However, when I operate from an existential frame of reference, I make a very different assumption: patients fall into despair as a result of a confrontation with harsh facts of the human condition-the “givens” of existence. When I see patients in group therapy I work from an interpersonal frame of reference and make the assumption that patients fall into despair because of their inability to develop and sustain gratifying interpersonal relationships.
One of our chief modes of death denial is a belief in personal specialness, a conviction that we are exempt from biological necessity and that life will not deal with us in the same harsh way it deals with everyone else.Įrik Erikson, in his study of the life cycle, described this late-life stage as generativity, a post-narcissism era when attention turns from expansion of oneself toward care and concern for succeeding generations.
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