| Summary: | 博士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 輔導與諮商學系所 === 101 === The concern for human’s experience of suffering has always been a core issue in counseling and psychotherapy. In face of sufferers, the focus of counseling and psychotherapy includes: where does human’s experience of suffering come from? How does it last? What is the process of unsuffering? To answer these questions, various theories of counseling and psychotherapy proposed corresponding explanation. This article browsed and organized theories of counseling and psychotherapy, investigated perspectives of various theories on human suffering and the transformation of such experience, and found: traditional counseling and psychotherapy theories see mind as a self-contained entity, the outer world and the inner mind are separate entities, experience of suffering is due to an individual’s inadaptable to the outer environment. Postmodern therapy approaches view the outer reality as the outcome of an individual or a social construction, and stress from mainstream culture is the cause of human’s experience of suffering. To unsuffering process, traditional counseling and psychotherapy theories emphasize how the inner mind interact with the outer world and reach harmony. Postmodern therapy approaches emphasize the transformation of individual constructionism, the development of new meaning to an individual through deconstruction of mainstream culture. Dealing with the disagreement between midmodern and postmodern counseling and psychotherapy approaches, this study was based on the viewpoint of “being-in-the-world” in Existential Phenomenology to propose that, the appropriate approach to understand suffering and its transitional experience is to find the “relation” between humans and the world. Base on such understanding, then the experience-based connecting points in various theories could be found.
This study used research methods of existential phenomenology to carry out interviews with three interviewees under suffering. The second interview was conducted one and a half years after the first one; the third one was half year after the second one. The total three interviews took two years, which analyzed the interviewees’ suffering and transitional experience. The results showed: (1) the interviewees’ experience of suffering came from their resistance to existing situation and disappointment of expectated one, being on the breaking points of existing and expected situations also caused suffering to the interviewees; (2) in transitional experience of suffering, the interviewees showed the following nine situated structures: 1. the sufferers lived in their existing familiar world; 2. the appearance of crisis changed their current situations, and the world brought a threat to the original project; 3. when the project was under threat, the sufferers still hung on to accomplishment of their original project, the world became the subject rejected by the original project; 4. encountering struggles in existing situation, emotions and bodies were used as tools to allow the sufferers to reflect feasibility of their original project and meaning shown by the world; 5. facing an unfamiliar world, the sufferers needed a theory to help themselves understand the world; 6. sufferers’ transitional experience included “revision” of the original project, and “acceptance” of the world considered a threat by them; 7. the sufferers saw the transitional experience as a “learning” process, which included: (1) wishing to solve the problems; (2) trying to solve the conflicts between the present and the future; (3) re-understanding and accepting their past; 8. using bodies and emotions as tools to allow the sufferers to recognize the changes in situations; 9. The sufferers no long clung to previous suffering experience, new situation or new possibility appeared, and they could start a brand new future.
This study discussed the existing descriptions of existential phenomenology on suffering and transitional experience from the viewpoint of counseling and psychotherapy, and made suggestions to counseling practitioners and future research. Limits of this study was also mentioned.
|
|---|
