Dialogues on the soul of Existential Therapy (SEA Dialogues Book 2) by Miles Groth & Todd DuBose

Author:Miles Groth & Todd DuBose [Groth, Miles & DuBose, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-09-13T15:00:00+00:00

Addendum

I wanted to add a couple of other points that are gnawing at me about meaning and knowing. Some clarifications are needed, or clearings or lightings, as an addendum to my last letter to you. As I was re-reading the dialogue between Gianfranco and Ernesto about existential therapy,7 I was reminded about how common it is for existential therapists to talk about meaning as something lost, created or found, and to see meaning as polarised from meaninglessness.

For me, meaning is neither lost, found nor created, which I will elaborate on in a moment. Moreover, ‘making meaning’ to me is an oxymoron, and the very phrase shows how deeply seeded our penchant for production is in our discourse. I appreciate how the Buddhist ‘ox cards’ may help here. As a series of cards depicting a monk and an ox as a metaphor for the Buddhist journey, one of the cards shows a monk riding an ox, looking for an ox. I think this is what we do with meaning.

Meaning, instead of being something found, lost or created, is lived out each and every moment of our lives and is thus ontological – and yes, is embedded into existence itself. We ontically take up ontological existence in meaningful ways, which is what Sartre and most other existentialists mean by finding and creating meaning, but I take a left turn at that point as I do believe that existence is inherently meaningful, and thus hold a kind of existential animism, albeit in a postmodern way. Declaring a universe indifferent overlooks how the very description, ‘indifferent’, is embedded with meaning. The entire project of nihilism rests on seeing meaninglessness as either a polarity or privation of meaning, which I reject. Each lived moment is an expression of ‘ultimate concern’, to use Paul Tillich’s phrase,8 even as moments of meaninglessness.9

Meaninglessness is neither a privation nor polarisation of meaning, but its own kind of meaning, such as the experience of ‘not being special’ or the experience of ‘whatever’. Meanings aren’t ontologically lost, even as they shift in their significance, or when transitions call for re-orientations of (in)significance. But looking for lost meaning is like looking for one’s glasses while they rest on top of one’s head. Found meaning is objectified meaning and thus is meaningful as an experience of objectification. Seen meaning isn’t lived meaning, but objectified meaning. Instead, if we want to know who we are or what matters to us, we should pay attention to how we are in situations. The unresolvable aporia is that once we ‘see’ it, we have missed it, even as when we attribute meaning to what we see than in the seeing itself. Therapeutic care, then, doesn’t ‘find’, it allows, facilitated, clears, lights, accompanies, joins and let’s Life live.

I am also very much aligned with Ernesto’s insistence on the role of the idiot in therapy or a stance of bracketed unknowing. As I see it, interpretation is not a coming to ‘know’, or even worse, an imposition of the analyst’s knowing onto the client, which is imperialistic colonisation.

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