International Journal of Existential Psychology & Psychotherapy
Elaborating an Exceptional Vision for Existential Psychology: A response to Paul T. P. Wong’s Existential Psychology for the 21st Century Brent D. Slife1
I
want to heartily endorse Paul Wong’s (2004) succinct statement of his vision for an existential psychology. I immediately felt myself caught up in this vision and I consider his project to be an important, if not vital, adjunct to the mainstream of psychology. Indeed, it is a sign of hope for the discipline. Wong’s emphasis on concrete practices is especially hopeful to me. Too long, as he notes, existentialism has been viewed as another theory or school of thought (or even another therapy technique) when it is far more radical than that. Wong properly points to its revolutionary understanding of the primacy and primordiality of practice, as reflected in the seminal work of French sociologists of Bourdieau (1980) and de Certeau (1980) as well as the recent distinctions between abstractionist and relational ontologies (Polkinghorne, in press; Slife, in press). Wong also mentions the crucial terms “agency” and “community” in articulating his vision. If I understand his use of the term agency here, it is a pivotal counterpoint to the rampant, albeit often overlooked, determinism and materialism of psychology. However, his juxtaposition of agency and community shows me that he is not necessarily endorsing the disengaged, contextless form of agency that liberal individualism has spawned in modern 1
Brent D. Slife is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Brigham Young University. Correspondence regarding this article should be directed to Brent_Slife@byu.edu.
www.existentialpsychology.org
Volume 1, Issue 1, July 2004
Western culture (Richardson, Fowers, & Guignon, 1999). Existential psychology is open to the radically social context of individuals, including many communitarian formulations (Sandel, 1996; Etzioni, 1996; Selznick, 19980?). Although not as explicit in many parts of his editorial, I want to note the inherent value-ladenness of Wong’s four questions and his vision. His mention of the significance of good and evil, for instance, makes clear, I believe, that existential psychology will take no part in the objectivist, amoral psychology of old, either in its content (theories, hypotheses) or its process (methods, techniques). Existential psychology has to begin with the inescapability of values, in all their many shapes and sizes. This does not preclude a plurality of values – itself a value about values – but it does preclude the deception of neutrality, or as Nagel (1986) calls it, the “view from nowhere.” Wong speaks eloquently of the “survival of humanity and the well-being of every individual”, surely significant topics for all psychologists. Still, I think he would agree that survival here does not necessarily imply an endorsement of the typical naturalistic and evolutionary understandings of that term (Slife, 2004). Moreover, wellbeing cannot be equated with the hedonistic strivings for happiness and pleasure that characterize some approaches to positive psychology and omit important aspects of suffering as a meaningful, perhaps crucial part of human existence (Slife & Calapp, 2000). Existential psychologists will surely want to frame important topics such as survival and well-being in broader and less naturalistic terms. My only quibble, and this may be due to the editorial’s brevity, is that I am not sure that I do not see a “contradiction between the holistic study of the whole person and the quantitative, experimental research of
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