peterson Podcast. I hope you enjoy this episode is a little bit more than you can be a little more than halfway through Season 3. Happy Holidays! xoxo, Michaela Peterson . Thank you, x XOXO, Michaela - The Jordan B Peterson Podcast (The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Season 3 Episode 37: Existentialism - Episode 37, Ep 37, Season 3, Episode 37 of The Mythology of the Mythology Podcast - Part 1, Episode 1, Season 2, Episode 2, Season 1, Ep 1, "Existentialistism, Nietzsche and the Greatness of the Mind" Season 2: "The Mythology Of The Mind" - Season 2 - "The Great Idea?" - Season 1 Episode 3, Season 4, Episode 4, "The Big Idea?"
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.800Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:53.920Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:00:58.500This is episode 37 of season 3, titled Existentialism, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard.
00:01:05.820In this lecture, 11th in the 2017 series, Dad discusses the giants of existentialism, a philosophically grounded psychological position positing,
00:01:15.140one, that psychopathology or mental illness slash distress is built into being itself.
00:01:20.580That would come from somebody in my family.
00:01:24.640And two, that the adoption of responsibility through action is the appropriate response.
00:01:30.260I shouldn't make bad jokes on this, but I do.
00:01:33.800Happy early Merry Christmas, everyone.
00:01:36.680If you'd like to check out the self-authoring program Dad has, you can use code MP for 15% off that.
00:01:44.240That's great for New Year's resolutions, too.
00:01:47.160And his understandmyself.com personality test is also 15% off right now with code MP.
00:01:52.680The second update, if you have purchased or pre-ordered his book, Beyond Order, you can go to his website, jordanbpeterson.com,
00:02:02.640and there's a printable PDF to put under the tree because the book isn't shipping out until March.
00:02:09.120This episode is brought to you by Thinker.
00:02:12.380I actually used Thinker recently to read a book, Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss in preparation for a podcast Dad and I did with him.
00:02:21.100Thinker.org summarizes key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form.
00:02:31.220Read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes.
00:02:34.280They really give you the gist of it in about six minutes.
00:02:37.380Books from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers.
00:02:42.840If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons, and become a better thinker,
00:02:46.840Go to thinker.org, that's T-H-I-N-K-R dot org, to start a free trial today.
00:05:24.700Now, the existentialists believe that action spoke louder than words.
00:05:32.420And that if you were interested in belief, and even if you were interested in analyzing belief, that it was better for you to look at how someone acted than what they said.
00:05:43.300Now, one of the things that you might think with regards to Rogers is that his psychotherapeutic practice would be predicated on the idea that you should bring how you act into alignment with what you say you believe.
00:06:00.780So that there's no discontinuity in your, between your body, that's one way of thinking about it, and your mind.
00:06:08.220And so that there are fewer paradoxes in your mind.
00:06:13.300In the way that you manifest yourself in the world.
00:06:17.960So the concentration on action is one of the fundamental characteristics of existentialism.
00:06:48.480Built into that is anxiety and pain and disease.
00:06:52.340And that you can fall prey to those things without there being something wrong with you.
00:06:58.560Now, 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.
00:07:08.420But Freud, in particular, tended to look for adult psychopathology in childhood misadventure.
00:07:17.820In childhood, in pathological childhood experience.
00:07:20.820And 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.
00:07:37.340But the existentialists, they don't really buy that perspective right from the beginning.
00:07:40.860They 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.
00:07:50.520Suffering that manifests itself as a consequence of your intrinsic vulnerability.
00:07:55.860That psychopathology is built into the human experience.
00:08:02.600Or at least, there's no reason to look for extra causes.
00:08:08.320That might be a better way of thinking about it.
00:08:10.860And you'd be surprised how often that sort of observation is useful for clinical clients, for example.
00:08:18.380Because 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.
00:08:25.540If they're suffering, maybe they're depressed or anxious or they have some sets of strange symptoms like agoraphobia or obsessive compulsive disorder.
00:08:33.280One 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.
00:08:45.540So that it's their fault and no one else is like them.
00:08:49.320And one of the things you do as a diagnostician, you know, you'll hear...
