Philosophy Café - Φιλοσοφικό Καφενείο

Mysterious are the ways of human happiness, as anyone who has surveyed the perplexing, often contradictory research findings can attest. But one nugget in particular truly boggles: Denmark is the happiest nation in the world. More than two-thirds of Danes report being “very satisfied with their lives,” according to the Eurobarometer Survey, a figure that has held steady for more than 30 years. True, Danes tend to be healthy, married and active — all contributing factors to happiness. But why, researchers wondered, are Danes happier than Finns and Swedes, who share many of these traits, not to mention a similar culture and climate? The answer is, in a word, expectations. Danes have low expectations and so “year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find out that not everything is rotten in the state of Denmark,” says James W. Vaupel, a demographer who has investigated Danish bliss. About once a year, some new study confirms Denmark’s status as a happiness supe

Eventually I grew to believe that I had something to say about an existential approach to therapy and spent years writing a text on the subject – a text with the arresting, dramatic title of Existential Psychotherapy. The term is a vague one and before proceeding farther allow me to offer a fairly uninformative definition of existential psychotherapy. Existential psychotherapy is a dynamic therapeutic approach which focuses on concerns pertaining to existence. I warned you the definition would be uninformative. Let me dilate it by clarifying the phrase “dynamic approach.” Dynamic has both a lay and a technical definition… … I use “dynamic” in its technical sense which retains the idea of force but is rooted in Freud’s model of mental functioning which posits that forces in conflict within the individual generate the individual’s thought, emotion, and behavior. Furthermore – and this is a crucial point – these conflicting forces exist at varying levels of awareness; indeed some are enti