Beschreibung:

XII; 367 S.; 21 cm; kart.

Bemerkung:

Gutes Ex., Einband gering berieben. - Englisch. - ... This book is intended for students, graduate and undergraduate, and for professionals, who seek to understand how existential psychology may be relevant to clinical problems. Part I argues that psychology is and should be involved in an evolution toward an existential orientation. The demands upon psychologists for new ways of thinking, talking, and seeing, for new foci of our attention, and for new approaches to our subject matter, are substantial. The existential-phenomenological approach answers these demands but itself makes new demands on psychologists, for better theory, new metaphors, and different attitudes. Part II looks to existential philosophy for several new concepts. This section is not an account of existential philosophy, but it selects a few ideas and shows their psychological relevance. The first two parts of the book, therefore, establish an existential point of view (not the existential point of view) from which to observe clinical phenomena of neurosis, psychosis, psychopathy, and psychotherapy. The chapters in the first two parts each close with a short glossary of "technical terms" as a kind of summary and a way to keep one's bearings in the difficult task of threading one's way through a pioneer area of psychology. Each of Parts I, II, III, and IV closes with a short summary as well. Parts III and IV confront directly the relationship between an existential orientation to psychology and concrete problems of the psychological clinic. The most difficult problems, from the author's point of view, are: (1) How are we to understand persons who are "mentally ill"? (2) How is that understanding related to how we diagnose and treat them? (3) How are our understanding, diagnosis, and treatment related to our intellectual assumptions and our existential commitments? In Part V, we address ourselves finally to the even more difficult issues of how everything so far is related to social values, to a systematic methodology, and to the existential situation of being a psychologist in the twentieth century. The book is somewhere between being an account for strangers of existential psychology and a statement of innovations within the community of existential psychologists. It also stands between the tasks of detached description of others' thought and personal advocacy of my own. It is both impersonal and personal, observing and participating, in the evolution of psychology toward a more adequate, more mature, more self-conscious, and more relevant science of man. ? (Vorwort)