The Present State of Existential Interventions Within Palliative Care

Existential psychotherapy is rooted in the European tradition of existential philosophy. Existential philosophers include Husserl and Heidegger, who were German, and Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty, who were French. Their works contain existentially ultimate themes such as death, freedom, meaninglessness, and isolation. Based on their knowledge of existential philosophy, Binswanger, Frankl, and Boss developed the earlier existential psychotherapies such as Dasein-analysis and Logotherapy, while May, Laing, Yalom, May, and Wong started later existential psychotherapies in the British and American culture. Focusing on patients with advanced cancer and/or terminal care, we found nine types of existential psychotherapies which were investigated using randomized controlled trials (RCTs): Meaning-Centered Group Psychotherapy (MCGP), Individual Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy (IMCP), Meaning-Making intervention (MMi), Meaning of Life Intervention, Managing Cancer and Living Meaningfully (CALM), Hope Intervention, Cognitive and Existential Intervention, Dignity Therapy, and Life-Review Interviews, from 19 relevant RCTs. All deal with death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom. Particularly, MCGP, IMCP, MMi, Meaning of Life intervention, and CALM emphasize finding and/or making meaning in the individual's life. The effects on existential or spiritual well-being were confirmed in MCGP, IMCP, Meaning of Life intervention, and Life-Review intervention although the number of studies were very few. In the other interventions, there were heterogenous findings and again the number of studies was very small. Further studies are required to investigate the effects of existential psychotherapy on patients with advanced cancer.

The Relationship Between the Meaning of Life, Psychological Well-Being, Self-Care, and Social Capital, with Depression and Death Anxiety in the Elderly Living in Nursing Homes: The Mediating Role of Loneliness

The current study aims to investigate the meaning of life, psychological well-being, self-care, and social capital, with depression and death anxiety in the elderly living in nursing homes through the mediating role of loneliness. The statistical population included all the elderly aged at least 60 years living in Tehran, Qazvin and Zanjan, Iran in 2020, among whom 489 (273 men and 216 women) were selected using convenience sampling method. Participants filled out Steger’s Meaning of Life, Ryff and Singer’s Psychological Well-Being Scale, Söderhamn et al.’s Self-Care Ability, Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s Social capital, Beck’s depression, Templer’s Death Anxiety, Russell et al.’s Loneliness questionnaires. The results indicated that there is a significant relationship between the meaning of life, psychological well-being, self-care, and social capital, with depression through the mediating role of loneliness. Besides, there was a significant relationship between the meaning of life, psychological well-being, self-care, and social capital, with death anxiety through the mediating role of loneliness. Moreover, the results of path analysis showed that the hypothesized model of the current study has an excellent fit in the study sample.

Phenomenological Analysis of the Meaning of Life in of People Who Experience Mental Illness

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the meaning of life in patients with mental illness.Methods: This study used a phenomenological research approach. Subjects were recruited from shared living houses or rehabilitation facilities. Subjects had received treatment for mental illness. An in-depth interview was conducted for data collection from June 2019 to September 2019.Results: Three themes of the meaning of life were identified; 1. discovering their own power to keep away from a shaky life, 2. expanding into a safe relationship, and 3. developing towards a more valuable life.Conclusion: The meaning of life for subjects who experienced mental illness was that they felt helpless in the process of endless mental illness, but they realized the value of accepting the disease and living their daily lives and tried to restore close relationships with people and live the life they desired.

PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

The author sets out to respond to the student complaint that ‘Philosophy did not answer “the big questions”’, in particular the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ The response first outlines and evaluates the most common religious answer, that human life is given a meaning by God who created us and informs us that this life is just the pilgrim way to the next eternal life in heaven. He then discusses the response that, from the point of view of post-Darwinian science and the evolution of the universe and all that is in it, human life on Earth must be afforded no more meaning than the meaning we would give to a microscopic planaria or to some creature on another planet in a distant universe. All things including human creatures on Planet Earth just exist for a time and that is that. There is no plan or purpose. In the last sections the author outlines the view that it is we humans ourselves who give meaning to our lives by our choices of values or things that are worth pursuing and through our resulting sense of achievement or the opposite. Nevertheless the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ can mean quite different things in different contexts, and so merit different if related answers. From one point of view one answer may lie in terms of the love of one human for another.

A child with disability as a value - motherhood in a noetic perspective

The paper attempts to embed the experience of being a mother to a child with intellectual disabilities in a noetic (spiritual) perspective of human functioning. According to the noo-psychotheoretical assumptions (Popielski, 2018) constructed on the basis of Viktor Frankl’s concept of logotherapy (2009), finding and fulfilling the meaning of life is the highest human need and a kind of metamotivation. The suffering resulting from motherhood is seen as a borderline experience, in which the existential situation so far is revalued and the meaning appears to be the acceptance of an attitude of moral heroism towards the inevitable fate.

Meaning of Life Crisis and Self-Attitude of Fetishistic Transvestites (Internet Research)

The determinants of the long-standing and relatively widespread practice of fetishistic transvestites have been so far insufficiently researched by the psychological science. In the present paper on a Russian sample of fetishistic transvestites of mature and young age (N=120) mediated by virtual reality, an Internet study of the severity of their meaning life crisis and the specifics of self-attitude, which have a deep systematic impact on self-management of the life process, was carried out within the norm. It is shown that the overwhelming majority of fetishistic transvestites do not experience a meaning-life crisis, and their self-attitude is divided into dichotomous lines of manifestation – balance in conditions of confidentiality and dissonance in the public environment. It is established that the meaning-of-life crisis provides a favorable corrective effect on self-abasement, blocking the trajectory of minimizing self-abasement to an abnormal state by the method of self-justification of personal experience of fetishistic transvestism. It is revealed that the absence of a meaning-of-life crisis is characterized by the expanded personal plasticity of fetishistic transvestites in transphobic social situations, maintaining their state of self-esteem at an acceptable level, while their autosympathy as a veiled dimension of self-attitude is contrastively encapsulated from the meaning of life crisis.