This post is a link to my Substack I am starting called “The Sunday Same”. This weeks post is about the current type of Existentialism and how it might be involved with mental health.
It is a more personal report, and engaging more directly with philosophical themes.
Often people are not engaged in their lived in a few important ways:
- We are not taught about to be intelligent about their own being
- We are not taught what we know about what it is to Be.
- We are not taught the relationship between Being, knowing, and mental health.
Click the link and find out how simple it is.
Existetnialist Therapy
traditionally and typically what we call Existential Therapy has been defined as therapy centering upon the following:
- authenticity
- responsibility
- ones relationship with death
- meaning
Those are the typical categories an Existentialist Therapist might work with.
(I have opinions on this, but I will write a separate post on that at some point.)
The more inclusive name for Existentialism is phenomenology.
Phenomenalism
In a certain historical light, Existentialism was the “last” philosophy of the Enlightenment philosophical schools. It announced what by the 2000’s philosophers were calling “the end of philosophy”…
…but it was just an realization of the end of a particular way of knowing.
Phenomenology or Phenomenallism is the category of philosophy[ph that is said to involved notions of experience such as
- perception
- appearance
- sense
- meaning
Phenomenalism, having to do with sense, is the basis of Phenomenology, having to do with meaning.
What is Psychology ?
Psychology is the meaningful reduction of sense to a subject. Psychological issues, as a modern category, thus arose from the sense that doctors and scientists were making about how to make meaning of the appearance of certain people.
These people appeared to be having problems. These problems appeared to not behave or respond to the usually way other behaviors of people responded to social correction, or the social norms.
The New Modern Science which was arising in the 19th century, was based in phenomenalism, by implication of not strict definition.
The modern doctors figured something must be wrong with such people’s soul. But they could not call it is soul due to the religious register “soul” had. So, to distinguish themselves from their historical forebarers, they summoned of Latin and Greek words.
Latin and Greek, for some reason, seemed more important and conveyed a certain air of intelligence for there doctors. This practice of using special words to grant prestige probably reached back to using Latin in the Catholic churches.
So the people dealing with people who did not comply with what was assumed “god-given” social civilized norms or behaviors and appearances gave the name “psyche”, their study of “psychology” distinguished their activities from the more religious “soul-science” of religion.
But the root is their ability to do so is based in phenomenalism. That is, of how to systematize what was given to sense.
By the early 20th century, a philosopher named Edmund Husserl delivered the philosophical justification for those people who were deemed special to pronounce a sciences of things. This philosophy, that we still work within to this day, is called Phenomenology.
Indeed, when psychologists and psychiatrists talk about a patient of theirs, they refer to the apparent system of sense that their patient is making as their phenomenology.
The Problematic Question of Mental Health
Modern science is the practice of removing a person’s agency from their own sense of meaning. The person is thus permitted to have agency through the systemized meaning that is passed down from special people upon the lives of those in society.
This ‘passing down’ is actually the interactive involvement of the person in reality. Such ‘passing down’ cannot be interrupted in itself, it is the simple involvement with all things that can be known.
However, we can recognize what is being passed down, whether or not we can specifically itemize or theorize what is being passed down as a problem.
Mental health is the person’s involvement with reality. It is only a problem when it is a problem, which then is usually and most often deferred, such that the person experientially (cognitively, emotionally, somatically, and so on) rejects the problem as something that is being imposed upon them.
What we call the “psychological issues” or “psychological disorders” are the various ways science makes sense of the appearances of people behaviors of having the experience of rejecting an aspect of reality.
Getting Back to the thing Itself: The Sense of the Person
Phenomenology is the separation of oneself from One’s Self. It is a real, modern phenomenon.
this is why mental health is a discipline unto itself:
mental health is the disciplinary assertion of one’s Self over the psychological, phenomenological, aspect of modern reality.
Mental Health is the opening of what has been closed by modern reality.
Take a deeper, perhaps more unsettling, dive into this topic HERE.
IF YOU LIKE THIS POST and my BLOG
PLEASE SHARE IT ! 🙂