00:08:53.320Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:08:57.520This is episode 37 of season three, titled Existentialism, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Kierkegaard.
00:09:03.940In this lecture, 11th in the 2017 series, Dad discusses the giants of existentialism, a philosophically grounded psychological position positing, one, that psychopathology or mental illness slash distress is built into being itself.
00:09:20.380That would come from somebody in my family.
00:09:23.380And two, that the adoption of responsibility through action is the appropriate response.
00:09:29.220I shouldn't make bad jokes on this, but I do.
00:09:32.020So happy early Merry Christmas, everyone.
00:09:36.080If you'd like to check out the self-authoring program Dad has, you can use code MP for 15% off that.
00:09:43.300That's great for New Year's resolutions, too.
00:09:46.140And his understandmyself.com personality test is also 15% off right now with code MP.
00:09:51.760The second update, if you have purchased or pre-ordered his book, Beyond Order, you can go to his website, jordanbpeterson.com,
00:10:01.600and there's a printable PDF to put under the tree because the book isn't shipping out until March.
00:10:08.280This episode is brought to you by Thinker.
00:10:11.160I actually used Thinker recently to read a book, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, in preparation for a podcast Dad and I did with him.
00:10:20.180Thinker.org summarizes key ideas from new and noteworthy nonfiction, giving you access to an entire library of great books in bite-sized form.
00:10:30.300Read or listen to hundreds of titles in a matter of minutes.
00:10:33.360They really give you the gist of it in about six minutes.
00:10:36.460Books from old classics like Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to recent bestsellers.
00:10:41.400If you want to challenge your preconceptions, expand your horizons, and become a better thinker, go to thinker.org.
00:10:47.880That's T-H-I-N-K-R dot org to start a free trial today.
00:10:59.960Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:11:04.980Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:11:13.220In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:11:18.360Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:11:27.660And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:11:30.540With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:11:38.300Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?
00:11:41.920Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:11:46.520That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
00:13:45.400So we started to talk a little bit about phenomenology last time and about Carl Rogers.
00:14:06.740And I mentioned that the phenomenologists were interested in experience in some sense as the ultimate reality.
00:14:17.340And that's a very complicated concept to grasp.
00:14:24.480The existentialists also adopted that viewpoint.
00:14:29.520They were concerned with the quality of subjective experience, not that they were ignoring the reality of objective experience,
00:14:37.540but they were concerned with the reality of subjective experience.
00:14:40.280And they're also more focused on action than on statement or belief.
00:14:45.820Because here's something to think about.
00:14:48.080You can think about this for a very long time.
00:14:50.240If you're trying to understand what someone believes, even if you're trying to analyze their representations of the world,
00:14:58.440should you pay attention to how they act or what they say?
00:15:01.720And that's a profound question, even from a neurological perspective or a neuropsychological perspective,
00:15:10.020because the memory system that you use to represent what you say that you believe is not the same memory system that you use to embody your knowledge about action.
00:15:22.960So it's akin, I would say, to the distinction between telling someone how to ride a bike and knowing how to ride a bike.
00:15:46.240And procedural memory is the same kind of memory that basically structures your perceptions.
00:15:50.700Um, not, it's not that you can't orient your perceptions consciously because you can, but once you've oriented them consciously, say towards some goal,
00:16:02.220it's automatic procedures that take over because you really don't know how it is that you organize your senses so that you can pay attention.
00:16:12.060Now, the existentialists believe that actions spoke louder than words.
00:16:18.100And that if you were interested in belief, and even if you were interested in analyzing belief, that it was better for you to look at how someone acted than what they said.
00:16:29.820Now, one of the things that you might think with regards to Rogers is that his psychotherapeutic practice would be predicated on the idea that you should bring how you act into alignment with what you say you believe so that there's no discontinuity in your, between your body.
00:16:52.360That's one way of thinking about it and your mind.
00:16:54.720And so that there are fewer paradoxes in your mind.
00:16:59.820In the way that you manifest yourself in the world.
00:17:04.460So the concentration on action is one of the fundamental characteristics of existentialism.
00:17:34.840Built into that is anxiety and pain and disease.
00:17:38.700And that you can fall prey to those things without there being something wrong with you.
