Almost 70 years ago, an existential psychologist, W. Wolf, already spoke to us about crises and the need to resolve them by focusing on the individual's personality and their system of values or symbolic representations. He introduced the notion of existential psychology, which remains underdeveloped. However, this field of research is particularly important when seeking to understand the causes of violence. This would not, in any case, be exclusively the result of education, culture, that is to say, an external context, but rather a mirror effect of a destructive personality, an externalization of hatred against oneself.
For Wolf, psychotherapy will then focus on the individual's value system, those that he truly carries (primary personality), including those that generate internal conflicts. This is the whole point of existential psychology. It is not a question of denying the importance of the time or the context in which we live, but of giving it its rightful place. Violence has always existed beyond time and space and has always been provoked by certain individuals, finding in destructive action an outlet for their internal tensions.
Here is an extract from his work (free translation):
Since recent events, the philosophical implications, cultural aspects, and sociological consequences of wars and attacks are being debated again and again. For many of these points of view, the era we live in is responsible for all these disorders, an era marked by the end of ideals, the loss of all hope, and the selfishness of modern man. Since the discovery of the concept of unconsciousness, man has been freed from his conscious responsibility. If we ignore the fact that we find the same statements in all the eras for which we have testimonies, it would seem... that simple bad luck has been replaced by predictable rules.
Now that we know that the unconscious forces of the human psyche undermine its conscious reasoning, the reactions of its environment would be largely provoked unconsciously by the individual himself and the probabilities of accidents follow the laws of psychic disorders. Man is no longer a victim of time, destiny or chance; on the contrary he shapes his time and his destiny. Thus, external events would be a mirror of his personality. The crises of our time would reflect the crises of our personalities. It is the conflict between unconscious forces and conscious goals, between desires and accomplishments, between imagination and reality that increasingly divides the structure of the human psyche and sets a part of him against himself. Inner struggles, self-denigration, all these internal tensions lead the individual to move away from his conscience and become disconnected from his personality..
And these tensions pursue him in his attempts to escape into distractions and other intoxications. He can no longer find rest even when he tries to escape from himself; he then tries to get rid of his tensions by externalizing them and transforming his self-hatred into aggression against other individuals. But the crises in our environment, the crises of our time, are not only a reflection of intrapersonal crises: they are produced by Man who wants to make the exclusion of himself bearable, who wants to escape from the murmurs of his conscience and substitute the resolution of an internal problem – his inner emptiness– by imagining or creating an external problem.
What one might call " personality crisis » is not produced by the times in which one lives, nor by education or experience, but would be a resulting from our very existence. The crisis in this sense puts into question the meaning and direction that a Man gives to his life. He must recognize the challenge of his existence, helped in this by existential psychology. This, defined as the interpretation of data in terms of the individual's value systems, finds applications in existential psychotherapy when the therapist's attention is focused on the area where the patient's values are challenged or flouted. Thanks to a non-directive approach, the patient not only relives his primary conflicts but also the crises which, at a higher symbolic level, threaten the entire organization of his personality and therefore his existence. This successive rediscovery of the Self is a creative process and, as such, mobilizes all the creative resources of the individual. Instead of the principle of destruction, creativity becomes the center of his personality; a creativity turned inward…. Man questioning his existence is the central theme of existential psychology and creative Man is the primary goal of existential psychotherapy.…The existential approach focuses on the individual's value system and tends towards a "psychology of values" (and symbolic representations).
Wolf's approach is rich in lessons and places the individual and their personality at the center of the analysis of crises and conflicts. Indeed, the context or the era in which we live cannot explain the permanence of human violence that has always existed. Personality theory offers more concrete avenues for reflection on the conflict resolutionand this at two levels: at the personality level herself because primary personalities are marked by an excess of energy but also because tInternal tensions and value conflicts exist within the individual's psyche (see book existential coaching and spiritual intelligence). The challenge for the existential psychologist will be to understand the system of symbolic representations of her patient in order to make him aware of its functioning.
Reference
Carrio E. (2015) Existential coaching and spiritual intelligence, Editions vie
Wolff W. (1950) Values and personality. An existential psychology of crisis, Grune & Stratton NY
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