For all that I complain here about the dominance of cognitive behavioral therapy in the field today -- and I actually think it dominates research more than actual practice -- I admit that I do from time to time draw on techniques that I learned from the behavioral approach I learned back at the dawn of time when I was in training. But I am far more engaged by the therapeutic process of exploring and discovering meaning -- of symptoms, of dreams, and of life -- in the lives of those I work with and in my own life.
In my first merry dance with graduate school, I had planned to do my dissertation on the development of a clinical measure to assess likelihood of suicide based on a pretty existential understanding of what underlies suicide. Maurice Farber, a social psychologist, had done some interesting research on factors involved in the differential rates of suicide in the three Scandinavian countries. He concluded that hope was the major factor and linked it to a variety of expressions. Working with him, we came up with a way to operationalizing hope in order to measure it. We saw it as sense of efficacy, future time perspective, and another that I can't remember now -- it has been almost 40 years since I gave much though to it. Well, I ended up leaving ABD and the study never got past the very early stages.
I was delighted today to read that others have been interested enough in how to measure meaning to have actually developed good research designs to do so. In an article in the Chicago Tribune,
" The developing field, called experimental existential psychology, or XXP, explores how people find meaning and purpose in their lives. A topic that was once the province of poets and philosophers can now be examined under the cold light of science, researchers say.
How people deal with existential concerns could help explain a broad spectrum of behavior, they believe, from political and religious leanings to altruism and the pursuit of riches to patriotism and terrorism.""We all want a sense of continuance, a sense that we're more than just these temporary creatures on this dirt ball," Greenberg said. "We want to feel we're significant beings in a meaningful world."