00:17:45.060Now, 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.
00:17:54.740But Freud, in particular, tended to look, tended to look for adult psychopathology in childhood misadventure and childhood and pathological childhood experience.
00:18:06.740And 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.
00:18:23.440But the existentialists, they don't really buy that perspective right from the beginning.
00:18:27.580They 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.
00:18:37.000Suffering that manifests itself as a consequence of your intrinsic vulnerability.
00:18:42.380That psychopathology is built into the human experience.
00:18:46.100There's no real way of avoiding it, or at least there's no reason to look for extra causes.
00:18:54.820That might be a better way of thinking about it.
00:18:58.840And you'd be surprised how often that sort of observation is useful 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.
00:19:11.720If they're suffering, maybe they're depressed or anxious, or they have some sets of strange symptoms like agoraphobia or obsessive compulsive disorder.
00:19:20.280One 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.
00:19:32.060So that it's their fault and no one else is like them.
00:19:36.160And 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.
00:19:48.280And 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.
00:19:57.240Like 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.
00:20:06.600And that means they're idiosyncratically strange in some incomprehensible way that no one else could possibly understand.
00:20:12.760And there's no way they could ever get better.
00:20:15.060And one of the things you do is point out to them is like, yeah, depression and anxiety doesn't really require any explanation.
00:20:30.400Well, but the point is, is that if you look through the experiences of the typical person, unless they're very, very fortunate 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.
00:20:54.880Now, 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.
00:21:04.540And so that that alienates them from other people and themselves even more than, than, than, than certainly far more than necessary.
00:21:12.300And part of the psychoeducation 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.
00:21:26.060And so the existentialists basically start from that stance.
00:21:31.500It's like a fall of man 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.
00:21:54.420And, um, I mean, I mean, people think they don't believe that, but they believe it all the time.
00:22:00.360Um, and it's frequently how people experience themselves, you know, as, as if there's something wrong that needs to be rectified.
00:22:09.160And it seems unique in some sense to human beings.
00:22:12.620It doesn't seem all that obvious that animals think that way, but people definitely think that way.
00:22:19.020And so, well, the existentialists basically take that as a given.
00:22:24.600And then they, 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?
00:22:36.120Because merely say giving into that misery or multiplying it doesn't seem to be, it doesn't seem to do anything but multiply it.
00:22:45.140It doesn't seem to do anything but increase it.
00:22:47.020And it was, if it's bad to begin with, you might say, well, increasing it is definitely going to be increasing.
00:22:51.860It is something that you have to regard as worse.
00:22:53.920So how do you conduct yourself in the face of misery?
00:23:01.420And, and this is an existential statement that describes the position of the individual in the universe.
00:23:08.960You might say, or, or, or you could say that it, it explains the individual, the deep, a deep characteristic of individual experience or existence.
00:23:19.580When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill or, or even see engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces, which I know not and which know not me.
00:23:36.720I 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.
00:23:46.320And so that's an element of existential thinking that is shared with a phenomenologists called thrownness.
00:23:55.100And that's a term that Heidegger originated, if I remember correctly.
00:24:00.500And what it means is, 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.
00:25:03.180So the question is for the existentialists, how do you deal with that?
00:25:07.800This is Walter Kaufman, if I remember Rollo May.
00:25:13.040Rarely has the existential question been put more simply or beautifully.
00:25:16.420In this passage, we see first, the profound realization of the contingency of human life with the, which the existentialists call thrownness.
00:25:25.500Second, we see Pascal flinch, facing unflinchingly, unflinchingly the question of being there or more accurately being where.
00:25:33.680Third, we see the realization that you cannot take refuge in some superficial explanation of time and space, which Pascal, a scientist that he was, could well know.
00:25:45.140And lastly, the deep shaking anxiety arising from this stark awareness of existence in such a universe.
00:25:50.720There's a fairly well-developed line of social psychological theorizing known as terror management theory.
00:26:02.280And the basic premise of terror management theory is that human beings have belief systems.
00:26:08.380And what the belief systems do is serve to protect them against death anxiety.
00:26:14.640And 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.
