Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to A Längle.
Aging confronts humans with specific existential issues. They frequently cause suffering in old age. Not dealing with or insufficiently dealing with these existential themes may result in crisis, psychological disorders, and illness. By integrating existential themes of aging into the understanding of one's own life, the process of aging contributes to personal maturity.
From the existential analytical point of view, anxiety is considered to be a basic theme of existence. The experience of being threatened is most commonly related to the physical and material aspects of life. But on a deeper level anxiety deals with the search for foundational and supporting structures for existence. When one loses the sense of safety of being held and of having shelter in a world that does not offer ultimate securities, one is prone to anxiety. Anxiety can therefore be perceived as a subjective parameter of feeling threatened in the existential structures. This paper gives an outline of an existential analytical approach to the understanding of fear and anxiety, a basic classification of anxieties, and an overview of the following specific methods of an existential treatment search for foundational structures of existence, personal position-taking, dereflexion (Frankl) and paradoxical intention (Frankl).
Introducing questions of individual purpose and meaning into psychotherapy was an important contribution of Viktor Frankl and a necessary supplement to traditional psychotherapy. V. Frankls "Logotherapy" (logos = meaning) however has found its main application in counselling (especially bereavement and grief processes) and prophylactic endeavours (e.g. pedagogics). Suffering from meaninglessness, on the other hand, showed up to be a respectively rare indication for psychotherapeutic interventions in its proper sense. Thus the question was arising how to apply Frankl's valuable meaning-centered concept of man (which he called "Existential Analysis") in a genuine way to other neurosis and to personality disorders, so far "unspecific indications" to Logotherapy. This paper gives an outline and methodological foundation of "Existential Analysis Psychotherapy". A case study finally is illustrating its phenomenological proceeding.
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