00:26:22.120And his theories in the denial of death have been put to the test by the terror management theorists with, I would say, some success.
00:26:28.960But I think the theory is flawed because I don't believe that Becker phrased the issue properly.
00:26:43.040I think it's deeper than a fear of death.
00:26:45.080And that's what the existentialists are attempting to communicate.
00:26:50.980It's more like, it's more like terror at ice.
00:26:55.320It's more like terror of isolated being.
00:26:58.660You know, it's not only that you're pro that you're mortal, you know, that you have a border.
00:27:05.620A temporal border, you're born and you die.
00:27:08.160But also that during that time, you're vulnerable to all sorts of things and all sorts of contingencies.
00:27:13.600One of which, of course, is death, but it's by no means the only one that is horrifying.
00:27:17.700I 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.
00:27:34.940It's a problem that human beings have been dealing with ever since they started to understand.
00:27:40.920They started to make sense of concepts that were beyond their immediate experience.
00:27:44.700Now, 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.
00:27:58.800They 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.
00:28:06.080And they were afraid of snakes that would come slithering along and bite them.
00:28:10.500And 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.
00:28:21.920And those were primarily birds of prey and cats and, and snakes or other reptiles.
00:28:28.800And 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.
00:28:37.840But you can also think of the world as the known, but you can also think of the world as the known surrounded by the unknown.
00:28:41.660It'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.
00:28:53.060And we use the same circuitry to represent the absolute unknown that, that we used so many millions of years ago to represent predators.
00:29:01.260Now it's more complicated for human beings because first of all, we're not just prey animals.
00:29:08.220And so we're not only targets, but we're the thing that makes other thing targets.
00:29:12.840And 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.
00:29:25.220And so we have this very paradoxical wiring, you might say, the unknown is partly terror and that's the prepotent element of the unknown.
00:29:35.060So negative emotion for human beings is more powerful than positive emotion is sort of dose for dose.
00:29:41.220And that's, I think that's because you can be completely and utterly dead, but you can only be so much happier.
00:29:48.260And 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.
00:29:57.940But 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.
00:30:13.280And it's better to be anxious than to be in pain or dead, even though it's not so good to be anxious.
00:30:22.500So for the existentialist that the fundamental, the fundamental quality of human existence is limitation in the face of incomprehensible complexity.
00:30:34.660And all of the things that stem from that existentialism is not a comprehensive philosophy or a way of life, but an endeavor to grasp reality.
00:30:49.100Existentialism is immersed in and arises directly out of man's anxiety, estrangement and conflicts.
00:30:53.780This was written 60 years ago and it was written.
00:30:57.360So it was, it was aimed at Western audiences at that point.
00:31:02.020If you go back a hundred years, you could make the case or, or, or perhaps a little longer than that.
00:31:07.380You could make the case that the parts of the world that weren't Western were still reasonably well ensconced in traditional belief systems.
00:31:14.520And so those traditional belief systems provided an overarching canopy of meaning.
00:31:20.560That's one way of thinking about it that was designed exactly to, you could say, rationalize, or you could say, cope with or deal with, depending on your perspective, that existential anxiety.
00:31:33.260It gave, it gave significance to everything.
00:31:36.720And those are religious systems, let's say, but they came crashing down in the West in the late 1800s and then increasingly everywhere else in the world.
00:31:45.100So the point at which we are now in time, it isn't reasonable to only consider this a pathology of the Western individual.
00:31:54.740It might even be the prime conflict that exists in the world right now between comprehensive and traditional religious systems.
00:32:06.280And a modern viewpoint that has this existential angst built into it as part of its, as part of its nature.
00:32:13.040Maybe it's the price you pay for increased technological mastery and awareness, but it's a big price to pay.
00:32:19.340And the existentialists were concerned about that because they also believed that although the scientific method had given us immense technological power, the worldview that came along with it, which you could say in some sense is incidental to the method, but it doesn't matter.
00:32:34.740The worldview that came along with it was sufficiently powerful and objective and reductive to blow gaping holes in the meaning systems that protected us from our existential anxiety and to open us up to the possibility.
00:32:52.320The proclivity, number one of nihilism, which is really belief in nothing, and we'll talk about that more as we progress or a proclivity towards rational totalitarianism, which would be, you might say, the, the extreme reaction to the threat of nihilism and the abandonment of classic belief systems.
00:33:10.900I, I think you still, I think you still, I think you still see that playing out everywhere.
00:33:14.900You certainly see it playing out in the universities right now because the, there's huge ideological conflicts at, at the, in the substructure of, of Western intellectual thinking.
00:33:23.460And people are, and this is very hard on young people.
00:33:28.280They're caught in part be, be between an emergent nihilism that seems to be implicit in a materialist worldview and the temptation of radical ideologies.
00:33:37.220And neither of those options I would say is tenable.
00:33:41.460I mean, the nihilistic option leaves you with nothing and that's not good.
00:33:45.380And that's an existential realization in some sense too, because if your life is fundamentally problematic without you being pathological, just as the essence of your life, then you need something to defend your, to defend against that.
00:33:59.060You can't just have nothing because all it does is leave you with the suffering that's implicit in your experience.
00:34:06.280And then to swing to a totalitarianism, totalitarian system means that you don't even exist.
00:34:12.220Once you've done that, everything you say can be predicted.
00:34:15.400You're just the puppet of a, of a rational scheme that has an explanation for everything, but that's really good for nothing except destruction because it's too vague and, and abstracted to be used to actually solve any concrete problems.
00:34:29.960So this is a, this is the situation of modern people as far as the existentialists were concerned and the people that I'm talking to you about specifically, I'm going to talk to you about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard.
00:34:42.460And I picked those people who aren't psychologists, except in the broader sense, because I don't think there is anybody who there were and are existential psychotherapists, but I don't think that any of them do as good a job of explaining the problem as those people do.
00:35:14.260Well, it means, at least in part, that the theorists that we're going to talk about had an idea that was akin to the psychoanalytic idea of facing what you're afraid of.
00:35:24.300And that's a key concept in psychotherapy.
00:35:26.480There's, there's not that many key concepts in psychotherapy.
00:35:29.380One might be that you enter into an honest relationship with your client.
00:35:34.540The second is that exposure to the things that you don't want to be exposed to is curative.
00:35:46.060It can't be involuntary because that'll just make it worse.
00:35:48.280Because you might ask, well, you know, if a kid has a fear of rats or mice, they got that fear because often they were exposed to rats or mice.
00:35:57.420And then you use exposure to rats and mice to cure them.
00:36:00.400Well, that makes the precipitator of the illness, the cure, which makes no sense.
00:36:08.440Well, it's, it's one thing to have something pop up at you when you're not expecting it.
00:36:12.660That puts you in a state of, of apprehension and preparation for action in a state of even a state of terror, a state of reflex of shock.
00:36:21.800And then perhaps terror and maybe something you don't recover from.
00:36:25.100That's completely different than facing something voluntarily.
00:36:28.940The psychophysiology isn't even the same.
00:36:31.200So if you're faced with a stressor of a certain magnitude and it's involuntary, your body produces a lot of the stress hormone cortisol.
00:36:37.580And in large doses, cortisol is toxic, especially if it's produced over long periods of time.
00:36:44.100But if you face it voluntarily, then that doesn't happen.
00:36:46.960You use a completely different set of circuits to do something voluntarily.
00:36:50.000And it's the utilization of the voluntary circuits that indicates your mastery over the thing that you're afraid of.
00:36:56.940And that mastery over the thing that you're afraid of and can't cope with, that actually constitutes your adaptive personality.
00:37:03.320And so part of what the existentialists were suggesting is that precisely, and you see this, you see this in Freud with his insistence that you go into your messy past and, and dig up the corpses and the skeletons and sort them out.
00:37:16.680And Jung's insistence that what you want is most is to be found where you least want to look.
00:37:22.540And Roger's insistence that people communicate honestly about difficult things.
00:37:26.220It's all predicated on the same idea in some sense that voluntary exposure is one of the prime things that cures people.
00:37:32.900And one of the things that you should think about, you think, well, is that a valid claim?
00:37:36.480Well, you have the psychophysiological evidence, but it's also the case that that is how people learn, right?
00:37:42.320If you're a child and you're learning to master the world, you actually exist in a state of existential anxiety unless you're near someone that will take care of you.
00:37:52.080So for example, if you take the typical child and you go to a mall, say a three-year-old, and then you have the three-year-old stand and you leave,
00:38:01.960it isn't going to be very long until you're far enough away so that most of most children in that situation will immediately start to cry.
00:38:09.980They'll get worried and they'll start to cry and then they'll break down because, well, because that's the existential anxiety.
00:38:16.180Like you think, well, a normal child is calm.
00:38:21.140A normal child close to someone who will take care of them is calm, but that is by no means the same thing.
00:38:26.900It's not even close to the same thing.
00:38:28.840And so you get backwards in your psychological thinking if you don't notice that because you think, well, the normal human being is calm and well put together.
00:38:38.320The normal human being in a place of safety is calm and well put together.
00:38:42.800But why you would ever think that a normal place is a place of safety?
00:38:47.580You know, assuming that that's the standard or the norm, there's absolutely no reason for that.
00:38:52.540You see this with rats too, because the behaviorists, for example, made the presumption that you had to teach rats to be afraid.
00:38:59.800But let me tell you how that actually worked.
00:39:01.820It's really interesting, and it shows you how carefully you have to analyze, say, psychological experiments to understand what's going on.
00:39:08.800So let's say you take a lab rat, okay?
00:39:11.920And let's say it's a lab rat like a rat that Skinner used, B.F. Skinner, who was the most famous of the behaviorists, and he could get rats to do anything.
00:48:02.620What happens instead is that you actually learn how to deal with it.
00:48:05.720You know, so you think about it this way.
00:48:07.120One of the things that human beings are archetypally related to is fire.
00:48:14.080And, of course, fire is something to be afraid of because it will burn you and it will burn everything down.
00:48:19.280But by the same token, when we mastered fire, which may have been two million years ago, something like that, because it looks like it was about then that we learned how to cook, which made a big difference.
00:48:29.660So, you know how chimps, I haven't told you the chimp story, I don't think.
00:48:32.900You know how chimps are sort of shaped like this?
00:48:34.600They've got this huge barrel-shaped body.
00:48:37.700Well, they spend like 12 hours a day chewing leaves.
00:48:49.480They hardly have any nourishment at all.
00:48:51.460And so if you're a chimp, all you do is sit around and chew leaves.
00:48:54.680And then you need to have an intestinal tract that could wrap two or three times around this room so that you can digest the damn things, right?
00:49:43.720And we know that because if we move you into a new environment, new genes will turn on inside of you and manufacture new parts of you.
00:49:50.480So if you stress yourself optimally, if you push yourself out into the world, you can incorporate information from that journey, the exploration.
00:50:02.560You go out and you learn something new and you adjust your behavior to it.
00:50:05.760You adjust your concepts to it and then you can master it.
00:50:08.620But what Piaget didn't realize was that it also transforms your biological structure at a microscopic level merely as a consequence of being put in the new situation.
00:50:17.800So the idea is that there's more to you than you know.
00:50:21.180And the way you call it out is by challenging yourself voluntarily in as many directions as you can manage.
00:50:52.360We're up against an opponent, so to speak.
00:50:55.620A social opponent, say, which would be the crushing weight of society.
00:50:58.620And a natural opponent that is nature, which overwhelms you.
00:51:02.580We're up against the ultimate opponent.
00:51:04.340But, and so in that sense, we're extraordinarily weak.
00:51:08.060But it turns out that if we face that opponent or that series of opponents, then all sorts of possibilities manifest themselves inside of us.
00:51:15.940And it isn't clear what the upper limits are to that.
00:51:18.560So, it's so interesting that it's a good example of how if you face what you're afraid of, you can find what you need.
00:51:25.640You say, well, the existentialists make the strongest case possible for the vulnerability of human beings.
00:51:31.300And out of that, they extract out the strongest case possible why human beings are strong and powerful.
01:38:53.320Out of love for mankind and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made.
01:39:04.760And moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
01:39:17.920There's a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there's also the truth.
01:39:27.120And that in truth itself, there is need of having the crowd on its side.
01:39:32.060There's another view of life which conceives that wherever there is a crowd, there is immediately untruth.
01:39:38.040So that to consider for a moment, the extreme example, even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth.
01:39:48.760Yet in the case, they were all to get together in a crowd, a crowd to which any sort of decisive significance is attributed to voting, noisy, audible crowd.
01:39:56.840Untruth would at once be in evidence for a crowd is the untruth in a godly sense.
01:40:06.940Eternally, Christianly, as St. Paul says that only one attains the goal, which is not meant in a comparative sense because a comparison takes others into account.
01:40:17.120It means that every man can be that one God helping him therein, but only one attains the goal.
01:40:22.240And again, this means that every man should be careful about having to do with the others and essentially should talk only with God and with himself for only one attains the goal.
01:40:34.080And again, this means that man or to be a man is akin to deity.
01:40:39.200In a world, in a worldly and temporal sense, it will be said by the man of bustle, sociability and amicableness, how unreasonable that only one attains the goal.
01:40:50.360For it is far more likely that many, by the strength of united effort, should attain the goal.
01:40:55.160And when we are many, success is more certain and it is easier for each man severally.
01:41:05.720And it is true also with respect to all earthly and material goods.
01:41:09.420If it is allowed to have its way, this becomes the only true point of view.
01:41:13.060And it does away with God in eternity and with man's kinship with deity.
01:41:16.660It does away with it or it transforms it into a fable and puts in its place the modern, or we might rather say the old pagan notion that to be a man is to belong to a race endowed with reason, to belong to it as a specimen.
01:41:31.800So that the race or species is higher than the individual, which is to say that there are no individuals, but only specimens.
01:41:39.800But eternity, which arches over and high above the temporal, tranquil as the starry vault at night and God in heaven, who in the bliss of that sublime tranquility holds in survey without the least sense of dizziness at such a height, those countless multitudes of men and knows each single individual by name.
01:42:00.300He, the great examiner, says that only one attains the goal.
01:42:04.580Nietzsche, a similar comment, the traveler.
01:42:13.160A traveler who had seen many countries and peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere.
01:42:20.220And he answered, men are inclined to laziness.
01:42:24.360Some will feel, he might have said with greater justice, they're all timid.
01:42:29.360They hide behind customs and opinions.
01:42:31.920At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once as something unique.
01:42:40.100And that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity, such a curious and diffuse plurality.
01:42:53.940From fear of his neighbor, who insists on convention and veils himself with it.
01:43:00.500But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbor, to think and act, heard fashion, and not to be glad of himself?
01:43:09.720A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases.
01:43:13.760In the vast majority, it is the desire for comfort.
01:43:17.620Inertia, in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveler spoke.
01:43:44.140The principle that every human being is a unique wonder.
01:43:46.440They dare to show us the human being as he is, down to the last muscle, himself and himself alone.
01:43:54.900Even more, that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness, he is beautiful and worth contemplating,
01:44:01.000as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull.
01:44:05.540When a great thinker despises men, it's their laziness that he despises.
01:44:12.900For it is on account of this that they have the appearance of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction.
01:44:21.760The human being, who does not wish to belong to the mass, must merely cease being comfortable with himself.
01:44:28.020Let him follow his conscience, which shouts at him,
01:46:33.620Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.
01:46:36.100Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man.
01:46:43.560Yet, I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction.
01:46:47.920We are now in a position to see the crucial significance of the existential psychotherapy movement.
01:46:55.620It is precisely the movement that protests against the tendency to identify psychotherapy with technical reason.
01:47:02.140We have seen that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as the representatives of the existential cultural movement following them, we have seen that, yes, not only contributed far-reaching and penetrating psychological insights, which in themselves form a significant contribution to anyone seeking scientifically to understand modern psychological problems, but also did something else.
01:47:22.880They placed these insights on an ontological basis, namely, the study of the individual as the being who has these particular problems.
01:47:34.080They believed that it was absolutely necessary that this be done, and that they feared that the subordination of reason to technical problems would ultimately mean the making of man over in the image of the machine.